The canon law and moral theology of the western Church in the later Middle Ages found articulation in Western Christendom’s cathedral schools and universities. To be of any use for the Church’s larger goal of ensuring everyone reached salvation through a moral life and repentance of sin, these ideas needed to reach those clergy with the responsibility for the pastoral care of laypeople. In response to this demand, a body of literature designed to aid in the cure of souls proliferated from the twelfth century onward. Since the latter half of the twentieth century, and especially since the groundbreaking work of the late Leonard Boyle, the study of pastoralia has served to illuminate the lived experience of late medieval Christianity in practice. Deeana Copeland Klepper’s outstanding monograph provides a study of one such work of pastoralia, Albert of Diessen’s Mirror of Priests, showing how the “Great Tradition” of Western Christendom found embodiment and expression in the “Little Tradition” of Bavaria and northern Tyrol in the late fourteenth century.
Ideas do not exist floating in the ether, but rather are embodied in the spoken word and then in physical stuff of the codex, on parchment and paper. To ignore the physical reality of the book is to engage in scholarly Gnosticism. Klepper’s examination of Albert’s Mirror keeps the physicality of the book front and center, showing how the theology and canon law of the Church found a physical instantiation in the codex. She further examines how this work expressed its author’s ideal of pastoral care not in a generalized “Western Europe” or even “Germany,” but rather in the in the holdings of the Augustinian convent of Diessen am Ammersee in southeastern Bavaria, Tyrol, Carinthia, and parts of Swabia.
Albert of Diessen’s Mirror is nearly unique in terms of pastoralia in that the autograph of the original text and two revisions are extant. Klepper makes excellent use of these manuscripts as well as the text of the work to show us how its author, an Augustinian canon, saw the role of the priest in the cure of souls as a custodian of and embedded in his local community in the late fourteenth century.
In chapter 1 of her book, Klepper provides a short history of pastoral literature, chronicling the shift from the so-called penitentials and their rigid penances in the early Middle Ages to the more case- and judgment-based guides to confession from the twelfth century and later. She pays particularly close attention to works of Dominicans from Raymond of Peñafort to Albert’s principal source, John of Freiburg’s turn-of-the-fourteenth-century Summa confessorum. This chapter will be exceedingly useful to the graduate student or medievalist seeking a quick introduction to pastoralia. As it is largely a lead-up to Albert and his sources, she sometimes neglects certain summas like those of William Peraldus that have little part in the lineage of Albert’s work, but this is not so much a criticism of the chapter (which is by no means meant to be exhaustive) as it is a note for the reader that not every pastoral summa will appear in its pages.
Chapter 2 covers Albert of Diessen himself, an Augustinian canon in the convent of Diessen, and how his role as such was significant in his composition of theMirror. The role of Augustinian canons regular in the cure of souls--particularly in those parish churches for which Augustinian houses had the right of patronage or possessed outright--has indeed received scholarly attention, but historiographically, the canons regular have often served as also-rans in comparison to the mendicants, especially in English-language scholarship. Klepper helpfully shows how Albert’s writing on his community’s “reputation, property, and privileges” (56) affected his sense of the convent’s role in the pastoral care of the larger community. She notes that his urbar, a list of the convent of Diessen am Ammersee’s possessions and their obligations, shows his sense of place. She shows how his description of the convent’s holdings follows their place on the route one would take traveling on an annual visit of them, which helpfully illustrates how the medieval mentality was one not of cartography, but itinerary, of routes and distances rather than of locations laid out on a map.
Most important for chapter 2 is her description of the physical community of Diessen, both the village and the convent. We read the specific details of a small town on the shore of the Ammersee, with two main cross-streets and the Augustinian convent looking down on the town from the slope of a hill rising above the lake. Albert, Klepper explains to us, was not just writing for “priests” or for “priests and laity,” but for the priests of one particular town and region. In particular, his work was for both Augustinian canons serving as priests in parishes owned by Diessen and the priests of parishes that ultimately reported to the convent. The discussion of the physical space of the town and convent and how it was spiritually understood shows an admirably interdisciplinary character, drawing on the language not only of history, but of religious studies, particularly in the discussion of how one theorizes space.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 are the heart of the book. In them, we encounter the manuscripts of Albert’s work, and how they show us three separate recensions of his work: the first 1370 recension (Munich CLM 12471), which ended up in the Augustinian house at Rottenbuch, the second (Clm 5668), held in Diessen and reflecting many later revisions, and finally, the third (Clm 18387), which went to the Benedictine monks of Tegernsee. She explains Albert’s later revisions, and how in his revisions of Clm 5668, he not only revised the text before composing this recension, but subsequently added marginal additions and additional material at its end, with each revision having a careful note explaining where it was to be placed in the body of the text. Her explanations of chapter divisions, headings, and capitals is accompanied by a series of plates to assist the reader.
Her examination of the text itself, found in chapter 4, is a masterpiece of attention to detail. Klepper tells us of Albert’s sources, which of his patristic and scholastic sources he probably drew from anthologies, and which of them he drew from the full texts. Albert’s most significant source was John of Freiburg’sSumma confessorum. Running through both Albert’s work and Klepper’s study is Albert’s concern to bring the work of learned churchmen to the parish priests whom, we must note, he believed intellectually capable enough to deal with sophisticated moral theology and canon law, a far cry from the view of the parish priest who was barely more literate than his parishioners that all too often still appears in the modern historiography.
Chapter 5 gives us three case studies in how in the text of his work, Albert envisioned assisting the priest in the construction of the Christian community: magic, sorcery, and witchcraft; Christian-Jewish relations; and rather uniquely in later medieval pastoralia, the end of the world. These case studies show us not only the instantiation of canon law in the world of the parish, but in particular show how it was adapted to the particular circumstances of his community. So, we see how in adapting canon-legal material on how Christians are to treat Jews and Muslims (pagani), Albert does not write about the latter, who were not present in Diessen and its dependent parishes, but he does discuss Jews, a community of whom inhabited Diessen, which we can tell by the town’s place names.
Klepper’s attention to the localizing work of the Mirror is a welcome addition to the study of pastoral care, because it can sometimes difficult to tell when pastoral literature (particularly the summas) reflects real-world concerns or reflects a copying of earlier texts or concern of the classroom. There is little such doubt for Albert’s mirror, which not only discusses the penance to be assigned for belief in werewolves (whose vernacular term he includes), but also omits references to Diana found in earlier sources like Burchard of Worms’s Decretum in the discussion of women who believe they can fly through the night sky, since of course an ancient Roman goddess was of little relevance to fourteenth-century Germans. Klepper convincingly argues that even Albert’s discussion on the Last Days is a response to local concerns, providing the orthodox interpretation of Revelation as an antidote to prophecies circulating in Bavaria that tied eschatological events to current events and people.
Community runs like a taproot through Klepper’s investigation of Albert’s text: how the parish priest should establish the boundaries of the community in whom he should exclude from communion, making it clear that extra-judicial violence against Jews was forbidden, and questions of when impotence would invalidate a marriage all point to a concern with maintaining the bonds and boundaries of the community.
Klepper is supremely informative to the scholar of pastoral care and medieval religious life and also goes out of her way to make her arguments and sources accessible. The plates provide a helpful illustration of her descriptions of the manuscripts. She has seven tables showing where Albert differs from John of Freiburg as well as where his different recensions of his Mirror differ from each other. Further, she cites manuscripts not only by shelf mark and folio, but provides the URL where one may find these manuscripts digitized. Even after Covid-19, in an age of shrinking budgets for travel and reproduction, it is a welcome aid to North American scholars who wish to consult the manuscripts themselves.
All told, Klepper’s work is a tour de force, with supreme attention to detail, and a constant eye to the lived experience of the priest and canon. It will be invaluable for scholars of the cure of souls in the later Middle Ages.