Leading by Example: The Pastoral Pedagogy of John Mirk's 'Festial'
type: CreativeWork
description: The prologue to the late-fourteenth-century sermon collection John Mirk’s Festial is clear in its target audience: those clerics ‘defaute of bokus and sympulnys of letture’ whose shortcomings, both in knowledge and vocational aptitude, he sought to remedy. While Mirk here directs his anxieties towards the behaviour of his colleagues, he does so with the hope that this will in turn improve the level and quality of teaching provided to their parishioners. By examining the strategies Mirk puts in place to counter the deficiencies he observed, my thesis contributes to the increased interest in the Festial that has followed Susan Powell’s EETS edition of the work in 2009, as well as recent studies of the text by Judy Ann Ford (2006), Beth Allison Barr (2008), Ellen Rentz (2015) and Laura Varnam (2018). It highlights the pedagogic and affective qualities of Mirk’s writing and explores how these made the Festial more than just an instructive text, facilitating lay devotional practice in and beyond the parish space, both by its original audiences and later readers. In Chapter One I use the Festial to situate the exemplum in its parish context. I argue that while exempla have a long and intricate history in rhetoric, preaching manuals included, the prevalence of the device in late-medieval preaching directly corresponds to the pedagogic drive of the Church that was catalysed by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. To do so, my thesis builds upon a body of recent, predominantly French, scholarship to propose a definition of the late-medieval exemplum as a didactic tool that is best defined by its rhetorical function. I argue that the delivered context of an exemplum – its speaker, listener(s) and locus - is fundamental to the meaning it conveys and impact it has. Within this framework, I highlight the range of ways in which Mirk used exempla to facilitate a layperson’s individual, often interior, experience of - and response to - his words. In so doing, I establish that the Fe…
abstract: The prologue to the late-fourteenth-century sermon collection John Mirk’s Festial is clear in its target audience: those clerics ‘defaute of bokus and sympulnys of letture’ whose shortcomings, both in knowledge and vocational aptitude, he sought to remedy. While Mirk here directs his anxieties towards the behaviour of his colleagues, he does so with the hope that this will in turn improve the level and quality of teaching provided to their parishioners. By examining the strategies Mirk puts in place to counter the deficiencies he observed, my thesis contributes to the increased interest in the Festial that has followed Susan Powell’s EETS edition of the work in 2009, as well as recent studies of the text by Judy Ann Ford (2006), Beth Allison Barr (2008), Ellen Rentz (2015) and Laura Varnam (2018). It highlights the pedagogic and affective qualities of Mirk’s writing and explores how these made the Festial more than just an instructive text, facilitating lay devotional practice in and beyond the parish space, both by its original audiences and later readers. In Chapter One I use the Festial to situate the exemplum in its parish context. I argue that while exempla have a long and intricate history in rhetoric, preaching manuals included, the prevalence of the device in late-medieval preaching directly corresponds to the pedagogic drive of the Church that was catalysed by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. To do so, my thesis builds upon a body of recent, predominantly French, scholarship to propose a definition of the late-medieval exemplum as a didactic tool that is best defined by its rhetorical function. I argue that the delivered context of an exemplum – its speaker, listener(s) and locus - is fundamental to the meaning it conveys and impact it has. Within this framework, I highlight the range of ways in which Mirk used exempla to facilitate a layperson’s individual, often interior, experience of - and response to - his words. In so doing, I establish that the Fe…
author: Dixon, Katherine
language: eng
keywords: devotional reading, exempla, exemplum, festial, john mirk, medieval parish, medieval worship, preaching, sermon
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2022-05-07
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:17Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.94399