The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, Ancrene Wisse, edited from MS. Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402

Illustrated with a double-sided frontispiece with photos of two pages from the original manuscript. Introduction by University of Oxford scholar N. R. Kerr. First edition, first printing. One of 3,000 first edition copies. Publisher's brown cloth, with front board and spine stamped in gilt; very good or better, with light soiling to foot of spine, light dimming to spine gilt, corners lightly bumped, Editorial Institute Library (Boston University) bookplate to front pastedown, and some very light penciled marginalia. With a laid-in slip of paper in an unknown hand that states "Gift of Geoffrey Hill," Hill being a noted British poet and Editorial Institute cofounder. Overall, a handsome copy. Ancrene Wisse is a 13th century religious text that served as a guide for nuns or anchoresses. Anchoresses (men were called anchorites) were women who retreated from the world into a room - often a cell attached to a church, known as an anchor-hold - to live out their days in religious seclusion. Fascinatingly, prior to committing themselves to their cells, anchoresses would undergo religious rites of consecration, symbolizing their transition to a living death. This book is an edited and heavily footnoted transcription of MS. Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402, one of seventeen extant Ancrene Wisse manuscripts. Ancrene Wisse was an important text in J. R. R. Tolkien's scholarly career - notably, he published an academic essay "Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad" in 1929, which has been called "the most perfect though not the best-known of Tolkien's academic pieces." In that essay, he developed "AB language," a scholarly discovery illustrating strong similarities in spelling between MS. Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402 ("A") and MS. Bodley 34 ("B"), the latter of which is a collection of five medieval texts known as the "Katherine Group." Sir Geoffrey Hill (1932 - 2016) was a major 20th and 21st century British poet, who produced "dense poems of gnarled syntax and astonishing rhetorical power" (Poetry Foundation). Literary critic Harold Bloom wrote of him, "Geoffrey Hill is the central poet-prophet of our augmenting darkness, and inherits the authority of the visionaries from Dante and [William] Blake onto D.H. Lawrence." Hill taught as a poetry professor for many years at Oxford University and cofounded the Editorial Institute at Boston University with literary critic Christopher Ricks. The Editorial Institute was created "with the conviction that the textually sound, contextually annotated edition is central to the life of many disciplines" (Boston University). …