John Mirk’s “Festial”: Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II (review)

John Mirk, an Arrouaisian canon of Lilleshall Abbey, compiled his Festial, sixty-four sermons for use by parish priests, “probably in the late 1380s” (1:ix). A lively and undemanding compendium of legend, folk-tale, and popular history, based mainly on the Legenda aurea, it was the most widely used English sermon collection of the pre-Reformation period, and it survives as a whole or in part in more than forty manuscripts. The earliest version (A) followed the order of the Church year; an early revision (B) reordered the sermons into nineteen Temporale and forty-five Sanctorale, and was itself revised in a post-1434 version (Rev.), which rewrote and augmented it to produce “a more scholarly collection aimed at a more sophisticated audience” (1:ix). In 1483, Caxton published a text of the B version, and the collection remained in print until the Reformation. After that, however, it did not reappear in print until 1905, in the first volume of an EETS edition (e.s. 96) by Theodor Erbe. Erbe’s death in World War I meant that his planned second volume, with introduction and notes, was never published. The new EETS edition satisfyingly remedies this loss. A substantial introduction discusses Mirk’s life and works, the nature, order, and function of the Festial’s sermons, its textual transmission, the “scribal production” of the base manuscript, and the reasons for its choice. The edited text (running across both volumes), which includes additional sermon material from the base manuscript, is meticulously produced and made more accessible by skillful modern punctuation. The second volume also includes comprehensive “Explanatory Notes,” a judiciously chosen “Select Glossary,” a glossary of proper names, and a list of scriptural references and allusions. The appendices give a tabulation of the contents of each manuscript, descriptions of the individual manuscripts, full collations of the introductory Prayer, the Prologue, and Sermons 2, 14, 24, 34, 39, and 56, a description and discussion of the scribal dialects found in α (London, British Library, MS Cotton Claudius A.II), and a transcription of its list of festa ferianda.

The number of the manuscripts of the Festial and the complexity of their interrelationships present a daunting challenge to the editor. Erbe chose as his base text Oxford, Bodleian Library, Gough Ecclesiastical Topography 4 (D), a mid-fifteenth-century manuscript of the A version; Powell prefers an earlier manuscript, Cotton Claudius A.II α, also belonging to the A group but sharing some features with the B version. She concedes that it is “an uneven text, compromised by a piecemeal assemblage of the text, perhaps from different periods, certainly by different scribes using different exemplars which themselves may well have been copied from other different exemplars” (1:lxxxiii). A good case can be pieced together from her introduction for this editorially unorthodox choice, but the theoretical framework underlying it needs to be more explicitly articulated. What kind of edition is she producing? At one point in the introduction (1:cxxii), it is described as a “critical edition,” and indeed Volume 1 is advertised on Amazon.com as A Critical Edition of Mirk’s “Festial,” although this description does not appear on the published title page. But although Powell uses some of the tools of the critical editor to repair textual defects in α, her edition has little in common with the traditional “critical edition.” The textual relationships of the manuscripts resist stemmatic analysis (1:cxi), and she makes no attempt to reconstruct an authorial original: “Given the different Hands and exemplars, any attempt to return α to an Ur-text closest to Mirk’s original would be fundamentally misguided, as well as involving constant and major intervention” (1:cxxii). Her editorial approach is closer, in its conservatism, to that of a “best-text” editor: “The policy is . . . to restrict intervention in the base-text...