SOURCE: Pantin, W. A. “Manuals of Instruction for Parish Priests.” In The English Church in the Fourteenth Century, pp. 189-219. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980.

In the following essay, originally published in 1955, Pantin discusses how Mirk's work was significant in providing religious instruction for parish priests.

In some respects, as in ecclesiastical politics, for instance, the fourteenth century, when viewed as the outcome of the thirteenth century, may seem disappointing, something of a misfit or an anticlimax; thus we may ask whether the episcopal appointments of the fourteenth century were what men like Innocent III had intended. But in the realm of religious literature we can see, in the clearest and most satisfactory way, the achievement of the fourteenth century as the logical outcome of forces at work in the thirteenth century and earlier.

There were three factors at work, which were closely interconnected. In the first place...