ABSTRACT
When Rotha Mary Clay wrote her ground-breaking, and still unsuperseded, Hermits and Anchorites of England,1 C. H. Talbot had not yet performed the feat of textual recovery without which this volume would probably not have come into existence. Her knowledge of Christina’s life was based on Nicholas Roscarrock’s plot summary of c. 1600, as printed by Hortsman, and the St Albans-centred highlights included (by a later hand) in the Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani, printed in the Rolls Series sequence of chronicles of the Abbey.2 Had she had access to the far more richly detailed text of the Life which, thanks to Talbot, we are now able to read, Christina would undoubtedly have featured more prominently in Clay’s book than she did.3
