Appraisals of the late medieval Church rarely escape the agenda imposed by the Reformation. Given that we are presently acclimatised, for instance, to an ecclesiastical landscape in which the parish looms large, and to spiritual criteria in which pastoral care takes pride of place, it is worth reflecting on the way in which the ecclesiastical history of the fifteenth century has habitually been dominated both by this institution and its success – or otherwise – in fulfilling the said principle. The outcome has been a peculiarly restricted view both of the pre-Reformation Church and of the extent of change resulting from the Reformation. The present volume aims to go some small way at least towards correcting these limitations, certainly by addressing the first of them in some detail so that the second, a more realistic assessment of change, may follow. For it is remarkable how we have – with only a few exceptions, most notably in the work of Alexander Hamilton Thompson – for so long turned a blind eye to the ecclesiastical landscape as it must have appeared to men and women before the Reformation, and to the spiritual criteria determining it. Christians in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries lived among a Church dominated by communities, the most prestigious and influential of which were large, and sometimes ancient, but all of which were liturgically pro-active. It has generally been assumed that a difference existed between monastic communities, some of which sought solitude and clearly tended to look ‘inwards’, as it were, and secular communities, which tended to look ‘outwards’, to serve the needs of the world in a practical manner. It has, moreover, been taken as axiomatic that secular communities differed profoundly from parishes.

The realisation that spurred the project that has produced this volume, however, is that such assumptions fail to do justice to the rich variety of communal life once on offer, and to the overlap frequently existing, in practice, between monastic and secular institutions, and between secular communities and parishes. Nevertheless, whereas monasteries have, to a limited extent (all too limited given their significance), received attention, secular communities – which may lay good claim to be regarded as the linchpins against which, in practice, all other Christian communities could be either coordinated or should be compared – have fared much worse.