In recent decades scholars have begun to question more deeply what level of Latinity the early readers of the Ancrene Wisse would have attained, and what their experiences were with the text written for them. Critical consensus generally dismisses more advanced Latinity as exceptional, beyond the ability of such women readers to perhaps pronounce Latin, or follow it in the liturgy. They instead characterize most readers of the thirteenth century as literate in the vernacular only, and claim that the more advanced Latin passages in the Ancrene Wisse were directed not at the intended audience of anchoresses but at the women's spiritual supervisors. In this study I re-examine that consensus, considering textual as well as manuscript evidence to demonstrate that the Ancrene Wisse's early thirteenth-century readers, particularly those who were aristocrats, were trained to read and comprehend not just the vernacular but Latin as well. I argue that such training would have enabled these readers to comprehend the entire text of the Ancrene Wisse.A review of the education of women in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in the first chapter, demonstrates that aristocratic women of this era could be quite well-educated in Latin, and that aspirational models such as St. Katherine and Felice of Gui de Warewic were trained in the trivium and quadrivium as well as in Latin. Having established this background, I turn to a close textual analysis of the early version of the Ancrene Wisse, represented in the Nero, Titus, Cleopatra, Corpus, and Vitellius manuscripts. A new look at textual evidence previously considered by scholars, together with my presentation of new evidence, reveals that the early anchoresses would have understood the Latin in the Ancrene Wisse and were heavily involved in manuscript culture. I then turn to the earliest manuscripts to uncover additional evidence that attests such Latinity and manuscript literacy. Looking particularly at the Nero manuscript, on which virtually no codicological work has been done up until this project, I consider how the manuscripts were made for women and how women used them. My examination of the grade, size, structure, and abbreviations of the manuscripts reveals that Nero and likely Titus appear to have been commissioned by anchoresses for use in their cells; I support this by comparing and contrasting the makeup of Cleopatra and Corpus. In considering how these women used their manuscripts, I catalogue the marginal annotations in Nero, few of which have been written about before now, and compare marginal annotations in the other three manuscripts to argue that Nero preserves annotations added by anchoritic women readers. This study builds on previous scholarship but goes beyond it in close textual and codicological analysis to argue for a greater Latinity and participation in manuscript culture by thirteenth century anchoritic readers of the Ancrene Wisse than has been demonstrated before in the scholarship.