Pastoral and devotional literature flourished throughout the middle ages, and its growth and transmutations form the focus of this collection. Ranging historically from the difficulties of localizing Anglo-Saxon pastoral texts to the reading of women in late-medieval England, the individual essays survey its development and its transformation into the literature of vernacular spirituality. They offer both close examinations of particular manuscripts, and of individual texts, including an anonymous Speculum iuniroum, the Speculum religiosorum of Edmund of Abingdon and later vernacular...

"Anchoritism in the Middle Ages" approaches medieval anchoritism from a variety of critical angles. Individually, the essays challenge perceived notions of the very concept of anchoritic rule and guidance, study the interaction between language and linguistic forms in anchoritic texts, address the connection between anchoritism and other forms of solitude, and explore the influence of anchoritic literature on lay devotion. As a whole, the volume, which ranges from the third century to the sixteenth and spans all of Europe, illuminates the richness and fluidity of anchoritic works and shows...

A new translation, in readable modern English, of an important group of early devotional poems.