Unlike its nearest early thirteenth century insular counterpart, Ancrene Wisse, which was rendered into Anglo-Norman within thirty years of its final revision and Latin within fifty, Edmund of Abingdon’s Speculum religiosorum circulated in only two of England’s three languages for well over a century. Despite its composition by one of England’s most celebrated saint-bishops, translation into Anglo-Norman (usually as Mirour de seinte eglyse) and retranslation several times into Latin (often under a title such as Speculum ecclesie), the first Middle English versions of the work date from the late fourteenth century. Where Ancrene Wisse played a fundamental role in the development of Middle English prose, the eight or so translations now known collectively as The Mirror of Holy Church, which survive in thirteen manuscripts and two early printed editions, were made too late to be of much significance to the history of Middle English stylistics or philology.

Work on the Speculum and its translations in general lags behind Ancrene Wisse scholarship, egregiously so with respect to its Middle English versions. Helen Forshaw’s edition of the Latin original and one later Latin retranslation was published in 1973, Alan Wilshere’s edition of the two redactions of the Mirour nine years later: twin culminations of a scholarly project that established the current consensus on this exceptionally mobile work’s early history. Yet little further work on any version has been done since the early 1980s and this has left research into the Middle English versions in particular in a primitive state. Despite the presence of independent prose translations of the work in three celebrated manuscripts – Vernon, Simeon and Thornton – and the availability, for over a century, of transcriptions by Carl Horstmann of the first and third of these, as well as of Vernon’s two verse versions, there is still no published critical edition of any version of the Mirror and no comparative critical study. At present, we do not even know exactly how many translations there were and which Latin or Anglo-Norman version they translated. It is not that the Mirror is not well known. Rather, the very ubiquity of this spiritual classic has caused it to be taken for granted.