This collection of nine essays (three written by the editor) surveys types of mainly vernacular literature in England and France that reflect those canons of the Fourth Lateran Council affecting the laity. The kinds of literature examined here were mainly composed in varieties of French and fall into the broad category of works of religious instruction (sermons, glossed Bibles, vernacular treatises—particularly on confession and communion, contemptus mundi, poetry warning against pride and cupidity, and Robert Grosseteste's Chasteau d'amour [in the contribution by Anna Siebach-Larsen]), but there is also attention to a chanson de geste (in the essay by Carol Sweetenham), an Anglo-French illustrated Apocalypse (in Daron Burrows's chapter), and some Middle English narratives.

The Fourth Lateran Council was convened to assert ecclesiastical control over the pastoral education of the clergy, who could then teach the laity—and Andrew Reeves demonstrates from the codicological evidence in manuscripts of sermons and other texts that the English parish clergy took their duties seriously (46–73). But Maureen Boulton usefully supplements this view by pointing to the “spiritual ambition” of some in the laity to engage in their own education as well (45). Boulton notes, for example, the Disme de penitanche composed by the French knight Jean de Journi in 1288 that surveys the deadly sins and contains a form of confession; Jean insists on confession to a priest, but he urges the laity to initiate this confession rather than wait for priestly interrogation (85–86). In the way it came to encourage and further the need for introspective examination of the conscience that forms the core of preparation for confession, the Fourth Lateran Council also has an important place in the development of ideas of the self in Western culture, a self conceived of as both a social and an ethical phenomenon. This kind of construction of subjectivity is implicit in some of the essays but is made the centerpiece of analysis in Wendy Larson's contribution on Middle English literature.

One can be grateful for these contributions to assessing the importance of the Fourth Lateran Council on vernacular literary production in England and France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.