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...

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