| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

J. Michael Hayden and Malcolm R. Greenshields. Six Hundred Years of Reform: Bishops and the French Church, 1190–1789. (McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion, series two, number 37.) Ithaca, N.Y.: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2005. Pp. xx, 604. $80.00.

This book by J. Michael Hayden and Malcolm R. Greenshields presents a powerful challenge to the reader in terms both of the difficulty in understanding it and its thesis that the Catholic Reformation must be traced as far back as 1190. In regard to the first, over half of the book is taken up with maps and nearly impenetrable graphs and tables. The 187 pages of text are dense with references to the supporting materials and such terms as categories, subcategories, and subsubcategories. The book's thesis is based largely on data accumulated by the Pastoral Visits Project of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, which published a catalogue of 8,483 pastoral visits made in the era 1190–1789. A pastoral visit involved the appearance of the bishop or his representative in a parish to inspect the parish fabric and the spiritual well being of priest and parishioners. A second source for determining the reform activity of French bishops is the set of 1,773 statutes issued by diocesan synods in the same period. Hayden and Greenshields chose their beginning date because it essentially marks the onset of synods and pastoral visits, and it creates a convenient block of 600 years for quantitative analysis.

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