SOURCE: Bird, Jessalynn. Review of Orient und Okzident nach den Hauptwerken des Jakob von Vitry, by Ilse Schöndorfer. Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire 77, no. 4 (1999): 1098-1103.

In the following review, Bird praises Ilse Schöndorfer's book on Jacques, particularly her attempt to provide a comprehensive study of Jacques's views, but criticizes the author for insufficiently considering the context of his works.

Many historians have mined James of Vitry's historical and homiletic works for colorful anecdotes while ignoring the moral imperatives which informed his descriptions. His jeremiadic decrial of contemporary abuses and sanguine hopes for the possibility of reform through a renewed priesthood and religious orders and novel forms of quasi-regular and regular religious life, including the mendicants, beguines and crusaders, were dismissed as the ravings of a zealot. Yet he was not a marginal or idiosyncratic figure. An influential reform preacher and recruiter for the crusade, bishop...