Animating this volume, as Greg Peters notes in its introduction, is a question rich in both theological and historical dimensions, as well as contemporary resonance: What is a Christian priest? Is the Christian priesthood an ontological category, or a function? Is it a state of being, or an office? The volume's essays explore that question primarily from the vantage points of intellectual history and historical theology, mostly in the western tradition, but with occasional comparative turns toward Byzantine Christianity. A detailed account of each essay is not possible here. Instead, a brief survey of a few key contributions can help gauge the effectiveness of the volume.

Robert Swanson's opening essay is exemplary for its concise articulation of the vast historical complexity of the Christian priesthood over a thousand years. Balancing generalization with the “devils and details” (5), he emphasizes that the story was not linear. It shifted unpredictably, and massively, in the twelfth century. After 1100, Gregorian ideals of a sacramental priesthood drove a “tectonic shift,” one that displaced a varied tradition that had tended to allow more room for the priesthood as function and as ministry. Swanson then surveys both the processes of becoming a priest (qualifications, training, and so on) as well as the realities of being a priest (sacramental and pastoral duties, career paths, and incomes) before reflecting on the long-term consequences of the twelfth century's changes. Especially important here is the conceptual and historiographical dynamic: how the hierarchical model of bishops, priests, and holy orders that soon emerged was eventually read back onto earlier centuries.

Also exemplary are two essays by the late Roger E. Reynolds. A first essay, on ordination in the early Middle Ages, is a compelling account of the interaction of text and image in early sacramentaries. In comparison to the many and often lavish illustrations of later pontificals, early medieval illustrated texts are rare. But, as Reynolds makes clear, they are often more immediate and accurate portrayals of liturgies of ordination. A second essay focuses on texts known as the “Ordinals of Christ,” short lists that drew parallels between the events of Christ's life and the many duties of the clergy. Although “scorned by theologians ever since the time of John Calvin's Institutes,” (141), they inspired centuries of reflection and debate on what it meant to be a cleric. The varied models for the numbers and ranks of clerical orders, an increasing emphasis on the priesthood and the Eucharist from the twelfth century, the capacity of the texts to shape clerical spirituality from doorkeepers to bishops—all suggest the “richness and almost exuberant diversity” of this neglected theological tradition (187).

Michael Cusato's overview of pastoral care in the Italian communes offers similarly nuanced insights. While tracing a familiar arc of “reform” that stretches from Gregory VII to Lateran IV, he also emphasizes the importance of an often-neglected Lateran III. The story of the coming of the friars and of the “horizontal,” pastoral turn in Italy's towns and cities, too, is told in a balanced way, and Cusato wisely acknowledges the wider context of country parishes, their secular clergy, and their intractable problems of pastoral care. Essays by Augustine Casiday and David Hunter are commendable as well for their comparative views of the Eastern and Western traditions. Casiday's discussion, focused on Constantinople under Justinian II (669–711), locates the priesthood in the contexts of imperial politics, local dynamics of property and patronage, as well as the norms and expectations of pastoral care. Hunter's essay traces the divergent positions on married clergy that emerged in east and west across the first millennium.

These essays rightly, and vigorously, historicize the claim that priesthood is an ontological category. They rightly point to a bewildering diversity across a thousand years, to the massive shifts of the twelfth century, and to a tradition of critique that challenged Gregorian models thereafter, all the way to the fifteenth century. The overall project seems also to be at least partly inspired by modern debates about the priesthood, as Colt Anderson suggests clearly at the end of his contribution. In Anderson's view, conservative defenders of a too sharply ontological and “exceptionalist” model of sacramental priesthood ignore a long history of countervailing reformist impulse. “Their resulting imprecision when speaking about ontological change,” he argues, “has led to a theology of priesthood that is impious at best” (304). But to frame the issue too strongly in this way comes with a certain risk: we tend to claim “reform” too strongly for ourselves, and to misread or even dismiss some four centuries of theology, law, and custom that did, in fact, make “extraordinary claims concerning the status of the ordained” (303) a daily reality across Western Europe—an always contested reality, to be sure, but one also upheld, defended, and otherwise presumed, by laity and clergy alike, in countless ways that challenge our modern categories.

One way to negotiate this interpretive danger is to focus more closely on the intersection of theology and piety with the medieval priesthood as lived, experienced, and contested on the ground. There are solid efforts in that direction here, especially in the essays noted above. But there is more to do, especially given how much work the theme has inspired of late—Maureen Miller's work on the sensibilities of power and hierarchy that suffused clerical clothing, for example; Jennifer Thibodeaux's exploration of questions of gender and celibacy; recent studies of clerical deviance, criminality, violence and their punishment, or of the unbeneficed scribes of the “clerical proletariat.” What might these human faces, across every medieval century, have to teach us not only about theologies of ordination, but about the nature of religion and society in the Middle Ages generally? To raise that question is not to discount the strong work that appears in these essays; it is merely to use the inevitable tradeoffs involved in these kinds of volumes as inspiration for future research. This is a solid collection, and one that accomplishes well the aims of the useful series in which it appears.