Medieval Widowhood and Textual Guidance: The Corpus Revisions of Ancrene Wisse and the de Braose Anchoresses
In this article, I shall examine the lives of Loretta and her siblings as templates for the kind of audience imagined by the authors of the Ancrene Wisse Group and, in particular, by the author of Ancrene Wisse as he revised his original text.
The Middle English Manuscripts and Early Readers of Ancrene Wisse
The main manuscripts (i.e. leaving aside E’) range in date from the mid- thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. The eartiest seem to be C and A. These manuscripts both seem to date on textual and palaeographical grounds from around the middle of the first half of the thirteenth century (C has revisions by other scribes in hands from towards the end of the century).
The female body, animal imagery, and authoritarian discourse in the Ancrene Riwle
Through close reading and rhetorical analysis of numerous passages in the guide, this dissertation re-examines the importance of the body and authority in this work and notes the points at which the discourse of the Ancrene Riwle tends to place restrictions on its audience of medieval women religious.