The anchoritic life was first attested among women in England in the early twelfth century and became an increasingly popular choice that continued up to the Reformation. In the thirteenth century, the time period under consideration here, the anchoritic life was flourishing, particularly for aristocratic women. The Ancrene Wisse, or Ancrene Riwle as it is alternatively known, was written in the West Midlands of England in the early thirteenth century as a handbook for such solitary women who sought physical enclosure, away from the world, in order to pursue a higher spiritual calling. The AW author's autograph text does not survive, but the unrevised version does, at one or two removes from the original, in the Nero manuscript (London, British Library, Cotton MS Nero A.xiv, henceforth “Nero”), dedicated to three aristocratic sisters who took up the anchoritic life and for whom the text was composed. The text was revised, possibly by the author himself, for a wider group of anchoresses, and this revised version is preserved in the Corpus, Cleopatra, Titus, Vitellius, and Vernon manuscripts. These, with the exception of Vitellius, make up the early manuscripts of the AW.

Particularly in the past thirty years, though studies of the readership of the AW have grown, few have probed more than superficially the relationship between the text and its thirteenth-century women readers. Even these studies typically consider English and French devotional literacy; questions of Latin literacy among this readership are often dealt with briefly and then set aside on the grounds that Latin literacy among thirteenth-century laywomen readers was exceptional, and the Latin that appears in the AW was not in the main directed at the women readers but at their supervisors. The predominant language of literacy was shifting; this shift is highlighted by the composition of the AW in English rather than in the Latin of Aelred of Rievaulx's anchoritic guidebook De institutione inclusarum only sixty or so years earlier. Also, the remarkable texts of the contemporary Katherine Group (KG) and the Wooing Group (WG) have often been taken as evidence that vernacular literacy among their women readers was supreme.