Priests and their Books in Late Anglo-Saxon England. By Gerald P. Dyson

Abstract

Gerald P. Dyson's study aims to use the evidence provided by priests’ books in the tenth and eleventh centuries to gain a fuller understanding of how pastoral care was practised in England. The questions asked are broad and thoughtful—How were priests trained? From where did they get their books? What did they read? The evidence is scant, and Dyson often has to rely on continental analogues or postconquest practices to extrapolate similarities for his chosen period and place. That said, the foci of investigation and the manner of exposition are stimulating and sure to provoke. Priests and their Books is divided into six core chapters that focus on issues of clerical literacy, the provision of priests’ books, and the principal genres of book identified as essential for secular priests. Dyson presents a consistently detailed set of readings that reveal the structures of the pastoral system in England and the tools required by each priest. Such priests ‘were ubiquitous figures in the medieval world’ (p. 17) and Dyson follows the tenuous estimation that they outnumbered monks by five to one, circa 1066 (p. 8). As such, there must have been a few thousand secular priests serving their congregations during this period, but it is difficult to find evidence about their identities and activities. How then can one build a case? Dyson methodically brings to bear an impressive range of critical scholarship and research on a number of manuscripts to analyse what can be gleaned from them. Books to which he frequently returns include the well‐known Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 41 (an Old English Bede and surrounding texts) and MS 422 (the Red Book of Darley), and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius MSS 85/86, together with less studied examples, like the Taunton Fragments. From the evidence of these and other textual objects, Dyson makes some excellent observations about the types of texts most likely to be required by secular priests (homilies, liturgical texts, compu‐ tistical material), and how these priests might have obtained their books. Combing through post‐conquest and continental sources allows a few examples of how books might have been procured—as purchases (sometimes secondhand), commissions, or gifts; but, on the whole, there is little attestation of any of these methods in early England. As Dyson states, ‘we have almost no knowledge of the personal book collections of secular priests before the Conquest’. One paragraph later on p. 109, though, he feels confident enough to conclude: ‘Books for priests were produced in the major cathedral and monastic scriptoria ... as well as in a variety of smaller centers.’ This disconnection between what little we know and what Dyson feels assured in declaring to be the case occurs more than once in this study.