John Mirk’s “Festial”: Orthodoxy, Lollardy, and the Common People in Fourteenth-Century England by Judy Ann Ford (review)

REVIEWS 269 munity as a whole. Foot demonstrates her skills as a medievalist, as she is able to survey evidence from a wide range of sources and carefully reconstruct a vivid picture of Anglo-Saxon monastic life. Her second part, “Without the walls,” focuses on the relationships that monastic institutions had with other monastic institutions as well as the world around them. Foot vividly describes every aspect of Anglo-Saxon medieval life, from the elevated ideals to the mundane day-to-day tasks. She carefully references modern scholarship and controversies without allowing them to cloud the clarity of her own survey. She argues convincingly that rather than being withdrawn from the world, monks in this period were actively engaged in the world around them. They were an integral part of the social fabric of the Anglo-Saxon world. They provided social and spiritual services to the laity while pursuing their own ideals. Foot closes by returning to her criticism of primary sources. Bede and Bishop Æthelwold, our main primary sources, had their own reasons for portraying monastic life as they did. Æthelwold wrote from the perspective of a later reformer and misread the earlier Bede. He and other Benedictine reformers did not approve of the variety and diversity of an earlier period. Foot engages the sources themselves. She consistently argues that this variety and diversity was a strength of monastic life of this period which was carefully attuned to the society and needs of its culture and period. Those who pushed the ninth-century Benedictine reform had a vested ideological interest in portraying the earlier period as lax and degenerate. Foot argues convincingly that it was not. She concludes that the Benedictine reforms were more than a reform, they were a revolution in Anglo-Saxon monastic life. Foot’s work is lucid and vivid. The daily and institutional life of AngloSaxon monasteries is vividly portrayed while issues in modern scholarship and problems of primary sources are lucidly explained. Foot’s work will be standard reading for anyone who wants to understand religious life in this period or medieval monastic life in the Latin West. At the same time, Foot’s work, carefully divided into topics with a thorough bibliography and index, can serve as a reference work. It has a place on every medievalist’s shelf. BENJAMIN DE LEE, History, UCLA Judy Ann Ford, John Mirk’s “Festial”: Orthodoxy, Lollardy, and the Common People in Fourteenth-Century England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2006) 168 pp. As the first full length study of John Mirk’s Festial, Judy Ann Ford’s new book is a much-needed addition to the critical canon on (il)literacy, rebellion, orthodoxy , and heresy. Given the fact that the Festial was the most popular vernacular sermon collection in late medieval England, it is, in some ways, a surprise that this work is the first one solely dedicated to it. Ford’s study, however, breaks that trend and gives new voice to the “most ordinary and unexceptional English men and women” that were the audience of Mirk’s sermons (2). This attention to the unexceptional and to the orthodox in the vernacular is valuable as a counterpoint to the critical literature on Lollardy, which has thus far received the lion’s share of historical and literary attention. Ford’s book is especially valuable as a source for an orthodoxy more representative of late medieval England than that which is often evoked by scholars in Arundel’s Constitu- REVIEWS 270 tions. In her readings of Mirk’s sermons, Ford is balanced and fair while explaining the social, political, and religious dimensions of the text. Ford’s most exciting thesis comes in her introduction and first chapter, “Popular Culture and the Study of Late Medieval Piety.” She challenges the commonly held belief that Lollardy was a truly popular movement due to its promotion of scriptural access in English. She points to the fact that literacy, despite its steady growth, was still not a reality for the vast majority of the English population, especially those who did not live in towns or cities. Her argument is made even more compelling by her analysis of the structural contents of a typical...