23 Facts About John Mirk

John Mirk is noted as the author of widely copied, and later printed, books intended to aid parish priests and other clergy in their work.

John Mirk was a canon of Lilleshall Abbey and later prior of the abbey.

John Mirk seems to have been deeply committed to pastoral work and his work was directly relevant to the situation of Shrewsbury and its environs in his period.

The defining event in John Mirk's background was the Black Death, which killed half the population and had major and protracted consequences for society and economy, as well as the spiritual life of the survivors.

Lilleshall Abbey, John Mirk's home, was a 12th-century foundation, originally intended to follow the rigorist teachings and practices of the Abbey of Arrouaise in northern France.

John Mirk was particularly critical of pilgrimage, which he considered both futile in itself and surrounded by numerous social ills.

John Mirk's works are definitely orthodox and the Festial rejects Lollard teaching both implicitly and explicitly.

John Mirk began with Advent Sunday and worked his way through to All Saints' Day, with a final sermon for the consecration of a church, although the order is disturbed to some extent in some manuscripts.

However, John Mirk chose to write in the vernacular, Middle English, a decision of ambiguous significance.

John Mirk was faced by the rise of a new class of literate laypeople, as well as by the sometimes unlettered parish clergy whom he acknowledges as his audience.

John Mirk's response was to present a compressed but comprehensive view of Christian teaching that privileges oral tradition above Biblical texts.

John Mirk's narrations have often seemed simplistic or "materialist" to later ages.

John Mirk goes on explicitly to reject Lollard teaching on images.

In John Mirk's telling of his legend, Alkmund was a King of Northumbria who had a wide hegemony.

John Mirk intervened in a dispute between two vassal states.

Where they rejected the cult of saints as a distraction from the central salvific role of Christ, John Mirk portrays the saint's sacrificial and altruistic death as imaging Christ's passion.

The underlying text behind his translation is not known, if it ever existed: it seems more likely that John Mirk drew inspiration from the earlier manuals but did not directly translate.

Archbishop John Mirk Peckham turned this into a clear list for his Archdiocese of Canterbury in the Lambeth Constitutions of 1281, which promulgated a manual known as the Ignorantia sacerdotum.

John Mirk was aware that many priests could draw on little learning in giving counsel to their flock.

John Mirk gives the priests general instructions on leading a chaste and austere life.

Once this excursus is finished John Mirk essentially follows the six points of the Lay Folks' Catechism.

John Mirk gives the text of the Lord's Prayer and the short form of the Hail Mary then in use, both in English.

John Mirk begins by contrasting the good priest with the modern priest, who is distracted by the vanities of secular life.