Matthew Wranovix. Priests and Their Books in Late Medieval Eichstätt

This outstanding and eminently readable study of the parish clergy in the late medieval diocese of Eichstätt takes the evidence of their book ownership as its starting point, but goes well beyond to present a finely worked evaluation of the education, personal expectations, and professional lives of the clergy in the generations before the Reformation. That reference point is significant, because Matthew Wranovix positions Priests and Their Books in Late Medieval Eichstätt in relation to the venerable notion that the late medieval clergy were poorly educated and often dissolute, an invidious myth that has (quite rightly) lost favor as an explanation for the Reformation but that persists given the relative paucity of thoroughgoing studies of the parish clergy in the late medieval Holy Roman Empire and, indeed, in Europe more widely. Literacy and literary interests are not central to prior studies of the clergy, and it is quite right that studies of book ownership and textual transmission rarely treat the parish clergy in a systematic fashion. The diocese of Eichstätt offers itself as a useful case study with a good rate of material survival, including a comprehensive episcopal visitation record of the parish clergy from 1480. It was, as Wranovix notes, a diocese skewed neither by the presence of one very large city nor by that of a major university with international appeal, but simultaneously it was no rural backwater: it did contain substantial towns (not least Eichstätt itself) and, at Ingolstadt, a university

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