Ancrene Wisse and the Book of Hours

Millett, Bella (2000) Ancrene Wisse and the Book of Hours. In, Renevey, Denis and Whitehead, Christiania (eds.) Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England. Cardiff, UK. University of Wales Press, pp. 21-40.

Abstract

A discussion of the routine of prayers and devotions in Part 1 of the early thirteenth-century English rule for anchoresses, Ancrene Wisse, and its relationship to the evolution of the Book of Hours in England and on the Continent. The routine in AW anticipates in many respects the devotional routine of the later Books of Hours produced for a lay readership. Its early date makes it an important witness to the origins of that routine; and its parallels with the statutes of extra-monastic groups across thirteenth-century Europe suggest that it might provide not just an instance, but a paradigm of how the supplementary devotions of monastic practice evolved into the fully developed late medieval "breviary for the use of the laity"'.

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