SOURCE: Fletcher, Alan. “The Manuscripts of John Mirk's Manuale Sacerdotis.” Leeds Studies in English 19 (1988): 105-39.

In the following essay, Fletcher examines the diversity of the manuscripts of Manuale Sacerdotis in an attempt to determine its audience and success.

John Mirk, an Austin canon active in the late-fourteenth century and, as we know only from his Manuale Sacerdotis, a prior of the abbey of Lilleshall in Shropshire, has left three known works. Two of these are written in English; his sermon cycle generally known as the Festial and his Instructions for Parish Priests. His third work, in Latin, remains unprinted.¹ This third work, the Manuale Sacerdotis, deserves more attention than it has received, both because John Mirk himself was an author of influential pastoral literature (judging from the quantity of its surviving manuscripts, his Festial appears to have been the most popular sermon cycle of the fifteenth century²) and...