Medieval Purity and Piety: Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform

Medieval Purity and Piety: Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy and Religious Reform. Edited by Michael Frassetto. [Garland Medieval Casebooks, Volume 19; Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Volume 2006.] (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1998. Pp. xix, 401. $75.00.)

This collection of fifteen essays is organized in four parts: (1) "History and Historiography"; (2) "Clerical Celibacy and Reform before the Age of Gregory VII"; (3) "Gregory VII, Celibacy and the Eleventh-Century Revolution"; and (4) "Medieval and Modern Consequences of Clerical Celibacy."

Edward Peters in "History, Historians, and Clerical Celibacy," after a brief overview of the Reformation and post-Reformation polemics, traces modern scholarship on the subject from the work of the Theiner brothers in 1828 to the studies produced after the Second Vatican Council. These investigations have enhanced our knowledge of developments far broader than that of clerical celibacy For example, "the results of this research from Fliche [ 1924-1937] and Tellenbach to Liotta [ 1971 ] and Brundage [ 1991] have...