THE READING PRACTICES of medieval women in the later Middle Ages have been subject to considerable scrutiny in recent decades. In the context of women's devotional literature, Anne Clark Bartlett's reassessment of how a female audience may have responded to the general misogyny inherent within male-authored medieval devotional texts has been particularly influential upon subsequent scholarly understanding. Bartlett argues that women may well have focused on what she identifies as the more positive discourses often running counter to or contending with the main discursive strands of the narrative – nuptial imagery, for example, Romance discourse or allusions to spiritual or familial friendships between women, all of which, as we have seen, are prevalent in Ancrene Wisse and its associated texts and may well have facilitated a ‘reading against the grain’. The author, after all, does lay down the ground for selective readings of his texts, when he instructs his audience at the end of Part Eight: ‘Read some of this book in your free time every day, whether less or more. I hope that if you read it often it will be very useful to you’ [‘of þis boc redeð hwen ℨe beoð eise euche dei leasse oðer mare. Ich hopie þet hit schal beon ow, ℨef ℨe hit redeð ofte, swiðe biheue’].