Lee Berta Grattan. Linguistic evidence for the priority of the French text of the Ancrene Wisse: Based on the Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402 and the British Museum Cotton Vitellius F VII versions of the Ancrene Wisse

Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 1974. — 92 p. — (Janua Linguarum. Series Practica 242).At some time and at some place in twelfth or thirteenth century England, a man, whose identity and status have long been the subject of controversy, wrote a work whose title is also in question. It is a guide for three young and high-born sisters who decided to forsake the world to live an enclosed life as religious recluses. The three young ladies, but not their names, are known from the fourteen surviving manuscripts, of which eight are in English, two are in Latin, and four are in French. The same material is also incorporated into a work which was widely disseminated on the continent and which was translated into English, from the French, and published in 1493. Even more virulent than the other arguments about this much debated religious rule have been those concerning the question of the original language in which it was written — English, Latin, or French.