As counsel for the objectors is recorded as submitting in a recent, controversial consistory court case: ‘Nowadays it is a Christian truism that slavery is abhorrent and to be condemned; but in the past, Christian churches around the world failed to condemn slavery, thereby covering themselves in shame.’Footnote ²

This book by a distinguished American mediaeval historian has a narrower focus, being ‘an investigation of the Christian church as a slave owner’ and ‘a survey of the church's own regulations about how to deal with its own unfree dependents and those of ecclesiastical personnel from the earliest Christian centuries until the beginning of the Atlantic World’ (p 240). But it is much more than this, for it also covers a great swathe of political and social history from the New Testament writers through to the end of the thirteenth century. This broad contextualising of the specific investigation is executed with a sureness of touch and range of sources that make for a compelling read, albeit, as R. H. Heimholz comments on the back cover, the book will for many be ‘the source of disappointment or unease’.

Key themes that emerge from the book are that ecclesiastical slaves were part of the res ecclesiae, treated (as were slaves owned by the laity) very much as other possessions, whether animals, buildings or chattels, although over time their special position as mindful beings was recognised. Second, whilst initially slaves had individual clerical owners, bishop or cleric, increasingly they became the property of the church in a corporate sense, belonging to a diocese or an abbey, and of course being a key element of the church's management of its vast, and growing, agricultural estates. Third, although it was generally recognised that slaves were by natural law ‘free persons’, they remained property of their owners. Indeed, a primary topic of the book is how property rights trumped any civil rights of ecclesiastical slaves, largely because of the universally accepted rule against the alienation of church property. The resources of ecclesiastical institutions ‘were the property of God and could not be alienated by those who served him’ (p 146). The strictness of this rule posed considerable problems for the manumission of ecclesiastical slaves, whose position was in this respect worse than that of lay slaves; for the latter, manumission led to proper freedom, whereas even in the restricted cases where an ecclesiastical slave attained freedom, it came with continuing obligation to the church, binding not merely on the manumitted slave but on his or her descendants in perpetuity. Whether a slave could be manumitted for the purpose of ordination was another problematic issue, eventually partly resolved by a form of provisional freedom, justified by the fact that as a cleric or monk he would remain a servant of God and the church (p 223). Fourth, whilst initially slaves, including ecclesiastical slaves, were not permitted to marry (lacking the legal capacity to enter such a juridical relationship), by the ninth century there was recognition of a right, subject to their master's consent, to contract marriages (that being better than enforced fornication) (for the 813 Council of Chalons, see p 177). ‘If servi were indeed human beings, then according to the natural law, they did have a right to marry, as did anyone else, marriage being the only acceptable way for a Christian couple to join together’ (p 229). The author traces the way in which gradually even the requirement for the master (or church's) consent was abandoned, following Pope Hadrian IV's letter of the late 1150s (p 229). Fifth, whilst laymen were free to sleep with slave females (or ancillae), bishops and their clergy were not allowed to do so (p 242). The repeated reference to this rule suggests to this reviewer that its breach was not unknown, although the author reminds us that her concern throughout is not with whether the rules were obeyed, but more with the content of the rules themselves.

At the heart of the book lies the book's longest chapter (The Classical Canon Law), with a masterful exposition of the place and works of Master Gratian of Bologna in the early twelfth century. The author records that the part of this chapter dealing with ecclesiastical slaves is a revised and expanded version of her own article ‘Gratian and the Servi ecclesiarum’ (2004), referenced at p 215; and indeed this whole book is an expansion of themes enunciated in that ground-breaking article. The chapter concludes with a short exposition of the Ius Commune, ‘the law as it was discussed by legal scholars, the theorists and the most learned judges and legal advocates’ and as increasingly discussed by law students not merely in Bologna, but in Salamanca, Orleans and Oxford (p 237).

At times the chapters can seem repetitive, for the conclusion is the mildly disappointing one that ‘Unfree ecclesiastical dependents were mostly treated no differently than those with lay masters’ (p 238). To be sure of that conclusion, the almost century-by-century trawl of the very many, scattered regions and sources was essential; and where there were at times special situations, as in some parts of Gaul, particularly in Riparian Francia (Belgium), or in Lombard-ruled Italy, or in England (pp 182–188), it is useful to have this in mind – for the pattern of emerging canon law was very far from uniform until the work of Gratian, and his immediate predecessors and successors.

The final chapter of the book (Conclusions) is much more than a summary of what went before, because the author devotes pages 246–256 to Canon Law after the Classical Period and to Modern Issues. Predominantly Anglican readers of this journal who complain of the slowness with which our ecclesiastical law changes will note how slow the Roman Catholic Church was to acknowledge the wickedness of slavery. Thousands of Muslim slaves were used to man the galleys of the papal navy from 1600 to 1800 (p 249). The Catholic Church's first official condemnation of slavery was in the documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), leading to the new Code of Canon Law (1983) (p 253). To this reviewer it was news that in 1992 slavery was said to be a sin against the seventh commandment: ‘thou shalt not steal’ (p 254), truly a case of creative interpretation.

The author makes plain that ‘the historian's job is not to judge, merely to describe’ (p 258). Some readers may find surprising her generous treatment of certain features of the story she is telling. Rather than criticise the clergy for greed in their exploitation of the ecclesiastical slaves, she stresses that ‘God's economic resources [including ecclesiastical slaves] had to be preserved so that God's work could be done’ (p 258). In connection with the giving of slaves, often first manumitted, to the church in return for prayers for the donor, she rejects the idea that ‘the stated desire for salvation of one's soul was mere window dressing’. Her view is that ‘these suggestions fail to recognise how intensely most people of that era felt the presence of the holy ones in their daily lives’ (p 205). This is a useful corrective to the cynicism and economic materialism of some historians.