Edmund of Abingdon’s Speculum religiosorum, composed originally for a religious audience, is an examination of what it means to live perfectly. His own career acquainted Edmund with a number of different forms of religious life: although he was associated with monastic houses – he spent time not only at the Augustinian house of Merton but also the Cistercian house of Pontigny – he was a secular priest. C. H. Lawrence suggests that Edmund wrote the Speculum around 1213-14 when he was staying at Merton Priory, before he incepted in theology at Oxford, and some years before he became archbishop of Canterbury in 1234. It combines catechetical material with a guide to contemplation, and although written originally in Latin gained widespread popularity through translation into French as the Mirour de Seinte Eglyse, and is later found in Middle English as the Mirror of Holy Church alongside works by Richard Rolle.

There is little in the Speculum that is original: Edmund used material from Christian authorities, such as the Church Fathers Augustine and Gregory, and the more recent mystical writers Bernard of Clairvaux and Hugh of St Victor, to compose his spiritual guide. The Speculum is concerned with the ascent to contemplation but its interest is not limited to those in a dedicated religious life; the catechetical material was useful for those in charge of lay people and the work as a whole can be considered a work of pastoralia. There are two significant Latin versions, both present in a number of manuscripts: as well as the original Speculum religiosorum, a later version, Speculum ecclesie, is a translation back into Latin from the Anglo-Norman Mirour de Seinte Eglyse. The differences between these two versions suggest something about the wide appeal of the work which could address both professed religious and more general readers.

There is a temptation to accord Speculum religiosorum priority as the original version authored by Edmund, but the other versions have equally valid places in medieval spirituality and are important for our understanding of the development of that spirituality. Bella Millett, in the introduction to her recent edition of Ancrene Wisse, calls into question the binary opposition of ‘author’ and ‘scribe’ which is constructed on an assumption of the superiority of the original text: