The Speculum clericorum of the Augustinian canon regular Albert von Dießen survives in three autograph manuscripts, the earliest of which is dated 1370. This text formed the basis of a much-expanded second recension, its autograph dated 1373, but to which manuscript Albert – and subsequently his fellow canons in Dießen – continued to add further material. A third autograph, dated 1377, is a fair copy on parchment, probably intended for the Benedictine abbey of Tegernsee, in which it was later held, and which represents a state of the work as it had come to exist by that point. Albert, meanwhile, continued to augment his working manuscript, notably in and after 1378 with material pertinent to the Papal Schism, and we do not, in fact, know how many “authorial” recensions of the Speculum clericorum remain to be located amongst the very many further manuscript witnesses to the text beyond the autographs, of which at least fifty-five have been identified thus far. The remarkable survival of so many autograph copies, including the crucial working manuscript (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 5668), allows an unusually close insight into the literary genesis of a long text on which its author worked for a good decade. It provides a model by which we might understand the compositional process of other extensive works from the German-speaking lands of the later Middle Ages, known to exist in multiple recensions, but in relation to which – in the absence of autographs – the question remains open as to whether more than one ought ever to be considered authorial. I think here in particular of the widely-circulated Dekalogerklärung (Commentary on the Ten Commandments) of Albert's exact contemporary Marquard von Lindau (d. 1392). One may further wonder whether this “processual” form of textual composition was made possible, or at least substantially facilitated, by the new medium of paper. The fact that two of the three autographs – the exception being the presentation copy for Tegernsee of 1377 – are on paper passes without remark in the present work, but its significance ought not be overlooked. It is useful to recall as a chronological marker that the earliest dated paper manuscript containing German-language texts is from 1348 (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Cgm 717). Albert belonged to the first generation of writers in southern Germany able to work routinely with this new medium.

Deeana Copeland Klepper locates Albert's Speculum clericorum against the backgrounds, on the one hand, of the later medieval tradition of penitential literature, which is surveyed judiciously and with great learning worn lightly in the first main chapter, and on the other, of Dießen and its far-flung estates and incorporated parishes across the Austro-Bavarian regions. The first strand in her approach is thus to consider Albert in relation to his literary sources, in particular the Summa clericorum of the Dominican friar Johannes von Freiburg (d. 1314), which provided the textual substrate for much of Albert's own work, but on which he drew only selectively and with considerable autonomy. The second is to locate Albert in his historical context, for he proves to have been a skilled administrator, extensively involved in the management of his convent's affairs in the decade or so prior to the inception of his work upon the Speculum clericorum, and consequently one who was thoroughly familiar with the needs and concerns of his fellow canons and the secular clergy of his region in their negotiation of the pragmatic issues of the Christian life, as these presented themselves to their parishioners. The Speculum clericorum emerges as a work in dialogue with learned Christian tradition and with local concerns simultaneously, and Albert is encountered as one who mediated the former in the service of the latter; one who was responsible for giving shape to Christianity as it was met and felt in the later fourteenth-century German parish.

Albert presented his work as an exercise in compilation rather than independent authorship (auctore proprio carens veruntamen tot habet auctores quot continet auctoritates: “lacking an author of its own, it has nevertheless as many authors as it contains authorities”), but through Klepper's keen vision, he emerges as a skilful and irenic guide. That is most strikingly evident in his repeated attention to the question of Christian interaction with Jews and his firm rejection of any suggestion that the extra-judicial killing of Jews might be considered legitimate. The renewed emergence of plague in the later 1360s may have raised in his mind the appalling spectre of pogroms, by which Germany had been convulsed twenty years previously, during the Black Death. We may not know exactly why Albert included so much on this subject, but Klepper makes it clear that in his Bavarian world Jewish communities were not some “external other” on the margins, against which Christians guarded and defined themselves; rather, as in Dießen itself, they occupied spaces integral to the town centre and were a routine part of the urban fabric. Albert provided much guidance on pragmatic issues of this kind and, as we might expect, on the sacraments, especially the eucharist and confession, both of which generated a great deal of anxiety in later medieval Germany, but he also had a capacity to look beyond the quotidian. He encouraged his clerical readers to envision themselves in the mould of the Israelite priesthood in the age of Aaron. He extended the scope of his Speculum clericorum in the later recensions with a final section on the last things and the end of the world; not to express pseudoprophetic concerns, as became increasingly prevalent in southern Germany from the 1380s onward, but to draw the minds of his readers into the broad scope of salvation history and the promise of the life to come. Deeana Copeland Klepper proves a fine guide to this fourteenth-century guide (= the Speculum clericorum), and it is extremely refreshing indeed to encounter a work that presumes, as its starting point, that late medieval parish clergy was highly educated and fully engaged in the provision of thoughtful and responsive pastoral care.