ABSTRACT
Handlyng Synne is an English vernacular adaptation of Manuel des Peches, a thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman work usually attributed to William of Waddington. Handlyng Synne was written by a man who identifies himself as Robert Mannyng. Robert Mannyng states at the beginning of Handlyng Synne that he began the work in 1303 and internal evidence in the text suggests that it was completed around 1318. The manuscript record of Handlyng Synne reveals a relatively poor rate of survival in comparison with the Anglo-Norman text from which it was adapted. Lacking any manuscripts to reconstruct the early Gilbertine audiences of Hand-lyng Synne it will be necessary to look at the terms in which Mannyng situated his text, or, one could say, the manner in which he imagined his text would reach and be understood by the audiences he targeted. Naturally, the idea of an author delineating an audience within the imaginative setting of a book raises certain problems.
