Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Papal Letters (review)

The years of Leo X’s pontificate are of crucial importance for those seeking to understand the condition of the late-medieval Church and the origins of Reformation. They saw, for example, the reforming attempts of the Fifth Lateran Council, the publication of Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum, and the posting of Luther’s Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis Indulgentiarum, otherwise known as the “Ninety-five Theses.” At the more local level, but of equal importance, they saw the steady functioning of the Church, the provision of bishops, the granting of dispensations, the resolving of disputes, and the arbitration of monastic conflicts all taking place alongside diplomatic negotiations between Rome and individual rulers. The series to which this volume makes an important addition seeks to make available all entries in the papal registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland, and it is a rich and remarkably varied historical collection. This particular volume deals with the first eighty-one Lateran registers of Leo X; the remaining registers will be covered in volume XXI of the series. It provides significant insight into the relationship between the papacy and the Church in Britain and Ireland, tacitly illustrating that the more dramatic events in ecclesiastical history need to be firmly rooted in an understanding of the day-to-day business of a Church deeply integrated within society and involved with countless different aspects of religious life.

Within this calendar of entries, we see affairs of state reflected: Cardinal Thomas Wolsey’s burgeoning career; the network of people operating around King Henry VIII; evidence of Katherine of Aragon’s piety, which was to have such momentous consequences. We encounter humanists such as Colet, Linacre, and Tunstall, and see intimations of Catholic reform in the establishment of the new feast of the Name of Jesus and the recent foundation of the Savoy hospital in London. But we also see a wealth of ordinary business taking place: provision of prayers and Masses for the departed, payment of tithes, merging of parishes, and arbitration “to avoid the tortuosity of suits” or to settle disputed elections. In the process, a wealth of fascinating detail is revealed that would otherwise be unknown to us: communities delineated, with their leading members, their contentious souls, their farmsteads and churches; and monastic communities described, with their property, their disputes, their role within society. This accumulation of evidence suggests that historians are mistaken who argue that the papacy had only peripheral importance for the English Church. The inclusion of Scottish, Irish, and English affairs side by side also illustrates the usefulness of comparative study, rather than looking at each in isolation.

This volume is an invaluable resource for anyone studying any number of aspects of late-medieval and early-modern church and society. It includes an excellent index of persons and places, which in itself is the fruit of immense labor required to decipher and identify the individuals and locations involved. It also contains a list of the “lost letters” of Leo X, of which only an anonymous, undated index survives; this has here been decoded and reassembled to make it intelligible to the researcher. An enormous amount of painstaking scholarly work has been required to produce this volume, as well as Anglo-Irish cooperation at the institutional level. It is a truly impressive achievement.