Sherry L. Reames

The Cecilia Legend as Chaucer Inherited It and Retold It: The Disappearance of an Augustinian Ideal

By comparing successive versions of an early saints legend, one can trace the progress of religious ideas across the Middle Ages. The procedure is always illuminating, but there is particular interest in applying it to the Cecilia legend, for this is the only actual saints legend retold by Chaucer. The implications of Chaucers version, the narrative he assigns to the Second Nun in the Canterbury Tales, cannot be seen clearly unless one knows the tradition behind it. The Cecilia legend survives in a series of alternative versions that comprise an ideal context for defining the salient features of Chaucers narrative. The oldest of these versions, and the ultimate source for all the rest, is the longer Passio S. Caeciliae. A derivative historical romance dating from the early Middle Ages,1 the Passio is noteworthy for its intellectual seriousness and its avoidance of the excesses, both in plotting and in theology, that characterize some of the more popular legends. In fact, the central meaning of the Passio resides in a complex ideal of perfection that is close to Augustines teachings, not only in specific details but also in its balance between affirmation and transcendence of the created order. Of the descendants of the Passio in later centuries, all but a few can be ignored here. Three of the English ones the drastic abridgment by iElfric at the end of the tenth century, the popular adaptation in the Northern Homily Cycle at the end of the fourteenth, and the more detailed account by Osbern Bokenham in the mid-fifteenth, which draws both on the Passio itself and on the Legenda aurea of Jacobus de Voragine2 will serve to illustrate

John Mirk's Festial Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II ed. by Susan Powell (review)

John Mirks Festial. Edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II. Edited by Susan Powell. 2 vols. [Early English Text Society, Original] S[eries] 334 and 335.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 2009 and 2011. Vol. 1: Pp. cxlv, 188;

Reconstructing and Interpreting a Thirteenth-Century Office for the Translation of Thomas Becket

130.00; ISBN 978-0-19-957849-8. Vol. 2: Pp. 189-690;

Virgins and Scholars: A Fifteenth-Century Compilation of the Lives of John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, Jerome, and Katherine of Alexandria (review)

135.00; ISBN 978-0-19-959037-7.)A first-rate edition of a medieval sermon collection is a blessing for historians, and all the more so when the collection in question is John Mirks Festial. Mirk, an Augustinian canon at Lilleshall Abbey in Shropshire, compiled this vernacular collection in the late 1380s or 1390s, explaining in his prologue that he designed it for clergy who did not have enough books or education to teach their parishioners about all the major feasts in the church calendar, as they were supposed to do. The market for such a preaching aid must have been enormous and long-lasting, for the Festial became one of the great best-sellers of its era. It survives, as a whole or in part, in more than three-In dozen fifteenth-century manuscripts and was printed more than twenty times between 1483 and 1532. Priests who used the book may often have supplemented it with other sources, of course, but it is reasonable to infer from its long popularity that the Festial exerted a formative influence on the preaching in English parish churches for several generations before the Reformation.Susan Powells edition of the Festial reproduces the contents and order of the earliest and most authoritative of the extant manuscripts. Besides the prologue and a brief opening prayer, the text has seventy-four chapters, sixty-seven of which are sermons for particular days in the Sarum calendar, running from Advent and St. Andrew (Nov. 30) to St. Katherine (Nov. 25). The occasions covered include the major feasts of Christ and the Virgin Mary, several dozen widely venerated saints and two local Shrewsbury ones (Alkmund and Winifrede), All Saints, and All Souls, plus Rogation Days, Ember Days, and all the Sundays from Septuagesima to the end of Lent. The last seven chapters are more miscellaneous in character: sermons for the dedication of a church, a marriage, and a burial, notes on the rules for burial in holy ground, advice on teaching the Ave Maria, an additional Marian miracle story, and a sermon that expounds the Paternoster.Before Powells edition, the Festial had been edited in modern times only by Theodor Erbe, who published a bare-bones version of the text CMirks Festial: A Collection of Homilies, EETS E.S. 96, London, 1905) and died shortly thereafter, without completing the introduction and notes he had planned for a second volume. Powells handling of the medieval text itself is more reliable than Erbes, and she supplements it with vast amounts of additional information. …