The ‘Right Ordering of Souls’ draws upon Clive Burgess’ many years of study of the archives of All Saints' Bristol. It is of particular benefit to historians of urban religion but, through the appearance of the civic elite in parish activity, it engages with urban politics and society. The parish of All Saints’, the focus of the study, has an exceptionally strong survival of source material. In addition to churchwardens’ accounts, there are the Church Book (containing material celebrating benefactors) and the accounts of two chantries. Burgess combines these with wills and deeds to give an exceptionally detailed study of parish management and piety in the century preceding the Reformation.

A number of arguments are made across the work. First, that in the century before the Reformation, parish religion was thriving with high levels of investment and participation from parishioners. Secondly, that guilds and chantry projects enhanced parish religion rather than detracted from it. Thirdly, that parishes in large English towns became centres of an elaborate form of worship that acted as role models beyond the town in question. Fourthly, that much parishioner activity is obscured from view in localities with fewer surviving sources.

Burgess’ story of All Saints’ goes beyond a parish history and touches on themes of urban politics. There is much evidence for how the role of the governing class stretched beyond the political sphere and into parochial affairs. These people were more than just parishioners, wielding a formal role in organizing piety. Bristol's mayor and other civic officials were pivotal in managing the Halleway chantry, scrutinizing it for signs of negligence and attending the anniversary (pp. 240–5). Collaboration between various sections of urban society is a recurring theme. Differences of opinion did occur, such as in 1525–26 when the mayor Richard Abynton overruled the wardens’ decision to halve the chantry priest's salary (p. 249). The majority of the time, though, there were high levels of co-operation between clergy, parishioners, guilds, abbots and the city's governing class.

Those studying urban society may find the heavy focus on elite individuals a limitation. The work by no means disregards the involvement of lower-status inhabitants. Indeed, Burgess makes the case that the wider body of parishioners were involved in some decision-making and perhaps even the auditing of the churchwardens’ accounts (p. 299). Yet these less-prominent parishioners are often treated as a collective group. There is little exploration of the piety of lower-status testators. As such, groups such as the fraternity of the Jesus mass are assumed to be a brotherhood of the parish elite (p. 327). My own work with reading wills, by contrast, has found many lower-status testators engaging with its own Jesus mass.

The greatest strength of the work is its careful consideration of the source material and its limitations. Its cautionary advice should be read by any historian working with parish records. Burgess explores why certain information was included or excluded from wills and churchwardens’ accounts. Major pious projects, like the Haddon family's, are absent from the churchwardens’ accounts since the parish assumed none of the financial burden (p. 171). In the case of Richard Haddon, his substantial acts of benefaction were expunged from the record when he later came into disrepute (pp. 178–80). Yet this point is not always applied with consistency. Burgess surmises that Richard Andrew and Roger Abyndon earned commemoration through service rather than financial generosity, since there is no record of their having made donations (p. 284). This is quite a leap, given the author's own evidence that many, often sizeable, donations are entirely absent from surviving sources. This exemplifies the difficulty historians face in reaching conclusions once historical sources have been critiqued.

While emphasis is placed on source limitations, the book contains little quantitative analysis. There are, however, places where this may have been of benefit. His ‘networks’ of testators are based on the appearance of wealthy inhabitants in each other's wills, rather than the formal statistical methods of network analysis (p. 91). With a qualitative examination of testamentary records, familiar elite names tend to catch a researcher's attention while the less familiar names of lower-status inhabitants pass under the radar. Equally, the description of John Thomas, vicar in 1479–1503, as ‘at the hub of the parish's social networks’ is not quantified or compared with other inhabitants (p. 265). Quantifiable network evidence could have allowed more probing questions to be tackled. To what extent were civic, parish and wealth elites overlapping circles or separate groups? Were the links within these elite groups at the expense of connections to lower-status inhabitants? Were connections between high-status and low-status residents direct or bridged by a middling class?

This book is a valuable asset to urban historians using parish records or wills. All Saints’ sources allow for a thorough assessment of the nature of the sources and for an exploration of the interaction between civic politics and parish life. Burgess’ work will enable researchers to investigate All Saints' further, perhaps exploring the piety of lower-status testators or undertaking a formal network analysis.