The Ancrene Wisse Group

Abstract

This chapter offers an overview of the ten Middle English religious prose works belonging to the 'Ancrene Wisse' Group (named from its longest and most influential work, a guide for anchoresses), and also outlines a 'unified theory' of their origin which attempts to explain their combination of older native and contemporary Continental influences, placing them in a West Midlands diocesan context and seeing them as the product of the European movement of pastoral reform that culminated in the Fourth Lateran Council.

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