The density and sheer size of Susan Wood's book attest to the ambitious nature of her task, which is to put onto a new footing the issue of whether, and how, churches were owned in medieval Europe. She intends thereby to intervene decisively in a venerable historiographical debate. ‘Proprietary church’ is how Wood renders into English the German Eigenkirche, which term denotes an influential theory first systematically propounded in the early twentieth century by Ulrich Stutz. Stutz argued that the barbarians invading the Roman empire brought with them a Germanic tendency towards ownership, which increasingly embraced things that by Roman thinking could not be owned, especially churches. This tendency began insidiously to corrode the entire Church, starting with smaller churches but in time affecting bishoprics, until reforming popes began belatedly and with immense difficulty to take counter-measures. Wood now seeks to reconsider the whole question.

To do this, Wood has digested, compared and synthesised remarkable amounts of evidence, from right across all of western Europe, and spanning over 800 years. Yet it is not her unquestioned grasp of empirical detail which makes her book so important. The crucial innovation lies in three key propositions which Wood brings to this evidence. The first is that property, in the ‘proprietary church’ as elsewhere, is a matter of degree. Wood in fact prefers to think in terms of proprietary attitudes of varying intensity. Placing property at one end of a continuum of lordship allows her to investigate shades of grey: not simply whether there was a proprietary church, but to what degree, and in what ways. Second is the principle that one cannot reconstruct practice from theory. In concrete terms, this means that charters of intent or other legal documents are never enough: one needs the history too, to put the charters into the context of what actually happened. Indeed, Wood shows that earlier practice very often conditioned later customs and legal rationalisations. Wood thereby avoids the trap of narrow legalism, happy with a little ambivalence and even paradox. A third proposition, kept more subjacent, is Weberian in flavour: that the proprietary church and its decomposition need to be understood in the context of a shift from a patrimonial, traditional form of society towards a more bureaucratic and legally defined one.

Armed with these propositions, Wood creates a complex, layered argument. Her nuanced understanding of property allows her to make a useful distinction between what she calls higher and lower churches, or otherwise put, between the great stone cathedrals and large monasteries, and the small, often wooden, more local churches. If we can talk of mills and farms as property, she argues we can do the same for minor churches, generally considered as owned by various parties. But higher churches were only ever ambivalently so treated, with bishoprics still more resistant to these attitudes than large monasteries. So Wood argues that proprietary attitudes did not seep upwards as Stutz suggested, simply that control to a proprietary degree was always going to be easier on the small scale, where fewer interests collided. Insistence on thick historical context leads her to argue that in terms of monasteries, it is the abbot who should be seen as the de facto ‘owner’ before the eighth century. Though political change later altered the situation, any continuing effective control of the monastery was through control of that office, either through personally taking it on, or by choosing who did. This leads Wood to question the long-term centrality of early monastic foundations for aristocratic families, whose intentions were probably, she asserts, as short-term as their actual control. Finally, her emphasis on the difference between the customary law of the early Middle Ages and the more abstract, precise law of the later twelfth century permits her to offer a new perspective on the slow phasing-out of the proprietary church. Wood's position is that the Gregorian Reform was not primarily oriented at uprooting proprietary attitudes. To the extent that it did, and not without leaving traces of property in churches behind (primarily in the form of patronage, especially monastic patronage), it was in combination with the development of more complex, abstract legal systems in the twelfth century. Accordingly, proprietary attitudes towards churches are not inherently ‘Germanic’, but rather reflect the dominance of traditional notions of authority, which, defined by customary law, almost always had proprietary overtones. Only when a more sophisticated body of law developed and was implemented which clearly separated property from control could those common sense ideas of ownership be more or less eliminated.

Not least of the book's merits is the sound foundation it offers for further research, to which Wood often points en passant. Working with twin concepts of property and lordship, both historiographical legacies, naturally Wood's primary focus is on the former. But now that she has dissected the category and practice of property with such admirable and forceful clarity, similar attention could perhaps be focused on lordship itself. Secondly, Wood necessarily only devotes passing attention to that force which resisted the Church's reduction into bundles of property rights and made such transformation only ever incomplete, namely sacrality itself, which Humbert of Moyenmoutier argued was destroyed by any attempt to own it. The interaction between ideas of the sacred and concepts of earthly lordship would surely reward renewed scrutiny in the light of Wood's work.

Wood's book is undoubtedly the new locus classicus for those looking for a definitive, comparative and long-term study of how and in what way churches were owned in the early Middle Ages, and of when and in what ways that changed. Setting out all the evidence transparently, it succeeds in its aim of offering a new framework for scholarship on the issue, and one may hope that in its impressive wake, study of this regrettably overlooked aspect of medieval history will be reinvigorated.