Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-century Early Middle English guide for anchorites, was initially addressed to just three women. By the early fifteenth century, it had been adapted for a wide range of readers in disparate vocations: nuns, monks, priests, mendicants, and pious laypeople of all genders. Unusually for a Middle English text, it was also translated into French and Latin as well. It became one of the most important sources for later English religious writing, in Latin and the vernacular, addressed to both men and women. In some cases, later writers borrowed specific images of Christ as lover-knight or God as a loving mother; in others, the anchoritic life furnished a model for ecclesiastical reform. More broadly, the adaptations of Ancrene Wisse attest to the text’s role as paradigm for extramonastic devotional reading.