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Finally, the experience of the people of the British Isles in the half-century after the political reformations is considered. The parish ministry in Scotland and England is compared, as is the use of churches, the nature of the liturgy and the practice of discipline. The text concludes with an attempt to understand what sort of Protestants emerged from the crises of the century.

This continues the study of the pre-Reformation Church, focusing on the ordinary clergy, first the regulars and then the seculars. It highlights the relative strength of English monasticism, but stresses particularly the importance of the friars and the observant movement. Parish clergy are compared across the British Isles and the relationship between wealth and proper performance of duties is debated.

The clergy of the three kingdoms are studied during the same years of change, 1530–1558. The focus is upon the role of the bishops and higher clergy in influencing political regimes, and on the appropriation of clerical wealth. Ordinary parish clergy are seen as largely resistant to new religious ideas, and vulnerable to lay pressures.

This chapter explores the divergent forms of religious culture and parish life which characterised the region of Michoacán, Mexico in the 1920s. It explains that the despite the best efforts to revolutionary priest-baiters, the Church exercised an omnipresent influence in 1920s Michoacán and the landscape was everywhere dotted with roadside crosses, church towers, and village sanctuaries. By the mid-1920s, Michoacán was not simply a divided political constituency but a mosaic of mutable parish identities which were based on varying degrees of religious participation, distinct popular attitudes to the sacraments and varying relationships to the parish clergy.

This chapter addresses the extent to which parish clergy were embedded in their local community and considers how familial, social, and economic factors firmly bound clerics to a life that very much mirrored that of their parishioners. In fact, people of the parish were often connected to their priests through ties of kinship and affinity. Clerics lived out their lives as more than just priests; they were also the sons, brother, uncles, and nephews of the people in the parish. In effect, priests behaved like laymen because they were laymen in the priestly profession. Indeed, parish clergy represented an amalgamation of both the clerical and secular worlds. The clerical profession provided them with a priestly identity, and their experience as men of the village, in turn, influenced how they interacted with parishioners as priests.

This chapter focuses on priests, priors, and monks who fought against their religious colleagues to carve out status and privilege and to gain prestige within the hierarchy of the parish as well as greater access to economic resources. To subordinate their co-workers and demean their rivals, clerics insulted, sabotaged, and orchestrated petty acts of revenge and violence. Moreover, the economic crisis of the 1330s in Catalunya intensified the competition among the parish clergy struggling to survive in a time of famine, deprivation, and inflation. Clerics frequently quarreled over the customary gifts obtained when they officiated at baptisms and marriages, celebrated special masses, and buried the dead. They also became more aggressive in defending the privileges connected to their status and the rights attached to their benefices.

This concluding chapter argues that medieval priests did not renounce their ministry and their ecclesiastical careers to marry and have families. Rather, in fourteenth-century Catalunya, parish clergy were able to meld a family and household with their profession despite the prohibition against marriage. The fact that so many clergymen were promoted through the holy orders to become parish priests and still managed to form de facto marriages, support their children, and train their sons to be clergymen indicates that, even though the standards of the medieval Church had changed since the Gregorian period, the customs of parish clergy had not. Contrary to contemporary assumptions, celibacy and the absence of marital union did not define the medieval Catalan priest. Ultimately, their public sexuality, use of violent acts in defense of honor, and participation in competition for standing in the community are evidence that clerics adopted characteristics of lay manhood in medieval society.

This chapter comments on the The Memoriale Presbiterorum. This work is a part of the great body of writing for the instruction of parish clergy, which is a prominent feature of the intellectual life of the English church in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In contrast to some of the other manuals, which range widely over the pastoral cure, the treatise is exclusively devoted to confessional technique. As a manual for confessors, the treatise proper is a thoughtful application of the continental canonical tradition to the mid-fourteenth-century English scene by a puritanical though sensitive observer. The author is a fierce critic of contemporary society that, in its middle and lower strata, he subjects to systematic review from the unusual perspective of penitential discipline.

This chapter reviews the book University Education of the Parochial Clergy in Medieval England: The Lincoln Diocese, c.1300–c.1350 (2014), by F. Donald Logan. In 1298, Pope Boniface VIII’s constitution cum ex eo was published. It was considered a landmark in the provisions of higher education for the parish clergy, opening the way for parish rectors who had not yet been ordained as priests to absent themselves from their parishes for up to seven years to attend university. Logan explores how this constitution was implemented across Europe by focusing on the diocese of Lincoln, the largest in England with nearly 2,000 parishes. Logan emphasises the distinction between cum ex eo dispensations and the parallel procedure called licencia studendi, both of which contributed significantly to the enhancement of clerical education in fourteenth-century England.