Reading, prayer and meditation constituted a major part of the job-description for medieval religious. As the three activities were not so much a triad as a continuum, the boundaries between them constantly shifting, it is hard to know what exactly devout women, and their spiritual advisers, understood by the terms in the 300 years leading up to the dissolution of the monasteries. Prayer and meditation were particularly problematic. In contrast, reading seems less so, but it too was not always an activity distinct from the others, while the promotion of ‘reading’ per se led on to a more awkward question: what should one read? For reading is both transitive and intransitive: it is one thing to recommend reading, quite another to prescribe what is to be read. The reading of religious women is a large subject that has attracted much recent scholarly attention. This paper will address a single aspect, that is, how far women religious had certain types of reading, even particular texts, prescribed (and others implicitly denied or forbidden).

At least three lines of enquiry are open to those interested in the reading practices of religious women in later medieval England. We can examine the relatively few texts composed by such women (at present virtually restricted to Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe), for evidence of what they must have read (or had read to them); or we can analyse surviving manuscripts of religious texts for which there is internal or external evidence of ownership by such women, as individuals or in communities. Thirdly, we can study texts composed for and read by women (though not necessarily confined to a female audience), to see what they have to say about reading, and what reading matter (if any) they recommend. This last is the approach adopted here.

Treatises of advice written by men in both Latin and the vernaculars for religious women have a long tradition in the West, which there is no need to rehearse. More specifically, many such Middle English treatises survive, of which the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse is pre-eminent. Of the forty-eight less memorable texts listed in Jolliffe’s Check-List of Middle English Writings of Spiritual Guidance, category O, ‘For Those living under Rule’, nearly half are written explicitly for a female audience.