Popular Piety in Late Medieval England: The Diocese of Salisbury, 1250-1550 by Andrew D. Brown (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 549 gard to temporal wealth." Brown discusses the financial difficulties experienced by the priory because of corrodies, inflation, royal pressure during war, and loss of property at Dunwich due to the depredations of the sea. In one of the more valuable sections of the introduction, she gathers together information about the various churches and tithes, with cross references to the documents. That she categorizes document 326 a forgery is an example of her meticulous scholarship . This reviewer did note, however, a discrepancy between the Latin title and the English calendar of number 369. The editor and the Suffolk Record Society should be congratulated for providing these two volumes on Eye priory. Those interested in monastic history, in the history of the honor of Eye, or in the genealogical history of persons associated with the Suffolk area will find these volumes valuable. John W. Dahmus Stephen F.Austin State University Popular Piety in Late Medieval England: The Diocese of Salisbury, 1250-1550. By Andrew D. Brown. [Oxford Historical Monographs.] (New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press. 1995. Pp. x, 297. $58.00.) Despite the immense difficulties always inherent in assessing what "popular piety" may actually mean, perhaps no topic has come to attract more attention from the most recent church historians of late medieval England. All the more welcome is Dr. Brown's exemplary study of that fundamental if complex theme within the Diocese of Salisbury, a work remarkable not only for its long chronological range (1250-1550) but also for its exploitation of a wide variety of unpublished and hitherto neglected archival material. Here is a book which triumphantly succeeds in living up to its author's objective of revealing "a religious landscape of remarkable depth and vitality." Not that the copious evidence Dr. Andrew Brown brings to light is usually at all easy to interpret; and he deserves congratulations too on the powers of discrimination he brings to bear on the various manifestations of popular piety he exposes to view. Naturally enough, several of the problems he confronts remain problems still; but Dr. Brown is nothing if not judicious, perhaps only seriously and understandably in some difficulties when trying to explain the widespread and comparatively rapid acceptance of sixteenth-century Protestantism in what had hitherto seemed—on his own evidence—a religiously conservative and conventionally pious diocese. However, this is a notorious issue which no ecclesiastical historian can be said to have satisfactorily resolved anywhere else in Reformation England. As it is, Dr. Brown's highly thoughtful chapter (the last in his book) on "The Reformation" is a most valuable contribution to a perennial debate, not least for his somewhat paradoxical conclusion that "continuity in pious practices and devotional habits ultimately made religious change more acceptable." 550 BOOK REVIEWS Popular Piety in Late Medieval England is nothing if not a comprehensive as well as an elegantly written monograph. Quite rightly determined that the religious houses of the diocese of Salisbury should not be "shunted into some obscure sideline of devotional interest," Dr. Brown begins his book with an admirable survey of the important role still being played by monks, nuns, and friars (as well as the clergy of Salisbury cathedral itself) into the early sixteenth century. Much more central to the purposes of this study are a series of chapters devoted to the complex web of pious and other activities focusing on the parish church. Here the author's ability to give due emphasis to so many important but very different themes, ranging from parish fraternities and chantry foundations to church-building, is highly impressive: and in many ways his pages on these subjects provide the most balanced and satisfying account of parish life in its entirety yet produced for any late medieval English diocese. More perhaps might have been said about the parish priests themselves; but the late Professor Hamilton Thompson would surely have welcomed so convincing an explanation of why their churches were so continually rebuilt from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Even more perceptive are Dr. Brown's comments on hospitals, private devotion, and Lollardy; and by yet another paradox it emerges that heresy and dissent tended to be most "intense" in towns...