Let us now turn to the invisible presence in the ‘Arise Early’ precepts: the addressee's wife. The male addressee moves from place to place, working, conversing with the public and partaking of meals. His wife, however, who has no mention up until the point at which her husband returns to bed, apparently has no role to play outside of the chamber. For all intents and purposes, she is invisible outside of the bed. In fact, we are only aware of the wife's existence in relation to the verb being executed by the male addressee: ‘plesse and loffe thy wife dewly’. This invisibility is not presented as strange, but instead as the norm: the man does the everyday tasks required of him as an upstanding man of the community while the woman silently, invisibly, waits in the chamber for her husband to return to bed. This chapter's title, ‘The Invisible Woman’, acknowledges the many ways in which the late medieval English woman is invisible. Many ordinary – and probably extraordinary – women are left out of history, their influences on the male lead roles rendered invisible. Documentary sources are much more likely to exist for men and, where evidence of individual women is found, it is often in relation to men, such as in proof of marriage depositions. Recent scholarship focusing on late medieval English women goes some way towards closing that gap, but while Women's History is considered a separate focus, women are still presented as other, with the spotlight elsewhere.

Late medieval women's invisibility is also found in the way in which we discuss medieval literature. In romances, the female characters are deliberately hidden behind almost exclusively masculine titles (notable exceptions including Le Bone Florence of Rome and Emaré) regardless of their importance within the narrative. This practice was occasionally performed by the scribe, in rubrication or headings, but was continued more broadly by post-medieval editors. It is particularly obvious in the treatment of Undo Your Door, which is now more generally known as The Squire of Low Degree. As Nicola McDonald argues, there is a marked difference between reading a romance entitled The Squire of Low Degree to reading Undo Your Door.