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John Mirk’s Festial edited from British Library MS Cotton Claudius A.II (review)

evidence for the enduring salience of ideas of the commons and of collective identities in post-medieval England. He reads these sources with a mind to the economic infrastructure of sixteenth-century England, whereby these fictions of collective identities ‘help to explain a property-based economy to itself while reminding it of the central importance of the commons’ (p. 5). Drawing on this prose evidence, Phillips succeeds in advancing a fresh and stimulating appraisal of the fictional works and their interaction with a sixteenth-century readership. Asserting the capacity for society to have produced texts and meanings which conveyed a sense of collective identity, Phillips uses his evidence to reveal (borrowing Benedict Anderson’s concept) ‘imagined communities’ whose members were alert to collective bonds. While his source base is sixteenth-century, Phillips’s conclusions also testify to recent patterns of thought indebted to sociology, behavioural economics, feminist theory, and legal studies, which have promoted the idea that the individual may not necessarily be a basic unit of knowing and acting. Phillips uses these insights to subvert traditional distinctions between the medieval person – thinking of himself as a member of a race or people – and the individualist outlook of the Renaissance. Instead he asserts that ‘we miss the extent to which group identification continued to be central to the experience of reality in the sixteenth century and beyond’ (p. 9). Phillips skilfully interweaves these theoretical insights with the practical realities of sixteenth-century communal life, including linkages based on clientage, patronage, kinship and marriage, legal institutions, as well as more nebulous links derived from local custom, neighbourly proximity, and friendship.