Bella Millett is best known for her work on the early thirteenth-century English guide for anchoresses, Ancrene Wisse, culminating in her recently published Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 with Variants from Other Manuscripts. The very title suggests Millett’s approach: magisterial, thorough and correct, yet acknowledging variations; never boastful but always respectful of her material; never assuming knowledge in her readers, but never patronizing. The precision and clarity Millett brings to her editing are also the hallmarks of her writing – which has a wider range than the early thirteenth century English works she is normally associated with. Her essay on the Green Man, for example, is a fine example of her analytic thinking and lucid writing. She has written about the practice of editing and on the use of computers and the internet for teaching and presenting: her home page includes a list of electronic publications.

In her writing on Ancrene Wisse and other associated works Millett has suggested new ways of reading Ancrene Wisse, including as a work of vernacular literature aimed primarily at women and as a precursor to the Books of Hours popular in the later Middle Ages. Importantly, she challenged the received wisdom of her quondam supervisor, Eric Dobson, asking new questions about the origins of Ancrene Wisse. The questioning of received authority is a recurring theme in this volume: Joseph Goering questions an attribution suggested by Leonard Doyle, and Elaine Traherne’s paper traces the mechanism by which an originally tentative attribution can, by gradual accretion, gain unquestioned authority. It is by going back to original sources – often the manuscripts themselves – that our contributors are able to address new questions, and occasionally come up with new answers. By returning to the manuscripts of the Lambeth Homilies, Ralph Hanna suggests new answers to the questions about the production of pastoral manuscripts – including those of Ancrene Wisse – in the thirteenth century.

The title of this collection of essays – Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care – gives a broad scope while retaining a definite focus. The pastoral and devotional literature considered in this collection was all written in, or in some way associated with, England in the Middle Ages. This is a category into which Ancrene Wisse itself would fit.