Bloomsbury (2016) h/b 247pp £70 (ISBN 9781472519030)
As a clergyman your reviewer is well aware that the term laity includes a whole spectrum, from the lay person whose godliness, faith, learning and zeal put many a cleric to shame, through to the person whose faith is based more on superstition than reasoned belief. This excellent study by Lisa Kaaren Bailey, a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland, shows that this spectrum was ‘ever thus’.
She offers a careful, thoroughly researched, judiciously reasoned exposition of the situation of the laity in a particular place—the area the Romans knew as Gaul—during a particular period, approximately the years AD 400-700.
The ‘worlds’ [plural] of the title is well chosen, as at the outset B. makes it clear that within this region and period there was diversity of phraseology and even some fluidity about who the laity were i.e. which minor orders this term encompassed and whether working for the church or living an ascetic life put one above the seculares i.e. most of the faithful who lived ordinary lives.
In her pages we find a world where the clergy may have had a high view of their own importance (an episcopal decree of 585 directed that on meeting a pedestrian cleric a mounted layman should dismount before paying his respects), but a world also in which the clergy would sometimes respond to lay initiatives e.g. building a church on the site of a tomb, which the laity had already begun to venerate as the shrine of a holy person.
With evidence from official church documents, sermons, hagiography, archaeology (especially epitaphs), our author introduces us to saintly women, who stay on in the world from a sense of duty, but whose piety is deeply admired; to a world where miracle is regularly invoked to reward faith or punish wrong-doing—miss church on Sunday and you have only yourself to blame if your house burns down. She tells us how at their best the clergy sought to engage with the laity, sympathetically addressing their doctrinal doubt and rebuking any tendency to slip back into pagan practices.
Her thesis, set out in the introduction, allies her with those who hold that ‘during this period lay Christians helped to shape Christianity by making their own decisions about what being Christian meant in their daily lives, being responsible in part for the formation of beliefs, institutions, rituals and environments’. It was only toward the end of this period that evidence suggests that uniformity and central direction began to be imposed.
Theme after theme is discussed, from the influence of the laity on town planning to the weight to be given to pious epitaphs as evidence of committed belief. With copious notes and an extensive bibliography this is, as the price reflects, a work of specialist scholarship, but has much to offer all interested in the development of the Christian Church.
Ray Morris