Parish priests and their books: Reading, writing, and keeping accounts in the late medieval diocese of Eichstaett

This dissertation examines the acquisition and use of texts by the parish clergy in the diocese of Eichstatt between 1400 and 1520 and argues that the late medieval parish clergy enjoyed much greater access to non-liturgical literature than has been previously thought. Chapter 1 places the priest in the context of the parish, diocese, and emerging territorial state and argues that the bureaucratization of the parish in the late Middle Ages required that priests possess a facility with documents and written records. Chapter 2 examines the level of learning that churchmen expected priests to possess, surveys the educational landscape in the diocese of Eichstatt, and estimates the number of parish priests who had attended the universities of Vienna and Ingolstadt. Chapter 3 traces the decline in the prices of paper and books in the fifteenth century and analyzes the books available in the parish library in Schwabach as well as seventy-three books that once belonged to members of the parish clergy in the diocese of Eichstatt. Most of the owners of these books remain relatively anonymous; Chapter 4 outlines the career of one priest, Ulrich Pfeffel, whose surviving notes allow one to say something about the circulation of texts in the second half of the fifteenth century. Finally, Chapter 5 again looks at the seventy-three privately owned books and discusses a few of the favored genres in greater detail.