A Social History of the Domestic Chaplain, 1530-1840 by William Gibson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS115 of the Society constitutes one of the most interesting chapters on Taylor's work. The heart of Taylor's book is a scrupulously complete study of the 6000 pages of Le Picart's 269 extant sermons. Through exhaustive and careful analysis she demonstrates that Le Picart pioneered a new simple, direct, and coherent mode of Catholic preaching which was infused with an emotional warmth that had deep appeal to the urban populace. Founding his homilies overwhelmingly on the texts of the Gospels and Pauline Epistles, Le Picart was able effectively to attach the principal positions of Protestant theology and to call for Catholic Reformation. Taylor thus demonstrates that the Catholic party work was far from ideologically disarmed by the Protestants on the eve of the wars of religion. In contrast to Le Picart's Sorbonnist orthodoxy there existed an evangelical party in France closely dependent on the royal court and the Gallican tradition. Its beliefs cannot be reduced to Calvinism or crypto-Calvinism. For many years it pursued an eirenic policy in relation to Protestants at home and abroad. If there is a defect in Taylor's admirable work it is her failure to delineate clearly the relationship between this group and the orthodox Catholic party. As a result of this lack of clarity, Roussel whether intentionally or not is erroneously misrepresented as a secret Protestant, while Rabelais is pictured distortedly as close to Le Picart. On the other hand,Taylor effectively utilizes her analysis of Le Picart's warm religiosity to show that Crouzet's notion of an increasingly punishing and apocalyptic Catholicism prior to the religious wars is overdrawn. Henry Heller University ofManitoba Winnipeg, Canada A Social History of the Domestic Chaplain, 1530-1840. By William Gibson. (Leicester: Leicester University Press. Distributed by Books International, Inc., RO. Box 605, Herndon,VA 20172-0605. 1997. Pp. vi, 250. $65.00.) "Chaplains buttressed much of the mental landscape upon which the elite drew for its self-assurance." This sentence sums up the thesis of William Gibson 's book: that chaplains were and remained a client group of the landed classes and that their prime contribution lay in increasing the independence and privacy of the elite household, featuring in the "polarization of [their] public and private life." Historians will find the monograph tremendously useful,filling as it does a gap in the literature concerning the religious life of early modern England. A chapter fleshes out the position of chaplains prior to the Act of 1530, which regulated their employment and gave rise to one of the abuses of the system—permitted pluralism by chaplains; the Puritan and episcopal campaigns against chaplains; the position of chaplains during the Civil War, Interregnum, and Restoration. Other sections discuss the status and roles of chaplains, their preferment, and the decline of the office. 116BOOK REVIEWS Lest the reader go away with the impression that this book is only for those concerned with the history of religion, it should be noted that Gibson, through its pages, tells us a good deal about the mechanics of early modern noble family life and about the relationships between the elite and their servants, amongst whom chaplains loomed large. For example, we read that in 1632 it was noted of chaplains that "if they come single it's a thousand to one but they will either be in love or married before they go away," thus underlining the way in which chaplains used the situation in which they found themselves to improve their own future. Similarly, in an account of the application made by RogerWilliams, chaplain to Sir William Masham, to marry the niece of his former patroness, Lady Joan Barrington, and of Lady Joan's response, we gain an insight into the contrasting views of chaplain and patron regarding the appropriateness of the request. The author has achieved a good balance between treating the subject from the patron's and the recipient's points of view. Perhaps the most serious fault in the book is that it does not go far enough in exploring the colonization of the domestic chaplaincy by the gentry and the "middling sort." Gibson asserts, I think with little proof, that merchants and...