IN HIS Festial, the most popular vernacular sermon compilation in late medieval England, clerical author John Mirk included an exemplum about a Devonshire vicar.

This book opened with an exemplum about a Devonshire priest who diligently set out to deliver extreme unction to a dying woman. He faced many challenges in this task, but succeeded in vanquishing a demon, witnessing a miracle of the consecrated host, and fulfilling his pastoral duties to a female parishioner. The tale ends with the priest going home, praising God for the marvelous events that had occurred.

I would like to end this book by relaying the conclusion of a similar, but more somber story that I introduced in the fourth chapter, Pastoral Care. Shrewsbury School MS 3 contains the tale of a young girl whose father sexually abused her as a child. The mother discovered the illicit affair and the father shunned his daughter. When the young girl, now very emotionally confused, “saw her father have no use of her,” she flew into a rage, murdering him in the night. Immediately thereafter she ran away to another country and became a prostitute, or “common woman” as the text specifically reads. Yet haunted by the guilt of her livelihood, her former incestuous relationship, and the murder of her father, she stumbled into a local church one day where a devout cleric was preaching. The sermon focused on “the mercy of our lord and how ready he is to grant mercy to sinners and they will ask it.” Overwhelmed by her guilt, the penitent prostitute threw herself at the feet of the preacher, pouring out her crimes and begging forgiveness.

CLEARLY authors of pastoral vernacular literature recognized their responsibility to women. They understood that “Christ's people’ included both men and women; they perceived the women they served in a somewhat realistic light; and, as this final chapter demonstrates, they attempted to offer women proper pastoral care. At the same time, female parishioners presented priests with unique challenges that complicated the pastoral care process.

John Mirk's Instructions for Parish Priests illustrates these points well. First, it recognizes women as ordinary parishioners who required ordinary pastoral care. Twice Mirk stressed that priests should impress upon both men and women the need for confession. In the introduction, he wrote:

Later, under a section entitled De modo audiendi confessionem, Mirk reiterated that priests must be prepared to care for male and female penitents.

Second, Mirk encouraged priests to exercise special caution with women, because of their sexuality. He warned priests about fraternizing with questionable women.

M.F. Wakelin, Susan Powell, and Alan Fletcher have made notable contributions to cataloguing and describing manuscripts containing the sermons of John Mirk. But these descriptions are scattered throughout a variety of articles and dissertations. Drawing on this previous scholarship and on my own examination of each manuscript, this appendix provides a unified list of the major Festial manuscripts. It also helps to clarify further distinctions between the Group A and Group B manuscripts and provides transcriptions of the two prayers and the prologue. Finally, it contains a brief introduction to the minor manuscripts of Mirk's Festial.

British Library MS Cotton Claudius A II

Description: Fifteenth century, 1425–50. 158 folios. Manuscript written in several different hands and includes 74 Festial homilies (the most in any extant version, ff. 1v–123v) and Instructions for Parish Priests (ff. 127r–152v). It includes the usual prayer and prologue and – as Wakelin remind us – the relatively rare homilies on St. Winifred, St. Alkemund, the death of Nero, and the Lord's Prayer. The sermons begin with First Sunday in Advent and end with Dedication of a Church. As Wakelin noted, the compilers of this manuscript clearly were concerned with pastoral needs. This collection would have provided readers with all the necessary information to conduct everyday duties such as baptism and confession; weekly duties such as preaching; and a calendar to remind them of upcoming feasts and celebrations (ff. 152v–153r).

WITH THESE opening words, John Mirk made the intent of his Instructions for Parish Priests clear: to better educate priests – in their pastoral duties as well as their daily conduct – so that they could better educate parishioners. The author of Speculum Sacerdotal similarly stated that he had composed his work at the request of priests to help them preach and teach to their parishioners:

FROM THE generous acknowledgment of women within some manuscripts to the regular inclusion of women within pastoral discussions of most manuscripts, clerical writers of vernacular sermon compilations recognized female parishioners as an ordinary part of pastoral care – both informing priests how to care for women and informing women how to fulfill their spiritual obligations. But who were the female parishioners to whom clerical writers acknowledged pastoral debt? Omnis utrusque sexus, the decree of Fourth Lateran Council, did not imply discrimination against any within the Church's care, male or female. It demanded blanket observance. In practice, however, when clerics penned their sermon compilations and instruction manuals, what types of women did they envision as typical petitioners? Their compassion would have extended to comely maidens, pious matrons, and chaste widows. But how much further would it have gone? Would it have extended to older singlewomen, working women, and those of ill-repute? Or would some women have slipped through the cracks? In short, did clerical writers approach female parishioners as they actually were or only as they were imagined?

A poignant exemplum from Festial sheds light on this matter. A bishop ready to administer the sacrament on Easter Sunday prayed that God would reveal to him the parishioners worthy and unworthy to receive the Host. As the people streamed in the church doors, making their way toward the sacrament table, the bishop realized that his prayer had been granted.

JOHN MIRK concluded his Festial sermon on the Lord's Prayer with an exemplum about a woman who had lived in sexual immorality for many years. One day when she was in church, she listened to a sermon about the “horrible pains of hell ordained” for those who lived in lechery and “would not leave it.” The words of this sermon so convicted her that “she was contrite and stirred by the Holy Ghost, that she went, and shrove her, and took her penance, and was in full purpose forto have left her sin for always after.” Yet on her way home she met her lover who seduced her with calming words. “If all things were such that is preached, there should no man nor woman be saved; and therefore leave it not, for it is not such. But be we hereafter of one assent, as we have been before, and I will plight you my troth that I will never leave, but hold you always.” Then “turned the woman her heart, and did the sin as they did before.” Shortly thereafter they both suddenly died. A concerned priest prayed that God would show him the state of their souls, and as he walked past a body of water one day, he saw a dark mist hovering above the surface and heard the voices of this man and woman emanating from the darkness.

Initiated in 2000 and now in its fourth volume, Fourteenth Century England has proved a success in fulfilling its purpose: to publish biennially a representative sample of recent and innovative work on the history of the fourteenth century, with particular emphasis on politics and the political culture of England. It is organised under the co-editorship of Nigel Saul (Royal Holloway, University of London), Chris Given-Wilson (University of St Andrews), Mark Ormrod (University of York) and Jeff Hamilton (Baylor University).

Fourteenth Century England is not the product of a specific conference, although it continues to derive some of its contributions from the sessions held annually at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, and the International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds. Certainly the sessions of the Society of the White Hart, founded by the late James L. Gillespie (in Kalamazoo), and the sessions of the Society for Fourteenth-Century Studies, organized by the editors of this journal (in Leeds), provide stimulating forums for the presentation and discussion of new research. Readers of this journal are encouraged to attend and participate in these meetings, although, again, contributions to the journal are in no way limited to participants of these, or other, conferences focusing on the fourteenth century.

Volume IV of Fourteenth Century England, like its predecessors, is not limited to a single theme, but rather represents the diversity of current scholarship, both in terms of subject and of methodology. John McQuillen, Alison McHardy, Beth Barr and Diane Martin are each concerned with the institutions and practice of religion, but the sources and methodological approaches they employ lead them to very different observations of the fourteenth-century experience. Amanda Richardson explores the relatively new field of landscape history, in the process demonstrating new applications for traditional types of documentary evidence. Biographical and prosopographical approaches are well represented in the articles by Alison McHardy, Christian Liddy, James Bothwell, John Leland and Martyn Lawrence. Another area that receives considerable attention in this volume is the application of the law. The use, or abuse, of the royal pardon in the reign of Richard is studied by both Helen Lacey and John Leland, while Diane Martin examines enforcement of the statutes of provisors and premunire in the same reign.