(English translator's interpolations extracts)

A late fourteenth-century translation of the Scala Claustralium on contemplative prayer (attributed to Guigo II, ninth Prior of the Grande Chartreuse and probably written c. 1150), the English Ladder derives from a revised version of the Latin treatise, rearranged so as to be less didactic and schematic, more suitable for devotional reading. The Latin text refers to ‘scala claustralium qua de terra in coelum sublevantur’ (p. 84), (a ladder for monks by which they are lifted from earth to heaven). The English translator – referring instead to ‘the ladder of cloysterers, and of othere Goddis lovers’ – apparently envisages an audience ‘consisting primarily of clerics, both within and outside the cloister, but also including the very pious among the laity’. The source is artfully reshaped into a work accessible to a wider audience, which the manuscripts attest included nuns and pious laywomen: the Ladder is extant in three fifteenth-century devotional miscellanies: Bodleian Library MS Douce 322 BL MS Harley 1706 and CUL MS Ff. 6. 33, which was made by William Darker, a member of the Carthusian house at Sheen, perhaps for the Brigittine nuns at Syon (it also contains an English translation of the Brigittine rule). Each of the ladder's ‘rungs’ is carefully explained:

Lesson is a besy lokyng vpon holy writte with intencion of the wille and in the witte. Meditacion is a studious inserchyng with the mynde to knowe that ere was hydde thurwe wischyng of propir skylle. Prayer is a devoute desiryng of the hert for to gete that that is good & to fordoo that is eville. Contemplacion is a risyng of hert into God that tastith sumdele of heuenly Swettnesse & savourith.