Ancrene Wisse and the Education of Laywomen in Thirteenth-Century England

Abstract

Histories of medieval education focus heavily on the world of the university (mostly male) or of the monastery, yet education was carried out much more broadly, especially for women and children. This article examines evidence of the reading practices, Latinity, and scribal work in the earliest text and manuscripts of the influential devotional treatise Ancrene Wisse, written for laywomen in early thirteenth-century England, and then discusses how this audience could have been educated to attain such literacy by presenting evidence of women's education from historical and literary sources—including the Tretiz of Walter of Bibbesworth, which provides insight into the education of women in the home.

FROM ITS COMPOSITION in about 1225 through the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, a handbook for female religious recluses remained one of the top-circulating vernacular devotional books in England. The popularity of Ancrene Wisse (or Ancrene Riwle; hereafter AW) is attested in part by the large number of surviving manuscripts, seventeen in all, including a variety of adaptations for religious communities of different sizes and genders. As a result, it has been well-studied, particularly in matters of its theology, origins, and linguistics. Questions about the literacy of its women readers have begun to be explored too in recent decades, with most critics concluding that these readers enjoyed at least some literacy in the vernacular, and perhaps a select few possessed some Latin literacy. Many of these studies, though, consider the literacy of women readers over the whole medieval history of the text, about three centuries in all; what has received little focused attention is the evidence from the text for the significant vernacular and Latin literacy of specifically the earliest readers, the three sisters for whom the handbook was first crafted, and how they would have attained the education required for such literacy. Elsewhere I have argued that these sisters and readers like them, aristocratic women with means and education, obtained a relatively significant degree of both Latin and vernacular literacy, and that this literacy allowed them to read privately, compose text, and participate in scribal culture.¹ My purpose here is to build on that material with a further examination of the earliest text and manuscripts of AW for evidence of the reading practices, Latinity, and scribal work of its first intended anchoritic audience, and then turn to a discussion of how this audience could have been educated to attain such literacy. Because so little explicit evidence is left of how girls and women in England were educated, it is necessary to consider a variety of sources and carefully examine them to see what might be gleaned. To that end, I gather together and examine evidence of women's education from historical and literary sources, including the Tretiz of Walter of Bibbesworth. My analysis of the Tretiz in particular provides new insight into the education of women in the home.

Evidence of Reading Practices and Literacy in AW

An anchoress was a woman—in the thirteenth century and beyond most often a laywoman—who wanted to withdraw from secular life and live instead in solitude, enclosed in a cell, giving over the rest of her earthly life to Christian devotion and such works of service as she could perform. In England the anchoritic life grew in popularity, drawing in increasing numbers of women, from about the twelfth century on, until peaking at the Reformation.² Several guidance texts for the anchoritic life were written, but AW was the lengthiest treatise and the most widely circulated. AW exists now in seventeen manuscripts, not all complete, that represent the early text as well as the series of revisions, adaptations, and excerptions carried out from its composition until the end of the Middle Ages, when its use declined sharply with the Dissolution. Its exact origins are unknown (the text is anonymous), but evidence points to Dominican authorship in the first quarter of the thirteenth century in the West Midlands.³ The text is written in English and Latin, with strong influences from a mix of other languages including French and Welsh.⁴ Further, AW frequently circulated with other West Midlands vernacular devotional texts (the Katherine Group and Wooing Group texts) written for women, though these texts do not contain Latin.⁵ While the audience of the text broadened significantly over time, growing to include men as well as women, the earliest intended audience of the handbook was quite narrow: three aristocratic sisters, all laywomen, who had undertaken to be anchoresses and needed a guide for daily living.⁶ The one manuscript that represents this earliest text is London, British Library MS Cotton Nero A XIV (ca. 1225–1250, hereafter "Nero"). This text was followed very shortly by likely-authorial revisions for a slightly larger audience of mostly aristocratic Anglo-Norman laywomen. The text revised for this audience survives in British Library MS Cleopatra C VI (ca. 1200–1250, hereafter "Cleopatra"); British Library MS Cotton Titus D XVIII (ca. 1225–1250, hereafter "Titus"), whose revisions also include some for a male audience; Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402 (ca. 1230, hereafter "CCCC 402"); and British Library MS Cotton Vitellius F VII (ca. 1300–1325, hereafter "Vitellius").⁷

In their influential book Women in Anglo-Saxon England and the Impact of 1066, Christine Fell, Cecily Clark, and Elizabeth Williams argue that the literacy of women following the pre-Conquest period, when it was comparatively high, fell considerably, and that the author of AW simplified his writing for these women, who purportedly did not enjoy high literacy like their predecessors.⁸ Since then, however, thanks to a growing interest in texts of the Early Middle English period, scholars have begun to examine AW more closely, reappraising what it reveals of the reading practices of its earliest audience and challenging this claim. Bella Millett, Elizabeth Robertson, and Susan Uselmann in particular have sought to nuance the types of literacy these women enjoyed. Millett and Uselmann argue that the Latin passages, which are glossed or translated to various degrees throughout AW, do not necessarily indicate a female readership well-versed in Latin. Rather, the text, in their analysis, was written for a range of readers, from litteratae clergesses, who were trained to read and understand Latin, to illiterate women who required the text to be read to them.⁹ Millett claims that likely the primary audience would have been educated at best, like Hildegard of Bingen, "more nobilium puellarum" (in the way of the daughters of the nobility) and that the untranslated Latin portions of the text were not aimed at the women readers, even the litteratae among them, but at their spiritual supervisors, a "university-educated clerical audience."¹⁰ Though she acknowledges that certainly the earliest audience was literate in the sense of using and sharing written works, being able to write, and having the elementary ability to pronounce Latin (legere), enough to say their Hours and other prayers, nonetheless the Latin ability of even the earliest audience was limited, holding an "intermediate position between laici and clerici, illiterates and litterati."¹¹ She explores little of the earliest anchoresses' Latinate abilities. Elizabeth Robertson suggests that these women might have known more Latin than Millett allows for, and that the anchoresses "probably experienced the French, Latin, and English passages they encountered in the Wisse as interchangeable text."¹² The question thus remains, as Uselmann writes, "how is it that such an academic or bookish vision of the reading process can be applied to an audience of lay anchoresses?"¹³

An examination of a passage from Jerome that appears in AW and two other anchoritic guidebooks suggests something of the shifting expectations of Latin literacy for women readers over a span of about four hundred years. Around 1160–1162, Aelred of Rievaulx composed an anchoritic guidebook, De institutione inclusarum, for his sister. Aelred draws in part on Hieronymian material for his text; the passage I discuss here comes from Jerome's letter to Eustochium: "crebrius lege et disce quam plurima. tenenti codicem somnus obrepat et cadentem faciem pagina sancta suscipiat" (Read often, learn all that you can. Let sleep overcome you, the roll still in your hands; when your head falls, let it be on the sacred page).¹⁴ Aelred adapts the passage for his text in this way: "cogitanti de scripturis somnus obrepat, euigilianti primum aliquid de scripturis occurrat, dormientis somnia haerens memoriae aliqua de scripturis sententia condiat" (Let sleep steal upon you as you ponder the Scriptures, let something from the Scriptures spring first to mind as you wake, let some quotation from the Scriptures, sticking in your memory, season your dreams while you sleep).¹⁵ While he does not include the recommendation to "Read often, learn all that you can," nor does he explicitly direct the anchoress to read, he emphasizes rumination on Scripture, whether while awake or sleeping, and gives his direction, of course, in Latin.

The author of AW, writing about sixty years after Aelred, adapts the same Hieronymian passage:¹⁶

Ofte, leoue sustren, ȝe schulen uri lease forte redden mare. Redunge is god bone. Redunge teacheð hu ant hwet me bidde, ant beode biȝet hit efter. Amidde þe redunge, hwen þe heorte likeð, kimeð up a deuotiun þet is wurð monie benen. For-þi seið Sein Ierome: Ieronimus: Semper in manu tua sacra sit lectio; tenenti tibi librum sompnus subripiat, et cadentem faciem pagina sancta suscipiat. "Hali redunge beo eauer i þine honden; slep ga upo þe as þu lokest þron, ant te hali pagne ikepe þi fallinde neb." Swa þu schalt redden ȝeornliche ant longe.¹⁷

(Often, dear sisters, you should pray less in order to read more. Reading is good prayer. Reading teaches how and what one might pray, and prayer obtains it afterwards. During reading, when it pleases the heart, arises a devotion that is worth many prayers. That is why St. Jerome says: Jerome: Holy reading should always be in your hand; sleep should steal over you as you hold the book, and the holy page should always support your drooping head. "May holy reading always be in your hands; may sleep come upon you as you look over it, and may the holy page receive your drooping face." So you should read eagerly and at length.)¹⁸

The AW author encourages anchoresses to read holy writings—scripture and devotional material—directly, often, and so privately that they might drop to sleep upon the faces of their books. He takes care to cite his authority in the Latin, and follows it with a very close translation in English in which he emphasizes reading, particularly "hali" (holy) reading. In the surrounding passages, he extols the virtues of reading frequently, superseding even prayer in stirring devotion. Notably, he follows Jerome's text much more closely than Aelred, though he does not translate "librum" (Jerome's "codicem") in the Early Middle English, even while he retains the sense of personal book usage, directing that "hali redunge" should always be in the hands.

The same passage again appears in the mid fifteenth-century translation of Aelred's De institutione into Middle English.¹⁹ The translator adapts it to reflect, ostensibly, an expectation that women would not be able to read the Vulgate: "Vse wel this remedye, that whether thou slepe or wake, thy mynde be euere vpon som sentence of holy writ or vpon som seyntes lyf." The "remedye" he references is "redynge of deuoute thinge and prayer and meditacyon of Cristys passyon."²⁰ The translator retains Aelred's emphasis on rumination, and invokes memorized Scripture and remembered saints' lives as the object of that rumination. He recommends the reading of devout material, prayer, and meditation, though, rather than scripture directly. The reader's mind, rather than eye, is to be on the biblical text, and the reading now is simply of "deuoute thinge." While Aelred and the AW author recommended direct, personal reading of Scripture and rely on the authority of Jerome in Latin to convey its importance, the late-medieval translator shifts the emphasis to simple meditation on devout material, whatever the source, heard or seen, with the direction to do so now given in English, lacking the additional Latin authority of Jerome (though the translator quotes a handful of Latin auctoritates throughout the text, Latin makes a markedly limited appearance compared with the earlier texts).

While it is unwise to draw a sweeping conclusion about the state of women's Latinity from a single comparison, it is nonetheless fruitful to consider how the material has been changed. Reading the Hieronymian material on an anchoritic continuum reveals not just a phasing-out of Latin in favour of the vernacular, but reveals that private, personal reading was an important anchoritic practice in the high Middle Ages, though perhaps less so in the late Middle Ages.

Evidence for Latinity and Anchoritic Scribal Activity in the Early AW Manuscripts

Much textual and codicological evidence from the early manuscripts of AW supports the assertion that personal reading was important to anchoresses. I discuss this evidence in detail elsewhere and so review it briefly here.²¹ The text of AW is written in the vernacular, appropriate for a devotional manual for an audience of laywomen, though small amounts of Latin (as well as other linguistic influences) appear throughout. Scholars have, in large part, interpreted the limited use of Latin, often accompanied by English translation or paraphrase, as a sure indicator that the intended audience of the text was illiteratus.²² Passages of the Vulgate, for example, are usually followed by an English translation, and much of the Latin that appears particularly in Part 1 is used for familiar liturgical elements such as versicles and responses, antiphons, incipits, and prayers. Auctoritates are cited at length in Latin throughout the text; these passages are usually followed by vernacular exegesis and amplification.²³ Yet not all Latin passages are translated, and in fact the author relies on these untranslated passages as integral for making sense of the text's careful structure throughout, for redirecting the reader to other biblical passages or devotional material, and even for setting up the main conceit of the text as a rule by beginning the Preface with a verse from Canticles followed by several lines of academic reflection.²⁴

Even if the earliest readers might not have understood the most academic or sophisticated passages, the author would not have written a text incomprehensible on the whole to his readers. A spiritual supervisor certainly could have, as noted above, recited and explained such sections to an anchoress, and passages from AW do indeed reference such a practice. In Part 3, for example, the author advises anchoresses to seek the stories of Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Moses, and Elijah from others, and in Part 4, he recommends receiving instruction from worthy male visitors, especially honest friars and priests, who could hear confession as well—yet the author also cautions against speaking alone with visitors at length.²⁵ Such warnings, together with the numerous references throughout the text to private reading, should be balanced against these few references to oral instruction.²⁶

The presentation of the text too indicates that Latin was familiar enough to the earliest readers that it did not require special marking or flagging. A helpful contrast is seen in Vitellius, a fourteenth-century manuscript witness. Here, the Latin is marked specially for the reader and set apart by rubrication and red underlinings. Finding aids and hierarchies also help distinguish between Latin and vernacular passages. Abbreviation of text appears quite minimally. All these devices clearly separate the vernacular from the Latin and indicate, it would seem, a readership more in need of navigational guidance. Nero and Titus, predating Vitellius by about a century and being contemporaneous with the text's earliest intended audience, contain no such visual distinctions between the Latin and vernacular. None of the text is rubricated, underlined, or changed in size or script or form to individuate languages or signal hierarchies. All text is subject to significant abbreviation. The Latin is abbreviated more heavily than the vernacular, though Malcolm Parkes has observed that this imbalance does not necessarily signal text meant for a more educated reader; this might simply be a consequence of heavy abbreviation being less fitting for a new, vernacular text.²⁷

The author is consistently emphatic throughout AW that he intends this text for a female readership devoted to a solitary, anchoritic life with minimal contact with the outer world. It is clear, too, given the inclusion of Latin material, the use of scribal abbreviation, and the lack of visual cues to separate Latin from the vernacular, that a degree of not just vernacular but also Latin comprehension was required to use the handbook. It follows, then, that we must begin to consider not simply if, but how, these thirteenth-century women readers would have obtained such training in comprehension.

The Education of Women in the Thirteenth Century

The system of formal schooling for boys and young men in post-Conquest England is worth a brief review, as its set progression is quite distinct from how, it seems, girls and women were educated. Boys typically began their formal schooling around seven to ten years of age in the scola cantus (song school), typically associated with cathedrals in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.²⁸ Song schools provided foundational elements for later learning: boys learned the alphabet, basic prayers, plainsong, and elementary Latin, often through Donatus's Ars minor. Boys could also be sent on to more formal education, particularly when they were intended for a clerical career.²⁹ After song school, boys might proceed to grammar school, in which they would learn more advanced Latin, moving from the legere of pronouncing Latin to the intellegere of comprehending it.³⁰ After grammar school, boys could move on to schools of higher study, such as the developing universities, which provided training in the liberal arts, philosophy, medicine, theology, and law.³¹

The intention of such formal schooling was, in this period, generally preparation for the church or, increasingly, related professions such as law and medicine, but a certain amount of Latin education was important for aristocratic sons (and perhaps daughters) who needed such skills to manage their estates, and they could be taught a number of the same skills of literacy in both the vernacular and in Latin. In the aristocratic class to which the earliest readers of AW belonged, education can also be thought of more broadly, as Nicholas Orme has pointed out, to include training not just in letters (though the aristocracy wanted this too) but in social arts, decorum, music, political craft, and skills such as hunting and jousting, to name a few.³²

Education for this socioeconomic group usually began domestically, in the home of the child or in another household, in infantia, as parents and nurses taught children basic language skills and prayers.³³ At about seven years old (coinciding generally with pueritia), and sometimes much younger, girls might either continue to be kept at home or be fostered in another household, moving into the care and training of a mistress (magistra, magistrix, or maitresse), who supervised instruction in social etiquette, musical arts, and aristocratic pursuits such as hunting and jousting. For anything the mistress could not teach personally she could call on specialists, such as minstrels or huntsmen, and for the teaching of reading and Latin grammar she could rely on the household chaplain or a clerk.³⁴ Cecily of Sandford, for example, was the mistress of Eleanor (1215?–1275), the youngest daughter of King John and Isabella of Angoulême, and was with her until Eleanor's marriage at about fourteen.³⁵ Cecily was also mistress to Joan of the de Munchensi family, for whom Walter de Bibbesworth wrote his Tretiz.³⁶ Matthew Paris praised Cecily as "docta valde et faceta et eloquens" (greatly learned and witty and eloquent).³⁷ Similarly to Eleanor and Joan, the aunts of Henry II were tutored by the grammar master Matthew before he became tutor to Henry.³⁸

Educational Treatises

A flourishing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of educational treatises for the aristocracy reflected their desire for such education. Of the three major treatise writers, Giles of Rome and Vincent of Beauvais were the only ones to address the education of girls, and Giles recommends training in reading only for noble women who should not work in textiles.³⁹ Vincent's primary concern for girls was their preparation for marriage and management of a household, along with pious training, but, relying on Jerome, he did recommend reading and writing skills, primarily so that girls could study the scriptures at home and avoid unholy thoughts and occupations.⁴⁰

A more practical treatise popular among the aristocracy in England in the thirteenth century, and one written in the vernacular, was the Tretiz of Walter of Bibbesworth, an aristocratic layman. He composed his work in French verse in Hertfordshire in the early 1230s, close in time to the composition of AW. Likewise, he wrote the text for a family of similar rank to the putative three sisters who were the audience of the AW Nero manuscript. Bibbesworth intended the Tretiz to teach the French of "gentils homme" (noblemen) to the children of his neighbour and fellow member of the gentry Dionisie de Munchensi, equipping them with the language skills necessary for their lives as gentlemen and gentlewomen.⁴¹ In this lengthy treatise, Bibbesworth uses a framework of life stages to present a wide range of vocabulary, beginning with birth and ending in adulthood, discussing the various pursuits of managing an aristocratic household—including baking, farming, husbandry, gardening, spinning, brewing, and education—and ending with a vivid description of a High Feast.

Among other matters, the Tretiz provides insight into how education was carried out in the home, particularly in infantia. Language instruction was not strictly oral but could be carried out using books: the Tretiz was a manual to be read at least by Dionisie if not by her children too, likely looking on as she read aloud. Further, the text illustrates how mothers and nurses provided the first stages of education. The Tretiz opens with a scene of childbirth, the mother's delivery of her child (lines 1–4), and the handing off of that child to a nurse (lines 8, 13). The next lines direct the mother how to instruct her child in language:

E quant il encurt a tele ageQu'il prendre se poet a langage,En fraunceis lui devez direCum primes deit sun cors descrivrePur l'ordre aver de 'moun' e 'ma,''Ton' e 'ta,' 'soun' e 'ça,' 'le' e 'la,'Qu'il en parole seit meuz aprisE de nul autre escharnis.

(When he reaches the age at which he can learn to talkYou must tell him in French how to name his own body first of all,To grasp the rules of 'moun' and 'ma,' 'ton' and 'ta,' 'soun' and 'ça,' 'le' and 'la,'To be better taught in speech and not made fun of by others.)⁴²

The mother who should direct the nurse in matters of feeding and clothing (lines 8–14) must also teach her child language skills, educating him or her in the correct terms for the body and beyond and in grammatical forms. As Bibbesworth illustrates, in this first stage of childhood, children were educated informally in the nursery, typically by female nurses or mothers.⁴³ Aristocratic girls and boys both, from a young age, would have learned the Latin alphabet and practised reading Latin with religious and liturgical texts, often at their mothers' direction, learning the Paternoster, Creed, and Ave to start.⁴⁴ Asser relates in his Life a famous early example of even King Alfred's mother's teaching him to read, though Michael Clanchy points out that she likely instructed him in matters of pronunciation (legere) rather than comprehension (intellegere).⁴⁵

Literary Examples

Literary examples from the types of texts that would have been used for education in the home testify to the advanced tutoring of girls in both the vernacular and Latin, social arts, and formal schooling.⁴⁶ Like the aunts of Henry II, Felice, the object of affection of Guy de Warewic in the eponymous Anglo-Norman romance, was tutored by masters from "Tulette," likely Premonstratensian canons from Toulouse or Toledo, in all the liberal arts, including astronomy, arithmetic, and geometry.⁴⁷ Of course for literary purposes Felice is presented in epitomized terms—not only is she very highly educated but is also supremely lovely, "de totes beltez … la flur" (the flower of all beauties)—so that Guy's quest to be worthy of her love is difficult indeed. Yet the author goes to some lengths to emphasize not just her training in "curteise" (courtesy or courtliness) but also that she is "enletre" in "tuz arz" (instructed in all the arts) by university-trained academic masters.⁴⁸

Likewise, St. Katherine of Alexandria is described in her thirteenth-century vita as an "icuret clergesse" (distinguished female scholar).⁴⁹ Katherine's father took care that she was well educated, tutored by "swiðe hehe meistres" (very advanced [male] masters), and she is described as always having her "ehnen oðer heorte" (eyes or heart) on "hali write" (holy scripture).⁵⁰ She takes to education "se wel þat nan ne was hire euening" (so well that none was her equal).⁵¹ In her debate with the emperor Maxentius, she quotes scripture in Latin and offers an English gloss, and she reveals that she has been trained in the Classics—Homer, Aristotle, Euscalapius, Galen, Philistiones, and Plato—though she rejects them all in favour of scripture.⁵²

Katherine is eighteen in her passio yet is described as being exceptionally educated; her education by "swiðe hehe meistres" would have been carried out, likely, in pueritia and adolescentia. Naturally, her epitomized education, like that of Felice, serves a literary purpose: it, along with her great beauty, piety, and service to the poor, heightens the idealization of Katherine. Yet saints lives' typically reflect, in their reshaping for different readers and times, current cultural interests and concerns, and her vita reveals information about education in the thirteenth century: masters had female pupils (such as the aunts of Henry II), a woman could learn the classical authors and become an "icuret clergesse"; fathers (mothers too, one imagines) could arrange for their daughters to be highly educated; and it was a virtue for a woman to have her eyes and heart on scripture in the Vulgate, memorizing it and repeating it back as well as glossing it in English.⁵³ Perhaps most importantly, Katherine with her superior learning was a model offered to women, particularly to anchoresses: her passio appears in Titus as additional reading material.⁵⁴

It is easy to imagine that the family of an anchoress-to-be might have owned and learned from manuscripts containing Gui de Warewic or Seint Katerine: the twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed the rise in popularity of household literature in Anglo-Norman, English, and Latin. Aristocratic households began to collect secular as well as spiritual material, from romances, chansons de geste, schoolbooks, histories, scientific material, and household miscellanies to hagiography, books of the Bible, Books of Hours, and Apocalypses, all of which were useful for teaching children.⁵⁵ Such books were one vehicle through which women also brought components of literacy—an appreciation for the book, for prayer, and for reading—into the home, particularly for their children.⁵⁶ But it was not just the devotional material that appeared in Latin. Christopher Cannon has recently noted the presence of Latin alongside French and English in twelfth-and thirteenth-century romance manuscripts, clearly intended for the cultivated reader and likely to be found in the library of an aristocratic household. The amount of Latin is not generally extensive, but it is "often related closely enough to the French it accompanies to seem meant for the same readers."⁵⁷ Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 50 (ca. 1250–1300), for example, contains the aforementioned Gui de Warewic (fols. 102–81) as well as Wace's Roman de Brut (fols. 6v–90r) followed by an account of British kings in French (fols. 89r–90v), a Latin summary of the kings of England (fols. 1–6r), and three additional verse texts in French.⁵⁸ Similarly, Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 86 is a multilingual miscellany mixing French, Latin, and English; it dates to the second half of the thirteenth century and contains seventy-nine items, a mixture of secular and spiritual texts in prose and verse. Certain of its texts strongly suggest aristocratic ownership and use (for example, a French text on the care of hunting birds, fols. 46r–62r).

Schooling Outside the Home

Starting in infantia, girls could also be sent out of the home for education. We see something like a nuns' school for girls represented, in fact, in AW. While anchor-holds were not nunneries, they shared some similar characteristics—women vowesses, devotion to a religious life, a day following liturgical hours—and the author's comment on the education conducted within them suggests that anchor-holds were seen as a natural site for education. In Part 8, in a passage appearing in Nero and followed almost exactly in Cleopatra and Vitellius, the author admonishes the anchoresses not to turn their cells into schoolhouses:

Ancre ne schal nout forwurðe scolmeistre, ne turnen hire ancre hus to childrene scole. Hire meiden mei þauh techen sum lutel meiden þet were dute of forto leornen among gromes, auh ancre ne ouh forto ȝemen bute god one.⁵⁹

(An anchoress shall not become a schoolmistress, nor turn her anchor-house into a children's school. Her maid, though, may teach some little girl fearful of being taught among boys, but an anchoress ought to be devoted to God alone.)

Naturally, AW prescribes an ideal, suggesting here as elsewhere in the text that what the author desires should happen is a corrective to established or common practices. Thus, the text indicates that anchoresses were often approached to be teachers to young girls; and in fact the author does not prohibit it but rather circumscribes its practice, so that teaching will not overtake an anchoress's godly devotion. Not only does this passage speak to educational practices in the thirteenth century, but it also underscores the educational accomplishments of these early anchoresses, who were trained well enough to teach skills perhaps similar to those described by Bibbesworth or more advanced devotional reading or devout recitation in Latin. (While provisions for illiterate anchoresses were made in AW, no such provisions were considered necessary for the earliest readers.) As R. Baird Schuman has pointed out, this passage also indicates that coeducation of boys and girls was a common enough practice, at least in Hereford or Worcestershire where AW has its roots; he generalizes from this passage that "young girls were educated commonly with young boys and that some sort of elementary education was generally available."⁶⁰

Girls could also be sent to nunneries for both education and overall care, whether girls were intended as child oblates or not; particularly if they were sent to a well-endowed nunnery with a sufficient library, their education in Latin could advance easily from legere to intellegere.⁶¹ Two of Henry II's children, for example, Joan and John, were sent to Fontevrault Abbey in infantia for care and education.⁶² Likewise, Harold Godwinson sent his daughter Gunhild to the Wilton nunnery in infantia (ca. 1069), and she remained there until her marriage in ca. 1093.⁶³ Marie de France draws on this type of education for the narrative of her twelfth-century Anglo-Norman lay Le Fresne, in which the slanderous wife's lady-in-waiting proposes a handy solution for the problem of twin girls: "A un mustier la geterai" (I will cast her [one of the twins] off into a monastery).⁶⁴ She leaves one daughter at the door of a rich abbey for the nuns and abbess to discover the child. The abbess raises the child, now named Fresne after the ash-tree in which she is found, as her niece, and her resulting education renders Fresne "curteise" (courtly or courteous, schooled in courtesy), "franche" (noble), "de bone escole" (properly educated), and "enseignee" (well brought up).⁶⁵

Nunneries are an undisputed source of education for girls. Critics have debated, however, how much Latin learning took place in nunneries following the Conquest. Cannon has offered the persuasive argument that in fact anyone in the Middle Ages who could read had some training in Latin, as it was "the language in which an educated person first learns to read and write."⁶⁶ Further, the history of Latinate training in pre-Conquest nunneries was strong and, as Alexandra Barratt and David Bell have convincingly demonstrated, that Latinity carried over well into the thirteenth century. Only then did it begin its decline, though the precise nature and timeline of the decline is hard to specify.⁶⁷ The degree of Latin training available likely varied from house to house, dependent particularly upon their incomes, libraries, and community size.

Select examples of Latinate nuns from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries demonstrate this. Barking Abbey, for example, with its large library, was a centre of Latinity in post-Conquest years.⁶⁸ One unidentified nun from Barking reworked Aelred of Rievaulx's Latin Life of St. Edward the Confessor into Anglo-Norman verse (the Vie d'Edouard) between 1163 and 1169. David Bell comments that "she seems to have had no difficulty in understanding Aelred's text," and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has advanced an argument that the author's Anglo-Norman was correct and sophisticated, rather than inferior as has often been claimed.⁶⁹ Another nun of Barking, Clemence, identifies herself at the end of her verse translation and expansion of an eleventh-century Latin prose life of St. Katherine of Alexandria into "extremely skillful" Anglo-Norman verse in the late twelfth century.⁷⁰

Similarly, important Latin texts survive from the nunnery at Wilton, "a centre of learning and an elite boarding school for the daughters of the nobility who were educated there as lay members of the community."⁷¹ Wilton claims, for example, the "inclyta versificatrix" ("celebrated poetess") Muriel, whose work does not appear to have survived.⁷² Goscelin of Saint-Bertin composed his Liber confortatorius for Eve of Wilton; Wilton also commissioned from him the Vita Edithae, to celebrate two of its abbesses, Edith and her mother Wulfthryth. He likewise composed a hagiographical work on Wulfthryth's sister Wulfhild, educated at Wilton and later Abbess of Barking. Notable lay pupils at Wilton include Matilda, wife of Henry I, from ca. 1085–1100; she was also educated at Romsey. William of Malmesbury describes her as "litteris quoque foemineum pectus exercuit" ("trained in letters as well as in what it means to be a [medieval] woman").⁷³ She was a patroness of literature and corresponded in Latin with her spiritual supervisor, Anselm (1033–1109), Archbishop of Canterbury.⁷⁴ Matilda commissioned a vita of her mother, Margaret of Scotland, also educated at Wilton ca. 1057–1069, in which Margaret's learning is praised.⁷⁵

Evidence of Latinity from Wilton as well as from the communities at Amesbury, Shaftsbury, and Nunnaminster also comes in the form of rotuli, memorial scrolls passed from house to house after the death of a prominent figure in which community members could offer contributions. Each of these houses contributed Latin verse to twelfth-century rotuli.⁷⁶ From Nunnaminster, too, survives Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Bodley 451, a Latin miscellany in which survives a colophon identifying the scribe of the manuscript as a woman.⁷⁷ The Shaftesbury Psalter likewise evinces scribal activity by a woman or women: pronouns in a prayer on fol. 138r have been altered from masculine to feminine.⁷⁸ An example of Latinity retained well into the thirteenth century is demonstrated in a now-lost Latin poem by Beatrix of Kent, Abbess of Lacock (d. 1280), praising Ela, Countess of Warwick (d. 1261), who founded the abbey at Lacock and was an earlier abbess.⁷⁹ A Latin letter dated 15 August 1239 survives from Ela herself, newly made abbess, to the Bishop and Dean of Salisbury.⁸⁰

Conclusions

In the face of such evidence, we must conclude that, for aristocratic young women in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, conditions for Latin literacy were good and expectations for learning could be high, and that the earliest audiences of AW were well positioned to read not just the vernacular text given to them but the Latin as well. The three sisters for whom AW was first written would have started their training in literacy early, being taught by their mothers or nurses the basics of language, learning something of Latin first through the Paternoster, Ave, and other simple prayers, the Creed, and the alphabet. Afterwards they may have been educated in their home or by mistresses—as were Joan de Munechensie and Eleanor, Countess of Pembroke—by a household chaplain, by a clerkly master shared with their natural or foster brothers, or by Latinate masters of their own, as were Felice and Katherine. They may also have been educated in nunneries, taught by Latinate women and perhaps composed Latin writing of their own. Such girls could have achieved a great deal of training in reading and understanding Latin, as did Matilda and Margaret of Scotland. Further, within the anchorhold, a woman would have received instruction from visiting friars and others who could have provided further Latin education. It seems clear that resources were available, and cultural expectations allowed it, so that women of the nobility and gentry could become variably accomplished in Latin. Exactly how and where the earliest readers of AW were educated is unknown; however, given the evidence, we can be reasonably sure that they were sufficiently litteratus to use AW as it was written for them.