The middle of the thirteenth century saw the rise of the first true manuals for penitents – in the sense of long guidebooks about sin that explicitly advertise their benefit to penitents, rather than priests. It was in the same period that self-examination practices, which had since the early days of the Church been the particular – but by no means exclusive – realm of the clergy, started to move decisively out of the cloister and into the home. This shift was heralded by Ancrene Wisse, which celebrates, describes, and dwells on self-examination practices, despite being addressed to a non-clerical audience. While a few other earlier works, like the twelfth-century Vices and Virtues, also anticipate non-clerical audiences, it is only in the second half of the thirteenth century that authors began to address members of the laity – as in those whose vocations fell primarily outside of the institutional church – in a significant way, and that manuals for penitents truly emerged. As the evidence here shows, these manuals reached lay audiences, who were expected to read them in their own homes, alone or in groups.

The movement of self-examintion material out of the cloister and into the home brought learning that had largely been controlled by the clergy into the hands of the laity and it can therefore be thought of as reflecting, and contributing to, the laity's growing interest in imitating clerical lives. Pastoral texts promoted a form of imitatio clerici among the laity, and encouraged the laity to engage in the lectio divina – a kind of meditative reading that had traditionally been the near-exclusive realm of the clergy. Claire Waters notes that religious works in this period addressed to the laity invite their readers to experience a clerical mode of reading: ‘Rather than shaping their audiences primarily as readers, these texts imagine and address them as students, as discipuli, in a model sometimes explicitly and more often implicitly tied to the monastic and scholastic modes in which their teachers had been trained’. Waters notes that this mode of reading ‘became available, as these texts were copied, recopied, and retranslated, to an ever-wider audience’.