The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, Edited from Magdalene College, Cambridge, Ms. Pepys 2498

8vo. Brown cloth boards with gilt lettering to front and spine, device of Early English Text Society to front. Two B&W folding reproductions of pages from the original manuscript, incl. frontis. xxiii, 184 p.p. Light rubbing to corners and spine ends, foxing to top edge, else a fine and clean copy. Dust jacket is price clipped, sunned at spine, bumped and rubbed at extremities, a few short tears, small damp stain to head of front cover, scuff to front. The Pepys manuscript contains an extensively rewritten version of the Ancrene Riwle from the second half of the fourteenth century. Recent scholarship has shown that it belongs to a group of fourteenth-century manuscripts representing the earliest type of London English that can be distinguished. The Ancrene Riwle (also known as the Ancrene Wisse) was the monastic rule (a type of manual) for Anchoresses and Anchorites, which were typically women who were like hermits, except where hermits were permitted a change of location the anchorites were typically bound to one place, typically a cell attached to a church. This version was addressed to both men and women in contrast to the original rule addressed to women only.…