This meticulously researched and detailed book is a close study of the religious life of the parishes of Durham between the Conquest and the Dissolution. There have been previous studies of the secular organization of the medieval city, and of Durham Priory: Harvey is closely acquainted with these and with their sources, and draws on them wherever useful. But no previous study has examined all the sources Harvey treats here with an eye to how they illuminate parish life: her sources include records of the bishop's consistory court and the archidiaconal court, church court records of the metropolitan court, parish financial records, secular court records of the bishop's and prior's secular overlordship and the bishop's representation of the king's royal prerogative, records of matters touching on parish and the clergy more generally, general financial records, the priory's registers, cartularies, letter books, Ripon's sermon collection, scattered other sermons, and post-Reformation records of the court of augmentations and consistory acta. There is surely no other scholar who could have synthesized these materials so successfully while also keeping recent scholarship on other regions, and on England as a whole, in view—nor any other who could have drawn so effectively on unpublished information about Durham manuscripts known only to A. I. Doyle and A. J. Piper.

It seems that Harvey envisages an audience for her book that would include not only church historians but also those with a more general interest in Durham's history or in lay religious life: many ecclesiastical and legal terms and concepts are explained or translated on their first appearance (for example, the course of the church year, “pittance,” sub pena nubendi) and expertly placed in the context of other recent scholarship as appropriate (for example, clerical marriage, mortuaries, chantries). It would be useful if all of these could have been indexed so that a reader might have easy recourse to the first discussion of each; but the efforts here have already made Harvey's scholarship far more accessible to students encountering this field of study for the first time as well as to the educated general reader.

Successive chapters treat the development of Durham's parishes; what records reveal of the course of the church year; lay parish life (on which see below); relations between the lower clergy and the laity; relations between the higher clergy and the laity; the secular clergy, including those in minor orders; education both through school attendance and pastoral instruction; chantries and other forms of commemoration after death; associations, guilds, and confraternities; hospitals and other charities; the laity's awareness of the wider church beyond Durham; and evidence for the impact of the Reformation in Durham. The succinct, discrete discussions of specific issues to do with lay religious life in Durham provided in each chapter are amply cross-referenced and make it easy for a reader interested in a specific topic to find what he or she seeks.

However, the reader may at times be surprised by a certain slippage between the general topic advertised by the chapter heading and the detailed analysis of specific records found in the chapter itself: this sense of slippage might also be felt to apply to the volume as a whole, where “lay religious life in late medieval Durham” introduces not a regionally focused rebuttal or corroboration of Eamon Duffy's more general conclusions in The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), as one might anticipate, but a series of closely focused, themed case studies of specific ways that the laity interacted with the Durham church, largely as revealed through court records. Analysis and conclusions are certainly not absent from Harvey's detailed account, but nevertheless she does not focus on lay piety and lay experience of religiosity in anything like the way we might expect on the basis of her volume's title or some of the chapter titles. To give another example, the chapter title “Lay Parish Life” introduces a detailed account of what we know about churchwardens and their duties, how lay proctors or procurators participated in the administration of the parish, a dispute between the parishes of St. Oswald's and St. Margaret's over the parishioners of the latter's rights and duties to the former, legal cases involving baptism, churching, marriage, mortuaries, funerals, and burials, jurisdictional overlaps between secular and ecclesiastical courts and how lay persons might try to exploit them, and the licensing and maintaining of hermits and administration of hermitages.

Nevertheless, Harvey's excellent book contributes substantially to our understanding of Durham's late medieval church administration and how it engaged with the lay population. Through her examination of one region, she sheds new light on more general concerns such as how parishes developed, how the church legislated marriage and attempts by the laity to exploit these rules, disputes over mortuaries, tithes, and clerical incontinence, whether ecclesiastical courts allowed bishops and priors to dominate the laity, whether education was dominated by patronage or open to at least a few meritorious scholars regardless of income, the origin and development of chantries, whether it was the infirm and deserving poor who benefited from hospitals and other charitable institutions, and how both the clergy and the laity reacted to the English Reformation. In the last case, court records are used especially effectively to demonstrate that, in many cases, pre-Reformation artifacts had been hidden rather than destroyed and were recovered in the course of the Rising of the North in 1569 in a way that demonstrates collaborative effort between lower clergy and laity, rather than merely the political effort of the elite that the Rising certainly also was.

This book is recommended to anyone with an interest in the institutional history of the late medieval English church.