The connections made in Bella Millett’s important article ‘Ancrene Wisse and the Book of Hours’ between pastoral instruction for anchoresses and the development of extra-liturgical devotional manuscripts for those who held an ‘intermediate position between literati and the illiterate’ illustrate the ways in which many readers benefited from vernacular devotional texts originally written for pious women. Starting from Ancrene Wisse through to the end of the Middle Ages there developed a large programme of pastoral instruction through vernacular devotional texts aimed at semi-religious and religious women, attested to even by the manuscript history of thirteenthcentury instruction for anchoresses. Through its elucidation of the distinctions between the inner and outer rule Ancrene Wisse also establishes two interconnected pastoral functions of Middle English devotional texts: to regulate external behaviour and to reform interior cognitive processes. Three key genres of devotional texts for female religious provided pastoral care for their readers: guides for religious living, treatises on spiritual topics and devotional exercises such as passion meditations. I will argue that as a supplement to interpersonal and community pastoral care led by male religious, pious women participated in an intermediate system of peer-to-peer care, sharing and teaching (in contrast to the caring and preaching performed by monks and priests) through vernacular books. In this way readers taught through their own examples, shared their manuscripts, and made use of the practices of translation and recording their devotional practices as both a form of spiritual exercise and a way to share these experiences with their peers. A small group of manuscripts associated with the Bridgettine monastery Syon Abbey is particularly helpful in considering the ways in which women participated in teaching and sharing through devotional texts.

The devotional texts written for the nuns of Syon by their brother monks and those at Sheen carefully coached their readers in how to approach the texts written for them. These texts offer an astonishing amount of instruction on reading, praying, meditating, and sometimes contemplating. They work hard to guide their unlearned readership (i.e., illiterate in Latin, literate in the vernacular, some with monastic training, some without) in practising devotions, as they offer the useful service of providing devotional texts for this audience.