John Bromyard on Church and State. The Summa Predicantium and Early Fourteenth-Century England: A Dominican’s Books and Guide for Preachers (review)

This is a curious volume. The Summa predicantium, compiled by the fourteenth-century English Dominican John Bromyard, is a major but neglected handbook for preachers. Walls’s book is firmly focused on the text, but whatever expectations its title arouses are rapidly dispelled by the contents. Much of the volume (eighteen of the thirty chapters) reflects what can only be described as an obsessive number-crunching of the sources cited in the text. These citations are enumerated, calculated, and at times tabulated—but rarely specifically identified—under headings such as “Biblia sacra” (chapter 2), “Civil Lawyers” (chapter 7), “Hagiographica” (chapter 10), “Feudal Law” (chapter 15), and “Romanciae” (chapter 18, solely noting three references to the Gesta Romanorum). Listing and counting abound, but to what end is rarely evident, as Walls provides little real analysis of or commentary on the material. Table 3.1, for instance, on pp. 55–72, lists the “Non-biblical authorities cited by Bromyard in the Summa: together with the number of citations of each of their works.” Its alphabetical ordering provides a key used in subsequent comments on individual authors, but the table is mostly information for its own sake. Similarly, what should be made of the information (at chapter 9) that the 140 citations from scholastic theologians amount to 0.98 percent of all citations and 3.83 percent of nonbiblical citations? (The full citation count is apparently 14,235, with 10,566, or 74.28 percent, categorized as biblical [p. 3].)

Part 2 moves beyond such numbers to discussion of the contents. This is, though, discussion rather than analysis, often centered on strings of translations of selected passages from the Summa. Coverage includes “Bromyard on bishops and the lower clergy” (chap. 22), “Some observations on Exempla” (23), “The depiction of Jews in the Summa” (25), “Bromyard’s references to recent French history” (28), and “The state of England” (30). The last, the longest such chapter, exemplifies the practice of stringing extracts together, without always making a convincing argument. The discussion often seems naïve, but the consideration of the dating of the Summa in chapter 24 (where Walls takes issue with Leonard Boyle to argue that the work dates from the immediate aftermath of the early-fourteenth-century Great Famine), does merit serious attention.

A sense that one is working through a curiosity, a book that is often annoying by failing to consider the wood while counting the trees and all their branches, increases as the volume progresses. The book is seemingly the outcome of a personal project, stimulated by encountering the 1484 printed edition of the Summa in York Minster Library—it does not go beyond that printed text as its exemplar. Walls and his publisher remain mysteries: no information comes up on Google. While professionally published, the contents bear indications of self-publishing or even “vanity publishing.” Walls has his stylistic idiosyncracies, notably an irritating penchant for inappropriate colons, and an equally irritating insistence on using Latin names for all the writers and popes he mentions (with Pope John XXII always “Iohannes XXII,” Gregory always “Gregorius,” Augustine always “Augustinus,” and so on). Such eccentricities distract, as do the odd conventions used in the references.

Yet, as its final curiosity, this can be a useful volume. Bromyard is a neglected writer, whose Summa is not normally readily accessible. This book includes a lot of transcriptions, making a range of key passages much more easily accessible. If this book provokes further work on the Summa, it will make a significant contribution to scholarship, but more by accident than design