The changing emphases of vernacular pastoralia as they imagine and support the confessor's or the penitent's role are increasingly acknowledged as part of a culturally and politically charged reading history of great importance in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Middle English studies. A kind of reading that may be loosely characterized as penitential – reading conceived as a disciplined, interior scrutiny of the self in relation to the particular ontology of Christian salvation history – remains a leading model of self-knowledge and self-fashioning in medieval culture from Lateran IV to Chaucer's Parson's Tale and beyond. This essay argues that, like a number of other reading histories, penitential reading cannot be adequately considered without due attention to the feminized francophone literary culture of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries and its continuations and bequests in the later period. The resources represented by this literary culture, which, in England, preceded, contributed to and developed the concerns of Lateran IV, have been largely overlooked. The vernacular results of Lateran IV have been unproblematically accepted as arriving in the late fourteenth century in the form of an ‘efflorescence’ of late medieval devotional and doctrinal texts in Middle English, even though for the century and a half before that efflorescence it is French that is the dominant language of pastoralia and the formation of the self in England. A great deal of research remains to be done on the francophone devotional and doctrinal texts of women's (and laymen's) reading from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries.