John Mirk's holy women.

Publication: Papers on Language & Literature

Publication Date: 22-SEP-07

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John Mirk's Festial, a popular English sermon collection, provided priests with orthodox, vernacular homilies for all the important saints' feasts of the Christian year (Fletcher 514). A canon-regular of the monastery at Lilleshall in Shropshire, Mirk composed these homilies from about 1382 to 1390 for St. Alkmund's, Shrewsbury, a church whose revenues supported Lilleshall Abbey (Spencer 311). Mirk's work was widely circulated, and during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Festial underwent twenty-four editions. (1) Throughout England, parishioners would have listened to these model homilies within churches that displayed wall paintings of the Virgin Mary and female saints. Like the wall paintings, Mirk's figurative language and fascinating narratives illustrate miraculous events in the lives of holy women. Many of these stories rely heavily on legends often depicted in churches. This essay explores the relationship between Mirk's narratives and Christian images by focusing on sermons devoted to the Virgin Mary and female saints. Festial provided preachers with homilies that encouraged parishioners to revere images and worship at shrines. Mirk made extensive use of figurative language, Christian symbols, and narration (as opposed to scriptural explication), and he urged the laity to see themselves as learned because they could read the symbolic in narratives and art. His stories of saintly women worked in conjunction with church paintings and carvings to produce the "truth" of legends and fables for parishioners.

When Mirk composed his model homilies, the use of images as "books" for the unlettered was a topic for debate. (2) Consistently denouncing images were the Lollards, the followers of John Wycliff. Wycliff saw some educational value in images, but he argued against their veneration. Embracing biblical teachings, his followers ardently opposed the laity's practice of worshipping at images, citing the Second Commandment against making graven images and linking the laity's behavior to devil worship (Aston, England's Iconoclasts 109-10). The Lollard movement was not entirely unified, but their opposition to orthodox use of images united them. In addition, both Wycliff and his disciples were troubled by literary influences on preaching. In their formulation, preachers should speak directly and should not "adulterate the Scriptures with contrivances" or make "affectations of verbal delivery." (3) Mirk's homilies about Mary, Mary Magdelene, Saint Katherine, and Saint Margaret are adorned with such "contrivances" and would have been particularly useful to preachers wishing to dismiss competing claims that the church's art fostered idolatry.

Festial does not simply defend Christian paintings and statues against Lollard charges of idolatry; rather, its narratives go much further to illustrate explicitly how their reverence saves the holy and converts the unbelievers. Mirk's stories prompted lay listeners to envision that something miraculous could occur in their lives if they, too, concentrated on depictions of saints. Mirk scorned Wycliffite notions about both physical and verbal images by shifting the meaning of the term "lewde" to signify a person's inability to grasp symbolic meanings. Jacobus de Voragine's The Golden Legend supplied Mirk with miracle stories about saints. (4) For Mirk, lay people did not need to be able to read scripture to be "learned"; rather, sermon listeners needed to be able to understand the symbolism of Christian stories and art. Knowledge of this symbolism distinguished a "learned" person from a "lewde" one. Traditionally, the term "lewde" meant "lay" as opposed to "clerical," signifying one who was untaught in Latin. (5) The term also meant "ignorant" or "uneducated." In Festial, a "lewde" person is unable to interpret religious images, stories, or symbols.

Using church artwork to illustrate his point, Mirk defines the term "lewde" in his St. Luke's Day homily. He writes that the four evangelists are "lyknet to fowre dyuerse bestys, and soo byn paynted yn fowre partyes of Cryst, pat ys: for Marke a lyon, for Mathew a man, for Luke a calfe, and for Ion an eron" (Mirk 261). (6) As a result of these paintings, Mirk contends, "mony lewde men wenen pat pay wern suche bestys and not men" (261). (7) The word "lewde" stands for those unable to grasp the figurative meaning that each creature signifies an aspect of the evangelists' work. Wycliff also used the term "lewed" pejoratively. But he chastised clerics with whom he disagreed, and it took on the meaning of "reprehensible" (Knapp 100). Festial was produced around about the same time as the Wycliffite Sermons, although the homilies are ideologically opposed to Lollard ideas (Spencer 311). Clearly, preachers using Mirk's collection would have been encouraging lay people to position themselves against Wycliff's disciples. (8)

Both Mirk and Wycliff used "lewde" as an attack word, but they used it differently to either defend or condemn the laity's perception of images. A Wycliffite treatise on the Ten Commandments demonstrates how the "lewed" people worship false gods in images: "Also he that worshippeth or prayeth to any image i-made of man with that worship and prayers that is only due God and to his saints, maketh that image his false God. For such dead images be lewed men's books to learn them how the[y] should worship saints in heaven after whom these dead images are shaped" (Aston, Lollards and Reformers 152). Wycliffite texts also fashion commoners as victims of "lewed" prelates, condemning clerical figures with precisely the same terms used against peasants as ignorant, lazy liars (Barr 203).

Mirk responded clearly to any competing notion that condemned Christian images: the cross, he contends, is set up in the church so that men can have their minds on Christ's passion, despite "whateuer pes Lollardes sayn" (171). Lollards sharply criticized the practice of worshipping at crosses and argued that the "creeping to the cross" rite was an "idolatrous performance" (Aston, "Lollards and the Cross," 100). Mirk's comment on Lollard's charges of idolatry suggests that he saw them as ridiculous. He easily dismissed them because he viewed images as a way for lay people to focus their thinking during mass. But he corrected what he saw as a misinterpretation of the meanings of an image. In "De Epiphania Domini," Mirk tells the story of the three kings who visited the infant Christ:

Then, when pe kynges passyd pe towne toward Bedeleem, anon pe sterre apered a3eyne to hom; and when pay syghen pe sterre coming a3eyne, pay wer gretly ioyet yn hor hertys. pen, as hit yn mony place ys payntude and corven, pat kyng pat ys yn pe mydell, for gret ioy pat he had, wryde bakward tohys fellow byhynd, and pytte hys hond vp, schewyng hym pe sterre; lewde men hauen an opynyon and sayne, pat he had slayne a mon, wherfor he turned backeward. But God forbade pat pys opynyon wer trew. (49) (9)

Mirk assumes that the laity are familiar with the paintings and carvings that illustrate the kings' story when he writes "that king that is in the middle." The "lewde" men misunderstand the reason for the king sitting backwards, reading the image as a form of public punishment. (10) The painting or carving provides the opportunity to discuss the narrative; it is crucial for lay understanding.

Festial also denounces idolatry, but, unlike Wycliffite works, it condemns only pagan images and plays up the idea that fiends reside secretly in them. Mirk tells of how St. Andrew confronts idolatry in the city of Patras where the justice forced men to make offerings to fiends within images. Similarly, in his homily about St. Phillip, Mirk relates how the saint preached against idols in Scythia, trying to prove they were devils. When the irate people forced Phillip into their temple to sacrifice to the idols, a dragon burst from the earth, breathing poisonous venom over the pagans. By healing their wounds, Phillip converts them. Mirk tells the same kind of story about St. John the Evangelist who confronts idolatry in Ephesus. In addition, his homilies for St. Katherine, St. Margaret, and St. James condemn the worship of pagan images. And in...

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