Regendering the Festial in British Library MSS Harley 2247 and Royal 18.B.XXV

This article examines the ways in which John Mirk’s Festial, a popular late fourteenth-century model sermon collection, was revised and edited in two mid-fifteenth-century manuscripts, British Library MSS Harley 2247 and Royal 18.B.XXV. While Mirk included stories and ideas designed for parochial audiences, many of those ideas were edited out of the Revision in order to create a more academic and intellectual version of the collection that would appeal to a somewhat more elite audience. This article argues that, in addition to making the sermons more academic, the sanctorale sermons (sermons that focus on celebrating the lives of saints) were edited in ways that minimize the power and authority possessed by Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Anna the Prophetess. Instead of Mirk’s active women who provide models of piety, in the Revision these women become passive figures who lack authority and who are dependent on masculine authority

Bartok · Elite · Fifteenth · Piety · Pulpit · Sermon · Early Modern Women Writers · Medieval Literature and History · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

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