Pfarreien im Mittelalter: Deutschland, Polen, Tschechien und Ungarn im Vergleich (review)

The great church historian Albert Hauck, a former Lutheran pastor, observed that it was almost exclusively through the parish priest's work that the Church asserted its influence over the laity. Until at least the eighteenth century the parish was also the center of the people's communal and social life and often the lowest unit in the state's administrative structure. Although Europe's parochial network was largely a medieval creation—for example, 80 percent of the parishes in the twentieth-century diocese of Cracow were in existence by the fifteenth century—medievalists have paid little attention to the institution.

To remedy this neglect, the Germania Sacra series sponsored a 2006 conference to compare the formation and evolution of the parish in Central Europe. Some of the eighteen articles in this volume were among the papers delivered on this occasion; others were added subsequently. (There is no indication which papers were presented.) Three are in English; the rest in German. The first four provide a historiographical overview. Enno Bünz indicates that there have been numerous regional and local parochial studies in Germany since the 1970s but no single comprehensive monograph.The communist regimes in Eastern Europe discouraged ecclesiastical history, but the most work was done in Poland, according to Leszek Zygner, because of the close link between Catholicism and Polish identity. Czech scholarship adheres largely to the paradigm created by František Palack ý and his prewar successors, but Eva Doležalová and Zdeňka Hledíková question some of their predecessors' conclusions. Hungarians never evinced much interest in the topic—only one of the 1,500 dissertations submitted between 1863 and 1993 to the theological faculty at the University of Budapest dealt with the medieval parish—perhaps, Áron Petneki suggests, because few medieval records survive from modern Hungary. In fact, two of the other three Hungarian articles concern Slovakia: András Vizkelety on the parish libraries in the Spiš region and Judit Majorossy on confraternities in Bratislava.

More than most such collections, this is a hodgepodge. Articles vary in length from nine pages (Waldemar Rozynkowski on the sources and methodology for reconstructing the parish network in the diocese of Chelmno) to 153 (Petr Elbel on papal provisions in the diocese of Olomouc). Heike Johanna Mierau deals ostensibly with the care of souls in the early-medieval bishopric of Freising, but she is really concerned with the successive obliterations of the Bavarian past. Not surprisingly, the focus of most of the other articles is on the later Middle Ages because the parochial system was largely established in East Central Europe in the thirteenth century. In spite of the title, the editors eschew any attempt to make comparisons or to draw conclusions. In fact, there are some connections. Rozynowski's piece dovetails with Andrzej Radzimin´ski's study of the parishes and clergy in Prussia and with Piotr Plisiecki's explanation how tithes can bse employed to reconstruct the development of the parochial network in the diocese of Cracow. While Elbel shows how limited the curial prebendal market was in Olomouc, Sabine Arend explores how most priests obtained their benefices in fifteenth-century Constance, and Nathalie Kruppa investigates which ecclesiastical foundations possessed parishes in Hildesheim. The focus of the studies is thus on institutional history rather than on the parish as a eucharistic community of the faithful. The medieval parish remains a field white unto harvest.