Chapter 4 focuses on a selection of bestselling genres on the colonial book market in Peru by analysing them in terms of production modes, materiality, and potential users. It exposes how a focus on the colonial market must necessarily include the entire array of print publications and, in particular, the small printing jobs relating to local affairs that penetrated various spheres of urban life. While the many small-format reprints of prayer booklets prove that religion was a popular subject for books, an unpublished calendar enterprise serves as a case study to assess knowledge of religious and scientific nature in print. In line with hypotheses of a Catholic Enlightenment, the chapter turns from religion to practical knowledge with an analysis of manuals and how-to books, revealing a shared canon of reading material within the empire. Depending on local relatedness, titles of each of the genres originated either from local workshops or as imports.

Some late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century compilations address both men and women, while employing the topos of the female religious reader to depict the exemplary Christian life for all. Other works offer specific connections with female, particularly aristocratic readers, both secular and religious. Book to a Mother explicitly addresses the mother of the author, a widow perhaps interested in joining a religious community while also addressing a lay public. As well as adapting anchoritic material, compilations also took up the spiritual teachings offered by Richard Rolleߣs vernacular writing. Disce mori, for example, both uses Rolleߣs texts and imitates the dynamics of Rolleߣs relations with his female readers, while also including a more general lay readership. Womenߣs writings, such as the Revelations of Birgitta of Sweden, play an important part too in compilations. Though evidence is scant, the example of Eleanor Hull suggests that women also acted as compilers. Compilations, then, demonstrate both the range and complexity of womenߣs involvement in devotional literary culture, and the wider significance of the female subject for devotional writers, male and female, in later medieval England.

The mystic and hermit Richard Rolle (d. 1349) claimed the authority to interpret biblical texts, to add his understandings of their meanings to the received and authoritative interpretations of the Fathers of the Church. This chapter takes up the question of how Rolle understood his own authority as an exegete and how his various explorations of this topic, across his many writings, in Latin and Middle English, compare to the theories of his contemporaries in Oxford and Cambridge, their understandings of how scholastic exegetical authority relates to the inspiration enjoyed by patristic interpreters and, ultimately, to the authors of the Bible itself. Rolle’s theoretical musings have much more in common with this scholastic material than has previously been appreciated, putting pressure on unfortunately persistent binaries of the devotional, affective or mystical, on the one hand, and, on the other, the scholastic or intellectual traditions of medieval Christianity.