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

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-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 (Mirk’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. Besides describing her own editorial practice, for example, Powell’s introduction presents the discernible facts about Mirk’s life, the principal sources of the Festial and the way he uses them, the complex relationships among the surviving manuscripts, the reasons for choosing British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II as the best text, and an expert analysis of the various scribal hands that contributed to this manuscript. Following the text, Powell provides nearly 200 pages of explanatory and textual notes, an extensive and helpful glossary, detailed descriptions and contents of all the Festial manuscripts (appendices I and II), full collations of eight selected portions of Mirk’s text (appendix III), an analysis of the dialects represented by the three main hands in the Cotton Claudius manuscript (appendix IV), a reproduction and transcription of the list of Festa ferianda in the manuscript (appendix V), and an index of biblical references and allusions (pp. 685–90).

Despite the strengths of Powell’s edition of the Festial, most readers will find it hard going at first. Like other EETS publications, it is designed primarily as a resource for specialists in Middle English and makes few...