Pastors and the Care of Souls in Medieval England ed. by John Shinners and William J. Dohar (review)

442BOOK REVIEWS the notion of a major intellectual and spiritual shift that occurred in the Latin West between A.D. 400 and 600 and that forever separated the Christianity of St. Augustine and John Cassian from that of Gregory the Great. In The End of Ancient Christianity Markus develops the idea at length. The basic change had to do with a contraction of the intermediate realm of the 'secular,' the realm of religious neutrality that separates the 'sacred' from the 'profane.' The precipitating cause was the triumph of an ascetic form of Christianity that made little provision for the innocent vestiges of ancient, non-Christian culture. Despite the profound influence that Augustine exerted on Gregory, therefore, they inhabited different worlds. Whereas Augustine lived and wrote in a varied intellectual culture, Markus states, Gregory's was much more homogeneously biblical. The idea is an illuminating one and can, I think, be employed to help explain real differences. It may also, perhaps, encourage the exaggeration of others. Drawing on his Signs and Meanings: World and Text in Ancient Christianity (Liverpool University Press, 1996), Markus presents Gregory's approach to allegorical exegesis as completely lacking the restraint and caution that characterized Augustine's. The point may seem surprising, given Augustine's ability to provide allegorical readings of Scripture as fanciful as anyone's. However, this is a minor caveat. Judged by the breadth of its scholarship and the richness of its ideas, Gregory the Great and His World is a very good book indeed, one destined to make an enduring contribution to our understanding of late antiquity . Wm. D. McCready Queen's University Kingston, Ontario Medieval Pastors and the Care ofSouls in Medieval England. Edited by John Shinners and William J. Dohar. [Notre Dame Texts in Medieval Culture, Volume 4.] (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1998. Pp. xx, 327. $40.00 clothbound; $25.00 paperback.) This wide-ranging and well-organized anthology of texts about the parish clergy in medieval England vividly illustrates the expectations and circumstances under which they exercised the pastoral role and their fitness for the task. All the texts are rendered in modern English. Each of the seven chapters (or themes) into which the book is divided has a brief introduction, more concerned with the subject of the clergy than the technicalities of the texts, and among these prefatory remarks the student will find a particularly helpful discussion of the medieval meaning of the word 'literate' and a succinct guide through the canonical and confessional material which was addressed to the priest. The flavor of the selection and the variety of sources raided is evident from the first chapter, which embraces excerpts from the sixth-century Cura Pastoralis of Gregory the Great to the late-medieval play, Everyman; between BOOK REVIEWS443 them are passages from Aquinas, Thomas of Chobham, Wyclif, Langland, Lyndwood , and a little-known poem,Many are the Presbyters. However, the bulk of the material in the book comes from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: the Gregorian item is the only one pre-Conquest, there are no Anglo-Saxon laws, charters, wills, or sermons cited, and no reference to the clergy in Domesday Book; while a few of the entries derive from the sixteenth century, the visitations of Canterbury diocese by Wareham in 1511, unusual for preserving the consequent injunctions, are passed over. Nevertheless, such omissions are more than offset by significant extracts from sources not otherwise readily accessible to students, notably William of Pagula's Oculus Sacerdotis, the Summa of Hostiensis, the rites of Sarum andYork on the sacraments, and—from Maskell's Monumenta Ritualia—a bishop's instructions to ordinands; furthermore, the shrewd inclusion of the notebook of aYork priest gives some idea of how seriously one curate took all these exhortations. The editors' judicious selection is also apparent in its balance: a chronicler's account of Bishop Louis de Beaumont 's illiteracy at his appointment to Durham in 1316 is set against the concern shown by Bishop Hamo de Hethe of Rochester thirty years later when he established a reference library for his clergy; on pluralism, the notorious example of Bogo de Clare is juxtaposed with that of the worthy, and...