John Mirk’s Festial: Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II, Vol. I, ed. Susan Powell

Abstract

John Mirk’s Festial was the most widely-used vernacular sermon collection in later medieval England. Explicitly designed for clergy impaired by ‘defaute of bokus and sympulnys of lettre’, the Festial sets out an entertaining and easy-to-use series of sermons to be preached on all the important feast-days of the year. As one might expect, the text draws very heavily on Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, with some fascinating local material added for the feasts of Winifred and Alkmund. These were saints local to the Augustinian abbey of Lilleshall in Shropshire, where Mirk served as a canon, and later prior, in the mid- to late fourteenth century. Biographical details on both Mirk and his monastic community are thin on the ground; we know nothing of the abbey’s library, or whether Mirk’s pedagogical outlook was shaped by a university education. The ongoing popularity of the Festial across the fifteenth and early sixteenth...