LIKELY COMPOSED BETWEEN 1190 and 1220, the works of the Katherine Group include three saints’ lives (Katerine, Margarete, and Iuliene), a virginity treatise (Hali Meiðhad / Holy Maidenhood), and an allegorical homily (Sawles Warde / Custody of the Soul). Given their shared West Midlands regional dialect and common themes, the Katherine Group is often considered part of the larger “Ancrene Wisse Group,” which also includes the early thirteenth-century anchoritic rule Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses) and Wooing Group prayers. While all eleven works are considered anchoritic literature, the Katherine Group saints’ lives also addressed a wider lay audience from the beginning. The Katherine Group hagiographies mention books literally and figuratively, shaping the audience's orientation to the written word by linking textual authority to fleshly proof. References to Margaret's “book-skin” (boc felle) and talismanic, self-authorizing vellum codices engage the reader's sense of touch, characterizing touch as a measure of proof while also fashioning a relic out of the manuscript itself through proximity to the holy body of the saint (historically) and the anchoress (contemporarily). By grounding their trustworthiness in bodily-centred (if precarious) authority, the Early Middle English texts both bolster the anchoress's role as a spiritual example for the community and reflect the material realities of an anchoritic-lay textual culture whose circulation was ephemeral and piecemeal. Building on Catherine Innes-Parker's theory about co-existing informal and formal vernacular textual cultures in the West Midlands, I will show how the Katherine Group narratives and codicological evidence indicate an anchoritic–lay literary culture operating adjacent to clerical manuscript culture. The “informal,” or ephemeral, textual community shaped layliteracy and manuscript use, including perceptions about the documentary authority of vernacular textual artifacts.

This materially engaged aesthetic arises from both the anchorite's place in the community and the nature of Early Middle English literary culture and textual production in the West Midlands. Linguistic, codicological, and literary evidence shows that the Katherine Group circulated more widely than the small number (three) of surviving manuscripts suggests, including via oral/memorial transmission and fragmentary circulation in booklets and on scraps of vellum.