10 - A Ladder for Sisters

Summary

Twenty-odd years ago, Catherine Innes-Parker published a study of the ‘gender gap’ between the inscribed and actual readership of 237 manuscripts of medieval English writings of spiritual direction for women. The majority of the texts she surveyed are directly related to Ancrene Wisse; they include not just the A-B texts, but also the Þe Holy Boke Gratia Dei, The Chastising of God's Children, The Poor Caitif and others. Her primary criteria for selection of these texts as ‘women's literature’, beyond their affili-ation with Ancrene Wisse, were that they were written in the vernacular and that they were specifically addressed to women, commissioned by women, or owned or transmitted by women. The actual readership of the works that Catherine surveyed, as demonstrated by evidence of ownership, was mixed: of the surviving manuscripts whose original or early ownership could be determined, 107 were owned by or copied for men, but only sixty by women – an unexpected ‘gender gap’ between readership and ownership. She concluded that women were not to be seen as a marginal audience, particu-larly for contemplative and devotional literature in the vernacular, but that their reading habits were not substantially different from those of lay men. Greater attention to the content and the implied audience of this literature should allow for a stronger conclusion – to give a greater voice to what might otherwise be taken for silence. This in fact is precisely what Catherine did in her subsequent studies of The Doctrine of the Hert and The Festis and Passion of Oure Lord Jhesu Christ in Holkham Misc. 41.

The present essay will examine another of the works mentioned in Catherine's study, The Ladder of Foure Ronges, the late medieval English tract on contemplation, the primary conceit of which derives from the Letter on the Contemplative Life (the Scala Claustralium) of Guigo II, the fifth prior of the Grande Chartreuse (d. 1188). The English text translates a version of the Scala that Edmund Colledge and James Walsh describe as re-ordering the material in a way that ‘appears to have been to make the treatise less schematic and less obviously didactic, and thus more suitable for devotional reading’.