SOURCE: Fletcher, Alan J. “John Mirk and the Lollards.” Medium Aevum 56, no. 2 (1987): 217-24.

In the essay below, Fletcher considers Mirk's intentions for writing the Festial, placing emphasis on its relation to the period in which it was composed.

I

The Festial of John Mirk, Augustinian canon of Lilleshall Abbey in Shropshire, is, in spite of everything its prologue avows, finally a work of undeclared intention. Certainly, although Mirk's prologue offers his work for general use, he could not have foreseen that it would become the most widely read vernacular sermon cycle of the fifteenth century, to judge both by the quantity of its surviving manuscripts and by the editions printed by Caxton from 1483 onwards.¹ But the signs are that Mirk may have had a distinct intention for his Festial, unmentioned in its prologue, which was at once very specific and altogether more modest; the fact of its subsequent...