Nearly eight centuries to the day after the canons of the Fourth Lateran Council were read out in the church of St. John Lateran, scholars from multiple disciplines in medieval studies gathered in Rome for a conference commemorating Pope Innocent III’s ambitious project. Papers presented at the conference eventually ended up in several volumes from several presses, to include this volume edited by Clare Monagle and Neslihan Şenocak. The essays in the book tease apart the relations of the pastoral, theological, and liturgical with respect to the cure of souls and the Council. Voices in this volume include stalwarts of their disciplines at career levels from associate professors to emeriti, with the result that the reader gets a strong sense of the state of the field and its future directions.

Monagle opens the volume with the great divide of the high medieval papacy. On the one hand, we have the institutional, centralized Church as its leadership envisioned it (and for which its modern critics have assailed it), managing and directing the individual subject. On the other hand, we have the Church as it existed in practice: somewhat ramshackle and ad hoc, dependent on local power brokers, and uncertain as to whether its decrees would indeed find fulfilment or end up a dead letter. With such a divide, she poses the question as to whether one can indeed use the language of the Council as a major watershed. By briskly looking at later medieval modes of thought and understanding, of scholarly and textual normativity, she shows that the Council led to a “nexus between correct thinking and practice” (37). Was it an immediate watershed? No, but rather it stood at a point of a shift in thought and practice, especially with respect to pastoral care.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, scholars such as Leonard Boyle brought the importance of the cure of souls in institutional, literary, and intellectual history to the attention of the broader community of medievalists. The scholarship in this volume shows us how the research has built on and branched out from that earlier work. A particular beneficiary of recent work has been the parish priest. As recently as the beginning of this century, scholars could still depict him as a bumbling semi-literate, scarcely more educated than his parishioners. That view of the priest is gone, and in its place we have a thoughtful and well-researched investigation of the priest and his education.

The chapters by Jessalynn Bird and Neslihan Şenocak stand out in the re-assessment of the priest. The role of Peter the Chanter’s Parisian intellectual circle leading to Lateran IV’s pastoral reforms has been apparent since at least the work of Baldwin. Bird illustrates how the Council’s reform program (and thus the Chanter’s thought) disseminated throughout Western Christendom by way of her deep expertise on the sermon and sermon manuscript. Such an investigation is welcome. After all, it is one thing for the Pope and Council to mandate, but quite another for these mandates to find implementation. Bird shows us how synods, mandated by the council, served as a vector of this thought, particularly through sermons preached to assembled clergy. Priests, per the council and reform program more generally, had a duty, “as providers not only of the sacraments but of preaching and now mandatory annual confession” (118).

Şenocak too examines this turn of the priest from custodian of local cultus to teacher, but turns how to read this transformation on its head. Scholars in an academic environment (myself included) are often tempted to see someone’s role becoming more scholarly and more teacherly as a Good Thing, if only implicitly. She sees less of an unalloyed good, arguing that the idea of the pastor delivering God’s word through media such as sermons ended up vitiating earlier notions of pastoral care such as seen in Pope Gregory the Great’s Regula pastoralis, in which the cure of souls involved individualized counseling as well as meeting the material needs of the destitute. For Şenocak, the priest shifting from counselor, provider, and leader to schoolmaster amounts to a complete reimagining of the priest, and one that may indeed have impoverished his role. If one could make any critique of Şenocak’s thoughtfully argued piece, it might be that it would have been helpful to compare the role of the priest as envisioned by Lateran IV more with the role of clergy in the centuries prior to the Council than in late antiquity.

The turn from custom to procedure, from cultus to classroom, happened in the most basic unit of religious life, the parish. Pier Virginio Aimone Braida goes into detail of how the years around the Council saw the notion of the obligatory parish reach its canonical form, such that each Christian was subject to the authority of the priest in a geographically bounded area. The Council of course mandated in c.21, Omnis utriusque sexus, that all Christians, lay or clerical, male or female confess to their “proper priest.” Although c.21’s requirement is almost a scholarly commonplace, Braida breathes new life into research touching on this requirement, examining the move from mandate to the practical business of its implementation. Like Bird, he examines how the synod served as a point of contact between the Church as it existed--or sought to exist--as an institution, and the lived experience of the priest and his congregation. “What emerges from the statutes of these synods and from the reports made by bishops in the course of the thirteenth century is a picture of parish life with light and shade, with aspects of vitality in some parishes and others less fortunate” (153).

A sense of the particular, of place, matters not only for the parish, but also, as Tommaso Carpegna Di Falconieri shows, for the city of Rome itself. We thus see Pope Innocent III situated in his physical environment in an examination of the pope and his relations with the clergy of Rome itself. We encounter intense interventions in the institutions, building, and liturgy of the local church. This focus on the liturgy of the local carries forward to a careful examination of the liturgical celebrations that occurred over the Council’s eight days. Here is a set of decisions thoroughly instantiated in time and place to the extent that even the choice of the consecration of the basilica of Trastevere came about because it was far from possible floods that might result from November rains.

Anne E. Lester takes the sense of place further by examining a breviary from the abbey of Corbie and its central folios with a set of devotions to the Veronica attributed to Pope Innocent III. The breviary, Amiens, BM, MS 115, showed continual updates over the later Middle Ages as it found regular use by the monks. These three prayers likewise point to the cure of souls, as she notes they were to be read aloud in a monastery that served as the local community’s church. She likewise ties these devotions in with Innocent’s initiation of a procession of the veil through the city of Rome, with the physical image of Christ standing as the representation of Christ’s presence with his Church, just as occurred seeing His physical form in the Host. Such processions were part of the cure of souls in Rome, and we see a nice synchronicity with Falconier’s examination of Rome the city. She returns then to the location of Corbie, showing how the devotions in this breviary reflect a devotion to the Veronica in the region and also the relation of Innocent’s rhetoric and processions to crusading. The one concern with this excellent close reading is that the attribution of these devotions to Pope Innocent III is uncertain and needs to be addressed by a bit more than a footnote to argue that “whether such doubts are founded is not the point here” (196).

Bird and Şenocak present the parish priest as the end-user of Lateran IV’s theology. Marcia Colish looks to the level of the schoolmen of the turn of the thirteenth century and applies her deep knowledge of intellectual history to show how the Council’s condemnation of Joachim of Fiore draws heavily on Stephen Langton’s thought. Langton of course was present at Rome for the Council, and others have mentioned his possible influence on c.2, but as Colish notes, they have done so “in vague terms” and “only in passing.” She goes into detail by closely reading Langton’s commentary on 1 Sentences, showing how his refutation of Joachim’s understanding of the Trinity emerged from the scholastic theology of the turn of the thirteenth century. And that scholastic theology, the theology of the Chanter’s circle, involved not only Langton, but one Lothario di Segni, the future Innocent III.

Juanita Feros Ruys likewise uses the canons of the Council as an accessus to the intellectual history of the early thirteenth century. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of course, saw the standardization of scholastic thought, and so Ruys shows us this process at work inFirmiter credimus, the Council’s first canon. Indeed, this canon was the first time an ecumenical council’s canons had included a statement of doctrine since late Antiquity and so serves as a ripe ground for examining the theology of the time. She takes a seemingly innocuous difference in a turn of phrase from the standard “the devil and his angels” (cf. Matthew 25:41) to “the devil and other demons” and, by drawing it back to the late twelfth century, demonstrates a conscious effort to steer away from dualism. In particular, she calls attention to Alan of Lille’s De fide catholica, where this particular turn of phrase appears.

Ruys argues that Alan, by referring to “the devil and other demons,” rather than “his angels,” seeks to downplay the notion of a Satanic hierarchy, a hierarchy that would stand as a mirror of the divine hierarchy. Such a mirrored hierarchy would of course tend in a dualistic direction, and, as she notes, in the context of the late twelfth century, would reflect concerns with heresy in Europe. She does not dwell much on the relatively recent historiographical question of whether there were dualists at all, save in briefly suggesting that Pegg is incorrect in calling Alan’s arguments against dualism a classroom strawman with no real-world application. Like others in the volume, she looks at the years before and after the Council, in this case, showing how William of Auvergne dealt with the devil in the early thirteenth century, and how he referred to demonic hierarchies and showed that the devil is not an infernal ruler, but rather a prisoner along with the other demons.

The essays in this outstanding volume range from the heights of the Trinity to the depths of hell, and in between show us the lived experience of humans on earth. The collection brings together intellectual and social history, liturgical studies, and the interplay of ideas and institutions. Although singing with different voices, these essays come together in a polyphonous whole, showing us the Fourth Lateran Council as a project deeply caught up and connected with the art of arts, the cure of souls.