John Mirk’s Festial Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II ed. by Susan Powell (review)

Abstract

John Mirk's Festial. Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II. Edited by Susan Powell. 2 vols. [Early English Text Society, Original] S[eries] 334 and 335.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 2009 and 2011. Vol. 1: Pp. cxlv, 188; $130.00; ISBN 978-0-19-957849-8. Vol. 2: Pp. 189-690; $135.00; ISBN 978-0-19-959037-7.)A first-rate edition of a medieval sermon collection is a blessing for historians, and all the more so when the collection in question is John Mirk's Festial. Mirk, an Augustinian canon at Lilleshall Abbey in Shropshire, compiled this vernacular collection in the late 1380s or 1390s, explaining in his prologue that he designed it for clergy who did not have enough books or education to teach their parishioners about all the major feasts in the church calendar, as they were supposed to do. The market for such a preaching aid must have been enormous and long-lasting, for the Festial became one of the great best-sellers of its era. It survives, as a whole or in part, in more than three-In dozen fifteenth-century manuscripts and was printed more than twenty times between 1483 and 1532. Priests who used the book may often have supplemented it with other sources, of course, but it is reasonable to infer from its long popularity that the Festial exerted a formative influence on the preaching in English parish churches for several generations before the Reformation.Susan Powell's edition of the Festial reproduces the contents and order of the earliest and most authoritative of the extant manuscripts. Besides the prologue and a brief opening prayer, the text has seventy-four chapters, sixty-seven of which are sermons for particular days in the Sarum calendar, running from Advent and St. Andrew (Nov. 30) to St. Katherine (Nov. 25). The occasions covered include the major feasts of Christ and the Virgin Mary, several dozen widely venerated saints and two local Shrewsbury ones (Alkmund and Winifrede), All Saints, and All Souls, plus Rogation Days, Ember Days, and all the Sundays from Septuagesima to the end of Lent. The last seven chapters are more miscellaneous in character: sermons for the dedication of a church, a marriage, and a burial, notes on the rules for burial in holy ground, advice on teaching the Ave Maria, an additional Marian miracle story, and a sermon that expounds the Paternoster.Before Powell's edition, the Festial had been edited in modern times only by Theodor Erbe, who published a bare-bones version of the text CMirk's Festial: A Collection of Homilies, EETS E.S. 96, London, 1905) and died shortly thereafter, without completing the introduction and notes he had planned for a second volume. Powell's handling of the medieval text itself is more reliable than Erbe's, and she supplements it with vast amounts of additional information. …