This essay focuses on Ancrene Wisse and the Ancrene Wisse Group of which this work is part. Ancrene Wisse survives in a significant number of manuscripts, and its place within the literary tradition of medieval women in England seems uncontroversial. However, nineteenth- and twentieth-century editors, many of whom were men, tended to focus on the linguistic significance of these texts, paying little attention to their gendered devotional context. They also placed much greater emphasis on speculation concerning the identity of the male author of Ancrene Wisse than on examining the role of its immediate audience in shaping the work addressed to them. Women scholars working on the Ancrene Wisse Group have, in contrast, tended to be more aware of the importance of the material in relation to the history of womenߣs anchoritism and more open to the possibility of womenߣs authorship of some of the works within this group. The essay suggests that Ancrene Wisse had an expansive direct and indirect influence not only on later texts but also on womenߣs devotional traditions, which, Sauer suggests, may also have extended beyond England.

Vernacular literature in English first developed in two separate iterations: the first ‘Old English’, the language brought to the island by Germanic invaders in the fifth century, and used (alongside Latin) in writing from as early as the seventh century; the second, after the hiatus brought about by the Norman Conquest, the twelfth-century re-emergence of ‘Early Middle English’, a non-standardized rendering of a fast-changing vernacular, dialectally highly variant, in constant textual contact with Latin and French. This chapter discusses each in turn, arguing that Old English literature, for all its astonishing precocity, variety, and brilliance, provides us with a fascinating study of a centuries-long, and eventually truncated, ‘beginning’: a vernacular literature sustained over time by a particular, and crucially coterminous, audience and patronage context (the royal or aristocratic court; the monastery) without ever reaching the point of being self-sustaining. In contrast, Early Middle English emerged spontaneously in the margins of multilingual manuscripts, and as an act of translation and adaptation without institutional support or aristocratic patronage; but it emerged into a different world, in which growing community literacy gave it an audience – potentially the whole population – that would drive its development ever forward.