Among her many contributions to scholarship on medieval women, Catherine Innes-Parker has permanently enriched our understanding of a series of thirteenth-century English soliloquies from the West Midlands, known as the Wooing Group after its longest member, The Wohunge of Ure Lauerd (Wohunge), the earliest long passion meditation in English and harbinger of many others. Her 2015 edition of The Wooing of Our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers in particular is a model of feminist historical scholarship and pedagogy: learned, generous to fellow scholars and readers and respectful both of the soliloquies themselves and their early audiences. Innes-Parker offers lucidly annotated editions and translations of all five texts she sees as part of the group (Wohunge, An Ureisun of God Almighti (Ureisun), The Lofsong of Ure Lauerd (Lofsong), The Oreisun of Seinte Marie, and On God Ureisun of Ure Lefdi), followed by appendices of translated excerpts from later texts. All too few Middle English editions are this well-presented.

Innes-Parker's introduction also re-addresses basic questions about the Group's membership and composition, arriving at answers some of which have implications for our study of the larger body of texts of which the Wooing Group is a subset. This is the Ancrene Wisse Group, traditionally divided into Ancrene Wisse in its several recensions, the Wooing Group, and the Katherine Group (the passions of Saints Katherine, Margaret and Juliana, Sawles Warde and Holy Maidenhood), although we will see reason to question whether this last grouping is as coherent as is usually supposed. This essay, written in her memory, explores some of these implications in ways I wish I could have pursued with her directly.

For thirty years, Innes-Parker worked to reconstruct what can be discovered of the readership and setting of Middle English writings for devout Christian women, never forgetting that ‘while the audience for these texts may well have been, in the first instance, women religious, in very short order these texts were owned and read by both women and men, lay and religious’, as she wrote as early as 2002.