Medieval anchoritisms: gender, space and the solitary life 9781843842774, 1843842777

Table of contents :
CONTENTS......Page 6
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......Page 8
ABBREVIATIONS......Page 10
INTRODUCTION......Page 12
1. Miles Christi: Early Anchoritic Masculinity and the Sacred......Page 22
2. Videte vocacionem vestram: Late-Medieval Male Anchoritism and the Spectral Feminine......Page 54
3. Writing the Flesh: Female Anchoritism and the Master Narrative......Page 88
4. Reading with the Eyes Closed: Revising the Master Narrative......Page 124
5. Mapping the Anchorhold: Anchorites, Borderlands and Liminal Spaces......Page 158
AFTERWORD......Page 189
BIBLIOGRAPHY......Page 192
INDEX......Page 206

Citation preview

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Dr Liz Herbert McAvoy is Reader in Gender Studies and Medieval Literature at Swansea University. Her other books include Anchoritic Traditions of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe and A Companion to Julian of Norwich. Cover: Saint Wiborada in her anchorite cell. Stiftsbibliothek St Gallen, Cod. Sang. 602, p. 345.

Series: Gender in the Middle Ages

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd

PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

MONSTERS, GENDER AND SEXUALITYMcAvoy MEDIEVAL ANCHORITISMS IN MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE

Originating in the deserts of northern Africa in the early years of Christianity, anchoritism, or the enclosed solitary life, gradually metamorphosed into a permanent characteristic of European religiosity. From the twelfth century onwards, and throughout the middle ages, it was embraced with increasing enthusiasm, by devoted laywomen in particular. This book investigates the wider cultural importance of medieval anchoritism within the different religious landscapes and climates of the period. Drawing upon a range of contemporary gender and spatial theories, it focuses on the gender dynamics of this remarkable way of life, and the material spaces which they generated and within which they operated. As such, it unites related – but too often discrete – areas of scholarship, including early Christian anchoritism, anchoritic guidance texts and associated works, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century holy women with close anchoritic connections, and a range of other less known works dealing with or connected to the anchoritic life.

MEDIEVAL ANCHORITISMS GENDER, SPACE AND THE SOLITARY LIFE

Liz Herbert McAvoy

Gender in the Middle Ages Volume 6

medieval anchoritisms gender, space and the solitary life

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Gender in the Middle Ages ISSN 1742–870X Series Editors Jacqueline Murray Diane Watt Editorial Board John Arnold  Clare Lees Katherine Lewis  Karma Lochrie

This series investigates the representation and construction of masculinity and femininity in the Middle Ages from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. It aims in particular to explore the diversity of medieval genders, and such interrelated contexts and issues as sexuality, social class, race and ethnicity, and orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions will receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Jacqueline Murray, College of Arts, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, H1G 2W1, Canada Professor Diane Watt, Department of English, University of Wales Aberystwyth, Penglais, Aberystwyth, SY23 3DY Boydell & Brewer Limited, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK Also in this series: I Gender and Medieval Drama, Katie Normington, 2004 II Gender and Petty Crime in Late Medieval England: The Local Courts in Kent, 1460–1560, Karen Jones, 2006 III The Pastoral Care of Women in Late Medieval England, Beth Allison Barr, 2008 IV Gender, Nation and Conquest in the Works of William of Malmesbury, Kirsten A. Fenton, 2008 V Monsters, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval English Literature, Dana M. Oswald, 2010

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MEDIEVAL ANCHORITISMS GENDER, SPACE AND THE SOLITARY LIFE

Liz Herbert McAvoy

D. S. BREWER

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© Liz Herbert McAvoy 2011 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Liz Herbert McAvoy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2011 D. S. Brewer ISBN 978-1-84384-277-4

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.co.uk A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Papers used by Boydell & Brewer Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests

Typeset by Word and Page, Chester Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements

vii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

1. Miles Christi: Early Anchoritic Masculinity and the Sacred

11

2. Videte vocacionem vestram: Late-Medieval Male Anchoritism and the Spectral Feminine

43

3. Writing the Flesh: Female Anchoritism and the Master Narrative

77

4. Reading with the Eyes Closed: Revising the Master Narrative

113

5. Mapping the Anchorhold: Anchorites, Borderlands and Liminal Spaces

147

Afterword

178

Bibliography

181

Index

195

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book has grown out of many years of thinking and writing about the phenomenon of medieval anchoritism and its invisibility to all but a few within modern consciousness. In particular, it has developed out of a longstanding and continued interest in women’s literary and material histories which has taken up much of my working and non-working life for several decades, and how voluntary female reclusion has played an unsung role within those histories. Without the help of a number of people, however, this book would still not have seen the light of day and I am grateful to them in equal measures. My especial thanks go to the College of Arts and Humanities at Swansea University for granting me a year’s study-leave during which to draft the book and to Neil Reeve, my Head of Department, who organized teaching cover and reallocated my considerable administrative responsibilities during 2008–9. My colleague, Catherine Clarke, has also been of great assistance as a patient reader of parts of this work, as has Sarah Salih. I am grateful to both for their astute and measured suggestions and for their sustained interest in my project. Thanks are also due to Diane Watt of Aberystwyth University, who continues to support my work with interest and enthusiasm. Similarly, I am indebted to Caroline Palmer of Boydell and Brewer for her support and interest in my projects and for contracting this book in its very early stages. I am also grateful to her for sharing with me her own interests in female anchoritism and for pointing me towards some useful sources, also published by the press. Also of invaluable assistance were my students opting for my undergraduate module, Writing, Gender and Women in the Wall and subsequent cohorts of MA students taking my Gender Trouble and the Medieval Anchorite course following my return to the classroom in 2009– 10. Their powerful and insightful responses to a range of the texts and contexts included in this book impacted most positively upon my own readings, rendering these groups of students a huge pleasure to teach. My Ph.D. student, Liz Cox, also deserves a special mention for her work as my research assistant in the closing stages of this book. Her efficient organizing of my bibliography has resulted in the book’s speedier execution and I am very grateful to her for her care and diligence. Finally, the contribution of my husband, Tony, must be recognized for his enthusiasm for my work, for trailing around remote churchyards in the worst and best of weathers with me, for foraging for printer cartridges, paper and food when I had run out of all three, and for supplying me with endless cups of coffee as energy and creativity appeared to wane. I am grateful to him for more than three decades of patience. Some parts of this book are developments of earlier publications or conference papers. Aspects of Chapter 2 were first explored briefly in ‘Gender, Rhetoric and Space in the Speculum Inclusorum, Letter to a Bury Recluse and the Strange Case of Christina Carpenter’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body vii

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within the Discourses of Enclosure, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), pp. 111–26; Chapter 3’s discussion of Ancrene Wisse is based, in part, upon ‘“Neb . . . sumdeal ilich wummon & neddre is behinden”: Reading the Monstrous in the Anchoritic Text’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition: Exeter Symposium VII, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 51–67; my discussion of Julian of Norwich in Chapter 4 is based on an analysis entitled ‘“For we be doubel of God’s making”: Writing, Gender and the Body in Julian of Norwich’, in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 166–80; and parts of Chapter 5 appear in truncated form as ‘“ȝe beoð þe ancren of Englond . . . a þah ȝe weren an cuuent of . . . Chester”: Liminal Spaces and the Anchoritic Life in Medieval Chester’, in Mapping Medieval Chester, ed. Catherine A. M. Clarke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011). I am grateful to the respective publishers for permission to reproduce this material here. A number of the texts used in this study constitute online editions, the URLs for which were last confirmed in April 2011.

viii

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ABBREVIATIONS BL CCR CPR EETS os PL

British Library Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of the Charter Rolls (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1908–) Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of the Patent Rolls (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1891–) The Early English Text Society Original Series Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844–64)

ix

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Incluse exclusa For all excluded voices and for those who are yet to be heard

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INTRODUCTION Already I have dropped back into the desert as if it were my own place; silence and solitude fall round you like an impenetrable veil.1

ANCHORITES: ORIGINS AND TERMINOLOGY

W

riting to her father from the desert at Kureifeh on Wednesday, 15 May 1900, Gertrude Bell attempts to articulate the extraordinary silence she had experienced there: ‘Shall I tell you my chief impression’, she asks him, ‘– the silence. It is like the silence of mountain tops, but more intense, for there you know the sound of wind and far away water and falling ice and stones; there is a sort of echo of sound there, you know it, Father. But here, nothing.’2 In this extract, Bell experiences the silence and solitude of the desert in terms of an empty nothingness, a non-space waiting to be filled, a place-in-waiting where, liminal to the rest of the world, the human being actually has a chance of becoming or of achieving a new kind of selfhood. Many years later, Bell would embellish this description, identifying the desert as some kind of original homeland, a place where silence and solitude separate the human off from the world with its ‘impenetrable veil’, a veil behind which a different type of being is possible. Such imagery of silence, solitude, homecoming and impenetrable veiling used here to summon up another state of being cannot help but evoke for the medieval scholar images of the medieval anchorite – a woman or a man, but more often a woman, who had opted for permanent solitary enclosure, usually in a small, purpose-built cell attached to a monastic institution or, more likely, a local parish church. For such recluses, this cell was deemed their figurative desert, an empty space within which they could encounter the same type of silence, solitude and the ineffable as experienced so profoundly by Bell on her desert travels. In this cell, following a formal rite of enclosure closely resembling the funereal rite, the recluse would be locked up to spend a life praying, meditating and mediating between humanity and its God, veiled from the world behind a small window and dark curtain.3 Throughout the later Middle Ages, such recluses were to be found in large numbers throughout Europe, fulfilling a range of functions, both ideological 1



2 3

The Letters of Gertrude Bell (1927), vol. I, Project Gutenburg of Australia. http://gutenberg.net.au/ ebooks04/0400341h.html. Bell, Letters. For an account of this rite as performed within the English anchoritic tradition, see E. A. Jones, ‘Ceremonies of Enclosure: Rite, Rhetoric and Reality’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cardiff, 2008), pp. 34–49.

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Medieval Anchoritisms and societal, within those communities which housed them. As such, as I will be arguing in this book, they formed a veritable ‘women’s movement’ which, despite its perpetual haunting of the male imaginary (as women’s movements have always done), was a way of life that gathered momentum throughout Europe, metamorphosing when necessary in the face of attempts to control it, and ultimately finding expression in almost every region of late-medieval England.4 The origins of this extraordinary life-choice had been embedded within the Christian imagination by biblical precedent: the wandering of Moses in the Sinai desert; the uncultivated habitat of John the Baptist, herald of Christ’s ministry; the locale to where Christ himself withdrew to suffer temptation and to strengthen his resolve for what was to come.5 Such narratives of desert experiences were added to and consolidated in the aftermath of Christ’s death as his followers were driven to more remote areas of desert on the edges of human habitation in order to flee persecution. Many of these, known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers, began to withdraw further into the desert to embrace the solitary life, becoming the first Christian desert hermits upon whom the anchoritic life in the west would ultimately be predicated. In this way, desert experience transformed into desert discourse, with such ideal Christian lives offering up extraordinary exempla for future generations, the late-medieval anchorite included. Within such discourse, desert withdrawal became associated in particular with a period of Christian waiting in which deprivation, suffering and asceticism played a major part; however, it was also a place of enlightenment and enrichment and intense spiritual productivity brought about by a total withdrawal from all worldly comforts and distractions and allowing ultimately for that ‘other way of being’.6 The term ‘anchorite’ derives from the Greek ἀναχωρέω (anachōreō) meaning ‘to withdraw’ or ‘to retire’.7 An anchorite was a person who had withdrawn from human society and its exchanges but, in many of the early sources documenting the life of the religious solitary, the term is used interchangeably with that of ἔρημος (erēmos), meaning amongst other things ‘solitary’ or even ‘desert’, and eventually ‘hermit’. This, in turn, points towards a common origin for these two solitary ways of life, although the anchorite was to become the one devoting her or himself to permanent stability of abode, whilst the hermit, in England almost always male, tended to embrace a more haphazard and peripatetic solitary life.8 It is with the

4



5

6

7





8

For an account of the various and changing expressions of women’s anchoritic enclosure, see the various essays collected in Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, 2010). For the preponderance of female anchorites within the English tradition set out in tabular form, see Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1985), p. 20 and Appendix 1. On this see, for example, my introduction to Anchoritic Traditions, pp. 1–21 (pp. 5–8). For a more detailed account of so-called desert spirituality within the anchoritic tradition see Dee Dyas, ‘“Wildernesse is anliche lif of ancre wununge”: The Wilderness and Anchoritic Spirituality’, in Approaching Medieval Mystical and Anchoritic Texts, ed. Dee Dyas, Valerie Edden and Roger Ellis (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 19–34. For a highly illuminating essay which traces the tradition of desert withdrawal and its epistemologies, see Judith Adler, ‘Cultivating Wilderness: Environmentalism and Legacies of Early Christian Asceticism’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006), pp. 4–37. See A Patristic Greek Lexicon, ed. G. W. H. Lampe (Oxford, 1969). The word ἀναχωρἑω can mean both ‘to withdraw from battle’ and ‘to retire from public life’. For definitions of various types of solitaries in other areas of western Europe see the essays collected in Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy.

2

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Introduction former expression of the solitary religious vocation, and one with a far stronger female presence in the later Middle Ages, that this present study is concerned. ANCHORITIC SCHOLARSHIP The past two-and-a-half decades have seen a considerable development in scholarly interest in the anchoritic life and its wider effects upon medieval society and its systems of belief. Increasingly, it has been recognized that anchoritism was often a major actor in the socio-religious politics of the day and its influence much more far-reaching than had previously been thought. The first major study of English anchoritism was undertaken by Rotha Mary Clay in her Hermits and Anchorites (1914), an extensive piece of historical scholarship which has yet to be surpassed within the field, although a great number of additional anchoritic and hermitic sites and, in some instances, texts have been identified since her book was published, some of which will be examined in this present study.9 Four decades later, in 1954, Francis Darwin published The Mediaeval Recluse, a volume which, as Mari Hughes-Edwards has recently identified, has been much underrated within anchoritic scholarship, in spite of Darwin’s attempts to dispel what he regarded as some crucial misconceptions about English anchoritism which had been generated in the light of Clay’s study.10 Darwin’s insistence upon the social nature of the role undertaken by the anchorite was at the time out of step with the current consensus, which tended to accept the literal notion of the ‘walled-up’ and isolated anchorite as its paradigm. More recently, the work of Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons (1985), has corroborated Darwin’s view and her work continues to dominate the field,11 although it is true to say that Warren’s main interest remains the socio-religious systems of support which formed the scaffold of the anchoritic life in England, rather than the anchoritic life itself, its meanings and its adherents. In addition, Warren’s findings were based only on already published sources scrutinized through a primarily historical lens, and since the book’s publication it has become clear that her figures were therefore far from complete. Indeed, two recent collections of essays on medieval anchoritism, the first co-edited with Mari-Hughes Edwards, the second by myself (Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages [2005]; and Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure [2008]) were envisioned as a means of probing and developing Warren’s findings and to point towards a plethora of work on as yet unpublished sources still needing to



9

10

11





Rotha Mary Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London, 1914). E. A. Jones is currently updating Clay’s research findings, which, to date, have been published as E. A. Jones, ‘Christina of Markyate and the Hermits and Anchorites of England’, in Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Holy Woman, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (London and New York, 2005), pp. 229–50; ‘The Hermits and Anchorites of Oxfordshire’, Oxoniensia 63 (1998), pp. 51–77; and ‘Rotha Clay’s Hermits and Anchorites of England’, Monastic Research Bulletin 3 (1997), pp. 46–8. See also his ‘Anchoritic Aspects of Julian of Norwich’, in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 75–87. F. D. S. Darwin, The English Medieval Recluse (London, 1954), on which see Mari Hughes-Edwards, ‘Anchoritism: The English Tradition’, in Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy, pp. 131–52 (p. 133). Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons.

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Medieval Anchoritisms be undertaken.12 A third collection focusing on anchoritic activity across western Europe, also edited by myself (Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe [2010]), was designed to extend our understanding of wider European expressions of medieval anchoritism, and to identify convergences and divergences between the various traditions by entering into dialogue with research being undertaken in languages other than English.13 Indeed, this is something which the Dutch scholar, Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, had already been arguing for, particularly in her study of a range of Low Countries anchorites in Lives of the Anchoresses (2005).14 Responding to the relative abundance of literary sources on the continent, Mulder-Bakker, herself a renowned historian in the field, promoted the gains to be made by exploring these sources through a historico-literary lens and, moreover, one which took into account issues of gender. This present book therefore is, in part, my own response to Mulder-Bakker’s call; it is also the result of many years of thinking about the ways in which a complex alchemy of gender and spatial dynamics are imbricated within the medieval reclusive life, and what the investment was of a wider society in its rituals, practices and hermeneutics. SOLITUDE: THEORIES AND TEXTS That Gertrude Bell was familiar with medieval anchoritism is unlikely, given its general disappearance from our collective memory since its demise in the aftermath of the Reformation. She was, however, clearly aware of the potential of silence and solitude to provide alternative ways of viewing the world. Standing on the height of Mount Pisgah, from where Moses is reputed to have first gazed down upon his own promised homeland,15 for example, Bell remarks of the Deuteronomy narrative which records the episode, ‘I stood on the top of Pisgah and looked out over the wonderful Jordan valley and the blue sea and the barren hills, veiled and beautified by cloud and thought it was one of the most pathetic stories that have ever been told’.16 Here again, Bell almost inadvertently touches upon the seductive, affective qualities of silence and solitude which, in very many ways, reached their zenith in the west during the Middle Ages, becoming reified in the image of the holy anchorite who trod a rarified pathway from insight to illumination, from solitariness to union with God in an ultimate, joyous ‘homecoming’. As such, the desert – and its more cultivated correlative, the wilderness17 – has long continued to form an ideological backbone to western Christianity, emerging and re-emerging

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Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-Edwards (eds), Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages (Cardiff, 2005); and Liz Herbert McAvoy (ed.), Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure (Cardiff, 2008). See n. 4 above. Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). Mount Pisgah is generally considered to be the biblical Mount Nebo, which rises up from the plains of Moab, as documented in Deuteronomy 34: 1, from where Moses is granted his first view of the Promised Land. Bell, Letters. On the meanings attributed to desert and wilderness within Christian theology, see Dyas, ‘“Wildernesse is anlich lif of ancre wununge”, pp. 19–33. Here, Dyas asserts that the terms are used largely interchangeably, both being employed to convey the meaning of the Hebrew midbar (p. 20).

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Introduction in those multiple dramas which make up both the Christian and Hebraic scriptures, and providing an apt symbol for the suffering of human existence, whilst bearing always the ultimate promise of ‘home’. In this, Bell anticipates by some forty years the pivotal work of Gaston Bachelard on some of the spatial poetics which frame the responses of humanity to the world. In particular, La poétique de l’espace (1958) focuses on how we as humans experience intimate places and it is a work to which I am greatly indebted in this present study of anchoritic spaces and those practices which produce them.18 For Bachelard, ‘there is nothing like silence to suggest a sense of unlimited space’. Moreover, ‘in the silence, we are seized with the sensation of something vast and deep and boundless’.19 Thus, for Bachelard, vastness can be as much experienced in small, enclosed places – the hermit’s hut, for example – as it can be in wide, open spaces, such as the desert wastes. Indeed, again mirroring Bell’s response, he identifies the role of the hermit within the cultural imaginary as itself providing ‘the absolute refuge’ of a homecoming.20 Solitude as a type of homecoming is something which in more recent times has also preoccupied the writer Sara Maitland, who, as part of a series of habitations of wild and empty landscapes, withdrew for a time into the Egyptian desert in order to discover how ‘silence emerge[s] as an effective instrument for inducing the profound experiences, and for lowering the barriers between the self and the Other’.21 For Maitland, contemporary life in the west has inserted itself between its adherents and the knowledge of their relationship with the Other, whether that ‘Other’ is God (as in her case); the unknown self; a philosophical system of ethics and aesthetics which somehow transcend the mundanity of our conditioned dayto-day interactions; or, quite simply, a newly understood concept of human love. For Maitland, life is simply too noisy and too busy for any human being to be able to place her/himself within any stable context within the world. It is too distracting an environment for self-knowledge and knowledge of the Other to thrive. Maitland’s journey into solitude as a means of rethinking social spaces and their meanings, as well as her own position within those spaces, echoes closely the type of deep introspection which, so I will argue, formed the heart of medieval anchoritism, although such a quest for meaning via a personal withdrawal from the world is by no means a purely Christian phenomenon, as I have also argued elsewhere.22 On the contrary, it has been an aspect of most philosophico-religious systems in almost every culture which has ever left traces of itself. In the words of John D. Barbour, whose analysis of the value placed upon solitude within the human imagination forms another starting point for my own exploration of medieval solitary reclusion here, ‘solitude at its best – when it realizes its fullest ethical and spiritual value – is not oriented towards escaping the world but to a different kind of participation within it’.23 For Barbour the solitary thus becomes a ‘site’ where a whole range This has been published in English as The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, 1969, various repr.). 19 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 43. 20 Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 32. 21 Sarah Maitland, A Book of Silence: A Journey in Search of the Pleasures and Powers of Silence (London, 2008), p. 203. 22 On the biblical origins of medieval anchoritism, see my introduction to Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy, pp. 1–21, especially pp. 5–8. There I also discuss the wider human impulse towards solitude (pp. 4–5). 23 John D. Barbour, The Value of Solitude: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography

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Medieval Anchoritisms of different ideologies, political and religious interests, discursive practices and other structuring mechanisms come together and compete for pre-eminence. As such, this ‘site’ bears the potential for a reframing of identity and, especially when the solitary is also a writer, can facilitate a new, reconfigured sense of agency.24 It therefore bears the potential to form a ‘critical practice’ which allows both the solitary and, by extension, the society which invests in that solitary, to view itself and its own modus vivendi from an altogether different perspective. The medieval anchorite, then, becomes a figure through whom a new light can be cast on the surrounding culture; conversely, too, it can offer the society espousing that culture new ways of being by means of its own identification with the anchorite in its midst. Such a definition of the solitary as fulfilling a fundamentally societal function which exists in parallel to the anchorite’s own desire for withdrawal from the world, thus identifies a perplexing central paradox to the anchoritic life – and one which has not yet been fully explored by any commentator to date: if the solitary is one who wishes to relinquish the world and find and produce alternative meaning within a deserted eremitic space, how does that positioning sit comfortably with society’s own need for an anchorite within its religious system, its own desire to encourage and nurture that figure as ideal spiritual representative and thus to contain it within its own discursive boundaries? Moreover, if the anchorite’s production of a sacred space is predicated on its solitude and privacy and those (secret) practices performed within it, how then can it perform a wider, public function without that predication being diluted or lost? And how do issues of sex and gender play out within this complex socio-religious matrix to effect the constructions of sacred spaces? To assist in the answering of these types of questions, as well as those Bachelardian poetics mentioned above, I will also be drawing on a range of other contemporary spatial theorists, in particular Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, both of whose writings illuminate the ways in which different spaces are constructed, valued and used within a range of social contexts, both physical and metaphysical.25 Also of use has been René Girard’s work on the links between violence and the sacred, including the role of the religious scapegoat, as documented below.26 The gender theories of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous continue to be of importance to my work; as, indeed, has the more recent work of feminist geographer Irit Rogoff, whose deeply engaging writing interrogates contemporary art’s complex engagement with the problematics of space and identity.27 All have proved particularly helpful for unpicking the complex workings of gender within discourses of the anchoritic life, in which enclosure and relinquishment, humility and silence, generally considered feminine necessities (either within anchoritism, under patriarchy, or both) are extended to all its adherents, whatever their sex and gender.28 (Charlottesville and London, 2004), p. 201. Barbour, Value of Solitude, p. 202. 25 I will be using in particular Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Oxford, 2005); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, 1977), and ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, 1 (1986), pp. 22–7. 26 Of particular use in these contexts is René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (London, 2005, various repr.). 27 Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London and New York, 2000). 28 Whilst I will draw upon a range of theories regarding the positioning of women within society and 24

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Introduction In order to address these fundamentally perplexing questions, in this book I will be examining a range of ‘anchoritic’ texts: that is to say, texts written by, for or about anchorites, covering almost the entire medieval period from the early days of Christianity through to the mid-fifteenth century. Whilst a good number of these have escaped widespread attention to date – and some never from a literary perspective – the texts chosen for scrutiny are by no means comprehensive, issues of genre, space and previous treatments dictating to some extent what is included and what is not. Those texts which do come under the spotlight have therefore been selected to reflect the range of genres at which we should be looking in our attempts to understand the anchoritic life more fully. As such, although a return to a selection of those guidance texts written especially for anchorites will take up some sections of the book, a highly nuanced understanding of aspects of anchoritism can be gleaned from less obvious sources: early monastic writings, the chronicle, hagiography, travelogue, encomium, cartulary, epistle, for example. In all of these sources containing an anchorite in some shape or form, she or he is inevitably put to some type of cultural work which may differ from, or correlate with, the ideological representation which we find in some of the guidance texts – with Ancrene Wisse as perhaps the most ideological, in particular. In this capacity, I also consider the writings undertaken by anchorites themselves in order to draw some conclusions about their own self-representation, how they responded to the vocation and how the vocation impacted upon the self they both sought, sought to express and sought to relinquish, in their adoption of the solitary life. Notable for its absence, however, is the medieval romance, in part because of its selfconsciously mythical representation of anchorites, figures who are often conflated with hermits within romance tales. Issues of space have also precluded such an analysis, although I do consider briefly the romance discourse used to interpellate the female anchorite in Ancrene Wisse in my third chapter. Nevertheless, a much more extensive scrutiny of the work undertaken by this popular romance figure is certainly worthy of further consideration. Using these selected texts, some of which, like Ancrene Wisse, are highly familiar, others of which remain unedited or not readily accessible, and all of which make use of complex and intricately gendered imagery, I will argue that the anchoritic life was, from its inception, a vocation particularly haunted by a femininity that was often reified and just as often subliminal. I will also suggest that much of the anti-feminist and pro-masculinist discourse within anchoritic texts reflect attempts to drive out this spectral feminine presence. However, as the vocation developed alongside contemporary socio-religious epistemologies, this spectrality began to metamorphose into fervent female participation, drawing women into its aegis in ever greater numbers until, at its height, it became overtly female in its practice and feminine in its ideologies – and, as I shall argue, this latter point becomes particularly apparent in the feminine hermeneutics adopted in the writing of female anchorites themselves. their relationship to traditional reading and writing activities, of particular importance are the essays collected in Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, 1985); Julia Kristeva, ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’, in A Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford, 1986), pp. 93–8, ‘Stabat Mater’ in the same volume, pp. 160–85; and Hélène Cixous, ‘Coming to Writing’, in Coming to Writing and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1991), pp. 1–58.

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Medieval Anchoritisms THE CHAPTERS In Chapter 1 I focus on the very origins of anchoritism, as captured in the writings of one of the early Desert Fathers, John Cassian, who, an early anchorite himself, was deemed to be the ‘father’ of the medieval Christian Church and one of the originators of so-called ‘wilderness theology’. In this chapter I consider Cassian’s influential definition of anchoritism and argue for an inherent tension between his attempts to retain a sense of masculine prowess for the anchorite as a spiritual warrior and the insistent feminization of the coenobitic life which, in many ways, grew out of early desert anchoritism. Such a masculinist representation of the potentially emasculated monastic also makes its presence felt in the Rule of Saint Benedict and one of its adjuncts and adaptations written specifically for male monastic anchorites in the tenth century, the Rule of Grimlaïcus. I argue that all of these works struggle to accommodate a femininity which lies at the heart of the enclosed life with the need for a masculine spiritual pre-eminence, each turning to an overdetermined and frequently hypermasculine discourse of military prowess to do so. In my second chapter I turn to the representation of the male anchorite in two guidance texts dating from the fourteenth century which were written specifically for the male monastic recluse. My focus is on the monk-as-anchorite, his role as cultural scapegoat and the ways in which that scapegoat status and the rituals it generates help to construct the sacred space which he occupies. It also looks at the gradual ‘ascent’ into anchoritism, a male configuration and process which is inherent to the monastic expression of the vocation, with the monk graduating towards anchoritism towards the end of an erstwhile monastic life. This directly opposes the frequent experience of the female anchorite, who tended to enter the profession directly from the laity. This chapter also examines the ways in which the male anchoritic body is represented in these texts alongside that of the devotional figure of Christ and how both male bodies enter into dialogue with the rapidly increasing prevalence of an urban, female anchoritism, which forms the main focus of Chapter 3. In this third chapter, I necessarily turn to Ancrene Wisse, examining it as an inherently misogynistic male-authored text which interpellates its female anchorites, those materialized spectres of Cassian’s, Benedict’s and Grimlaïcus’s imaginaries, as always already monstrous in body. I demonstrate how the practices this text advocates for the countering of such ontology contrast radically with those presented to the male anchorites in the previously examined texts. Thus the chapter examines the relentless interpellation to which the women are subject and discusses those reading practices which may well have been adopted by the text’s female audience to facilitate an alternative, more affirming response to such interpellative strategies. As such, it raises questions of agency and response and the possibilities of ideologically disobedient reading practices, issues which are again taken up in Chapter 4, which concentrates on the ‘anchoritic’ writings of Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and the female author of the fifteenthcentury A Vision of Purgatory. Here I examine the writing strategies of these three fifteenth-century anchoritic (or, in the case of Kempe, what I term ‘anchoritically minded’) women writers. Arguing for their adoption of anchoritic hermeneutics which are dependent upon a far more positive view of the female body and the 8

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Introduction dynamics of a specifically female gaze, I suggest these form part of a carefully constructed literary strategy devised to counter the misogynistic interpellation to which they were culturally subject and to lend weight, credence and authority to their anchoritic insights and aspirations. The authority lent to the figure of the anchorite, and the female anchorite in particular, also takes on a strong political flavour in those texts focused on in my final chapter, which examines the anchoritism of the Welsh-English borderlands known as the Welsh Marches. Here I focus on how two of the primary discourses of anchoritism, that of stability of abode and the vocation as inherently feminine, are deployed at the hands of a series of politico-religious authors, including Gerald of Wales and the Chester encomiast known as Lucian. Writing in and about the same region within which Ancrene Wisse was composed, the anchorites in these texts – and their prevalence within historical record – suggest that Marcher anchorites, who were frequently from the ruling elite, were envisioned as political tools with which a coherent narrative of stability and Christian civility could be imposed upon a region torn by uprising and warfare for much of the Middle Ages. As this book will demonstrate, anxieties about and the appropriation of women and the discourses attached to their bodies are ubiquitous throughout anchoritic literature and occupy all its spaces, both covertly and overtly. Nevertheless, whether driving the wet-dreams of its early desert adherents or worrying its monastic virtuosos in the fourteenth-century; whether inciting a vitriolic anti-feminism or necessitating the complete closure of bodies; whether adopted, adapted and exploited as a means of expressing self-love, divine love or other eschatological concerns; whether embodying stability in spite of the ubiquitously conceived instability of its female adherents, anchoritism’s insistently feminine hermeneutics allowed, if only for a short time, the otherwise silent woman to speak out from behind her culturally imposed veil as if she were, to adapt the words of Gertrude Bell in her own literary outpouring, genuinely ‘in her own place’.

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Chapter 1 MILES CHRISTI: EARLY ANCHORITIC MASCULINITY AND THE SACRED I have used the phrase ‘violence and the sacred’; I might as well have said ‘violence or the sacred.’ For the operations of violence and the sacred are ultimately the same process.1

SOLITUDE AND THE DESERT EXPANSE

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arratives of the desert and its corollary, the wilderness, have long been intrinsic to the Christian belief-system. From the exploits of Old Testament prophets such as Moses and Elijah to the life of solitary privation preferred by John the Baptist in the New Testament, so-called ‘wilderness theology’ unsurprisingly formed a centrepiece within the writings by and about the early Christians – the Church Fathers and Mothers – who had fled to the more remote areas of Palestine and Egypt to avoid persecution under the Romans.2 The geographies of wilderness and desert were thus overlayed like a palimpsest to form one of the most sustained physical and metaphorical topoi within Christian discourse. This, however, was not entirely a result of the harshness of the desert landscape within which Christianity originated, as several critics have argued,3 but, as the geographer Irit Rogoff suggests, because location is one of those ‘epistemological categories [which] determine what we know, how we know it and why we know it’.4 As an epistemological continuity, then, the discourse of the desert has permeated the Christian grand narrative from its origins up until the present, migrating from a literal deployment in the depiction of the caves and remote recesses where the early Christians lived out their frugal and pared-down lives, and metaphorically

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Girard, Violence and the Sacred , p. 273. The experiences of the so-called ‘Desert Mothers’ is beyond the scope of this chapter but for an overview of this topic see, for example, Laura Swan, The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives and Stories of Early Christian Women (New York, 2001). For an account of the male experience, see, for example, Philip Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority, and the Church: In the Age of Jerome and Cassian (Oxford, 1978). See also Benedicta Ward, The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, trans. Norman Russell (London/Oxford and Kalamazoo, MI, 1980), especially pp. 1–46; and Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000 (Oxford, 2003). For a comprehensive examination of the importance of wilderness within Christian theology see George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1962). For a more contemporary analysis of the poetics of solitude in autobiographical writings, see Barbour, Value of Solitude. Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 11.

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Medieval Anchoritisms taking up residence within the anchoritic lives and texts which provide the focus of this present study. Reasons for the persistence of this discourse are many and complex, but the work of Gaston Bachelard may, perhaps, offer us some insight. In his formative Poetics of Space, Bachelard suggests that the need for solitude, which has inscribed its mark upon most human cultures, reflects a search for the ontological traces and erased ‘memory’ of a pre-discursive life once occupied within the ‘cave’ of the womb. Moreover, such traces are indelibly written upon our subconscious, frequently bubbling to the surface as part of a shared, or ‘inherited’ cultural discourse or ‘knowledge’ which makes its longed-for presence felt in literature – particularly in poetry: ‘And all the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so.’5 Moreover, for Bachelard, this space is one which, if it ‘does not seek to become extended [. . .] would like above all still to be possessed’.6 Bachelard’s paradoxical identification of solitude as the simultaneous site of both primary isolation and primary unity also anticipates the work of Julia Kristeva, for whom the hermit’s hut, the attic, the garret and the draw of solitude conflate in a conceptualization of the primary realm (that is to say, the womb) as the chora, a prediscursive space of origins where a fleeting unity with the (m)other within that place of isolation, the womb, is experienced and quickly lost for ever.7 For Kristeva, this loss embeds itself into the human psyche and its cultures to emerge in a range of metamorphosed forms: again, poetic language being one of the primary examples.8 The medium of poetic language allows access to the vestiges, the traces, of the semiotic and prethetic.9 Thus, when allied to the eremitical spatial poetics of Bachelard’s analysis, which incorporate unity, loss, desire and longing, both Bachelardian poetics and Kristevan semiotics transport us directly back to the Edenic stage where the biblical origins of Christianity are perpetually reinvoked, origins which the early Christians attempted to recreate out of sheer physical necessity. As a result, in this realm, love, transgression and loss tragically converge to produce the always already fallen state which has traditionally lain behind the impulse towards a specifically Christian religious reclusion – but which also provides the location in which this state may be overcome. Such a discourse of loss and its ultimate redemption is one which infiltrates with maximum impact the writings by, for and about anchorites which form the main focus of this present book. Indeed, medieval anchoritic reclusion forms just one expression of a human impulse towards withdrawal into solitude which takes

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Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 10. See also Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Harmondsworth, 1991). Here Bettelheim reads the forest wildernesses of fairy tales as ‘the dark, hidden, near-impenetrable world of our unconscious’ (p. 94). Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 10. I have drawn here upon my earlier discussion of the spaces of solitude in Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy, pp. 1–21. I will develop this concept in the context of Julian of Norwich’s enclosure in Chapter 4. See, for example, Kristeva, ‘Revolution’. The pre-thetic can be defined as the period of confrontation between the lost semiotic and the symbolic at the point of language acquisition. For a useful examination of Kristeva’s treatment of this, see Janet Rex, ‘Heterogeneous Contradiction: Towards a Kristevan Practice’, Poetics Today 7, 4 (1986), pp. 765–70.

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Miles Christi on many forms and guises within virtually all cultures, as discussed above. In this sense it can be usefully read in terms articulated by John D. Barbour, who, writing on the traditional ethics of solitude, explains: ‘societies need, sustain and value solitaries. Every human society creates niches where solitude can be practised.’10 For Barbour, human withdrawal into solitude constitutes an important ‘critical practice’ whereby society can be viewed – and therefore view itself – from a different perspective, that is to say through the eyes of the solitary, who is both part of, whilst apart from, that same society.11 Solitary reclusion therefore provides a critical practice which allows for a productive critique of society, its mores and, as Pierre Bourdieu has expounded, its habitus.12 As such, the potential of the solitary life within any given society lies embedded within its ethical and spiritual values: it is not a way of life which aims to escape the world in its entirety (whatever claims it expounds within discourse, as we shall see) but, to adapt the words of Barbour, its intervention is brought about in order to enact a different type of participation within it.13 CONFLICT AND THE SOLITARY LIFE IN THE COLLATIONES OF JOHN CASSIAN14 One of the earliest Christian commentators to write on anchoritic enclosure was John Cassian (d. 435), whose work is widely considered to have ‘permanently influenced the Christian life and culture of Europe through its effect upon the form and diffusion of the western ascetic movement’.15 In spite of this, as Owen Chadwick also points out, Cassian’s influence upon the codifying of the Christian religion had long been overlooked, ceding to the wider renown of his pupil, Saint Benedict (d. 547), who took precedence as the perceived ‘father’ of western monasticism. According to Chadwick, however, if Benedict was the ‘masterbuilder’, then Cassian was the provider of the tools of his trade.16 In his writing, John Cassian consistently configures anchoritism as the pinnacle of monastic experience.17 Writing in his Collationes of the ‘three kinds of monks’ [‘Tria [.  .  .] genera monachorum’]18 to be found within the expanses 12 10 11



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Barbour, Value of Solitude, p. 31. Barbour, Value of Solitude, p. 200. For Bourdieu the habitus is the system of structured and structuring dispositions which dictate the operations of any given society. These are both conscious and unconscious and are based upon accepted practices and past experiences. Like the workings of language, the habitus also reflects, articulates and constructs what constitutes ‘reality’ in any given social context. On this, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, 1992). Barbour, Value of Solitude, p. 201. Sometimes also referred to as the Conlationes, the original text has been edited in PL 49, cols. 477– 1328. The modern English translation is taken from John Cassian: The Conferences, ed. Boniface Ramsey, OP (New York and Mawah, 1997). References to this translation will appear parenthetically by conference number, chapter, section and page after the citation of the Latin original. Owen Chadwick, John Cassian: A Study in Primitive Monasticism (Cambridge, 1950), p. 5. See also David Knowles, who argues that Cassian’s Collationes ‘became one of the most widely known of spiritual classics’, in The Evolution of Medieval Thought (London, 1962), p. 12, n. 1. Chadwick, John Cassian, p. 5. The Rule of Saint Benedict mandated for the reading of Cassian’s writings within all religious communities. Chadwick, John Cassian, p. 5. PL 49, col. 1093 (Conferences XVIII.iv.2, p. 637).

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Medieval Anchoritisms of the Egyptian desert, Cassian configures the vocation as one adopted by men who, like ‘the first hermits’ Paul and Antony, ‘sought out the recesses of the desert not, indeed, because of faintheartedness, or an unhealthy impatience but from a desire for higher progress and divine contemplation’ [‘Qui non, ut quidam, pusillanimitatis causa nec impatientiae morbo, sed desiderio sublimioris profectus contemplationisque divinae, solitudinis secreta sectati sunt’].19 He also makes it clear that he too had himself belonged to this prestigious group, telling his audience: ‘We too have chosen to be part of this profession’ [‘cujus professionis nos quoque optamus esse participes’].20 For Cassian, therefore, anchoritism was not a vocation undertaken lightly, or thoughtlessly, or early in a religious career. Rather, it was a way of life which had to be adopted as part of an ascent to perfection, and which was only achievable after rigorous training within the regular coenobitic environment. Anchorites were necessarily those ‘who are first instructed in the cenobia and then, perfected in their practical way of life, choose the recesses of the desert’ [‘qui prius in coenobiis instituti, jamque in actuali conversatione perfecti, solitudinis elegere secreta’].21 In order to emphasize the strenuous – and frequently hazardous – route to religious perfection, whether attempted in the coenobium or elsewhere, Cassian frequently makes recourse to militaristic metaphor, drawing upon the exploits of his Old Testament forebears, of course, but also more explicitly on later biblical precedent, in particular the letter of Saint Paul to the Ephesians 6: 11–17, which reads: Put you on the armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the deceits of the devil. For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places. Therefore take unto you the armour of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and to stand in all things perfect. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of justice, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. In all things taking the shield of faith, wherewith you may be able to extinguish all the fiery darts of the most wicked one. And take unto you the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit (which is the word of God).

In his opening conference, for instance, Cassian tells of the relationship he forged as a young monk with his close companion, Germanus (‘one mind and soul inhabiting two bodies’ [‘unam mentem atque animam duobus inesse corporibus’]),22 and how they had been companions ‘from the time of our basic training and the beginnings of our spiritual soldiery’ [‘ab ipso tyrocinio, ac rudimentis militiae spiritualis’].23 Cassian tells how both he and Germanus once sought out for instruction an ancient anchorite fully experienced in the rigours of ascetical desert existence at Skete. After a long preamble, the anchorite, Abba Moses, compares the route towards a successful life of solitude within the desert 21 22 23 19

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PL 49, col. 1101 (Conferences, XVIII.vi.1, p. 639). PL 49, col. 1094 (Conferences, XVIII.iv.2, p. 637). PL 49: col. 1094 (Conferences, XVIII.iv.2, p. 637). PL 49, col. 483 (Conferences, I.i, p. 41). PL 49, col. 483 (Conferences, I.i, p. 41).

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Miles Christi with the vagaries of the military life, its performances of strength and its striving for worldly recognition, using an extended simile which bears clear overtones of the military epic: Quemadmodum hi quibus usus est bellica tela tractandi, cum ante regem mundi hujus artis suae cupiunt peritiam demonstrare, in parvissima quadam scutula, quae depicta in se continet praemia, jacula vel sagittas intorquere contendunt, certi quod non alias nisi destinationis suae linea ad finem possint desiderati praemii pervenire; quo tum demum utique potientur, cum propositum scopon valuerint obtinere;24 [[Achieving the anchoritic life] is like those who are accustomed to handling weapons of war: when they want to show off their expertise in this art before a king of this world, they strive to aim their javelins or arrows at some very small targets that have the prizes pictured on them. They are certain that other than by the targeted mark they cannot arrive at the end, the sought-after prize, which they will possess as soon as they have been able to hit the goal that was set.]

This type of comparison, of course, is steeped in the rhetoric of a culturally superior performance of masculinity: the soldiers are experienced in handling their weaponry; their duty is to display their military prowess in public before king and populace; the javelin and arrow in their possession, when directed at the passive target, take on the language of the phallus, invested with power, purpose, possession and productivity. For the supreme warrior, there will be the prize – not merely the gold or the laurel wreath, but the ‘prize’ of being recognized by his peers and the worldly king as ‘the man’. As Henri Lefebvre argues: ‘If phallic power was to become one with that of the triune God, the space of kings, the space of the written word and rule of history – then this space had also to be that of military violence – and hence a masculine space.’25 Such a performance of masculinity is both public and palpable, adhering closely to the observations of Jo Ann McNamara, who, in her examination of later forms of medieval masculinity, claims that the inherent fragility and tentative nature of masculinity needs to be first masked and then denied by means of strong social and public support in order to maintain its social dominance.26 For Vern Bullough, however, such a performance of dominant masculinity is only part of what it was to be a ‘man’ in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: as in many cultures and epistemologies, culturally acceptable masculinity is built not only upon physical strength but also upon the ability of a man to occupy a clearly delineated position within a heterosexual matrix: as impregnator of women; the protector of dependants; the provider for his family.27 If, then, as Bullough argues, the dominant expression of medieval masculinity was dependent upon an overt and public performance of all three of these roles, we may join McNamara and others in puzzling over where this left the celibate monk such as Cassian, PL 49, col. 486 (Conferences, I.v.1, p. 43). Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 262. 26 Jo Ann McNamara, ‘“The Herrenfrage”: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150’, in Medieval Masculinities, ed. Clare A. Lees (London and Minneapolis, 1994), pp. 3–29 (p. 3). 27 Vern L. Bullough, ‘On Being Male in the Middle Ages’, in Medieval Masculinities, ed. Lees, pp. 31–45 (p. 34). Here Bullough draws upon the work of David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven, 1990), especially p. 223. 24 25

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Medieval Anchoritisms Germanus, Abba Moses and their confrères in the masculinity stakes, men who had eschewed a role within the heterosexual framework, along with its various socio-cultural responsibilities.28 Whilst McNamara’s argument concentrates primarily on eleventh-century monasticism, within which such a challenge to perceived precepts of orthodox masculinity brought about what she terms a ‘crisis of masculinity’ or herrenfrage, such a ‘crisis’ is already perceivable as taking shape beneath the surface of Cassian’s Collationes and will surface repeatedly in those later texts aimed at the male religious – and the male recluse in particular, as I shall demonstrate. CASSIAN AND THE FEMININE Cassian takes great pains in his Collationes to persuade the reader that the triedand-tested desert anchorite is not a man as other men are. Like the anchorite Abba Moses, such a man has taken himself away from his monastic foundation, secular society and gender hierarchy to live a life of hard asceticism in the most inhospitable place of all, the hot and unforgiving ‘desert recesses’ [‘solitudinis secreta’].29 Here, a performance of masculinity such as that discussed above is unnecessary, since there is nobody else to witness it. When ‘battling’ for survival of body and soul, the physical trappings of manhood – the javelin, the bow, the arrow – and the type of masculinity they configure have no currency and can serve no cultural purpose: on the contrary, they constitute the burden of excess in an environment where survival depends upon, for example, the gathering of brushwood for fire or a pillow upon which to sleep.30 Similarly, the exercising of masculine sexual prowess has no role to play in anchoritic withdrawal and there is no gain to be had from the type of sexual performances and performativities so crucial to the inscription of worldly masculinity upon the male body.31 In fact, the monk’s attempt to shed this sexual masculinity forms one of the most strenuous of his activities and, as Peter Brown has recounted, tormenting thoughts connected with this sexuality were clearly eradicated only with enormous difficulty.32 Again, this is fully borne out in Cassian’s writing, where he suggests: Whilst McNamara’s focus is on the later period of 1050–1150 – and on Europe – nevertheless the question remains a valid one for the period under scrutiny here, especially in view of the rapid expansion of desert monasticism and celibacy which was to have such a major influence on the West in later periods. See McNamara, ‘“The Herrenfrage”’, p. 5. 29 For example, PL 49, col. 1101 (Conferences, XVIII.vi.1, p. 639). 30 Typical of Cassian’s writing is to invest seemingly irrelevant details with a particular charge: rather than the pillows to which he has obviously been accustomed, he is offered instead ‘little bundles which are gathered into long slender packets and tied together with heavier papyrus stalks at footand-a-half intervals’ [‘embrimiis pariter capiti nostro cervicalium vice suppositis, grossioribus papyris in longos gracilesque fasciculos coaptatis. Quae pedali intervallo pariter colligata’]. He then proceeds to expound upon the advantages of these for a further ten lines or so. PL 49, col. 522 (Conferences, I.xxiii.4, p. 64). 31 Joyce E. Salisbury has shown that there were close ties between conceptions of sexuality, masculinity and male public roles in the ancient world, attitudes which were inherited by medieval thinkers, for which see her ‘Gendered Sexuality’, in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A Brundage (New York and London, 1996), pp. 81–102 (p. 84). 32 Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1998), pp. 229–32. 28

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Miles Christi Nam cum famulantes huic voluntati nostrae ad hanc remissionem voluerimus nosmetipsos paululum relaxare, confestim aculei carnis insurgunt, suisque nos vitiis et passionibus sauciantes, nequaquam in illa, qua delectamur, puritatis qualitate stare permittunt, atque ad illam quam horremus frigidam voluptatem, plenamque sentibus pertrabunt viam.33 [For when we are subservient to this will of ours and want to let down our guard a little, all at once stings of the flesh make their appearance, wound us with their vices and passions, and do not permit us to abide in the state of purity that we delight in; they drag us to that chilling path of pleasures which horrifies us and which is full of briars.]

For Cassian, sexual temptation is a perpetual obstacle which finds its way to the innermost parts of the desert recluse because of the laxity brought about by free will. This, however, necessarily brings about a contradiction: whilst the eradicating of sexual impulse lies behind the life of asceticism embraced within the desert, it also provides a motivating factor for the achievement of spiritual purity: Dum haec pugna quotidianis diebus utiliter exagitatur in nobis, ad illud quartum quod nolumus salubriter venire compellimur, ut puritatem cordis non otio nec securitate, sed jugi sudore et contritione spiritus acquiramus, castitatemque carnis districtis jejuniis, fame, siti ac vigilantia retineamus; directionem etiam cordis, lectione, vigiliis, oratione continua, et solitudinis squalore capiamus.34 [While this conflict is stirred up within us every day to our benefit, we are salutarily driven to that fourth condition, which we do not want, in order to acquire purity of heart, not at leisure or at ease but with constant toil and a contrite spirit; to seize hold of chastity of the flesh with severe fasting, hunger, thirst, and watchfulness; to set a direction for the heart by means of reading, vigils, unceasing prayer and the squalor of the desert.]

Sexual temptation therefore frequently becomes a recast inner performance within the writings of the Desert Fathers – in the words of Brown, ‘an ideogram of the unopened heart’35 – thus remaining pivotal to the ultimate aim of the desert experience, the purity of an open heart, and yet always lurking to remind the anchorite that he still remains a man. This constant attempt at a de-gendering both invokes and complicates the pressing question first posed by R. W. Swanson: were these desert aficionados able to retain their manhood at all without the public display of any of the external trappings of masculinity?36 This also poses the question that, if the desert is intent on stripping away a man’s masculine identity, how then can his male body be spoken about without it? Indeed, this appears to be a problem which besets Cassian in his introduction of the anchoritic ‘expert’, Abba Moses, whom he visited with his companion Germanus in order to obtain advice on the anchoritic life. As a desert recluse who had seemingly transcended all bodily desires and reached 35 36 33

34

PL 49, cols. 598–9 (Conferences, IV.xii.2, p.162). PL 49, col. 599 (Conferences, IV.xii.4, pp. 162–3). Brown, Body and Society, p. 230. Swanson asks a similar question in the context of the celibate priesthood of the later period in ‘Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (London and New York, 1999), pp. 160–77 (p. 160).

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Medieval Anchoritisms the state of the ‘open heart’, Abba Moses is contrasted significantly with the type of ‘spiritual soldier’ who, according to his own discourse, personifies the novice recluse’s struggle to renounce the world of sexual temptation. Instead, the old desert recluse and his peers are described in decidedly more femininized terms: not only does Moses live ‘in the midst of those splendid flowers [which] gave off a particularly sweet odor because of his practical and his contemplative virtue’ [‘qui suavius inter illos egregios flores non solum actuali, verum etiam theorica virtute flagrabat’], but he has also been ‘worn out’ [‘fatigatus’] by the insistent questioning of his visitors determined to receive some wisdom and encouragement from him.37 Similarly, this wisdom and advice are configured in terms of ‘a banquet’ [‘cibo’] with ‘two courses of instruction’ [‘geminae institutionis epulis’] prepared and fed to them by ‘the holy Moses’ [‘beatus Moses’].38 Whilst some elements of Abba Moses’ masculinity clearly remain assured because of his age, status, experience and wisdom, nevertheless, his ‘desexualized’ anchoritic identity is here being configured in terms of characteristics more often associated with cultural constructs of femininity: physical weakness; the provision of food; the physical comforting of others – all enhanced by the flowers and sweet odours of his ‘sanctity’. Moreover, the expediency of such an incursion as a tool for overwriting the unwanted elements of cultural masculinity appears to be recognized by Abba Moses himself: in his attempts to encourage the less experienced Cassian and Germanus to embrace the hardships of the desert and set their sights on purity, he draws not upon his biblical male precursors such as Elijah, Job, John the Baptist or even his namesake, Moses, but protractedly upon the figures of Mary and Martha, who provided the most consistent paradigms of acceptable feminine sanctity within Christian discourse throughout the Middle Ages.39 Martha and Mary form an almost standard motif within later anchoritic texts, but in Cassian’s first conference, in this all-male setting within a text written for a male audience, its use is arresting; even more so since it forms by far the most protracted exemplum used by Abba Moses in his responses to the questioning of Cassian and Germanus, and is decidedly more focused on the specifically ‘feminine’ devotion of its protagonists than in many later treatments of the same biblical episode.40 For example, Martha’s toil in the kitchen is undertaken ‘with devout concern and she was distracted with her work’ [‘Nam cum laboraret Martha pia sollicitudine ac dispensatione distenta’].41 Mary, however, is not merely sitting at the feet of Christ but undertaking a hyperbolic performance of feminine devotion in ‘clinging to Jesus’ feet, which she was kissing and anointing with the ointment of a good confession’ [‘Maria spiritali tantummodo intenta doctrinae, Jesu pedibus inhaereret, quos osculans PL 49, cols. 482–3 (Conferences, I.i, p. 41). PL 49, cols. 557–8 (Conferences, II.xxvi.4, p. 104). 39 As tradition would have it, whilst Martha busied herself in the kitchen, immersed in domestic ritual, Mary withdrew from her own duties to sit at the feet of Christ, listening to him converse. For a detailed history of the interpretation of this biblical episode during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, see Giles Constable, ‘The Interpretation of Martha and Mary’, in Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 1–142. 40 See, for example, the protracted use of this exemplum in the late fourteenth century in The Cloud of Unknowing, chapters 17–23, where the author deploys a far more gender-neutral lexis to discuss the anointing of Christ’s feet by Mary Magdalene, being more concerned with extended exegesis than narrative. 41 PL 49, col. 491 (Conferences, I.viii.2, p. 47). 37

38

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Miles Christi bonae confessionis liniebat unguento’]. Like Mary, too, Abba Moses ‘clings’ to the feet of Christ, having also ‘chosen the better part’ [‘meliorem elegerit partem’],42 thus conflating the life chosen by himself and his followers with that of the woman who cast off her own sexual sinfulness to become, much later, herself a desert penitent.43 Thus, in Abba Moses’ estimation, the progression from coenobitic service to anchoritic contemplation is aptly summed up by recourse to the women, Martha and Mary, whose feminine activities within the service of Christ would become representative of the two paths to Christian salvation, the active and the contemplative. Moreover, if a woman like Mary, steeped in an original and personal sinfulness which was also deemed deeply feminine, could cast her own gendered sin aside and achieve perfection, how much more readily could the aspiring recluse cast off his masculine libidinousness to become, like her, apostola apostolorum, ‘apostle to the apostles’. Thus, with Cassian and Germanus sitting at his feet as he speaks, and through his recounting at length this story and its exegesis, Abba Moses simultaneously casts himself as apostola to Christ, and as Christ to the ‘Marys’ of Cassian and Germanus. (DE)GENDERING THE DESERT RECLUSE As I have suggested above, in Late Antiquity, as in the Middle Ages, the degendering of a man (to the extent to which that is even possible) did not necessarily confer upon him a gender-neutral status. Aristotelian concepts of sex and gender, which still prevailed during this period, famously envisaged a one-sex body, with male as the default and female ‘as it were a deformity’.44 Females, then, rather than ‘being’ of a different or ‘opposite’ sex were, in effect, conceived of as defective and therefore ‘not male’, taking up a position alongside those other perennial ‘others’ to the Christian ‘same’, that is to say the Jews and, later, the Muslims.45 Hence, when a man became divested of the most instantly recognizable markers of his gender (in Cassian’s configuration, ‘our family, our homeland, honors, wealth, the pleasures of this world, and every enjoyment’ [‘parentes, patria, dignitates, divitiae, deliciae mundi hujus, et voluptas universa’]),46 such a degendering threatened to render him similarly ‘not-male’ and thus have him occupy a position more allied to the feminine, rather than a gender-neutral space, as we have seen. Such an alliance was even more pronounced by the female characteristics which PL 49, col. 491 (Conferences, I.viii.1, p. 47). For a comprehensive study of the legends and iconography surrounding the figure of Mary Magdalene, with whom Mary of Bethany was conflated, see Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York, 1993). See also Benedicta Ward, Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources (Kalamazoo, 1987), pp. 10–25. 44 Aristotle, De Generatione Animalium [‘Generation of Animals’], trans. A. L. Peck (London and Cambridge, MA, 1963), IV.vi.775a, lines 15–16. For a useful discussion of this see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1990), pp. 28–32. See also Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science and Culture (Cambridge, 1993), especially pp. 21–6; 31–4; 106–9. For a distillation of the argument, see Bullough, ‘On Being a Male’, p. 31. 45 For a useful essay on the gendering of Jew and Muslims in the later period, see Louise Mirrer, ‘Representing “Other” Men: Muslims, Jews and Masculine Ideals in Medieval Castilian Epic and Ballad’, in Medieval Masculinities, ed. Lees, pp. 169–86. 46 PL 49, col. 487 (Conferences, I.v.3, p. 44). 42 43

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Medieval Anchoritisms came to be associated with the desert landscape as wild, expansive and untamed, what Cassian himself terms ‘vast solitude’ [‘vastissimae solitudinis’].47 Here was a wide-open yet enveloping space which invited penetration and which, after much suffering, could be productive of ‘new life’. Indeed, Christ himself explicitly conflates the desert wastes with the feminine in Luke 23: 28–31 as he attempts to comfort the lamenting women, including Mary Magdalene, who are following him to Golgotha: ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not over me; but weep for yourselves, and for your children. For behold, the days shall come, wherein they will say: Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that have not borne, and the paps that have not given suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains: Fall upon us; and to the hills: Cover us. For if in the green wood they do these things, what shall be done in the dry?’

Within this apocalyptic imagery, a direct link is drawn between the semiotics of femininity – tears, fecundity, breast milk – and a futuristic desert, all of which lead into a liminal, transitional space towards the Last Things and a salvation brought about by Christ’s imminent death. Within this semiotic system, then, the desert forms the barren womb from where humanity may yet be reborn into eternal life. In Cassian’s writing, the barrenness of the desert is also associated with spiritual procreativity and fecundity because of the anchorite’s interaction with it: it produces, for example, ‘the fruits of the solitary life’ [‘solitudinis fructus’];48 it is a ‘more expansive vastness’ [‘diffusiore [. . .] vastitate’], which the anchorite seeks out ‘with insatiable desire’ [‘insatiabili desiderio’] and within which he is ‘seized with heavenly ecstasies’ [‘coelestes illos rapiebamur excessus’].49 Such a configuration clearly injects a metaphorized sexual charge into those attempts at de-gendering and neutrality previously alluded to, thus serving discursively to reinstate the model of sexual masculinity purportedly left behind in the world. If, as Lorraine Dowler, Josephine Carrubia and Bonj Szczygiel assert, ‘landscape not only reflects certain moral codes but performs as a medium to perpetuate socially constructed gender stereotyping’,50 then the desert is configured as a feminine space which the male anchorite must penetrate, overcome and transform into a fertile spiritual garden, in keeping with those elements of his cultural masculinity outlined above. The concept of landscape as a social project resonates clearly with Henri Lefebvre’s assertion that the desert as a space far outstrips its geographical reality. For Lefebvre, as an all-encompassing place into which one can disappear or escape, the desert comprises a space one can live ‘within’, its pull being ‘to do with mental [. . .] categories’, rather than mere physical geography. Nevertheless, as Lefebvre also argues, each of ‘these two kinds of space [i.e. mental and physical] involves, underpins and presupposes the other’.51 Thus, any degendering of the male 49 50 47

48



51

PL 49, col. 484 (Conferences, I.ii.3, p. 42). PL 49, col. 1131 (Conferences, XIX.iv.3, p. 672). PL 49, col. 1132 (Conferences, XIX.v.i, p. 672). Lorraine Dowler, Josephine Carrubia and Bonj Szczygiel (eds), Gender and Landscape: Renegotiating Landscape and Space (London and New York, 2005), p. 1. Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 14.

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Miles Christi anchorite attempted during the course of his vocation is countered in Cassian’s text by an emphatic deployment of militaristic metaphor on the one hand, and a heterosexualized desire to subdue the ‘female’ desert and its temptations on the other. In this way, the early anchoritic imaginary was shored up by a ‘virtual’ phallic fantasy of military activity, penetration, immersion and domination upon which the anchorites’ successful roles as de facto ‘not-men’ with direct access to God depended. The tension between the ‘fantasy’ of the phallus and the need to relinquish the vestiges of worldly masculinity is clearly something which had impinged upon Cassian’s own attempts at a life of perfection, at times drawing him away from solitude back to leadership within the coenobium.52 The mental conflict which this engenders seeps into his Collationes in his account of two other ‘failed’ anchorites, Abba Paul and Abba John, both of whom were drawn back to the coenobium, even after thirty years or more in desert solitude.53 In the words of Abba John: Sed quia degustata ejus puritas sollicitudine interdum carnalium rerum interpolata sordebat, recurrere ad coenobium commodius visum est, ut et promptior arrepti planioris propositi consummatio sequeretur, et minus esset de praesumptae sublimioris professionis difficultate periculum.54 [because the purity [of anchoritism] that I experienced was occasionally soiled by a concern for carnal matters, it seemed more appropriate to return to the cenobium so that the readier perfection of an easier chosen orientation – the one that I took up – might be acquired and there might be less danger from the humility of a more sublime profession that had been presumed upon.]

Amongst the usual dangers which threaten the desert recluse are ‘spiritual pride’ [‘elationum spiritalium’], ‘fatal vainglory’ [‘exitiabilis cenodoxiae’] and even ‘the possession of material things’ [‘materialium rerum possessio’].55 In addition, Abba John records: Solent autem nonnulli ita diuturno silentio solitudinis efferari, ut prorsus hominum consortia perhorrescant, et cum vel paululum a secreti sui solitudine [. . .] discesserint, notabili mentis angore et evidentibus pusillanimitatis indiciis aestuare.56 [People [who] become so savage due to the unbroken silence of the desert that they are utterly distraught at the society of human beings, and when they depart even a little from the habits of their reclusion [. . .] they are shaken by a remarkable mental anguish and by manifest indications of faintheartedness.]

In such circumstances, it is only fitting that the tormented recluse should return to the coenobium for solace and to pursue a different kind of ‘perfection’ where the parameters are visible and finite. In his recounting of these episodes, Cassian is not only reinforcing the binary established between coenobitic and eremitic lives but also clearly recognizes the arbitrariness of the gap between ideal and social 54 55 56 52 53

Chadwick, John Cassian, p. 7. PL 49, cols. 1125–50 (Conferences, XIX. i–xvi, pp. 669–82). PL 49, col. 1129 (Conferences, XIX.iii.2, pp. 670–1). PL 49, cols. 1135 and 1136 (Conferences, XIX.vi.4, p. 673). PL 49, col. 1140 (Conferences, XIX.x.1, p. 676).

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Medieval Anchoritisms practice. He thus configures anchoritism as part of another interdependent binary which is equally arbitrary: not only does anchoritism form a progression into what Adalbert de Vogüé terms a ‘“beyond” which gives it meaning [. . .], [a] “beyond” [which] can be realised here below’,57 but the joys which that ‘beyond’ promises are always prospective. Indeed, from its earliest conception, the anchoritic arena was a space where waiting was permanently enacted. It was also a space within which the anchorite’s patience would be tested to the ultimate degree in a process of endless ‘becoming’. Like the anchorite’s gender, ‘perfection’ is an illusion, always striven for, always performed and yet always ‘the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction’.58 Like gender too, ‘perfection’ is ‘neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived’.59 Its ‘value’ lies in its existence as social practice and its wider relevance to the Christian community and not just those espousing it.60 Indeed, in many ways the solitude experienced by the desert anchorite is a corporate one, a solitudo pluralis which vicariously offers to the community of coenobites left behind an attempt at a discursively ‘degendered’ perfection which they are unable to realize themselves.61 Ultimately, however, all routes lead back to the homosocial arena of the coenobium: at the conclusion to Conference XIX, Cassian records that Abba John halts his discussion of the metaphysics of solitude quite simply because dinner is ready.62 SAINT BENEDICT AND THE FEMININE The fundamental influence of Cassian upon later expressions of Christian anchoritism must not be understated, particularly in view of the fact that Saint Benedict, the so-called ‘father’ of western monasticism, was deeply familiar with his writings, as mentioned above, and certainly shared his view of the value of a solitary contemplation performed in private within the ‘remote’ desert recesses.63 By Benedict’s time, however, those ‘recesses’ had spread to new locations and were translated accordingly into woodland huts, mountain or coastal caves or specially appointed cells within which monastic settings the anchoritic spaces of the Egyptian desert could be reimagined and reconfigured.64 Benedict’s own renown Adalbert de Vogüé, Community and Abbot in The Rule of St Benedict, trans. Charles Philippi, Cistercian Studies 5 (Kalamazoo, 1979), p. 50. 58 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London, 1990), p. 141. 59 Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 141. 60 Barbour, Value of Solitude, p. 21. 61 Cassian discusses the three types of renunciation the solitary has to undertake in order to approach perfection in PL 49, cols. 564–74 (Conferences, III.vi–x, pp. 123–31). On this type of solitude-byproxy see André Louf, ‘Solitudo Pluralis’, in Solitude and Communion: Papers on the Hermit Life, ed. A. M. Allchin (Oxford, 1977), pp. 17–29. 62 ‘With this Abba John, having noticed that the meal at the ninth hour was ready, put an end to his conference’ [‘Hoc abbas Joannes; cum horae nonae refectionem imminere sensisset, collationem fine conclusit’]. Cassian, Collationes, PL 49, col. 1150 (Conferences, XIX.xvi.5, p. 682). 63 According to Lowrie J. Daly, ‘Cassian is by far [Benedict’s] favourite writer, being quoted more than 90 times [in his Rule]’, for which see Benedictine Monasticism: Its Formation and Development through the Twelfth Century (New York, 1965), pp. 91–2. 64 Again, for an overview of this process, see Dyas, ‘The Wilderness and Medieval Anchoritic Spirituality’. For another useful overview of the teleology of desert spirituality, see Henrietta Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism 1000–1150 (London, 1984), especially pp. 7–18. 57

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Miles Christi as a deeply spiritual man, a writer and miracle worker was evidently already widespread by the closing decade of the sixth century, when Pope Gregory the Great wrote of him in 594: Benedict was eminent, not only for the many miracles that made him famous, but also for his teaching. In fact, he wrote a Rule for Monks [. . .] . If anyone wishes to know Benedict’s character and life more precisely [. . .] he may find a complete account [. . .] in [. . .] that Rule: for the Saint cannot have taught otherwise than as he lived.65

It seems then, as John Chapman has asserted, Benedict was a ‘great celebrity’ of his day, renowned for both ‘miracles and prophetic gifts’.66 It is likely that Benedict began writing his Rule soon after taking on the abbacy at the monastery of Subiaco in Italy, where he had been living as a recluse for some time, and there is much to suggest that it was written progressively, its author adding to it year by year according to his experience and as his knowledge of the monastic life accumulated.67 What is clear is that within years of his death in 594, not only had his text become synonymous with his own life and practices but it had rapidly spilled out of his own monastery to inform and assist other monastic establishments in their religious lives. Thus, Benedictine monasticism was born, proliferating throughout western Europe, with its Rule serving to homogenize its practices. Moreover, that Rule would itself spawn multiple offspring, finding its way into innumerable religious, devotional and mystical texts throughout the Middle Ages and beyond.68 Benedict’s debt to Cassian is clear from the start, something which is particularly evident in his exposition of the various categories of monks. Here, like Cassian, he conflates anchorites and hermits, including them within the same reclusive category and allotting them a space apart from the rest of the monastic community.69 Unlike Cassian, however, Benedict does not devote a lot of textual space to panegyric or eulogy to expound the anchoritic life. However, he does follow Cassian in his insistence upon the reclusive life as being suitable only for those who enter it ‘after long probation in a monastery [.  .  .] in association with many brethren’ [‘monasterii probatione diuturna [.  .  .] et bene exstructi Gregory the Great, Dialogues, II.36, cited in The Rule of Saint Benedict in Latin and English, ed. and trans. Justin McCann (London, 1952), Introduction, p. vii. All quotation from the Rule will be taken from this edition. 66 John Chapman, Saint Benedict and the Sixth Century (London, 1929), p. 13. 67 This is the stance taken by his 1952 editor Justin MacCann, himself a Benedictine abbot: for which see Rule of Benedict, p. viii. Jean Leclercq also concurs with this view in ‘Western Christianity’, in Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, ed. Bernard McGinn, Jean Leclercq and John Meyendorff (New York, 2002), pp. 113–31 (pp. 124–5). 68 As David Knowles asserts: ‘if the Rule holds within it so much of the wisdom and experience of the past, its anticipation of the needs of the future is even more striking’, for which see The Monastic Order in England (Cambridge, 1966), p. 9. 69 The Rule states,‘secundum genus est anachoritarum, id est heremitarum’ [‘the second are the Anchorites or Hermits’]: Rule of Benedict, ch. 1, p. 14/15. The translation offered here by McCann, however, downplays the synonymy offered by Benedict between the two vocations, with his rendering of ‘id est’ [‘that is’] as ‘or’. It is quite clear from the Latin, however, that Benedict saw the two vocations as identical, rather than similar. This type of denotive conflation between the anchorite and the hermit remained the case in many contexts and regions, particularly in Italy, until the high Middle Ages. Again for useful comparative studies of the anchoritic traditions of western Europe see Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy. 65

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Medieval Anchoritisms fraterna’],70 rather than ‘in the first fervour of their conversion’ [‘conversationis fervore novicio’].71 For Benedict, therefore, the anchoritic life is only suitable for the elite monastic who has already proved himself within and to his community. The more ascetic anchoritic life is therefore both framed by regular monasticism and, necessarily, a product of it. By implication, as monks and anchorites, those men who have progressed along the monastic path into reclusion (and, it must be remembered that it is the same spiritual path trodden by all monks within the Benedictine framework)72 are not in need of a separate rule, since their religious practices are seen to be a development or intensification of a way of life already adhered to within the regular monastic setting: they should continue on the same path – but travel further along it. The distinction between the monk and the anchorite is therefore one of degree rather than difference. Here I would concur with Vogüé who, in his study of Benedict’s configuration of the relationship between the monastic communitas and the abbot, argues that the Rule is not so concerned with recommending solitary reclusion as an end-point to coenobitic ascesis (although he does recognize that this may well be implicit in Benedict’s treatment of it); instead, Benedict’s emphasis is on the size and magnificence of the original coenobitic foundation which renders reclusion a possibility for those deemed suitable for it.73 Benedict therefore presents the solitary life as an open possibility, rather than an elite space restricted for the privileged few. As such, anchoritism is nowhere hierarchized by Benedict to the detriment of regular monasticism. Indeed, as Vogüé also points out, Benedict’s Rule is singularly devoid of any exemplum concerning a monk wishing to become an anchorite or hermit, and he goes on to suggest that anchorites are only covered by Benedict because of his desire to catalogue coenobitic possibilities more widely.74 Thus, Benedict’s approval of anchorites, implicit though it is within his text, should not in any way be over-emphasized, for on no occasion does he accord them with any significantly superior status. Benedict’s only other treatment of reclusion in his Rule is within the context of punishment: any brother who commits a significant, albeit minor, fault should ‘be excluded from sharing the common table [. . .] and he shall have his meals alone, after the community meals [.  .  .] until by suitable satisfaction he have obtained pardon’ [‘a mensae participatione privetur [.  .  .]. Refectionem autem cibi post fratrum refectionem solus accipiat [. . .] usque dum satisfactione congrua veniam consequatur’].75 For graver faults, the level of exclusion is more intense: should a monk be recalcitrant, then the abbot is advised to exclude him both from meals and from the oratory. Nor should he be spoken to or blessed by any of the brethren, upon fear of excommunication. Instead, he should restrict himself to solitude and ‘penitential sorrow’ [‘in paenitentiae luctu’], which, if unsuccessful in reforming

Rule of Benedict, ch. 1, p. 14/15. Rule of Benedict, ch. 1, p. 14/15. 72 See, for example, Rule of Benedict, ch. 7: ‘we must set up a ladder of our ascending actions [which] we descend by self-exaltation and ascend by humility’ [‘actibus nostris ascendentibus scala [. . .] nisi exaltatione descendere et humilitate ascendere’], p. 38/9. 73 Vogüé, Community and Abbot, p. 48. 74 Vogüé, Community and Abbot, p. 48. 75 Rule of Benedict, ch. 24, p. 72/3. 70 71

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Miles Christi him, will incur a corporal punishment of some kind.76 Here, of course, we see writ large the thin and permeable membrane which separates the ascetic arena from the punitive and just how easily the one may slide into the other. Just as in many monastic institutions the reclusory could – and did – double-up as a prison when and if necessary, so the term ‘prison’ (carcer) was first applied to describe monastic enclosure within the context of a specifically anchoritic reclusion.77 This would appear to confirm the suggestion proffered in more recent times by René Girard, who asserts that ‘the operations of violence and the sacred are ultimately the same process’.78 Here Girard is identifying the violence which he sees as underpinning all expressions of the sacred within any given culture and its need for a ‘surrogate victim’ to expiate the fears of the community. If, within the monastic context (as in medieval society more widely), ‘Religion instructs men what they must and must not do to prevent a recurrence of destructive violence’, then any violation of prohibition causes them to ‘call down upon themselves transcendent violence’. Moreover, for Girard, such violence of expiation also ‘assumes the role of demonic temptor – an illusion for which men will continue to fight, spiritually as well as physically, to the point of total annihilation.’79 Thus, the punishment of the recalcitrant monk, who, in Girard’s terms, becomes the ‘scapegoat’ of the community in order to ensure its cohesion, echoes closely the privations of the equally ‘excluded’ anchorite, whose ascetic practices in the solitary frame of his cell take on the same violent surrogacy as the punishment of his disruptive confrère – and provides another perspective, perhaps, on the prevalence of militaristic imagery in texts written specifically for or about the male anchorite. Such a conflation of punitive practice and spiritual elitism also invokes Michel Foucault’s examination of how punishment operates within society as a corrective mechanism.80 Within the Foucaultian framework, disciplinary punishment such as that outlined by Benedict is not so much about the punishment of a specific misdemeanour (or ‘an outraged law’) as it is about visible and demonstrable ‘reduplicated insistence’ of the punishment’s applicability within any given circumstance. Thus, the discursive effects with which punishment is freighted, that is to say expiation of the misdemeanour and enactment of individual repentance, may merely be incidental but are again shared by the miscreant and the anchorite; punishment is, after all, like militarism, a type of training: in the words of Foucault ‘to punish is to exercise’.81 Thus, the ritualistic punishment which Benedict advocates for the errant monk, along with its burden of implications, forms part of the ‘training’ regimen for anchorites too, producing elite spiritual practices which came to prevail within medieval anchoritism: individual solitude, meals taken alone, self-reliance, silence, penitence, spiritual exercise, physical deprivation, self-harm. In the one case, however, the ‘exercise’ is inflicted on the recipient from without (the Rule, the abbot), on the other it is self-sought: but in both cases it is undertaken as a means of producing a better Rule of Benedict, ch. 23, p. 72/3 and ch. 25, p. 74/5. The potential collapsing of these categories into one another is something which has been examined in some detail by Jean Leclercq, ‘Le cloître est-il une prison?’ Revue d’ascetique et de mystique 47 (1971), pp. 407–20 (p. 412). 78 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 273. 79 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 274. 80 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 179. 81 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 180. 76

77

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Medieval Anchoritisms ‘scapegoat-self ’ through a suffering which ultimately translates into the production of a ‘better’ and ‘saved’ community. Whilst the isolation of the solitary is encoded differently in each case, nevertheless the gaze of the community remains resolutely upon the enclosed surrogate, who occupies ‘the centre towards which all gazes [are] turned’.82 Moreover, so closely similar are these codes that the one always bears the potential of being read in terms of the other, and the difference between the two positions is very quickly elided.83 ‘SCALA . . . IPSA ERECTA’: THE RECLUSE AND THE LADDER OF SPIRITUAL ASCENT One of the most protracted and memorable metaphors used by Benedict to help the reader visualize the spiritual progress inherent in the monastic life is that of Jacob’s ladder, taken from Genesis 28: 12. This image had long been popular within biblical exegesis, receiving particular approbation by patristic writers such as Origen (d. 254), Gregory of Nyssa (d. after 394) and John Chrysostom (d. 407), for example.84 For John Chrysostom, the main function of Jacob’s ladder was its provision of an analogy for the training and self-improvement required by the Christian during his or her lifetime: And so mounting as it were by steps, let us get to heaven by a Jacob’s ladder. For the ladder seems to me to signify in a riddle, by that vision the gradual ascent by means of virtue, by which it is possible for us to ascend from earth to heaven, not using material steps, but improvement and correction of manners.85

In more modern times, however, the upright ladder onto which intellectual progress – and progression – have been traditionally plotted has been exposed as a specifically male intellectual paradigm within which women struggle to find a place because of its being a product of the type of ‘phallic’ thinking central to the male imaginary. Within traditional western philosophical thought, for example, as Hélène Cixous explains, ‘The (political) economy of the masculine and of the feminine is organized by different requirements and constraints, which, when socialised and metaphorised, produce signs, relationships of power, relationships of production and of reproduction, an entire immense system of cultural inscription Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 173. For an account of the European tradition of such a conflation between recluse and outlaw, see Karl-Heinz Steinmetz, ‘Eremita et Latro: Discourses of Hermits and Robbers and the “Rhetoric of the Outsider”’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold, ed. McAvoy, pp. 179–210. 84 Origen’s treatment of the theme appears in his Homily 27 on the Book of Numbers 33: 1–2, in which he recognizes two such ladders intrinsic to the Christian life. The first is an ascetic ladder ascended during the Christian’s lifetime; the second takes the soul towards God after the Christian’s death. Gregory of Nyssa, meanwhile, offers a far more mystical interpretation of the ladder, suggesting it leads to the mystical temple itself in the heavenly Jerusalem (The Life of Moses, 224–7). He also takes this theme up again in his treatment of Moses’ ascent of the mountain (2. 238–44). Parts of this text have been translated by Anthony Meredith in Gregory of Nyssa (London and New York, 1999), pp. 99–109. 85 John Chrysostom, The Homilies on the Gospel of St. John and the Epistles to the Hebrews, ed. Philip Schaff, Christian Classics Ethereal Library 14 (Edinburgh, n.d.), Homily 83:5. For the original Greek text see ‘Homiliae in Iohannem’, Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne, vol. 59 (Paris: 1862). 82 83

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Miles Christi readable as masculine or feminine’.86 For Irigaray, too, traditional paradigms of intellectualism and learning take the form of a ‘rocky ascent’ up which the ‘philosophy teacher [. . .] drag[s] the child’, heading relentlessly towards the desired end-point, which is ‘at last the crowning glory of the Idea’.87 Within Irigaray’s analysis, the ‘Idea’ equates both with the finite knowledge of phallic thinking (the Logos) and with God as its reification (here also conceived as ‘the Sun [. . .] in his omnipotence’).88 Benedict’s scala erecta quite clearly falls into the category of both sign and cultural inscription of phallic privilege and hegemony in his insistence that he and his monks ‘must set up a ladder of our ascending actions’ [‘actibus nostris ascendentibus scala’] for ‘The ladder erected is our life in this world’ [‘Scala vero ipsa erecta nostra est vita in saeculo’].89 Benedict, however, takes the analogy between the ladder and ‘our life’ even further, conflating it synecdochally with the male, monastic body: ‘Now the sides of this ladder are our body and soul, into which sides our divine vocation has fitted various degrees of humility and discipline which we have to climb’ [‘Latera enim ejus scalae dicimus nostrum esse corpus et animam, in quae latera diversos gradus humilitatis vel disciplinae evocatio divina ascendendos inseruit’].90 Both the intellectual endeavour and the means to its achievement, therefore, are clearly privileged as ontologically male and, by default, progression on to spiritual perfection is equally a male enterprise as they climb resolutely to emulate and meet a male God. Benedict systematizes the ascent of the ladder by means of its twelve ‘rungs’ or ‘degrees’ [‘gradus’], each of which forms a separate stage in the quest for a humility which lies at the very top. Moving from the first ‘rung’ where he must keep the fear of God before his eyes, the monk is expected to progress steadily up the ladder, divesting himself of the layers of self-exultation as he goes. He must abandon his own will, for example; he must relinquish all authority to the abbot; he must readily confess all his sins to his abbot; he must consider himself to be ‘a bad and unworthy workman’ [‘velut operarium se malum judicet et indignum’]; he should denigrate himself verbally; he should relinquish all personal agency and ‘restrain his tongue’ [‘lingeam ad loquendum prohibeat’]; he should not be moved to laughter and his voice, if he has to speak, should be used ‘gently’ [‘leniter’]. Upon these rungs of relinquishment he should climb upwards until, finally, he reaches the top, where Si non solum corde monachus, sed etiam ipso corpora humilitatem videntibus se semper indicet; id est, in opera Dei, in oratorio, in monasterio, in horto, in via, in agro, vel ubicumque [. . .] inclinator sit semper capite, defixis in terram aspectibus, reum se omni hora de peccatis suis aestimans.91 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Elaine de Courtivron (New York, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Toronto, 1981), pp. 90–8 (p. 93). 87 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 298. 88 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 298. The inference here of the ‘Son’ as the desired embodiment of omnipotence aspired to by the male thinker is also inescapable. 89 Rule of Benedict, ch. 7, pp. 38/9. 90 Rule of Benedict, ch. 7, pp. 38/9. Here, he also seems to be drawing on John 1:51 which equates the ladder with the body of Christ: ‘you shall see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man’. 91 For Benedict’s configuration of the ladder of ascent via practices of humility, see Rule of Benedict, pp. 38/9–49/50. 86

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Medieval Anchoritisms [The monk should not only be humble of heart, but should also in his behaviour always manifest his humility to those who look upon him. That is to say, whether he is at the Work of God, in the oratory, in the monastery, in the garden, on the road, in the fields, or anywhere else [. . .] he should always have his head bowed and his eyes downcast, pondering always the guilt of his sins.]

What is striking here is that the desired humility is configured by Benedict in decidedly feminine terms, adhering closely to the parameters of acceptable femininity set by commentators such as Tertullian (d. c. 220) who proscribed to women: ‘paint your eyes with modesty and your mouth with silence [. . .] Bow your heads to your husbands [.  .  .] You should clothe yourselves in the silk of modesty, and the linen of sanctity, and the purple of chastity [‘depictae oculos uerecundia et os taciturnitate [. . .] Caput maritis subicite [. . .] Vestite nos serico probitatis, byssino sanctitatis, purpura pudicitiae’].92 It also anticipates those ‘feminine’ qualities which would become so important to the later construction of the Virgin Annunciate as cult figure – bowed head, downcast eyes and a pondering heart.93 Such a femininity is made possible for the monk since, at each rung of the ladder, the monk is stripped incrementally of layers of his culturally approved masculine privilege: the right to be fearless, the right to exercise his own will, the right to be an active agent, the right to have his voice heard within public space; the right to laugh with his friends. By the time he reaches the top, he is hardly a ‘man’ at all, according to the precepts of medieval manhood and masculinity examined above. Moreover, once he has taken on these characteristics, the monk becomes immediately subject to the defining male gaze, which threatens both to shape him and police him in his feminized practices. Thus, he is party to the same tensions which lie between masculine privilege and the type of feminine submission required to approach God which we saw manifesting themselves in Cassian’s text, and again there is the same need to find recourse to phallic imagery in order to redress the balance. This time, however, instead of the spear and sword providing the phallic model with which to create symbolic redress, here it is the upright ladder, reaching as far as heaven itself, which provides a primary image in the text and undertakes the same cultural work. After all, to quote the observation of Lefebvre: ‘The Phallus is seen. The female genital organ, representing the world, remains hidden.’94 As an example of reassuring phallic inscription embedded within an apparently feminized context, it embodies what Lefebvre has also identified as a ‘prestigious Phallus, symbol of power and fecundity [which] forces its way into view by becoming erect’. As such, it retains the same ‘verticality and political arrogance of towers’, so privileged by the male imaginary but which is asserted, as Lefebvre points out, ‘Unconsciously, of course – and all the more effective for that’.95 Benedict’s ladder of spiritual progress, straddling this world and the next, therefore adheres to the Lefebvrian notion of space as not only a Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum [‘On the Apparel of Women’], II.13. Online Latin Library edition, ed. Mari Turcan (1971), available at http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/tertullian/tertullian.cultu2. shtml. My translation. 93 For a critique of how the virgin came to shape the ideals of femininity in the West see Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’. See also Marina Warner, Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London, 1990); and Maurice Hamington, Hail Mary (London, 1995). 94 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 262. 95 Lefebvre, Production of Space, pp. 262–3. 92

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Miles Christi production of ideas and the ideal, but also as the production of the social and the mental spheres of apprehension. Although progressively stripped of their temporal masculinity as they ascend towards God, the monks are nevertheless allowed to retain ‘absolute refuge’96 as men within the male imaginary by means of the text’s central hermeneutic of the monastic scala erecta. GRIMLAÏCUS AND THE REGULA SOLITARIORUM Benedict’s Rule, of course, was written specifically to instruct monks rather than anchorites, the latter category being subsumed into the former for purposes of instruction. The question therefore remains of how the monastic recluse was supposed to operate within a vocation that not only required the taking on of characteristics deemed to be culturally feminine but which also clearly required him to ‘fight’ against evil on behalf of the community as its miles Christi. Where, therefore, was he to position himself within the contexts of his former community and the wider world, of which he was both a part and yet no longer a part? These were some of the questions evidently occupying the mind of the tenthcentury German monk, Grimlaïcus of Metz, who attempted to resolve some of the tensions between the coenobitic life and that of anchoritic reclusion by producing a Rule specifically tailored to meet the requirements of the male monastic recluse.97 Indeed, as far as we are aware, this was the first Rule to have been composed for this purpose; previously, recluses had almost certainly relied upon the Rule of Saint Benedict for their direction but, for Grimlaïcus, this left instruction for the monastic recluse somewhat wanting. Indeed, Grimlaïcus’s Regula was devised in part to fill the lacuna encountered by the monk who had reached the ‘top’ of the ladder who wanted to proceed onwards to an even more refined spirituality.98 It was also devised to impose some structure upon a way of life which was becoming increasingly popular throughout western Europe within a monastic system which was degenerating into crisis (and, in England, threatening to disappear altogether).99 To this end, Grimlaïcus sets out the store of his text’s rationale in I borrow this term from Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 32. The Rule of Grimlaïcus (Grimlaici Presbyteri Regula Solitariorum) has been edited in PL 103, cols. 573–644. A modern English translation has been produced by Andrew Thornton, OSB, of Saint Anselm Abbey, Manchester, US, forthcoming with Cistercian Press. I am grateful to Br. Andrew for sharing an early draft of this translation with me. Since his translation was in unpaginated format, chapter numbers only will be used to identify quotations. I have, on occasion, modified Thornton’s translation, however. To differentiate this Rule from that of Saint Benedict, I will refer to Grimlaïcus’s text as the Regula. 98 The Regula appears to have been read and copied primarily in Benedictine circles, including Regensburg, St Gall, Scheyern, Tegernsee, and St Maximin in Trier. There are, however, two Upper German translations extant from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the latter of which (St Gall Stiftsbibliotek, Codex 930, fols. 30r–129r) was adapted for female anchorites in 1425. See Gabriela Signori, ‘Anchorites in German-speaking Regions’, in Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy, pp. 43–61 (pp. 44–6). 99 On this see, for example, Leclercq, ‘Western Christianity’, pp. 124–5. See also Phyllis G. Jestice, Wayward Monks and the Religious Revolution of the Eleventh Century (Leiden, 1997), in which she claims that, via the recluses of the tenth and eleventh centuries, we are able to read a shift in attitude towards monasticism which made the diversification of Benedictinism ‘not only possible but necessary’ (p. 91). Jestice also claims Grimlaïcus’s Regula to be one of the most important sources in this capacity (p. 92). 96 97

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Medieval Anchoritisms chapter 27 of his sixty-nine-chapter treatise: quod istis temporibus pene jam nemo sit qui ea observare valeat vel satagat [. . .]. Merito enim lugendum est praesentis vitae tempus, in quo tot mala tantaque flagitia videmus quotidie cumulari [. . .] Sic autem omnia confusa.100 [for in these days there is hardly anyone who is strong enough to observe [the precepts of Christ] or who is interested in doing so. We really ought to grieve for the time of this present life, in which we see so many thoroughly disgraceful deeds being heaped up every day [. . .] everything is falling apart.]

The Regula Solitariorum is therefore, amongst other things, a concerted attempt at uniting a Christian community by encouraging it once more to turn to the religious recluse as its paradigm. Relying heavily on the Rule of Saint Benedict, Grimlaïcus’s Regula also draws concertedly on the writings of the early Church Fathers, in particular John Cassian and Gregory the Great, in order to bring about a return to a previous, more spiritually rigorous way of life. However, as well as the spiritual development and well-being of the recluse, he also concerns himself with his physical health and the place of his reclusion. Chapter 16, for example, deals with its required architecture: it should be ‘small [. . .] and surrounded on all sides by very solid walls’ [‘retrusionis debet esse exigua, et firmissimis undique munitionibus circumsepta’].101 The recluse may, however, have further rooms attached to his cell, along with an oratory, if he is a priest, and a carefully curtained window within the oratory which will allow him access to the main monastic church.102 Similarly, Grimlaïcus shows concern for what the solitary should eat and drink, and when he should take his meals; what he should wear on his body and his feet; what bedclothes he should use to sleep under;103 and even the times when he should shave, lest he ‘become hairy’ [‘ne sint comati’].104 This latter exhortation forms part of a chapter which focuses on the cleanliness of the recluse and again is directed specifically at the recluse who is also a priest. Indeed, Grimlaïcus’s frequent return to the subject of the priestly recluse would suggest that the default monastic anchorite is more likely to be a priest than not. Having therefore to keep himself clean for the celebrating of the Eucharist, the recluse is also to have a ‘tub’ [‘dolium’] in his cell and make use of it as often as is necessary.105 In response to those whose complaints he anticipates, Grimlaïcus cites the case of Saint Antony, who reputedly never bathed; but, adds Grimlaïcus, ‘neither did he ever sing the Mass’ [‘nec unquam missam cantavit’].106 By implication, the responsibilities of the contemporary recluse require modifications of the old order of desert anchorites, and Grimlaïcus is everywhere concerned that the Regula should be particularly relevant to a contemporary audience. Total isolation is a type of self-indulgence which can degenerate into the sin of vainglory and it is far more important for recluses to ‘give others a good example and humbly submit to the commands 102 103 104 105 106 100 101

PL 103, col. 612 (ch. 27). PL 103, col. 594 (ch. 16). PL 103, col. 594 (ch. 16). PL 103, col. 633 (ch. 42); cols. 640–1 (ch. 49); cols. 641–2 (ch. 50). PL 103, col. 642 (ch. 51). PL 103, col. 642 (ch. 51). PL 103, col. 642 (ch. 51).

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Miles Christi of their masters’ [‘ut sic vivant, quatenus aliis bonum exemplum praebeant, et humiliter magistrorum imperiis subjaceant’].107 This type of social responsibility which the tenth-century recluse carries is something which has been argued for by Phyllis Jestice, who suggests that the type of monastic recluse at whom Grimlaïcus directs his Regula would have enjoyed regular interaction with both lay and ecclesiastic society as counsellor, advisor or prophet, these having become some of the most important roles within the reclusive life by the tenth century.108 Thus the position of the monastic recluse had developed into a far more socially symbolic and responsible one: on the one hand he was now locked up within a cell deep within the monastery itself in order to concentrate wholly on God; on the other, the local community had access to that cell in order to receive his advice, counselling and accumulated wisdom. As such, the body of the monastic anchorite provided a threshold between humanity and God, a gateway to the next life, his cell offering a fixed point within the monastery, where this access could be enacted. Grimlaïcus therefore makes much of the stability of the cell and the value of the reclusive life which it concretizes within the monastic setting, no doubt responding in part to the fragmenting of the Carolingian Empire, which, as Jestice suggests, was bringing issues of security and stability sharply into focus in many walks of life.109 Thus, the body of the anchorite is likened by Grimlaïcus to the monastic body, his cell to the monastery and, more widely, the Church. Just as the anchorhold is the stable ‘heart’ of the monastic building, so the anchorite is the stable ‘heart’ of the monastic (and wider religious) community. The well-being and stability of that heart is imperative for the well-being of the community and must, therefore, be kept pure: as Grimlaïcus demands of his audience, ‘What good is it to hold onto a quiet place with the body only and to have disquiet dwelling in one’s heart?’ [‘Quid enim prodest si locus quietus tantum corporaliter teneatur, et inquietudo in corde versetur?’].110 The stability, then, which the author is identifying as central to the anchoritic endeavour here is more than just about location: stability, just like the desert ideal, is a state of mind rather than a physical experience. No longer is reclusion about flight from the world but about its adherent’s producing – and occupying – an apparently stable and deeply symbolic space within it.111 GRIMLAÏCUS AND THE FEMININE To this end, Grimlaïcus plays much with the notion of the ‘anchor’ in his text and the supposed etymological links between anachoresis (anchoritism) and anchora (anchor).112 In Chapter 24, for example, he likens the complacent solitary PL 103, col. 643 (ch. 52). Jestice, Wayward Monks, p. 93. Anneke Mulder-Bakker points out, however, that this type of social role was set to diminish once the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh century got underway, with the monastic and priestly recluse becoming ever more separated from the outside world. See Anneke Mulder-Bakker, ‘Anchorites in the Low Countries’, in Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy, p. 31. 109 Jestice,Wayward Monks, p. 96. On the disintegration of the Carolingian regime, see, for example, Robert I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford, 2000), especially pp. 39–45. 110 PL 103, col. 604 (ch. 23). 111 This is a point also argued by Jestice, Wayward Monks, p. 102. 112 The Latin term anachoresis derives from the Greek term ἀναχώρησις, meaning ‘withdrawal from the world’, ‘the life of a recluse’, whilst anchora/ancora is taken from ἄγκῡρα, meaning an anchor or, 107

108

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Medieval Anchoritisms to somebody who has failed to bail out of a ship the water which has seeped in via the cracks and holes in its hull. The ship is therefore rendered inherently unstable, even when anchored in the harbour: cum ad portum solitudinis venerit, si repentina et minuta peccata de animae suae sentina exhaurire neglexerit, in ipso quietis portu naufragii discrimen incurrit.113 [If, when they have arrived at the harbour of solitude, they neglect to bail out from the hold of their soul the minute sins committed on impulse, they will run the danger of suffering shipwreck in the very harbour of quiet.]

Elsewhere, Grimlaïcus takes up and develops this simile, likening the unstable anchorite to ‘someone who weighs anchor and sails a ship full of cargoes out of port and then lets a storm take it and steers it onto reefs and rocks’ [‘hic talis agit ac si aliquis oneratam mercibus navim a portu solvat, et tempestati tradat, et ad scopulos et saxa detorqueat’].114 Again, stability is a state of mind or an abstract condition which has to be actively worked for, rather than something which emerges simply by means of entering the vocation and, in this text, the instability and ever-changing ontology of water provides one of its most persistent and memorable conceits: like the desert landscape, it remains fundamentally the same, but yet it is constantly shifting and changing in format, appearance and in the threat it poses.115 Grimlaïcus compares the dedicated solitary to a ‘man standing over a very deep lake’ [‘viro stanti super lacum profundissimum’], for instance;116 the danger of sin ‘is as though someone were crossing over a river on a very narrow bridge’ [‘Sicut enim quis transiens super flumen, per angustias arctissimi pontis’].117 On each occasion, the microcosmic space of the narrow reclusory is threatened and buffeted by the macrocosmic waters of the earth. Thus, these dangerous and unpredictable locations of endlessness provide the author with an analogy for the desert expanses of Late Antiquity’s reclusion – and yet they draw on imagery with which his early-medieval audience would have had actual physical experience. Similarly, just as the cave gives shelter and structure within the anarchic desert expanses, so the ship’s hull can keep the solitary safe from the incursion of the ocean depths. Each expanse is similarly feminine in the enclosed protection it offers from the lived-in world – but dangerous if negotiated wrongly; in its excess it can either kill or illuminate, but in either case provides what Bachelard terms a ‘contemplation of grandeur [which] transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity’.118

115 113

114

118 116 117

alternatively, ‘a symbol of security: refuge, hope support’. Both terms are grammatically feminine. See Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, Fascicule 1: A–L, ed. R. E. Latham (London, 1975). PL 103, col. 606 (ch. 24). PL 103, col. 663 (ch. 69). For a contemporary account of the oxymoronic changeability of the desert landscape, see Rebecca Solnit, What Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art (Athens, GA, 2003), pp. 63–89. As Sonit asserts: ‘The desert is famously a place of silence. A place without language, to some extent, unnamed, unmapped, unfamiliar, corresponding to no familiar categories of experience, not truly outside representation but challenging to it’ (p. 75). PL 103, col. 591 (ch. 14). PL 103, col. 606 (ch. 24). Bachelard, Poetics of Space, p. 183.

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Miles Christi Grimlaïcus is also clearly aware of the role the infinite plays in the discourse of water expanse as analogy for the desert wastes which surround and engulf the recluse. From the very onset of his Prologue, he takes great pains to establish and develop his water hermeneutic, using a series of vividly realized images. For example, he worries that his writing of the Regula may incur charges of his ‘putting a fish in the sea or water in a river’ [‘in mari mittere pisces aut in flumine aquas’]. And yet, in the act of writing, he is most keen to ‘imitate the way a river acts [. . .] flowing along in its bed, if it happens upon sunken valleys off to the side, it immediately diverts its flow into them; when it has filled them up it promptly flows back into its bed’ [‘morem fluminis imitari studui [. . .] dum per alveum defluit, si valles concavas ex latere contingit, in eas protinus sui impetus cursum divertit; cumque illas sufficienter impleverit, repente se in alveum refundit’].119 Extending the metaphor of watery penetration still further, Grimlaïcus actually becomes the river himself, dissolving into a literary fluidity which flows into the minds and practices of his readers and, in so doing, recalling the anchoritic imperative to conquer and ‘fertilize’ the desert expanses which we saw in Cassian’s writing: quasi ad vicinam vallem explanationis undam retorsi; et dum ipsam obscuritatis vallem sufficienter expositam perspexi, rursus ad sermonis propositi alveum recucurri.120 [I turned my current, as it were, into the nearby valley of explanation. Once I had sufficiently explored that valley of obscurity, I ran back again to the riverbed of my main theme.]

This links neatly with the Regula’s configuration of its own intertextuality as plumbed ‘from rivers’ [‘de [.  .  .] fluminibus’] and ‘ocean depths’ [‘pelagique gurgitibus’]121 of other sources – a dramatically visual account of the author’s own writing practices and the processes of composition, which, he tells us, are based on the ‘flowers of the sayings of the saints’ [‘de sanctorum floribus’].122 Here, no doubt, he is referring to the works of saints such as Benedict, Gregory the Great, Isidore, Jerome, all of whom make appearances in his text. Similarly, the ‘little streams’ [‘modicos rivulos’], he explains, are his ‘sixty chapters’ [‘sexaginta [. . .] capitula’],123 which flow out from the main ‘river’ of the text and yet form part of the same water-course. As such, he makes little distinction between himself as author and the words of his text. Both are represented as fluid and adaptive to the requirements of physical location; both are active agents, able to reach and fertilize the aridity of a desert which no longer speaks as resonantly within the contemporary religious climate. Grimlaïcus therefore takes it upon himself to become the ‘fount’ which sprinkles all knowledge regarding the reclusive life on arid ground. The drops of his knowledge combine to ‘flow’ towards and into his anchoritic reader via the ‘streams’ of his text and ultimately merge with the depths of the engulfing oceanic waters themselves. Such malleability and fluidity stands in stark contrast to the rigidity of the ladder 121 122 123 119

120

PL 103, col. 577 (Prologue). PL 103, col. 577 (Prologue). PL 103, col. 576 (Prologue). PL 103, col. 576 (Prologue). PL 103, col. 576 (Prologue).

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Medieval Anchoritisms of progress which formed a primary metaphor in the Rule of Saint Benedict. This ladder, however, is nowhere to be found in Grimlaïcus’s text, nor are his chapters in any way as orderly or ‘logical’ in their organization as Benedict’s. Indeed, Grimlaïcus remains entirely true to his ‘aquatic’ self-perception in the way he organizes his chapters: they are fluid and often tangential, containing a type of internal logicby-association rather than being shaped by a rigid structure imposed on them externally. Indeed, each chapter’s organization reads aptly in terms of a ‘stream-ofconsciousness’ paradigm, with its own internal logic dictating the flow and direction of what the author has to say. In terms of gender, such fluidity was – and is – far more associated with the feminine than the masculine modus operandi, of course. Aristotelean conceptions of gender difference, within which women were cold, wet, changeable and unstable, still continued to resonate throughout the Middle Ages,124 contributing to an institutionalized social and literary misogyny which was deeply suspicious of female-authored texts. Medical lore, too, deemed the womb to be both cavernous and insatiable, providing a constant threat to those men with whom women interacted, and thus embodying the type of ambivalent attitudes towards ‘immensity’ which both the desert and the ocean generated.125 For more recent commentators, too, the female specificity of the womb continues to underpin gender relations as it always has done. Like the woman for whom it provides an inevitable synecdoche, the womb is ‘neither open nor closed’; it renders her similarly ‘indefinite’ and ‘in-finite’, and thus, ‘form is never complete in her’.126 The womb is never a static entity, sometimes small, blood-lined and blood-shedding, sometimes engorged with child and water. Thus, its changeability renders the woman not infinite but neither is she a unit(y), such as letter, number, figure in a series, proper noun, unique object (in a) world of the senses, simply ideality in an intelligible whole, entity of a foundation etc. This incompleteness in her form, her morphology, allows her continually to become something else, though this is not to say she is ever unequivocally nothing [. . .] Perhaps this is what is meant by her insatiable (hysterical) thirst for satisfaction. No one single thing – no form, act, discourse, subject, masculine, feminine – can complete the development of woman’s desire.127

Within a male imaginary, therefore, the womb becomes a symbol of extinction, the space-before-existence where there is only nothingness; a space within which he can ‘become’ only as a result of a female desire which is endless and which makes the womb receptive for his own generation. Moreover, it is a space which reminds him that the womb – woman – always precedes him, like God, and it is for this reason that it/she must be brought into line according to his own organizing principles. For Irigaray, however, such female morphology produces an uncategorizable ‘excess’: it is an ‘indefinite flood’ which bears the potential to be redeployed in the production of a female subjectivity and a specifically female imaginary realm. Indeed, the invocation of such a realm can frequently be glimpsed For a discussion of this see Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, pp. 170–7. Again, see Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, where she demonstrates how the composite theories of Aristotle, Galen and Plato served to render women subject to ‘the erratic influence of a powerful and active organ [the womb] that affected health and disposition and was the repository of a formidable sexual appetite’ (p. 26). 126 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 229. 127 Irigaray, Speculum, p. 229. 124 125

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Miles Christi in many of the mystical writings by women which punctuated the Middle Ages – and in England by Julian of Norwich in particular (aspects of whose writing I examine in Chapter 4). Within these contexts, the discourses of desert and ocean as deployed in Grimlaïcus’s text can both be read as decidedly feminine in their tenor, generating a type of ‘haunting’ by which that same feminine refuses to be obliterated, lapping away at the margins and always demanding entry.128 As I also suggested earlier, such an incursion of femininity was able to operate in ways which could be regarded de bono or de malo: indeed, many of the more acceptable characteristics of a specifically chaste femininity (humility, gentleness, patience) were actively adopted as part of the production of a sacred space where the masculine failed to signify in traditional ways. Thus, on numerous occasions Grimlaïcus associates the fluid outpourings of his text with the flowing of tears. In Chapter 24, for example, the solitary recluse is encouraged to transform his cell into a courtroom in which he is both the judge and the accused – a masculine enough scenario, of course. Each day, however, he is to render himself victim to his own judgement, causing the ‘blood of the confessing soul [to] flow out through tears’ [‘sanguis animae confitentis per lacrymas profluat’], thus complicating the arbitrary division between traditional gendered behaviours.129 As Caroline Walker Bynum and others have concertedly argued, in the Middle Ages blood-flow and tears were consistently allied to one another and tended to be associated with the feminine, and feminine piety in particular, because of the free association which they carried for the suffering of the Virgin as mater dolorosa, the wounds of Christ, the penitent Mary Magdalene and those other biblical women associated with them at the foot of the cross and in Gethsemane.130 Whilst this is particularly true of the later Middle Ages, where it forms an ubiquitous motif, nevertheless tears also functioned as a signifier of an appropriate register of femininity during the earlier period.131 Allied to the prevalent water imagery and the structural fluidity just examined, this focus on anchoritic tears serves therefore to reinforce this author’s engagement with the feminine in order to interpellate his audience as anchorites operating outside of the mainstream phallic economy. For a insightful analysis of the mystical experience as fundamentally feminine, see Luce Irigaray, ‘La Mystérique’, in Speculum, pp. 191–202. Whilst anchoritism and mysticism do not necessarily coincide, anchoritic enclosure is frequently seen as a likely prerequisite for that experience. On this see Susannah Mary Chewning, ‘Gladly Alone, Gladly Silent: Isolation and Exile in the Anchoritic Mystical Experience’, in Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs, ed. McAvoy and Hughes-Edwards, pp. 103–115. 129 PL 103, col. 607 (ch. 24). 130 On this kind of association see, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991). Of particular use in the context of medieval women’s tears is Katharine Goodland, Female Mourning in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama (Aldershot and Burlington, 2005), especially pp. 31–6. Peggy McCracken, however, in The Curse of Eve, the Wound of the Hero: Blood, Gender and Medieval Literature (Philadelphia, 2003), has argued for the flow of blood as equally associated with the masculine. However, as McCracken posits, the values attributed to men’s blood in the Middle Ages are always predicated upon those associated with women’s blood, which, in its most prominent form, includes menstrual blood, the blood of childbirth or defloration (p. ix). 131 Tears were also closely associated with the ‘duties’ of widowhood from very early times, based upon biblical precedent, for a discussion of which see, for example, Leslie Abend Callaghan, ‘The Widow’s Tears: The Pedagogy of Grief in Medieval France and the Image of the Grieving Widow’, in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, ed. Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl (New York, 1999), pp. 245–63. 128

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Medieval Anchoritisms Elsewhere, Grimlaïcus follows Benedict in configuring the multi-occupied reclusory in terms of a panopticon-like space within which the recluses keep each other firmly under scrutiny: Sint autem singuli in singulis cellulis separati, sed animo, et fide, ac charitate inseparabiliter conjuncti. Cellulae quoque illorum nulla intercapedine inter se dividantur, sed ita sint ad invicem connexae quatenus ad unam fenestram venientes, alterutrum se valeant ad Dei servitium excitare.132 [The individual solitaries should be separated in individual cells, but they should be inseparably joined together in spirit and in faith and charity. Their cells should not be separated by a space but so connected to one another that the solitaries can come to one window and there be able to encourage one another to serve God.]

In addition: Oportet itaque ut invicem opera nostra quotidie consideremus et perspicaciter attendamus: quis nostrum in opere Dei sit promptior, quis in oratione ferventior, in lectione sollicitior, in castitate purior, in lacrymarum ubertate profusior, in corpore honestior, in corde sincerior; quis in ira sit mitior, in mansuetudine modestior, in risu rarior, in compunctione ferventior, in gravitate fundatior, in charitate jucundior.133 [We are all bound, therefore, to examine and scrutinize each other’s deeds every day to see who of us is more eager to perform the work of God, who is more fervent in prayer, more careful in reading, purer in chastity, more profuse in shedding tears, more decorous in body, more sincere in heart; who is kinder in anger, more modest in gentleness, less ready with laughter, more fervent in compunction, more steadfast in seriousness, more joyful in charity.]

Here, within this specular system which renders each recluse simultaneously subject and object, the qualities being policed are again many of those demanded of the ideal woman: for example, the shedding of tears; personal decorum; kindness in anger; modesty; purity; chastity; an unreadiness to laugh; fervent compunction; joy in charity. All are facets of a performed, culturally endorsed ‘femininity’, which, according to Butlerian analysis, are learned, endlessly reiterated and absorbed into an illusion of ontology. Grimlaïcus’s injection of the culturally acceptable face of femininity into his own text here therefore produces a ‘code of practice’ which inscribes an ideal femininity upon his recluses (and himself) in order to signify their separation from the world of secular men and the ordinary monk. Moreover, this feminine inscription, although presented as both safe and favourable, functions also to absorb – or at least deflect – the more dangerous feminine excess which lurks within discourses of the desert and other oceanic expanses, as discussed above. Thus, even at those moments when we might expect an outburst of misogynistic rhetoric based upon the type of anti-feminist sentiment common to many of the texts of the period and their sources,134 it simply fails to emerge in any significant way. For PL 103, col. 594 (ch. 16). PL 103, col. 606 (ch. 24). 134 For a useful selection of extracts from such texts, as well as from those attempting to counter them, see Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, ed. Alcuin Blamires and Karen Pratt (Oxford, 1992). See also Anke Bernau, ‘Medieval Misogyny’, in The History of British Women’s Writing: Volume 1, 132 133

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Miles Christi example, in chapter 16, which lays down the regulation for the solitary’s dealing with actual women, at no point is an anchorite forbidden to speak to a woman. On the contrary, he is encouraged to treat her as he would any other member of the laity: she must speak to him from a public vantage point in front of the window of his cell; he is to respond to her as he would to anybody else because solitaries ‘are obliged to offer good example to everyone’ [‘bonum exemplum omnibus praebeant’].135 He is, however, on no account to touch her or kiss her since ‘women are to be loved not carnally but spiritually’ [‘Diligendae sunt autem mulieres non carnaliter, sed spiritualiter’]136 and his conversation should never ‘provide the opportunity for anyone to get the wrong impression’ [‘sinistrae opinionis afferre suspicionem’].137 Rather than elaborate personally on what that ‘wrong impression’ may be, however, Grimlaïcus retreats from his own endorsement into a safer textual space, hedging his bets by quoting the direct words of Saints Basil and Jerome, both of whom are far more explicit in their own writings about the ‘raging fire’ [‘flammigero igne’] which women incite and the ‘wickedness in your soul’ [‘nequitiam in anima tua’]138 that contact with women will inevitably engender.139 On another occasion, too, Grimlaïcus offers an exemplum taken from the Life of Macarius, in which two small black devils appear momentarily, only to take on the form of women to tempt the desert recluse (‘they turned into what looked like a woman’ [‘quasi in mulierum speciem vertebantur’]).140 Here we witness a commonly used topos of the devilcum-woman who seduces the unsuspecting anchorite, yet this image is not pursued in any concerted way by Grimlaïcus; the primary threat remains with the demons as ‘Ethiopian boys’ [‘Aethiopes pueruli’] rather in their manifestation as women.141 Perhaps the most extraordinary use of a woman in this text is buried within Grimlaïcus’s account in chapter 26 of how a recluse should best observe God’s commandments, in particular to what extent he should love God above all things. Here, the author introduces the figure of a married woman as a paradigm for the type of love the solitary should have for God: Sicut enim casta mulier, quae virum suum amat, nullum alium amat, ita et homo, si Deum amat, mundum non amat: si autem mundum amaverit, jam Deum ex toto corde non diligit.142

700–1500, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt (New York, forthcoming 2012). PL 103, col. 594 (ch. 16). 136 PL 103, col. 595 (ch. 16). 137 PL 103, col. 595 (ch. 16). For a helpful essay on the history and dynamics of monastic friendships between men and women (seen through the lens of Christina of Markyate and her various male associates), see Kathryn Kelsey Staples and Ruth Mazo Karass, ‘Christina’s Tempting: Sexual Desire and Women’s Sanctity’, in Christina of Markyate, ed. Fanous and Leyser, pp. 184–96. 138 PL 103, col. 595 (ch. 16). 139 I examine the incursion of the feminine into Jerome’s Life in Chapter Three in the context of the female body as a monstrous entity. However, as Jestice also argues, it is important to remember that the many quotations and exempla taken by Grimlaïcus from the Desert Fathers did not necessarily reflect those beliefs which were current at the time of his writing the Regula. On this, see Jestice, Wayward Monks, p. 116. 140 PL 103, col. 622 (ch. 33). 141 PL 103, col. 622 (ch. 33). For an informative essay on the sexualized topos of the Ethiopian in medieval hagiography, see David Brakke, ‘Ethiopian Demons: Male Sexuality, the Black-Skinned Other, and the Monastic Self ’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 10, 3 and 4 (2001), pp. 501–35. 142 PL 103, col. 611 (ch. 26). 135

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Medieval Anchoritisms [Just as a chaste woman who loves her husband loves no other man, so too a person who loves God does not love the world. If he were to love the world, he should not be loving God with his whole heart.]

Used in this context, the word ‘chaste’ does not, of course, mean virginal; nor does it necessarily refer to a relinquishment of sex within marriage. Instead, it refers to a woman whose affections, both physical and emotional, are directed to her husband only, in full keeping with the statement in chapter 4: quibus non abundant, nisi qui illis carnalibus ex corde renuntiant. Quae quamvis ipsa sint bona, ut pote a bono Deo create; tamen quia sunt bonis malisque communia, student ea spirituales viri contemnere.143 [The only people who have these virtues in abundance are those who renounce carnal things from the heart. Although carnal things are good, in as much as they were created by God, nevertheless since both good and bad people have them, spiritual people make it a point to despise them.]

Carnal sin, therefore, is first and foremost a sin of the mind – a sin which can occur without bodily complicity and, therefore, it is the sin which is to be despised and not its convenient reification in the form of the female scapegoat. Moreover, in his use of the married woman within this traditional heterosexual matrix to refer to the solitary’s love for God, that solitary is necessarily feminized in a way which anticipates the female-subject position of later devotional and mystical treatises of the English traditions based on the Song of Songs, such as those found in the Wooing Group. In this respect, Grimlaïcus proves himself to be remarkably resistant to the type of anti-feminist leanings of his source texts and aware of the potentialities of the female and her body to provide a suitable hermeneutic for explication of the solitary life. Whilst acknowledging in passing the potential dangers posed by a woman’s changeable body, his representation of the anchorite’s ability to overcome the temptations she may pose produces an illusion of eradicating the more dangerous feminine from both text and the monastic anchoritic experience. Therefore, whilst he strategically erases explicit reference to the ‘female problem’ in his text, nevertheless, femininity as fundamental to the discourse of enclosure continues to haunt its hermeneutics in the form of water, tears and fluidity. This is not to say that Grimlaïcus’s stance on the femininity of reclusion was necessarily a conscious one: indeed, it is likely that he absorbed much of it from his precursors such as Cassian and Benedict, both of whom make use of a spectral feminine which has gone ‘underground’ in the writing, as it were. It may also be that, since Grimlaïcus was writing at a time when, in German-speaking regions at least, female solitaries were beginning to make their presence felt and, in some cases, to make great impact upon the religiosity of communities,144 his text is automatically laying down the ground for increased female participation in the reclusive life. I would, however, take issue with the assertion made by Jestice that 143

PL 103, col. 582 (ch. 4). On the development of female anchoritism in German-speaking regions, again see Signori, ‘Anchorites in German-speaking Regions’. In particular, Signori focuses on the tenth-century recluse, Wiborad of St Gall, who was not only outspoken in her criticism of local ecclesiastical dignitaries but also, on occasion, celebrated her own Eucharist (p. 51).

144

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Miles Christi when people reached the highest ranks of spiritual perfection, gender ceased to be an issue.145 Whilst this may well have been the case discursively, as I have been arguing, the subliminal evidence I have been focusing on here suggests the opposite to be true. As women themselves began to reach those ‘highest ranks’, they precipitated a wave of male anxiety concerning independent female religiosity which was to spread rapidly throughout Europe and lead ultimately to the papal bull Periculoso decreed by Pope Boniface VIII (d. 1303) in 1298, which attempted to enforced the strict enclosure and regulation of all holy women.146 Moreover, that anxiety manifested itself in a myriad of ways which were not always overt: whilst the advantages of a safely discursive and culturally approved femininity as revealed in Grimlaïcus’s writing continued to be acknowledged, nevertheless the requirement that this be scrutinized, policed and controlled to prevent its ‘excess’ from spilling over into uncontrollability became evermore an imperative.147 Thus, whilst apparently not actively engaging with contemporary misogynistic ideologies, as author Grimlaïcus nevertheless confronts the feminine at the level of his writing practices, striving in turn to both control and adopt it, as we have seen. In this sense, he fails to evade the ‘law of the Father’ which Irigaray and others in more contemporary times have identified as a male denial of female subjectivity based ultimately upon a patriachal ‘fear’ of the mother and the immensity of her womb. If, as Irigaray also suggests, ‘the role of maternal-feminine power is often nullified in the satisfying of individual and collective needs’,148 then the same can be said of discourses concerning these aspects of the ‘feminine’ as penned by the male author: they too are appropriations of what are deemed to be the useful paradigms of maternal femininity but, removed from the women themselves, they serve perhaps only the purposes of male rhetoric: as Irigaray adds, somewhat sardonically, ‘For them, that corresponds to good sense and good health, when it’s not virtue and sainthood!’149 COUNTERING THE FEMININE Grimlaïcus’s use of the discourses of femininity are here applied to male bodies in order to generate an anchoritic sanctity which is, in effect, a living sainthood.150 But, whilst he certainly casts these feminine traits in a far more favourable light than Jestice, Wayward Monks, p. 90. On the effects of this decree, see Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: ‘Periculoso’ and its Commentators 1298–1545 (Washington, DC, 1997). See also Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275–1535 (Cambridge, 1922, various repr.), pp. 353–4, for its general lack of success in England. Again on the sexuality of enclosed religious women, see Staples and Karras, ‘Christina’s Tempting’. 147 On this, see Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy, especially, Mario Sensi, ‘The Italian Tradition’, pp. 62–90. 148 Luce Irigaray, ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford, 1991), pp. 34–46 (p. 36) 149 Irigaray, ‘Bodily Enounter’, p. 36. 150 PL 103, col. 579. As Jestice points out, few recluses were ever called to literal martyrdom (Wayward Monks, p. 117), although some of the vitae constructed around their lives would have us think otherwise. They were, nevertheless, ubiquitously thought of discursively as ‘living saints’. For a discussion of this aspect of reclusive life see Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 7; and MulderBakker, Lives of the Anchoresses, pp. 174–8 145

146

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Medieval Anchoritisms some of the more masculine traits which he appears to deplore – ‘telling obscene stories’ [‘obscenis confabulationibus’] with a ‘dirty guffaw’ [‘turpiter cachinnare’], and ‘bursting out [. . .] with joking and laughter’ [‘risum proferre’]151 – he nevertheless sees fit to counter, and therefore control, a concerted feminization of his recluses by reasserting the need for a violently antagonistic response to sin on their part. In this context, he ubiquitously employs the same type of militaristic hermeneutic as evidenced in the Collationes of Cassian and the Rule of Saint Benedict – but this time in an even more hyperbolized capacity – fully corroborating Girard’s conflation of violence and the sacred within human cultures. Grimlaïcus begins his first chapter by drawing on Cassian’s classification of coenobites and anchorites as decidedly militaristic: they are, for example, to ‘fight against the devil’ [‘contra diabolum pugnare’], enter the ‘battle line [‘acie’] and engage in ‘single combat’ [‘singularem pugnam’].152 As the text progresses, he offers similar droplets of masculine imagery which are rarely extensively developed but which, like the water seeping through the ship’s hold, begin to erode and reshape the text and its feminine hermeneutics. ‘Those people’, that is to say the recluses, are ‘to do battle for God’ [‘eis qui militant Deo’] and, in so doing, will inevitably be ‘battered by the devil’s instigations’ [‘quatitur diabolica impulsione’].153 For Grimlaïcus’s recluses too, the senses of hearing, sight and speech are unequivocally ‘three wars’ [‘tribus bellis’] within which they are serving as soldiers always subject to ‘the ambushes of the enemy’ [‘insidias inimici’] and ‘buffeted by temptation’ [‘tentationibus [.  .  .] pulsantur’].154 Nevertheless, as soldiers they also have the remit for aggression in return: they may, for example, ‘choke off ’ the beginning of an invasive thought [‘caput cogitationis exclude’] in order to ‘guard’ their hearts [‘corda illorum custodire’].155 Nor is their aggression necessarily to be a reactive one: on the contrary, they may initiate battle to secure a better chance of winning: ‘if we [. . .] desire to wage war for God’ [‘si cupimus militare Deo’].156 In fact, the proactive waging of this war is exactly the reason for the solitary’s having entered the anchorhold in the first place, something which is emphasized by Grimlaïcus’s quoting of the biblical exhortation from I Corinthians 1: 26, ‘Look to your call’ [‘Videte vocationem vestram’]157 (which also forms a recurrent refrain in the later text for male recluses, Speculum Inclusorum, which I discuss in the following chapter). In this context, the ‘call’ is the drum-beat or bugle-call of battle, into which the author collapses the vocational call of the anchorite; and it is at this point, too, that he also chooses to develop this intensely masculine metaphor into the most full-blown military conceit of the text: Vitia enim nostra hostes nostri sunt. Caveamus autem ne unquam cum eis habeamus foedus. Necessaria enim nobis est pervigil cura indefessaque custodia, quia hostis iste sine pace est: vinci potest, et recipi in amicitia non potest. Et ideo praelium istud quod suscipimus satis arduum, satis durum, satis periculosum est, quia intra hominem 153 154 155 156 157 151

152

PL 103, col. 607 (ch. 24); col. 598 (ch. 19); col. 618 (ch. 30). PL 103, col. 579 (ch. 1). PL 103, col. 582 (ch. 4); col. 588 (ch.10). PL 103, col. 592 (ch. 14); col. 596 (ch. 17); col. 657 (ch. 65). PL 103, col. 655 (ch. 64). PL 103, col. 604 (ch. 23). PL 103, col. 604 (ch. 23).

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Miles Christi geritur et nisi cum ipso homine non finitur. Ideo ergo ad hanc tranquillam, secretam et spiritualem vitam venimus, ut quotidie contra passiones nostras infatigabili congressione decertemus, ut cordis nequitias circumcidamus vel linguae gladium retundamus.158 [Our vices are our enemies. But we must be careful never to make a treaty with them. It is imperative that we be ceaselessly on guard and keep careful watch, because this enemy will never make peace. It can be conquered but can never be taken into friendship. This battle, then, that we have taken up is extremely strenuous, extremely hard, extremely dangerous, because it is waged within a human being and is finished only when that human being is. Therefore we have come to this tranquil, hidden and spiritual life to contend every day against our passions by tirelessly attacking them and so circumcise the wickedness out of our heart and blunt the sword of our tongue.]

Here there is absolutely no doubt that the anchorite is to take full control via his military might and his ‘innate’ masculinity, a control which is rarely afforded to the enclosed woman in those guidance texts written specifically for her, as we shall see. If sin does manage to pierce the male body, in Grimlaïcus’s text it is in terms of a military take-over, a rout, an enemy in the ‘camp’, a skin-wound, but on no occasion is it depicted in terms of a full penetration of the anchoritic body itself. If no longer accorded a sexual organ, the inscription of a negatively freighted feminine ‘lack’, ‘wound’ or ‘openness’ upon his body is avoided by his being allowed to maintain a position as privileged possessor of the figurative phallus. Thus the emasculated penis morphs into an expression of the phallic power of military victory: Turrim namque excelsam exstruere volumus, praeparemus nobis sumptus ad structuram, ut coeptum aedificium ad perfectionem deducamus; ne quando praetereuntibus veniamus in derisum, et gratulentur de nobis inimici nostri.159 [We want to erect a tall tower. Let us get ready the resources we need to build with, so that we may complete the building that we started, lest we become a laughingstock to passers-by and our enemies gloat over us.]

Whilst this tower conveniently masquerades as the tower of virginity which frequently makes an appearance in texts directed at women, or the Tower of Babel which stands in for human depravity, it is, in effect, the Lefebvrian phallic tower writ large, erected by Grimlaïcus in order to protect his recluses from an inscription of the feminine redefining their male bodies and thereby effecting a cultural castration. Femininity they may perform, both personally and textually, for as Girard also asserts, ‘the sacred is able to include within itself so many opposites’;160 however, the ‘defective’ female they may not ultimately ‘be’. A homogeneous ‘body’ of male anchorites can thus only be brought about in relation to a femininity which is carefully deployed in a discursive capacity, and therefore discursively controlled. In Girard’s words: ‘men are only capable of reconciling their differences at the expense of a third party’ and, invariably within the anchoritic guidance text, that ‘third party’ always leads back to the woman. Far from gender not being an issue PL 103, col. 604 (ch. 23). PL 103, col. 604 (ch. 23). 160 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 273. 158

159

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Medieval Anchoritisms within the anchoritic life,161 it remained a complexly defining factor within those works which were produced for its adherents to read and follow. Again according to Lefebvre, ‘What is involved, therefore, is a production – the production of a space. Not merely a space of ideas, an ideal space, but a social and mental space.’162 How the social and mental space of anchoritism continued to develop as a gendered space over the course of the next six centuries in England will be taken up in the following chapters.

161

Jestice, Wayward Monks, p. 90. Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 260.

162

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Chapter 2 VIDETE VOCACIONEM VESTRAM: LATE-MEDIEVAL MALE ANCHORITISM AND THE SPECTRAL FEMININE Practical faith is the condition of entry that every field tacitly imposes, not only by sanctioning and debarring those who would destroy the game, but by so arranging things, in practice, that the operations of selecting and shaping new entrants .  .  . are such as to obtain from them that undisputed, pre-reflexive, naive, native compliance with the fundamental presuppositions of the field which is the very definition of doxa.1

MALE ENGLISH ANCHORITISM AND THE BENEDICTINE IDEAL

T

he ‘practical faith’ of medieval male anchoritism and the compliance of its adherents to an ideal were deeply indebted to the ‘fundamental presuppositions’ which made up the Rule of Saint Benedict, presenting the reader with a male anchoritic paradigm which remained close to its coenobitic and desert roots, in spite of its geographical and temporal separation from those origins. As such, this ‘ideal’ anchorite tended to generate far less anxiety for those responsible for his welfare than did the female anchorite, due in part to his already having been subject to tried and tested regulation as a monk or priest (the ‘condition of entry’).2 It was doubtless also a result of the panopticon-type scrutiny to which the male anchorite was party and to which he would also have become already well accustomed within the monastic setting. Whilst actively gazed upon by his brothers, he was nevertheless himself an active gazer too, a duality of perspective which restored to him the subjectivity which he may otherwise have been in danger of relinquishing. Such a process of mutual surveillance adheres closely to what Foucault refers to as a ‘calculated multiplicity’3 which is also hierarchical and within which ‘a network of relations [. . .] “holds” the

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Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, p. 68. Ann Warren presents the statistics for priestly anchorites in England between the twelfth century and the sixteenth in Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 23–4. The advantage to a community (whether monastic or lay) of a male anchorite’s ability to perform the Eucharist, hear confession etc. goes without saying. This had the effect of professionalizing the anchoritic vocation in a way which was not technically available to female anchorites. This again points towards an inherent difference between the way in which society perceived and configured male and female anchorites, something which I will again be arguing for in Chapter 3. However, see the argument of MulderBakker, who claims that within the Low Countries tradition, female anchorites took on many of the characteristics of the parish priest: a life marked by celibacy and recognizable clothing, the undergoing of solemn ritual in order to qualify, and submitting to either ordination (for the priest) or benediction (for the recluse): Lives of the Anchoresses, p. 13. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 173.

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Medieval Anchoritisms whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisors perpetually supervised’.4 As we have seen, within the monastic framework, a monk’s withdrawal into deeper solitude had long been considered a highly elite form of coenobitic spirituality, very often equated with militaristic leadership and power. This was thus something to be much aspired to and worked towards by an already enclosed man of exceptional piety. In this sense, male anchoritism formed part of a life-long trajectory, a clearly defined career path, which was readily accessible to the monk and for which life he had already received an advanced training.5 Indeed, the words of Ann Warren regarding later medieval male anchoritism hold true across the entire period: anchorites ‘were educated men and their talents accompanied them into their cells’.6 Although significant numbers of laymen were also drawn to the anchoritic life in the later Middle Ages, nevertheless, as Warren also points out, for men, ‘The Benedictine pattern became the norm’.7 As a man selected to rise above his peers and thus made to signify in a manner which would enhance the profile of his whole community, in many ways the male anchorite can also be read in terms of a positively configured communal scapegoat, as I suggested in the previous chapter: closely associated with eschatological violence, at the same time he also eschewed the aggression of the world, thus producing a deeply sacred space which was maintained by his own ‘armed combat’. For Girard, of course, the figure of the scapegoat is primarily that of the unwilling victim, selected involuntarily to fulfil a particular communal need. His role is to absorb the very violence which his singling out is devised to ‘cure’ or ‘prevent’. Yet Girard also recognizes this ‘sacred violence’ as lying at the heart of the religious imperative, asserting: ‘Religion in its broadest sense, then, must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds man’s efforts to defend himself by curative or preventative means against his own violence’.8 The ‘theology’ which Girard recognizes as latent within the figure of the scapegoat thus holds true whether the ‘victim’ is an involuntary one or entirely self-selecting. As a voluntary ‘scapegoat’ who simultaneously scrutinizes and is scrutinized, the medieval anchorite serves as a potential antidote for societal ills, although, as we shall see, these services function in rather different ways according to whether the anchorite is a man or a woman and, I argue, the different socio-religious narratives attached to their deeply gendered bodies. Whilst not actively violated by the community (unless reneging on vows),9 nevertheless, the practices of anchoritic asceticism, whatever the sex of its adherent, impose a violence upon the enclosed body which becomes alchemically transformed into the sacred. In the words of Grimlaïcus, ‘By

4 5

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Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 176–7. Again, Mulder-Bakker categorizes this type of priestly, monastic recluse as ‘the honors class’, which differs considerably from the vocation as adopted by women espousing the ‘free anchoritic life of laypersons’ (Lives of the Anchoresses, p. 14). See also Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 24. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 24. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 23. Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 24 (original emphasis). Very little has been written on those anchorites who reneged on their vows, although see my essay, ‘Gender, Rhetoric and Space in the Speculum Inclusorum, Letter to a Bury Recluse and the Strange Case of Christina Carpenter’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold, ed. McAvoy, pp. 111–26. For an account of the treatment of other runaway religious, see F. Donald Logan, Runaway Religious in Medieval England c. 1240–1540 (Cambridge, 1996).

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram means of fasts and prayers, mysteries kept concealed in heaven are revealed and secrets known only to God are laid open’ [‘per jejunia enim et orationes occulta mysteriorum coelestium revelantur, divinique sacramenti arcana panduntur’].10 THE REPLY TO A BURY RECLUSE Within Girard’s estimation, an essential facet of the scapegoat is that, in order to perform the necessary function, he ‘must in principle meet the approval of the divinity’.11 This also remains true of the anchorite, of course, whose divine approval for enclosure is delegated to an ecclesiastical hierarchy standing in to assess a candidate’s suitability for the anchoritic life. Such an assessment has evidently already taken place in the case of an early-fourteenth-century monastic anchorite for whom a short guidance text was written by the abbot of the Benedictine abbey at Bury St Edmunds. Published as ‘The Reply of a Fourteenth-century Abbot of Bury St Edmunds to a Man’s Petition to be a Recluse’,12 the document itself is undated but clearly bears an early-fourteenth-century provenance.13 In this text, the abbot offers gentle guidance to a newly enclosed recluse of the same order, who has evidently progressed up the ladder from monk to anchorite, having successfully petitioned his abbot accordingly. Like Grimlaïcus before him – and as we might expect within this Benedictine context – the author draws heavily upon the Rule of Saint Benedict for the guidance he proffers. By implication, the anchorite is advised to always keep that Rule before his eyes, particularly chapter 41, which deals with how the monk should occupy himself at mealtimes during the various seasons of the religious year.14 The abbot’s need to supplement the instructions of Benedict in this context, however, also shows how the shift from a communal religious life to that of solitary confinement necessarily altered the anchorite’s performance of the Rule and therefore what it symbolizes: whereas Grimlaïcus’s anchorites were able to combine and therefore police one another’s devotions, this anchorite appears to be a solitary whose policing would be primarily one of self-scrutiny. This demonstrates clearly how the practices and ideals of male anchoritism continued to form part of a professional incline towards an elite spiritual monastic vocation in the fourteenth century. By the time the Bury abbot came to write his text for the new recluse, however, the context for anchoritism throughout Europe more generally had changed radically, having morphed into a female-dominated vocation with its adherents far more likely to be laywomen than professed and experienced monks.15 This would

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PL 103, col. 645 (ch. 54). Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 24. In Girard’s account, the sacrificial scapegoat is very rarely a woman (p. 13). Antonia Gransden (ed.), ‘The Reply of a Fourteenth-Century Abbot of Bury St Edmunds to a Man’s Petition to be a Recluse’, English Historical Review 75 (1960), pp. 464–7 (henceforward Bury Recluse). All Latin quotations will be taken from this edition and the translations are my own. The Latin incipit to the text reads: ‘Responsio domini abbatis ad peticionem domini L.’, whilst the somewhat convoluted English title is the invention of Gransden as the text’s only editor. On the dating of the Bury Recluse, see Gransden’s edition, p. 465. See Rule of Benedict, pp. 98/99. For an examination of this phenomenal change, see Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, especially pp. 18–29, and Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy, passim. As Warren points out, whilst anchoritism

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Medieval Anchoritisms explain why, alongside the Rule of Saint Benedict, the Bury St Edmunds abbot draws also upon an earlier anchoritic guidance text, this time written for a woman. De Institutione Inclusarum was written in 1162 by Aelred of Rievaulx to meet a similar type of request for anchoritic guidance made by his newly enclosed sister (and is a text which also provides an important source for Ancrene Wisse).16 This text comprises one of the earliest of English anchoritic guidance texts17 and in it Aelred lays down rules for both the spiritual and physical governance of his sister’s anchoritic practices. Its use by the Bury St Edmunds abbot as a source for his own guidance points not only towards widespread dissemination beyond its initial audience but also a clear need in England for a modification of the Rule of Saint Benedict to accommodate the reconfigured requirements of an enclosed monastic anchorite. Besides, the Rule of Grimlaïcus appears not to have travelled beyond German-speaking regions, which left the abbot with a text written explicitly for a woman to help him modify Benedict’s Rule for male anchoritic digestion. On the other hand, however, such a borrowing also demonstrates an awareness – even in fourteenth-century male monastic circles – of the importance of what I suggest were the fundamentally feminine hermeneutics of enclosure and how they might be appropriated by the male recluse in order to enhance his own spiritual elitism. The primary difference, of course, was that, by the Bury St Edmunds abbot’s time of writing, the links between the anchoritic life and the female spirituality had become increasingly overt and, indeed, now formed a cultural commonplace.18 ARCHIVE AND ANCHORITE: THE RECORDS OF BURY ST EDMUNDS The Reply to a Bury Recluse is recorded in BL, MS Harley 230 (fol. 170), a register

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had exploded into a widespread phenomenon throughout Europe by the thirteenth century, it was also a vocation which had become increasingly female with new reclusoria being constructed everywhere for such women at their own request (Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 20–1). This is acknowledged by the Ancrene Wisse author himself, who draws heavily on Aelred’s text in places. See, for example, 6.285 (p. 139). where he refers directly to Aelred: ‘as Seint Ailred þe abbat wrat to his suster’ [‘as Saint Aelred the abbot wrote to his sister’]. For a discussion of this legacy, see Alexandra Barratt, ‘Anchoritic Aspects of Ancrene Wisse’, Medium Aevum 49 (1980), pp. 32–56. There is a Middle English translation of De Institutione Inclusarum in the Vernon Manuscript, as well as a version of Ancrene Wisse. I discuss Aelred’s text in more detail on pp. 54–5 and 68, below. For an edition of Aelred’s Latin text, see Aelred of Rievaulx, De Institutione Inclusarum [‘Rule of Life for Recluses’], in Aelred of Rivaulx, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis I, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot (Turnhout, 1971), pp. 635–82. Citations will be to section, line and page numbers. All modern English translations will be taken from Aelred of Rievaulx, ‘A Rule of Life for a Recluse’, in The Works of Aelred of Rievaulx, vol. I: Treatises and Pastoral Prayer, ed. and trans. Mary McPherson (Spencer, MA, 1971), pp. 41–102, and page references to this translation will be given in brackets after the reference to the original Latin text. It is significant that by the time the Bury abbot came to write his letter, Aelred’s text was already surfacing in Middle English translation, for which see Aelred of Rievaulx’s De Institutione Inclusarum: Two English Versions, ed. John Ayto and Alexandra Barratt, EETS os 287 (London, New York and Toronto, 1984), demonstrating its continued relevance and popularity within a changing religious landscape. The only earlier guidance text to have emerged in England is that written by Goscelin of St Bertin to his protégée, Eve of Wilton, who left Wilton c. 1080 to become an anchorite near Angers in France. For an edition of this text, along with introduction and interpretive essays, see Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber Confortatorius, ed. Stephanie Hollis, Rebecca Hayward, Kathleen Loncar and Michael Wright (Turnhout, 2004). I discuss this text in Chapter 3. This is something which I discuss further in the remaining chapters of this book.

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram of Bury St Edmunds abbey, recording events connected with the monastery between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.19 Penned by an unnamed abbot (‘domini abbatis’), the document had, at some stage in the register’s history, been inserted into the completed manuscript, sewn to the final page of a work entitled ‘floruit temp[us]’, a survey of the abbey lands, arranged by hundreds, and written by Walter de Pinchbeck, one of the abbey monks who lived there from about 1327.20 Its compact fourteenth-century charter-hand is unique to the register21 and its incipit, ‘Responsio domini abbatis ad peticionem domini L’ [‘response of the lord abbot to the petition of Dom L’]22 specifies its purpose as confirmation of enclosure and the provision of a short guidance text directed at a newly enclosed anchorite. Antonia Gransden, the text’s first editor, considers the most likely setting for the anchorhold in question to be a monastic one, an opinion reinforced by the abbot’s insistence that his anchoritic addressee should undertake private recitations of the office [‘regularium horarum’] when prompted to by sounds from the nearby choir [‘signo in choro pulsate’].23 For this commentator, at least, this intimates an anchoritic cell which was probably within the abbey itself, close – or attached – to the chancel, with a view of the high altar.24 However, if we consider further the manuscript evidence and place it within its wider historical context, Gransden’s hypothesis becomes less assured – particularly in view of the fact that no evidence of an anchorite cell has yet surfaced for the abbey itself in spite of the wealth of extant documents associated with the monastery. The early fourteenth century had witnessed extensive unrest within the town of Bury St Edmunds. The great wealth and power amassed over centuries by the abbey had incited considerable friction between the monastery and the townspeople, who were also increasingly frustrated by the abbey’s protracted monopoly of rights and privileges in the town and surrounding lands.25 In 1327, this unrest exploded

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For an account of this manuscript, see The Archives of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, ed. Rodney M. Thomson, Suffolk Records Society 21 (Woodbridge, 1980), pp. 132–3. See also Thomson’s introduction to the volume, pp. 22–3. I discuss this manuscript in more detail below, pp. 48–9.. Bury Recluse, p. 465. This manuscript comprises, however, a register of Abbot Thomas of Tottingham (1302–12) and Abbot Richard of Draughton (1312–35), along with other documents pertaining to members of the abbey community, Pinchbeck (de Pyncebek) included. Whilst Pinchbeck’s floruit tempus carries no date, another work of his is the ‘Album Registrum Vestiarii’ (Cambridge University Library, MS Ee. 3, 36), which runs to 326 folios. This register is dated as having been begun in the year 1333 and is chiefly occupied with all the pleadings etc. between the town of Bury St Edmunds and the abbey during what was a highly fractious time in the history of the relationship between the two. See ‘Houses of Benedictine Monks: Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, in A History of the County of Suffolk, vol. II (1975), pp. 56–72. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?com pid=37880&strquery=floruit+tempus. Gransden, ‘Introduction’, Bury Recluse, p. 465. Bury Recluse, p. 465. Bury Recluse, p. 465. See also p. 466, where the abbot instructs the new recluse to be responsive to the singing in the choir [‘facta pulsacione in choro’] as a means of attaining the correct level of spiritual fervour. Bury Recluse, p. 465. The Domesday Book, for example, records seventy Suffolk churches as owned by the abbot of Bury St Edmunds, whereas elsewhere in England, church ownership appears to have been that of small thegns and freemen. Similarly, under Edward the Confessor, churches became increasingly recognized as lucrative assets and began to be bestowed upon the religious houses. See Knowles, Monastic Order in England, pp. 595–6. For an account of this unrest, see The Memorials of St Edmunds Abbey, ed. T. Arnold, 3 vols., Rolls Series (London, 1890–6), vol. II, pp. xxxviii–xlviii; and pp. 327–61.

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Medieval Anchoritisms into armed conflict and a widespread conflagration from which neither town nor abbey were to fully recover for the best part of the fourteenth century.26 In November of that year, for example, the abbot Richard of Draughton (1312–35) was taken hostage by the townspeople and imprisoned along with a number of monks. During the same period, the abbey was invaded and much of it taken over by the dissatisfied townspeople, who sacked it of its valuable goods and documents.27 At the same time, the prior was marched into the chapter house and forced to sign and seal a range of documents which handed over enormous sums of money to a select group of men.28 Nor did the acrimonious dissent end there. The violence soon spread to a large number of the abbey’s manors, where properties were burnt, goods stolen, livestock seized and grasses cut,29 resulting in widespread disarray within the abbey’s institutional affairs for decades to come. Such damage to the outlying abbatial properties may also have been encouraged by the fact that, during the early part of the fourteenth century, many of the monks of Bury St Edmunds were said to be living in the villages radiating around the monastery, apparently wearing the clothes of laymen and engaging in abductions and other unlawful activities, including fathering illegitimate children, and no doubt incurring the additional resentment of the ordinary populace of those areas.30 Whilst the source of this information, the Chronica Buriensis, is no stranger to expedient hyperbole, nevertheless, as Martin Heale has observed, Benedictine monasteries were in the habit of sending out their monks to cells near the mother house for ludi, that is to say periods of rest during which they could take time off from many of their monastic observances.31 Whereas the monks were expected to spend their time reading and studying in a less regimented environment, in many instances they were still expected to observe the canonical hours, including the night office, and to celebrate daily masses.32 This having been the case here is, however, problematized by the fact that Heale finds no record of Bury St Edmunds monastery ever having had such dependent cellae or priories on its lands, but it is patently clear from the Chronica account that some type of informal monastic outposts established on abbey lands were occupied by monks from the abbey during the fourteenth century. It may well be then that the Bury recluse mentioned above was housed in a church attached to one of these outlying villages, something which becomes more likely in the light of evidence which has emerged from the Bury archives which is not taken into account by Heale in his study.33 Two of the manuscripts which escaped damage during the looting of the Bury archive34 are the aforementioned BL, MS Harley 230 (the so-called Registrum See Archives, ed. Thomson, p. 23. See CPR 1327–30, I Edward III, pp. 213–14; p. 218. CPR 1327–30, I Edward III, p. 219. See, for example, CPR 1327–30, I Edward III, pp. 218–19. This is recounted in the Chronica Buriensis AD 1026–1346 [‘Bury Chronicle’], for which see Memorials, ed. Arnold, III, pp. 1–73 (pp. 65–6). This is recorded for the year 1345. However, in 1327 it is recorded that there were thirty-two monks taking a holiday in the villages surrounding Bury St Edmunds who were on the receiving end of unrest in those locations (p. 39). 31 Martin Heale, The Dependent Priories of Medieval English Monasteries (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 144–50. 32 Heale, Dependent Priories, p. 145. 33 Given that Heale’s study is of independent priories throughout England, this is hardly surprising. 34 In view of the level of acrimony between the townspeople and the monastery, the damage and losses within the looted archives were not as extensive as they might have been, the raiders ‘being led by 28 29 30 26 27

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram Thome) and an associated manuscript, BL, MS Harley 3977 dating from the same period, that is to say the early fourteenth century. The former of these, as we have seen, contains the Reply to a Bury Recluse, along with a range of haphazardly organized material from the reigns of Abbot Thomas of Tottington (1302–12) and Abbot Richard, the latter being the abbot abducted in 1327, as recounted above. Abbot Richard is much more extensively documented than Abbot Thomas in this manuscript, with blank pages having been left to be filled with later material throughout his reign.35 Whilst this manuscript has generally been regarded as the official register of these two abbots,36 this seems unlikely, since, excepting the letter directed at the recluse, the hand throughout is a cursive one, leading Thomson to suggest that the manuscript constitutes a ‘draft book’ for documents which were eventually to be copied into the now lost registers of these respective abbots.37 As we have seen, however, the letter itself is an addition, attached to the end of a list made by Pinchbeck of the manors ‘in the eight and a half hundreds’ owned by the abbey (fols 144–157v.), many of which were also the sites of unrest in the 1327 uprising. Moreover, Pinchbeck’s list is evidently the one referred to in another manuscript, Cambridge University Library, MS Ee. Iii. 60, the socalled ‘Pinchbeck Register’, dated 1333, and a book clearly compiled by the monk in an attempt to rectify the archival disorder caused by the recent rioting in the town and its environs.38 In the prologue to this work, Pinchbeck lays down his intentions for the book, one of which is to produce ‘registers of the eight and a half hundreds and of all holdings of the monastery’.39 The said list, however, fails to materialize in Pinchbeck’s register itself, appearing instead in a cursive hand in the manuscript under scrutiny here with the Reply to a Bury Recluse attached to it. Whilst Thomson rightly suggests that the cursive document provides the draft for an original which never made it into the Pinchbeck register, I also suggest that the attaching of the Reply to a Bury Recluse to the final folio of this document points towards some kind of association between the two sets of contents. This is further corroborated by the fact that the Pinchbeck list is immediately preceded by a second insertion into the Registrum Thome, this time an entire quire containing material which is replicated in BL, MS Harley 3977, a customary which was probably Abbot Thomas’s own.40 This insertion contains an account of Thomas’s election in 1301, along with a list of the manors owned by the abbey during the vacancy between his reign and that of his predecessor, Abbot John of Northwold (1297–1301). As mentioned, two identical documents appear in the customary on fols. 111–114v. Nor does the connection between the manuscripts stop there: on

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men who knew what to look for’, at least in Rodney Thomson’s estimation. As a result, although the muniments had been the main target of the abbey’s looters, ‘the assault on the archive seems to have resulted in disarray rather than wholesale destruction’. See Archives, ed. Thomson, p. 21. Archives, ed. Thomson, p. 22. See, for example, ‘Houses of Benedictine Monks: Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, in A History of the County of Suffolk, vol. II (1975), pp. 56–72. URL: http://british-history.ac.uk/report. aspx?compid+377880. A Registrum Thome and a Registrum Ricardi Abbatis are mentioned in later-fifteenth-century record books by folio ranges which do not correspond to any of those in this particular manuscript, suggesting that the clean and final copies of these two registers are no longer extant. See Archives, ed. Thomson, pp. 22–3. See Archives, ed. Thomson, p. 21. Quoted in Archives, ed. Thomson, p. 21. Archives, ed. Thomson, p. 145.

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Medieval Anchoritisms fol. 78v of this same customary appears a list of manor churches currently housing anchorites – and there are forty-two of them listed, again many of them echoing those manors ransacked and burnt in the uprising of 1327.41 It would appear, then, that during the first decade of the fourteenth century at least, an extraordinarily high number of the abbey properties included churches which housed anchorites within their walls, something which is virtually unique in the records.42 The insertion of a letter written to one such anchorite immediately after two lists detailing the extent of the monastery’s manorial estates suggests that the ‘Bury recluse’ had taken up residency in one of those outlying churches some time after 1327, rather than a cell within the abbey itself, and I would therefore concur with Heale’s assessment of these monastic outreach sites as providing opportunities for ‘monks with eremetical leanings’.43 This evidence also, perhaps, points towards a policy of what today we would term ‘viral management’ of the abbey’s assets, with the most spiritually resilient of abbey monks, or their protégés, being sent out to manage, or at least oversee, the estate.44 Thus could be drawn an extended ‘sacred perimeter’45 between the monastic and secular worlds, a boundary which reached far beyond the town, constructed invisibly by a network of those monastic – and anchoritic – bodies deployed there. Such boundaries, like the anchorite-studded one between Wales and England which I examine in Chapter 5, therefore formed what Elizabeth Grosz has termed ‘an interface’ or a ‘cobuilding’ between both the urban and rural environments, and the religious and the secular conditions.46 As such, again in Grosz’s terms, these locations of monastic outreach formed ‘assemblages or collections of parts, capable of crossing the threshold between substances to form linkages, machines, provisional and often temporary sub- or microgroupings’47 which helped to police and stabilize these settlements (which, as we know, were also frequently inhabited by the monastery’s own sometimes more renegade members).48 All such religious, however, would have still been

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See again, for example, CPR I Edward III, 1327, 29 November, p. 219. The churches in question also include Bradfield, Newton, Farnham St Martin, Farnham All Saints, Westley, Risby and Whepstead. Whilst Clay does not mention any of these anchorholds, Warren includes them in her statistics and alludes to them briefly in Anchorites and Patrons, p. 168. Her source, however, is a note appended to Gransden’s edition of the Bury Recluse (p. 464, n. 2), rather than the manuscript itself. The existence of forty-two anchorholds associated with the abbey at this time is particularly significant, given that Warren records only 214 for England as a whole in the fourteenth century, ninety-six of which were occupied by women and seventy-seven whose occupants’ sex cannot be determined from the records. See Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, Table 1, p. 20; and Appendix 1. Heale, Dependent Priories, p. 143. Also significant is that the Bury St Edmunds abbots were largely exempt from episcopal oversight and had special powers to confer both minor orders on monks of the house and to call in any bishop of the Church to admit monks to higher orders within the monastery. Under such circumstances, the type of proliferation of anchorites on monastic lands being examined here can also be explained in part. Moreover, initial field-work undertaken in these villages has revealed a significant number of extant anchorholds from the period containing piscinae and aumbries, suggesting priestly occupants, at least during their early history. Heale suggests that this was fairly common practice and a much cheaper option than employing a lay steward (Heale, Dependent Priories, p. 26). I borrow this term from Mario Sensi, ‘The Italian Tradition’, in Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy, p. 65. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Bodies-Cities’, in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton, 1992), pp. 241–53 (p. 248). Grosz, ‘Bodies-Cities’, p. 248. Heale points out that in some instances external cells of monks could act as ‘pressure valves’ to relieve the primary monastic house of difficult or recalcitrant brethren (Dependent Priories, p. 120).

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram obliged to sing the office in choro, possibly even led by a monk-priest from the abbey also.49 In many ways, therefore, the said anchorite enclosed within the rural church would indeed constitute an institutional ‘scapegoat’, deployed to the anchorhold in order to defend the rights, properties and ideologies of Benedictine monasticism in the face of rising unrest and to render sacred the various outposts which, in Bury St Edmunds, never appear to have morphed into regular dependent priories or official cellae. In Girard’s terms, therefore, his primary role would be to protect both literally and metaphorically religious interests and the community ‘by curative or preventative means against . . . violence’.50 THE TEXTUAL PRODUCTION OF SACRED SPACE The Reply clearly forms part of the formal process of anchoritic enclosure, although it is unclear whether dominus L had undergone the type of enclosure rite experienced by anchorites from the laity.51 What is clear, however, is that, in keeping with expected practice, dominus L had already made a formal application to become a recluse, whether in the monastery52 or elsewhere in one of the monastic churches, as I have suggested. Late-medieval practice demanded that a monastic applicant for the anchorhold present his or her case to both bishop and abbot (or, in the case of a nun, the prioress) for consideration, although this particular letter bears no evidence of this having been undertaken, probably because of the special privileges enjoyed by Bury abbots which left them largely exempt from Episcopal oversight.53 Indeed, at no point does the abbot mention any episcopal involvement, appearing to shoulder the responsibility for dominus L’s enclosure alone. For Warren this suggests an internal private agreement may have been reached between postulant, abbot and monastic community, rather than pointing to something organized and overseen at diocesan level (and, in which case, certainly running counter to canon law).54 Such abbatial autonomy, if that is the case here, would therefore reflect an extension of the considerable pastoral responsibility already invested upon the abbot by the Rule Heale points out that this was also a common practice, expedient for financial gain in particular (Dependent Priories, p. 216). 50 Girard, Violence and the Sacred, p. 24 (original emphasis). 51 On this see Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 76–7 and 97–100. For a detailed account of the enclosure rite, see Jones, ‘Ceremonies of Enclosure’, pp. 39–49. 52 Such internal reclusoria were known to have existed in a number of English monasteries and nunneries, for which see Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 68. See also David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948–59), II, pp. 219– 22, where he cites evidence for such reclusion in abbey churches. However, Knowles claims there is no evidence to suggest that such recluses were monks of the house (p. 219). Knowles, however, was evidently not acquainted with the evidence under discussion here. 53 See n. 43. For a detailed account of the history of episcopal involvement in anchoritic enclosure see Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 53–91. The evidence scrutinized by Warren suggests that during the later Middle Ages, the role played by the bishop within enclosure procedures was ‘implicitly acknowledged’ (p. 57). See, in particular, pp. 53–4 for a discussion of the series of canons which ratified the authority of the bishop, often in conjunction with that of an abbot. For a selection of the relevant canons themselves, see Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, ed. Johannes D. Mansi, 31 vols. (Florence and Venice, 1757–98; new edn, Paris and Leipzig, 1898–1927), VIII, 331, col. 347 and col. 993. 54 Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 69. See also pp. 54–55 for a discussion of the cooperation expected between bishop and abbot in such cases. 49

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Medieval Anchoritisms of Saint Benedict, which instructs: ‘Let him [the abbot] realise also how difficult and arduous a task he has undertaken, of ruling souls and adapting himself to many dispositions [. . .] that he may not only suffer no loss in the sheep committed to him, but may even rejoice in the increase of a good flock’ [‘Sciatque quam difficilem et arduam rem suscipit, regere animas et multorum servire moribus [. . .] ut non solum detrimenta gregis sibi commissi non patiatur, verum in augmentatione boni gregis gaudeat’].55 For Benedict, the role of the abbot is more than simply a pastoral one; as well as father, brother, judge, teacher, advisor and punisher, he is also Christ’s representative within the monastic space [‘Christi enim agere vices in monasterio creditor’].56 To this end, any increase in his ‘good flock’ reflects back upon him favourably as being worthy of that role. This imperative towards concerted pastoral care within the monastery had been further reinforced by the constitution, Pastor bonus, laid down by Pope Benedict XII in 1335. Benedict had himself been a Cistercian monk and abbot before rising to the papacy, and this particular constitution was, in Logan’s estimation, the most significant mandate made during the entire Middle Ages regarding an abbot’s responsibility for his monastic ‘flock’.57 It is therefore likely that, even though the practice of anchoritic enclosure was, in theory, canonically dependent upon the supervision of the bishop, informal delegation to a responsible abbot was very often the practice – and certainly within this particular monastery. The Bury St Edmunds abbot does appear to have taken both his spiritual and physical responsibilities towards dominus L very seriously, although the fact that the document is primarily concerned with the offering of an ‘outer rule’ on physical anchoritic practices, rather than an ‘inner rule’ on spirituality, suggests that he was familiar with this particular anchorite and confident about his spiritual commitment, at least. This anchorite, no doubt, had already proved his spiritual acumen within the context of established practices within the monastery and, as a result, his enclosure appears to elicit very little anxiety from the abbot – although he certainly recognizes that an altered location can impact upon the meaning of established practices. For this reason, he stresses both the new location and the newly defined ritual on a number of occasions: ‘Firstly we grant that you may perpetually inhabit a cell assigned to you in the manner of an anchorite’ [‘In primis tibi concedimus ut intra cellam tibi assignatam ad modum anachoritarum perpetuo inhabites’] and, a little later, ‘in that same cell you will be obliged [to say] the regular Hours’ [‘in eadem cella debitum regularium horarum’].58 As Grimlaïcus was also aware, withdrawal into isolation produces a range of new semiotics, adhering closely to Bourdieu’s more recent observation about the rules governing those suppositions which lie behind meaning-production (what he terms doxa):

57 58 55

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Rule of Benedict, pp. 20/1–22/3. Rule of Benedict, p. 16/17. Logan, Runaway Religious, pp. 123–4. Bury Recluse, p. 465. These opening words have led Warren to suggest that dominus L may be one of a number of recluses at the abbey, all of whom fall under the aegis of this abbot. As further evidence she cites the letter’s later mandate that the recluse is to have regular contact with nobody except for the particular servant and confessor who have been allocated to him [‘excepto confessore et famulo tibi assignatis’ (p. 465)]. Whilst this is, of course, entirely possible, if he were an abbey anchorite, I think it more likely that the allocation to this anchorite of an appropriate cell, confessor and servant merely reflects his enhanced individual status, rather than suggesting that he is part of a group of esteemed anchorites occupying cells in the monastery simultaneously.

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram all the actions performed in a structured space and time are immediately qualified symbolically and function as structural exercises through which practical mastery of the fundamental schemes is constituted. Social disciplines take the form of temporal disciplines and the whole social order imposes itself at the deepest level of the bodily dispositions through a particular way of regulating the use of time, the temporal distribution of collective and individual activities and the appropriate rhythm with which to perform them.59

Whilst many of the ‘doxic’ practices of the monastic anchorite remain the same as those previously performed within the ‘structured space and time’ of the abbey, nevertheless, their role as symbolically charged, communal ‘structural exercises’, whose meanings have shifted upon the locking of the anchorhold door, are clearly in need of being stabilized by the written word. Thus, in his insistence that the recluse’s newly reconfigured practices are to be specifically ‘anchoritic’, the abbot provides the lens through which all his words – and the recluse’s practices – are to be refracted. In this way, too, a superior status is conveyed upon the anchoritic cell, transforming it discursively from a narrow architectural ‘place’ into a sacralized space to be produced and maintained by the recluse and his reconfigured practices, since [i]nhabited space [. . .] is the privileged site of the objectification of the generative schemes, and, through the divisions and hierarchies it establishes between things, between people and between practices, this materialized system of classification inculcates and constantly reinforces the principles of the classification which constitutes the arbitrariness of a culture.60

The anchorhold as a sacred space, like all such produced space, is therefore ‘[r]edolent with imaginary and symbolic elements’ and has a meaning which ultimately lies, in Lefebvre’s words, ‘in the history of a people as well as in the history of each individual belonging to that people’.61 For a specifically Benedictine recluse, therefore, that ‘history’ is that of his desert forebears, and of the imbrication of Benedictine monasticism within his own personal, spiritual ‘history’. REPRESENTING ANCHORITIC SPACE The importance of the architectural lay-out of the medieval monastery for shaping monastic practices and religiosity has been examined by Valerie I. J. Flint, who argues that the distribution of architectural features created a wide range of discrete spaces which served to frame the monks’ activities: the guest house, the novice house, the refectory, the infirmary, the scriptorium etc. were spaces which were brought into being by, whilst simultaneously bringing into being, the practices which they prescribed within their boundaries.62 Clearly defined areas, partitioned off for specific purposes and temporally configured activities ,and named accordingly, thus served 61 62 59

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Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, p. 75. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, p. 76. Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 41. Valerie I. J. Flint, ‘Space and Discipline in Early Medieval Europe’, in Medieval Practices of Space, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (Minneapolis and London, 2000), pp. 149-66, here at p. 149.

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Medieval Anchoritisms to ‘sculpture and direct’ the day-to-day practices and those ideologies attached to them. In fact, as Flint also points out, the Rule of Saint Benedict and the many customaries it generated all demonstrate an intense preoccupation with issues of monastic space, how it should be occupied and, more importantly, how it should be produced through practice.63 The Rule of Saint Benedict can therefore be read as a mapping out, in both the literal and the figurative sense, of the Benedictine life and the spaces within which it is best performed. In writing of the anchorhold, however, the abbot makes little mention of its physical materiality beyond its being a cell [‘cella’], as mentioned above, contrasting significantly with Grimlaïcus’s Rule, which makes some considerable effort to lay down firm architectural guidelines for the anchoritic cells, which form part of the monastic complex itself.64 Instead, as a material, lived-in space, the anchorhold within the Reply cedes entirely to its representational and sacred ‘double’, the author preferring to concern himself with what the anchorite should be undertaking within the walls of the anchorhold, that is to say the type of realigned practices which will both construct and uphold its representational – or symbolic – qualities. As a result, the anchorhold itself becomes conflated synecdochally with the required behaviour of the anchorite and the history he embodies: his body becomes its body, his practice becomes its practice and his isolation becomes its isolation. As Bourdieu points out, ‘the body believes in what it plays at [.  .  .] it does not memorize the past, it enacts the past, bringing it back to life [and] is thus constantly mingled with all the knowledge it reproduces’.65 Thus, in his insistence that the recluse should ‘never indulge in conversation with any persons, whether monastic or secular’ [‘nec cum regulari vel seculari colloquium habiturus’],66 and should ‘keep silence whilst eating’ [‘in comedendo silencium teneas’] the ‘isolation’ of the cell is represented by the abbot in terms of the anchorite’s solitary practices.67 And, whilst such proscription would seem to be self-evident to the reclusive life and therefore redundant, nevertheless it forms part of the ‘modus anachoritarus’ with which the abbot glosses it at the onset of the text, transforming simple cella into the representational space of the desert itself. In this text, too, there is little threat posed to the anchorite by the outside world, nor by a permeable body or cell, in spite of these concerns being clearly present in Aelred’s text, one of its primary sources, as mentioned above and discussed further below.68 What we find instead is the abbot encouraging the anchorite to remain intrinsically aware of the environment outside his cell and to forge his practices according to the rhythms of the seasons and the days as he is already accustomed to doing – in effect, remaining receptive to the doxa of his former life in order to imbricate it within his new one. For example, citing the Rule of Saint Benedict as Flint, ‘Space and Discipline’, p. 149. Grimlaïcus advises, for example, that the cell should be ‘small [. . .] and surrounded on all sides by very solid walls’ [‘exigua [. . .] et firmissimis undique munitionibus circumsepta’] ; ‘ he shall have rooms inside the enclosure that meet his needs’ [‘habeat interius praeparatas habitationes suis usibus necessarias’]; ‘the oratory should adjoin the church building’[‘oratorium ita sit domui ecclesiae contiguum’]; ‘a curtain is to be hung in front of this window, both inside and outside’ [‘sint etiam ante ipsam fenestram deintus et deforis vela appensa’]: PL 103, col. 594. 65 Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, p. 73. 66 Bury Recluse, p. 465. 67 Bury Recluse, p. 466. 68 This is something I will also examine in the following chapter in the context of Ancrene Wisse. 63

64

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram his authority (whilst somewhat ironically drawing his vocabulary and syntax from Aelred), the abbot exhorts his anchorite: ‘You should take care [. . .] at all times of year that the night does not obscure the daylight with its darkness before you sleep’ [‘Caveas [. . .] omni tempore anni ne totam diei lucem antequam dormitum eas nox suis obducat tenebris’], since self-discipline at night for the recluse is just as important as self-discipline during the hours of daylight.69 Whilst the Benedictine exhortation for this type of self-regulation had long been directed at all monks within the order,70 in the case of Aelred’s text the same exhortation is made to militate against his sister’s oversleeping and failing to carry out her night vigil. This, of course, suggests a potential for indiscipline or idleness on the part of the female anchorite which is neither part of Benedict’s discourse, nor that of the Bury St Edmunds abbot. Such a ‘deferral’ of meaning, therefore, which is brought about by this unstated reference to a source text, carries with it a gendered potential for disruption since, within the anchorhold, as we have seen, as in the monastery more generally, lurks the ever-present danger of a ‘feminine’ weakness which will invite sin into its midst in the form of sloth and all its dangerous ‘sisters’. Indeed, in his own text, Aelred reinforces the gendered nature of idleness [‘osiositas’] as explicitly female by configuring it as ‘the wet-nurse of vices’ [‘nutrix vitiorum’]71 which ‘sows evil thoughts in the mind [and] kindles illicit desires’ [‘pessimas cogitations seminat [et] affectiones illicitas creat’].72 In this way, the Bury abbot is highly selective in the ways in which he draws on both the Rule of Saint Benedict and Aelred’s De Institutione Inclusarum, tailoring their discourses to fit a specific third purpose, which is to help shape the reconfigured monastic practices which will turn monk into anchorite and cell into that representational realm which incorporates the entire Christian history. Nevertheless, what remains unstated continues to haunt his rhetoric: whilst his anchorite’s mettle has already been tried and tested, nevertheless, any complacency will allow for the incursion of an unruly feminine into his cell, turning the rigorous into the languorous, the sealed into the permeable, the private into the public.73 Yet, as Lefebvre has pointed out, ‘Private space is distinct from, but always connected with, public space’,74 suggesting that the separation from the world sought by the anchorite – discursively, at least – can never be fully realized. In this capacity, where the Reply makes use of a rhetoric of prohibition, it tends to be open to modification in practice. For example, the author’s occasional use of the word ‘numquam’ [‘never’], or his much more frequently deployed mandatory subjunctive (‘you should’),75 belies the fact that the seemingly rigid boundaries of a hermetically sealed space where ‘fervent silent reading and spiritual devotion’ [‘leccioni meditatcioni et oracioni ferventi’] prevail, are rendered much more relaxed and fluid by the use of linguistic modifiers such as ‘nisi’ [‘unless’] or Bury Recluse, pp. 466–7. Rule of Benedict, pp. 98/9. 71 De Institutione, 8. 257, p. 644. This translation is my own since McPherson translates this somewhat misleadingly as ‘nourishes vice’ (p. 55). 72 De Institutione, p. 644 (p. 55). 73 Again, for an analysis of how gendered notions of the body impact themselves on how we conceptualize space, see Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, especially pp. 66–79. 74 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 166. 75 For example, ‘inhabites’ [‘you should inhabit’]; ‘studeas’ [‘you should study’]; Bury Recluse, p. 465. 69 70

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Medieval Anchoritisms ‘excepto’ [‘except’] to signpost their contingency.76 Thus, the anchorite is ‘never’ [‘numquam’] to engage in conversation with anybody – ‘except’ [‘excepto’] his confessor or servant; this should ‘never’ be undertaken – ‘unless’ [‘nisi’] upon licence from the abbot. As we shall see, this same linguistic strategy also plays a major part in the rhetorical strategy of Ancrene Wisse and, to a lesser extent, De Institutione Inclusarum. However, the important thing in the case of the Reply to a Bury Recluse is that the anchorhold’s liminality is being reconfigured as contingent: it constitutes a made-to-measure space which can be adjusted and adapted to suit the spiritual ‘size’ of its occupant. On the surface of it, then, the anchorhold at the centre of this text is constructed as a place of silent contemplation, ritualistic chanting, prayer and reading; in essence, it is the tranquil, meditative, stable and essential core of the wider monastic institution. Yet, from beneath this edifice there bubbles up a veritable bustle of activity and interaction reflecting a lived-in and public environment: servants come and go; there is regular communication with a spiritual confessor;77 books on suitably edifying subjects such as saints’ lives, passions or miracles are exchanged.78 Even the occasional visitors may be admitted to the enclosed space in a seemingly casual way.79 Far from being an actual severance from a past life and a rebirth into a new one, in practice this monastic and male version of the anchoritic life is thus a discursive intensification of an already enclosed sanctity, and his anchorhold an architectural space upon which new or reconfigured meanings are inscribed via their representation through discourse. It is, indeed, the locale of an ‘honors class’80 to which its occupant simply retires at some point during a life which has already been one of withdrawal and devotion to God. In the words of Knowles, this recluse was ‘just one more of the honourably pensioned brethren, who had deserved well [. . .] and who wished to spend his last years in quarters somewhat more secluded than the other stagiarii but not necessarily in any remarkable austerity.’81 SPECULUM INCLUSORUM: TEXT AND CONTEXT A much more extensive text dating from the same period is Speculum Inclusorum, a Latin text similarly addressed to a male anchoritic audience. This guidance text makes use of many of the same dynamics as we saw in the Reply to a Bury Recluse, although they are more protractedly dealt with and more systematically developed and organized by its anonymous author. The text survives in two manuscripts: BL, It would seem, for example, that a vow of silence may be disregarded if the anchorite needs to give instructions to his servant, in which case he can offer a ‘few short words’ [‘paucis et brevibus verbis’ (p. 465)] to instruct him; with permission, he may also speak freely to his confessor and, despite its being technically forbidden to write or receive letters [‘vel accipere vel litteras mittere non presumes’ (p. 467)], permission to do so may still be granted by the abbot or, in his absence, the anchorite’s spiritual confessor. 77 Bury Recluse, p. 465. 78 Bury Recluse, p. 466. 79 Bury Recluse, p. 467. 80 I have borrowed this term from Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses (see p. 33, n. 195). 81 Knowles, Religious Orders, II, p. 221. Here Knowles is referring to an anchorite of Westminster, and is quoted by Gransden in Bury Recluse, p. 465. 76

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram MS Royal 5 A.v and St John’s College, Oxford MS 177.82 Also indebted to Aelred,83 but produced almost certainly within a late-fourteenth-century English Carthusian context,84 it seems soon to have spilled out from the Charterhouse walls into the wider community, suggesting a more widespread interest and relevance to a lay readership than its production for a male anchoritic audience would initially suggest. However, as E. A. Jones has posited, ‘there is evidence that [the author] envisaged a limited extension of his readership beyond recluses alone’,85 citing as evidence the author’s address at one point to the imperfect who wish to rise to maximum perfection [‘imperfectis qui ad gradum maximum perfeccionis anhelant’],86 and a later reference to anybody else who is desirous of the solitary life [‘quis [. . .] vitam solitariam desiderat’].87 As we saw in the writing of Cassian, Benedict and Grimlaïcus, the anchoritic life was consistently seen within male monastic circles as the pinnacle of a ladder of progression upon which all monks were placed, although only the select few had what it took to reach the top. Nevertheless, the text’s movement into a wider audience is certainly corroborated by the fact that not long after its composition it was translated into the English vernacular in the early fifteenth century by an unknown translator, clumsily adapted for a female or mixed audience, and eventually entitled The Myrour of Recluses by its twentieth-century editor, Marta Powell Harley.88 This, of course, not only points towards the growing community of anchorites in England, both male and female, but also to a leakage of anchoritic spirituality into the laity more widely during the period.89 Like the Reply to a Bury The former manuscript version has been edited by P. L. Oliger in Lateranum n.s. 4 (1938), pp. 1–148, which is the edition I make use of here. The translations are my own, although I have been guided by the sense conveyed by the only Middle English translation, for which see n. 88 below. Oliger proposes a date for Speculum Inclusorum between 1342 and 1362, although this has recently been challenged by E. A. Jones, who proposes a later date of 1349–82, for which see ‘A New Look into the Speculum Inclusorum’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition: Ireland, England, Wales: Exeter Symposium VI, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 123–45. I have adopted the reassessed dates here. Jones is also currently preparing a parallel-text edition. See also Mari Hughes-Edwards, who also deals with the text in her forthcoming book, The Ideology of the English Anchorhold (Cardiff, forthcoming 2012). 83 The author explicitly acknowledges this debt in his Epilogue where he mentions Aelred’s ‘De institutione reclusi’ as recommended reading for his recluses (Speculum, p. 140). Again, in a discussion of mystical rapture in Part IV, which deals with the many rewards [‘mercedes’] the devout anchorite may expect, the author quotes Aelred’s Sermones de Oneribus, sermo III (PL 193, col. 371) in order to posit the possibility of mystical rapture for the anchorite, adding ‘prout narrat sanctus Alredus’ (Speculum, p. 129). Oliger also identifies several other areas of the text which are derivative of Aelred, for which see p. 137. See also Barratt, ‘Anchoritic Aspects’, for a discussion of the Aelredian legacy. I discuss this legacy in part on pp. 66–8 below. 84 The text is listed in an undated document which names books and other items removed from the London Charterhouse by the Carthusian, John Spalding; for this, see E. M. Thompson, The Carthusian Order in England (London, 1930), p. 325. Jones also favours a Carthusian provenance for the text, since both surviving manuscripts have strong Carthusian associations: ‘New Look’, p. 135. 85 Jones, ‘New Look’, p. 133. 86 Speculum, p. 72. 87 Speculum, p. 73. 88 For an edition of this Middle English translation see The Myrour of Recluses, ed. Martha Powell Harley (London and Ontario, 1995). For Harley’s discussion of the manuscripts and various titles previously attached to the work, see pp. xi–xiii. 89 This is something I will deal with in the context of Margery Kempe in Chapter 4, but is a premise which has also been argued by Anne Savage in her essay, ‘From Anchorhold to Cell of SelfKnowledge: Points along a History of the Human Body’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold, ed. McAvoy, pp. 157–72. 82

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Medieval Anchoritisms Recluse, this text makes clear the specifically monastic context of its inception and initial audience in a number of ways. For example, Part Two, which focuses on the various constituents of the anchoritic life, outlines the need for the anchorite’s ‘fervent prayer’ [‘oratione fervida’],90 which is to be performed ‘according to the manner and custom of his order or estate’ [‘iuxta modum et consuetudinum sui Ordinis sive status’].91 Elsewhere, the author instructs that the anchorite’s prayers should be delivered ‘vocaliter’ (‘orally’, or, possibly, ‘tunefully’), suggestive of a seasoned monastic chanting ‘by ordinance of the Church or that of his superior’ [‘ex ordinacione ecclesie vel superiorum suorum’].92 Thus, again there is a strong sense that the anchorite is familiar with and will continue to perform many of those practices which already help to define him. The difference now, however, is that those practices formerly performed as part of a community or in private will be framed both physically and ideologically by four impenetrable walls and performed within a site of discursive separation and solitude. Thus, even if the practices remain the same, their interaction with an altered and confined location imbue them with all the facets of the representational which, as we have seen, are particularly conducive to the production of sacred space and the sacred body which inhabits it. ANCHORITISM AND THE CARTHUSIAN ORDER A Carthusian provenance for both author and text was suggested by the text’s first editor, Livarius Oliger, in his introduction to his edition.93 This argument has also been persuasively taken up by Jones, who draws on both the external evidence of manuscript ownership and circulation, and compelling internal evidence to make out a case for Carthusian provenance and, more specifically, an association of this text with the reclusoria at Sheen.94 The Carthusians, of course, were renowned for their support of anchorites in the later Middle Ages and, indeed, espoused anchoritic ideals as an integral part of their modus operandi.95 The order had been founded in the late eleventh century and had developed out of the withdrawal of the highly educated canon-turned-monk, Bruno Hartenfaust, to the forests of Burgundy to live amongst the early eremitic groups of Cistercians there.96 Bruno’s flight to the forest, however, whilst re-enacting that of the early Speculum, p. 85. Speculum, p. 87. Speculum, p. 87. Speculum, p. 44. The Carthusian house of Sheen was founded by Henry V in 1414, to the north of the royal palace on the Thames, for which see Glyn Coppack and Mick Aston, Christ’s Poor Men: The Carthusians in England (Charleston, SC, 2002), pp. 45–6. In a reconstructed plan of the monastery on p. 45, the site of a reclusory is clearly marked, although this is thought to be one of several which occupied the site. 95 The influence of Carthusian spirituality upon the Ancrene Wisse author has also been discussed by Alexandra Barratt, who makes out a convincing case for the author’s having drawn upon two of the order’s foundational texts – something I examine in more detail below in the context of Speculum Inclusorum. See Barratt, ‘Anchoritic Aspects’. 96 For a useful overview of the origins and development of the Carthusians in Europe generally and in England more specifically, see Coppack and Aston, Christ’s Poor Men, passim. As Coppack and Aston point out on p. 151, much of the established work on the Carthusians is seriously out of date and needs to be treated with some caution. However, they provide a useful bibliography of more 92 93 94 90 91

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram Christians into the desert, reflected a more widespread reaction against what was increasingly regarded as a Benedictine monastic excess characterized by inexorable accumulation of wealth, power and domination throughout Europe. Indeed, Bruno and his followers widely regarded Benedictine monasticism as having entirely lost track of its eremitic origins. Bruno’s relinquishment of his monastic status and his adoption of the life of a hermit-in-community in the Burgundian forests therefore reflected a growing call for reform, which ultimately resulted in the founding of a range of new orders, the Carthusians amongst them. Later, in about 1084, he went on to found a small hermitage in the foothills of the Alps at Chartreuse, a house which was to become the first Carthusian house – indeed, the first house of any of the new orders which were beginning to proliferate within the western Church and which would dominate for the following five hundred years or so.97 Here at Chartreuse, Bruno and his followers lived out a religious life which closely adhered to the tenets of ancient eremitism and established the type of ascetic existence which would be sustained throughout Carthusian history: although dwelling in the same geographical location, the monks nevertheless occupied separate cells where they worked, ate and prayed alone in the manner of their desert forebears. The first Carthusian house to be founded in England was at Witham in Somerset in 1178 – far from the ‘desert’ expanses of the order’s origins. By this time the order and its Rule had become well established elsewhere in Europe, particularly in central and northern France.98 Upon arrival in England, Carthusian demands were clear – and clearly idealistic: its adherents required isolation in which to build their charterhouse, far away from worldly considerations,99 wishing to transform the remoteness of the English countryside and forests into the desert expanses of the early Christian eremites where they could live in communal solitude. It would therefore be with some resistance that they responded to a call in later centuries to compromise these principles in the face of a growing urbanization, which led to the founding of charterhouses much closer to larger communities – at Hull, Coventry and, eventually, London, for example.100 In this sense, Carthusian spirituality and its practices were already firmly framed by the precepts of anchoritism. For the Carthusians of the later Middle Ages, monastic anchoritism appears to have been primarily a matter of degree. One of the most compelling features of Speculum Inclusorum to suggest Carthusian provenance is its author’s promotion in Part Three of a four-fold spiritual contemplation which includes ‘prayer, meditation, reading or any honest manual labour’ [‘orandum, meditandum, legendum vel aliquid honestum manibus operandum’],101 a quadripartite system of devotion which was very much a Carthusian ideal. Indeed, this contemplative system had first been promoted in the Consuetudines Cartusiae, a rule written for the Carthusian order in the twelfth century by its fifth prior, Guigues (Guigo) de St Romain (d. 1136). Some time later it was developed by the highly popular Carthusian, Adam of Dryburgh (d. c. 1212), recent material on pp. 151–2. Coppack and Aston, Christ’s Poor Men, p. 13. Coppack and Aston, Christ’s Poor Men p. 23. Coppack and Aston, Christ’s Poor Men, p. 23. The charterhouse at Smithfield was founded in 1371; the Hull and Coventry foundations were established in 1389 and 1375 respectively. 101 Speculum, p. 108. 98 99 100 97

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Medieval Anchoritisms in his Liber de Quadripartito Exercitio Cellae [‘Book of the Quadripartite Exercise of the Cell’] and, as Alexandra Barratt has concertedly argued, both of these texts appear also to have influenced the Ancrene Wisse author in his own guidance writing.102 The Liber de Quadripartito Exercitio Cellae was one which enjoyed much popularity within the charterhouse context both in England and abroad.103 Adam is explicit that life as an ordinary Carthusian should be firmly predicated on the desert ideal, with solitude and silence forming two major imperatives. Indeed, for Adam, such a life provides a typology of heaven itself, emphasized by his characteristic play on the words cella [‘cell’] and caelum [‘heaven’] in asking, ‘quid cella, nisi coeli aula?’ [‘what is the cell unless the court of heaven?’].104 For Adam, the Carthusian monk is the occupant of a solitary cell which collapses into the heavenly court itself by means of the solitary practices which he undertakes within it. Elsewhere, this conflation is confirmed in his encouragement of his male audience to identify with the figure of Mary Magdalene in her Mary of Bethany guise.105 For Adam, Mary’s privileged (and much rehearsed) release from manual labour into the contemplation of Christ heralds the release of the Carthusian monk into the contemplative universe; the scene of her release – that is, the small room of the family home in Bethany – thus prefigures both the site of his own contemplation and the court of heaven. Like Cassian, Adam thus requires his male audience to adopt the exceptional virtues of Mary Magdalene in order to achieve the necessary transformation of cell into paradisiacal space: gaudet autem vehementer super placida, sed tranquilla, sed quieta, sed suavi, sed dulci, sed jucunda, sed bona, sed serena, sed amoena, sed speciosa, sed luminosa, sed deliciosa sessione Mariae.106 [On the other hand, he should take great pleasure in more than stillness, but in the tranquil, quiet, pleasant, sweet, delightful, good, serene, lovely, beautiful, luminous, delicate seat of Mary [Magdalene].]

As discussed in the previous chapter, such virtues were deemed to be part of the ideal feminine, forming a script to be inscribed upon the male, monastic body which will make it worthy of the sacred. Like the Magdalene, he must be placid and tranquil, gentle and good – and here the conglomeration of feminine nounendings in the Latin adds to the gradual construction of the feminine identity which Barratt, ‘Anchoritic Aspects’. The Consuetudines of Guido are to be found in Statua Ordinis Cartusiensis a domino Guigone priore Cartusie edita (Basel, 1510). For Adam of Dryburgh’s Quadripartite Exercise of the Cell, see PL 153, cols. 868–70. All translations are my own. This latter text has been examined by James Hogg in ‘Adam the Carthusian’s De Quadripartito Exercitio Cellae’, in De Cella in Seculum: Religious and Secular Life and Devotion in Late Medieval England, ed. Michael Sargent (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 67–79, and he suggests a date of c. 1190, although agrees that it is not possible to date the text more precisely (see ‘Adam the Carthusian’, p. 72). The following discussion is indebted to Hogg’s treatment in this essay. 103 Knowles, Monastic Order in England, p. 384. 104 PL 153, col. 810. 105 Barratt notes the similarity in treatment of Mary and Martha by Aelred, Guigo and the Ancrene Wisse author in ‘Anchoritic Aspects’, pp. 38–9. For an account of the development of the figure of Mary Magdalene within the Christian Imaginary, see Haskins, Mary Magdalen. For her conflation with Mary of Bethany, see p. 21. 106 PL 153, col. 810. For an account of Cassian’s use of Mary Magdalene in her Mary of Bethany guise, see pp. 18–19 above. 102

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram the monk must take upon himself in order to effect the necessary transformation within his cell. Here, of course, is the realm where Christ himself presides as ‘bridegroom’, accentuating the monk’s need to acquire a feminine persona if he is to greet Christ as sponsa. Such a de facto feminization of the Carthusian monk by Adam in this way will, I argue, have a bearing upon the tenets of the guidance offered to the male recluse in the Speculum Inclusorum, as we shall see. REFLECTING THE ENCLOSED BODY If we accept Carthusian provenance for this text, then it comes as no surprise that its author forges strong links for his audience between their own chosen vocation and the lives of a range of ‘desert’ saints, both male and female. As early as the first chapter, for example, following an extended affirmation of the anchoritic vocation, he invites his readers to turn their gaze towards Saints Thaïs, Mary the Egyptian, Paul the first hermit, Hilarion and Mary Magdalene, all of whom were closely connected to desert spirituality. He does this to exemplify three of what he regards as the four most common motivations for entering the reclusive life [‘quadruplex [.  .  .] causa motiva seu intencio principalis’]:107 the desire to avoid hard labour [‘vivendi [.  .  .] sine gravi labore’]; the desire to undergo voluntary penance [‘voluntas penitendi’]; the desire to avoid sin [‘vitande oportunitatis peccandi’]; and the desire to be free for divine contemplation [‘vacandi liberius Dei contemplacioni’].108 In keeping with the writing of Adam of Dryburgh, the fourth of these precepts, focusing on divine contemplation, draws upon Mary Magdalene as paradigm, whose choice of desert withdrawal is explicitly identified by this author as ‘the better part’ [‘optimam partem elegit’].109 Here the Magdalene’s sophisticated choice and contemplative acumen separate her hierarchically from the male exempla used in support of the third premise (the desire to evade sin), for which the author uses Paul the first hermit and Hilarion as paradigmatic of those who are ‘fearful and simple’ [‘timidis et simplicibus’] and who withdraw from the world primarily as a means of avoiding the sins of the flesh.110 Thus, the choice made by the anchorite to follow a specifically contemplative life is allied from the onset to the feminine, and establishes a textual precedent for its audience’s need to take up of a feminine subject position – or at least a female-identified one – within their own vocation. These feminine associations are further reinforced by the author’s recourse Speculum, p. 66. Speculum, pp. 66–7. 109 Speculum, p. 67. ‘The better part’ is more often associated with Mary’s desire to listen to Christ teaching than her desire to become a desert recluse at the end of her life. See my discussion in Chapter 1. 110 Speculum, p. 67. It is nevertheless significant that Hilarion is consistently represented hagiographically as feminized in his appearance and demeanour. See, for example, Jerome’s account of his life where he states of Hilarion: ‘His cheeks were smooth, his body thin and delicate, unfit to bear the slightest injury which cold or heat could inflict’ and depicts him in terms of ‘a rose [which] blossomed on a thorn’. Although Hilarion never actually succumbs to sexual temptation, he is nevertheless frequently tormented by it as a young man. See ‘The Life of Hilarion’, trans. W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W. G. Martley, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. VI, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY, 1893). Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. http:// www.newadvent.org/fathers/3003.htm. 107

108

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Medieval Anchoritisms to two other desert saints who, like Mary Magdalene, had enjoyed an early life as harlots. The Lives of both Mary of Egypt and Thaïs tell of a sudden religious conversion which propels them out of whoredom towards a life of asceticism and penitence. Whilst, however, such penitence is traditionally configured as ‘voluntary’, in the case of Thaïs at least, it is freighted by strong elements of male coercion which shape her anchoritic transformation.111 Both women, too, like Mary Magdalene, are always defined primarily by their role as former prostitutes (Thaïs is explicitly ‘quondam meretrice’ [‘a former prostitute’], for example),112 providing a demonstrably fallen ontology which is particularly useful for the Speculum author’s purpose here. As whores-to-born-again-virgins, their bodies undergo a metamorphosis of meaning which is reliant entirely on their movement, both discursive and physical, from public to private ownership, from the social domain to solitude, from the desire for all men to desire for God. As such, this movement closely resembles the ideological precepts attached to anchoritic enclosure itself and the type of transformation required of its adherent upon entering the reclusory. These women’s ‘voluntary’ withdrawal into reclusion involves an attempt at active erasure of a sexual body which was once highly visible. Thus, when the audience is invited to view these women in the text, they are in fact observing a body whose sexuality they are led to believe is now firmly under wraps, in spite of the inevitable slippages which are present in contemporary versions of their Lives.113 In this way, they form part of a grand narrative – what Hélène Cixous terms a ‘stigmatext’ – which would have them void their own bodies by choice in order to erase the threat to men which such bodies generate.114 Only then are they able to become the multivalent role-model for the male anchorite. As primary role-models for the anchoritic life, however, these women also provide a reminder of those feminine discourses which underpin that way of life, discourses which always bore the potential to be ‘read differently’ by those hundreds of women who were later to be drawn to it. For, in the words of Cixous, the language of the stigmatext ‘always speaks several languages at once, and runs with a single word in opposite directions’. Moreover, ‘Sentences and their words always lead elsewhere than the place we were expecting them. Neither the reader nor above all the author For the account of the life of Thaïs as recorded in the Vitae Patrum, see PL 73, cols. 661–3. For Mary of Egypt, see PL 73, cols. 673–690. These lives were disseminated widely throughout the Middle Ages and rewritten for multiple audiences, both religious and lay. Probably by far the most popular and widely disseminated of these was that of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea, for a translation of which see Jacobus de Voragine: The Golden Legend, ed. and trans. Christopher Stace (Harmondsworth, 1998). 112 Speculum, p. 67. 113 For example, The Golden Legend tells how Mary (‘the Sinner’) of Egypt had lived a life of ‘the greatest austerity’ for forty-seven years, naked in the desert and visible only to God, until happened upon by the ‘aged priest’, Zozimus, whose gaze reinscribes upon her a ‘shameful’ sexual identity once more. As a result of this reinscription, Mary asks for Zozimus’s cloak, a reification of the patriarchal proscription she has evaded for forty-seven years, to put on before she is able to turn to face him and converse with him (Golden Legend, p. 113). The imprisoned Thaïs, meanwhile, invokes a vision with a subtle sexual charge, received by Paul, the chief disciple of Saint Antony Abbot. In this vision, which is in many ways a re-presentation of the brothel originally occupied by Thaïs, Paul is shown a bed prepared for her ‘decked out with costly coverlets’ and guarded by ‘three virgins with shining faces’ in readiness for ‘Thaïs, the courtesan’. Paul’s account of this vision is then ruminated over by the three men implicated in Thaïs’s punishment, Paphnutius, Antony and Paul, before she is released from her anchorhold-prison (Golden Legend, p. 272). 114 Hélène Cixous, Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London and New York, 1998), p. xii. 111

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram knows, foresees, commands, calculates, anticipates, prepares for the event of the revelation’.115 In this way, the author of Speculum Inclusorum builds into his text a series of exempla in which a lay female audience will see themselves reflected in ways that their male counterparts could not. Whilst the men are requested to gaze upon these women, learn from their example, their most immediate identification is likely to be with Zozimus or Paphnutius and his monastic male comrades who help to construct them as holy women, rather than with Mary or Thaïs whose construction is therefore always already dependent on that same male gaze. For those many women entering the anchorhold from the world, be they virgins, married women or widows, rather than merely being like these women, they could actually become them. In this way, the discourses of anchoritic enclosure as embedded within these hagiographic texts ultimately demand the taking up of a female subject-position far more difficult to achieve for the male, monastic anchorite than for the similarly interpellated laywoman. VISUALIZING THE VOCATION The use of these harlot saints as anchoritic role-models reflects a more widespread lack of misogyny in this text. Women, it would seem, were not something that enclosed male, monastic anchorites needed to worry about overmuch since the days of interacting freely with women of the world were probably long gone. This contrasts dramatically with the earlier Ancrene Wisse, which, although written specifically for a female audience, displays excessive anxiety about the female body expressed via startlingly flamboyant and provocative rhetoric, as we shall see. Nor is this explained sufficiently well by the different contexts within which each text was written, that is to say for the experienced monk vis à vis three former laywomen. This, in turn, points towards there being fundamentally different cultural and ecclesiastical attitudes towards male and female anchorites, something running entirely counter to an overarching rhetoric of anchoritism in the Middle Ages, which liked to imagine itself as ultimately transcending gender difference, in keeping with the adage of Saint Paul in Galatians 3: 28: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus’. In practice, however, anchoritism was shaped in no uncertain fashion by continual anxieties regarding gender and the ways it might enhance – or impede – the journey towards spiritual perfection. In the light of this argument, it is unsurprising that we find similar dynamics operating in Speculum Inclusorum as we did in the Reply to a Bury Recluse. Both, for example, posit an audience of a spiritually accomplished male recluse well versed in the rigours and customs of the coenobitic life and who thus needs encouragement rather than prescription. The Speculum author also presumes upon the vocational element of the anchoritic life as primary: it is a life to which the monk has been actively ‘called’ and to which, like the aforementioned harlot saints, he has chosen to respond. He is also continually encouraged to visualize – and therefore scrutinize – that vocation by means of a repeated use of the quotation from I Corinthians 1: 26 (which is also used by Grimlaïcus in his text): Cixous, Stigmata, p. xii.

115

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Medieval Anchoritisms ‘See your vocation’ [‘Videte vocacionem vestram’].116 Unlike the advice frequently offered to women, however, this self-scrutiny is not a self-disparaging one; on the contrary, not only does it provide a simple mnemonic but also forms part of an important interpellative strategy within which the ‘proper’ anchoritic mindset is constructed, maintained and policed by repetitive doxic practices. Good recluses, for example, are those who ‘are accustomed’ [‘solent’] to being perpetually enclosed under prison-like conditions [‘perpetuo carceri [.  .  .] mancipare’],117 configuring the acceptable face of male anchoritic reclusion fundamentally as a performative practice which collapses into ontology. This contrasts starkly with the type of recluse whose only concern is to avoid hard work or to ‘flee his order’ [‘fugiunt ab ordine suo’], in effect the type of recluse who rejects those repetitive, ritualistic demands which actually construct the ‘good’ anchorite in the first place.118 The author’s main anxiety is that an apparent performance of ‘vocation’ may be no more than a masquerade for the lazy, a type of mimesis undertaken without vocation and without ontological propulsion. As a result of such anxieties, the author of Speculum Inclusorum proceeds to dedicate an entire chapter to this type of empty anchoritic performance, which allows its adherent to ‘live at liberty and without hard labour’ [‘vivendi iuxta libitum sine gravi labore’]119 and ‘have the freedom to exercise his own will’ [‘libertas habende voluntatis proprie’].120 This type of uncommitted, bodily performance does not produce a genuine ‘anchoritic’ space and thus runs counter to an anchoritism which keeps its eyes firmly on the penitent bodies of the harlot saints for its inspiration. Without vocation, the ‘vigils, fastings, prayers and other occupations’ [‘vigiliis, ieiuniis, orationibus et aliis occupacionibus’] which constitute anchoritic practice, will produce nothing but a mere verisimilitude [‘verisimiliter’]121 incapable of producing the correct alchemical mix for the cell’s transformation into sacred space. There is, however, a strong sense that the form of male, monastic reclusion being recommended, when performed properly, is per se an elite form of enclosure and, for this author at least, such elitism is also highly gendered. In chapter 2 for example, the author examines a variety of further – and, in his view, inferior – motivations for ‘recluses of our times’ [‘nostri temporis inclusis’] being ‘called’ to the anchoritic life.122 Amongst these is the desire of those living ‘not in the wilderness but in the town’ [‘non in heremo sed in urbe’] to gain money and alms in order to experience an easier life – but for doing very little in return.123 Moreover, for this author, such false and worldly anchorites magnam familiam retineant, consanguineos et amicos, amplius quam in alio statu poterant, iuvent et promoveant et fere in omnibus victu delicaciori gaudeant quam in statu seculari verisimilter potuissent.124

118 119 120 121 122 123 124 116 117

For Grimlaïcus’s use of this quotation, see PL 103, col. 604 (ch. 23). Speculum, pp. 65–6. Speculum, p. 66 and p. 68. Speculum, p. 68. Speculum, p. 69. Speculum, p. 68. Speculum, p. 70. Speculum, p. 70. Speculum, p. 70.

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram [maintain a great household, and help and advance their kinsmen and friends more than they might in any other circumstance, and enjoy a more delicate way of life in almost all ways than they had likely been able to do within a secular state.]

This statement certainly accords with anxieties concerning half-hearted male anchorites from the laity as expounded in a slightly later, early-fifteenth-century treatise, Dives and Pauper.125 Here, Dives, who is personified as a rich layman, observes of the male anchorite: ‘For we sen þat whan men takyn hem to ben ankerys & incluhs, withynyn fewe ȝerys comonly or þei fallyn in reueryys or heresyys or þey brekyn out for womanys loue or for orchod of her lyf or be some gyle of the fend’. In response, the mendicant Pauper, to whom Dives addresses his observations, explains that men’s improper motivation is because they ‘trostyn to mychil in himself & nout trostyn in God as þei auȝtyn to don’.126 Male anchorites from the secular world thus fall prey to complacency regarding their own ‘superior’ masculine status and therefore they easily ‘groundyn hem al in pride and ypocrisye’, opting for a life in which ‘schal no man reprouyn hem.127 One may also read the above extract from Speculum Inclusorum, however, not only in terms of an underlying tension between the ‘purity’ of a monastic anchoritism clearly founded upon the wellpractised, male institutional life, and what is represented in no uncertain terms as the diluting ‘band-wagon’ of urban anchoritism, but also as a direct criticism of the type of anchoritism which, as we know, was particularly favoured by pious laywomen in statu seculari in the burgeoning towns and cities throughout Europe.128 Thus, the author’s identification of such incontinent worldly anchorites as emerging from the secular life suggests that he is letting slip an internalized scepticism about the strength and abilities of laywomen in particular to endure the demands of the anchoritic life, especially when compared to the intense asceticism of Carthusian reclusion which his text is clearly advocating. Indeed, as he proceeds to embellish his concerns, the author associates this form of anchoritic enclosure with an effeminate weakness, coming closer to producing an anti-feminist rhetoric than anywhere else in his text when he describes the wordly anchorite’s enjoyment of malam consuetudinem nimium delectandi in curiosis et delicatis vestibus, cibis et otibus aliisque humanis usibus necessariis atque in diviciis, amicis carnalibus et consanguineis in vanis inmundis et illicitis cogitacionibus et confabulacionibus de inhonestis nutilibus et ociosis.129 [the wicked habit of excessive delight in unusual and delightful clothing, in food and leisure and other necessary human customs, and in riches, fleshly friends and relatives, in vain, filthy and illicit thoughts and gossipings about dishonest, unprofitable and idle matters.] Dives and Pauper, ed. Priscilla Heath Barnum, vol. I, part 2, EETS os 280 (London, 1980), p. 92. I am grateful to Sarah Salin for directing me towards this reference. 126 Dives and Pauper, vol. I, part 2, pp. 92–3. 127 Dives and Pauper, vol. I, part 2, p. 93. 128 The figures collated by both Clay and Warren in their respective studies categorically demonstrate this to have been the case in England, for which see Clay, p. 73 and Appendix C, pp. 203–63 and Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 20. Mulder-Bakker also argues for this most emphatically in Lives of the Anchoresses, as do most of the contributors to Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy, except for those examining Scotland and Wales, where the tradition appears to have been somewhat different. 129 Speculum, p. 69 125

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Medieval Anchoritisms Deftly squeezing into a few lines virtually the whole gamut of deadly sins which these undisciplined urban anchorites enjoy, this entire passage reads like a succinct summary of the corrupt (female) body which the Ancrene Wisse author takes several chapters to map out: it is a body which is ontologically permeable, unstable and deeply feminine in its openness to worldly pleasure and, for this author at least, entirely unsuited to effective anchoritic enclosure. In contrast, the sealed, continent and specifically monastic male body is best positioned to respond to the anchoritic calling. SPECULUM INCLUSORUM AND ITS AELREDIAN LEGACY In his betrayal of such anxieties regarding a feminized anchoritic body, the Speculum author, like that of Ancrene Wisse, is clearly taking his lead from his Aelredian source, De Institutione Inclusarum, which also becomes greatly exercised when the worldly, urban, female anchorite comes under scrutiny. For Aelred, this is a woman whose ‘tongue [. . .] runs about all day through towns and villages, market-place and square, prying into other people’s lives and behaviour and into such affairs as are not only idle but often shameful’ [‘lingua tota die per vicos et civitates, per fora et nundinas, per vitas et mores et opera hominum, non solum in utilia, sed etiam turpia curiose discurrat’]. Moreover, as Aelred embellishes: Sunt aliae quae [. . .] animum curiositati, linguam et aures tota die otio rumoribusque dedentes. Aliae [. . .] quod fere vitium per omnes huius temporis serpit inclusas, pecuniae congregandae vel multiplicandis pecoribus inhiant [. . .] ut eas matres vel dominas familiarum aestimes, non anachoritas [. . .] ut nummus appositus nummo cumulum erigat et avaritiae sitim accendat.130 [There are others who [. . .] spend the whole day indulging their curiosity, gossiping and listening to gossip – a vice which is becoming more and more prevalent today among recluses. Others [. . .] are yet so eager to make money [. . .] and could well be mistaken for châtelaines rather than anchoresses [. . .] Their money attracts money [. . .] and gives them a thirst for wealth.]

For Aelred, the tongue of the gossipy female anchorite is an anthropomorphized entity, collapsing synecdochally into the body of a woman who runs unchecked through town and village, spreading malice and disrupting the integrity of the community, turning her anchorhold into a brothel as she does so. She is thus a Mary the Egyptian, a Thaïs or a Mary Magdalene in reverse, corroborating the clear danger attached to an ontologically open and unruly female body which I have been arguing for here, a body, moreover, which is always capable of reverting to its original state. Indeed, at one point in his text, Aelred warns his sister not to become the type of anchorite who considers herself to be chaste as long as ‘she is not drawn forth pregnant from her cell’ [‘si non onusto uentre extrahantur’].131 At the time of writing De Institutione Inclusarum, Aelred had recently been responsible for investigating the highly problematic case of the aberrant nun De Institutione Inclusarum, 2.20–2, p. 638, and 3.49–59, p. 639 (pp. 46–7). De Institutione Inclusarum, 6.162 (p. 51).

130 131

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram of Watton in 1164. Watton was a Gilbertine monastery close to Aelred’s abbey of Rievaulx which, so Aelred tells us in the third of the thirty-one homilies in his Homilies on the Burdens of Isaiah,132 housed a community of nuns for whom mystical rapture, along with its necessary detachment from the physical world of the body, had become commonplace.133 This mystical environment had been generated following the experiences of one remarkable woman of the same order, who was apparently able to achieve both detachment and protracted mystical rapture, something Aelred uses in this particular homily to exemplify the Cistercian notion of excessus or ‘ecstasy’.134 It is within this milieu that the disturbing affair concerning another nun at Watton came to be investigated by Aelred, an affair which I believe helps to explain the underlying anxiety regarding the aberrant femininity betrayed by Aelred in his letter to his sister written soon afterwards (and which also manifests itself in the anxieties of the Speculum author and, more overtly, in Ancrene Wisse). According to Aelred, the unnamed nun in question had been a child oblate at the double house of Watton who, on reaching young womanhood, began to resist the life which had been ordained for her by the archbishop of York, Henry Murdac, some years earlier, and give herself over to worldly pleasures.135 As a result, she soon became pregnant by one of the canons, or perhaps a laybrother, within the monastery, for which transgression she was held in irons and viciously beaten by the other nuns. The same treatment was meted out to the young nun’s lover, whom she was forced to castrate publically. Interestingly, it is at this point in Aelred’s narrative that the account begins to take on the generic characteristics of the harlot saints’ Lives examined earlier, demonstrating clearly the same kind of need for patriarchal intervention to control the excess of the aberrant woman. For example, following the nun’s imprisonment, Aelred recounts how the recently deceased Archbishop Murdac appeared to him in a vision in order to speak in the nun’s defence. As a direct consequence of this ghostly visitation, the nun’s fetters – and her pregnancy – miraculously disappear, leaving Aelred to present the case as closed, both to himself and to God. In his examination of this account in 1969, Aelred Squire was barely able to suppress his repugnance for the Watton nuns in question. Indeed, his deictically motivated assessment that, as readers, we must necessarily share Aelred’s relief at ‘not having to worry himself any further with women beneath whose lives of

Beati Aelredi Rievallis Abbatis Sermones de Oneribus in Capp. XIII et Seq. Isaiae Prophetae, PL 195, cols. 361–500 (here at cols. 370–1). 133 Although Aelred does not mention Watton by name in his third homily, nevertheless, the evidence would suggest that it is to Watton that he is referring, since he expressly mentions that it is a nunnery of the Gilbertine Order where these ‘spiritual ecstasies’ are commonplace. This communal mysticism is discussed by Aelred Squire, Aelred of Rievaulx: A Study (London, 1969), p. 141. 134 Squire, Aelred, p. 138. The term excessus is not only suggestive of a departure from the ‘normal’ state of being which is implicated within mystical ecstasy, but also of the potential for transgression which is also inherent to the mystical experience. See Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources ed. Latham, excessus 1c. To this end, Aelred also recounts a sceptical nun of the same community who is only able to achieve a watered-down version of the experiences of her peers because of its remaining body-bound – and therefore deceptive. 135 His account of this episode can be found in De Sanctimoniali de Wattun, PL 195, cols. 789–96. For a discussion of this episode, see Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Nuns in the Public Sphere’, Comitatus 27, 1 (1996), pp. 55–80; and Sarah Salih, ‘Monstrous Virginity: St Aelred Writes the Nuns of Watton’, Mediaevalia 20 (2001), pp. 49–72. 132

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Medieval Anchoritisms prayer a primitive barbarity only slumbered’,136 reflects the persistence in more contemporary times of the same kind of attitudes and anxieties regarding unruly women which I have been identifying here. Squire’s horror is not simply generated by the nuns’ behaviour per se, but by those dangerously duplicitous bodies which had produced it and which are forever capable of reverting to type, whatever verisimilitude of sanctity or performances of chastity they undertake. In this respect, Squire is both reflecting and responding to those anxieties which surely beset Aelred in his overseeing of the events at Watton – anxieties which I suggest make their presence felt not only in the text written for his sister but also those later anchoritic texts which were influenced by it. Writ large for ever upon the religious landscape of this once prestigious institution and its mystically enabled nuns is the announcement of a female instability which articulates the need for concerted policing. For Aelred and, by implication, the author of the Speculum Inclusorum and Ancrene Wisse, the woman acting alone outside the restraints of community and its doxa poses a perennial threat. As in the bringing-to-heel of the harlot saints within hagiographic discourse, scapegoat-like she too must both embody and yet expel those unruly elements which pose a threat to society. However, even when brought back into line, she always harbours the potential to exercise what Squire sees as a ‘primitive barbarity’ which is only ever ‘slumbering’. SEALING THE MALE BODY For both Aelred and the Speculum author, then, worldly anchoritism tends to be problematic space, a potentially hostile feminine realm always in danger of inviting in both sin and damnation as companions. Nevertheless, as I have also argued, the male, monastic anchorhold was a place which always threatened to collapse into that feminine realm because of its ideological insistence upon chastity and the relinquishment of an active male sexual identity. For its earliest adherents, therefore, discourses of masculine prowess were privileged in order to counter such feminization. Within this context, Conrad Leyser has argued that ascetic masculinity in the early Middle Ages should be read as a fierce display of public power rather than as a retreat into passivity and invisibility.137 This is supported by McNamara, who suggests that since masculinity has far weaker biological underpinnings than femininity upon which to build its construction, so it requires a strong and systematic support in order to maintain its fictions.138 I argue, therefore, that such a systematic support makes its presence felt as ‘alphamasculine’ discourse in many of the works written for, by and about celibate males throughout the Middle Ages in an attempt to construct what McNamara terms ‘a cosmos and a terrestrial order that firmly support[s] the natural law of masculine superiority’.139 Squire, Aelred, p. 118. Conrad Leyser, ‘Masculinity in Flux: Nocturnal Emission and the Limits of Celibacy in the Early Middle Ages’, in Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. D. M. Hadley (London, 1999), pp. 103–20. See also David Clark, Between Medieval Men: Male Friendship and Desire in Early Medieval Literature (Oxford, 2009). 138 McNamara, ‘“The Herrenfrage”’, p. 3. 139 McNamara, ‘“The Herrenfrage”’, p. 19. 136 137

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram In order to maintain his own fictions, the author of Speculum Inclusorum adopts similar tactics, making available to his audience a range of alternative masculinities with which to shore up the threatened gender identity of his monastic audience. For example, at the same time as encouraging them to identify with the ‘anchoritic’ harlot saints, he also encourages an affinity with those male advisors and visionaries who brought these women into line. Similarly, as we have seen, the anchoritic ‘fathers’, Paul and Hilarion, are also promoted as role models, making it clear that it is perfectly possible for the anchorite to follow the masculine path towards apotheosis, should he so desire. Elsewhere, the author takes up and reshapes other traditional forms of masculinity – protector and provider for the family, for example – which, unavailable to the male anchorite as viable practice, nevertheless could be accessed spiritually via the miles Christi discourse, as I suggested in Chapter 1. It was this, above all, which could transform the anchorite from a man who prayed into an active warrior-knight. I have already examined how such discourse came to be used formulaically as an analogue for monastic discipline, but, as Michael Evans has asserted, subsequent generations of exegetes sought to elaborate on the conceit in order to maximize its full potential.140 For this reason, it was taken up with great enthusiasm within pastoral works, particularly sermons, which sought to break down the boundaries between monastic and lay piety after the Fourth Lateran Council.141 Such an endorsement of military masculinity as a legitimate monastic identity was further encouraged in the twelfth century by the support of the Knights Templar by Bernard of Clairvaux, who approved their role within the Crusades as Christian knights who literally fought for Christ.142 Such knights physically animated the metaphor of spiritual battle and provided a material focus for the playing out of a reasserted Christian masculinity in the realm where it was most visible: the medieval battlefield. Even a precursor (and possibly a source) to the Rule of Saint Benedict was adapted to the militarism of the Knights Templar, allowing, for example, the Templar Grand master to serve as both ‘abbot’ to his knights and powerful military leader in the Crusader battles themselves.143 Thus, in the Templars we see two ways of being a medieval man fused into the production of a medieval killing machine. This in turn confirmed to those non-fighting monks their own militaristic masculinity by proxy, whilst rendering acceptable the butchery of medieval warfare within the Christian imagination at the same time. In the words of Bernard of Clairvaux, these milites Christi were a religious order ‘that fights flesh and blood as well as the spirits of wickedness [and who] are the

For a brief examination of the development of this as a topos see Michael Evans, ‘An Illustrated Fragment of Peraldus’s Summa of Vice: Harleian Ms 3244’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 45 (1982), pp. 14–68 (p. 17). 141 On the new pastoral initiative see p. 52 above. 142 On the Knights Templar see, for example, Walter Nigg, Warriors of God (New York, 1972); and Malcolm Barber, The New Knighthood: A History of the Order of the Templars (Cambridge, 1995). 143 See the Regula Magistri [‘Rule of the Master’], PL 88. This has long been considered an embellishment of The Rule of Saint Benedict, although some commentators consider it to be a source text. For a summary of the debate regarding provenance of this Rule, see Rule of Benedict, pp. xix–xi. This Rule is three times as long as that of St Benedict’s but, as McCann points out, it incorporates the whole of the latter, leading him to believe that it actually predates Benedict’s Rule, rather than being a development of it (p. xx). 140

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Medieval Anchoritisms martyrs who die in battle [. . .] and are united with the Lord’.144 Such an exhortation is everywhere apparent in Speculum Inclusorum, where a ‘true’ anchoritic calling is also closely related to military prowess. In chapter 3, for example, the audience is specifically hailed as ‘noble knights of Jesus Christ’ [‘generosi milites Ihesu Christi’]145 and ‘kinsman of the everlasting King of Heaven’ [‘consanguineus regis eterni’], the author drawing upon traditional chivalric discourse, which configured the knight as god-fearing retainer to his lord as well as earthly fighter.146 Nor is this role merely passive or defensive: on the contrary, anchorites are fully expected to ‘take up again the arms of spiritual knighthood’ [‘resumatis arma milicie spiritualis’]147 in order to achieve the ‘victory of a most grievous spiritual battle’ [‘pro gravissimi spiritualis belli victoria coronabuntur’]148 fought ‘to the death against all possible temptations’ [‘usque ad mortem contra omnes temptaciones’].149 Here, writ large, is the anchorites’ incorporation into the Pauline miles Christi hermeneutic within which defeat against the enemy forces is unthinkable and the only possible end-product is the victor’s crown. Discourses of successful combat and warfare, unsurpassed soldiery and military prowess thus provide a suitable metaphor in the text for the power of a Christian sanctity which, within the monastic context, was required to maintain a masculine face. Moreover, such metaphors helped, on the surface at least, to keep such sanctity firmly within the parameters of a safely heterosexual matrix and traditional gender binary. The anchorite as faithful Christic retainer takes up arms for his lord and community and thus produces a paradigmatic male body which, like his anchoritic cell, is ultimately impenetrable, unless he actively drops his guard or opens it up to the enemy by choice. The issue of penetrability is an important one within anchoritic discourse and one which is particularly associated with its female adherents, as we shall see. This was made clear by Aelred in his warnings to his sister cited above, and is patently a subtext to the Speculum author’s fears of a porous urban anchoritism. Moreover, the issue of penetrability when applied to bodies, as opposed to buildings, takes on an overtly sexual slant. Within the heterosexual matrix men were – and are – traditionally considered to be the penetrators and not the penetrated.150 Any Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘In Praise of the New Knighthood’, cited in C. H. Lawrence, Medieval Monasticism (New York, 1984), p. 210. This text is available at http://www.the orb.net/encyclop/ religion/monastic/bernard.html. 145 Speculum, p. 70. 146 According to Michael Evans, tales of chivalric romance provided a literary context for the fusion of two essentially incompatible metaphors for Christ as both lover and warrior. He also points towards the Old English tradition of the Christian epic poem, which also popularized the use of military allegory. See Evans, ‘Illustrated Fragment’, p. 20. 147 Speculum, p. 76. 148 Speculum, p. 80. 149 Speculum, pp. 72–3. 150 For a useful appraisal of medieval attitudes towards ‘homosexuality’ and the fear of sodomitic practices, see Warren Johansson, ‘Homosexuality’, in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York and London, 1996), pp. 155–89. The classic work on this topic remains John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago and London, 1980), although his work in this area has recently become subject to some criticism. See, therefore, The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago, 2006). For a succinct summary of the field, see Robert Mills, ‘Homosexuality: Specters of Sodom’, in A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages, ed. Ruth Evans (New York and Oxford, 2010), pp. 57–79. 144

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram permanent break-down of male bodily borders was therefore deemed monstrous and unnatural (as in sodomy) or death-invoking (as in battle wounds). In either case, the end-product was an opened-up male body which gave entry to death, whether of the soul, the body, or both.151 As a result, texts such as Speculum Inclusorum are keen to interpellate the anchoritic ‘knights of Christ’ as sealed and inviolate in both body and soul, in order to make safe the fragile membranes between good and evil, purity and sin, inside and outside. As a result, nowhere in this text do the dangers of bodily penetration threaten the male anchoritic body in any significant way; which, of course, contrasts radically with similar texts such as Aelred’s directed at women, where the threat of the penetrable body is forever haunting the discourse. Even in the author’s exposition of human sensuality and the five bodily wits in Part 1, chapter 4, where we might justifiably expect to find such imagery, such fears do not raise their heads.152 Instead, rather than being vulnerable to penetration by sin via the open senses, the primary threat to the male anchorite is that he might ‘enter’ sin himself. On one occasion, for example, the author warns him against any opportunity which may be inclinced to ‘induce [a recluse] into mortal sin’ [‘que solet inducere mortale peccatum’];153 elsewhere, he is alerted to the dangers posed to him by ‘an inclining into sin’ [‘inclinata ad peccatum’]154 or ‘a falling into mortal sin’ [‘labendum in mortale peccatum’].155 On each occasion, sin is something which the anchorite actively engages with, moves towards or falls into, rather than the boundaries of his own sealed body being broken down by it. His body is thus rendered ontologically intact and impenetrable and, by extension, his anchorhold becomes a ‘natural’ fortress which he may occupy as one of the perfect who is ‘sufficient to fight in single combat against individual temptations’ [‘contra singulas temptaciones soli pugnare sufficiunt’].156 Such militaristic practices will therefore produce an anchoritic space which is also ‘shut up against the voluptuous melodies of the world’ [‘contra voluptuosas seculi melodies clauditur’], unlike those ‘wordly’ anchorites, who willingly invite those ‘melodies’ in.157 In this way, the Speculum author’s audience is constructed as fully equipped to embrace the role of disciplined and seasoned resisters of the onslaught of sin: they are, indeed, the ‘noble knights of Jesus Christ’ [‘generosi milites Ihesu Christi’] whose discursively ‘sealed’ selves within their discursively ‘sealed’ cells are ultimately able to enact the anchorhold’s transformation into the chamber of heaven. In turn, they themselves become the definitively masculine ‘secreti camerarii Dei’ [‘secret chamberlains of God’].158



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152 153

156 157 158 154 155

See also Ruth Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto Others (New York, 2005) for further evidence of the active–passive binary within this context; and Clarke, Between Medieval Men. These links were frequently made explicit in medieval images of hell in which the punishment was seen to meet the ‘crime’. Very often, former sodomites are tortured eternally by means of bodily penetration by a range of grotesque weapons. See, in particular, Robert Mills, Suspended Animation (London, 2005). Speculum, pp. 77–81. Speculum, p. 77. The Middle English translator emphasizes this point by means of a synonym, translating inducere mortale peccatum as ‘to induce or to leede a man in-to deedly synne’ (Myrour, p. 12). Speculum, p. 77. Speculum, p. 78. Speculum, p. 72. Speculum, p. 79. Speculum, p. 70.

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Medieval Anchoritisms THE OPEN MALE BODY This is not to say, however, that the monastic anchorite in this text is entirely free from the dangers posed by temptation. Monastic anxieties extended far beyond the infiltration of the disruptive feminine. This guidance writer reminds his audience repeatedly of the wages of sin but, unlike the internalizing rhetoric of those texts written specifically for women, here the male anchorite is encouraged to externalize the causes and effects of sin and view them from a distance, as if belonging to others rather than himself. For example, in a standard set of exempla in chapter 4, forming part of his treatment of the five bodily wits, the anchorite is invited to identify with those biblical men whose downfall was brought about by gazing at a woman or an idol: Samson, David, Achor, the children of Israel. In each case, however, the exemplum posits a distance between the onlooker and the object of his gaze, between the anchorite and sin, suggesting an element of choice which is dependent upon his ability as a man to control the gaze, and which therefore allows him to make a rational decision whether or not to engage with the sin laid out before his eyes.159 The same holds true for his sense of hearing. He is similarly encouraged by the author to listen to the voices of temptation from afar and make a rational and informed decision to refuse them entry: ‘O happy is the ear of the man who is so carefully disposed that he does not open up the door to illicit voices’ [‘O felix auris hominis, que sic prudenter disponitur quod contra voces illicitas non aperitur’].160 The author’s prevalent use of the vocative case here and elsewhere not only adds to the interpellative effect of his rhetoric but also announces the celebratory discourse which he attaches to his inviolate anchorites. However, at times he relinquishes this technique in favour of one which creates more distance between him and his audience, preferring to make concerted use of the third person or passive voice. For example, when documenting a long list of worldly items which could lead to temptation in Part I, chapter 4, instead of presenting them as a direct threat to the body of the anchorite, the author proceeds to generalize in the third person about a particular temptation ‘which frequently propels a man to fall into sin’ [‘que frequentius impellit hominem incurre in iniquitatem’].161 This linguistic technique also increases the distance between the anchorite and the type of sin under discussion: it will contaminate him only if he moves towards it and actively embraces it. In the same way, the author substitutes a range of personified abstractions for the five bodily wits, configuring them as ‘the unwise messengers of the heart’ [‘minus prudentes nuncii cordis’],162 and thus establishing them as Some aspects of medieval theories of vision considered sight to be a type of interactive ‘touching’ between viewer and the one viewed, for an overview of which see the introduction to Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality and Sight in Medieval Text and Image, ed. Emma Campbell and Robert Mills (New York and Basingstoke, 2004), especially pp. 3–5. Presumably, this is one reason why ungoverned looking can readily invoke sexual sin. 160 Speculum, p. 79. 161 Speculum, p. 78. It is also significant to my argument here that the Latin verb incurro carries the militaristic connotations of to attack, invade or strike (Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, ed. Latham, incurro, 1a, 1b and 3), again suggesting a physical contest between the anchorite and sin. 162 Speculum, p. 77. 159

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram somewhat foolish intermediaries between a man and sin. Such textual gymnastics, therefore, allow the anchorite to remain detached from the onslaught of sin, leaving the externalized senses to take the brunt of the attacks and placing him in a better position to parry them. The same can be said of the ensuing section, in which the author discusses the seven deadly sins.163 At no point during this narrative are the sins ever attached to the body of the anchorite as monstrous appendages or penetrations. Instead, the author deftly combines his treatment with a succinct and methodical Passion narrative, in which the seven sins are inscribed as wounds upon the bleeding – and legitimately open – body of the crucified Christ. For example, he deals with the sin of pride thus: rivulos sanguinis decurrentis a capite Christi, pro tuis sceleribus spinis acutissimis ad obprobrium coronati, ut diluat quicquid peccasti per illicitum usum tui capitis cum quinque sensibus in eo fixis, et superbie peccatum tollat a te humilis inclinacio capitis Christi in cruce.164 [honour the streams of blood running down from Christ’s head which was crowned with hatred with the most acutely sharp thorns for you, so that he do away with all that you have sinned by illicit use of your head with the five wits fixed within it, and by inclining yourself humbly towards the head of Christ on the cross, withdraw yourself from the sin of pride.]

In this account, which is mirrored by each of the seven deadly sins in turn, agency to withdraw from sin by an active emulation of Christ’s body is offered to the anchorite on each occasion. Again this has the effect of externalizing sin and expelling it from proximity to the anchoritic body, since it is projected onto the body of Christ, whose open wounds are able to expel it with the flowing of the blood, the wine and water and upon whom, again, the anchorite is encouraged to gaze. The anchorite is thus left unscathed since Christ, the benign scapegoat, suffers on his behalf. In this sense, in true affective fashion, the entire passage becomes more mnemonic than an exhortation to close up an open body against temptation, and at all times the open and penetrated body of the crucified Christ both stands between and stands in for the male anchorite and the onslaught of sin upon him. Thus, by inviting Christ into the anchoritic cell and reconfiguring it as the place of his salvific Passion, the Speculum author has him absorb the threat posed by temptation and sin to the body of the spiritually seasoned anchorite and presumes upon prevention rather than capitulation. There is, however, one instance in the text when we do see the male anchorite capitulate to temptation. Indeed, it is also a temptation hinted at by the author of the Reply to a Bury Recluse, who makes a veiled reference to a specific sin arising from ‘the repugnant condition of your members’ [‘legem membrorum tuorum repugnantem’].165 Whilst the Bury abbot fails to elaborate upon this, we can presume that here he is making an abstruse reference to masturbation.166 The Speculum 165 166 163

164

Speculum, pp. 96–7. Speculum, p. 96. Bury Recluse, p. 467. Although issues of sodomy and masturbation continued to be evaded or veiled throughout the Middle Ages, the problems concerning ‘unwitting’ nocturnal emission is dealt with considerably,

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Medieval Anchoritisms author, however, is not so coy when it comes to articulating this ‘sin’, which he brings to the fore in Part 1, chapter 4 during his discussion of the dangers attached to the sense of touch [‘sensus tactus’], which, he says, can allow ‘the delight of lechery’ [‘voluptas venerea’] to take hold of the anchorite, either in a ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ manner [‘tam naturalis quam contra natura’].167 It is, however, the touching contra natura, that is to say self-touching, with which he is most concerned, rather than with the anchorite’s being touched by others. Recounting the various stages of this sin in some detail, he identifies it specifically as masturbation [‘mollicies’] which is ‘abominable to the angels’ [‘angelis abhominabilem’], and (quoting Romans 1: 30) ‘hateful to God’ [‘Deo odibilem’].168 He continues: Et si vigilando talem delectationem continuet quousque corporis voluptuosa pollucio subsequatur, perficitur quidem luxurie species contra naturam, que mollicies ab apostolo nuncupatur, ubi dicit quod neque molles, neque masculorum concubitores regnum Dei possidebunt.169 [And if he continues in such delight until a voluptuous pollution of the body ensues, a certain type of unnatural lechery is brought about, which has been called by the apostle ‘masturbation’, where he says ‘neither masturbators nor sleepers with men will possess the kingdom of heaven’.]

According to this author, a voluptuous pollution of the body caused by habitual masturbation can lead ultimately to becoming ‘masculorum concubitores’, a likely euphemism within this context for men who engage in sodomitic practices170 – a cause-and-effect scenario which, interestingly, is omitted entirely by the text’s translator in the Myrour of Recluses, no doubt because the representation of a sodomitic anchorite was deemed to be inappropriate within a text translated partly for women. Whilst, however, the Latin text also inserts a brief apologia regarding the ‘irrelevance’ of a proscription against self-pleasuring and sodomy to a seasoned male anchorite (‘a recluse is far removed from these types of lechery’ [‘ab omnibus huius modi luxurie speciebus longe subtrahitur inclusus’]),171 the Middle English translator renders the statement female-specific, asserting that ‘alle suych spices of lecherie ben fer from an ancresse’.172 Here, both the Latin author and translator betray strong anxieties about what they perceive to be the only dangers posed to the integrity of the enclosed male body: for the Speculum author it is a latent sexuality which may make itself felt in ‘unnatural’ ways and lead to ejaculation and/or sodomitic penetration; for the translator, such activities by a female recluse are unthinkable and, by implication, it is therefore only the male anchorite who

169 167

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most notably by Cassian in his Institutiones, VI. 20; Collationes XII. 15 and XXII. It was, however, Gregory the Great who systematized Cassian’s attitudes on this matter, constructing the canonical account for the medieval Church. See Leyser, ‘Masculinity in Flux’, p. 103. Speculum, p. 79. Speculum, p. 79. Speculum, pp. 79–80. The Douay-Rheims Bible translates molles as ‘the effeminate’ and masculorum concubitores as ‘liers with mankind’. On the complexity of the terminology to describe such sexual practices, see Johansson and Percy, ‘Homosexuality’, in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, pp. 155-88. Speculum, p. 80. On the use of this term in this capacity, see Jerome D. Quinn and William C. Wacker, The First and Second Letters to Timothy (Grand Rapids, 2000), p. 88. Speculum, p. 79. Myrour of Recluses, p. 14 (my emphasis).

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Videte Vocacionem Vestram needs to be on his guard against them. To further his point, the author of the Latin text proceeds to tell a salutary ‘true story’ [‘vera historia’] of a hermit who habitually practised masturbation and who, having failed to curtail this behaviour, was without warning carried off by demons:173 Quidam heremita sanctissimus reputatus dum molliciei vicio laborabat, nec hoc tanquam peccatum ponderans penitebat, subito raptus a demonibus nusquam comparuit.174 [A certain hermit with a reputation for the utmost sanctity, whilst he was working at the vice of masturbation – nor did he consider repenting of his sin – was suddenly taken away by demons and never seen again.]

Again, this sinning hermit is examined from a distance. His incontinent body thus functions in the text as another externalized site of sinful activity upon which the so-far sin-free anchorite is able to gaze from his safe, internal and untainted perspective. Thus, when his rhetorical function is complete, the hermit simply disappears from view – and from the text – with no lasting consequences. Once more, our male anchorite is offered a simple let-out clause which, even in the face of mortal sin, allows him to retain his bodily integrity under threat: Et si, quod absit, unquam ceciderint, digne peniteant, sicque pro gravissimi spiritualis belli victoria coronabuntur.175 [And if, heaven forbid, at any time they [the male anchorites] fall, let them worthily repent, and so they will be crowned for the victory of a most grievous spiritual war.]

Anxieties regarding the male body are therefore few in Speculum Inclusorum and those that do exist fall into line with far more widespread monastic anxieties.176 Permeable male bodies tend also to be intellectualized in the promotion of the text’s hermeneutics of integrity and the male audience is constantly invited to gaze upon them from a detached distance, rather than to associate them with ontological disposition. In this way, the male anchorite can maintain a body free from sin and fully police himself. The text’s somewhat clumsy translator, however, struggles to incorporate a female audience into the text’s hermeneutical structure, sometimes making use of the term ‘men and women’, at other times retaining the generic ‘man’; elsewhere, too, he translates reclusus/inclusus as ‘ancres and ankresses’, and on one occasion, simply as ‘ancresse’.177 Significantly also, it is the section on sexual temptation which appears to present the Middle English translator with Speculum, p. 80. Speculum, p. 80. Speculum, p. 80. Leyser asserts that the real testing of a monk’s concentration on the efficacy of his prayer and reading during the day came at night whilst he slept. Those whose concentration had lapsed during the day would find themselves betrayed by their bodily desires at night (‘Masculinity in Flux’ p. 114). See also D. Brakke, ‘The Problematization of Nocturnal Emissions in Early Christian Syria, Egypt and Gaul’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 3, 4 (1995), pp. 423–4. Here Brakke presents Cassian as the initiator of the language of pollution which was attached to nocturnal emission within monastic thinking. Also useful is Swanson, ‘Angels Incarnate’, p. 167, where he asserts that, next to women, masturbation and sodomy were the primary sources of anxiety to men within the monastic context. 177 Myrour of Recluses, p. 6, p. 13, and p. 14, for example. 175 176 173

174

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Medieval Anchoritisms most difficulty, and he is evidently unable to find a way of synthesizing a male and female body within this context. As a result, immediately following a discussion, again in chapter 4, of how blessed is the sealed-up anchorite who ‘openeþ nat þe ȝates again suych vnleefful noyses [i.e. temptations]; & ys schyt & spered again þe voluptuous or lusty melodyes of the world [i.e. sexual temptation]’,178 he sees fit to add an interpolation of his own which emphasizes his evident concerns about enclosed women: ‘Anchoresses [. . .] bien more streytly closed þan oþir religious men & wommen, enclosed in her houses be leue of her souereyns and in alle tymes at her souereyns wyl’.179 Here the translator suggests a female ontology of bodily openness which poses a permanent threat to the female recluse, as opposed to those sealed bodies within the Carthusian ideal. Thus, in his attempt to clarify the link between reclusion and a body which has become inviolate to sin, the translator draws a clear line between the experiences of the male and the female recluse, and consequently between the institutional recluse and the lay. It is at this point too that the only reference in the text to an anchoritic body which sin may actually penetrate is inserted by the same translator, who asserts, ‘Swych ancres & ankeresses ben more sekyrly conseruyd & kept fro þe perils of þe bodily wyt of touchynge, by þe which entriþ þe lust of lecherie’.180 It would appear that the problematics of sexual temptation, along with a female body inserted into the text at the point of translation, brings about a shift in hermeneutics which causes the translator to render the more innocuous Latin term ‘continguit’ [‘touches’ or ‘takes hold of ’] as ‘entreþ’ in order to accommodate the different meanings ascribed to male and female bodies. The implications are clear, particularly when read alongside those anxieties generated by the phenomenon of urban anchoritism discussed earlier. In order to reach the same level of sanctity as her male, monastic counterparts, the female-bodied, lay and urbanized anchorite needs to withdraw further – both figuratively and physically – from the world and must be more closely policed, by both her ‘souereyns wyl’ and by God, if she is to counter her own openness. Only then may she be singled out for special and representational status. The strength of her bodily ramparts will only be as strong and as thick as those stone walls which contain her, and as such she presents an initially much more risky and problematic investment on the part of the Church and society. This, in turn, goes some way to explaining the reasons for the authors of those guidance texts directed at women to have recourse to startlingly different image patterns and rhetorical devices to drive their points home, suggesting that the male and the female anchorite occupied somewhat different sites within the cultural imaginary and generated different levels of anxiety for those whose job it was to oversee them and offer them guidance.

Myrour of Recluses, p. 13. Myrour of Recluses, p. 13. 180 Myrour of Recluses, p. 13 (my emphasis). 178

179

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Chapter 3 WRITING THE FLESH: FEMALE ANCHORITISM AND THE MASTER NARRATIVE [A] body is always a substance for inscription . . . the flesh writes and is given to be read; and to be written.1

GENDER AND THE MASTER NARRATIVE

I

n an essay examining the relationship between the female author, reading and writing, Hélène Cixous rereads the tradition of Eve’s transgression as the provision of a fundamental lesson for women about the politics of reading. For Cixous, Eden as primal location provides the ‘scene of the meal in which desire and prohibition coexist’.2 The ‘meal’ in question is, of course, that of the ‘forbidden’ fruit which, throughout the Middle Ages, provided a primary symbol for humankind’s problematic relationship with its own innate desires and its cultural systems of taboo. Faced with the prohibition of God’s law and her own desire to move beyond its boundaries, Eve chooses to read the apple as symbol of satiation rather than one of transgression or disobedience. Although aware of the rhetoric of death as punishment for indulgence of desire (‘For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it, thou shalt die the death’),3 within an economy where death does not yet exist, for Eve its meaning, paradoxically, is devoid of anything meaningful. Thus, in its nonexistence, death fails to signify, whereas the apple – tactile, mysterious and inviting investigation of its luscious interior – is present in all its multiplicity of potential significations. The contest between law and desire, therefore, turns out to be no contest at all. Thus, Eve’s reading of the apple, not as a ‘fruit-not-to’4 but as means towards a ‘libidinal education’,5 transforms this first act of female reading into a negotiation of the competing discourses of desire and taboo. Such discourses are first inscribed upon the apple and subsequently imprinted upon Eve’s own body as a woman in a cultural act of writing; firstly because of her ingestion of that fruit and secondly because of its assimilation with her body as female flesh. In so doing, she offers up this same fleshly body to an insistent cultural inscription of both desire and taboo which will for ever render her subject to counts of bodily duplicity. In their duality of meaning, therefore, and their susceptibility to 3 4 5 1

2

Cixous, ‘Coming to Writing’, p. 26. Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, in Coming to Writing, p. 149. Genesis 2: 17. Cixous, ‘Author in Truth’, p. 151. Cixous, ‘Coming to Writing’, p. 148.

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Medieval Anchoritisms contesting readings, the fruit of the forbidden tree and the body of the first woman constitute a foundational and man-made master narrative, an entire philosophy, produced under the proscriptive hegemony of the Law of the Father. In the words of Cixous: ‘The philosophical constructs itself starting with the abasement of woman. Subordination of the feminine to the masculine order [. . .] appears to be the condition for the functioning of the machine.’6 The preceding chapters have already demonstrated some of the ways in which the ‘monstrous text’ of femininity set about haunting male anchoritism and its ecclesiastical adherents throughout their history. This ‘haunting’ not only manifested itself in an insistent feminizing of the monastic recluse brought about by his withdrawal from the imprinters of orthodox masculinity within the world; it was also enacted literally by means of those visions and dreams in which the seductive figure of Eve in her myriad aspects appeared to the beleaguered holy man, threatening always to drag him back to the world – and to damnation – with her relentlessly insatiable body. The thirteenth-century Life of Saint Jerome, for example, as retold by Jacobus de Voragine, depicts the pious Jerome as being tricked into donning woman’s clothing by his enemies whilst still a cardinal at Rome,7 a ‘sin’ which explicitly contravenes the biblical proscription, ‘A woman shall not be clothed with man’s apparel, neither shall a man use woman’s apparel: for he that doeth these things is abominable before God’.8 Jerome had previously admonished a group of local men for their ‘wanton behaviour’ [‘lasciviam’], in retaliation for which they secreted into his room at night an array of women’s clothing, potent symbols of such abomination – and of Eve’s transgression. Mistaking these garments for his own in his hurry to get to church, the unwitting Jerome not only donned the women’s attire but also proceeded to wear it to church,9 parading both the forbidden garments but also the reification of the sin not (yet) committed by him. The moral is clear: unless the holy man is constantly vigilant, the abominable ‘garment’ of female wantonness, the always already sin-in-waiting, will continue to haunt his body and his vocation. Jacobus has Jerome respond by withdrawal into eremitic solitude within the desert. Even here, however, he is besieged by ‘scorpions and wild beasts’ [‘scorpionum [.  .  .] et ferarum’] who transform themselves at will into ‘bevies of young girls’ [‘choreis [. . .] puellarum’] who envelop him just as completely as did the female clothing in his days as

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Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst, 1980), pp. 90–8 (p. 92). This episode appears to be an addition by Jacobus de Voragine to the various Lives of Jerome which had been emerging from the ninth century. Jerome does not seem to have been regarded as a saint much before the time of Bede, although his sanctity was taken up and embellished by a series of medieval hagiographers, Jacobus included. His inclusion of this episode is, perhaps, a nod in the direction of Jerome’s evident contemporary reputation as what E. Gordon Whatley has termed ‘a vituperative homme au femmes’. However, it also resonates soundly with the type of institutional misogyny which I will be examining in this present chapter. See Whatley’s introduction to the the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages edition of Saints’ Lives in Middle English Collections (Kalamazoo, 2004), online at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/whjerintro. htm. All references to the Life of Saint Jerome and the Life of Saint Benedict will be from Jacobi a Voragine, Legenda Aurea vulgo Historia Lombardica dicta ad optimorum librorum fidem, ed. Th. Graesse (Leipzig, 1850), pp. 653-9 and pp. 204-12 respectively. The English translations are taken from the Penguin edition, for which see p. 62, n. 111 above. Deuteronomy 22: 5. Legenda, p. 654 (Golden Legend, p. 251).

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Writing the Flesh ‘cardinal’.10 Now beast, now scorpion, now woman, the delicate membrane between the material and the visionary, the actual and the discursive is broken down by these hybridized creatures who inhabit both Jerome’s mind, his cell and the realm of the cultural imaginary which he represents: as the holy man confesses: ‘Ipsam quoque cellulam meam quasi cogitationum conscientiam pertimescebam’ [‘I even dreaded my own cell, because it shared so many of my guilty thoughts’].11 Such sentiments are also echoed by Saint Benedict in the context of his own desert trials, also recounted by Jacobus in his Life of Saint Benedict. Upon Benedict’s withdrawal into solitude, the most concerted temptation to assail him is the insistent visionary appearance of a woman to whom he had once been highly attracted. So strong remained his desire for this woman that he ‘was close to giving way to his desire and abandoning his life as a hermit’ [‘ut paene eremum voluptate victus deserere deliberaret’].12 Like Jerome, however, Benedict’s solution is to cast off the feminine threat which is engulfing him, literally ripping off its fleshly ‘garment’ by flaying his own contaminated skin: se exuit et in spinis et vepribus, quae ibi aderunt, se adeo volutavit, ut toto corpore inde vulneratus exiret et per cutis vulnera mentis vulnera educeret.13

[He stripped off his clothes and threw himself among the thorns and briars which covered the place and rolled about in them until he had torn his body from head to toe. In this way he drew out the sins of his soul through the wounds he inflicted on his body].

Whilst, on the surface of it, of course, such behaviour adheres closely to the type of imitatio Christi upon which an identity as a holy man may safely be built, nonetheless it also clearly betrays the ubiquitous male anxiety regarding the connection between women, the flesh and the loss of Eden, an anxiety which haunts much of the male-authored literature of the Middle Ages, particularly those works directed at women themselves. Thus, like Jerome’s taboo garment and Benedict’s concupiscent flesh, the female body must be disavowed and excised through discourse, for safety’s sake to be supplanted by the sackcloth of a ‘perfect’ piety or strongly ideological form of virginity. As Jerome confesses, male sanctity comes at a price if the flesh is to be overcome: Horrebant sacco membra deformia, squalida cutis [. . .] adduxerat [. . .], humo nuda vix ossa haerentia collidebantur.14 [My limbs, all raw, twitched beneath the sackcloth. My skin was filthy and burnt black [. . .] my bones, with scarcely any flesh to hold them together, grated on the bare ground].

Laid bare upon Jerome’s body are the results of the attempt to extirpate the feminine, which forms a perennial double-edged sword within Christian 12 13 14 10

11

Legenda, p. 655 (Golden Legend, p. 251). Legenda, p. 655 (Golden Legend, p. 251). Legenda, p. 205 (Golden Legend, p. 104). Legenda, p. 205 (Golden Legend, p. 104). Legenda, p. 655 (Golden Legend, p. 251).

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Medieval Anchoritisms discourse. Once the flesh is cast aside or torn away like the female tunic into which it collapses, what is left are the ‘bare bones’ of the man and thus the ‘essence’ of an ideal Christian sanctity stripped of the divisive, distracting or dangerous fleshly body. As such, this model discursively provides the ideal for a male, monastic and reclusive religiosity which, by implication, could only be extended to women if they too, abandoned their bodies and took up a male subject position, stripped too of their signifying flesh, with their orifices safely sealed: in the words of Jerome, ‘Sin autem Christo magis voluerit servire quam saeculo, mulier esse cessabit, et dicitur vir’ [‘when she wants to serve Christ more than the world, then she shall cease to be called a woman and shall be called a man’].15 Thus, for the Church Fathers, as Gillian Cloke points out, ‘anyone holy enough to be an exemplar of the faith could not be a woman [. . .] they could only disguise the sex they had, either actively, in assuming the outward habit and guise of a man, or by assuming inward “male” habits of determination and courage in piety’.16 However, I argue that such a ‘holy disguise’ was subject to a perpetual double bind; for female ‘disguise’ was also a sign of an ontological duplicity inherited from Eve, something which forms a primary discourse in much of the guidance works written for enclosed women. IN PRAISE OF VIRGINITY: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST The history of treatises on virginity which prefigure the best-known of female guidance texts, Ancrene Wisse, is redolent with such attempts to rationalize fears of female bodily incursion upon the male intellectual sphere.17 Within a native English context, they loom particularly large in the writings of Aldhelm (d. 709– 10), abbot of Malmesbury, for example, who, at least according to Michael Lapidge and James L. Rosier, was ‘the first Englishman of letters [and] the most widely learned man produced in Anglo-Saxon England during its first four centuries of Latin Christendom’.18 Such an assessment is also endorsed by Andy Orchard, who regards Aldhelm as being ‘perhaps the most important figure in the history of Anglo-Latin, indeed of Anglo-Saxon literature’,19 an opinion which also seems to have been shared by Bede, who, in his Ecclesiastical History, referred to Aldhelm as ‘a man most learned in the Scriptures’, selecting for especial mention ‘a most excellent book on virginity [written] both in hexameter verse and in prose’ [‘Scripsit et de uirginitate librum eximium [.  .  .] et uersibus exametris et prosa conposuit’].20 Here Bede is identifying the work for which Aldhelm is probably

Jerome, ‘Commentarium in Epistolam ad Ephesios’, PL 26, cols. 459–554 (col. 533). Gillian Cloke, ‘This Female Man of God’: Women and Spiritual Power in the Patristic Age, AD 350–450 (London and New York, 1995), p. 220–1. 17 For a concerted examination of the gendering of virginity in the Middle Ages see Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2001). 18 Aldhelm: The Prose Works, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge and L. Rosier (Cambridge, 1985), p. 1. All translated quotations from Aldhelm’s work will be taken from this edition and will appear by page number parenthetically after references to the original Latin text. All references to the original text will be to Aldhelmi Malmesbiriensis: Prosa de Virginitate cum Glosa Latina atque Anglosaxonica, ed. Scott Gwara, Corpus Christianorum vols. 124–4a (Turnhout, 2001), henceforward Prosa. 19 Andy Orchard, The Poetic Art of Aldhelm (Cambridge, 1994), p. 1. 20 Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. 15

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Writing the Flesh best remembered: his treatise in praise of virginity, Prosa de Virginitate, a lengthy work written on request for a group of women either at Barking Abbey, or else for the abbesses of a group of English abbeys.21 In this work, Aldhelm combines a protracted examination of the theories of virginity with examples of ‘perfect’ virginity in practice, using a series of hagiographic exempla to illustrate his points. However, conscious that his audience of Anglo-Saxon aristocratic nuns had also very often been wives and mothers,22 he grapples and reworks much of his patristic source material in order to render it more appropriate to the circumstances of his immediate audience, which included non-virginal nuns.23 Such a reworking is characterized by concerted attempts on the part of Aldhelm to remove the problematic and sinful female body from the discourses of virginity themselves, creating a rift between its theories and its practices as he does so. For example, in an early explication of his reasons for authoring this text, Aldhelm praises his audience for their intellectual achievements, referring to them as ‘adoptive daughters of regenerative grace brought forth from the fecund womb of ecclesiastical conception through the seed of the spiritual word [. . .] through [the Church’s] maternal care’ [‘immo adoptivas regenerantis gratiae filias ex fecundo ecclesiasticae conceptionis utero spiritalis verbi semine progenitas per maternam viderit sollicitudinem divinis dogmatibus’].24 As Tereli Askwith has argued within this same context, ‘Aldhelm’s choice of language serves to foreground images of femininity and motherhood, yet at the same time, dissociate the women from their gendered bodies and their potentiality or reality of motherhood’.25 Within Aldhelm’s rhetoric, the discourses of fecundity, impregnation and birth normally attached to the female body are detached from that body (and, by implication, that of the text’s recipients) and reconfigured as metaphysical agents of ecclesiastical teaching and its pastoral mission. In effect, therefore, Aldhelm’s crafted discourse brings about a rift or, in the words of Luce Irigaray, a schism which separates off what Irigaray terms ‘matter-body’ from a culturally constructed ‘body’ which is nothing but a ‘socially valued, exchangeable body [and] a particularly mimetic expression of masculine values’.26 Thus, as Askwith also points out, rather than these

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Mynors (Oxford, 1969), book V, ch. 18, pp. 514/515. This is something which has been subject to some considerable debate in recent years, for a summary of which see Gwara’s introduction to his edition of the Prosa. As Stephanie Hollis has noted, it was fairly common practice for women to leave their husbands for a monastic life, in spite of ecclesiastical disapproval of this practice: Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church: Sharing a Common Fate (Woodbridge, 1992), p. 59. She takes as her evidence the regulations laid down in book II of Theodore’s Penitential, a mid-eighth-century compilation dating back to Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury between 669 and 690. This is discussed by Emma Pettit in ‘Holiness and Masculinity in Aldhelm’s Opus Geminatum de Virginitate’, in Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages, ed. P. H. Cullum and Katherine. J. Lewis (Cardiff, 2004), pp. 8–23. See also Tereli Askwith, ‘De Virginitate: From Patristic Background to Anglo-Saxon Audience’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Swansea University, 2009, for a more recent and protracted treatment of this material from a gender-theoretical perspective. Salih also points out in Versions of Virginity the tensions incurred by male writers on virginity who on the one hand advocated a gender equality as achievable by means of virginity, but who on the other hand seriously backtracked from any expression of such equality in practice, hastening at this point to ‘stuff cats back into their bags, with a visible struggle’ (p. 24). Prosa, II, lines 7–10, p. 35 (Prose Works, pp. 59–60). Askwith, ‘Patristic Background’, p. 139. Luce Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 799–811 (p. 802).

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Medieval Anchoritisms women themselves being recognized as actual or potential mothers whose bodies could prioritize them within this ecclesiastical ideology, they are interpellated as ‘adoptive daughters’ [‘adoptivas filias’] of the Church and its teachings, and their bodies are fetishized as ‘pure’. This produces the same sense of dislocation between the evidence of the body and the literary discourse used to configure it, thus rendering their relationship with Church authority highly contingent – again in Irigaray’s terms, an ‘appropriation [. . .] to public use’.27 The same can be said of other aspects of Aldhelm’s treatise. For example, wishing to illustrate how the bodies of his audience are implicated in the production and retention of virginity, the author turns to a variety of non-female bodies in order to animate his assertions. Most memorably, Aldhelm draws on the classical – and Pauline28 – image of the naked male wrestler in order to help him articulate the effort required to attain a perfect Christian life. In a description shot through with an electrifying homoerotic charge, Aldhelm foregrounds the male body in such as way as to elide that of the Christian woman almost entirely, configuring her struggle in terms of sagaces gimnosofistas [. . .] quodam agonitheta palestricis disciplinis et gimnicis artibus in gimnasio exerceri [. . .] ut alius strenua anthletarum luctamina cum aemulo sinuosis laterum flexibus desudans in meditullio scammatis flagrante delibutus lubrici liquoris nardo solerter exercere studeat.29 [talented athletes [. . .] training in the gymnasium through wrestling routines and gymnastic exercises [. . .] one, smeared with the ointment of slippery liquid, strives dextrously with his partner to work out the strenuous routines of wrestlers, sweating with the sinuous writhings of their flanks in the burning centre of the wrestling pit.]

Here, as we saw in the writings of Cassian, Benedict, Grimlaïcus and the author of Speculum Inclusorum, the potential for feminization inherent to discourses of virginity and its sealed bodies is overridden by the foregrounding of bodies which are deemed to be intensely male and masculine. In this passage, Aldhelm puts on display the classical athlete whose body epitomizes a combative masculine strength and prowess which excludes the woman and the inherent dangers attached to her entirely. Aldhelm’s intention here is clearly to erase the female ‘matter-body’ and enforce upon his audience an identification with those male bodies brought before its gaze as themselves paradigmatic of the virginity of which he writes. Elsewhere, too, Aldhelm draws enthusiastically upon the traditional image of the miles Christi, which, as we have seen, was a staple component within the discursive armoury of the male writer wishing to evade or escape the dangers accorded to femininity. Once more, therefore, Aldhelm configures his audience in terms of the male combatant, this time the loyal soldier who must contra horrendam superbiae bestiam simulque contra has virulentorum septenas Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, p. 802. Saint Paul uses the image in his letter to the Ephesians 6: 12, in which he invokes the image of the Christian as miles Christi, asserting: ‘For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and power, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.’ 29 Prosa, II, lines 11–18, pp. 33–7 (Prose Works, p. 60). 27

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Writing the Flesh vitiorum beluas, quae rabidis molaribus et venenosis genuinis inermes quosque ac virginitatis lorica spoliatos pudicitiaequa parma exutos atrociter discerpere nituntur.30 [fight with muscular energy against the horrendous monster of Pride and at the same time against those seven wild beasts of the virulent vices, who with rabid molars and venomous bicuspids strive to mangle violently whoever is unarmed and despoiled of the breastplate of virginity and stripped of the shield of modesty.]

Aldhelm’s desire here is again clearly to erase the female body from the discourse, invoking this time a somewhat overdetermined identification of the reader with the miles Christi. As Askwith argues, both this passage and the one focusing on the male athletes serve unequivocally to remind the women that they are not men, merely onlookers and occasional players in a man’s world, and their role, in fact, is to embody another idealized form of virginity which involves humility and submission to the (male) authority of the Church. As Askwith adds: ‘Though [Aldhelm] use[s] masculine imagery invoking the male body [. . .] ultimately his themes of submission and obedience are intended for the religious woman’.31 In other words, Aldhelm’s discourses of a gender-neutral (or, perhaps, double-gendered) virginity mask his determined retention and reinforcement of a gender binary which keeps his audience of powerful and highly influential abbesses nevertheless in their preordained place of submission to an overriding patriarchal authority. Again, in Irigaray’s terms, Aldhelm produces a ‘phallocratic’ model that carries ‘the force of law’.32 This is fully supported by the fact that, in this text, the primary battle of the miles Christi is waged against the ‘the horrendous monster of Pride’ [‘contra horrendam superbiae bestiam’] in particular, with each of the other deadly sins also configured as monsters or beasts. Within the medieval imagination, of course, Pride was closely associated with femininity, often manifesting itself as a delight in a decorative personal appearance and lavish costume.33 Indeed, Aldhelm goes on to develop this association, leaving his audience in no doubt that their former lives as wealthy aristocratic women and desirable dynastic and political pawns is what is actually under the spotlight. Such an alliance of femininity, female bodies in need of transformation, and their mingling within the closed and sacred spaces of the nunnery makes for a heady mixture which, in Aldhelm’s text, results in a quasi-allegorical outburst against some of the manifestations of Pride which barely disguises where his fears and antipathies lie: Ungues ritu falconum et accipitrum seu certe adinstar cavanorum accuuntur, quos naturaliter ingenita edendi necessitas instigat obunca pedum fuscinula et rapaci ungularum arpagine alites et sorices crudeliter insectando grassari.34 [Fingernails are sharpened after the manner of falcons or hawks, or more properly, to the likeness of the night-owl, whom the innate need for food naturally incites to Prosa, XI, lines 21–5, p. 29 (Prose Works, p. 68). Askwith, ‘Patristic Background’, p. 175. Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, p. 811. For a book-length study of the history of the sin of Pride, see Michael Eric Dyson, Pride: The Seven Deadly Sins (Oxford, 2006). See also Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (Lansing, MI, 1952). 34 Prosa, LVIII, lines 15–19, p. 737 (Prose Works, p. 128). 32 33 30 31

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Medieval Anchoritisms pursue and attack with cruelty small mice and birds with the curved trident of their feet, and the ravenous grappling hook of their talons.]

Aldhelm, then, is calling upon his audience to cast off the sinfulness of their own predatory femininity – a sinfulness which is allied to the devil himself and his ‘curved trident’ [‘fuscinula’] – in order to counter its dangerous effects. In so doing, they will produce a virginity which is both combative and masculine and can thus be ingested and appropriated by the male religious imaginary to serve its own ideological ends. At the same time, however, Aldhelm’s words also serve to remind his female audience of an ontology which is for ever a fallen one and, as such, for ever destined to produce deception and ravenous desire. Thus, whilst appearing to offer his audience a way out of this destructive cycle, at the same time Aldhelm also keeps them firmly reminded of their limitations in order to harness their increasing authority and prestige to the ground laid out by patriarchal hegemony. In this context, the words of Cloke, speaking of fifth-century holy women, hold true: ‘Saintly women might indeed be able to change the disposition of the empire, but they could not change the dispositions of the Church Fathers.’35 And, although the popularity of Aldhelm’s text entered into a decline following the Norman invasion and the decline of the double houses, nevertheless its cultural legacy can be heard resounding in other guidance writings for holy women, including Ancrene Wisse, as we shall see. GOSCELIN OF ST BERTIN AND THE RE-WRITING OF EVE One exception, however, is the early-eleventh-century guidance text written by Goscelin of St Bertin for his young anchoritic protégée, Eve of Wilton, in about 1080. The earliest known guidance text within the English anchoritic tradition, the Liber Confortatorius [‘Book of Consolation’] takes the form of a letter written in four books in which Goscelin heavily laments and, at times, bitterly admonishes Eve, a young nun of Wilton Abbey, for leaving for France without any indication that she was planning to do so. Eve had entered Wilton Abbey as a child oblate at the age of seven and, as one of the chaplains of the abbey at that time, Goscelin tells of how he had quickly been won over by her ‘kindnesses’ [‘beneficiis’] and she by his edifiying ‘talk’ [‘alloquiis’], explicitly reminding Eve of this at the beginning of book 1.36 Indeed, much of this first book is concerned with Goscelin’s recalling of the closeness of the relationship which had evidently developed between them and the articulating of his unmitigated devastation at Eve’s unannounced departure for France. At the text’s very onset, for example, in an admission which seems to go far beyond a mere trope, Goscelin confesses to his writing’s having been interrupted by a violent outpouring of grief: 35

Cloke, Female Man of God, p. 221. All references to Goscelin’s text will be taken from ‘The Liber confortatorius of Goscelin of St Bertin’, ed. C. H. Talbot, Analecta monastica, series 3, Studia Anselmiana 37, ed. M. M. Lebreton, J. Leclercq and C. H. Talbot (Rome, 1955), pp. 1–117 (henceforward Liber) and cited by Book, line and page number. The English translation is taken from Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber confortatorius, ed. Stephanie Hollis with W. R. Barnes, Rebecca Hayward, Kathleen Loncar and Michael Wright (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 97–207 (henceforward Book), here at Liber, l.3, p. 28 (Book, p. 102).

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Writing the Flesh Sed ecco, dum scribo, grassans dolor non potuit dissimulari; cecidere manus et usus scriptorii; rugitus et eiulatus inuasit me [. . .] Magnis clamoribus infremui: Sancta Maria, succurre miseris iuua pusillanimes.37 [But behold, even as I was writing, my suffering, running wild, could not be concealed. My hands have fallen and my writing skills have failed and I have been overcome by wailing and lamenting [. . .] I bellowed loudly: ‘Holy Mary, succour the unhappy; help the faint-hearted.’]

Goscelin’s sense of emasculation here at the loss of Eve is clear and, a little later, he speaks of Eve’s departure explicitly in terms of a lover’s desertion,38 lamenting overtly to her that her ‘heart is closed’ [‘obstrusum pectus’] to him,39 evidently struggling with an intention to configure their formerly close friendship as entirely a union of minds. Goscelin’s close relationship with his ward was forged at a time when male–female spiritual friendships within monastic contexts were at their height and the exchange of letters between them common, particularly on the continent.40 However, a sense of this particular relationship as having exceeded the boundaries set by such a tradition is made clear by the deeply personal and accusatory register into which Goscelin frequently slips, made explicit by his addendum to Eve: ‘But if ever your former love awakes and a panting storm of affections rises, there will be one to whom you may call from the depths of your marrow’ [‘Si quando autem pristine euigilauerit caritas et surrexerit anhela affectuum tempestas, erit cui de profundis medullarum signato corde clamares’].41 Whilst many recent commentators have been keen to locate such passionate avowal within the frame of spiritual friendship or the sometimes allegorical configuration of ‘ennobling love’, I suggest that Goscelin’s struggle to superimpose such rhetorical devices upon what is essentially a literary outpouring of personal emotion should not be elided in that process.42 As a result of this struggle, his text fails to fit happily into the common epistolary genre, despite its being compiled as a letter: letters tended to be brief and were often highly formulaic, whereas this one, as I have suggested, continually slips into a personal and far less rhetorically mediated register with which Goscelin palpably wrestles, and there is a tension between its dualistic role as personal missive to Eve and its likely appropriation as a public document during its transmission, or afterwards.43 On the other hand, it also Liber, lines 22–30, p. 27 (Book, p. 102). Liber, line 31 (Book, p. 105). Liber, line 8, p. 42 (Book, p. 118). See Hollis’s Introduction to Writing the Wilton Women, p. 3. For a helpful essay on the context of spiritual friendship in which Goscelin attempts to place himself, see Rebecca Hayward, ‘Spiritual Friendship and Gender Difference in the Liber confortatorius’, in Writing the Wilton Women, ed. Hollis, pp. 341–53. Hayward, however, sees Goscelin’s texts as occupying an already precarious – and therefore poignant – position between ‘the monastic tradition of friendship and the more knowing, Ovidian culture [. . .] where erotic desire found new forms of expression in chaste and openly sexual relationships’ (p. 353). 41 Liber, lines 12–14, p. 42 (Book, p. 118). 42 For a summary of scholarship on this issue, see Hayward, ‘Spiritual Friendship’, pp. 341–7. Hayward herself is also cautious on the issue, whilst acknowledging the sexual terminology frequently made use of by Goscelin. For a wider study on the discourses of ennobling love more generally, see C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love; In Search of a Lost Sensibility (Philadelphia, 1999). 43 There is no evidence to suggest that Eve ever received this letter but, in his Prologue, Goscelin refers 39 40 37

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Medieval Anchoritisms fails to adhere to what we would expect of an anchoritic guidance text, which tends to concern itself primarily with the physical and spiritual welfare of its audience rather than digress into an outpouring of personal emotion. And, as I have suggested, whilst Goscelin valiantly attempts to disguise his intentions by drawing upon common discourses associated with both these genres, in fact the Liber betrays a passion which always threatens to tip over into something more carnal, manifesting itself primarily via Goscelin’s relentless gaze upon both the present and the absent Eve. He tells her, for example, how at her profession alongside thirteen other young women (‘maidens with candles shining like stars’ [‘uirgines, coruscantibus cereis’]), he was struck ‘more deeply in my heart by your humble habit, your trembling approach, your face, blushing’ [‘ille humilis habitus, ille tremebundus acessus, ille suffusus uultus [.  .  .] altius uiscera’],44 characteristics which, for Goscelin, threw Eve fully into relief besides the other women. A little later, he reminds Eve (or confesses to her) how, at another feast, ‘I did not watch the groups of girls with robes of purple decked with gems and gold embroidery, outstanding in beauty, but you, with that beauty that the king of chastity has desired’ [‘non purpurata, non gemmata, non auro texta, non facie presentia puellarum agmina, sed te, ea specie quam concupiuit rex castitatis attendebam’], as a result of which, ‘The darts of love were fixed deeper and stuck fast; my wounded heart languished’ [‘Heserunt altius infixa spicula, caritatis languebant uulnerata precordia’], and he speaks frequently of his ‘sighs’ [‘gemitus’], ‘weaknesses’ [‘defectus’], ‘sick expectations’ [‘egras expectationes’], ‘empty days and nights’ [‘uacuos dies et noctes’], ‘the love of your longedfor soul’ [‘desiderantissime anime caritatem’].45 However these professions are read, by Goscelin’s own admission they were induced by his gazing upon the physical presence of Eve, which he now has to (re)present in writing in order to (re)capture it in her absence – her body, her youth and her carnal beauty. All of these Goscelin seems to have formerly drunk in with his senses whilst in Eve’s presence, as he now asks her to ‘drink in’ [‘haurire’] the written representation of his own desire, his ‘voice and [. . .] sighing words’ [‘uocem et uerba nostra suspiriosa’].46 References to Eve’s physicality thus endlessly accrue in this opening section, at times barely veiling an erotic subtext which Goscelin constantly attempts to allegorize. For example, he reminds her of a dream she once had in which he fed her ‘white bread’ [‘pane candidissimo’], adding that, whilst chewing the bread, ‘you found bits of gold in your mouth, which gradually you collected in your bosom’ [‘aureas in ore repertas, quas sensim in gremium colligebas’]. Later, these fragments of gold are made into an ‘eternal necklace’ [‘eternum monile’] with which she is to be adorned; invoking the Song of Songs, too, Goscelin tells Eve that to him she smelt of ‘nectar and balsam’ [‘nectar [. . .] et balsama’]; both her eloquence and her silence inflamed him, and he recalls with some small satisfaction how he was once an onlooker when Eve was to the text as ‘a private document of two people’ [‘archanum duorum’] (Liber, l. 12, p. 26 [Book, p. 99]), whilst acknowledging that it is likely to be read by others and render him ‘an object of mockery by the superciliousness of strangers’ [‘alieno supercilio infatuari’] (Liber, lines 16–17, p. 26 [Book, pp. 99–100). 44 Liber, lines 10–12, p. 28 (Book, pp. 102–3). 45 Liber, lines 8–10, p. 29 (Book, p. 104). 46 Liber, lines 16–17, p. 27 (Book, p. 101).

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Writing the Flesh greeted by the bishop with a ‘fatherly embrace’ [‘paterno sinu’].47 Throughout this section, Eve’s physical body is both anatomized and singled out for special attention – her eyes, her voice, her ears, her tongue, her breast – and prioritized over her discursive and virginal one by Goscelin. His voyeuristic act of writing thus captures its earlier effect upon him, which he then aims to transmit (and presuming upon Eve’s reciprocity of feeling in the process). Indeed, the intense physicality of his passion, whether requited, consummated, or neither, and its dominating of his spiritual fervour may well have led him to attribute Eve’s departure to his own culpability (‘these torments of separation, which were owing to my crimes’ [‘que meis debebantur sceleribus, hec separationis tormenta’]),48 something also implied by his rapid volte face after a second vivid description of her beauty which follows swiftly on: ‘From this point the manner of my speech is compelled to change, because reason approves of the path of virtue’ [‘Hinc mutari cogitur oratio, quia uirtutis quidem uiam comprobat ratio’].49 Much of the rest of Goscelin’s text, therefore, struggles to concern itself with more conventional matters: the spiritual support of Eve in her new anchoritic life; reinforcement of her resolve to endure her life as a recluse; the provision of a new ways of approaching the spiritual universe which she has chosen to occupy. And yet, like Aldhelm’s treatise, the work also bears an inherent ‘duplicity’, not because of the ambiguous unpredictability of its likely audience and reception, as some have suggested,50 but because Goscelin is, in effect, writing two texts palimpsestically: a book of exhortation for a newly enclosed anchorite, and a book of lamentation for the loss of his own earthly and spiritual passion. As many commentators have queried, exactly whom is the Liber Confortatorius meant to be consoling? I think what we have here, therefore, is as much a letter of unrequited passion by a man struggling to come to terms with the enormity of its implications, as it is a text which suppresses the worldly in order to provide guidance for the object of a professed spiritual affection. Perhaps one of Goscelin’s more successful rhetorical ploys in this context is to reverse traditional gender binaries within his text in an attempt to explode the problems of the troubling binary sexual matrix with which he seems to have found himself caught up – but which should have no place within the monastic setting (except, perhaps, in the context of renunciation or sponsalia Christi). For example, again at the start of book 1, when Goscelin self-consciously changes the direction of his text from his declaration of love and abandonment to more spiritual matters, he begins by depicting himself as the ‘mother soul, which with her womb panting brought you [Eve] to birth’ [‘Illa mater anima que te anhelis uisceribus peperit’]. 49 50 47

48

Liber, lines 15–21, p. 29 (Book, p. 104). Liber, lines 13–14, p. 27 (Book, p. 101). Liber, line 27, p. 29 (Book, p. 104). Gerald A. Bond, The Loving Subject: Desire, Eloquence and Power in Romanesque France (Philadelphia, 1995), p. 48, cited by Rebecca Hayward, ‘Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius: Complaints and Consolations’, in Writing the Wilton Women, ed. Hollis, pp. 355–67 (pp. 356–7). Bond’s focus is on the epistolary genre which, in the Middle Ages, was one with a double audience: both private and public. As Hayward points out in her essay, there are clues in Goscelin’s text that he is protecting himself against accusations of improper conduct and scandal in his anticipation that readers other than Eve will also have access to his letter. Tangentially to this, there is no evidence to suggest that Eve ever received his letter.

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Medieval Anchoritisms Like that mother, too, Goscelin despairs about the exile of his child, lamenting how Eve could desert her ‘mother’ with ‘as much cruelty as insolence’ [‘tam dure quam insulte’].51 Elsewhere, Goscelin configures himself as the ‘bruised reed’ [‘calamus quassatus’] of Isaiah 42: 3,52 or even in terms of the Virgin, that ‘matchless mother [who] stood beside the cross, gazing with her eyes overflowing’ [‘Stabat iuxta crucem illa mater singularis, illum undosis obtutibus respiciens’] at the imminent loss of her son.53 For Goscelin, Eve has been called as sacrificial Christic scapegoat who ‘had to be sacrificed so that we could be reconciled to God’ [‘Vt reconciliaremur Deo immolanda erat uictima’]; again, like Christ, Eve as an anchorite is the ‘appeasing and mediating victim, balanced on the scales of the cross, suspended between heaven and earth’ [‘placabilisque et mediatrix hostia in statera crucis librata, inter celum et terram suspensa’].54 Goscelin’s reversal of gender-role associations continues in his drawing upon traditional depictions of the anchoritic life as a military battle and the anchorite as a seasoned and accomplished soldier. As we have seen, this was an image most commonly used to depict male coenobites and anchorites throughout the Middle Ages and, as we saw in the case of Aldhelm, sometimes nuns, but rarely used in any protracted or insistent way to configure the female anchorite.55 Goscelin, however, disrupts this norm in a somewhat overdetermined way, again in an attempt to erase Eve’s ‘matter-body’ from the picture and reconfigure it in terms of the intact and impenetrable miles Christi. It is not a ‘matter-body’ which, as in the case of Aelred or the Ancrene Wisse author, is abject and degenerate, however; it is a ‘matter-body’ which has aroused deep feelings of love and profound respect in Goscelin, indivisible from the spiritual beauty which he recognizes in Eve. As such, it is arguably more dangerous to him – and yet he is unable to disparage or denigrate it in order to expel it, as do so many other male writers of the period. Ultimately, therefore, Goscelin invites Eve into himself as ‘the home of your soul in Christ’ [‘anime tue domicilium in Christo’],56 but has to eliminate her feminine self from his text in order to allow for this possibility. This is further evidenced as early as book 1, where Goscelin performs a type of gender alchemy on Eve, exhorting her to victory in battle and other militaristic activities which ‘are not dependent on sex, age, or physical strength, but on mettle, Liber, lines 28–31, p. 29 (Book, p. 105). Liber, line 17, p. 32 (Book, p. 107). Liber, lines 1–2, p. 31 (Book, p. 106). Liber, lines 5–12, p. 54 (Book, p. 133). For my account of the anchorite’s role as scapegoat, see Chapters 1 and 2. 55 However, this is likely, in part, to be because two of the three prominent pre-fourteenth-century guidance texts extant reflect a changing epistemology in which virginity becomes increasingly feminized (on which the primary treatment remains Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘The Virgin’s Tale’, in Feminist Readings in Medieval English Literature: The Wife of Bath and all her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson [London, 1994], pp. 165–94). The polarities of this position have, however, been challenged more recently by Salih in Versions of Virginity, who argues that the distinction between the virgin as sponsa and miles is not as clear as their being posited as binaries may suggest (p. 10). Whilst I would agree with Salih to some extent, nevertheless, from the evidence examined in this present study, it was unusual for a woman to be interpellated as miles as insistently as a man and the term was more frequently made use of as a way of minimizing the implication of a femininity which would inevitably be foregrounded by a focus on a role as sponsa. The latter, in fact, as we saw in Aldhelm (and which is also true of Goscelin), is the constant ‘elephant in the room’ which haunts the text. 56 Liber, line 5, p. 117 (Book, p. 206). 53 54 51

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Writing the Flesh on constancy, on a soul unconquerable in the conquest of all things’ [‘non sunt sexuum, non etatum, non membrorum, sed magnanimitatis, sed constantie, sed animi ad omnia uincenda inuicti’].57 Within the same breath, by contrast he figures himself as ‘without arms and worthless’ [‘inermis et uacuus’], ‘without any strength’ [‘sine omne uirtute’], as ‘weak’ [‘eneruem’] and ‘soft’ [‘mollem’] and as one who ‘gave birth to you and loved you’ [‘peperi te et dilexi’], in effect stripping himself of any vestige of authoritative masculinity.58 Goscelin therefore constructs a new, safer sex/gender matrix by reversing the heterosexually charged one which has proved so difficult for him to accommodate, an innovation which he hopes will remove both Eve and himself from culpability and which will also help him to master his almost ungovernable grief at the loss of her. Thus, as the text progresses, Eve is transformed from the passive object of desire and vessel to be filled by discourse which he once considered her to be,59 into an active and fearsome warrior who wields the ‘sword of slaughter’ [‘ferrum occisionis’]60 and whose ‘natural’ milieu is now the ‘tumultuous clamour of war’ [‘incondito belli clangore’].61 From now on she will ‘arm’ herself with fortitude [‘armeris fortitudine’] and set up her own humility as the ‘fortification of good works’ [‘bonorum operum [. . .] munimentum’].62 As part of this concerted regendering, Goscelin also takes some trouble to separate Eve off from her fallen Edenic precursor and namesake, the latter receiving minimal attention in the text; Adam, when he is mentioned, tends to remain in isolation.63 This remains the case even when Goscelin makes mention of the seductive qualities of the apple (‘beautiful in appearance and pleasant to eat’ [‘pulchrum uisu et ad uescendum suaue’]). Normally a catalyst for some kind of formulaic anti-feminist diatribe in the male-authored text, even the forbidden fruit fails to invoke this knee-jerk response in Goscelin. Instead, the fruit-notto ‘conquers the first Adam’ [‘Vicerat [. . .] primum Adam’], leaving Eve entirely out of the picture.64 Elsewhere, too, Goscelin reconfigures the serpent as having ‘seduced man’ [‘hominem seduxit’],65 rendering the seduction generic, rather than echoing its normal association with female ontology and having Eve explicitly shoulder the blame. Even when the Edenic Eve is invoked, she is almost an irrelevancy: she is the ‘old Eve’ [‘antique Eue’]66 exempted from blame; she is also Liber, lines 26–8, p. 36 (Book, p. 112). Liber, lines 21–9, p. 36 (Book, p. 112). 59 For example, Goscelin describes himself as pouring advice into Eve’s ears ‘as if I were giving birth’ [‘ut parturiens’], thus identifying with both the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and queering his own gender identity in the process. Again, this is symptomatic of Goscelin’s struggle to subsume his passion for Eve within a rhetoric of spiritual devotion. See Liber, l.18, p. 28 (Book, p. 103). 60 Liber, lines 26–7, p. 51 (Book, p. 130). 61 Liber, line 6, p. 63 (Book, p. 144). 62 Liber, lines 24–7, p. 92 (Book, p. 177). 63 For a brief discussion of Goscelin’s elision of Eve from the Edenic space, see Rebecca Hayward and Stephanie Hollis, ‘The Female Reader in the Liber Confortatorius’, in Writing the Wilton Women, ed. Hollis, pp. 385–99 (pp. 389–91). For a more protracted treatment, see Gopa Roy, ‘“Sharpen your Mind with the Whetstone of Books”: The Female Recluse as Reader in Goscelin’s Liber Confortatorius, Aelred of Rivaulx’s De Institutione Inclusarum and the Ancrene Wisse’, in Women, the Book and the Godly, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 113–23. 64 Liber, lines 12–14, p. 132 (Book, p. 132).. 65 Liber, line 29, p. 53 (Book, p. 133). 66 Liber, line 7, p. 70 (Book, p. 152). 57

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Medieval Anchoritisms the second Eve, Mary, and Ecclesia: ‘For, just as Eve was made from the side of Adam, so the Church has been redeemed and has grown from the side of Christ’ [‘Nam sicut ex latere Ade fabricate est Eua, ita ex latere Christi redempta creuit ecclesia’]. By implication, Eve of Wilton joins Eve, Mary and Ecclesia as part of ‘the body of Christ by an inseparable mixing’ [‘per inseparabilem mixturam fit Christi corpus’].67 Indeed, this refusal to negatively foreground his protégée’s body by associating her with her carnal foremother is something which Goscelin had prepared for in book 1 in his account of Eve’s meeting with the bishop, mentioned above: Quotiens te pontifex noster paterno sinu et uoce tali excipiebat: Eua mater uiuentium, ego alludens ad nomen: illa, inquam, mater uiuentium, hec erit filia uiuentium.68 [Whenever our bishop greeted you with his fatherly embrace and with these words: ‘Eve, mother of the living’, I, playing with the name, said: ‘that Eve is the mother of the living; this Eve will be the daughter of the living’.]

As Rebecca Hayward and Stephanie Hollis point out, this is in marked contrast to the reminder of Eve’s ontological roots which was made by Hilary of Orléans in his eulogy to her after her death in Angers in 1120.69 Thus we see Goscelin’s love for Eve invoking a selective re-reading of the master narrative to remove from her any taint of blame for human sin but, in order to do so, Goscelin must also minimize the culpability of her forerunner and concentrate instead on the Edenic Eve as ecclesial typology and mother of the saved as well as the living. Goscelin’s treatment of sin is also necessarily dictated by this endeavour to subvert traditional gender norms as part of his protective mechanisms. As I have suggested, as the miles Christi at the centre of the discourse, Eve is not subject to an interpellation by the same fears of the feminine which we saw operating in Aldhelm’s text, for example, and, in fact, Goscelin never concerns himself directly with her as virgin. On the contrary, she is depicted as an active, masculinized attacker of the seven deadly sins, a soldier ‘in single combat’ [‘ad singulare’] rather than as victim of them.70 Instead of prowling monsters, the sins are more ephemerally depicted as ‘spirits’ who, once conquered, can pose no further threat to the person previously beset by them.71 Even on the odd occasion when Goscelin does choose to bestialize sins as ‘dogs of the devil [. . .] toothed with bitter malignity’ [‘canibus demoniacis [.  .  .] acri inuidia’], with whom Eve as ‘calf ’ [‘uitulam’] is ‘locked in’ [‘inclusam’] they are, he tells Eve, ultimately ‘without power’ [‘sine uiribus’] in the face of ‘the beams of the holy cross’ [‘cornibus sancte crucis’] with which she is now ‘armed’ [‘armata’]. 72 And, in recalling the words of Luke 10: 19 (which, in turn, makes reference to the bruising of the serpent’s head by the Edenic Eve in Genesis 3: 15), ‘I have given Liber, lines 10–14, p. 90 (Book, p. 174). Liber, lines 18–20, p. 29 (Book, p. 104). 69 Hayward and Hollis, ‘Female Reader’, p. 390. Hilary’s words are recorded in Hilary of Orléans, ‘Die Gedichte und Mysterienspiele des Hilarius von Orléans’, ed. N. M. Häring, Studi Medievali, 3rd series, 17 (1976), pp. 915–68 (p. 925). 70 Liber, line 1, p. 49 (Book, p. 136). 71 Liber, pp. 56–9 (Book, pp. 136–9). 72 Liber, lines 22–3, p. 49 (Book, p. 128). 67

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Writing the Flesh you power to tread on serpents and scorpions [. . .] and nothing will harm you’ [‘dedi uobis potestatem calcandi supra serpents et scorpions [. . .] et nichil uos nocebit’],73 Goscelin again removes both Eve of Eden and Eve of Wilton entirely from the framework of fleshly and sinful culpability within which women are cast in those other texts examined in this study so far. The same remains true of Goscelin’s textual conception of the physical space which Eve is to inhabit. Unlike those other texts written specifically for female anchorites which configure them as always already open and permeable and in need of being closed up and secured, the cell which Goscelin envisages for Eve is a feminine ‘cave’ [‘speluncam’] and an ‘asylum from the storm of the world, a house of refuge from the eddy of evils’ [‘asilium a mundi tempestate, domus refugii a malorum turbine’].74 It is a ‘small place’ [‘rerum paruitas’]75 where she should remain ‘entombed’ [‘sepultam’].76 Moreover, although Eve’s ears should be ‘hedged [. . .] with thorns’ [‘sepi aurem tuam spinis’] and ‘the windows of your cell be closed against stories and idle talk’ [‘Celle, lingue et aurium fenestre a fabulis et uaniloquiis, immo maliloquiis, sint obserate’], Goscelin adds that the window of that cell should nevertheless be sufficiently large to admit an extensive library of books for Eve to read (that is to say works by Jerome, Augustine, Gregory and other Church Fathers). Indeed, if this is not the case and the library cannot be admitted to the anchorhold, then the window should be at least large enough for Eve to read these books ‘brought up to it from outside’ [‘a foris appositam’]. This, in turn, will allow her defensive strategies to operate both externally and internally, facilitated by the written word; as Goscelin urges her: ‘sharpen your blunted mind with the whetstone of books’ [‘hebetatam mentem cote librorum exacue’],77 books which, of course, he hopes will include his own. Unlike Aelred, whose anxieties regarding anchoritic permeability are extensively articulated in the guidance written for his sister, as we have seen, for Goscelin, the anchorhold should be permeable only in order to allow the influence of the Fathers and himself to enter both Eve and the sacred space that her anchoritic practices will produce: rather than be silent, therefore, Goscelin would have Eve communicate via her window and, inside the anchorhold, raise her voice loud and ‘sing [the psalter] as if you were in the sight of angels’ [‘cane sicut in conspectu angelorum’].78 Working within such a dichotomous context, then, and in order to exempt Eve from the culpability which he is struggling not to impose upon her, Goscelin can only configure her as an ideal and idealized anchorite; she is thus also configured as a ‘solitary turtledove’ [‘turtur solitaria’], albeit one in a foreign land,79 a ‘solitary with the Lord’ [‘cum Domino solitaria’],80 the ‘almswoman of Christ’ [‘Christi elemosinaria’],81 all of which attempt erasure of the troubling body which has aroused in him such wide swings of emotion, and redefinition of that body as that 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 73

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Liber, line 26, p. 49 (Book, p. 128). Liber, line 2, p. 78 (Book, p. 160). Liber, line 3, p. 78 ( Book, p. 160). Liber, line 8, p. 79 (Book, p. 162). Liber, lines 4–31, p. 80 (Book, p. 163). Liber, line 17, p. 82 (Book, p. 165). Liber, line 32, p. 36 (Book, p. 112). Liber, line 15, p. 80 (Book, p. 163). Liber, line 3, p. 104 (Book, p. 190).

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Medieval Anchoritisms of the sponsa Christi. However, whilst at first Goscelin’s use of the discourses of sponsalia also provide him with a seemingly safe strategy, even that tips over into a reminder that, now in the arms of Christ, Eve was nevertheless formerly his; Goscelin therefore cannot help but enact an intervention and become a third party within this new, divine coupling: Age ergo, karissima, ut sit Dominus inter me et te, et in se astringat pectore, quos interim disternimauit corpora.82 [Therefore bring it about, sweetest one, that the Lord may be between you and me, and may bind us together in himself in our hearts, whom for the time being he has separated in body.]

A little later, Goscelin’s struggle topples even further to betray a barely sublimated sense of rivalry with a Christ who has ‘won’ Eve from him, in spite of what Goscelin believes to be his own ‘prior claim’ over her: quam nunc plango quasi uite iocunditatem perdidisse, aliquando gaudeam interuentricem repperisse, ualente Domino de damnis nostris melius fructificare. Sit mihi iam patrona pro filia, cuius tam indignus sum prerogatiua, quam impar uita.83 [although I now lament having lost someone, as if she were the delight of my life, I shall rejoice at some time to have found her again, as one who intervenes for me, since the Lord is able to make out of our losses a profit of greater value. May I now have a patron in place of a daughter, of whose prior claim I am as unworthy as I am unequal to her in life.]

It would seem that, for Goscelin, such is his love for Eve that even Christ presents as a rival, albeit a worthy and superior one, invoking in him a crisis which is much more far-reaching than the mere loss of a dearly loved protégée and companion. Eve’s departure has brought about for Goscelin a questioning of the tenets of the master narrative itself and, in many ways, the Liber Confortatorius is less an anchoritic guidance text than a struggle with himself and attempt to rewrite that master narrative from a non-misogynistic and all-inclusive viewpoint. And, ironically, this is best summed up by the fraught, recriminatory and pain-ridden onset of his narrative where he announces that the text is ‘to one shut in from one shut out’ [‘Incluse exclusus’].84 By the time the text reaches its conclusion, however, his rhetoric has done its job, producing in Goscelin the hope that he will one day be safely reunited with Eve in eternity and – through her mediation alone – be one with her within the body of Christ. ANCRENE WISSE AND THE MASTER NARRATIVE The Ancrene Wisse author’s treatment of the enclosed female and her body is not so accommodating: comprising a detailed guide written initially for a group of Liber, lines 18–20, p. 34 (Book, p. 110). Liber, lines 26–29, p. 34 (Book, p. 110). 84 Liber, line 1, p. 26 (Book, p. 99). 82 83

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Writing the Flesh three female recluses and drawing, in part, on Aelred’s De Institutione Inclusarum, the text was produced by an anonymous male author during the first quarter of the thirteenth century.85 Soon, however, it was subject to major revision by its original author in order to address a much larger group of women living together as recluses (and this is an issue to which I will return in my final chapter). Such was the text’s popularity that over the course of the next three centuries it would be translated into Latin, French and Anglo-Norman, with one copy even being adapted and interpolated for a likely Lollard audience.86 For the purposes of this study, however, I focus on the version edited from the revised original, found in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, because of its proximity to the original text and because, although addressing a widening audience, its audience was still clearly envisaged as female and anchoritic.87 Unlike Aldhelm and Goscelin, however, both of whom, for different reasons and in different ways, attempt to deny or erase the flesh-and-blood female body almost entirely from the frameworks of their texts,88 the Ancrene Wisse author’s much later treatment of that same body takes up and develops a number of those anxieties which we have seen manifested in Aelred’s writing, resulting in a relentless foregrounding of the female body as malign influence. This, of course, is hardly surprising within a climate of naturalized misogynistic sentiment co-existing alongside a sustained increase in women wishing to enter the holy life throughout Europe during the period,89 something which makes Goscelin’s treatment all the more remarkable, as I have suggested. The extent and intensity of such a foregrounding, however, is perhaps more unexpected in the context of its being directed at women who had already been carefully scrutinized and institutionally endorsed as anchorites.90 This, in turn, may lead us to reflect upon thirteenth-century attitudes towards the sacred female body within ecclesiastical circles and, more pertinently, what the effects may have been upon a specifically female audience which was also configured as the upholder of an otherwise paradigmatic sanctity. How, for example, did female aspirants to the anchoritic life respond to being reminded of their own flesh as sinful ‘garment’ or their ontology as hawk-like and monstrous? Unable to cast it On the dating of this text see Bella Millett, ‘The Origins of Ancrene Wisse: New Answers, New Questions’, Medium Aevum 61 (1992), pp. 206–28. 86 This is a version which is extant in Magdalene College, Cambridge, MS Pepys 2498, and has been edited by A. Zettersen, The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, EETS os 274 (London, New York and Toronto, 1976). 87 Unless otherwise stated, all references to Ancrene Wisse will be from Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, 2 vols., vol. I, EETS os 325 (Oxford, 2005). The translations are also Millett’s, taken from Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses, ed. and trans. Bella Millett (Exeter, 2009). The page numbers are the same throughout both editions. 88 This is not to say that Aldhelm does not foreground the female body in his retelling of the lives of the virgin martyrs elsewhere in his Prosa. Indeed, they take up a prime position. However, the treatment of the female body in the virgin martyrologies announces the very dangers – and their control – which he elsewhere tries to eliminate. Both are essentially expressions of a deeply ingrained cultural misogyny. 89 Again, on this see the various essays in Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy. Also useful for an account of the early English tradition is Tom Licence, ‘Evidence of Recluses in Eleventh-Century England’, Anglo-Saxon England 36 (2007), pp. 221–34. 90 On the routine and ritual for the enclosing of female anchorites in England during the later period, see Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 92–124. See also Jones, ‘Ceremonies of Enclosure’. 85

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Medieval Anchoritisms off or drive it out without denying a negatively interpellated body entirely, we may rightly wonder how those thousands of women throughout Europe in the later Middle Ages, who flocked in ever-increasing numbers to the anchorhold and other locations in order to live out a semi-regulated or independent religious life, were able to configure a life of sanctity which took into account, rather than rejected wholesale, their own female flesh and bodies. In the remainder of this chapter and the next, therefore, I will examine some of the ways in which such negatively charged, male-orchestrated discourse could be reconfigured to allow them to find their own, equal – or meaningful – place within it and evade what Cixous defines as a ‘masochistic prostitution of [a woman’s] body to a desire that is not her own and that leaves her in her well-known state of dependency’.91 The belief in the ontological foundations of female dependency can, of course, again be traced back to that master narrative beginning in Eden invoked at the beginning of this chapter and aired again during my discussion of Eve of Wilton. In response to her transgression and her illicit desire to ‘know’, Eve’s punishment is not only to have her body inserted into the realm of the Kristevan abject in which permeable, open and leaky bodies act as a reminder of a perpetual underlying disorder (‘in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children’), but to render such abjection as foundational to ‘natural’ human gender relations (‘thou shalt be under thy husband’s power, and he shall have dominion over thee’).92 Likewise, the duplicitous serpent, usually gendered male in keeping with its phallic appearance and satanic associations,93 is punished with a similar abjection: for his attempt to usurp the position of an all-knowing and speaking God, he is stripped of his masculine prerogative of self-determination and subjected to the Law. As a result of this newly imposed emasculation, his phallic, upright stance is reduced forever to flaccid, impotent, slithering abjection: ‘upon thy breast shalt thou go, and earth shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel’.94 In this way, both Eve and the serpent are destined to be locked in perpetual confrontation with one another within the realm of the abject, each vying to outdo and subjugate the other within this new, feminine space. Whilst this ‘battle of the abject’ was to become a common theme in Christian literature, from that of the Church Fathers onwards, although rejected by Goscelin, as discussed above, it most certainly takes up centre stage in Ancrene Wisse and its associated texts: the so-called Katherine Group and Wooing Group.95 Like Ancrene Cixous, ‘Sorties’, p. 100. Genesis 3: 16. In her Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva considers abjection in terms of a psychic borderlessness, a female-associated realm based upon enforced separation from the mother which threatens meaning itself, since all meaning is predicated upon ‘identity, system, order [. . .] borders, positions, rules’. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1982), p. 4. For Kristeva, too, the symbolic order, policed according to a male Imaginary, maintains its own boundaries by performing an exclusion or attempting to control the abject. However, the abject can never really be eliminated since it forms part of our own identities. 93 The Aberdeen Bestiary (Aberdeen University Library MS 24), for example, directly associates the serpent and the devil on fol. 71v: ‘serpens id est diabolus’ [‘the serpent, that is the devil’]. An edition of this text, along with a translation, is available online at http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/intro.hti. 94 Genesis 3: 14–15. 95 The ‘Katherine Group’ is a title used to denote the five works grouped together in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 34 (and in various combinations in a number of other manuscripts): the lives of the three virgin martyrs, Seinte Katerine, Seinte Margarete, and Seinte Iuliene; a treatise advocating 91

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Writing the Flesh Wisse, this entire collection comprises a series of male-authored works written specifically for women aspiring to or already living a holy life of chastity and anchoritic enclosure, as mentioned above, and it is still considered likely that this body of writing, originating from somewhere in the West Midlands during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, may have been penned by the same author for the same or similar audience.96 Whatever the truth of that supposition, it was certainly composed within an area with particularly strong links to French and Anglo-Norman culture and the initial audience was clearly conversant with both the English and French vernaculars.97 All five Katherine Group texts were also written using a closely related literary dialect and register.98 The links between them are further reinforced by the fact that the texts are often found together in the same manuscripts and share imagistic, thematic and rhetorical techniques which seem to go beyond what Elizabeth Salter has termed ‘the practical relationship between function and style’ which we might expect to find in works directed at a specific type of audience.99 The Wooing Group forms a similar subgroup of associated texts. Comprising four lyrical mediations focusing primarily on the love of Christ for the human soul, these texts were presumably devised as required reading for the enclosed or aspiring female anchorite.100 All these texts seem to have served to focus the attention of the enclosed woman on the particular demands of her



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religious virginity as opposed to marriage, Hali Meiðhad; and a treatise on the custody of the soul, Sawles Warde. Whilst there is no concrete evidence to suggest common authorship, Millett asserts that ‘there are good reasons for treating these works at least provisionally as a single group with a common origin’ (Bella Millett, Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, Annotated Bibliographies of Old and Middle English Literature, vol. II [Cambridge, 1996]), p. 6. The edition of Hali Meiðhad used in this chapter is that edited by Bella Millett and Jocelyn WoganBrowne in Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse (Oxford, 1990), pp. 2–43. The ‘Wooing Group’, which comprises a series of devotional poems focusing on the body of Christ and the Virgin, is thought to have been written earlier, also for the attention of female anchorites. See Millett, Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, especially pp. 5–6 and p. 39. For a list of the manuscripts in which this group is to be found, see p. 61. Millett addresses this issue and the debates surrounding it in Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, pp. 13–15. See Millett, Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, p. 13, for a summary of scholarship on the subject. See also Bella Millett, ‘Women in No Man’s Land: English Recluses and the Development of Vernacular Literature in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed. Carole M. Meale (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 86–103. Here Millett argues for the importance of English recluses such as those under scrutiny here for bridging the gap between a Latinate ecclesiastical culture and a vernacular, oral culture. For a full-length treatment of aspects of this subject see Cate Gunn, Ancrene Wisse: From Pastoral Literature to Vernacular Spirituality (Cardiff, 2008). This dialect is generally known as the ‘AB language’ and has been the subject of much scholarship, for which see Millett, Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, especially pp. 8–9, 10–11, 17–21. For a more recent discussion, see Richard, Dance, ‘The AB Language: the Recluse, the Gossip and the Language Historian’, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 57–82. On the Anglo-French connection, see D. A. Trotter, ‘The Anglo-French Lexis of Ancrene Wisse: A Re-evaluation’, in the same volume, pp. 83–101. Elizabeth Salter [Zeeman], Review of Þe Wooing of Ure Lauerd, ed. W. Meredith Thompson, EETS os 241 (London, 1958), Review of English Studies, n.s. 13 (1962), pp. 166–7. For an account of the manuscript groupings of these texts within the extant manuscripts, including a helpful grid, see Ancrene Wisse Parts 6 and 7, ed. G. Shepherd (London, 1959; repr. Exeter, 1985), especially p. xiv. On the Wooing Group and its origins, see Millett, Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, pp. 5–6 and pp. 13–17. See also the recent volume edited by Susannah Mary Chewning, The Milieu and Context of the Wooing Group (Cardiff, 2010).

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Medieval Anchoritisms religious vocation, one serving as a guide for her modus operandi, some aimed at explication and reinforcement, others as a means of meditating on the Passion and leading the reader to a more intense type of contemplation, which bordered on the mystical. In all of these texts, however, the female body is rendered highly visible and is frequently aligned with the type of pervasive and haunting abjection mentioned above. In this same context, Robert Hasenfratz has suggested that one of the most significant characteristics of the Ancrene Wisse author’s literary strategy is that he encourages a ‘relentlessly allegorical and exegetical way of reading’.101 Indeed, this can also be said of most of those texts included in both the Katherine Group and the Wooing Group; but for Hasenfratz the primary allegory in Ancrene Wisse lies in the ‘quasi-mystical’ elements of the text, which invite the female anchorite to identify with the ‘soul’ as bride of Christ, like a lady awaiting her absent lord.102 Here, Hasenfratz’s reading of the allegorical content is decidedly more positive than negative: he prioritizes those aspects of the text with which the audience of gentle or noble women would readily identify – that is to say discourses of chivalry and nobility through which the biblical Song of Songs is refracted and which encourage the female anchorite to respond to Christ as his bride.103 Most prevalent amongst these discourses is that which is generated by the protracted allegory which dominates Part Seven of the text, within which Christ is cast as the LoverKnight and the enclosed woman as his spouse, besieged in a castle surrounded by her enemies whilst her husband is away: A leafdi wes mid hire fan biset al abuten, hire lond al destruet, ant heo al poure inwið an earðene castel. A mihti kings luue wes þah biturnd upon hire swa unimete swiðe þet he for wohlech sende hire his sonden, an efter oðer, ofte somet monie; sende hire beawbelez baðe feole ant feire, sucurs of liueneð, help of his hehe hird to halden hire castel. Heo underfeng al as on unrecheles, ant swa wes heard iheortet þet hire luue ne nahte he neauer beo þe neorre. Hwet wult tu mare? He com him selof on ende; schawde hire his feire neb, as þe þe wes of alle men feherest to bihalden; spec se swiðe swoteliche, ant words se murie þet ha mahten deade arearen to liue; wrahte feole wundres ant dude muchele meistries biuoren hire ehsihðe; schawde hire his mihte; talde hire of his kinedom; bead to makien hire cwen of al þet he ahte. [A lady was completely surrounded by her enemies, her land laid waste, and she herself quite destitute, in a castle of earth. But a powerful king had fallen in love with her so passionately that he sent his messengers to woo her, one after another, often many Ancrene Wisse, ed. Robert Hasenfratz, The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, 2000), online at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/awintro.htm. Here, Hasenfratz also briefly discusses the mystical elements of Ancrene Wisse in his introduction to the text. 102 Robert Hasenfratz, ‘“Efter hire euene”: Lay Audiences and the Variable Asceticism of Ancrene Wisse’, in Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs, ed. McAvoy and Hughes-Edwards, pp. 145–60 (p. 152). 103 For a thorough treatment of this aspect of the text, see Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘Ancrene Wisse and Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd: The Thirteenth-Century Female Reader and the Lover Knight’, in Women, the Book and the Godly, ed. Jane Taylor and Lesley Smith (London, 1995), pp. 137–47. More recently, Innes-Parker has revisited this theme in her essay ‘The Legacy of Ancrene Wisse: Translations, Adaptations, Influences and Audience, with Special Attention to Women Readers’, in Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Wada, pp. 145–73 (pp. 156–7). Also useful as an overview is the article by Rosemary Woolf, ‘The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight in Medieval English Literature’, Review of English Studies n.s. 13 (1962), pp. 1–16. 101

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Writing the Flesh together; he sent her many splendid presents of jewellery, provisions to support her, help from his noble army to hold her castle. She accepted everything as if it meant nothing to her, and was so hard-hearted that he could never come closer to winning her love. What more do you want? At last he came himself; showed her his handsome face, as the handsomest of all men in appearance; spoke so very tenderly, and with words so beguiling that they could raise the dead to life; did many amazing things and performed great feats before her eyes; demonstrated his power to her, told her about his kingdom; offered to make her queen of all that he owned.]104

There can be no doubt that the female anchorite here is being recast in terms of the life she has left behind, but viewed through an idealistically (and ideologically) refracted lens; she is the Lady of chivalric romance, but now recast to occupy a devotional-mystical frame. However, as Christopher Cannon has recently argued, the dynamics of the secular world of the Welsh Marches which bore witness to the text’s origins are also clearly embedded here in this configuration.105 Siege, warfare, hostage-taking and rescue were all too common in the unstable borderland area between England and Wales, and very often the women of the Marcher nobility, as commodities for dynastic exchange, found themselves caught up in all of these scenarios.106 Indeed, Cannon goes so far as to suggest that those anchoritic women who made up the initial audience may regularly have witnessed such skirmishes ‘through their “church window”’,107 rendering them onlookers upon a way of life of which they both were, and were no longer a part. This is something to which I will return in my discussion of borderland anchorites in Chapter 5, but there is much internal evidence to suggest that the author of this text is keenly aware of his audience’s socio-ideological background and he is clearly attempting to mould his work to suit both that background, the experiences it generated and, of course, their previous reading practices, in order to shape their spiritual lives.108 In this passage, too, there is also a strong sense of female dependency upon male – and masculine – military prowess for the woman’s own salvation. However, unlike Goscelin’s text, at no point is this militaristic discourse ever transferred to the woman herself in order to render her miles Christi and facilitate an evasion of her traditional gender constraints. Instead, the author takes great care to confine both her sex and gender within rigid heteronormative boundaries which run with, rather than disrupt, Ancrene Wisse, 7.68–80, pp. 146–7. The geo-biographical aspects of the text have recently been examined by Christopher Cannon in a highly innovative and illuminating essay, ‘The Place of the Self: Ancrene Wisse and the Katherinegroup’, in his The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford, 2007), pp. 139–71. This is something which I will take up again in Chapter 5. 106 The little that we know about those identifiable female anchorites from powerful Marcher families would completely bear this out. The de Braose family, for example, was to generate two renowned anchorites who entered the anchorhold in their widowhood: Annora and Loretta, both of whom had married into other powerful families before embarking upon the anchoritic life in 1232 and 1219 respectively. Both, too, had been caught up in and had suffered under the traumatic reign of King John at the end of the twelfth century. In the early thirteenth-century, Katharine de Audley, whose father, John Giffard, had been rewarded with Marcher lands during the first wars of the Norman English against the Welsh, also entered the anchorhold at Ledbury in 1312, seemingly, in part, to avoid the type of dynastic remarriage to which many Marcher widows appear to have been subject. For a brief account of these three women, see Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 165–6; pp. 168–9. I am currently preparing a study of these three women for publication. 107 Cannon, Grounds of English Literature, p. 160. 108 See Innes-Parker, ‘Legacy’. 104 105

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Medieval Anchoritisms contemporary gender ideologies. Thus, at this possible moment of slippage, with the woman locked up in her castle surrounded by her enemies, instead of taking up arms herself, as Eve of Wilton and her male equivalents were exhorted to do, she must wait for Christ to take up arms on her behalf: in true Romance fashion, her passivity thus facilitates the actions of men and permits legitimate interaction between them, leaving the Lady anchorite as a mere ‘bit-player’ in the triangular drama,109 and forcing her to remain in her common state of dependency. Like the Lady of popular romance, too, this allegory also configures her as both hard-hearted and contemptuous; indeed, as the embodiment of Pride in refusing to love her lord, she is also of ‘a base nature’ [‘uueles cunnes cunde’].110 This ‘base nature’, of course, is that of Eve, whose legacies to the world, according to the master narrative, are pride, vanity, heartlessness and monstrosity, primarily seen as feminine characteristics. Indeed, this particular extract ends with a meditation on the nature of love aimed at reminding the woman, as representative of fallen humanity, of the role played by her heartlessness within Christ’s suffering: Muche luue is ofte bitweone mon ant wummon. Ah þah ha were iweddet him, ha mahte iwurðen se unwreast, ant swa longe ha mahte forhorin hire wið oþre men, þet þah ha walde aȝein cumen, he ne kepte hire nawt. [There is often deep love between a man and a woman. But, even if she were married to him, she might become so depraved, and might prostitute herself to other men for such a long time, that even if she wanted to come back to him he would have nothing to do with her.]111

One is struck here by how different the rhetoric is from that deployed by Goscelin in his enunciation of how Eve as an anchorite is implicated in an ennobling love. For the Ancrene Wisse author, worldly marriage and those compulsions of heterosexuality which drive it are seen as superficial and easily corruptible, with the woman placed in the invidious position of giving sway to a wicked ontology which renders her ever dependent upon the male. A woman’s love thus degenerates easily into whoredom and, for this author at least, it would seem that the categories ‘woman’ and ‘whore’ are continually in dialogue with one another, eventually collapsing readily into a single category. Such a carnal, worldly image of marriage, whilst used rhetorically to cast into relief the discourse of sponsalia Christi with which he is also engaging in this allegory, also serves as perpetual reminder to the woman that she is locked in the prison of her own ontology and is therefore in need of perpetual guidance. As Sarah Salih notes of this same passage: ‘The erotic, therefore, is not an isolated element, but is combined with the language of power, both divine and social’.112

For a contemporary interpretation of the ways in which the gender binary serves to facilitate relations between men, see Eve Kosowski Sedgewick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), especially ‘Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles’, pp. 21–7 110 Ancrene Wisse, 7.93, p. 147. 111 Ancrene Wisse, 7.136–9, p. 148. 112 Salih, Versions of Virginity, p. 73. 109

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Writing the Flesh GENDER AND ANCHORITIC MONSTROSITY Gender, sexuality and their adjunct, power, are also main players in another of the texts closely associated with Ancrene Wisse: Hali Meiðhad [‘Holy Maidenhood’], a text which can in many ways be considered a ‘prequel’ to the former.113 Like Aldhelm’s treatise, this Katherine Group text was written to extol the benefits of holy virginity, albeit a late-twelfth-century version in this instance. In this text, the author maintains an intense – and some would again say an overdetermined – focus on the dichotomy between the worldly bride and the sponsa Christi, exploiting a tension – schism even – within the master narrative itself in order to present it as central to the lives of its intended audience of young women. In Hali Meiðhad the ‘naturalized’ female body is rendered abject to the point of monstrosity. For example, in a section which uncompromisingly unpicks what it sees as the ‘horrors’ accompanying female sexuality, the body and childbirth, the author outdoes even Aldhelm in his depiction of the procreative woman’s body as the site of a monstrous hybridity ever engaged in a hideous self-consumption. His warnings famously culminate in what is probably the most vociferous antichildbearing admonition of the Middle Ages: þi rudie neb schal leanin, ant ase gres grenin; þine ehnen schule doskin, ant underneoðe wonnin, ant of þi breines turnunge þin heaued aken sare. Inwið i þi wombe, swell in þi butte þe bereð þe forð as a weater-bulge, þine þearmes þralunge ant stiches i þi lonke, ant i þi lendene sar eche riue; heuinesse in euch lim; þine breostes burþerne o þine twa pappes, ant te milc-strunden þe þerof strikeð. Al is wið a weolewunge þi wlite ouerwarpen; þi muð is bitter, ant walh al þat tu cheowest; ant hwet mete se þi mahe hokerliche underueð – þet is, wið unlust – warpeð hit eft ut. Inwið al þi weole ant ti weres wunne, forwurðest a wrecche. Þe cares aȝein þi pinunge þrahen bineomeð þe nahtes slepes. Hwen hit þenne þerto kimeð, þet sore sorhfule angoise, þet stronge ant stikinde stiche, þet unroles uuel, þet pine ouer pine, þet wondrinde ȝeomerunge.114 [Your rosy face will grow thin, and turn as green as grass; your eyes will grow dull, and shadowed underneath, and because of your dizziness your head will ache cruelly. Inside, in your belly, a swelling in your womb which bulges you out like a waterskin, discomfort in your bowels and stitches in your side, and often painful backache; heaviness in every limb; the dragging weight of your two breasts, and the streams of milk that run from them. Your beauty is all destroyed by pallor; there is a bitter taste in your mouth, and everything that you eat makes you feel sick; and whatever food your stomach disdainfully receives – that is, with distaste – it throws it up again. In the midst of all your happiness and your husband’s delight, you are reduced to a wretch. Worry about your labour pains keeps you awake at night. Then when it comes to it, that cruel distressing anguish, that fierce and stabbing pain, that incessant misery, that torment upon torment, that wailing outcry.]

Of all the texts within this group, Hali Meiðhad is the one most relevant to the aspiring female anchorite. It would, of course, also be highly useful as ideological tract for the early years of a woman’s anchoritic life, should her resolve or commitment be wavering. 114 Hali Meiðhad, lines 31–10, pp. 30–2/31–3. 113

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Medieval Anchoritisms Insisting upon a reading of the female ‘matter-body’ as ‘carnal filthiness’ [‘flesliche fulðen’]115 and thus as the site of ontological corruption, this author’s purpose is to convince on a deeply visceral level that only perpetual virginity, a literal sealing-up against these internal, bodily abominations, can protect the woman from the dangers to both her body and her soul. Thus, in view of such deeply affective rhetoric, when he does ventriloquize overtly what is at stake, it is entirely superfluous to requirements: Ant зef hit eaver timeð þet ti licomes lust, þurh þe false feont, leaðie þe towart flesliche fulðen, ontswere i þi þoht þus: ‘Ne geineð þe nawt, sweoke! Þullich Ich chulle beon in meidenes liflade, ilich heouene engel. [And if it happens that your physical desire, through the false fiend, should ever incite you towards carnal filthiness, answer mentally in this way: ‘It does you no good, traitor! In my way of life as a virgin, I shall be like an angel in heaven.’]116

Like Ancrene Wisse, this text presents women as possessing two bodies, both of which are firmly ideological, thus confirming the ‘irreconcilable bodies’ of Irigarayan analysis, bodies which are also ‘two sides, two poles, nature and society [. . .] the perceptible and the intelligible, matter and form, the empirical and the transcendental’.117 However, I would also argue here that the virginal body of both Hali Meiðhad and Ancrene Wisse is not simply presented as a desirable alternative to the concupiscent one: the binary is not as clear-cut as this might suggest. Implicit to this discourse is that sin is always already engaged in some kind of threatening dialogue with the chaste body, constantly negotiating the protected space of the male symbolic order and articulating its desire relentlessly from the shadows and the margins. As a result, within this female and heterosexual context, sin is also something that continually threatens to penetrate those bodies and become assimilated as a monstrous progeny: as the author of Hali Meiðhad reminds his audience in the context of lechery (paraphrasing Saint Paul as he does so), ‘every sin that is committed is outside the body except this one alone’ [‘euch sunne þet me deð is wiðute þe bodi bute þis ane’].118 This sin, then, is not so easily dealt with by the adoption of an identity as miles Christi since, as woman, her raison d’être is to be penetrated, whether by sin, by man – or, in the case of the anchorite, by God. As a result, she constitutes not a site occupied by either chastity or concupiscence but as the ambiguous and monstrous combination of both at the same time; she is de facto a ‘dual entity’ and thus the embodiment of a potentially monstrous hybridity. For this reason, the young virgin who, by means of her sex, is always susceptible to lascivious thoughts and actions, may, if she adheres to the author’s regimen, nevertheless also identify with Iesu Cristes brude, þe Lauerdes leofmon þet alle þinges buheð, of al þe worlt leafdi, as he is of al lauerd; ilich him in halschipe, unwemmet as he is, ant þet eadi meiden his deorrewurðe moder; ilich his hali engles ant his heste halhen; se freo of hireseoluen ha nawiht ne þearf of oðer þing þenchen bute ane of hire leofmon wið treowe luue cwemen. 117 118 115

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Hali Meiðhad, lines 16–17, pp. 2/3. Hali Meiðhad, lines 25–8, pp. 40/41. Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, p. 804. Hali Meiðhad, lines 22–3, pp. 30/31.

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Writing the Flesh [the bride of Jesus Christ, the lover of the Lord to whom all things do homage, lady of all the world as he is lord of all; like him in integrity, spotless as he is, and that blessed virgin his beloved mother; like his holy angels and his highest saints; with such freedom for herself that she need not think about anything at all apart from pleasing her beloved with true love.]119

Again, the resonances with the Ancrene Wisse passage discussed above are clear: although the woman in both texts always inclines towards the Edenic scene, she is offered a second way which focuses on the chaste female body as the site of potential apotheosis and transcendence and which offers a route to transform hybridity into apparent unity. What is actually at stake here, however, is a patriarchal imperative to appropriate the emptied-out female and her body (in Irigarayan terms, the ‘envelope’)120 to provide a conduit between the man and a plenitude which takes the form of an ultimate union with God. It is, of course, Goscelin’s desire to share the marital bed of Eve and Christ masquerading under another name. However, as I shall argue, within such appropriation, there also emerges an opportunity for the holy woman’s re-appropriation and rereading of the discourse because of its being predicated on her own body. And, as a body which is separated from the interpellative male gaze by walls of stone, that realigned discourse can also be redeployed in the service of her own emerging identity as an anchorite, releasing a potential for a jouissance over which the author has little or no control.121 ANCRENE WISSE AND THE MONSTROUS BODY The ‘relentless allegorical’ content which Robert Hasenfratz recognizes as central to the Ancrene Wisse author’s treatment of the sponsalia Christi motif finds its most secure expression in the author’s use of the same kind of monstrous discourses as are prevalent in Hali Meiðhad. This time, however, these discourses are most notably allegorized as fearsome animals, something which we also glimpsed in Aldhelm’s De Laude Virginitatis. As I have already suggested, allegorized cultural narratives are always ripe for a number of interpretations and, in spite of concerted authorial attempts to direct audience understanding in a single direction, ultimately produce a range of bifurcated texts which can offer up more subversive and heterodox readings than were initially envisaged by the author himself. Useful in this context is the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, who, in a study examining literary constructions of hybridity as a form of monstrous discourse, concludes that the hybrid is essentially a dialogic entity; as inherently two bodies within a single corporeal boundary, it is neither one thing nor the other, and thus its ‘contraries and [.  .  .] simultaneous are in perpetual conversation with each Hali Meiðhad, lines 13–18, pp. 4/5. Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, p. 802. 121 This is discussed by Amy Hollywood in her examination of Irigaray’s critique of Lacanian theory in Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference and the Demands of History (Chicago, 2002). Whilst the primary focus of the discussion is female mysticism, Hollywood recognizes that the encouragement given to the virgin to deploy her sexual energies towards Christ would place her in a similar subject position to female mystics such as Angela of Foligno, for example (pp. 180–1). 119

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Medieval Anchoritisms other.’122 However, what Bynum overlooks in this particular analysis is that the hybrid body is far more than the mere sum of its parts. Indeed, the merging of two entities not only creates a third category, but potentially many more in its multiple configurations and ‘othernesses’. As such, the hybrid bears multiple possibilities for destabilization and revelation. I argue, therefore, that, although functioning as a key metaphor for the dangerous female body, the concept of monstrous hybridity, so prevalent in Ancrene Wisse, was able to open up for the medieval woman reader a text of multiple pathways which could be followed in a number of more affirming ways than that for which it was originally designed by its male author. Ultimately, then, such a hybrid body forms a fitting symbol both for the multiplicity of the anchoritic experience, and for Ancrene Wisse as text in which both meanings and identities shift and change, chameleon-like, according to the gendered perspectives and reading strategies employed by an ever-widening audience. Within this text, we find a complex and volatile combination of monstrosity and transcendence being engaged with, seemingly locked in perpetual dialogue with one another, and it is the body of the female anchorite which forms the site where this contest is played out. Moreover, this body is one which blends seamlessly with the architecture of the anchorhold in what we can term a metaphysics of enclosure. As has been frequently pointed out by commentators, in structural terms the text enacts the very enclosure which it aims to regulate: whilst Parts One and Eight concern themselves with the day-to-day practices and physical concerns of the female anchorite (prayer, clothing, meal-times etc.), Parts Two to Seven deal in detail with a specifically female spirituality and, most explicitly, the dangers posed to the enclosed woman by an incomplete or half-hearted adherence to anchoritic precepts. In other words, the ‘outer life’ encloses the ‘inner life’ and, if adhered to concertedly, will ultimately serve to protect and preserve that inner life. This structure, however, also reflects the type of anxieties about the enclosed woman which I have been discussing here. If, as we saw in the case of the Reply to a Bury Recluse and Speculum Inclusorum, sacred anchoritic space is created and maintained by those practices enacted within it (or, indeed, deemed to be enacted), then the bodily ‘space’ of the enclosed woman can in the same way be maintained as sacred by means of devoutly enacted ritual and behavioural codes. The textual structure thus re-enacts the processes whereby the dangerous female ontology may be controlled and contained, enclosing it and blocking off its exit route by ideologically regulated practice, whilst at the same time giving the reader a ‘technicolour’ view of the perils which always lie within the realm of that enactment – the anchorhold and the sealed body within. As a result, virtually all of the monstrous discourse attached to the female body is to be found in the ‘internal’ chapters, particularly Parts Two to Five, where, along with the generic, sinful female anchorite, Eve’s presence is always implicitly or explicitly acknowledged as the ‘mother’ of human sin. At the beginning of Part Two, for example, the audience is reminded: Eue, ure alde moder [. . .] ‘biheold o þe forboden eappel, ant seh hine feier ant feng to delitin i þe behaldunge, ant toc hire lust þer-toward, ant nom ant et þrof, ant ȝef hire lauerd.’ Low hu Hali Writ spekeð, ant hu inwardliche hit teleð hu sunne bigon. Caroline Walker Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity (New York, 2001), p. 160.

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Writing the Flesh Þus eode sihðe biuoren ant makede wei to uuel lust, ant com þe dede þrefter þet al moncun ifeleð. [Eve, our first mother [. . .] ‘looked at the forbidden apple, and saw that it was beautiful and began to delight in gazing at it, and desire for it overcame her, and she picked it and ate some of it, and gave it to her husband.’ See what Holy Scripture says, and how penetratingly it describes how sin began. In this way sight went first and made a way for sinful desire, and afterwards came the act whose effect all humanity feels.]123

Part Two, therefore, in which the author emphasizes to his audience the dangers presented to the enclosed body by the five senses, explicitly takes the reader back to Eden and the scene of the woman’s primary sin; even thinking about these dangers is depicted as an act of penetration since ‘Holy Writ’ as a master narrative tells us inwardliche of sin’s origins as female. Thus, in the prolonged account of the threat posed to the enclosed woman by her five senses which immediately follows, where Eve is not directly invoked, her presence as the perpetrator of sin is rendered absolutely implicit by means of the passage quoted above. Indeed, for this author, each of the unbounded senses has a major role to play in the enactment of the first sin: Eve enters into conversation with the serpent and listens to him; she sees the apple on the tree and feels it plump in her hand; its aroma compounds its irresistibility and the fateful die is cast as its taste permeates her body. Eden, then, in its tempting fecundity, is the ‘natural’ home of the similarly fecund female anchorite, a home which she must, of course, eschew. For the male recluse, however, as we have seen, it is the aridity of the desert which he must embrace in order to escape the fecundity of the world and the women within it. Thus, as we have seen, within the desert of male anchoritism, it is the woman, not the serpent, which tends to provide the primary threat to anchoritic perfection, imposing her own fecundity upon the scene of male sensory deprivation to strip it of its meaning. And this holds true even if the desert inhabitant is herself a woman: both Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt must be divested of their own alluring matter-bodies, shrivel, grow old, be burned black by the sun and become unrecognizable as women before their realigned corporeality can signify fully as sanctified and perfect. In other words, in order to signify positively within a masculine spiritual economy, women must visibly lose the sexual power generated by a fertile body. Thus, the Ancrene Wisse author similarly requires his audience to be ‘burnt’ [‘forculet’] by God’s grace, rendered ‘worthless to the outside world’ [‘unwurð to þe world wiðouten’] and to become ‘unsightly’ [‘unseowliche’], in order to remove the most volatile ingredient from the spiritual equation.124 The anchoritic cell of Ancrene Wisse is therefore far more likely to be represented as a location where Eden may either be regained or extirpated than as a contemplative desert expanse. In Part Four, for example, which deals with the danger posed by the seven deadly sins, the anchorhold is transformed into a postEdenic wilderness occupied by myriad wild beasts. But this wilderness is not the ascetic desert of the first, coenobitic anchorites, not even that of Mary Magdalene and Mary of Egypt: it is a dangerous interspace, a place of unstable liminality. It is not a place of empty nothingness where God can be re-encountered but a wild Ancrene Wisse, 2.59–7, p. 21. Ancrene Wisse, 2.23–5, p. 20.

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Medieval Anchoritisms and unpredictable borderland region, a place of prowling beasts with voracious appetites. This is neither heaven nor hell but the origins and edge of the known world itself. ‘Wildernesse’ is anlich lif of ancre wununge [. . .] for i þis wildernesse beoð uuele beastes mnie: liun of prude, neddre of attri onde, vunicorne of wreaððe, beore of dead slawðe, vox of ȝisceaunge, suhe of ȝiuernesse, scorpium wið þe teil of stinginde leccherie, þet is, galnesse. [The ‘wilderness’ is the solitary life of the anchoress’s cell. [. . .] There are many evil beasts in this wilderness: the lion of pride, the serpent of poisonous envy, the unicorn of wrath, the bear of mortal sloth, the fox of avarice, the sow of gluttony, the scorpion with its tail of stinging lechery, that is, lust.]125

Here, the anchorite’s post-Edenic ‘dwelling’ is both her cell and her own body, of course, and the prowling animals her own sins. Significantly, two of these threatening creatures, the snake and the scorpion, are not only common inhabitants of the wilderness but are also central to the Edenic narrative itself. Moreover, these creatures were frequently conflated in medieval animal lore, the danger of the one compounding that of the other, forming the perfect hybrid to embody the sins of envy and lust.126 However, the Ancrene Wisse author goes a stage further: in his subsequent development of the sin of ‘stinging lechery’, he not only collapses the two creatures into one another but, as part of his attempt to anthropomorphize them, he inscribes upon the resultant hybrid the face of a woman: Scorpiun is a cunnes wurm þe haueð neb, as me seið, sumdeal ilich wummon, ant neddre is bihinden. Makeð feier semblant ant fikeð mid te heaueð, & stingeð mid te teile. Þis is leccherie; þis is þe deofles beast. [The scorpion is a kind of snake which has a face, so it is said, rather like a woman, and is a snake behind. It attracts and beguiles with its head, and stings with its tail. This is lechery; this is the devil’s livestock.]127

This ‘devil’s livestock’, with its female face and its snaky, stinging tail, constitutes an embodied and animated act of miscegenation, presenting the sexual act in a way which would be fully at home in Hali Meiðhad and which, I argue, has profound implications for the representation of women in the text. Here, too, the author is almost certainly also engaging with a developing tradition in the Middle Ages which recognized the serpent as ontologically female. In medieval animal lore, the scorpion was closely associated with the Edenic serpent, possibly because of its venomous sting and its appearance of crawling on its abdomen, in keeping with the curse proffered by God because of its role in the Fall, as mentioned earlier. In early Christian times, the encyclopaedist, Isidore of Seville (d. 636) also commented on the destructive nature of the scorpion, configuring it in terms of a monstrous mother who regularly devoured her own young, except Ancrene Wisse, 4.230–43, pp. 74–5. The viper is subject to especially vituperative treatment by the Aberdeen Bestiary, being both violent and sexually insatiable in its mating practices (see fols. 66v–67r). 127 Ancrene Wisse 4.422–5, p. 79.

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Writing the Flesh for one, which would survive only to consume both her and its father too. For Isidore, this creature was therefore one which posed a considerable threat not only to humanity because of its poison but also to the continuation of its own species.128 This is an idea which seems to have been picked up and developed by later tradition and subsequently came to be inscribed also onto the snake. For example, the renowned twelfth-century Parisian theologian, Peter Comestor (d. 1178), refers to a now lost reference from Bede which apparently described the serpent as having a face resembling that of a virgin.129 A twelfth-century bestiary found in Oxford, MS Bodley 764 goes even further: upon the moment of insemination itself, the male of the species is rewarded for the sexual ecstasy he invokes in his partner by having his head bitten off as she reaches orgasm.130 Eventually, however, the gestated offspring will bite their way out of the mother’s body and kill her as they emerge, just to begin the cycle again. Such attributes, of course, can be read as a barely disguised reification of those thinly veiled fears of phallic castration which form part of the ontological make-up imposed upon women within the medieval male imaginary. Indeed, we might at this point recall the trials of Jerome in the wilderness at the hands of his own shape-shifting scorpion-women who threatened to keep him from his religious calling and inflame him with lust. Picking up on this tradition, therefore, the author makes use of it to develop the master narrative to concur more explicitly with an exegesis which recognized the Fall as generated by a woman. This scorpion-serpent, therefore, possessor of female face, legs and wings but incontrovertibly phallic in its uprightness, points towards a terrible pre-ontology of fallenness lying at the heart of a monstrously reified femininity which would usurp masculine privilege and thus castrate the man – even before Eve’s seduction. The specific characteristics attributed to the female scorpion by the Ancrene Wisse author, however, are ‘giggling’ [‘gigge lahtre’]; ‘wanton glances’ [‘hore ehe’]; ‘seductive gestures’ [‘lihte lates’]; ‘provocative words’ [‘tollinde word’]; ‘talk about love’ [‘luue speche’]; and ‘indecent fondling’ [‘vnhende grapunge’], all of which take the reader directly back to fundamental fears regarding femininity and the devastating knowledge gained by Eve in Eden via ‘this devil’s scorpion with its poisonous tail’ [‘þis deofles scorpion, attri iteilet’].131 In drawing upon this same signifier, the Ancrene Wisse author now begins to entangle himself within a complex web of association in order to construct his own hybrid, exegetical monster. His scorpion comprises a fatal admixture of desirability (‘neb [.  .  .] sumdeal ilich wummon’) and poison (‘stingeð mid te teile’), her power resting on the fact that it is simultaneously phallic and female, devil and diva, same and other.132 Moreover, Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911), X.193–4; online at http://penelope. uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Isidore/home.html. 129 On this and the tradition of the female serpent more widely, see Nona C. Flores, ‘“Effigies amicitiae .  .  . veritas inimicitae”: Antifeminism in the Iconography of the Women-Headed Serpent in Medieval and Renaissance Art and Literature’, in Animals in the Middle Ages, ed. Nona C. Flores (New York and London, 1996), pp. 167–95 (p. 168). 130 Richard Barber (ed.), Bestiary: An Edition of Bodleian Lib. Oxford, MS Bodley 764 (Woodbridge, 1993), p. 186. 131 Ancrene Wisse, 4.395–405, p. 79. 132 For an account of the scorpion’s phallic associations see The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life and Literature, ed. Debra Hassig (New York and London, 1999), p. 171. Other essays in this collection also offer useful insights into the genre of the medieval bestiary. 128

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Medieval Anchoritisms the threat she poses rests firmly upon a mingling of the familiar and the alien in one body, fully in keeping with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s recognition of the ‘intimate stranger’ who lies at the heart of monstrous representation.133 According to Cohen, the monster is the ‘cultural, linguistic, sexual other who seems to be intimate [. . .] but in fact brutally converts an identity familiar and secure into an alien thing, into a subject estranged from its own body’.134 Such a representation of the scorpion in Ancrene Wisse seems to have been devised to have just the same effect upon its female audience; not only does the author convert the once-familiar body of the female anchorite into the site of the alien other but, more crucially, clearly attempts to recast that alienation again in terms of the familiar. In effect, he is demanding of her that, as part of her own ‘libidinous education’, she read the text of her own body in terms of its being per se the ‘intimate stranger’ which lies at the heart of the monstrous, or, to adopt the words of Bynum, a ‘mixed thing with no name’.135 In effect, the female anchorite is being asked to read her own body as a hybrid and monstrous text. Continuing with this theme, again in Part Four we find a full ‘monstrification’ of each of the seven deadly sins, all of whom pose a threat to the corporeal integrity of the woman.136 ‘The lion of pride’ [‘þe liun of prude’]137 for example, rides alongside the ‘the serpent of poisonous envy’ [‘neddre of attri onde’];138 the ‘unicorn of wrath’ [‘vnicorne of wreaððe’]139 is companion to the ‘bear of heavy sloth’ [‘beore of dead slawðe’],140 as is the ‘fox of avarice’ [‘vox of ȝisceunge’]141 and the ‘sow of gluttony’ [‘suhe of ȝiuernesse’].142 The depiction of this menagerie, of course, like the figure of the scorpion, again draws heavily upon the genre of the medieval bestiary which, originating in Hellenistic science and pseudo-science, was at its peak of popularity at the time when the Ancrene Wisse author was operating.143 As Dorothy Yamamoto has argued, ‘the bestiary’s readings of the bodies of animals are thoroughly infused with the social and cultural preoccupations of its time,’144 something which, as both Cohen and Bynum have also demonstrated in their own studies, remains true of most transcultural and transhistorical constructions of the monstrous. More specifically, however, Yamamoto points out that animal bodies are manipulated within the bestiary genre in order to deliver a chosen message which, written upon their bodies, also articulate the hopes and anxieties of a

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters and the Middle Ages (Minneapolis and London, 1999). 134 Cohen, Of Giants, p. 2. 135 Bynum, Metamorphosis, p. 118. 136 Although this is generally recognized as the first such treatment of the seven deadly sins in English literature, as we have seen, Aldhelm’s Latin Treatise De Virginibus offers a prototype for this sort of treatment and its deemed appropriateness for a group of aristocratic enclosed women religious. For an account of the history of this type of representation see Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins. 137 Ancrene Wisse, 4.245, p. 75. 138 Ancrene Wisse, 4.308, p. 76. 139 Ancrene Wisse, 4.337, p. 77. 140 Ancrene Wisse, 4.350, p. 76. 141 Ancrene Wisse, 4.364, p. 78. 142 Ancrene Wisse, 4.382, p. 78. 143 See Hassig, The Mark of the Beast. 144 Dorothy Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (Oxford, 2000), p. 24. 133

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Writing the Flesh particular epistemological moment.145 Viewed within the context of an epistemological moment of philosophical debate which, as discussed in Chapter 1, still validated a traditional Aristotelean notion of gender difference and which, on occasion, queried whether woman was, in fact, human at all, the unstable body of the woman becomes infinitely malleable for this type of hybrid representation.146 She is thus able to constitute an apophatic statement of what men are not, nor could ever be, which, allied to the ontological ‘openness’ to which she was considered to be subject, allowed for an infinite corporeal ambiguity to be written upon her ‘monstrous’ body. As a result, in Ancrene Wisse we see the female anchorite potentially subject to penetration by and mingling with a whole host of bestial partners, including those representing the seven deadly sins documented above, something which the militarism of those texts aimed at the monastic anchorite examined earlier renders impossible. Elsewhere, therefore, she is also in danger of taking on the nature of a hen [‘henne cunde’] or a jackdaw [‘kaue’],147 or a raven [‘reauenes cunde’],148 all three of which fall into the category of a gossiping woman [‘rikelot’],149 not to mention the devil, whose whore she is always in danger of becoming [‘deofeles hore’].150 And, at one point in Part Two, in a section which deals with the dangers of speaking and listening, the text explodes into what can only be termed a frenzy of monstrification. Here, the incontinent anchorite’s tongue becomes ‘slippery’ [‘slubbri’];151 she spits out her venom with ‘chattering mouths, wide open lips’ [‘meaðelinde muð(es)’ and ‘ȝeoniende tuteles’];152 she ‘glides’ [‘slit’] and ‘wades in water’ [‘wadeð i wete’];153 with her backbiting she ‘eats human flesh’ [‘cheoweð [. . .] monnes flesch’]154 and ‘vomits up everything that the poisonous heart sends up to the tongue’ [‘culcheð al ut somet þat te attri heorte sent up to þe tunge’].155 The female anchorite and her simultaneously familiar-yet-alien body is reminded of what is to be resisted and driven out if she is to become paradigmatic of her vocation, a lady-in-waiting, a sponsa Christi. In effect, her body is rendered a text which articulates the miscegenation which forms the dangerous end-point to a yielding to her own ontology. Again, she is, quite simply, being asked to read onto the intimate strangeness of her own body a narrative of similitude and otherness. An open body, of course, always incorporates the notion of violation and a Yamamoto, Boundaries of the Human, p. 24. See, for example, Aristotle, Generation of Animals, ed. and trans. by A. L. Peck (London, 1963), book 4, ch. 6, p. 775a, lines 15–16, where he refers to woman as ἀναπηρία [‘deformity’]. This can also be translated as ‘lameness’, ‘mutilation’ or ‘stunted development’, all of which are classified as pollutants in Leviticus 21 and therefore prohibit access to God’s altar. Aristotle uses it on a number of occasions in the context of women and it is significant in this instance that his use seems to stimulate a passage in which he deals in some detail with monstrous pregnancy brought about by corruption within the womb. For a useful overview of Aristotelian theory in this context see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1980). 147 Ancrene Wisse, 2.291–3, p. 27. 148 Ancrene Wisse, 2.545, p. 34. 149 Ancrene Wisse, 2.618, p. 36. 150 Ancrene Wisse, 4.1623, p. 111. 151 Ancrene Wisse, 2.420, p. 31. 152 Ancrene Wisse, 2.496, p. 33. 153 Ancrene Wisse, 2.420–1, p. 31. 154 Ancrene Wisse, 2.541, p. 34. 155 Ancrene Wisse, 2.594–5, p. 35. 145

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Medieval Anchoritisms penetration of boundaries which denies the contiguity of the external and internal as separate regions. Like the lady within her castle, locked up against enemy hordes, or like the urban anchorite of Speculum Inclusorum, she is never entirely safe, always susceptible to violation and death at the hands of the enemy. Indeed, within this text’s configuration, she is equally likely to become the enemy within by means of her merger with that which penetrates. Thus, like the anchorhold which she occupies, her body is always considered to be a breachable internal space, open to penetration and contamination by sin entering from the outside: As deð com [. . .] into þe world þorch sunne, asswa deað þurch þeos echþurles haueð hire inȝong to þe saule [. . .] Ant mid good richt muȝen ha beon ihaten eilþurles, for ha habbeð idon muchel eil to moni ancre. [As death came into the world through sin [. . .] so death through these windows gains entry to the soul [. . .] And they might rightly be called eilþurles [harm-windows], because they have done a great deal of harm [eil] to many anchoresses.]156

Here again we are reminded implicitly of Eve’s role in inviting death into the world. In the same way as the anchorite can invite sin into her anchorhold, so sin can enter through the unguarded eye’s opening, rendering the external internal and thus breaking down the barriers of a safe inside–outside demarcation. For this reason – and, again, unlike the male anchorite – the female anchorite is explicitly exhorted to seal up the doorways of her body and her cell because of the threat posed to the desired integrity of both, thus collapsing the one entirely into the other: Ore pur ceo toutes les ouertures de toutes voz fenestres, ausi come ci-deuant a la vewe de touz homes vnt esté closes, ausi soient ça enaprés. E si plus fermement poient, plus fermement soient closes. Generale reule est: toutes celes qe bien les closent, Dieu bien les garde; et toutes celes qe moustrent sei meismes a vewe dome issi qil pecche dedenz son queor funt ensement lomme peccier ou do fol oil, ou od bouche, ou od main. Et fet cel, od plus et multes tieles choses desauenantes et desnaturels a recluse sur toutes, lesqueux ne fuissent iames avant venues si ele eust sa fenestre ferm estoppee. Et si nule contredit ceste, ieo treis a testmoigne sa conscience demeyne encontre lui, qele parmi sa fenestre demeine ad oil, ou bouche ou main recue, et fole parole oueqe, tout fut ele adubbé et od feinte seinteté falsement coloree. [Now for this reason all the openings of all your windows should be closed in the future, just as they have been in the past, so no men can see in. And if they can be more firmly closed, they should be more firmly closed. It is a general rule that all those who keep them well closed are well protected by God; and all those who reveal themselves to a man’s gaze so that he sins in his heart also cause the man to sin either with his lecherous eyes, or with his mouth, or with his hand. And he does this and many more such things, unbecoming and unnatural for an anchoress above all, which would never have come about if she had kept her window firmly sealed. And if anyone denies this, I call her own conscience as a witness against her, that through her own Ancrene Wisse 2.185–91, p. 25. As Millett points out on p. 184, n. 30 of her translation, the word eilþurl is very rare, constituting a complex pun on eyes and opening (Old French ueil, ‘eye’ and Middle English þurl, ‘opening’). By implication, then, the windows of the cell and the eyes of the female recluse are potentially openings for trouble or harm.

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Writing the Flesh window she has received a look, or a kiss, or a touch, together with indiscreet talk, even though it might be embellished by a false colouring of pretended holiness.]157

In this extract, there is little distinction made between the holy woman and her cell: her eyes are its windows, her body its walls, and thus the cultural investment in the female anchorite made at this particular epistemological moment begins to reveal itself in very different terms from that of her male counterpart. Unlike those guidance texts which we have examined in which the anchorite as miles Christi is encouraged to actively penetrate sin with his sword or spear, here the concept of penetration takes on a sexual – and deeply gendered – connotation with penetrated bodily boundaries being depicted as explicitly female and spilling over into the very fabric of the anchorhold itself. Thus, the ideological enterprise which is English anchoritism in the later Middle Ages reveals itself: as the cultural scapegoat for the problem posed to Christianity by human sexuality, the anchoritic woman and her closed-up body are projected onto the walls of stone which house her, making visible – and yet invisible – the containment necessary for the production of her sanctity. WOMEN (RE)READING THE MASTER NARRATIVE How such women read and interpreted such discourses, however, remains another question, but one which becomes increasingly easier to address with the adaptation of Ancrene Wisse and associated texts for a wider audience from the late thirteenth century onwards.158 The rapid and relatively widespread adaptation of anchoritic texts for use by an increasingly literate laity would suggest a need for a body of literature which remained firmly ideologically anchoritic in tone and content but which also occupied a ‘middle ground’ between a monastic, Latinate reading environment and the world of a primarily visual or auditory literacy.159 A lay audience of burgeoning literacy in the English vernacular, of course, would instantly recognize the primary conceits, such as the lady in her castle and the array of monstrous beasts always intent on devouring the anchoritic woman. Indeed, images of the latter would have been ubiquitously represented in church wall-paintings, rendering the modified text a reflection of a pre-existing imagistic world and, as such, itself a textual ‘interspace’ between theology and its visual animation.160 Moreover, the ritualistic practices of prayer and daily life laid down Ancrene Wisse, 2.208–22, pp. 25–6. This section is missing from the Corpus manuscript but appears in Cotton Vitellius (for which, see the previous footnote) which contains the French translation of the text. 158 Elizabeth Robertson has addressed this issue and other questions regarding the audience’s reading habits in her essay ‘Savouring “Scientia”: The Medieval Anchoress Reads Ancrene Wisse’, in Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Wada, pp. 113–44. I do not intend to cover the same ground here but will extend some of her arguments in the context of three women writer-readers in the following chapter. Extant manuscripts containing Ancrene Wisse indicate that, in its later adapted form, it was read by people of both sexes, religious and lay, copies being owned by people within all strata of society, including royalty. It also enjoyed a widespread distribution across England and even crossed the channel to the continent. For an account of some of these various manifestations, see Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘Legacy’, especially p. 155. 159 Again, on Ancrene Wisse as pastoral literature, see Gunn, From Pastoral Literature, passim. 160 As Roger Rosewell points out in Medieval Wall Paintings in English and Welsh Churches 157

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Medieval Anchoritisms for the anchorite in Parts One and Eight could also help to transport the layperson literally into an ‘anchoritic’ space of the mind, regardless of status, profession, sex – or location. Indeed, as Stijn Bossuyt observes, ‘through performance of [. . .] ritual, a certain degree of sanctity is conferred upon “everyday”, “normal” secular reality [but] in order to achieve this goal, it is essential that these rituals or liturgical acts are performed outside a space that is already considered to be sacred’.161 Thus, as we shall see in the following chapter, in the absence of an ‘anchorhold of her own’, in the fifteenth century Margery Kempe was able to produce a type of ‘portable anchoritism’ by ‘re-reading’ and adapting a traditional anchoritic spirituality and practices within the context of a lay existence, and by forging extensive anchoritic connections, sometimes within non-anchoritic ‘anchoritic’ spaces.162 Similarly, affluent and influential laywomen and men could adopt what can be termed an ‘anchoritism by proxy’ by supporting anchorites from their positions of secular privilege; whilst bona fide female anchorites such as Julian of Norwich and the Winchester anchorite, both of whom I also examine in Chapter 4, could form part of an influential spiritual community to which both laymen and women were inexorably drawn, creating satellite communities around them and ‘virtual’ connections between them.163 In the words of Denis Renevey, ‘[Julian’s] contribution attests to the ever-increasing hermeneutic scope offered to those outside the monastic and anchoritic milieu who have an interest in the contemplative life’.164 It is therefore no coincidence that this type of ‘middle ground’ also reflects the textual position occupied by the three anchoritic sisters at whom the Ancrene Wisse author directed his initial work: they are simultaneously its generators, its recipients, and its primary protagonists, intrinsic to its production, interpretation and its performance and, as such, provide a crucial legacy as ‘mothers to think back through’ for the way in which those anchoritically minded women I examine in the next chapter were to approach their own writing more than two hundred years later. As Anne Savage has emphatically argued, ‘while a range of sources provided [Ancrene Wisse’s] basis, it was written both about and with these anchoresses’.165 And herein lies another way in which these women may have escaped interpellation by the text’s seemingly relentless ideology and been able to hand on a tradition of

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(Woodbridge, 2008), p. 24 and p. 31, painted images of the seven deadly sins on church walls in England and Wales developed after about 1300 and, judging from the variety of forms they took, drew upon multiple sources. Stijn Bossuyt, ‘The Liturgical Use of Space in Thirteenth-Century Flanders’, in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 187–206 (p. 192). See Chapter 5. The evidence for these types of ‘satellite’ communities is earlier, and much more prolific on the continent, on which see Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses; see also the various essays collected in Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy. Also useful as an overview of this is the first chapter of Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing, ed. Anneke Mulder-Bakker and Liz Herbert McAvoy (New York and London, 2009), pp. 1–23; on the widespread influence of individual holy women, some anchoritic, some not, see the other essays collected in that volume. Denis Renevey, ‘Margery’s Performing Body: The Translation of Late Medieval Discursive Religious Practices’, in Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England (Cardiff, 2000), pp. 197–216 (p. 202). Anne Savage, ‘The Communal Authorship of Ancrene Wisse’, in Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Wada, pp. 45–55 (p. 46), original emphasis.

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Writing the Flesh female anchoritic agency. As occupants of multiple, superimposed spaces which are simultaneously textual, physical and ideological all these anchoritic women generated what Foucault would recognize as a type of ‘heterotopia’ or ‘countersite’ which, according to Foucault, stands in for, represents, contests and inverts a plethora of other ‘real’ sites found within a particular culture.166 Like all heterotopic spaces, too, the anchorhold is ‘haunted by the hidden presence of the sacred’, something which equates well with Bachelard’s conception of space as always imbued with traces of memory or ‘daydreaming’ and onto which we project our perceptions, our dreams and our passions.167 Thus, for Foucault, the heterotopic space is also heterochronic; that is to say, it disrupts traditional teleological precepts and gathers together within its precincts both ‘loss of life and [. . .] quasi eternity’.168 The connection between heterotopic discourse, the anchorhold and its female occupant therefore could not be more apparent,169 again providing possibilities for multiple readings and treatments, in Cixous’s terms ‘an “other meaning”, which is constantly in the process of weaving itself, at the same time ceaselessly embracing words and yet casting them off to avoid becoming fixed, immobilised’.170 Thus, in the same way as Eve’s transgressive reading of the apple constituted part of her own ‘libidinous education’, so the female reader’s response to the anti-feminisms of the male-authored text is not necessarily an ideologically ‘obedient’ one in which she adheres unquestioningly to those parameters laid down for her by the male perspective.171 As Irit Rogoff also points out, ‘bodies might be operating quite differently if read through official ideology and through the contexts of their own subjectivity’.172 This is perhaps why, at the end of his text, the Ancrene Wisse author admits that he would ‘rather set out to Rome than start writing it [the book] again’ [‘Me were leouere [. . .] do me toward Rome þen forte biginnen hit eft forte donne’].173 Like Goscelin, he can only hope that his text will be received the way in which he envisages. However, as we shall see, as the culturally hybrid figure and occupier of a middle ground located ‘between two deaths’, between this world and the next, the female anchorite and those who followed her lead could read and respond to the similarly hybrid text in a multiplicity of ways, searching out its more positive and empowering discursive pathways and explicating them through the lens of her own bodily experiences. Again in the words of Cixous, writing about her own reading practices within the cultural hegemony of our present era: ‘But I know how to read with my eyes closed. To you, who have eyes with which not to read, I have nothing to reveal. Woman is one of the things that you are in no position to understand.’174 Instead of reading text into themselves, Cixous 168 169 166 167



170 171

174

172 173

Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, 1 (1986), pp. 22–7. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, passim. Foucault, ‘On Other Spaces, p. 26. This is a connection which was first posited by Laura Saetveit Miles in her essay, ‘Space and Enclosure in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love’, in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. McAvoy, pp. 154–65. Cixous, ‘Sorties’, p. 103, original emphasis. For a useful essay on medieval misogyny and how it relates to women’s own literary production, see Anke Bernau, ‘Medieval Misogynies’, in History of British Women’s Writing: Vol. 1, ed. Liz McAvoy and Watt (forthcoming 2012). Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 147. Ancrene Wisse, 8.339–40, p. 164. Cixous, Coming to Writing, p. 35.

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Medieval Anchoritisms suggests that it is possible for women to read themselves into the text and, in so doing, fully respond to the resultant interplay of textual and corporeal hybridity. With hybridity at the core of this anchoritic text directed at the woman reader, it is the imaginative and ultimately individualistic reading strategies undertaken by those who knew how to read with their eyes closed which provided a means of controlling its monsters and producing a meaning which placed women at the salvific centre rather than at the margins.

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Chapter 4 READING WITH THE EYES CLOSED: REVISING THE MASTER NARRATIVE Estranged from language, women are visionaries, dancers who suffer as they speak.1

T

he reading practices of medieval women in the later Middle Ages have been subject to considerable scrutiny in recent decades. In the context of women’s devotional literature, Anne Clark Bartlett’s reassessment of how a female audience may have responded to the general misogyny inherent within male-authored medieval devotional texts has been particularly influential upon subsequent scholarly understanding.2 Bartlett argues that women may well have focused on what she identifies as the more positive discourses often running counter to or contending with the main discursive strands of the narrative – nuptial imagery, for example, Romance discourse or allusions to spiritual or familial friendships between women, all of which, as we have seen, are prevalent in Ancrene Wisse and its associated texts and may well have facilitated a ‘reading against the grain’. The author, after all, does lay down the ground for selective readings of his texts, when he instructs his audience at the end of Part Eight: ‘Read some of this book in your free time every day, whether less or more. I hope that if you read it often it will be very useful to you’ [‘of þis boc redeð hwen ȝe beoð eise euche dei leasse oðer mare. Ich hopie þet hit schal beon ow, ȝef ȝe hit redeð ofte, swiðe biheue’].3 In more recent times, however, Diane Watt has recognized that the politics of women’s relationship to literary production do not necessarily echo the same teleological trajectory as men’s; indeed, as Watt asserts: ‘neither modern nor medieval definitions of authorship and literacy are adequate to describe the complex processes by which women contributed to and engaged in textual production’.4 In this assessment, Watt develops the earlier argument of Felicity Riddy, who suggested that late-medieval women’s reading was both a communal and a collaborative activity, and that it therefore bridged the artificial divides between the nunnery, the anchorhold and the community.5

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2



3

4



5

Julia Kristeva, ‘Oscillation between Power and Denial’, in New French Feminisms, ed. Marks and de Courtivron, pp. 165–7 (p. 166). Anne Clark Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Literature (Ithaca and London, 1995). Ancrene Wisse, 8. 336–7, p. 164. Diane Watt, Medieval Women’s Writing: Works by and for Women in England, 1100-1500 (Cambridge, 2007), p. 13. Felicity Riddy, ‘“Women talking about things of God”: A Late-Medieval Subculture’, in Women and

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Medieval Anchoritisms The point which both Riddy and Watt are most keen to establish, however, is that those women who read together, and shared or exchanged books, or who even took to writing themselves, were not necessarily alienated – or even separated – from patriarchal ways of thinking and operating,6 and with this I would certainly concur. However, for the devout woman writer, particularly the female anchorite, it is clear that some of the primary issues at the forefront of her writerly consciousness were how to avoid male interpellation, how to achieve endorsement and how to gain ultimate authority – all, of course, highly gendered and politically loaded issues. Without there being reserved for her a suitable place within the tradition of the auctor and his auctoritas, without having a legitimate public forum from which to voice her experiences, in fact without having a right to voice anything at all under Pauline proscription, she had to search out ways of evading the type of relentless male ventriloquism which pervaded her prescribed devotional reading, for example, and find a way of carving out a literary space for (self-)authorization. This could mean seeking out already-established female voices, as in the case of Margery Kempe’s consultation with Julian of Norwich on the issue of discretio spiritum [‘discernment of spirits’], or her reading (or having read to her) the writings of Bridget of Sweden and Marie d’Oignies, for instance.7 Or it could mean that the woman writer would strive to form a strong and mutually beneficial bond with an authoritative man, whether confessor, patron, parish priest, or priestly anchorite etc., who would, perhaps, filter her words and render them ‘safe’ and orthodox enough for wider dissemination.8 As I shall argue here, however, this process frequently involved the adoption of a reading and exegetical strategy on the part of the woman which could open up a more malleable, less clearly defined and potentially disruptive space into which the ‘anchoritic’ woman writer could insert herself and destabilize anticipated criticism of her. Again, the potential for such a strategy is conveniently laid out as a clear possibility by the Ancrene Wisse author elsewhere in Part Eight, when he attempts to control where, how, by and for whom ‘his’ text will be used: Ȝe ancres ahen þis leaste lutle stucche redden to ower wummen suche wike eanes aþet ha hit cunnen. Ant muche neod is þet ȝe neomen to ham muche ȝeme, for ȝe mahen muchel beon þurh ham igodet – ant iwurset [. . .] leareð ham to halden hare riwle, ba for ow ant for ham seolf [. . .] for swuch ah wummone lare to beonne, luuelich ant liðe ant selthwenne sturne.



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Literature in Britain 1150–1500, ed. Meale, pp. 104–27. Watt, Medieval Women’s Writing, p. 13. See also the essay by Elizabeth Robertson, ‘Gendering Women’s Networks’, in History of British Women’s Writing: Vol. 1, ed. McAvoy and Watt (forthcoming 2012). See, for example, Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sandford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS os 212 (London, 1997), ch. 18, pp. 42–3; ch. 39, p. 95; and ch. 62, p. 153. On the influence of the translated writings by or about Bridget and Marie, see Laura Saetveit Miles, ‘Bridget of Sweden’, and Jennifer M. Brown, ‘Marie d’Oignies’, in History of British Women’s Writing: Vol. 1, ed. McAvoy and Watt (forthcoming 2012). On the important mutuality of this bond, see, for example, Catherine Mooney, Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters (Philadelphia, 1999); and the essays collected in Women and Experience, ed. Mulder-Bakker and McAvoy, passim.

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Reading with the Eyes Closed [You anchoresses should read this last subsection to your women once a week until they are familiar with it. And it is most important that you take great care with them, as you can be greatly helped by them – and harmed too [. . .] do your best to teach them kindly and lovingly to keep their Rule, both for your sake and theirs, because that is what women’s teaching should be like, loving and kindly and seldom stern.]9

Here, in laying down his prescriptive advice, the author inadvertently endorses the anchorhold as a woman-on-woman space where learning, teaching, exegesis and discussion bear the potential to escape the dictates of patriarchal policing and direction. The anchoritic space generated here is intimate and private and the women’s use of it is also private – and therefore freighted with possibility: not only is the anchorhold a place where new literary practices may be developed and exchanged by like-minded women away from the male interpellative gaze, but it is a literary space within which something approximating to a female imaginary, predicated on a specifically female gaze, may be glimpsed and accessed, as I shall demonstrate.10 JULIAN OF NORWICH AND SEMIOTICS OF THE ANCHORHOLD In her critique of the type of male-authored discourse concerning a female body deemed to be consuming and threatening within the male imaginary, Luce Irigaray calls for a ‘non-phallic’ language which, rather than seeking to control this perceived ‘threat’, will embrace the ‘love, desire, language, art, the social, the political, the religious’ which she claims the mother, as possessor of that ‘threatening’ body, brings to the world and which is denied her under patriarchy.11 For Irigaray, in order for women to (re)discover their place within their own subjectivity and language, they have to cross the chasm back to the place of the mother and reject traditional oedipal configurations which sever them from the primary unity which they once shared with her: ‘We have to discover a language which does not replace the bodily encounter [with the mother], as paternal language attempts to do, but which can go along with it, words which do not bar the corporeal, but which speak corporeal.’12 The oedipal

9

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Ancrene Wisse, 8.297, p. 163. For a most useful summary of how the male gaze is implicated in the achieving of phallic power, see Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Literary Theory, ed. Rivkin and Ryan, pp. 585–95 (especially pp. 585–7). Luce Irigaray, ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford, 1991), pp. 35–46 (p. 43). Here, Irigaray’s use of the term ‘mother’ is frequently read literally, something which has levelled charges of reductive essentialism against the author. However, Irigaray’s use of the figure of the mother in her work should be considered in terms of her ubiquitous critique of patriarchal fetishization and appropriation of the female body to serve its own imaginary. Her use of the term ‘mother’, therefore, is more often than not associated with the female body as an ‘envelope’ filled with male-generated meaning and discourse. In this essay, she calls for women to reappropriate their potential for motherhood as part of their own subjectivity, as well as their relationship with their own mothers, and wrest both away from the patriarchal machinery. Re-presented in these terms, ‘motherhood’ would begin to signify something entirely different from the baggage-laden category it has long occupied within western philosophical thought. Irigaray, ‘Bodily Encounter’, p. 43.

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Medieval Anchoritisms equation which, within Freudian analysis, is dependent upon the ‘killing’ of the mother, renders sexual difference primary within human culture and thus functions, according to the appraisal of Amy Hollywood, ‘to naturalize the multiple forms of power and oppression on which white, propertied, Christian, European men grounded their supremacy’.13 In other words, Freudian anxieties regarding maternal power within patriarchal cultures lead to the production of a fetishized, suffering and desubjectivized female body which is dependent upon traditional male political and institutional authority for its meaning, something which I have been arguing for in my previous chapters. As I have also demonstrated, it is just such a desubjectivized body which the Ancrene Wisse author invokes in his text with his hybrid discourses of Romance and monstrosity, both of which refract the female body through a male – and patriarchal – lens. It is also, of course, such a body which Julian of Norwich was necessarily in possession of at the moment of her first visionary encounter with Christ, experienced in 1373, when she was thirty years of age. Julian at this time was self-professedly ‘a woman, lewed, febille, and freylle’,14 an assessment which follows to the letter cultural assumptions about women and their intellectual and physical capacities. In spite of this overt acknowledgement of her own perceived gendered limitations, Julian nevertheless betrays another, deeper understanding: that her sex, although frail, should not preclude her from articulating her utterly extraordinary experiences, whatever male-authored proscriptions may be on this matter. She continues: ‘Botte for I am a woman shulde I therefore leve that I shulde nought telle yowe the goodenes of God, sine that I sawe in that same time that it is his wille that it be knawen?’15 Julian’s sense of her own weakness, whilst a recognizable literary trope, is not merely a product of patriarchal discourse and convention, however; it is also probably stimulated by the memory of her recent illness and the life-threatening paralysis which had also produced a flesh-andblood, abject and alienated body as the cipher for her visionary experiences. In other words, the feebleness and frailty which she articulates here, rather than merely reflecting the type of internalized discourses of ontology which I have been examining so far, are, in reality, recently lived physical and intensely felt experiences of the body, a body which also happens to be culturally sexed and gendered female. I argue, therefore, that the electrifying mystical encounter which accompanies Julian’s illness, and which is predicated on her suffering body, is also sexed and gendered female as a result, something which compels her over the course of the next forty years to develop a powerfully persuasive, non-phallic written language in an attempt to best articulate it as it was lived and understood by her. Not for Julian, therefore, are the conventional discourses of sponsalia or

13

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15

Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, p. 239. It is generally accepted that the first of Julian’s written responses to her experiences of 1373 (A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, also known as the Short Text) was written soon after those experiences, with a longer text (A Revelation of Love, also known as the Long Text) serving as a protracted development and modification of that first exposition. The second version was probably developed and completed during more than twenty years of exegetical thinking in the anchorhold, to which Julian withdrew, probably in the 1390s. All references to Julian’s writing will be taken from The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (Turnhout, 2006) and will be cited by section/chapter, line and page (here Vision, 5.36–7, p. 75). Vision, 6.40–2, p. 75.

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Reading with the Eyes Closed miles Christi, as generated and framed by the insistent gender politics of phallic thought. Instead, recognizing her experiences as unable to be captured within the confines of traditional male discourse, over time she devises a language and hermeneutics which, I argue, prefigure those called for in more recent times by Irigaray, Cixous and, more particularly, Julia Kristeva, all of whose work searches relentlessly for an idiom with which to articulate a specifically female experience of the body and its productivity. Again upon Julian’s own admission in the first of her two texts, as a young woman she had actively sought the abjection of a bodily sickness, fully in keeping with accepted late-medieval ascetic practices, particularly those associated with women.16 By means of this sickness she hoped to gain access to a fuller understanding of the suffering of Christ’s Passion and share with him the three ‘woundes’ of ‘contrition’, ‘compassion’ and ‘wilfulle langinge to God’.17 Significantly, Julian also chooses to identify with the figure of Mary Magdalene (‘I wolde have bene that time with Mary Maudeleyne’),18 an anchoritic stalwart, as we have seen, whose experience of Christ was ubiquitously represented in the Middle Ages as bodily and human, whilst also spiritual and transcendent.19 Within contemporary exegetical readings of Mary Magdalene’s relationship with Christ, however, Christ’s post-Resurrection appearance to her before all others and his instructing of her to take the news to the disciples, also rendered her apostola apostolorum (apostle to the apostles),20 essentially a male role but appropriable by Mary Magdalene because of her position as especially chosen messenger of the word of God. Allied to her former whoredom, however, such a role resulted in a permanently hybrid identity and a gendered doubleness, something which allowed Mary Magdalene (at least on the level of patriarchal discourse) to evade the limitations of a singularly dangerous body and gain access to the ‘traditional’ and ‘institutional’ configurations of power which have always operated within the realm of the masculine and the intellectual. Julian’s early use of Mary Magdalene in A Vision, then, suggests that from the outset of her attempts to write she is grappling with issues of the female body and acceptable ways of overcoming the type of ontological legacy and its gendered problematics as laid out by the Ancrene Wisse author. This, of course, is crucial if Julian is to substantiate the orthodoxy of her own bodily experiences and their meanings, justify her necessary incursion upon the ‘traditional’ and ‘institutional’ realms of male religious authority, whilst relaying her insights as accurately as she can to her ‘evencristen’ in a language which does them justice. The fact that Julian also draws upon another of the popular female saints, Saint Cecelia, would seem to corroborate this.21 As I have argued elsewhere, For a detailed overview of such practices and their feminine hermeneutics, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1991). 17 Vision, 1.40–1, p. 65. 18 Vision, 1.6, p. 63. 19 See Haskins, Mary Magdalen, passim. 20 See John 20: 17. On Mary Magdalene’s role as apostle see Katherine Ludwig Jansen, ‘Maria Magdalena: Apostolorum Apostola’, in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverley Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (Los Angles and London, 1998), pp. 57–96. See also Haskins, Mary Magdalen, pp. 55–94. 21 Vision, 1.36–8, p. 65. 16



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Medieval Anchoritisms in A Vision the invocation of the virginal Saint Cecelia and her torturous path towards youthful martyrdom demonstrates clearly Julian’s further toying with suitable role-models in order to offer a female context for – and to justify – the extraordinary account which is to follow. Cecelia, as a particularly popular saint in the later Middle Ages, was in the eyes of the Church another entirely orthodox figure for Julian as a young woman to be identifying with.22 Not only was Cecelia a young woman living within the world, as Julian seems to have been at that point in her youth,23 but her life follows the traditional – and, on the surface of it, empowering – hagiographic pattern of the young woman’s resistance to torture and abjection at the hands of a patriarch whose attempts to subdue her ardour for God fail at every juncture. Nevertheless, the traditional hagiographic narrative upon which Julian draws also constructs Cecelia’s young, sealed and virginal body as a deeply physical and fetishized spectacle entirely dependent on the male gaze and definition for its meaning within a male imaginary:24 in the words of Kristeva the ‘hysterical saint plays her pleasure against social order, but in the name of God’.25 As such, this body is denied its own potential as a self-defining (pro)creative entity, bowing instead to a male-constructed version of itself, a desubjectivized ideal which constitutes a virile form of piety superimposed upon a female body, which hagiographic narrative always seeks to dismember and destroy. Julian’s early introduction in A Vision of these popular, main-stream female saints therefore allows her to draw on a discourse of maleapproved orthodoxy, whilst offering a platform from which to explore the bodily potential which is denied the (m)other within the male symbolic order (but which is central, of course, to Julian’s mystical insights and her later configuration of God as Mother). Indeed, for Julian, the female body as a complex and multivalent symbol – but also as a lived ‘reality’ – carries the potential not only to mirror and shape that ‘reality’ in a number of different, more affirming ways than those presented to her as definitive and male (‘the techinge of haly kyrke’, for example, or ‘alle the lawe of cristen men’)26 but also, to coin the words Susan K. Hagan was one of the first commentators to recognize the importance of Julian’s identification with Saint Cecelia, commenting, ‘Saint Cecelia [. . .] provides Julian with historical affirmation of woman’s value as a voice for Christian wisdom in the face of sceptics and nay-sayers’. See Susan K. Hagan, ‘St. Cecelia and St. John of Beverly: Julian of Norwich’s Early Model and Late Affirmation’, in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York and London, 1998), pp. 90–114 (p. 108). 23 Not all commentators are convinced about Julian’s status as a laywoman prior to her anchoritic enclosure. For a summary of the debate surrounding her early life, see my introduction to A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. McAvoy, pp. 1–16 (pp. 2–7). 24 On the female saint’s body as fetish see Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, pp. 240–1. For Hollywood, the male hagiographer’s subtext is a fetishization of the suffering female body as substitute for his own body and his own hopes for immortality. As such, the female is ‘susceptible to fixation and reification’ in a way which is ‘profoundly debilitating’ (p. 241). But see also Shari Horner’s essay, ‘Saints’ Lives’, in History of British Women Writers: Vol. 1, ed. McAvoy and Watt (forthcoming 2012). Here, Horner argues for the body of the martyred saint as self-authored text, able to be read against the grain by a female readership, and which draws upon a different set of bodily hermeneutics from those generally prioritized within male readings. 25 Julia Kristeva, ‘Woman Can Never Be Defined’, in New French Feminisms, ed. Marks and de Courtivron, pp. 137–41 (p. 141). 26 Vision, 1.11, p. 63; and Vision, 18.13, p. 101. This is not to say that Julian does not accept these teachings: on the contrary, she is at all times most emphatic about presenting her beliefs as wholly orthodox. Nevertheless, both texts are also imbued with a tension which hinges on the discrepancies between what she believes from Church teaching and what she ‘knows’ and ‘understands’ as a result of her 22

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Reading with the Eyes Closed of Hollywood, ‘to invert, question, reject, and transcend it’.27 Throughout her writing, therefore, Julian toys relentlessly with this body as a place in which the ‘complexities of desire and identification play out’,28 whilst resisting its negatively charged associations. I therefore argue that, whilst drawing initially upon the abject body of female hagiography, that male-authored site of an ‘ideal’ female piety, Julian converts that ideal body into a type of smoke-screen from behind which she is able to safely develop an alternative, authoritative, female-focused exegetical frame of reference – in more contemporary terms, an attempt at a female imaginary, perhaps – which recasts orthodoxy by inserting a redefined and re-experienced body into its core. From this point A Vision moves rapidly on to recount in detail the major, lifethreatening illness experienced by the author prior to the onset of her mystical experiences. This illness resulted in extreme pain and bodily abjection which endured, Christ-like, for three days and nights, taking Julian to the brink of death: ‘on the thirde night I wenede ofte times to hafe passed, and so wened thaye that were aboute me’.29 Here, Julian is intent not only on stressing the severity of her illness from her own perspective but also to corroborate it by including the perspective of those who are witnessing it alongside her (‘and so wened thaye that were aboute me’), in what aptly constitutes a type of ‘double-vision’. In A Vision particularly, this extract introduces a description in which she appears to be casting herself – again like Cecelia – as affective spectacle whose abject body is there to be ‘read’ via the gaze of both her onlookers and her readers in full hagiographic mode in order to prepare them for the extraordinary revelations which are to follow. However, by the time she comes to revise this account in her second version, A Revelation – by which time she is almost certainly writing from within the anchorhold – Julian is confident enough in the textual authority generated by her own body to be able to dispense with this hagiographic smoke-screen and the literary performance of male-approved orthodoxy which it provides. Whilst retaining the pivotal episode of her illness in A Revelation, she excises all reference to Saint Cecelia, turning instead to the language generated by her own enclosed body and the authority of her own gaze to by-pass the heteropatriarchal language of traditional hagiographic discourse.30 Also excised from A Revelation is Julian’s representation of her own mother, who, in A Vision, takes up a prominent position in Julian’s sickroom and who thus allows for a powerfully affective discourse of traditional Marian piety to

29 30 27

28

visionary experiences. These, however, do not always dovetail neatly with religious orthodoxy and require much musing and examination to reconcile them within this context. On Julian’s religious orthodoxy, see Denise Nowakowski Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: from Vision to Book (Princeton, 1994), especially pp. 63–82. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, p. 217. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, p. 217. Vision, 2.4–6, p. 65. It is highly significant to the argument I will be making that, while erasing Cecelia from the narrative of A Revelation, Julian chooses to retain reference to a series of other male saints, including Peter, Paul and Thomas. She also introduces the lesser-known John of Beverley, whom an extant Dutch source casts as a reformed murderer, for which see Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 236, notes on Revelation, 38.13–29, p. 236. The only female saint whom Julian retains is Mary Magdalene in her capacity as sexual sinner, thus removing altogether the tortured female body, as configured by male-authored hagiography, as a frame of reference for her own experiences of suffering.

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Medieval Anchoritisms be attached to the narrative. Indeed, Julian’s literary foray into the realm of the affective in this initial account of her own sickness threatens to invoke the same fetishistic appropriation of the (m)other alluded to earlier in the context of the virgin martyrologies discussed in Chapter 3:31 ‘My modere, that stode emanges othere and behelde me, lifted uppe hir hande before me face to lokke min eyen. For she wened I had bene dede or els I hadde diede.’32 The recognizably specular, affective qualities of this account are, however, problematized by the fact that Julian’s narrative will not play out in a traditional, hagiographic mode: she is not dead, merely paralysed bodily by illness and transfixed psychologically by the vision of Christ, which, unbeknown to her companions and her mother, is unfolding before her own gaze. Indeed, the potential for traditional affect is further negated by the complexity of the multiple perspectives offered by Julian at this point: her own, those of Christ, her mother, her readers, all of which combine to form what Sarah Stanbury has termed ‘the intersected trajectories of multiple lines of sight’,33 which deny any one perspective as definitive. Julian is also leaving her increasingly abject body behind in the sick-room with the onlookers – and her readers – whilst entering a parallel and palimpsestic mystical space. She is quite literally there and not there, and it is the convoluted doubleness of this inside-outside perception of the body, along with the fixedness of her own gaze, which not only allows for her remarkably nuanced response to her own visions but which becomes, in her revised text, fundamental to the forging of a suitable poetics for their understanding and articulation. Moreover, since the scene of its inception is the female-focused and maternalized space of Julian’s sickroom, and the female-focused and (re)productive space of her own body, it is hardly surprising that, as an author, her primary hermeneutic will also be an intensely female and maternal one, allowing her access to a range of expression which will ultimately render female bodily abjection entirely God-like. Moreover, in Julian’s hands this treatment moves way beyond mere identification, metaphor or, indeed, allegory; in radical contrast to the Ancrene Wisse author, for Julian, a (re)productive female body can both pave the way to and articulate the redemption of a humanity which is, like its deity, reconfigured along female lines. There is thus a sense that Julian is striving to construct a generative body which functions as both metatext and semiotic framework and which, in its convoluted doubleness, will be able to overlay and integrate traditional ‘paternal’ narratives and exegeses. Again in the sickroom of A Vision (a space which is typologically anchoritic, of course), we see this fully in action: in this enclosed space, a ‘chaumber’ with womb-like resonances, which is ‘alle dyrke’ and where Julian cannot but watch the ‘rede blode trekille downe’,34 the reciprocity between the bodies of Julian and her mother provides the bridge for an articulation of Julian’s transition from the here-and-now of rational, phallic thought to the semiotic expanse of the mystical

For a protracted analysis of the role played by the Virgin within Western culture from a feminist perspective, see Julia Kristeva’s essay ‘Stabat Mater’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York, 1986), pp. 160–85. 32 Vision, 10.26–8, p. 83. 33 Sarah Stanbury, ‘The Virgin’s Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion’, PMLA 106, 5 (1991), pp. 1083–93 (p. 1086). 34 Vision, 2.29, p. 67, and 3.10, p. 67. 31

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Reading with the Eyes Closed domain. Viewing her mother’s anguish from her own helpless perspective leads Julian to directly confront the anguish of the Virgin whose pain upon seeing her own son’s suffering was caused by the commonality of their flesh and the unity of their love: ‘Criste and sho [Mary] ware so anede in love that the gretnesse of hir love was the cause of the mekillehede of hir paine’.35 Typically, Julian’s use of the verb ‘anede’ here is also multifaceted – and holds the key to what I am arguing: its maternal associations within this particular context are clear (Christ’s humanity is one with his mother’s flesh), associations which serve to destabilize the hierarchical gender binary of male/female which dominates traditional phallic discourse. The term, however, is also redolent with echoes of primary unity, of that maternal, pre- or extra-linguistic space also identified by Kristeva as the semiotic chora – the pre-symbolic, enclosed and sealed site of unity with the mother which underpins all human existence (and exactly the space which the virgin martyrologies make such concerted effort to deny in their energetic dismembering of the material female body, of course).36 It is no coincidence, therefore, that this choric space will inform Julian’s later fully blown configuration of God as mother in her revised text, written – or at least completed – in the enclosed and freighted space of her Norwich anchorhold. As such, these choric traces are ideally positioned to provide an echo of a language outside of language with which to express the ultimately inexpressible event unfolding before Julian’s eyes, since its origins, like that of mystical unity with God, lie before and beyond language. Indeed (and again recalling the there-andnot-there of Julian’s mystical encounter), the semiotic chora is for Kristeva ‘no more than the place where the subject is both generated and negated’.37 Thus, in Julian’s sick room, as a desperately ill and helpless woman she experiences human negation, whilst at the same she is (re)generated as a visionary woman, an enforced gazer, of remarkable privilege and insight. It is therefore clear that, from this early stage in A Vision, Julian is reading her visionary insights in terms of the feminine and the female, plumbing her own experiences, both mediated and unmediated, of being a woman of the ‘vulnerable flesh’, and her relationship with her own mother for a suitable hermeneutic with which to articulate her highly complex mystical insights. In drawing initially on traditional models of femininity and manoeuvring them in and out of spaces of enclosure, Julian reconfigures their scope, however. In so doing, she destabilizes the hegemony of a male-authored perspective, the end-product of which is the gestation of a ‘new’ language redolent with a reconfigured poetics of femininity better suited to express an intensely female-embodied experience of mystical unity. This is also true of Julian’s visceral representations of other abject bodies, both Christic and human, for it is the experience of the body which her readers – her ‘evencristen’ – will recognize and with which they will identify most readily. But it is also this same body which, for Julian, can facilitate an understanding Vision, 10.37–40, p. 85. Kristeva borrows the term chora from Plato’s Timaeus, where it is deployed to denote an ‘essentially mobile and extremely provisional articulation’. Kristeva uses it to designate the ‘rhythmic’ space which precedes language and the entry of the child into the symbolic. It is where the primary and as yet unbroken bond with the mother is constituted. It therefore underpins, whilst it is simultaneously denied by language and representation. See Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, p. 94. 37 Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, p. 95. 35

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Medieval Anchoritisms of the very complex theological and mystical issues with which she is dealing and produce a language ideally crafted to represent the seemingly inexplicable. Her movement towards this position is particularly apparent in an extraordinary passage appearing only in A Revelation (and it is a passage which has been excised from all but one of the witnesses to this later text, most likely by a prurient scribe anxious about its highly visible scatology). Here, Julian articulates her perception of the goodness of God again in terms of human abjection: Forto the goodnes of God [. . .] cometh downe to us, to the lowest party of our need [. . .] A man goeth upperight, and the soule of his body is sparede as a purse fulle fair. And whan it is time of his nescessery, it is openede and sparede ayen fully honestly. And that it is he that doeth this, it is shewed ther wher he seith: “He cometh downe to us, to the lowest parte of our nede.” For he hath no dispite of that he made, ne hath no disdaine to serve us at the simpilest office that to oure body longeth in kinde, for love of the soule that he hath made to his awne liknesse. For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skinne, and bones in the flesh, and the harte in the bowke, so are we, soule and body, cladde and enclosedde in the goodnes of God.38

In this extract (and in full maternal fashion), God nurtures us in our helpless abjection, that is to say, ‘in the lowest party of our need’, and it is a need which unites all humans, regardless of age, sex, gender or socio-religious status. Here, however, Julian configures this need in terms of the helpless human infant, entirely dependent upon the mother and locked in a fleeting pre-separation with her until its inevitable entry into the symbolic (and thus into language) brings about permanent disruption and individuation. In Julian’s account, however, she resists such permanent disruption by recapturing what Kristeva terms the ‘network of traces’ or semiotics of primal unity which surface only within poetic language, resulting in ‘the explosion of the semiotic in the symbolic’.39 Thus, if Julian’s daring and exposed account of the defecating body is read in this context, it also carries with it the same traces of the semiotic bubbling up through the intensely poetic language used to configure it. Not only is the body a purse opening to spare its waste (‘soule’), even that waste becomes synonymous with the beauty of the human soul (also ‘soule’) and, therefore, of God (‘the soule that he hath made to his awne liknesse’). Julian’s adept pun on the word ‘soule’ here (as both the human soul and bodily waste)40 produces a unity between the faecal matter produced by the human body and the transcendent soul and both, therefore, become an expression of an imago Dei. For Julian, even the abject act of human defecation is a vision of God and the very waste-matter the body voids itself of (like the child the mother voids herself of during childbirth) is made, like the soul, in the image of God-our-Mother. This act of human abjection, Revelation, 6.25–37, pp. 143–5. Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, p. 118–19. 40 Edmund Colledge and James Walsh define Julian’s use of the word ‘soule’ in this extract as ‘undigested food’ in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Showings, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Toronto, 1978), p. 306, n. 35. Watson and Jenkins, however, gloss it as a ‘meal’ or ‘food’ (Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 142, note on lines 29–31). The latter reading also concurs with my own assertion in ‘A purse ful feyer’ and in Authority and the Female Body that the passage anticipates Julian’s portrayal of God as Mother in chapters 55–62 of A Revelation. 38 39

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Reading with the Eyes Closed therefore, offers the reader a further introit into the complex mystical theology of unity, in effect another route back to the enclosed realm of what Kristeva terms the pre-thetic semiotic, with which Julian completes this extract: ‘so are we, soule and body, cladde and enclosedde in the goodnes of God’. Such a multivalent – and often startling – poetics within Julian’s writing is far more than a linguistic category, therefore: it is integral to the conflated hermeneutics of femininity and enclosure which I have been identifying here. As Kristeva asserts: ‘Indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgement, but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax.’41 As she gains confidence in her own poetics, then, we perceive a veritable haemorrhaging up of the normally unaccommodated semiotic through the multiple surfaces of Julian’s writing in what approximates to a female imaginary predicated upon powerful anchoritic discourses of womb-like enclosure and mother–child (or God–human) unity. This semiotic articulation provides, therefore, one of the sites where there can be an extra-symbolic expression of fully embodied female-identified practices, a site where ‘endless, ceaseless, illimitable desire might be thought and lived outside of a phallic law of [female] impotence’.42 Thus, within the productive space of her anchorhold, Julian is able to write her daring theology of Christ’s motherhood, culminating, perhaps in these words: oure lady is oure moder, in whome we be all beclosed and of her borne in Crist. For she that is moder of oure savioure is mother of all that ben saved in our saviour. And oure savioure is oure very moder, in whome we be endlesly borne and never shall come out of him.43

The complex conflation of ‘lady’, ‘moder’, ‘we’, ‘Crist’, ‘savioure’, ‘him’ as subjects here points towards the unity of a mystical encounter with God in which the subject is endlessly generated, defined, relinquished and negated, in which all and nothing is possible, a unity which is inherently pre-discursive and extralinguistic and which, like Julian’s God and the earthly mother, is ‘the endlesse fulfilling of all true desyers’.44 For, in Julian’s connotive universe, the bridging of binaries and the elision of their differences is ultimately productive of a third category – all that there is: ‘for alle oure life is in thre’.45 Moreover, this ‘thre’ is defined by Julian in multigendered terms: it is ‘kinde’, ‘mercy’, and ‘grace’; it is also ‘oure fader [. . .] oure moder, and [. . .] oure lorde’, tripartite equations which are ultimately subsumed into the entirely reconfigured category of ‘oure moder in kind [. . .] in whom we be grounded and roted’.46 Such a remarkable disruption of traditional language, logic and imagery by Julian is thus fully productive of the type of non-phallic language called for by Irigaray, which I cited earlier and which, as we have seen, can serve to counter the relentless anti-feminism found within those anchoritic texts I have been examining in previous chapters. 43 44 45 46 41

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Kristeva, ‘Revolution’, p. 97. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, p. 278. Revelation, 57.40–3, p. 305. Revelation, 59.14; 15–16, p. 311. Revelation, 58.25, p. 307. Revelation, 59.28–35, p. 311.

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Medieval Anchoritisms As a language which emerges unmediated from female bodily experiences, as a language which is toyed with and endlessly processed by Julian within the space of the anchorhold, it does not deny the corporeal but, quite clearly, ‘goes along with it’. As such, it is ideally placed to express a ‘vision showed to a devout woman’ as closely as possible and to reappropriate those hermeneutics of the feminine which first haunted and then began to shape the later-medieval anchorhold and the spirituality it generated. As such, Julian’s visionary language of unity and love, although emerging from utter bodily abjection, resists entirely those monstrous categories invoked by the Ancrene Wisse author to categorize the destructive potential of his female audience’s ontology. And this, no doubt, provides one reason why Margery Kempe sought out Julian as anchoritic mentor in her own quest to evade the proscriptions of the phallic script and find a means of articulating her own visionary experiences.47 MARGERY KEMPE’S ANCHORITIC AUTHORITY The Book of Margery Kempe, written c. 1438–40 at the end of its author’s highly eventful and unconventional life,48 is testimony to the increasingly visible role played by holy women in the later Middle Ages and, in the case of its author, within a lay context. Like Julian’s writing, the Book is similarly shot through with anchoritic hermeneutics. which focus on the performances and perspectives of an insistently female body which is locked in intimacy with God. It is, however, witness to the thin line trodden by the holy woman wishing to obtain spiritual authority and socio-religious acceptance for her experiences; in many ways, too, it also points towards the crucial importance of the late-medieval anchorhold as providing a much safer space for the transgressive female utterance than did a ‘mixed life’ within the world.49 Like Kristeva’s ‘dancer’ with which I began this chapter, and unlike Julian, Margery Kempe suffers publicly as she speaks, forever the emerging ‘subject-in-process’ who balances the tight-rope between acceptance and vilification, being understood and misread, being included and excluded.50 On Julian’s likely influence on Margery Kempe’s spirituality see Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, Margery Kempe’s Meditations: The Context of Medieval Devotional Literature, Liturgy and Iconography (Cardiff, 2007), pp. 62–3, 66–7, and 72–3. 48 Margery Kempe documents a life characterized by an adherence to the so-called ‘mixed’ religious life, that is to say one which emulated the spirituality of religious enclosure, whilst continuing to live and operate within the world. For a recent treatment of this issue, see Ruth Summar McIntyre, ‘Margery’s “Mixed Life”: Place Pilgrimage and the Problem of Genre in The Book of Margery Kempe’, English Studies 89, 6 (2008), pp. 643–61. All references to the text will be taken from The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS os 212 (London, New York and Toronto, 1997). 49 This is a concept coined by Georges Bataille, who also argues that the misunderstanding of such transgression is fundamental to Christian thought. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco, 1986), p. 90. Stanbury also draws upon this notion in the context of the Marian lyric in ‘The Virgin’s Gaze’, p. 1086. 50 The theory of the ‘subject-in-process’ is one which has evolved across Kristeva’s work, a theory which rejects the structuralist notion of a stable subject in favour of one which is always shifting and incomplete, perpetually coming into being. This, she argues, denies the ‘truth’ of a language based upon a ‘monolithic’ and phallic (male) body and, as such, opens up points of slippage. These, in turn, reveal traces of the pre-linguistic semiotic, identified with the subliminated and 47

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Reading with the Eyes Closed Whilst I have dealt with the bodily hermeneutics of Margery Kempe’s writing in depth elsewhere,51 how those hermeneutics intersect with late-medieval urban anchoritism, a vocation now dominated by women and, as I have been arguing, one always relentlessly underpinned by different notions of the feminine, demands further scrutiny.52 Margery Kempe, of course, was not an anchorite, although she was later to become identified as one in a redacted version of her text, produced soon after her death and published by Henry Pepwell in the sixteenth century.53 As this designation would suggest, therefore, there is much about Kempe’s writing which can be read as ‘anchoritic’, something which a number of commentators have already acknowledged. Denis Renevey, for example, has identified the ways in which Margery’s ‘performing body’ becomes an ‘anchoritic’ script, bridging the spirituality of the anchorhold and that of the laity with her excessive bodily performances and personally shaped devotion.54 Similarly, I have argued briefly that Margery’s relationships with a number of influential anchorites are of crucial importance to her as she forges her own version of the ‘mixed’ religious life.55 In this present treatment, however, I also wish to assert that Margery made it her business to align herself, often on divine instruction, with a number of anchorites, not only for purposes of immediate spiritual support, but also to forge a suitable means to legitimize her text. In other words, Margery’s self-alignment with contemporary urban anchoritism constitutes a conscious personal and literary strategy to insert her text, and the self she constructs within it, into a framework which will place both at the heart of an elite, urban – and by now relatively secure – spiritual orthodoxy. By populating her text with an array of local anchorites of various levels of repute, Margery could appropriate the exceptional esteem in which they were held within contemporary urban spirituality and cast herself as an equally exceptional holy woman within the light of that spiritual elitism. This is not to say that all of Margery’s anchoritic contacts were fully supportive of her. On the contrary, a number of them come under the same scrutiny as do many other vocational religious in the Book who are unable to recognize Margery’s own chosen status. As such, they are subsumed into a textual strategy which requires Margery to be ultimately misunderstood and ostracized by many of her contemporaries in order to cast into relief her very special status in the eyes of God.56 As Watt has again recently argued in the context of Margery’s



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denied female-maternal. See, for example, Kristeva’s early treatment of this in Polylogue (Paris, 1977). Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge, 2004). Warren’s scrutiny of published sources posits a ratio of 2:1 in favour of female anchoritism in fifteenth-century England, with the sex of another twenty-eight anchorites impossible to determine from the records (Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 20). This later redaction of the Book, produced soon after the author’s death and printed by Henry Pepwell in 1521, designates Margery Kempe as ‘deuoute ancres [. . .] of Lynne’, although there is no evidence beyond this to suggest that Margery entered the anchorhold at the end of her life. This redaction is published as an appendix in the aforementioned edition, pp. 353–7. This reference is to p. 357, n. 11. Renevey, ‘Margery’s Performing Body’. Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘“Closyd in an hows of ston”: Discourses of Anchoritism and The Book of Margery Kempe’, in Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs, ed. McAvoy and Hughes-Edwards, pp. 182–94. Lyn Staley has argued for The Book of Margery Kempe as being a vehicle for a relentless socio-

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Medieval Anchoritisms sometimes fraught relationship with other women: ‘an understanding of influence and tradition that can accommodate discord and disagreement may give us a more nuanced sense of how texts such as The Book of Margery Kempe negotiate the problem of female authority in an age when authority was the prerogative of men.’57 We find, therefore, that upon her return from pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Margery is twice accused of immoral conduct by ‘misguided’ anchorites. Indeed, one male anchorite even accuses her of conceiving and giving birth to a child whilst she was away,58 an accusation, of course, which attempts to posit the widest possible schism between Margery and the type of anchoritic spirituality which she is keen to appropriate in her text, whilst betraying the same haunting by fears of the feminine which were prevalent in the male-directed texts which I examined in earlier chapters. A little later, whilst in York, an unnamed female anchorite also adamantly refuses to admit Margery to her company ‘for sche had herd telde so mech euyl telde of hir’.59 Margery relates how she had been eager to renew her acquaintance with this holy woman who ‘had louyd hir wel er sche went to Ierusalem’ and to spend some time eating bread and water with her, it being the eve of Our Lady’s Day, and sharing with her ‘gostly communicacyon’.60 Margery’s attempts to morph into a bona fide anchorite by proxy in this instance and share in an anchoritic identification with the Virgin are entirely thwarted by this York recluse, who, so she claims, had previously been well disposed towards her. Instead, she is taken in by sundry ‘fremd folk’, strangers who, in contrast to the antipathetic anchorite, ‘made hir rith good cher for owr Lordys lofe’.61 In view of the visionary and prophetic experiences which Margery on other occasions associates with the anchoritic life (and which ‘gostly encres’ she was anticipating here), her rejection at the hands of both these anchorites, whom she introduces in quick succession, should appear to work against her: we are left wondering what these two anchorites know that her narrative is not revealing to us, and by what means they have gleaned this information. However, in both cases, Margery turns rejection to her own favour as a textual strategy which underscores an individuated and personal suffering experienced outside the anchorhold, but which is brought about by the practices of anchorites inside the supposedly sacred space. Thus, in subjecting herself to their discursively misconceived criticism, Margery raises herself above them



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religious critique in Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1994). Whilst I would not go as far as Staley here, nevertheless I do agree that Margery attempts to enhance her own status by rendering her textual self as continually misunderstood by a myriad of vocational religious who, it is suggested, should know better. Diane Watt, ‘Margery Kempe’, in History of British Women Writers: Vol. 1, ed. McAvoy and Watt (forthcoming 2012). Book, p. 103. This was the Benedictine anchorite, Thomas Brakleye, of the Chapel in the Fields, Norwich. See p. 307, n. 103/1 sq. Interestingly, Margery seems to hedge her reply here, something which has led to some speculation as to whether she was already pregnant when she left England. However, see my ‘Margery’s Last Child: A Refutation’, Notes and Queries n.s. 46 (1999), pp. 181–3, in which I demonstrate quite clearly that this was not the case. It is, of course, highly unlikely that she became pregnant on the journey, as Brakeley accuses her of doing, and in response Margery intimates that the only child she bore whilst on pilgrimage was a spiritual one: ‘Ser, þe same childe þat God hath sent me I haue browt hom’ (Book, ch. 43, p. 103). Book, ch. 49, p. 119. Book, ch. 50, p. 119. Book, ch. 50, p. 119.

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Reading with the Eyes Closed in their subsequent rejection and abjection of her, rendering them a distorted mirror through which may be reflected her own status and prestige. On a more prosaic level, both of these judgemental anchorites also point towards the dangerous type of discourse community that traffics in gossip rather than spirituality which so exercised Goscelin of St Bertin in his letter to Eve, Aelred in his address to his sister, the author of Ancrene Wisse and, to some extent, the Speculum Inclusorum author, as we have seen. Misguided anchorites, however, serve Margery’s purpose in the same way as do corrupt priests or self-important prelates in her relentless negotiation of the poetics of suffering and aesthetics of exclusion. Indeed, they throw into relief her own ‘anchoritism which is not one’, in which her spiritual allegiances are cast as both multiple and palimpsestic. Hers is a personally devised, pragmatic and mimetic type of anchoritism, lived within the isolation of the world she inhabits rather than within a permanently locked cell. It is configured on her own terms and is, as Savage argues of latemedieval anchoritism and its predication on female bodily practices more widely, ‘a spiritual domain [. . .] founded on a mysticism of the body as a frontier of the human [. . .] her body a threshold’.62 For Savage, too, this threshold-body is one which draws people ‘to look, not at her [the anchorite], but through her, to a world they had only heard of and never seen, a world in sight of which she lived’.63 This is an assessment which chimes resonantly with Irigaray’s notion of women as occupying a ‘threshold’ site through which men traverse, both physically and figuratively, without necessarily being invited in.64 But Irigaray also calls for women to occupy a threshold site for themselves, a place where they can undertake their own inside-outside traversing, a position which would instil virginity as a basic civil right for women: in the words of Margaret Whitworth, ‘the condition of women’s being for-themselves’.65 Irigaray’s twentieth-century exhortation to women to eschew compulsory (hetero)sexuality thus casts the medieval holy-woman’s performances of chastity and virginity in a new light. Whilst, as we have seen, the coercive discourses of Hali Meiðhad and Ancrene Wisse are stamped with the male fetishizing of a pure and virginal female body to achieve its own salvation, nevertheless, the sacred and physical enclosure of the anchorhold, within which a performed virginity is central, bears the potential to be a ‘for-themselves’ space where the female anchorites may discover a habitation in which they can develop as individuals outside the patriarchal economy and away from its gaze. It is a space which may allow for the women themselves to be ‘the mediators and the bridges [. . .] bringing the god to life through [them], as a resurrection and transfiguration of blood and flesh through their language and their ethic’.66 In her own mimetic appropriation of anchoritic discourses and practices, Margery Kempe thus sites the threshold of her own body within those communities of ‘fremd folk’ into which she inserts herself, insisting on it as a ‘forherself ’ opening which, like the anchorhold itself, is predicated on an obsessive 64 65 66 62 63

Savage, ‘From Anchorhold to Cell of Self-Knowledge’, p. 169. Savage, ‘From Anchorhold to Cell of Self-Knowledge’, p. 158. See, for example, Luce Irigaray, Le Temps de la difference: pour une revolution pacifique (Paris, 1989). Whitworth, Luce Irigaray, p. 160. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London and New York, 2004), p. 129.

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Medieval Anchoritisms virginity and through which the people, both men and women, can glimpse their salvation. Such a siting of the body within a firmly anchoritic context is also revealed in Margery’s seeking out of more paradigmatic and insightful anchorites as part of her own ‘becoming’, all constituting memorable episodes which tend to be juxtaposed within her text.67 There is, of course, her prolonged visit to Julian of Norwich in 1413, whom she visited not just for spiritual reassurance but also to help shore up her perennial anxieties about the volatile mix of sex, gender and spirituality in which she found herself caught up. In this meeting, recorded by Margery in some detail, Julian famously advises Margery not to fear ‘þe langage of þe world’68 and, in view of her own success in deploying a redolently femalefocused language in her writing, as identified above, Julian here appears to be pointing the younger woman towards an alternative mode of expression which evades the misunderstandings generated outside the spiritually rarified environment of the anchorhold. If, as Irigaray has claimed, the mystical speakingposition (what she terms the ‘burning glass’) ‘is the only place in the history of the West in which woman speaks and acts so publicly’,69 then Margery’s position as another mystical spokeswoman who, unlike Julian, is living very publicly within the world, can certainly find protection within the more positive ideologies surrounding the ‘threshold’ role of the female within the anchoritic life – whether sponsa Christi, apostola apostolorum or prophetic ancilla Dei, for example. In this much-cited meeting with Margery, which appears to have taken place over ‘many days’,70 Julian bestows upon her from the security of enclosure the benefits of many years of musing on her own visionary experiences and insights received forty years previously in 1373.71 Indeed, as suggested, the anchorite may even still have been working on her revised account of her visions and their exegesis at this time; and, although there is no evidence to suggest that Margery or anybody else knew of Julian’s role as an author, Julian’s advice to Margery as recorded is fully in step with her writings as they have come down to us, in which she advocates an anchoritelike stability gained through trust in God as love: Þe Holy gost meuyth neuyr a þing ageyn charite, &, yf he dede, he wer contraryows to hys owyn self, for he is al charite [. . .] & þe Holy Gost makyth a sowle stabyl & stedfast in þe right feyth & þe rygth beleue.72

We also know from Margery’s account that Julian was a known and respected ‘ankres’ within her own community as an expert in discernment of spirits and in offering advice on spiritual matters.73 What is not generally commented on, however, is the fact that Margery is first ‘bodyn be owyr Lord for to gon to an These episodes are all recounted in the Book between ch. 18 and 19, pp. 41–7. Book, ch. 18, p. 43. Irigaray, ‘La Mystérique’, p. 191. Book, ch. 18, p. 43. On the influence of enclosed spaces upon Julian’s writing, see Laura Saetveit Miles, ‘Julian of Norwich and St Bridget of Sweden: Creating Intimate Space with God’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold, ed. McAvoy, pp. 126–40; and ‘Space and Enclosure in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love’, in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. McAvoy, pp. 154–65. 72 Book, ch. 18, p. 42. 73 Book, ch. 18, p. 42. 69 70 71 67

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Reading with the Eyes Closed ankres [.  .  .] which hyte Dame Ielyan’,74 something which not only establishes Julian’s divinely approved sanctity for both Margery and her text, but also includes Margery within Julian’s intimate anchoritic circle because of God’s deliberate intervention in the matter. Moreover, Julian is the only anchorite in Margery’s text who is actually named. This offers her an identity which moves beyond textual anchoritic trope and again suggests an important sphere of influence, something which Margery configures as especially female because of the intimacy between the two that she relays: ‘Mych was þe holy dalyawns þat the ankres & þis creatur haddyn be comownyng in þe lofe of owyr Lord Ihesu Crist many days þat þei were togedyr.’75 Such a ‘comownyng’ as a way of life is nevertheless devised to bring about the ‘despyte, schame & repref ’ which form part of the poetics of suffering of an abjected body which ultimately leads to salvation: as Julian explains, ‘for the more despite, schame & repref þat ȝe haue in þe world þe mor is ȝowr meryte in þe sygth of God’.76 I have already documented Julian’s own redemptive suffering as a young woman, but no doubt the discomfort of forty years in a small cell, however well appointed, is also informing Julian’s eschatological perspective here and, for all we know, her own writing may have met with similar disapproval from those who knew of it – whether a scribe, spiritual confessor or fellow anchorite (which may also help to explain the lack of evidence for circulation of the revised text in her own lifetime). Whatever the case, there is no doubt about the empathetic treatment which Julian offers Margery during this visit and her astuteness in ultimately recommending the anchoritic virtue of ‘Pacyens’ to Margery in her anchoritic-like ‘isolation’ within the world: ‘for’, as Julian adds, ‘in þat schal ȝe kepyn ȝowr sowle.’77 A second anchorite with whom Margery forges a supportive relationship – this one relatively long-term – is also brought about by a visit by Christ whilst she is praying in the chapel of Saint John in St Margaret’s church in Norwich on the Friday before Christmas, an episode which takes place shortly after her conversion. Here Margery’s spirit is ‘rauyshed’ by Christ in true anchoritic fashion78 and, during their interchange, in which he grants her eternal absolution for her love, Christ instructs her to visit another local anchorite for purposes of endorsing her visionary experiences and to act as her confessor: ‘gon to þe ankyr at þe Frer Prechowyrs & schew hym my preuyteys & my cownselys’, he tells her, adding as his primary rationale, ‘for my spyrit xal speke in hym to þe’.79 Christ’s selecting of the Norwich anchorite, a friar of the Dominican order, as a suitable confessor for Margery recognizes her anchoritic spirituality and prefigures a protracted friendship between them, one which will endure even after public and ecclesiastical concern about Margery’s behaviour begins to marginalize and stigmatize her. For Margery, whether contemporaneously or in retrospect as she dictates her story, 76 77 78 79 74 75

Book, ch. 18, p. 42. My emphasis. Book, ch. 18, p. 43. Book, ch. 18, p. 43. Book, ch. 18, p. 43. Book, ch. 5, p. 16. Book, ch. 5, p. 17. Hope Emily Allen considers this recluse to be ‘a fanatical type of mystic’ (p. 264, 17/31 sq. and p. 279, 44/3) and thus one especially suited to being Margery’s confessor. It would certainly appear that Margery is drawn to this Dominican anchorite because of how she envisions her own anchoritic and mystical spirituality.

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Medieval Anchoritisms this anchorite not only has the authority of his order and the anchoritic life he occupies within it bestowed upon him but, as especially singled out by Christ, is himself a threshold through which Margery can confirm what God has in store for her. Unable to publicly assert her own desires and intentions, Margery has God speak through her anchorite-confessor on her behalf and thus, long after his death, which occurs during Margery’s lengthy pilgrimage to Jerusalem, she continues to grieve and lament him as ‘þe most special synguler comforte þat euyr I had in erde, for he euyr louyd me [. . .] & wold neuyr forsakyn me for nowt þat any man cowd do er seye whylys he leuyd’.80 Through Margery’s documented relationship with this male anchorite, we are also able to get a glimpse at the dynamics between a priestly anchorite and his community and the ways in which anchoritic spirituality may have been disseminated outside the anchorhold. It would appear, for instance, that this anchorite was sometimes absent from his anchorhold at the Dominican friary in Norwich, since Margery tells of how she complained to him about the harsh treatment she was receiving at the hands of a second, non-anchoritic confessor ‘in ȝowr absens’.81 Whilst Hope Emily Allen posits that Margery’s anchorite confessor may have been ill during this period, she also considers the possibility that he was able to leave his anchorhold periodically for purposes of scholarship and learning.82 Since the Dominican order was known to privilege learning opportunities, it may well be that he was able to travel upon license to pursue these activities in spite of his anchoritic vocation. This may also be another reason to explain why Margery was particularly devoted to him, given her thirst for knowledge and her need to be supported by knowledgeable and well-educated men.83 Margery’s account also betrays further benefits which might accrue to her from a relationship with a male anchorite. In recounting her own devotion to this man in chapter 19, she records her fraught interactions with a Norwich widow whose husband has recently died.84 Upon the authority of Christ, Margery meets the widow and the widow’s confessor in one of the side-chapels in order to inform the woman that her husband is currently suffering in purgatory and, moreover, that it will be a considerable time before he is delivered to heaven. Incensed by Margery’s presumption, the widow angrily refutes her prediction, in spite of her own confessor’s siding with Margery, and claims indignantly that ‘hir husbond was a good man’.85 As a result of this altercation, the widow enlists a posse of household members, led by her own daughter, to visit Margery’s anchorite confessor in his cell, presumably to complain about Margery’s ‘insights’ and to demand ‘þat he schuld forsakyn hir [Margery] & ellys he xuld lesyn hir

Book, p. 168. During this time, too, the Priory of the Friars Preachers and its surrounding buildings were burned down in a huge fire which beset the town of Norwich, in which fire two members of the order lost their lives. This incident is recorded briefly by Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, Rolls Series (London, 1864), vol. II, p. 385. 81 Book, ch. 18, p. 44. 82 Book, p. 280, n. 44/3. 83 Warren notes the exiting of the anchorhold by some anchorites whether for the purpose of changing cells, going on pilgrimage or attending court, including the Winchester recluse whom I discuss towards the end of this chapter. See Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 158, n. 53. 84 Book, ch. 19, pp. 46–7. 85 Book, ch. 19, p. 46.

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Reading with the Eyes Closed [the widow’s] frenshep’.86 I suggest here that that the ‘frendship’ which the widow is threatening to sever is that of anchoritic patronage or, perhaps, a potential bequest which, as we know from Ann Warren’s study, not only bestowed status upon those offering it but also constituted a type of ‘insurance policy’ for salvation within the next world and purgatorial relief for those who had already left it.87 This anchorite may well have been employed by the widow to pray for her husband’s soul, or else had been left money to do so in her husband’s will, something which would certainly explain the angry crowd which she sends to the anchorite, set on ‘persuading’ him to relinquish his support of Margery, whose prescient powers have ‘seen’ that her husband is still locked in torment. Whatever the case, it is clear that Margery is again placing herself in the position of the anchorite, usurping the role of her confessor himself and offering her own ‘anchoritic’ advice to the widow within the enclosed space of the chapel – which, of course, doubles as her own contingent ‘anchorhold’. There is also clearly a complex web of relationships existing between all the main protagonists here, within which barely concealed issues of power and authority are playing out. Clearly, the widow-cum-patron is unconvinced by Margery’s own anchoritic pretensions and uses her influence to assert her stake in the genuine anchorite’s powers of mediation and spiritual practices. As mentioned, this episode forms part of a series of interactions between Margery and her anchorite confessor, interactions which also involve the intervention of another antipathetic urban widow. In a chronologically muddled and fragmented account which straddles chapters 18 and 19,88 Margery documents how a second widow approached her, rather than the anchorite, for advice on how to relieve her dead husband of his time in purgatory, thus placing Margery very firmly within the frame of ‘anchoritic confessor’. During her prayers about the matter, Margery is advised firstly to ensure that the widow leaves her own confessor for Margery’s anchoritic one and secondly to offer the woman penance and almsgiving as a remedy for her husband’s purgatorial suffering.89 Both pieces of advice precipitate a crisis. In the first instance, the widow steadfastly refuses to do Margery’s bidding and leave her own confessor – unless, so she explains (and no doubt sarcastically too), she too could become privy to the same type of grace as Margery. Following a battle of harsh words about the relative ‘grace’ of each of them, the widow promptly bans Margery from entering her house.90 Margery’s own response, as ever generated by Christic intervention, is to have a master of divinity write a letter on her behalf to send to the widow, in which document she shamelessly pulls rank on the woman, announcing: ‘þat þe widow xuld neuyr han þe grace þat þis creatur had’ and that ‘þow þis creatur come neuyr in hir howse it Book, ch. 19, p. 46. See, for example, Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 256: ‘merchant testators who remembered anchorites were leaders of their communities, men and women of substance and social position [. . .] such persons were worthy of the leadership roles they played in their society.’ 88 At the onset of this episode, a capital ‘C’ has been inserted in red into the margin, suggesting that chapter 19, which contains the two other accounts concerning widows, should begin at this point. This episode would sit more happily towards the end of chapter 19 to embellish the account of the recalcitrant widow discussed above. 89 Book, ch. 19, p. 46; ch. 18, p. 45. 90 Book, ch. 18, p. 45. 86 87

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Medieval Anchoritisms plesyd God ryt wel’.91 Christ also instructs Margery to visit the woman’s confessor herself, a visit which will eventually bring about the desired schism between the widow and him (even though, so we are informed, that actually takes place ‘twelue ȝer aftyrward’).92 During this period, too, Margery discovers from Christ that the widow has also failed to comply with the penance and almsgiving which she gave to her previously (‘þat þyng I bad xuld a be don for þe sowle it is not don’), something which the anchorite confessor also confirms, suggesting that, if the widow had not officially transferred her allegiances to him, he was nevertheless privy to her spiritual activities and perhaps acting as a second confessor to her. He is also evidently keen to pour oil on troubled waters, stating that, whilst penance is good in its own right, in this case there is no real requirement for its completion since ‘þe sowle [of the widow’s husband] had no need þerof ’.93 Not to be put off, Margery demands he speak to the widow on her behalf. But even this has no effect, likely because the anchorite has already suggested to the widow that the soul of her husband is perfectly safe, something which points ultimately towards the anchorite’s split loyalty and his occupying of an altogether different type of ‘threshold’ site positioned between the two sparring women. But the real point of the episode is Margery’s unshaken sense of her own Godgiven rectitude, which she delineates in terms of anchoritic prescience, authority and a direct communication with God, all of which ‘gifts’ she tries on for their ‘anchoritic’ size, as it were, in a process which ultimately bathes her textually within their light. The result of such anchoritic support and Margery’s identifying with it, then, is emphatically ‘this creatur [.  .  .] was mor bold þan sche was beforn’,94 a boldness which is exacerbated, no doubt, by Christ’s ecstatic profession of love to her as recounted two chapters later, which unequivocally places her, as a married woman, above widows in the spiritual hierarchy, entirely contrary to patristic thinking, which consistently placed widows above married women, of course: Ȝa, dowtyr, trow þow rygth wel þat I lofe wyfys whech woldyn levyn chast [. . .] for, þow þe state of maydenhode be mor parfyte & mor holy þan þe state of wedewhode, & þe state of wedowhode mor parfyte þan þe state of wedlake, ȝet dowtyr I lofe þe as wel as any mayden in þe world.95

Thus, Margery’s construction of the negatively charged widow and her alliance with the anchorite with whom they both interact forms an intrinsic part of her own personal development as an anchoritic self. Within this context, she is able to insert herself into an anchoritic ‘community of discourse’ which enables her to develop an astute ability to counter the debilitating ‘langage of the world’, which would, among other things, silence her and send her home to her husband.96 Such 93 94 95 91

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Book, ch. 18, p. 45. Book, ch. 18, p. 45. Book, ch. 19, p. 47. Book, ch. 19, p. 45. Book, ch. 21, p. 49. Within patristic thought, from Saint Paul onwards, widows came close to virgins because of their renunciation of sexuality, leaving married women at the bottom of the hierarchical equation. For an overview of patristic attitudes towards widows, see Constructions of Widowhood, ed. Carlson and Weisl, ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–21. This is rendered literal on occasion when Margery is quizzed about her marital status and the location of her husband by both the authorities and her peers (see, for example, Book, ch. 51, p. 122), or when she is wished back to the domestic sphere by an antipathetic audience (Book, ch. 13, p. 27;

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Reading with the Eyes Closed accounts also cast into the shadow those ideologies of the anchorhold as remote desert or isolated wilderness, and the anchorite as ‘dead to the world’ generated within those anchoritic texts examined in previous chapters. Indeed, they bring into clear relief the sometimes messy interactions to which the life of the latemedieval anchorite could be subject – even more so the would-be anchorite without the protection of stone walls to contain her. Clear too are some of the petty jealousies generated within the religious circles within which Margery operates and the personal enmities which she elicits by her insistence on her own anchoritic grace and divine communications outside the anchorhold wall. As mentioned above, many of Margery’s most memorable encounters with God occur within private, intimate and enclosed spaces, all of which further serve to enhance her anchoritic persona in the text. Her first vision of Christ, for example, takes place, Julian-like, when, subsumed by her post-partum dementia, she is chained to her bed unable to move, and locked in the ‘anchoritic’ cell of her own bedroom. Without warning, a gently feminine and solicitous Christ appears to her whilst her servants are absent, curing her of her illness with his benign presence: as sche lay aloone and hir kepars wer fro hir, owyr merciful Lord Crist Ihesu [. . .] aperyd to hys creatur [. . .] in lyknesse of a man, most semly, most bewtyouws & most amiable þat euyr mygth be seen with mannys eye, clad in a mantyl of purpyl sylke, syttyng upon hir beddys side, lokyng vpon hir with so blyssyd a chere.97

Some years later, Margery’s more developed mystical experiences are heralded in within the same bedroom whilst she is lying next to her husband,98 and this time it stimulates a life-long performance of devotions which are decidedly ‘anchoritic’ in their tenor: fasting, continual prayer, the wearing of a hair shirt under her clothes and tears of deep contrition, for example. Similarly the immediacy and intimacy of many of the Book’s major visionary episodes adhere closely to those types of meditations which the Ancrene Wisse author requires of his own anchoritic audience’s performances of sanctity: envisioning the life of the Virgin Mary, for example, and a personal participation in the Nativity and the Passion.99 Perhaps most significant of all, however, is the fact that, when Margery does come to write in her own widowhood and old age, it is again her chamber that provides her with the anchorhold-like space necessary for her literary production: Whan þis booke was first in wrytyng, þe sayd creatur was mor at hom in hir chamber with hir writer & sayd fewer bedys for sped of wrytyng þan sche had don ȝerys beforn [and] hir hert was drawyn awey fro þe seying & set mech on meditacyon.100

Margery’s preference for enclosure within a single room and her immersion in the acts of meditation and authorship speak volumes in terms of what I have been arguing here. If, as Diana Fuss attests, ‘a writer’s domestic interior opens ch. 53, p. 129). Book, ch. 1, p. 8. 98 Book, ch. 3, p. 11. 99 For example, Book, ch. 6–7, pp. 18–20. Again, Renevey has examined these performative anchoritic practices of Margery in ‘Margery’s Performing Body’. 100 Book, ch. 88, p. 216. 97

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Medieval Anchoritisms a window onto both author and text’,101 the small space which Margery ends up occupying with her scribe becomes the sacred space within which the word of God is generated and from where it may be disseminated: as God confirms to Margery ‘ȝet xulde ȝe not plesyn me mor þan ȝe don with ȝowr writing, for dowtyr, be þis boke many a man xal be turnyd to me & beleuyn þerin’,102 words which are surely Margery’s version of Julian’s statement ‘shulde I therefore leve that I shulde nought telle yowe the goodenes of God, sine that I sawe in that same time that it is his wille that it be knawen?’ quoted earlier in this chapter – and which serve the same purpose. Like the anchorhold too, this ‘domestic interior’ is both a single space but also one which is nevertheless capable of constituting multiple spaces at any given time and therefore of generating multiple meanings which operate within multiple time-frames or ‘heterochronies’.103 There is also much about the generation of this type of Foucaultian space which is performative – both Julian and Margery develop the spaces of enclosure into powerful female-identified hermeneutical frameworks in which to perform both selfhood and text, creating ultimately a textual ‘anchorhold of their own’. Thus, for Margery in particular, the private, enclosed space becomes the privileged ‘anchoritic’ realm within which an elite form of spirituality can be performed by a woman unable, unready or unwilling to make that particular leap in life-style herself. Such a performance, however, in keeping with Lefebvre’s conception of (sacred) space as ‘redolent with imaginary and symbolic elements’104 can nevertheless bring about a verisimilitude of anchoritic devotion which, in the words of Savage, ‘seem[s] derived from anchoritic reworking of ideas of the body which then made their way into theology at ground level’.105 In other words, Margery’s adoption of sporadic anchoritic discourse and practices whilst still in the world, along with the relationships she evidently forges with actual anchorites, exploits the changing role of the sacred female body within the contemporary religious imaginary and, at least at the level of the text, carves out an authoritative role for herself under the guise of the ‘anchoritic’. It is also testimony to the ‘success’ of this guise that, within a few years of her death, a collection of her more gnomic ‘sayings’ were extracted and collated in a radically redacted text, and promoted as the writings of ‘a deuoute ancres called Margerie kempe of Lynne’.106 A WINCHESTER RECLUSE AND HER VISION OF PURGATORY The second quarter of the fifteenth century yields for us a third English woman writer whose work, known today as A Revelation of Purgatory, not only helps to inform us about contemporary approaches to the doctrine of purgatory but

Diana Fuss, The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms that Shaped Them (London, 2004), p. 2, cited by Miles in ‘Space and Enclosure’, p. 156. 102 Book, ch. 88, p. 216. 103 Miles posits these as ‘a mélange of liturgical schedule, personal time of life and death, and universal eschatological time’, in ‘Space and Enclosure’, p. 156. 104 Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 41. 105 Savage, ‘From Anchorhold to Cell of Self-Knowledge’, p. 162. 106 See p. 125, n. 55 above. 101

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Reading with the Eyes Closed also, since Mary Erler’s recent identification of her as a Winchester recluse,107 has offered us further insights into the agency accorded to the female anchorite in fifteenth-century England, along with her writing practices and textual strategies. Prior to Erler’s identifying of this author as the same anchorite who, according to the records, was summoned to London to meet Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick, in 1421,108 it was considered unlikely that this was an anchoritic text. Indeed, the text’s first editor, Marta Powell Harley, had promoted it as the work of either a Winchester nun or, in her own words, an ‘unallied holy woman more in the manner of Margery Kempe’.109 Unaware of the Beauchamp connection, Harley’s conclusion was drawn from the fact that the visionary, on her own admission, had recently left the anchorhold to undertake a pilgrimage on behalf of a dead friend named Margaret who had appeared to her in a series of visions, as well as having visited a number of male ecclesiastics to tell them of those same visions. Given Erler’s conclusive findings that the visionary was indeed the anchoritic mentor of Richard Beauchamp, whom she visited in London, it is clear that this anchorite had the freedom to leave her anchorhold to undertake short pilgrimage on behalf of her deceased friend and to visit other male religious.110 As Erler notes: ‘pilgrimage thus seems a possibility for [. . .] recluses’, also pointing out that the chance of there being two such prestigious, influential – and peripatetic – holy women living in Winchester at the same time ‘seems unlikely.’111 That the Winchester anchorite was held in special esteem by Richard Beauchamp is beyond doubt and it is through her connection with him that we can trace a wide and well-connected network of anchoritic interaction which stretched the length and breadth of England. Moreover, it is an interaction which demonstrates cogently the blurring of the boundaries which had formerly been drawn between lay and anchoritic spirituality, leading to the type of permeability which, as we have seen, was embodied in the religious practices of Margery Kempe, in particular. Beauchamp had been born into a family with a long history of anchoritic patronage: both his father, Thomas, and grandfather, William, have left records of anchoritic patronage, the latter having established and endowed an anchorite cell for men at Droitwich in the late fourteenth century.112 The records also show that in 1421 Mary C. Erler, ‘“A Revelation of Purgatory” (1422): Reform and the Politics of Female Visions’, Viator 38, 1 (2007), pp. 321–83. 108 This is noted by Warren in Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 204 as evidence of the occasional ability of an anchorite to leave her/his cell whilst on religious or political business. The source of this information is Charles Ross, ‘The Estates and Finances of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick’, Dugdale Society Occasional Papers 12 (1956), pp. 3–22, here at p. 15. For a concise biography of Beauchamp, see The Beauchamp Pageant, ed. Alexandra Sinclair (Donington, 2003), pp. 25–49. Beauchamp’s life was captured in pictures and text in this manuscript, reputedly commissioned by his daughter Anne, for which see Pageant, p. 1. 109 The text has been edited as A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown Fifteenth-Century Visionary: Introduction, Critical Text, and Translation, ed. Marta Powell Harley, Studies in Women and Religion 18 (Lewiston/Queenston, 1986), here at pp. 26–7. 110 Indeed, this is something noted by Warren in Anchorites and their Patrons, who points out on pp. 77–9 that papal dispensation for anchorites to undertake a pilgrimage was not unheard of. She also quotes from the Calendar of Entries in the Papal Registers relating to Great Britain and Ireland: Papal Letters, ed. W. H. Bliss et al. (Public Record Office; London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1893–), 5 (1396–1404), p. 471, which documents how Emma Scherman, a Pontefract anchorite, was granted permission to leave her cell annually ‘for the purpose of visiting churches and other pious places’. 111 Erler, ‘Revelation of Purgatory’, p. 326. 112 Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 202. See also R. Nash Treadway, Collections for the History 107

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Medieval Anchoritisms Beauchamp sent two of his own men on some kind of mission to the Winchester anchorite, one of whom was the chaplain (and probably hermit) of Guy’s Cliff near Warwick, an ancient foundation which had been taken over and renamed after the famous tenth-century recluse, Guy of Warwick, by Beauchamp’s grandfather in the early fourteenth century.113 Nor was the Winchester anchorite the only female recluse whose advice Beauchamp had sought out: the York anchorite and visionary, Emma Rawgton, is recorded as having proffered important advice to Beauchamp on a number of occasions.114 Rawgton appears to have been renowned for her politically focused visions, many of which seem also to have been prophetic,115 and we know that at least two of these visions directly concerned Beauchamp himself. For example, in 1422, following the death of Henry V, it was Rawgton who prognosticated that Beauchamp himself was best suited to become the guardian of the new infant king, Henry VI (a guardianship which was later to become actualized in 1428 when Beauchamp was made ‘maister of kynge herre the syxt in hys tender age’, a member of the ruling council and the young king’s tutor between 1428 and 1436).116 It was also on Rawgton’s advice in 1422–3 that Beauchamp established a chantry chapel, also at the hermitage of Guy’s Cliff, to assure the production of a male heir for himself, something which had evaded him to date.117 It is therefore highly likely that Beauchamp’s dealings with the Winchester visionary during the same period were for a similar purpose, but whatever the case, his connections with her and Emma Rawgton testify clearly to the respect and esteem now being proffered to female anchoritic prophesy within the circles of orthodoxy. No doubt this respect was to increase further when, following the death of Beauchamp’s wife Elizabeth, also in 1422, his new wife, Isabel le Dispenser, immediately produced the required son and heir.118 The Beauchamp family’s close ties with other fifteenth-century anchorites are also apparent from the records: like Margery Kempe and the wealthy urban widows who accrued to the Norwich anchorite mentioned earlier, before her death Elizabeth Beauchamp had been one of ‘several fashionable ladies’ who formed part of a circle attached to the popular anchorite, Thomas Fyschebourne, another part-time recluse.119 Elizabeth had been one of a group of temporary of Worcestershire, 2 vols. (London, 1799), vol. I, pp. 331–2. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 205. In addition to this, Richard Beauchamp’s greatgrandfather, William de Beauchamp, tenth earl of Warwick, is recorded as having left four shillings to every anchorite in Worcester and its environs in 1268: Nicholas Harris Nicolas (ed.), Testamenta Vetusta, 2 vols. (London, 1826), vol. I, p. 51 (cited by Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 19). 114 The primary source of this information is John Rous, Rows Rol (London, 1845), no. 50 (unpaginated), but it is discussed in some detail by Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, p. 155 and Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 203–6. One of Rawgton’s prophetic announcements is also recorded in Pageant 47 (fol. 24), p. 144. John Rous was an antiquarian and chaplain of Guy’s Cliff from 1444 until his death in 1491. 115 On the tradition of female prophecy in the later Middle Ages within which these anchorites were operating (as, indeed, were Julian and Margery Kempe), see Diane Watt, Secretaries of God (Cambridge, 1997), especially pp. 15–36. 116 Rous, Rows Rol, no. 50. Quoted by Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 206. See also Pageant 47 (fol. 24), p. 144. 117 Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 204–5. 118 G. E. Cokayne, The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain & the United Kingdom, Extant & Extinct or Dormant (London, 1916), 12 vols. in 14, I, p. 27. 119 Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 203. Fyschebourne also appears in the Chronica rerum gestarum in monasterio S. Albani, a Johanne Amundesham, monacho, ed. Henry T. Riley, 2 vols.,

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Reading with the Eyes Closed residents at the popular nunnery of Sopwell to whom Fyschebourne had acted as director, something which according to David Knowles had brought him to the king’s attention.120 Fyschebourne became a man of some political and ecclesiastical influence, leaving his own anchoritic cell in 1418 in order to obtain a papal bull approving the newly established Syon Abbey foundation, whereupon he was appointed the first confessor-general of the new Brigittine institution, where he remained until his death in 1428.121 Perhaps even more relevant and intriguing, however, is the fact that Beauchamp’s father’s sister was none other than Isabella Ufford, countess of Suffolk, who is recorded as having left Julian of Norwich 20 shillings in her will of 1416,122 a not insubstantial gift, recorded between details of legacies to religious houses and other more personal benefactions to individuals, including 40 shillings for ‘the two sisters of Sudbury’ (who may also have been anchorites in the church of St Gregory’s there).123 That Beauchamp would not have known of Julian, therefore, might be considered somewhat unlikely, since, clearly, anchorites and anchoritic spirituality had formed part of the raison d’être of the extended Beauchamp family for several generations. Thus, what comes into focus in the context of A Revelation of Purgatory and its authorship is its place within a widespread community of anchorites and their supporters who directly interlace with each other at the highest levels. Furthermore, this community formed a formidable politicoreligious hierarchy, one of whose characteristics was to offer a critique of what Erler refers to as the ‘excoriating failure in the lives of professed religious’ during the fifteenth century,124 a failure which, of course, is also of fundamental concern to Margery Kempe in her own work. It is clear, therefore, that such influential channels of communication formed part of an authoritative and anchoritic ‘community of discourse’ whose long-established traditions were being drawn upon throughout England as a means of bringing about religious reform and stability.125 A Vision of Purgatory takes the form of a letter directed at another member of its author’s anchoritic circle, a man identified in the text simply as ‘þe recluse of Westmyster’.126 This recluse is one of six men named by the dead nun, Margaret, speaking to the author from Purgatory, and who, so she instructs, are to say

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Rolls Series 28, 5 (1870–1), vol. 1, p. 27. The extract is reproduced in Knowles, Religious Orders, II, p. 367. On his role at Syon see Knowles, Religious Orders, II, p. 180. Knowles, Religious Orders, II, p. 180. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 180. This will has been translated and reproduced in its entirety in Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, pp. 433–5. The church of St Gregory had certainly housed two anchoritic sisters in the thirteenth century, as recorded in Calendar of the Liberate Rolls (Public Record Office; London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1916–), 1245–51, p. 172. The anchorhold was therefore evidently able to house two recluses at any given time but whether it was still standing in the fifteenth century is uncertain. The church, however, still bears evidence of two squints at the east end of the church behind the altar. Erler, ‘Revelation of Purgatory’, p. 334. This is a point also demonstrated emphatically by Erler in ‘Revelation of Purgatory’, where she places the text within its immediate socio-religious context, connecting it to the impulse towards reform reflected in the foundation of Syon Abbey in 1314 and the increasing popularity of the Brigittines in England. See pp. 328–39. I examine the wider implications of this use of the figure of the anchorite in the following chapter. Revelation of Purgatory, p. 62.

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Medieval Anchoritisms masses on her behalf.127 Erler considers the Westminster anchorite to be most likely John London, who is recorded as having been absent from his anchorhold between 1415 and 1419, during which period he took charge of the newly established Syon foundation.128 In turn, this Westminster recluse was instructed to inform another Westminster monk, one Petrus Combe, enjoining him too to pray for Margaret’s soul. The four remaining recipients of the vision were all Winchester ecclesiastics, all of whom also bore close ties to the reformist movement within the English Church and had extensive anchoritic connections, as Erler documents in some detail.129 As mentioned above, the visionary seems to have left her anchorhold briefly to take news of her purgatorial vision to each one and to persuade them to say masses for the soul of her friend: And on the morrow when I rise vp, I went to Maister Fforest, my gostly fadyr, and told hym whate he shod do for hyr [Margaret], and [. . .] I went to Sir John Wynbourne, my oþer gostly fadyr, and told hym whate he shold do for hyr, and he graunted also, and so did al þe prestes þat sho spake of þat sholden synge for hyr.130

Whilst little is known of the two other Winchester priests, identified in the text as John Pery and Richard Bone,131 Erler has established that the visionary’s two confessors, John Forest and John Wynbourne, both had close associations with Henry Beaufort, who was currently the bishop of Winchester. Forest, for example, had been directly supported by Beaufort throughout his career and Wynbourne was chancellor to Beaufort’s brother, Thomas, duke of Exeter.132 Henry Beaufort, of course, was the legitimated son of John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford, and half-brother to Henry IV, and was a man who would go on to become both a cardinal and royal chancellor, incurring two fleeting mentions in The Book of Margery Kempe. Here, Margery relates how, soon after the death of Henry V in 1422, she had a prophetic insight that Beaufort, ‘þe Bischop of Wynchestyr’ was still alive at that time, despite reports to the contrary being widespread.133 Later, Margery also reports her personal contact with members of Cardinal Beaufort’s retinue during a dinner to which she was invited in London in the late 1420s or early 1430s. During the meal, as the wine was flowing and the people ‘in her myrthys’, some began to rehearse jokes about Margery, apparently unaware that she was also at the table, but demonstrating, of course, that they had heard of her by repute. True to form, Margery takes them severely to task for their speaking badly of somebody about whom, she claims, Erler, following Harley and the manuscript evidence, has identified these men as John Forest, the visionary’s principal advisor; John Wynbourne, an Augustinian canon; John Pery (or Pury) and Richard Bone, two local priests; and two Benedictine monks of Westminster, one of whom was also an anchorite and the other who is named as [Petrus] Combe (‘Revelation of Purgatory’, pp. 328–31). 128 Erler, ‘Revelation of Purgatory’, p. 332. 129 Erler, ‘Revelation of Purgatory’, pp. 328–35. 130 Revelation of Purgatory, p. 67. 131 On this, see Erler, ‘Revelation of Purgatory, p. 331. 132 Erler, ‘Revelation of Purgatory’, pp. 330–1. For a comprehensive account of Beaufort’s life, see G. L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort (Oxford, 1988). 133 Book, ch. 72, p. 172. Margery’s allusion to this prophecy and the gossip which it dispels follows on directly from a stark but undeveloped announcement that ‘in þe menetyme þe Kyng deyid’, suggesting some kind of discursive link between the two which she never elucidates upon. 127

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Reading with the Eyes Closed they know actually very little: ‘for I am þat same persone to whom þes wordys ben arectyd’. Also true to form, as a reward for her outspokenness, God visits her with ‘ful hy deuocyon’ and ‘swet dalyawns’, whilst the local clergy cast her out of their churches, for ‘þey wold not suffyr hir’.134 Margery’s rationale in recounting this episode is clearly twofold: whilst demonstrating her desired inclusion within the circles of orthodoxy, it also serves to animate her spiritual exclusivity in the light of this company’s attempts at ridicule and exclusion. Elsewhere, Margery also presents herself as part of the circle of Henry Beaufort’s sister, Joan ‘my Lady of Westmorlonde’, and her daughter, Lady Graystoke, whom she claims to have visited on a number of occasions at their behest in order to regale them with spiritual allegories. Again somewhat predictably, the usual rumour-mill which follows Margery everywhere has it that it is she who was responsible for Lady Graystoke’s leaving her husband and that she should be indicted for it.135 Margery’s account, of course, betrays her precarious position as an unwalled-up holy woman who is always teetering on the edge of the acceptance she so craves and the ostracism and ridicule which constantly beset her. In many ways, therefore, the Winchester visionary can be seen from our perspective as Margery’s alter ego: sought out and influential, she presents the more orthodox and acceptable face of a fifteenth-century holy woman who occupies a position at the centre rather than the margins, one who is facilitated by the walls of the anchorhold which surround her and the complex semiotic matrix which they generate. As Erler points out of A Vision of Purgatory: ‘The text’s connection with the Beauforts [. . .] places the vision beyond the heterodox [. . .] situating the text [. . .] within the Lancastrian dynasty just below the royal’.136 The author of the text recounts in closely observed detail a vision of purgatory which she received in several instalments over the course of three nights. Her observation and understanding of what she sees, however, are guided by the apparition of Margaret, her recently deceased friend, a former nun whose agonizing purgatorial sufferings, along with those of other male and female religious, and some lay people too, the visionary is forced to witness and to whose aid she is enrolled in order to mitigate the torture. Hinging, therefore, on female friendship and unquestioned female authority, like Julian’s experiences this vision is mediated and framed throughout by a fixed female gaze which then proceeds to shape and control the vision’s transmission, in this case to the circle of influential churchmen. As Erler has also established, its content was also probably influenced by a similar purgatorial vision recounted by Saint Birgitta in her Revelations, which had recently become available in England.137 Moreover, Birgitta’s writings foreground the importance of female friendships, as does The Book of Margery Kempe and, on one occasion, the writing of Julian of Norwich, suggesting the influence of female connection and communitas upon the development of these women as writers outside of the male circle of supporters Book, Liber 2, ch. 9, p. 244. This second allusion to Beaufort is immediately followed by the account of Margery’s visit to Sheen Abbey, the male house to which the new Syon foundation was connected, suggesting the same kind of discursive link which pulls together a similar BeaufortSyon-Lancastrian connection to that found within the context of A Vision of Purgatory. 135 Book, ch. 54, pp. 133–4. On this see Meech’s note in Book, p. 317, n.133/23. 136 Erler, ‘Revelation of Purgatory’, p. 331. 137 Erler, ‘Revelation of Purgatory’, p. 335. 134

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Medieval Anchoritisms on whom they were all also dependent.138 The vision, which in Erler’s estimation is ‘slashing, wild, excessive, full of snakes and bodily deformity’,139 proceeds to unfold inexorably in all its horror before the eyes of the sleeping woman, just as Julian’s vision unfolded relentlessly before her own fixed gaze emanating from an equally inert body. In it, the tortures to which Margaret is subject are clearly devised to fit a particular sin committed by her during her lifetime. First she witnesses devils tearing out her friend’s tongue and heart ‘for bakbytynge and sklaundrynge’, whereupon other devils ‘pare away al hyr lyppis’, and immerse her in ‘a grete vessel of brasse’ containing the foulest creatures imaginable, who proceed to draw her limb from limb.140 As she is tortured, the devils responsible announce which of the deadly sins is being punished; but what is of particular significance here, particularly in the light of the treatment of the woman’s sinful body elsewhere in the anchoritic literary tradition, is that none of the sins is in any way overtly sexualized, in spite of their being described in traditional terms as ‘cursed and ‘wikked’, ‘vile’ and ‘stynkynge’.141 Likewise, the specificity of Margaret’s body as female is never at any point an issue, being treated simply as generically human, rather than cast as fetish upon which to project the fears and anxieties of the onlooker: And in þis grete vessel þay put hyr amonge þis grete fowl venym and al to-drow hyr lym fro lym and seid, ‘Tak þe þis bath for þy vile, stynkynge lechery’.142

Elsewhere, the text emphasizes that Margaret’s body is actually clothed, rather than uncovered like those female bodies we are so used to seeing in the virgin martyr hagiographies, for example, or the tormented bodies of so many depictions of the Last Judgement. And, whilst she first appears in her ‘wyrst clothes as she went on erth’, two devils then proceed to dress her up in finery, rather than strip her for punishment: with a longe goun and a longe traille folwynge hyr [. . .] ful of sharp hokes [. . .] And þat same deuyll toke wormys and pych and tarr and made lokedes and sett ham vpon hyr hede and he toke a lange grete addyr and put al about hyr hede.143

Arrayed, then, in a hideous parody of the grand lady from the social class from which she no doubt originally hailed, Margaret is also tormented by two spirits in the form of peculiar animal familiars which also hail from that former earthly life (‘a lytel hound and a lytel catte folwynge hyr, al of fyr brennynge’).144 These On this under examined aspect of female texts and communities, see McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, pp. 193–5; and Diane Watt, ‘Saint Julian of the Apocalypse’, in Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. McAvoy, pp. 64–74 139 Erler, ‘Revelation of Purgatory’, p. 335. 140 Revelation of Purgatory, pp. 67–9. However, the narrative is not burdened by a sense of spite or voyeuristic vengefulness which its graphic depictions could suggest to the reader, presenting instead a series of purgatorial punishments which appear regularly in contemporary accounts of the afterlife during the period. For Harley the text is essentially a work of ‘spiritual shock treatment’ (p. 11). 141 Revelation of Purgatory, pp. 68–9. 142 Revelation of Purgatory, pp. 68–9. 143 Revelation of Purgatory, p. 66. 144 Revelation of Purgatory, p. 61. 138

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Reading with the Eyes Closed creatures, whose form seems to be wholly unprecedented in this type of literature, appear regularly in the text, at times leading Margaret directly to the visionary, at others adding to her pain and suffering, their purpose being to torment her because ‘þay wer hir mawmettes þe whil sho was on lyve, and sho sett hyr hert to mych on such foul wormes’.145 Margaret had evidently housed such pets both before and after her profession and had bestowed upon them an unsanctioned affection of the type satirized by Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales depiction of the Prioress.146 Female religious were, of course, strongly discouraged – sometimes forbidden – from keeping animals as pets, something which also tended to exercise the anchoritic guidance writers such as Goscelin, Aelred and the Ancrene Wisse author (but not those authors whose texts were directed at the male recluse, interestingly enough),147 the latter of whom permitted the keeping of a cat but no other animal since ‘An anchoress ought not to own anything that attracts her heart outwards’ [‘Ancre ne ah to habben na þing þet utward drahe hire heorte’].148 These animals, however, whose access to the anchoritic space is a visionary one, remain a far cry from the array of monstrous creatures populating Ancrene Wisse, being fierce little inversions of their benign earthly selves, and testifying to a woman’s culturally acquired vanity and superficiality, rather than to any monstrous ontology or propensity for miscegenation. Nor are any of the other monsters in this text equated specifically with women. Far from being hideous embodiments of specific sins as they are in Ancrene Wisse, Margaret’s purgatorial devils, although vicious, are nevertheless presented in far less complex terms as merely ‘vij deuelles’.149 Rather than full embodiments of the seven deadly sins, these devils are merely their anthropomorphized representatives, each interchangeable with the next and therefore needing to distinguish themselves verbally for Margaret, for the visionary and her audience (‘I am þe deuyll of pride’ etc.).150 The appearance of seven devils as Margaret’s torturers also evokes connotations of Mary Magdalene, the patron saint of recluses, who was herself quickly redeemed by Christ after he drove from her the ‘seven devils’ of her own sinful nature, suggesting that a similarly redemptive fate awaits Margaret.151 However, rather than lechery, it is pride (or vanity) which appears to be the primary sin to have predominated in Margaret’s life, since far more details are offered about her punishment for this sin than any of the others. It is also this sin which induces the two familiars, the dog and the cat, to ‘frette insondyr hyr leggis and hyr armes’, causing her to cry out her loudest ‘þoȝt al þe world myȝt haue herd hyr.’152 Again Revelation of Purgatory, p. 78. Chaucer tells us ‘Of smale houndes hadde she that she fedde / With rosted flessh’: ‘The General Prologue’ in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford, 1987, various repr.), lines 146–7, p. 25. 147 Goscelin writes to Eve: ‘May no cat, no bird, no little animal [. . .] share your home’, [‘Non cata, non altilia, non bestiola [. . .] sit tibi condomestica’], Liber III, lines 13–14, p. 80 (Book, p. 163), an edict amended by the Ancrene Wisse author to permit a cat but not any livestock (Ancrene Wisse, 8.91, p. 157). 148 Ancrene Wisse, 8.99–100, p. 158. 149 Revelation of Purgatory, p. 66. 150 Revelation of Purgatory, p. 67. 151 See my discussion, p. 117 above. 152 Revelation of Purgatory, pp. 66–7. 145

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Medieval Anchoritisms the image of Chaucer’s prioress comes to mind, and the account falls neatly into line with warnings about pride’s manifestation as vainglory as proffered to religious women in a plethora of medieval texts directed at them.153 In marked contrast, however, Margaret’s punishment for an unspecified type of lechery remains unfocused: she is placed in a large brass bath of poison with unnamed venomous creatures submerged within it, who tear her body apart.154 As a former nun, of course, Margaret may well have been tempted by sins more opportune than lechery; nevertheless, the visionary’s account of her punishment is clearly resisting the usual association between the female body and lechery so prevalent in male-authored texts, covering it in clothing or submerging it in opaque and creature-infested water to counter any appropriation by an onlooker’s fetishistic gaze. Whilst the visionary clearly ‘saw in peynes and turmentys what syn man or womman vsed moste in har lyfe and which of þe vij synnes þay loved best’,155 in the case of Margaret, lechery was not one of them. Neither Margaret’s sins nor her punishments, then, are tailored to narrate a fallen femininity; indeed, in this text, femininity appears to be treated largely as an irrelevance – although womanhood is certainly foregrounded, offered as a legitimate, indeed appropriate, conduit for important eschatological insights as mediated by two women in collaboration beyond the grave. This also holds true in the case of the punishment of other sinners in the vision. Soon after Margaret disappears from view, for example, the text funnels our attentions towards the souls of other men and women undergoing purgatorial suffering. Firstly we get to view lecherous priests and their concubines, followed by religious men and women. After this come the torments of married men and women and single men and women. Both here and elsewhere, however, the author is entirely consistent in resisting the conflation of sinful humanity with women, insisting on the use of the binary, ‘men and women’, almost to the point of pedantry. Generally, men and women receive equal punishment for equal sinfulness and, whilst lechery is frequently punished by the cutting off of the ‘priue membres’,156 on no occasion is this offered a significant affective or sexual charge. Even when a woman’s suffering is observed in isolation (as in the case of another suffering nun), her punishment is more vocation-specific than gender-specific and again remains free from a sexualizing gaze: Þe deuelles kut þe nunnes lippis in-sondre, and þe deuelles bad ham take þat for har lykerous kyssynge þat þay kissed men and made many fal to syn þat wold noȝt ne had [þay] bene. Also, me þoȝt þat the deuelles kest veillys of fyr vp-on har hedes and þat came doun to har brewes, and þan seid þe deuelles, ‘Take her þese veillys for þe grete shewynge þat ȝe shewed ȝour face in ȝour lyf – agayne ȝour ordyr – to styr ȝow to syn and oþer both.’157

The writer, however, makes a startling exception in the case of the priestly miscreants who, initially tortured alongside their concubines, receive the most See again Goscelin’s letter to Eve in which he warns her extensively about the dangers of vainglory, Liber IV, pp. 95–9 (Book, pp. 181–5, and p. 186) 154 Revelation of Purgatory, pp. 68–9. 155 Revelation of Purgatory, p. 69. 156 For example, Revelation of Purgatory, p. 72. 157 Revelation of Purgatory, p. 74. 153

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Reading with the Eyes Closed severe punishments recounted (including being torn apart from the inside with razors, and being plunged up and down in filthy water on hooks attached to their skin). However, in a moment which can only be read as a deliberate point of slippage, the women are suddenly released (‘lowsed’) from their punishment, whilst the men go on to be laid on burning metal anvils and hit with hammers, have molten gold poured in their mouths and have their tongues plucked out. Such an uneven treatment is not left without explanation, however. In the words of the admonishing devil to the priests: Tak ȝow þis [. . .] for ȝour fals and foule sclaundrynge words þat ȝe spake þer-with of lechery and broȝt many women to þat syn and out of har goode lyvynge [. . .] both nunes, wyfes, ankeresses, single women and maydnesse, and many women þat neuer wold haue done þat syn. Ȝe with ȝour fals god and plesynge speche haue broȝt ham to syn.158

Once more we see how far we have travelled from the essentially seductive woman of Ancrene Wisse: here these women, whether religious or secular, are depicted as having been disposed to ‘goode lyvynge’, their downfall brought about by the dishonest lechery and deceptive speech of those priests with whom they formerly associated and who now occupy a position way below them in the inverted socioreligious hierarchy of purgatory. Here the priesthood, it would seem, is no longer a category which carries with it an automatic power and authority; indeed, the fact that an anchoritic woman can safely and confidently present such a vision to a whole series of priests and other male religious testifies cogently to her secure place at the heart of an imperative for Church reform. The gendered punishments for fornication meted out to ‘both sengle men and wommen’ are also subject to similar treatment by the visionary. Initially, the accusatory ‘ȝe’, as uttered by the tormenting devil, is directed at single people of both sexes (‘take ȝe þese peynes for ȝe disused ȝour-self in þe foul lust of lechery’).159 However, again this suddenly undergoes a change without warning, shifting to focus only on the male perpetrators of a sin which tended to be more often associated with women, as we have seen: ‘for ȝe despised þe ordre of wedlake, and for ȝe dredded þat, if ȝe wer weddet, þat oþer men wold tak ȝour wyfes [. . .] tak [. . .] þese addres and þese snakes euer to gnaw on ȝow [. . .] til God have shewed on ȝow his mercy’.160 Here, instead of being depicted in terms of the scorpion-faced woman who embodies her own seductive essence, this particular form of lechery, which manifests itself in extra-marital sex, is rendered male-specific; indeed, this time it is the man who becomes the snake-like hybrid as the serpents consume him for his lecherous way of life (‘take [. . .] þese addres and þese snakes euer to gnaw on ȝow til our bandes of syn be wasted away and til God have shewed on ȝow his mercy’). If there is a vestige of the fearsome Medusa-like monster here in these devils of lechery, it is short-lived, since the visionary is also clear about the fact that they are, paradoxically, crucial agents of the redemptive process: ‘Ffor wit ȝe welle þis is noȝt helle – þis is an instrument of Goddis ryȝtwisnesse to purge Revelation of Purgatory, p. 71. Revelation of Purgatory, p. 76. 160 Revelation of Purgatory, p. 76. 158

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Medieval Anchoritisms ȝow of ȝour syn in purgatory’.161 In this way, caught up within the text’s concerted attempts to create a gender-inclusive narrative, we find a subtle, inbuilt resistance to misogynistic discourses which have traditionally produced the woman as the scapegoat for human sin. It comes as no surprise, then, that nowhere is there any allusion to Eve and her sinful legacy, bringing the text more into line with Goscelin, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, perhaps, all of whom had different vested interests in maintaining the feminine as sacred in their writing, as I have argued. This is also true of A Revelation of Purgatory despite the fact that the text is framed by the author’s allusion to Adam and his role as occupant of the lost earthly paradise.162 As such, the Fall, which lies behind all of the purgatorial excesses revealed, is configured as Adam’s responsibility not Eve’s, a perspective which aligns itself neatly with the responsibility for sin shouldered by the lecherous priests and not their concubines, as discussed above. Like Adam, it was they who should have directed the women away from sin, rather than encourage them in it. In this way, the text generates the same kind of acerbic critique of fifteenth-century priestly hypocrisy and corruption observed from a woman’s perspective as is central to The Book of Margery Kempe (and which also makes its presence felt, although more subtly, in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation), and, like Margery and Julian, the author frequently withdraws behind linguistic smoke-screens in order to promote her opinions. This is particularly true of her almost hyperbolic use of the same distancing mechanisms as appear in the writing of her two contemporaries and which, as Fumiko Yoshikawa has demonstrated, tend to proliferate in the religious writing of visionary women keen to maintain an aura of humility in the face of their own authorship: phrases such as ‘þan me þoȝt’; ‘and hit semed’; ‘as me thoȝt’, for example, everywhere abound.163 These also serve to mitigate for the reader the author’s active female gaze and her onlooker, visionary status and flag up an anchoritic humility which is akin to that of Mary herself. In fact, on two occasions, both of which mirror one another, the author deftly exploits the authority of Marian discourse by playfully conflating herself with the Virgin, toying with the doublemeaning of the term ‘lady’, as uttered by Margaret twice as she fades from sight. In the first instance, as Margaret exits at the end of her first appearance, she utters a great screech and cry, followed by a final address to the visionary, ‘O der lady, be my help’.164 On the second occasion, however, when the visionary demands to know what Margaret means by these anguished words, it is apparent that this time it is the Virgin upon whom Margaret calls in her use of the term ‘lady’, something which is corroborated by her justification, ‘for sho is wel of mercy, I cried on hyr Revelation of Purgatory, p. 76. The text speaks initially of the ‘heigh paradise, whar Adam was first’, p. 64; and at the end of ‘þy kynde heritage [. . .] þat Adam was in’, p. 86. 163 Fumiko Yoshikawa, ‘Julian of Norwich and the Rhetoric of the Impersonal’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold, ed. McAvoy, pp. 141–54. Yoshikawa has also extended the range of her analysis to cover The Book of Margery Kempe in ‘“For I am a woman, leued, febille, & freylle”: Discourse Strategies to Avoid Suspicion in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe’, unpublished paper delivered at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds 2009. 164 Revelation of Purgatory, p. 65. This address is obviously directed at the visionary herself since Margaret has already asked her former friend for her help on a number of other occasions, using the pronoun ‘þe’ rather than the noun ‘lady’ (for example,‘in þe name of God I ask help of þe’ [p. 61]). 161

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Reading with the Eyes Closed in my grete woo’.165 Nevertheless, as we have seen, the entire text is predicated entirely upon Margaret’s having pleaded with the visionary first and foremost for help and that, in turn, like the Virgin, she is also a well of mercy who directs her anchoritic practices and influence towards Margaret’s salvation. In some ways, then, the text and its internal penitential mechanisms become a Marian concern, fusing with the intimate dialogics forged between the visionary and her friend Margaret and promoting a view of the role played by women within the salvific drama as paramount. As a result, at the text’s conclusion, when the Virgin ‘broȝt hyr [Margaret] to a well, and þer al hyr body was wesshen [. . .] And me þoȝt þe fayr lady offred Margarete to hym [Christ]’,166 we are presented with an allegory for the visionary’s own role in effecting Margaret’s redemption by directing her own prayers and those of a circle of churchmen of the highest influence on her behalf. Within this visionary’s eschatological universe, therefore, the anchorite is Mary, not Eve, something which allows for an apparently unproblematic insertion of self into a major reformist movement of which both Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich were arguably also a part.167 In many ways then, at least from the evidence purveyed here, female anchoritism – and its writings in particular – came to provide a medium for a linguistic, imagistic and corporeal translation in which words, bodies and textual bodies become subject to a female – and feminine – defining gaze, problematizing their cultural meanings in the process. With anchoritism, mysticism and prophetic and visionary activity having, in many ways, relinquished some of their anti-feminist demons by the time all three of these women were operating and, having very often become conflated into a single, feminized genre, late-medieval female reclusion appears to have led to what Irigaray once valorized as ‘the place where “she” – and in some cases he, if he follows “her” lead – speaks about the dazzling glare which comes from the source of light that has been logically repressed’.168 In all three texts examined in this chapter, therefore, we see the ‘dazzling glare’ of a female perspective on God and the eschatological universe predicated on a human relationship with him. Indeed, this is something best summed up in a final image of Margaret, who, with her body rent with a ‘greuous and [. . .] horrible wound’ and emanating dazzling ‘sparkles of fyr’,169 instructs her anchorite friend to hurry to a close circle of male ecclesiastics and bid them follow the anchorite’s ‘lead’. If, therefore, as Irigaray asserts, the mystical encounter is inherently an experience of the feminine, one that allows to surface the otherwise repressed semiotics and ‘language’ of a pre-Imaginary realm, a space in which the subject becomes fleetingly unified,170 then the ground-swell of female anchoritism and anchoritic practice witnessed during the period to which all three of the texts examined here fully attest, also provide witness to a democratizing of the holy woman’s perspective, her needs and her voice, allowing her access to otherwise prohibited, or at best fully mediated realms of intellectual expression on her own terms. Transformed into 167 168 169 170 165

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Revelation of Purgatory, p. 77. Revelation of Purgatory, p. 85. Erler covers this in some detail in ‘Revelation of Purgatory’. Luce Irigaray, ‘La Mystérique’, in Speculum, pp. 191–202 (p. 191). Revelation of Purgatory, pp. 60–1. Again, for an astute analysis of this aspect of Irigarayan philosophy which focuses on her essay ‘La Mystérique’, see Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, especially ch. 6 (pp. 187–210).

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Medieval Anchoritisms orthodox medium, therefore, the vision of the fleshly woman becomes the epitome of Cixous’s call for a female bodily inscription which is both written and given to be read; the visionary text becomes the Kristevan ‘dance’ whose performance transforms suffering into the ‘language’ of a fully speaking female subject.

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Chapter 5 MAPPING THE ANCHORHOLD: ANCHORITES, BORDERLANDS AND LIMINAL SPACES [A]t times of searching for a point of entry into either a triumphant or a self-flagellating historical narrative, it is often possible to re-write the history . . . through a critical analysis of the representations of women’s bodies in the service of specific ideologies and cultural strategies.1

ANCRENE WISSE: A BORDERLANDS TEXT

I

n her account of mapped views of the world, Irit Rogoff asserts that such views are in fact, ‘meditations on issues of boundaries and definitions and the interactions between the two’.2 Drawing on the work of J. Wreford Watson, she demonstrates how geographical narratives regarding the apparent specificity of place help to shape our own concepts of representation and meaning. For Rogoff, the geography of the land is ultimately the geography of spatial construction, which in turn becomes a geography of the mind itself.3 This is a concept which has been explored in the context of medieval literature by Christopher Cannon, who, drawing upon the Hegelian notion of thinking as mediated through objective materialities, themselves part of an ‘inward pulse’ always already beating within the ‘outward appearances’ of things, suggests that ‘the unique object assembles a singular combination of ideas’.4 Such ideas, which are formulated out of material realities surrounding the thinker within any given culture, therefore find their way from the landscape and the material world around us into our cognitive processes themselves, rematerializing in the ways in which we envisage our world, its societies, its bodies and what they signify. As Cannon has also argued, such cognitive processes are clearly at work in Ancrene Wisse, which provides one of the main foci for his discussion. However, whilst Cannon’s interest lies in the ways in which the English landscape, and contemporary politics as played out within it, are brought to bear upon the text’s imagistic patterns, hermeneutics and structure, he overlooks the importance of the anonymous author’s more specific allusions to place, as found in the revised version of the original text in the Corpus manuscript, discussed in Chapter 3. In 3 4 1

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Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 146. Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 98. Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 97. Christopher Cannon, The Grounds of English Literature (Oxford, 2004), p. 9. Here Cannon draws upon Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, asserting that the ‘universe of the mind’ is simultaneously the ‘universe of nature’.

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Medieval Anchoritisms Part 4 of this text, which deals with the physical and spiritual temptations which may be encountered by the enclosed women, the author evidently felt the need to add an interpolation which is absent from his original text. In this addition he compares the growing group of female anchorites for whom he writes to religious communities living in named towns elsewhere, thus creating a ‘virtual’ community out of a real one, and erasing their geographical separation from one another in the process:5 For euch is wiðward oþer in an manere of liflade, as þah ȝe weren an cuuent of Lundene ant Oxnefort, of Schreobsburi oðer of Chester. [For you are all turned toward one another in a single manner of living, as though you were a single convent of London and Oxford, of Shrewsbury or of Chester.]6

Whilst the binary ‘London and Oxford’ serves an obvious narrative purpose, that is to say it extends this virtual community to two of the towns considered to be main hubs of learning in England during the period,7 his drawing upon the towns of Shrewsbury and Chester is not so obviously explained.8 This extends the ground covered by Cannon and raises the questions of why the Ancrene Wisse author attempts to map his text and audience in this very specific way and what it suggests about the concomitant mapping of minds, if we return to Rogoff ’s configuration of the effects of geographical narratives upon culture. In his examination of the topography of Ancrene Wisse, Cannon offers a compelling argument for the text as crafted by the geographies – and turbulent histories – of the Welsh Marcher region where this guidance text is now believed to have been composed.9 Cannon takes as his main premise the author’s concerted use, both explicit and implicit, of militaristic imagery and battle-mongering ideologies so evocative of the Welsh wars against the English during the thirteenth century, including his concerted use of hermeneutics of walls and protective enclosures, ramparts and gateways, weaponry and shields, all of which everywhere abound in the text. In his analysis, however, like many critics Cannon fails to take account of the very different experiences, histories

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E. J. Dobson’s opinion that this comparison is a hypothetical one and that ‘cuuvent’ refers to ‘an organized conventual house’ occludes the Ancrene Wisse author’s possible reasons for allying Shrewsbury and Chester to the much further afield London and Oxford, for which I argue in this chapter. See E. J. Dobson, The Origins of Ancrene Wisse (Oxford, 1976), p. 133, n. 2. Ancrene Wisse, 4.1082–5, pp. 96–7. On medieval London see, for example, Caroline M. Barron, London in the Middle Ages: Government and People 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2000), especially pp. 302–7. For a useful history of the city of Oxford, see Ruth Fasnacht, A History of the City of Oxford (Oxford, 1954). Dobson posits that Shrewsbury and Chester are included, and Hereford and Worcester omitted, because of the wealth and importance of the ‘regular’ religious houses in the first two towns (Origins, pp. 134–5). He does, however, also suggest that the references reflect an authorial mindset which thinks ‘as a member of the Anglo-Norman feudal society of the Welsh Marches’ (p. 135). Cannon, Grounding of English Literature, pp. 137–71. For a detailed history of the Welsh Marches see, for example, R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales (Oxford, 1987). Both linguistic and imagistic evidence have led scholars to concur that the the place of this text’s production and audience was the mid- to northern borderland between England and Wales – the Welsh Marches – and at least four of the extant manuscript versions appear to have originated at some point along this axis, for which see Millett, Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, pp. 19–20. See also my discussion below.

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Mapping the Anchorhold and mind-geographies produced as a result of gender differences between author and audience – in spite of the fact that his chapter on Ancrene Wisse concludes with an examination of enclosed bodies and the generating of an anchoritic ‘self ’ within the text. At no point, however, does Cannon consider that an anchoritic ‘self ’, constructed by landscape, geography and conflict, may be mediated by the type of gender ideologies which, as I have shown, permeate the anchoritic text on every level. As Rogoff notes in her discussion of how bodies form a site of geographical ambivalence, ‘bodies might be operating quite differently if read through official ideology and through the contexts of their own subjectivity’,10 something which I have also argued for in Chapters 3 and 4 of this book. Whilst I take no issue with Cannon’s innovative and ultimately convincing topographical analysis, or the role played by militaristic circumstance in the construction of the anchorite’s selfhood, his analysis is clearly rendered problematic by the fact that it is specifically female and not generic bodies and selfhoods which are being constructed here, something, of course, the Ancrene Wisse author refuses to allow his audience of women to forget at any point. What I also want to argue here, however, is that, whilst militarism was a primary modus vivendi of both Marcher men and women during the period and thus forms an entirely appropriate hermeneutic with which to discuss anchoritic enclosure, as Marcher women the text’s recipients were also clearly shaped by an alter ego as commodity for dynastic exchange. As such, they were always already possessors of fetishized bodies onto which could be projected a social, political or religious aspiration which, as the words of Rogoff suggest in the epigram to this present chapter, would then serve ‘specific ideologies and cultural strategies’. Therefore, although concurring with Cannon’s appraisal of the Marcher lands and culture as deeply imbricated within Ancrene Wisse and the other Katherine Group texts, I would press the implications of his charge a little further. I suggest that it was more specifically the marginality and eccentricity of the Marcher lands that helped to nurture a female anchoritic impulse which was to spread rapidly throughout England during the later Middle Ages, fuelled also by a similarly inexorable wave of female anchoritism throughout Western Europe during the same period.11 As mentioned in Chapter 4, Ancrene Wisse was most likely composed in the late 1220s or early 1230s at the request of three female anchorites who felt in need of further guidance.12 These three anchorites, who feature in the author’s initial text (extant in Cotton Nero A.xiv),13 are evidently consanguine sisters, each with her own servant and supported by one or other of the affluent local families. They are also all well known to the author himself and to the surrounding community, with whom they clearly interact:

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Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 147. Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy. Millett, Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, p. 12. She refers to 1230 as an ‘anchor date’ for the terminus ante quem of the original version, and a terminus a quo for the revised version of the text. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Edited from Cotton MS. Nero A. XIV, on the basis of a transcript by J. A. Herbert, EETS os 225 (London, 1952).

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Medieval Anchoritisms Ȝe, mine leoue sustren, beoð þeo ancren þet Ich iknowe habbeð lest neode to uroure aȝean þeos temptaciuns [. . .] vor mid eise ne mid more menske not Ich none ancre þet habbe al þet hire neod is þene þe þreo habbeð [. . .] Uor ȝe ne þencheð nowiht of mete ne of cloð, ne to ou ne to ouwer meidenes. Euerich of ou haueð of one ureonde al þet hire is neod; ne þerf þet meiden sechen nouðer bread ne suuel fur þene et his halle [. . .] Muche word is of ou, hu gentile wummen ȝe beoð, vor godleic and for ureoleic iȝirneð of monie, and sustren of one ueder and of one moder, ine blostme of ower ȝuweðe uorheten alle worldes blissen and bicomen ancren. [You, my dear sisters, are the anchoresses that I know who have the least need of support against these temptations [. . .] because I do not know any anchoress who has all she needs with more ease or more respect than you three have [. . .] For you have no worries about food or clothing, either for yourselves or for your maids. Each of you has from one friend all that she needs; the maid does not have to look further for bread or other provisions than at his hall [. . .] You are much talked about, what well-bred women you are, sought after by many for your goodness and for your generosity, and sisters from one father and one mother, [who] in the bloom of your youth renounced all the joys of the world and became anchoresses.]14

In the light of such information, and as I argued at the end of Chapter 3, the text can certainly be read as a work of collaboration between author and audience, adding fuel to Savage’s argument that the enclosed women themselves had some kind of input and investment into how the text in its first and second stages was constructed (and, in which case, certainly complicating further Cannon’s analysis).15 Moreover, by the time the author came to revise it some five years later, possibly in the light of responses to his initial work from these three original recluses, his anchoritic audience had burgeoned from three to ‘twenty, now, or more’ [‘twenti nuðe oðer ma’].16 Thus, within five years this revered anchoritic community had become almost seven times larger than when the author first completed his work and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that an even wider audience may have had some kind of input into the revised text. Even by the standards documented by Warren, which demonstrate a two-and-a-half fold increase in the number of female anchorites in England during the thirteenth century,17 such a seven-fold increase constitutes an extraordinary growth in this particular expression of female spirituality within a single geographic area. 18



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Ancrene Wisse, 4. p. 73, n. 4. See p. 110, n. 165. Diane Watt has also argued in Medieval Women (p. 18): ‘It is imperative that women’s literary history should take into consideration, alongside the figure of the woman writer, the female patron or book commissioner, the female beneficiary of book patronage, the female subject and, crucially, the woman as audience and as reader’. Since we know of a number of female anchorites who continued to bear an influence beyond their cells, both in legal and literary matters, it is also not beyond the bounds of possibility that the three anchorites commissioned and paid for their own book. Ancrene Wisse, 4.1078, p. 96. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 38. For Shropshire in the thirteenth century, Warren records five female anchorites and three whose sex is indeterminate from the records, distributed over eight sites. For Herefordshire, she notes six females distributed between four sites (Anchorites and their Patrons, Appendix 1, u.p). Warren’s study is based only on published records, although my own field-work has uncovered considerably more sites throughout the region.

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Mapping the Anchorhold These Marches, as the etymology of the word suggests,19 were long considered a hybrid and plastic space, comprising an area which the Ancrene Wisse author himself identifies as ‘the end of England’ [‘Englondes ende’] towards which ‘your community is beginning to spread’ [‘ower cuuent biginneð to spreaden’].20 Moreover, if the background and standing of this growing community of recluses continued to mirror those of the women featuring in the author’s initial text, they were certainly likely to have been women from families of some standing, also members of the powerful Marcher families who dominated these volatile borderlands between England and Wales during the period in question. Indeed, Catherine Innes-Parker has persuasively promoted a case for this, pointing out (as do I in Chapter 3 above) that two of the daughters of the de Braose Marcher family, Loretta and Annora, both withdrew as widows to separate anchorholds elsewhere in England, in 1219 and 1232 respectively, where they lived out the remainder of their lives.21 Similarly, as also mentioned, the wealthy Marcher heiress, Katharine de Audley, daughter of the redoubtable John Giffard, who had been a leading campaigner against the Welsh leading up to the conquest, retired to the anchorhold at Ledbury in 1312, some years after the death of her husband, Nicholas.22 Of course, widows of this class who failed to remarry are particularly noteworthy since the widows of the wealthy nobility, especially those of the Marcher families, more often than not were remarried quickly into equally powerful local dynasties and, in this way, could accrue and protect considerable lands and fortunes built upon their dowers and other inheritances. This would render them valuable commodities through which could be constructed formidable alliances between some of the most powerful lordships in the land.23 Young Marcher women were also often forcibly married into the Welsh nobility as a subduing, colonialist strategy,24 although the leading Marcher families ‘staunchly resisted acculturation, insisting on their separateness from the Welsh’, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen notes.25 Dowager noblewomen and their fortunes, therefore, had an exceptionally strong impact upon Marcher history,26 and those like Annora, Loretta and Katharine who eventually opted out of this dynastic imperative and into the anchoritic life offer us further insights into the narrow range of functions available for Marcher women within the border politics of the

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For example, ‘a boundary, a frontier’ or ‘a tract of disputed land between two countries’, Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘march’. This is also discussed by Cannon, Grounds of English Literature, p. 145. Ancrene Wisse, 4.1090, p. 97. It was Dobson who first postulated that this might refer to the region of the Welsh Marches. For his argument, see Origins, especially ch. 3, pp. 114–73. Innes-Parker, ‘Legacy’. Cases of consanguine sisters withdrawing to the anchorhold, either instead of marriage or after being widowed, are not uncommon in medieval England. As well as the Ancrene Wisse sisters and the de Braose sisters, three sisters from the de Lisle family were enclosed at Doncaster in the closing years of the thirteenth century. For a brief summary of this, see Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 210–11. See p. 97, n. 106. This issues is examined tangentially in Davies, Lordship and Society, pp. 34–66. Davies, Lordship and Society, pp. 444–5. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (New York, 2006), p. 78. This is a point made by Davies in Lordship and Society, p. 42. A good many long-lived noblewomen could experience multiple marriages during their lifetime. For example, the renowned and powerful Elizabeth de Burgh had been widowed three times between 1308 and 1360, when she died at the age of 65; Cokayne et al., Complete Peerage, vol. XII/2, p. 177. See also Davies, Lordship and Society, p. 42.

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Medieval Anchoritisms day. Indeed, a good many of those entering the anchorhold who are known to us by name seem already to have had widespread renown for such dynastic reasons, and their reputations frequently continued after their enclosure.27 MAPPING THE WELSH BORDERLANDS In the thirteenth century, the region now entitled ‘Wales’ was deemed to be a dark, uncivilized and irreligious place, the construction of which within popular English imagination tipped over into threatening unknowability. In the words of Cohen: ‘The twelfth-century Welsh March was an unstable geography. Belonging to neither Wales nor England, composite in its culture and mixed in its blood, possessed even of its own law, the March was a place where identities, like political boundaries, had yet to be firmly fixed.’28 Also in the twelfth century, the author of the Gesta Stephani configured Wales as a land ‘immediately bordering on England’ [‘Angliae proxima uicinitate contermina’], going on to bestialize its inhabitants as, amongst other things, ‘men of an animal type [. . .] unstable in their faith and abodes’ [‘hominum nutrix bestialium [.  .  .] fide semper et locis instabilium’].29 John of Salisbury (d. 1180), too, writes of the Welsh as a godless race which ‘despises the Word of Life’ [‘aspernatur verbum vitae’], imposing a religious and spiritual otherness upon those peoples who lay just beyond the March.30 In such configurations the godlessness and inherent instability associated with the Welsh people render them entirely resistant to the ‘civilizing’ forces of the Norman English whose dominant influence could offer them their only chance of reaching full humanity. Although such a representation, as part of the mechanism of ‘othering-intoan-enemy’, served to construct the Welsh as a single, cohesive race,31 there was certainly little notion of cohesive identity within Wales or the Marches during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.32 But, as Rogoff observes on the work undertaken by the processes of border demarcation, ‘one curious dimension of this border work is that [. . .] it assumes some cohesion on each side of the border, each country an internally unified entity and identity’.33 It is thus entirely likely that, in his allusion to the community of female anchorites as having reached the furthermost limits of England mentioned above, the Ancrene Wisse author is This was, of course, the case with the Winchester anchorite focused on in Chapter 4. Loretta de Braose also continues to appear in the records, administering her estate and making bequests at regular intervals, and Katharine de Audley is recorded as attempting to regain control of her own lands from her anchorhold in 1326 just before her death. See, for example, CCR 1226–57, II Henry III, 16 July 1227, p. 52 and Calendar of Memoranda Rolls (Exchequer), Michaelmas 1326 – Michaelmas 1327 (Public Record Office; London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office 1968), 25 February 1326–7, respectively. 28 Cohen, Hybridity, p. 81. 29 Gesta Stephani, ed. and trans. K. R. Potter (Oxford, 1976), pp. 14–15. 30 John of Salisbury, Letters, ed. W. J. Mellor and H. E. Butler (London, 1955), Letter 87, pp. 135–6. 31 This is something which has been famously examined by Gwyn A. Williams in his important When was Wales? (Harmondsworth, 1991). For a more recent and succinct appraisal, see Simon MeechamJones and Ruth Kennedy, introduction to Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales, ed. Simon Meecham-Jones and Ruth Kennedy (New York, 2008), pp. 1–11. 32 On this see Cohen, Hybridity, especially ch. 3, pp. 77–108. 33 Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 120 (my emphasis). 27

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Mapping the Anchorhold mapping them onto the last frontier of Christian civility at England’s uttermost end before the abyss of Wales opens up its devouring maw.34 Similarly, this author may well also be drawing a subtle contrast between the widely disparaged incivility deemed to lurk beyond the border and the elevated nature of the anchoritic life, which is configured in his text in specifically female terms – and as specifically English. Again, this is particularly likely, given the almost complete absence in the records of any kind of female anchoritism in Wales during the period and an ongoing antipathy between the vestiges of the ‘Celtic’ Church and its Roman neighbour.35 As the embodiment of a particularly concentrated, gendered and esteemed form of western Christianity, Ancrene Wisse’s growing community of women, dotted as they are along these volatile borderlands, could therefore play a vital role in literally anchoring civilized, Christian values within a terrain with very little stability and one which more often than not was likely at any time to explode into a cycle of male-orchestrated insurrection and retaliation.36 Indeed, this is exactly what I will be arguing here in this chapter (and at this point I certainly intersect with Cannon’s premise): that it is no coincidence that the richest of our extant anchoritic guidance texts should have emerged within a borderland context in which the way of life it maps plays more than an ordinarily important part in asserting the superiority of English identity and the construction of an expedient common enemy in the uncivilized and ungodly Welsh. Thus, in his reminder to his audience in the revised text, ‘you are the anchorites of England’ [‘ȝe beoð þe ancren of Englond’],37 it is possible to hear resound on the part of the Ancrene Wisse author not just a little nationalistic pride – propaganda, even – in this designation, especially in his insistence on the absolute homogeneity of his audience, in spite of their geographical separation from one another. If, as Homi Bhabha has asserted, ‘To exist is to be called into being in relation to an otherness’,38 the ‘existence’ of this author’s ‘anchorites of England’ is produced by means of their united front within a disputed and volatile geography; and much of what is at stake within that existence is laid out as part of the text’s concerted ideological project. Recognizing the problematics of sameness and otherness vying to dominate a single space, Cohen has recently identified the Welsh Marches as ‘a difficult middle’, ‘a complex web of competing gravitational forces’, and a region where typically ‘selfdeclared advanced culture imagines it discovers a more primitive realm’. As Cohen also argues, one of the end-products of such a clash of hierarchized cultures is the development of a cultural programme aimed at teaching the underdog his own Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson visualize the community of female anchorites as being ‘quite far-flung geographically’ and concur with Dobson on Limebrook priory as being the likely ‘motherhouse’. Anchoritic Spirituality (New York, 1991), pp. 381–2, n. 91. 35 This is something I discuss further below in the context of Gerald of Wales. On the Welsh solitary tradition, see my essay ‘The Anchoritic Tradition of Medieval Wales’, in Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy, pp. 195–216. For a detailed examination of Welsh women’s spirituality more widely in the Middle Ages see Jane Cartwright, Feminine Sanctity and Spirituality in Medieval Wales (Cardiff, 2008). For her conclusion about the lack of female anchoritic activity, see pp. 207–8. 36 This is a point also made by Cannon, who points out the connections between anchoritism and the nautical associations of the term. Indeed, the Ancrene Wisse author draws the connection explicitly in comparing the anchorite to ‘ancre under schipes bord forte halden þat schip’ [‘anchor under the side of a ship to hold the ship’]. Ancrene Wisse, 3.330, p. 56. 37 Ancrene Wisse, 4.1077, p. 96. 38 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), p. 44. 34

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Medieval Anchoritisms marginal status.39 Thus, whenever the concept of a geographical border is invoked, the civilized world is considered to be on one side of it only. Read in this way, the extraordinary burgeoning of an anchoritic community along the problematic and constantly changing fault-line between England and Wales, as documented by an author fully imbued with the tenets of Parisian scholasticism and the civilizing force of a new ecclesiastic pastoral mission, would certainly bear this out. In his identifying of an expanding community of anchorites, the author is at the same time both demarcating and mapping out a physical territory of occupation which is inevitably productive of a ‘geography of the mind’, that is to say a navigable spiritual mind-set based upon what he presents as tangible and physically immediate phenomena. Moreover, the culturally freighted body of the female anchorite as always already fragile and yet at the same time bearer of exalted values constituted the ideal vehicle for this demarcation: how dichotomous were these ‘ancren of Englond’ to the fallen and warmongering warriors of the makeshift Welsh armies and their immoral women lurking malevolently just across the border, malefactors who inevitably succumbed to every anti-Christian impulse? In his insistence upon the Englishness of his gentlewomen anchorites and particularly the realm they inhabit, the author imbues them with a strong sense of both religious and national identity which mingle in a body – and bodies – which come to represent stability of place and stability of purpose. As we have seen, these are heavily policed female bodies, ideally suited as a text for talking a permeable and shifting geographical boundary into some kind of coherent stability. In this sense, the specific allusions to place which we find in Ancrene Wisse may well be more overtly politicized than has hitherto been considered, even by Cannon in his own analysis. I argue, therefore, that such rhetoric contributes to the construction of a specifically sacred space along the volatile borderlands which, to adapt the words of Rogoff, serves to harden the arbitrariness of borders into immutable facts.40 CHRONICLING BORDERLAND STABILITY This assertion can perhaps be borne out further by considering a range of other contemporary writings which are fully imbricated with borderland mentalitiés and which make use of the gendered anchoritic body in far more obviously political ways. The first of these is the highly eclectic Chronicle of Lanercost, extant only in one late-fourteenth-century manuscript and believed to have been written either at the priory of Lanercost or at Carlisle in Cumbria at some stage during the fourteenth century.41 In whichever case, it is undoubtedly a Cohen, Hybridity, p. 82, p. 84, p. 101. Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 98. 41 The oldest extant manuscript containing this chronicle is BL, Cotton Claudian D.vii, which was edited by Joseph Stevenson for the Maitland and Bannatyne Clubs in 1839. All quotation will be taken from this edition, which will be referred to as Chronicon. Stevenson, however, considered the text to be written by a minorite friar from Carlisle rather than its provenance being the Lanercost Priory which its title would suggest. James Wilson, however, in his introduction to Herbert Maxwell’s English translation of the text (referred to here as Lanercost) reassesses the evidence in favour of a Lanercost provenance. See The Chronicle of Lanercost, trans. Herbert Maxwell, 2 vols. (Cribyn, 2001), vol. I, Introduction, pp. ix–xxxi. The English translation of all quotations will be taken from Maxwell’s translation. 39

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Mapping the Anchorhold borderlands text and much of its material is preoccupied with the same type of borderland identity politics which have been outlined above. The Chronicle itself is, true to its genre, a type of ‘literary scrap-book’42 compiled as a means of recording historical and pseudo-historical events as news of those events reached the author. Entries are often based on hearsay, imperfect evidence or oral intelligence passed on via similar types of discourse communities or politico-religious networks to those examined in the previous chapter. Indeed, in his preface to the 1913 translation of this particular chronicle, James Wilson asserted that the Augustinian house of Lanercost, the most likely settling for the Chronicle’s composition, was geographically well-placed on the border as an ‘emporium of news’,43 and the most likely source of many of the entries were the mendicant friars who everywhere abound within the text and who receive ubiquitous approval by its author.44 Reading the Chronicle less as a historical source, then, and more as a rich repository of custom, anecdote and cultural concerns regarding the socio-religious politics of the period, it is unsurprising that a fair number of links between this northern borderland region and that of the Welsh Marches present themselves. The author concerns himself primarily with the documenting of an apparently random conglomeration of events dating from 1201 to 1346. Much of his material is haphazardly gathered and is frequently used anecdotally in an attempt to create a credible and cohesive teleology between past, present and future. For example, the popular legend of the murdered child, Hugh of Lincoln, makes an appearance, as we might expect within a narrative concerned with the production of a national homogeneity and normative male identity,45 and, like the aberrant Jews in that tale, women tend to form part of this same narrative strategy throughout the work. Thus, except for a handful of sketchily presented noblewomen and queens, the ordinary woman-in-the-street is, for instance, typified by a murderous maid employed by Margaret of Scotland, who pushes a pompous court official into the Tay and drowns him; a scheming wanton who seduces a cleric in York; or one of a clutch of young village women in Inverkeithing who are drawn by a corrupt priest into a revival of ‘the profane rites of Priapus [. . .] [in honour of] Father Bacchus’ [‘Priapi prophana parans [. . .] Libero patri’].46 Each in her own way is responsible for the breaking down of bodily and/or societal boundaries, underscoring the extent to which unpoliced femininity has long been constructed as ‘a meeting point between rational and irrational discourses’,47 no more so than in texts such as these. Configurations of gender, then, form one of a range of normalizing strategies Wilson, in Lanercost, p. xvii. Lanercost, p. xxxi. 44 This echoes the approval extended to the Friars Preacher and the Friars Minor by the Ancrene Wisse author in his revised version of the text. Here he evidently approves of visits to female anchorites by the Mendicants, newly arrived in England from the continent, whereas his earlier version had expressly discouraged visits from men. See Ancrene Wisse, 2.311–26, p. 28 (p. 28). 45 Chronicon, p. 62 (Lanercost, p. 6). The inclusion of this popular episode (which is recorded in the Annales Waverley and by Gerald of Wales, amongst others), in which a young child is murdered by Jews living in Lincoln, is apparently sparked off by a preceding allusion to King Henry III’s ‘son’ whose absence fighting the ‘non-believers’ on the last Crusade caused the coronation to be deferred. 46 Chronicon, p. 95, p. 120, p. 109 (Lanercost, p. 7, p. 47, p. 29). 47 Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 150. 42 43

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Medieval Anchoritisms which serve to throw into relief what comprises by far the greater content of this particular work: male militaristic prowess and/or piety, masculine courage and loyalty, the activities of kings, princes, prelates and Marcher lords from both the Scottish and Welsh borderlands at a time when both regions presented the greatest threat to Anglo-Norman sovereignty and perceived integrity. A great deal of space is also allotted to recounting many of the main events concerning the so-called Welsh Rebellion during the 1280s. Alongside allusions to the activities of Griffin de la Pole and Roger Mortimer in the Welsh Marches, for example, we find reference made to the powerful Marcher lord, Ranulf III (named Ranulf de Blunderville in this text), earl of Chester and concerted supporter of Marcher anchorites, to whom I will briefly return later.48 As part of the same strategy of establishing a range of ‘others’ in order to define an imaginary English ‘sameness’, the Welsh do not fare any better in their representation than Jews and the ordinary woman in the eyes of the Chronicle’s unequivocally pro-English author. Early in the text he records how, in an incursion of 1283, gens Britonum, nesciens in pace vitam transfigere, extra suos limites prorumpentes, caedes et incendia incipientes, in die Palmarum in populo processionem prosequente et etiam obsidiones fecerunt.49 [the Welsh nation, unable to pass their lives in peace, broke over their borders on Palm Sunday, carrying fire and sword among the people engaged in procession, and even laid siege [to some places].]

Again the border itself is presented in terms of both nation and body, both ideologically enveloped within watertight membranes which are designed to keep the inside in and the outside clearly separate and intact. In breaching those membranes, the incontinent nation becomes synonymous with those unruly bodies which comprise it and therefore monstrous in its inability to be contained or even self-contained. As Rogoff asserts in her analysis of the politics attached to border creation: ‘On the other side, from whichever perspective that other side is viewed, there is always a specter of a demonized population, its character traits exaggerated, and its ability to contain itself doubtful, its menacing ambitions to spill over and flood the protected entity forever threatening.’50 Such a fracturing by the Welsh of their own borders and their own spilling into England therefore brings about both contamination and powerful demarcation of difference. The bellicose inability of the Welsh fighters to maintain any integrity, bodily or otherwise, is pitted against what is clearly configured here as the absolute ability of the English to lead peaceful and piously stable lives on the ‘right’ side of the arbitrary line of demarcation. The former, therefore, are lambasted by the Chronicle’s partisan author, both here and elsewhere, as constituting an uncivilized otherness which explodes into and dismembers the pious religiosity on the English side of the border – and in this instance on Palm Sunday, of all days. Here the English are quite literally immersed within one of the most Chronicon, p. 142 (Lanercost, pp. 53–4). Chronicon, p. 111 (Lanercost, pp. 32–3). 50 Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 117. 48 49

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Mapping the Anchorhold powerfully performative peace-rituals within the calendar of the Christian Church. In what resembles a demonic assault upon virtue then, fire and sword at the hands of the Welsh arrive to scythe and conflagrate the worshipers and, in an ultimate act of cannibalistic ingestion, they are surrounded and laid siege to. These are the biblical unbelievers writ large; these are the uncontainable ‘other’ of the colonial imaginary. No wonder, then (and seemingly in response to this episode), some pages further on in the Chronicle where the author returns to the subject of the ‘turbulent and distracted nation’ [‘gens illa convulsa ac dilacerata’] of the Welsh,51 he chooses to insert a protracted account of an episode which reputedly took place in 1296, in which a Shrewsbury anchorite, one of many located in the region, takes up centre stage, an episode which I will examine in detail below. THE FEMALE ANCHORITES OF SHREWSBURY Shrewsbury was – and still remains – a town situated on the very border between England and Wales, a frontier town and capital of one of the three great Marcher earldoms of the period.52 It was a place where the presence of anchorites throughout this troubled period seems to have been particularly prevalent. In an entry for the Kalends of February 1314, for example, the register of the bishop of Lichfield records the building of an anchorhold for Isolda de Hungerford in a garden previously granted to Shrewsbury Abbey in 1227. What is of particular interest here is that the register also mentions that Isolda’s cell is situated close to the ‘houses in the cemetery of St Romald’s church in Shrewsbury, where ‘the other anchorites lived’ [‘in domibus cimiterii Sancti Romaldi Salop ubi alie anacorite degebant’].53 In this location, so the register suggests, was housed what appears to have been a longstanding community of female anchorites, and it is tempting to speculate that it could have been this community, dating from the first decades of the thirteenth century, to whom the Ancrene Wisse author makes mention in his reference to the ‘cuuvent’ of Shrewsbury and Chester, as discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Shrewsbury had never housed a nunnery; and, in fact, there is only one recorded for Shropshire as a whole and that was in Brewood Forest some distance to the east. Anchorites, on the other hand, are recorded as having lived in or near the town from the late twelfth century.54 Similarly, other registers record Chronicon, p. 181 (Lanercost, p. 148). The three earldoms were those of Chester, Shrewsbury and Hereford, all of which were semiautonomous and developed their own legal system known as ‘Marcher law’. These earldoms survived throughout the medieval period and many of the lordships which they generated were not assimilated to either Wales or England until the Act of Union in 1536. On this see Trevor Rowley, The Welsh Border: Archaeology, History, Landscape (Stroud and Charleston, 2000), p. 91. For a study of the significance of the concept of the ‘frontier’ in the Middle Ages, see Medieval Frontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus Mackay (Oxford, 1989). For a brief discussion of this in the context of the Welsh Marches, see Cohen, Hybridity, p. 101. 53 Lichfield Joint Record Office B/a 1/11, f.67v. See also H. Owen and J. B. Blakeway, History of Shrewsbury, 2 vols. (London, 1825), II, p. 475. 54 An anchorite at St Mary’s church in the town was entitled to an annual payment of 20 shillings from Kenley manor (R. W. Eyton, Antiquities of Shropshire, 12 vols. (London, 1854–60), VI, pp. 89–90). There were also anchorites recorded as living at Leebotwood, or Betchcott before 1170 (Eyton, Antiquities, VI, p. 245). 51

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Medieval Anchoritisms a number of single-occupancy anchorholds within the town, amongst which was the chapel of Saint George, which incidentally lay near what was referred to as ‘the Welsh Bridge’ just outside the ‘Welsh Gate’. This anchorhold had been occupied by a female anchorite since 1278 at least,55 and Clay identifies it as still occupied in 1310 by one Emma Sprenghose, who ‘from childhood always affected and still affects to serve Almighty God in the solitary life of an anchorite’ [‘Deo omnipotenti in vita solitaria annacorite a pueritia sua jugita famulari affectasi et adhuc affectas in presenti’].56 This would suggest that Emma Sprenghose, most likely a member of the local gentry family of the same name,57 had probably been enclosed here or perhaps elsewhere in the town since she was a very young woman. At a time when, according to Warren, anchoritism appears to have been still primarily a rural phenomenon in England,58 it is of interest here that this border town and others like it had a conglomeration of anchorholds almost a century before the phenomenon began to transfer itself to other major urban centres in any significant numbers. This, I would argue, was precisely because of its precarious geographic location peeping over the edge into the ‘dark’ Welsh regions and its strategic positioning on one of the main communication routes between the centres of administration in the region.59 Travellers journeying through the town and moving on to other places within the Marches would leave the town via the Welsh bridge, itself a liminal architectural space spanning town and wilderness, security and threat, its submerged foundations anchoring it within the swirling waters of the Severn. No doubt, too, they would often have stopped to consult Emma Sprenghose or her predecessors on their way. With women like Emma occupying the pinnacle of her vocation, having overcome – discursively, at least – the many impediments posed by her femininity, her transformed bodily lexis would render her, too, a bridge to a sanctity and stability which could be accessed by travellers as they left the relative safety of the town for more dangerous realms. In the words of Dawn Marie Hayes, drawing on an analysis of the sacred by Emile Durkheim: ‘Medieval people considered sacredness to be contagious which added to the complexity of the relationship between benevolent and malevolent phenomena’, adding: ‘any person, place, or object that came into contact with a source of sacredness had the opportunity to appropriate its energy’.60 Owen and Blakeway, History of Shrewsbury, II, p. 468. Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, p. 92; Owen and Blakeway, History of Shrewsbury, II, p. 475. 57 The CCR for 1265 records a female anchorite at nearby Astley who is in possession of a ‘seld’. The charter confirmed in this entry on 5 May is witnessed by one Sir Roger Sprenghose, amongst others. Other appearances in the records include his being given Oswestry castle in 1282 as a keeper of castles (CPR, 4 April 1270, p. 104) and he is also recorded as ‘taxer [. . .] in the County of Salop’ (CPR, 4 April 1270, p. 419). Owen and Blakeway note that Roger Sprenghose was of an ancient family whose forefathers had been lords of the March for many years at the manor of Longnor in the hundred of Condover, adding that the name appears regularly on the list of sheriffs (History of Shrewsbury, I, p. 132). 58 Again see the table of rural and urban distributions of anchorholds in Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 38. 59 Rowley also points out that many of the houses established after the Norman Conquest in the Marches were built on such communication routes and were called upon to provide hospitality to people passing between the earldoms of Hereford, Shrewsbury and Chester: The Welsh Border, p. 118. 60 Dawn Marie Hayes, Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe 1100–1389 (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), p. 5. Here Hayes draws on Emile Durkheim’s analysis in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York, 1995 [1912]), p. 322. 55

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Mapping the Anchorhold EMMA OF STAPLETON It is just this sort of positively ‘contagious’ spirituality which characterizes the depiction of the Shrewsbury anchorite within the Lanercost Chronicle mentioned above. The episode in question concerns itself with a series of miraculous revelations experienced by a recluse, also named Emma, in 1296, who occupies an anchorhold attached to the church of Saint John the Baptist at a distance of ‘six miles from the town’ of Shrewsbury [‘sexto ab urbe miliario’].61 This church was most likely that of Stapleton, a small village which still houses that same church, once a double-storey structure with several rooms still extant within the void beneath the church itself.62 Emma, we are told, had long been consecrated there as an anchorite and had also long been ‘accustomed to receive visits from holy men’ [‘sanctorum assueta visitationibus’],63 that is to say the new mendicant Franciscans, who, as mentioned above, are ubiquitously approved of within this text and who appear to carry news and gossip between the regions. Emma is herself also evidently affiliated to the Franciscan order, since we are told she wears their habit.64 On this occasion, appropriately the festival of Saint Francis, she admits to her hospitality two friars, who unfortunately fail to rise as required at midnight to recite the appropriate prayers. Stirred, therefore, to do so herself, Emma calls to her maidservant for a light but the candle is twice extinguished by two strange gusts of wind which appear from nowhere. Following these mysterious occurrences, however, a ‘ray of heavenly light’ [‘radium aetheri luminis’]65 enters the church, whereupon John the Baptist himself (identified here as Emma’s ‘prior’) makes an entrance, a saint moreover to whom Emma was ‘bound by more than common love’ [‘cui inclusa speciali subjecta amore’] and with whom she had ‘experienced many intimacies [as] the friend of Christ’ [‘plures amici Christi experta est familiaritates’].66 This, then, is not a one-off visionary experience; indeed, we are led to believe that Emma is deeply familiar with this type of visionary encounter with Saint John. Such an association therefore allows her to embrace personally the liminal desert and biblical space which John the Baptist traditionally inhabited, a sacred space which thus conflates not only with Emma’s anchorhold but also its borderland location. Such a conflation is also fully borne out by the subsequent appearance to Emma of Saint Antony, ‘the first hermit’, along with the Virgin herself, who are also accompanied by three local Minorite ‘celebrities’: Chronicon, p. 183; Lanercost, p. 151. Stapleton lies on the primary route south from Shrewsbury to Ludlow, and on to Hereford (the present-day A49), and is a highly suitable location for the events as recounted in the Chronicle. The undercroft, with a view of the main altar, is divided into two rooms and would therefore fit the account as it appears in the Chronicle. However, it is also possible that the church in question could be that of Church Preen, also dedicated to St John the Baptist and also showing the physical remains of likely anchoritic activity. The Victoria County History remains undecided about the likely location of this anchorite, for which, see ‘Religious Houses: Introduction’, A History of the County of Shropshire, vol. II (1973), pp. 18–26. However, with Church Preen being approximately fifteen miles from Shrewsbury, I consider Stapleton to be the more likely location. 63 Chronicon, p. 183 (Lanercost, p. 151). 64 Chronicon, p. 183 (Lanercost, p. 152). 65 Chronicon, p. 183 (Lanercost, p. 152). 66 Chronicon, p. 183 (Lanercost, p. 152).

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Medieval Anchoritisms ejus felicem adventum comitati fuerunt quatuor de ordine Minorum, quorum preaecipuus extitit sanctus Antonius, praeclarus Verbi praedicator, necnon et tres alii de Anglia oriundi, vita vel scientia famosi.67 [Four of the Minorite Order bore her [the Virgin] company [. . .] of whom the chief was Saint Anthony, an illustrious preacher of the Word, and with him were three others, natives of England, famed either by their lives or by their wisdom.]

These so-called ‘natives of England’ remain unnamed in the text but the national specificity attached to them and their visionary appearance at Stapleton, just on the English side of the border, along with the emphasis placed upon their ‘vita vel scientia’, has the effect of identifying this location as being also the desert of anchoritic origins which I discussed in Chapter 1, and thus a space which boasts not only elite spirituality but also civility, religious piety and mystical transcendence. The dangerous and unpredictable Welsh Marches themselves are thus turned literally into the geographical location which gave birth to an equally elite anchoritism and collapse, too, into the anchorite herself, who stands firm as the resister of persecution and ungodly impulse. Emma of Stapleton therefore becomes the reified essence of an ideal Christianity which is written invisibly onto her body and the alien landscape, imbuing both with the imprint of divinity. In his work Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida has identified how an apparent cultural homogeneity or synthesis can be produced by means of a space which ‘orders itself wholly for the habitation and inscription in itself of the body “proper”’. For Derrida, that space is configured differently, depending upon whether it is ‘read’ by ‘the movement of the hand’, that is to say by writing, or by the ‘eye’, that is by reading. Thus, for Derrida, ‘the space of pure reading is always already intelligible’ and cannot be separated from that of pure writing. Instead, the binary is maintained merely for purposes of convenience, the result being ‘an ideal signified produced at the moment of writing’ which then substitutes for the ‘thing’ itself.68 In other words, the body, like the land, is always already inscribed and encoded, able to be read in multiple ways for a myriad of cultural and ideological purposes. Pursuing this idea, Rogoff argues that the body is therefore crucial for purposes of legitimizing a jus terrundum [‘law of the land’] and that ‘the marking of a presence in the soil is the making of a law of ownership and territoriality’.69 Lodged within her anchoritic space, which in turn is anchored to the borderland ‘wilderness’ of the Welsh Marches, Emma’s presence thus marks the land with ‘evidence of the body in the soil’.70 Here, however, the ‘presence in the soil’ is both anchoritic and female, and one which marks out its territory as biblical, sacred and a Christian ideal. Thus, again in Derridean terms, Emma’s anchorhold and the borderland church to which it is attached are marked by the imprint of its anchoritic inhabitant and all that she experiences. Suddenly, therefore, the Ancrene Wisse author’s behest at the end of Part Two to his audience to ‘each day scrape up the earth of their graves, in Chronicon, p. 18 (Lanercost, p. 153). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London, 1974), pp. 288–9. 69 Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 134. 70 Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 135. 67

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Mapping the Anchorhold which they will rot’ [‘euche dei þe eorðe up of hare put þet ha schulen rotien in’],71 takes on a new and urgent resonance. As well as inscribing the floor of her cell with the outline of her own grave, she also marks the land – the soil – with her presence, and eventually that same land will ingest and assimilate her body after her death, the one transmuting physically into the other.72 Ultimately, therefore, both Emma’s body and its extraordinary experiences are able to be read as text which leaves its mark on, and is incorporated into the very borderland which she inhabits. No surprise, then, that during the mystical mass which ensues and in which Emma takes full part, the church and its environs are bathed in celestial light, as if it were heaven itself; and such melodious singing emanates from the church that it fails to be contained by the stone walls, bursting forth from the confines of the building, floating away in a type of textual free-fall along the borderlands to Shrewsbury and imbuing the region with the sanctity of the hereafter as it does so: the others [in the church] sang with such marvellous sweetness and thrilling melody, that many blameless persons in a distant part of the town [i.e. Shrewsbury] wondered at the harmony, not knowing whence it came. [caeteri tam mirabilis melodia et claro carmine cecinerunt, quod plures innocentes remote in villa existentes harmoniam admirati sunt, sed unde procedere nescierunt.]73

The word which is of particular interest here is ‘blameless’ [‘innocentes’]. Its use to signify those people ‘touched’ by the sacred contagion of Emma’s visionary experience nevertheless automatically summons up its binary opposite, ‘blameful’, which plays with the positively charged term in an endless ‘game’ of deferral (again, to coin another Derridean concept). Whilst only the ‘blameless’ persons living on the borderlands between Stapleton and the far reaches of Shrewsbury can hear this celestial music, they are necessarily permanently haunted by the presumably blameful hordes excluded from this category, those who would assault and ingest the local people even on Palm Sunday, those who, in the vituperative words of John of Salisbury, constitute a race which ‘despises the Word of Life’ [‘aspernatur verbum vitae’]74 (as preached, of course, by Emma’s celestial ‘prior’, John the Baptist).75 As a woman, Emma is potentially – and ontologically – closer to the blameful than the blameless, something which the author is at pains to counter in this episode. As a means of dispelling the arguments of those ‘ignorant persons who might cavil at the Ancrene Wisse, 2.1034–5, p. 46. Although frequently read as ideological and, perhaps, metaphorical, this instruction nevertheless seems to reflect social practice in some instances. For example, the gravestone of Annora de Braose still occupies the site of her cell in Iffley church, near Oxford. In other places, such as the cell overhanging the cliff on the south wall of St John’s churchyard in Chester, the remains of two skeletons were found upon excavation. See ‘Religious Houses: Introduction’, A History of the County of Chester, vol. III (1980), pp. 1124–7, n. 18. Online at: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report. aspx?compid=39973. 73 Chronicon, p. 184 (Lanercost, p. 153). 74 John of Salisbury, Letters, ed. W. J. Mellor and H. E. Butler (London, Edinburgh, Paris Melbourne, Toronto and New York, 1955), Letter 87, pp. 135–6. 75 According to John 1: 23, John the Baptist’s response to questions put to him by the Pharisees about whether or not he was the Christ, was ‘I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness’. 71

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Medieval Anchoritisms divine revelations accorded to this humble woman’ [‘aliqui coelestium inexperti divinis revelationibus huic parvulae factis derogarent’],76 he therefore has Saint John tell Emma (and, of course, the text’s wider audience) that such people should ‘Inquire of those who sneer at divine benefactions whether the Evil Spirit can perform such sacred mysteries’ [‘perquire ab his, qui detrahunt divinis beneficiis, utrum malignus spiritus tam sacra mysteria perficere possit’].77 Thus, in contrast with those unstable bodies which have preceded her in the text and are implicated within this episode, this narrative now presents us with a woman whose body becomes synecdoche for a divinely endorsed stability and sanctity, the site of an ideological mobilization which services political and largely utopian ends. As such, she occupies an island of sealed corporeality, is bathed in light and is productive of harmony – all evidence of a veritable ‘geography of the mind’ which throws into relief everything to which she stands opposed within the everencroaching turbulence of the Marcher landscape and its warring peoples. THE POLITICAL ANCHORITES OF GERALD OF WALES Another borderlands writer to make strategic use of the figure of the anchorite in his writing is the frequently hybrid and always identity-confused Gerald of Wales, who, more than a century earlier than the Lanercost chronicler, had, in his Itinerarium Kambriae [‘Journey through Wales’] and Descriptio Kambriae [‘Description of Wales’] in particular, articulated the difficulties of occupying an unstable grey-zone of multiple identities.78 Gerald himself had been born in the castle at Manorbier in modern-day Pembrokeshire and, like so many powerful Marcher figures, was of mixed Welsh and Anglo-Norman parentage. Gerald’s maternal grandfather had been a leader in the early attempts to conquer Wales and, in keeping with the colonial strategy of subduing through marriage,79 had subsequently married Nest, the princess of Deheubarth. The ongoing conflict between the Anglo-Normans and the Welsh, alluded to earlier, had resulted in Wales and its peoples becoming increasingly bestialized in popular imagination, as we have seen, and it was into this highly volatile context that Gerald was born in the mid-twelfth century. In this way, he spanned the plastic space between the English and the Welsh, was caught between both and belonged fully to neither, as his writing fully attests. Gerald seems to have been destined from childhood for a career within the Church and in 1175 had been appointed archdeacon of Brecon by the bishop of St David’s, David FitzGerald, who was also Gerald’s uncle.80 In spite of benefiting in this way from the type of nepotistic practices which were common within Chronicon, p. 184 (Lanercost, p. 154). Chronicon, p. 184 (Lanercost, p. 154). 78 Geraldus Cambrensis, Itinerarium Kambriae and Descriptio Kambriae, in Opera, ed. James F. Dimock, vol. VI (London, 1868), pp. 1–227. All Latin quotations will be taken from this edition and cited by book, chapter and page. The English translations will be taken from The Journey through Wales and A Description of Wales, ed. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1968). For a helpful fulllength study of Gerald of Wales see Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales (Oxford, 1982). 79 Davies, Lordship and Society, pp. 350–1. 80 Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, p. 31–2. 76

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Mapping the Anchorhold the Welsh Church, Gerald went on to become a vociferous and unpopular clerical reformer, activities which, as Bartlett points out, were also imbued with secular and political edge as well as religious zeal.81 Later, however, Gerald was to clash violently with the attempts of the English Church to regulate Welsh religious practices and to bring the see of St David’s firmly under the control of Canterbury. In 1199, for example, having accepted nomination for the St David’s episcopacy, Gerald was cast by himself and others as champion of the Welsh Church, of which he had previously been so critical, and resister of English ecclesiastic imperialism in Wales, an apparent contradiction summed up shrewdly by Bartlett’s claim: ‘Gerald’s life and writing resound with the clash between principle and expediency.’82 The result was that Gerald’s candidacy for St David’s was rejected, instigating not only fury on his part – this had been, after all, a last-ditch attempt at ‘high’ office – but also in his proffering a new respect for the Welsh struggle for independence in his writing, and for the Welsh language as a symbol of that struggle.83 Clearly, then, Gerald was caught up within the interstices between nationalistic and alienating discourses for his entire life, creating a tension in his writing which always manifests itself more or less overtly. This is particularly true of his Itinerarium Kambriae, which recounts his kaleidoscopic travels undertaken in 1188 with Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury through the denigrated Welsh lands, a text which proved to be highly popular, even extending to a third edition in 1214.84 This text, and the Descriptio Kambriae with which it is closely associated, clearly reflect Gerald’s pro-English period, and both veer between angry criticism of the ‘barbaric’ customs the Welsh refuse to relinquish and an underlying admiration and sympathy for them. Thus, rather than constituting a realistic account of a linear peregrination, the Itinerarium in particular tends – to quote the words of Cohen – ‘to progress via associative logic, wandering the byways of a fertile mind rather than offering a pilgrimage to some secure destination’.85 As a result, individual episodes tend to spark off memories of earlier encounters, attitudes and reactions or written accounts, and also produce a range of hear-say representations replete with multivalent images which are, in every sense, associative. This is particularly true of Gerald’s use of the figure of the anchorite, who forms a central part of this rich and hybrid text’s ‘associative logic’, and, although appearing very seldom, is never far away from the centre of Gerald’s overarching and unstable politico-religious agenda. Moreover, Gerald’s anchorites are almost always male, and frequently prophetic, harnessed by him as authoritative figures within the hierarchy of the Welsh Church and employed by him textually to critique his opponents.86 This has the effect of offering special significance to anchoritic spirituality when Gerald does invoke the figure, something he makes overtly clear Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, p. 36. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, p. 44. For a detailed account of this particular period in Gerald’s life, see Michael Richter, Giraldus Cambrensis: The Growth of the Welsh Nation (Aberystwyth, 1976). 83 Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, p. 46 and p. 49. 84 Cohen, Hybridity, p. 96. Bartlett points out the extensive number of extant manuscripts and editions of the text, suggesting widespread readership and popularity of this text in the high Middle Ages. Gerald of Wales, p. 179. 85 Cohen, Hybridity, p. 96. 86 The lack of female anchorites in Wales has been noted on p. 153, for an exposition of which see my ‘Anchorites of Wales’, in Anchoritic Traditions, ed. McAvoy. 81

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Medieval Anchoritisms in the closing paragraphs of the Descriptio. In the final chapter of this work, where Gerald offers the strongest possible defence and apologia for the Welsh people (whilst having been expressly critical of them elsewhere in the text), he details their exceptional Christian piety and exemplary spirituality, using the figure of the religious recluse as paradigm: ‘Nowhere can you see hermits and anchorites more abstinent and more spiritually committed than in Wales. The Welsh go to extremes in all matters’ [‘Heremitas et anachoritas abstinentiae majoris, magisque spiritualis, alibi non videas. Gens etenim haec in omni vehemens est intentione’].87 For Gerald, the Welsh religious recluse, whether anchorite or hermit, embodies the best that the Christian religion and an ideologically homogenized Welsh ‘nation’ has to offer in terms of the potential for spiritual harmony and unity – in the same way as the Chronicle of Lanercost and Ancrene Wisse present female anchoritic spirituality as the epitome of English religiosity. Anchoritism, it would seem, is certainly ripe for political exploitation on both sides of the divide and the very liminality of its adherents, who occupy a space positioned between two states of being, that is to say life and death, clearly speaks cogently to a writer who is also destined to fall into the cracks between a range of competing, seemingly monolithic identities. With men as the main actors within Gerald’s political arena, however, any authority ascribed to Gerald’s anchorites is clearly more connected to their maleness and their elite position within an all-male religious hierarchy than their anchoritism per se. Allowed an active and strident ‘voice’ in the way women were not, especially within the Welsh religious system, the male anchorite could speak of his observations with his tongue whereas the female anchorite was frequently left to speak more covertly with her body, as we have seen. And, as also mentioned, whereas English anchoritism had by this time begun to move towards being primarily a female and lay phenomenon, in Wales it continued to be rooted in a Celtic monasticism and ecclesiastical structure which rested uneasily alongside that of its English counterpart.88 The use to which Gerald puts the figure of the anchorite in his Itinerarium first becomes evident in an account which draws heavily on Bede, in which he describes an encounter between Augustine as archbishop of Canterbury and seven Welsh bishops summoned from Wales by the archbishop for a meeting on what is now the border of Gloucestershire and Monmouthshire.89 Displaying what Gerald suggests is his ‘typical Roman arrogance’ [‘Romano fastu’],90 Augustine deeply insults all seven bishops at a throw by omitting to stand up to greet them upon their arrival, rendering this borderland location again a space of contested cultural and religious power dynamics. By way of response, the insulted bishops immediately turn on their heels, making a dignified retreat to Wales in contempt of Augustine’s pride [‘superbiae notantes’].91 It is at this point that Gerald, again drawing on Bede’s account, retrospectively recounts how, en route to their meeting with Augustine, the bishops had consulted an Gerald, Descriptio, I.xviii, p. 204 (Description, p. 254). On the relationship between Celtic and Roman Christianity in the Middle Ages, see, for example, Oliver Davies, Celtic Christianity in Early Medieval Wales (Cardiff, 1996). 89 This is an event first recorded by Bede in his Historia Ecclesiastica, for which see Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, II.2, pp. 136/7–138/9. 90 Gerald, Itinerarium, II.i, p. 105 (Journey, p. 164). 91 Gerald, Itinerarium, II.i, p. 105 (Journey, p. 164). 87

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Mapping the Anchorhold esteemed Welsh anchorite, a piece of information ‘after the fact’, which further condemns Augustine for his failure to recognize the sanctity of the Welsh Church and its representatives, although, unlike Bede, Gerald does not elaborate on what the particular advice proffered by the anchorite may have been.92 As a result of the anchorite’s prophetic wisdom, however, Gerald tells us that ‘on their way home they announced to everyone they met that they would never acknowledge Augustine as their archbishop’ [‘nec ipsum pro archiepiscopo se habituros publice proclamabant’].93 Thus, for Gerald, a definitively ‘Welsh’ form of Christianity and resistance to English governance was built upon a sanctity underpinned by the clear vision of the solitary life, and on several occasions during his Itinerarium he draws upon eremitic founding narratives to reinforce the teleological precepts of his point. Llanthony Abbey, for example, in another borderland location between present-day Monmouthshire and Herefordshire (and a place with which Gerald appears to have had close affinities), is described by him as having been ‘originally founded by two hermits, in honour of the eremitical way of life, in solitude and far removed from the bustle of everyday existence and built on the bank of the Honddu’ [‘a duobus eremitis in honorem eremitae primo fundatus, ab omni populari strepitu in solitudine quadam longe remotes, super fluvium Hotheri per vallis ima labentis situs’].94 For Gerald, a male, monastic reclusion, whether hermitic or anchoritic, clearly represents a utopian synecdoche for Welsh socio-religious politics and culture. Elsewhere in his writing Gerald makes use of the prescient and highly verbal anchorite in a similarly political – and self-interested – way, particularly when recounting his struggles over the St David’s episcopacy some years later. For example, in his Libri de Invectionibus he tells of how an esteemed inclusus of Newgale in Pembrokeshire once summoned him to his anchorhold by letter.95 Speaking to Gerald via the anchorhold window [‘per fenestrum suum’], the anchorite proceeded to alert him to the various temporal punishments which he foresaw would be meted out shortly to various English-appointed canons of St David’s cathedral (who, he makes clear, are both his enemies and Gerald’s).96 Gerald also recounts the visionary predictions of another emphatically male anchorite [‘vir bonus anachorita’], this time from Locheis.97 This anchorite had apparently received a vision of Gerald in the form of an inert body lying in a dark prison, obviously pointing towards the type of institutional attempts to silence Bede recounts how the anchorite suggested that they should follow Augustine ‘if he is a man of God’ [‘Si homo Dei est’], something which would be evident if ‘if he rises on your approach’ [‘si uobis adpropinquantibus adsurrexerit’] (Historia Ecclesiastica, ed. and trans. Colgrave and Mynors, II.2, p. 138/9. 93 Gerald, Itinerarium, II. i, p. 105 (Journey p. 164). 94 Gerald, Itinerarium, I, iii, p. 37 (Journey, p. 97). See also Journey, p. 97, n.102. On the latemedieval history of Llanthony Abbey, see George Roberts, ‘Some Account of Llanthony Priory, Monmouthshire’, Archaeologia Cambrensis 3 (1846), pp. 201–45; and E. W, Lovegrove, ‘Llanthony Priory’, Archaeologia Cambrensis 97 (1938), pp. 213–29. Tradition would have it that one of these hermit founders was none other than the powerful Marcher lord, William de Lacy, who, influenced by the Celtic spirituality with which the place was imbued, decided to abandon the military life and live a life of reclusion in the same location as Saint David himself was reputed to have done. 95 Gerald of Wales, Libri de Invectionibus, in Opera, pp. 125–96 (here V. xxiii, p. 178). The translations are my own. 96 Gerald, Libri de Invectionibus, V.xxiii, p. 178. 97 Gerald, Libri de Invectionibus, V.xx, pp. 175–6. 92

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Medieval Anchoritisms Gerald about which he complains on many other occasions. At the behest of this anchorite, however, Gerald is restored to life and released from the prison, to everybody’s great joy.98 Again, it is not difficult here to see writ large the unabashedly overt political purpose served by the figure of the male anchorite whom Gerald frequently employs in a ventriloquistic capacity to voice his own opinions and whose enlightenment he shares within the anchorhold–prison–tomb–rebirth association of the vision in this example. As the most sacred of religious personages and, in Wales, elite members of a non-English male religious hierarchy, Gerald’s anchorites not only outstrip all those corrupt (and, by implication anti-Gerald!) ecclesiastics whose aim is to keep him from the highest office (that is the St David’s episcopacy) but also pull rank as ecclesiastical ciphers for the public utterance of the pro-Gerald word of God. GERALD OF WALES’S CHESTER It would seem, therefore, that Welsh anchorites too could be written into occupying the ideological, spiritual, moral and political ‘high ground’, something which again Gerald is aware of at the end of his Itinerarium. Here, Gerald and his travelling companion, Archbishop Baldwin, make a foray across the border into England, arriving in the Marcher town of Chester on the day of Absolution, 14 April 1188.99 Like the Marcher region more extensively – and, indeed, Gerald’s own mixed identities – medieval Chester was a place which, in Cohen’s estimation, ‘incarnates the fluctuating Welsh borderlands’ because of its being built, at least according to Gerald’s account, upon a river whose banks and fords are perennially unstable [‘fluvio transcurso’],100 sometimes moving towards Wales, sometimes towards England (and, incidentally, providing a prognostication of who was to win the next skirmish between the Welsh and the English in the process).101 This type of geographic instability was also reflected in Cheshire politics, something confirmed by James Alexander, who, writing of medieval Cheshire, claims: ‘Whatever one calls Cheshire, it was not a normal English county’, adding that ‘kings of England did not apparently think it politic to interfere in Cheshire affairs’. Indeed, Chester, as its primary settlement, like the Marches proper, was a place where ‘a quasiindependence was claimed’.102 As a liminal, hybrid, out-on-a-limb space, therefore, Chester inevitably invites Gerald to populate it with strange and marvellous hybrid bodies which serve further to destabilize any sense of this being a solidly ‘English’ settlement – or solid entity at all.103 A bitch in the town, for example, who has recently mated with a monkey, gives birth to a litter of monkey-like puppies whose ambiguous bodies Gerald, Libri de Invectionibus, V.xx, p. 175. Gerald, Itinerarium, II. xi, p. 139 (Journey, p. 198). 100 Gerald, Itinerarium, II. xi, p. 139 (Journey, p. 198). For a discussion of this, see Cohen, Hybridity, p. 103. 101 According to Gerald, the outcome of the next skirmish could be ascertained according to which side the river was currently veering towards, the Welsh or the English. Itinerarium, II.xi, p. 139 (Journey, p. 198). 102 James A. Alexander, Ranulf of Chester: A Relic of the Conquest (Athens, GA, 1983), p. 61. 103 On Gerald’s use of marvels and miracles in his writing, see Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, pp. 88–103. 98

99

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Mapping the Anchorhold are then fatally misread by the warden of the soldiers’ garrison, who slaughters them all with a stick. Labelled by Gerald as a ‘country bumpkin’ [‘rusticus’] the man is punished wholeheartedly by his master for this act of violent misreading.104 Gerald is equally sympathetic to the town’s otherness in recording the existence of a congenitally handless woman, by all accounts an expert seamstress whose legs and feet have taken on the tasks normally allocated to the hands.105 Far from being negatively represented, however, she constitutes a source of wonder and, like the monkey-puppies, constitutes a ‘sign’ intrinsic to the sense of marvellous instability which Chester as Marcher earldom embodies. As such, these miscegenations and distorted bodies form the crux of a narrative strategy which conflates them with the ambiguous town itself in order to construct what Rogoff terms ‘sites of geographical ambivalence and [. . .] hidden longings [which] provide a possibility for critically thinking through the official narratives of the state and of its production of vehement discourses of cultural belonging’.106 ‘Other’ these border inhabitants may be, but, as Gerald is keen to recount, they are quickly won over in large numbers ‘to the Cross’ [‘crucesignatis’] by the stabilizing force of Archbishop Baldwin’s crusading call.107 Gerald of Wales’s Chester, therefore, seems to have long been a location inciting the gestation of myth and legend. Whilst, in reality, it had been a frontier town since Roman times and in Gerald’s day was a strategic base for Anglo-Norman colonial activities in both Wales and Ireland,108 on the other hand, it also proved a fly-trap for a multitude of peoples and ethnicities and thus the type of nonconformity reified by Gerald in his account (and, no doubt, something with which he strongly identified). As a result, with its unstable geographical location allied to its unpredictable inhabitants, caught as they all were within the interstices between competing cultures and political ambitions, Chester called out for an injection of continuity and stability from Gerald’s somewhat partisan pen – and, once again, it was the ideologically authoritative figure of the male anchorite to whom he turned to provide it. But not just any old anchorite: in a story which has persisted since his supposed death on the battlefield of Hastings in 1066, King Harold of England himself was reputedly one of the first recorded anchorites in the town.109 Far from having been slain by William’s troops at the Battle of Hastings, the last of the ‘English’ kings, though blinded in one eye, had escaped the carnage and fled to Chester, where he ended his days as an anchorite in the cemetery of the Collegiate Church of St John the Baptist.110 Indeed, a small cell still remains on the site, which was said to have housed a one-eyed anchorite during the late eleventh century, and his uncorrupt body was reportedly discovered by monks from St Werburgh’s abbey in 1332.111 Another claim by Gerald which also refused 106 107 108 109 110 111 104 105

Gerald, Itinerarium, II.xi, p. 141 (Journey, pp. 199–200). Gerald, Itinerarium, II.xii, p. 142 (Journey, p. 200). Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 147. Gerald, Itinerarium, II.xii, p. 142 (Journey, p. 200). Dobson also makes this point in Origins, p. 136. Gerald, Itinerarium II.xi, p.140 (Journey, pp. 198–9). Gerald, Itinerarium, II.xi, p. 140 (Journey, p. 199). For more information on the history of St Werburgh’s abbey, later the cathedral, see Richard Vernon Higgins Burne, The Monks of Chester: The History of St Werburgh’s Abbey (London, 1962). A number of sources support the proliferation of this legend, which is not restricted to Gerald’s text. For

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Medieval Anchoritisms to die is that the Holy Roman emperor, Henry V, married to Mathilda, the mother of England’s Henry II, abandoned his wife in order to live out his life as a recluse named Godescall at Chester.112 These two monarchs, of course, were closely bound up in the political crises of conquest and continuity which beset the period and their supposed anchoritic vocation at Chester served discursively not just to stabilize and sacralize one of the most unstable and vulnerable of border towns, but also to offer an anchor for a perceived English nationhood and help construct it as an ontological category. Again, these particular forms of anchoritism were not just male, traditional and authoritative, but were also imbued with the mystique of what would come to be known as the divine right of kings. In this context, therefore, the assessment of Henri Lefebvre of the role of the religious recluse holds true: both anchorite and anchorhold served in part to represent the validity of an old order as the new order took hold.113 LUCIAN OF CHESTER AND THE ANCHORITIC BODY Chester, as a particularly elusive ‘interspace’,114 between England, Wales and Ireland, is identified as such by yet another borderlands writer and contemporary of Gerald of Wales: a monk known to us only as Lucian, of St Werburgh’s monastery in Chester. The text in question is his De Laude Cestrie, a lively encomium dedicated to the town and its population and written at some stage in the 1190s.115 In this



112

115 113

114

example, the Vita Haroldi, quondam Anglorum Regis in BL, MS Harley 3776, fols 1–25, tells of how the barely alive body of Harold was discovered by some women on the field of battle, from where he was removed to Winchester and attended upon for two years. Thereafter, following a pilgrimage to Palestine, he travelled under the name of Christian to Shropshire, hiding his scarred face with a cowl and taking up residence in an anchoritic cell at Ceswrddin. Hounded out of it by the warmongering Welsh, he moved on to Chester, where he took up occupancy of the anchoritic cell in the cemetery of St John’s church, just outside the wall of the town, following the death of the previous anchorite there. The author of the vita dismisses William of Malmesbury’s contradictory account, stating that he obtained his information directly from an anchorite named Sebricht, who had been Harold’s servant at Chester. Similar verification was also received from the anchorite who took over Harold’s cell in Chester after his death, an account which makes up two supplementary chapters within the text. Although the author of this narrative has not been traced, internal evidence suggests that it was written about 150 years after the Battle of Hastings. Gerald, Itinerarium, II.xi, pp. 139–40 (Journey, p. 198). In the case of Henry V’s link to Chester, Ormerod records that the altar tomb in the south aisle of Chester cathedral choir is said to be that of Henry V, something also recorded in the cathedral annals for 1110, which state: ‘Henricus rex filius Willielmi Bastardi filiam suam Udescalco imperatori Alemanie dedit qui nunc Cestrie jacet’ [‘King Henry, son of William the bastard, gave his daughter in marriage to Udescalcus, emperor of Germany, who now lies buried in Chester’]. Udescalcus is obviously a form of the name Godescall. See G. Ormerod, History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, 2nd edn, ed. T. Helsby (London, 1819), vol. I, p. 295 and p. 193; and Annales Cestriensis, ed. and trans. Richard Copley Christie for the Record Society (London, 1819), pp. 16/18 (facing translation pp. 17/19). Here Christie notes that the legend appears to have originated with Gerald. There is also further information on these legends on the Chester Wiki website: http://www.chesterwiki.com/Hermitage. Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 256. I borrow this term from Cohen, Hybridity, p. 103. All references to Lucian’s De Laude Cestrie will be taken from Liber Luciani de Laude Cestrie, transcr. and ed. M. V. Taylor, The Record Society 64 (London, 1912) and cited by folio and page reference. The English translations are based on those of Mark Faulkner (www.medievalchester.ac.uk) with the occasional modification. Since Lucian’s Latin is notoriously convoluted and obscure, it has been necessary to combine translation with paraphrase in order to render the sense of the original, if not

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Mapping the Anchorhold text, however, Lucian makes clear those same widely held attitudes towards the Welsh which we saw articulated in the writing of John of Salisbury. He laments, for example, that his beloved Chester ‘is bordered upon by spiteful enemies’ [‘collimitetur lividis hostibus’],116 who, because of their inherently bellicose nature, have been left only ‘a narrow corner of land’ [‘angularem angustiam’] on which to live.117 Elsewhere, however, like Gerald, Lucian destabilizes his own discourse on the subject, recognizing of his fellow Cestrians,‘having a common border with the Welsh on one side and, through the long admixture of customs, [they are] similar to a great degree’ [‘Britonibus ex uno latere confines, et per longam transfusionem morum, maxima parte consimiles’].118 Elsewhere, he depicts the cordial trade-links between North Wales and Chester upon which the town is, in part, dependent, again pointing towards a fissure between those official narratives of otherness and separation between the English and the Welsh with which he has been engaging and the type of discrete and separate regional coherence which his text attempts to promote overall. As he later asserts, Chester can best be defined as ‘harbour of the Irish, neighbour of the Welsh [and] afforded the provisions of the English’ [‘Hibernis receptoria, Britannis vicina, Anglorum sumministratur annonam’].119 In effect, as mentioned above, the town was a quasi-autonomous space full of free citizens, a place which, as Lucian explains quadam a ceteris Anglis privilegii distinctione sit libera, et per indulgentias regum atque excellentias comitum magis in cetu populi gladium principis quam coronam regni consuevit attendere.120 [by a certain distinction of privilege [. . .] is freed from certain English customs, and through the indulgence of kings and the excellencies of its earls the popular assembly is more accustomed to attend the sword of the earl rather than the crown of the king.]

If, as Lefebvre has also asserted, space is created by means of those social practices which are enacted within it, as well as by the meanings and implications attached to those practices,121 then Chester, as I have suggested, was clearly a space spinning away from the rest of England because of its marginal geographic location and the relative emancipation from feudal control which it had begun to enjoy. Again like Gerald, Lucian was quite evidently aware of this movement towards independence and the celebration of difference and frequently depicts Chester in terms of a hybrid, feminine otherness which is free-floating and ethereal. For Lucian, however, it is also an ambiguous maternal body feeding her citizens and neighbours with her teats [‘ubera’].122 Chester is a woman who is both ‘Mother and Mistress’ [‘Mater et Domina’]123 and whose four gates [‘portas quattuor’]

118 119 120 121 116 117



122 123

the literal meaning, in modern English. The dating of the manuscript is discussed by Taylor in his introduction, pp. 8–10. Fol. 9r, p. 42. Fol. 12v, p. 45. Fol. 114r, p. 65. Fol. 114r, p. 65. Fol. 114r, p. 65. For Lefebvre, the city, for example, is ‘a space which is fashioned, shaped and invested by social activities during a finite historical period’. Lefebvre, Production of Space, p. 73. Fol. 114r, p. 66. Fol. 105v, p. 62.

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Medieval Anchoritisms correspond to the four winds [‘ventis quattuor’].124 Although such allusions constitute generically recognizable literary topoi, nevertheless Lucian’s treatment of them is offered weight, momentum and singularity by the fact that the town is built upon an unstable tidal river where nothing ever remains as it first appears: ‘Because someone frivolous or uncouth, not knowing the nature of the sea, might perhaps disdain to believe it, if worldly experience has not demonstrated it, let the eye confirm it’ [‘Quod aliquis delicatus aut durus, nesciens naturam maris, credere fortasse contempneret, si non orbis astrueret, oculus comprobaret’]. 125 Lucian then proceeds to exploit the city’s inherent elusiveness to the full, configuring it, as does Gerald, in terms which are governed by powerfully feminine aesthetics: Habet preterea nostra Cestria ex Dei munere, ditantem atque decorantem amnem secus urbis muros pulchrum atque piscosum [. . .] Preterea reumate cotidiano non cessat eam revisere maris patentissima plenitudine, quam apertis et opertis latissimis harenarum campis, indesinenter grate vel ingrate aliquid mittere vel mutauare consuevit, et suo accessu vel recessu afferre quippiam vel auferre.126 [God has given our Chester an enriching and beautifying river which follows the line of the city walls and teams beautifully with fish [. . .] The daily tide does not cease to render a very generous bounty from the sea, which from both known and hidden ports grants or loans things both pleasant and unpleasant and by its ebb and flow brings things forth and takes them away.]

For Lucian, the river’s softly undulating curves draw the city towards it and its boundaries meld themselves to its fecund, unstable and shifting contours, adding to the sense of feminine unfixedness and instability. Like the mother-woman, too, the river is presented as the harbinger of both life and death, ‘one moment water, the next dry land’ [‘nunc existens aqua, nunc arida’],127 and, for those fishermen who once greedily attempted to overdrain her to appropriate her maternal productivity, ‘when they wanted to drain it further, they were engulfed in waves’ [‘dum fretum exhaurire volunt, fluctibus absorti sunt’].128 Again in the context of Rogoff ’s argument regarding female bodies as sites of geographical ambivalence which I quoted above,129 in Lucian’s text a female-bodied river gives undulating form to an ethereally feminized Chester in order to work through, in part, the official narrative of its being a somewhat anomalous frontier town situated on the liminal threshold of three unsettled ‘nations’ in a time of turbulent warfare. Such a claim is further supported by the fact that Lucian, as we might expect within a text of this type, draws copiously upon the patron saint of his own monastery, Saint Werburgh, reshaping the ontology of her body to render it synonymous with Chester itself, this time as its primary figure of protection. For Lucian, she may be a member of the ‘weak sex’ (‘infirmo sexu’), but she is also

126 127 128 129 124 125

Fol. 12v, p. 45. Fol. 13r, p. 46. Fol. 12v, p. 46. Fol. 12v, p. 46. Fol. 12v, p. 46. Rogoff, Terrra Infirma, p. 147 as quoted on p. 106.

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Mapping the Anchorhold firmissimam sanctitate, laudabiliter et letissime providit ex suo munere, que puellari virtute et preclara virginitate refulgens, civem tuendo, civitatem tenendo contra adversa omnia, suis sufficiat meritis incolas obumbrare. Nam regis filia et sponsa regis regionem secundum nomen suum tuetur ab emulis, quia convirginalis Virginis Matris votis suis dulciter inclinat viscera Salvatoris. Et ideo facile tuetur urbem quia sponsum habit orbis auctorem. Cui nihil arduum vel difficile, salvam et incolumem gloriosis precibus asservare, et supplicem familiam gregis sui et humilem fidem simplicis populi. Quod si pravitas nostra provocat ulcionem ad prima flagella penitentibus nobis, sanctitas illius avertet sentenciam iudicis.130 [most firm in her sanctity, and laudibly and most joyfully keeps watch out of her kindness, who, shining with girlish virtue and outstanding in her virginity, by protecting the citizen, and preserving the city against all troubles, is sufficent by her merits to defend the inhabitants against harm. For the daughter of a king and the bride of a king protects the region from rivals according to her name, because the fellow virgin of the Virgin Mother sweetly bends his Saviour’s flesh to her intercessions. And therefore she easily protects the city because she has as a husband the creator of the world. For her to protect this city, the suppliant household of her flock and the honest faith of the ordinary people safe and unharmed with glorious prayers is not at all arduous or difficult. For, if our depravity provokes retribution, her sanctity averts the judge’s sentence before the first lashes against our sins.]

Like Lucian’s beloved city, Werburgh’s body is a site of ambivalence: it is weak, vulnerable and unstable in its femininity but yet it is in possession of a sacred seal which perpetually reinforces its intactness and thus serves to stabilize it. Such sealed stability is able then to be superimposed upon the town itself to render it similarly inviolable. Countering and supplanting the discourses of militarism, aggression and incursion which elsewhere punctuate Lucian’s text, and thus acting as antidote to the ‘depravity’ of humanity, Werburgh’s body, like that of Emma of Stapleton examined earlier in this chapter, functions as a representational strategy in the text which mobilizes both her gender and sexual status to establish what Rogoff has termed ‘a new visual language anchored at the level of the body – for the dominant ideology’.131 Whilst this ‘dominant ideology’ in Lucian’s text, as in Gerald’s, is essentially a male, monastic one, nevertheless within his ‘visual language’, Werburgh’s body takes centre stage, embracing the town with hands and feet which reach out across it to its ‘guardian churches’: ‘Nam siquis stans in fori medio, uultum uertat ad ortum solis, secundum ecclesiarum positiones, inueniet Iohannem Domini precursorem ab oriente, Petrum apostolum ab occidente, Werburgam uirginem ab aquilone, archangelum Michaelem a meridie’ [‘For anyone standing in the middle of the marketplace may turn his face to the east and examine the position of the churches, noting John, precursor to the Lord, to the east, Peter the apostle to the west, Werbugh the virgin to the north, and Michael the archangel to the south’].132 As such, she performs the same ideological work as those female anchorites of the Marcher lands examined earlier and undergoes the same startling transformation as does the protagonist of that most lyrical of Fol. 9r, p. 42. Rogoff, Terra Infirma, p. 144. 132 Fol. 13r, pp. 46–7. 130 131

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Medieval Anchoritisms anchoritic texts closely associated with Ancrene Wisse, the poem known as ‘Þe wohunge of ure Lauerd’ [‘The Wooing of Our Lord’], also a text of the Welsh Marches, the only copy of which appears alongside a copy of Ancrene Wisse in BL, MS Cotton Titus D.xviii, probably a south Cheshire manuscript dating from the 1340s.133 At the culmination of this poem, the female anchorite cries out to Christ, uniting with him synecdochally as crucified body and merging with own her cell as animated crucifix, stretching out to all four walls in what can only be termed a redeemed and redeeming abjection:134 Mi bodi henge with thi bodi neiled o rode, spered querfaste with inne fowr wahes. And henge I wile with the and neauer mare of mi rode cume tilt h[at] I deie [. . .] A Iesu, swa swet hit is with the to henge, forhwen th[at] iseo o the th[at] henges me biside, the muchele swetnesse of the reaues me fele of pine. [My body hangs with your body nailed to the cross, enclosed on all sides within four walls, and I will hang with you and never again come off my cross until I die [. . .] Oh Jesus, it is so sweet to hang with you, for when I see you hanging beside me, your great sweetness totally frees me from pain.]135

In Lucian’s text, there is a similar conflation of woman, enclosure, cross and salvation: Werburgh’s body as symbol of the city is mapped onto the cruciform geography of its streets, anchoring it not only to the land but also to God himself: Habet etiam plateas duas equilineas et excellentes in modum benedicte crucis, per transversum sibi obvias et se transeuntes, que deinceps fiant quattuor ex duabus, capita sua consummantes in quattuor portis, mistice ostendens atque magnifice, magni Regis inhabitantem graciam se habere.136 [Chester also has two excellent, equally straight streets in the manner of the blessed cross, by means of their intersection exposed to and crossing each other, which thereafter become four from two, their ends finishing at the four gates, secretly and marvellously showing themselves to have the inherent grace of the great King.]

Lucian’s poetics, then, are indisputably anchoritic in tenor: combining the feminizing topoi of the generic encomium with the tenets of traditional virgin martyr hagiography, the writer is also clearly drawing upon the emerging feminine The term ‘Wooing Group’ was first coined by W. Meredith Thompson as a means of identifying the links between four lyrical meditative poems on Christ and the Virgin Mary, all of which are closely connected with Ancrene Wisse and its associated texts: On Ureisun of ure Louerde; On Lofsong of Ure Lefdi; On Lofsong of ure Louerde; Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd. For an account of provenance and manuscript traditions, again see Millett, Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, especially p. 39. Here Millett points out the dearth of scholarly attention received by this group at the time of writing, although that has now been rectified in part by a most useful volume of essays devoted to the Wooing Group works: see Milieu and Context of the Wooing Group, ed. Chewning. For a bibliography of scholarship on the Titus manuscript, see Millett, Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, p. 53. 134 For a discussion of this term in the context of the Edenic narrative, see p. 94. Here in Þe wohunge, the female anchorite-speaker is offered an opportunity to merge with an abject Christ whose suffering is designed to redeem the sin of Eve. As such, her own abject ontology is able to participate in that same redemption. 135 Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd, lines 590–602. 136 Fol. 13r, pp. 46–7. 133

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Mapping the Anchorhold aesthetic of English anchoritism, a life-choice for women which was also making its presence heavily felt in Chester and Cheshire more widely during this same period. THE ANCHORITES OF CHESTER In view of Lucian’s often arresting deployment of feminine imagery and enclosed female bodies to configure – perhaps somewhat paradoxically – both instability and stability in his writing, it is of particular interest to learn that, soon after the production of his text, the records begin to reveal a wealth of other enclosed female bodies housed within the town and its immediate vicinity. The rapid appearance of a number of female anchorites during the course of the next hundred years would, I argue, not only serve a similar purpose within their local communities as anchoring and stabilizing mechanisms but also introduce the same type of purifying framework as employed by Lucian in his contrasting of Werburgh’s sanctity with the ‘depravity’ of ordinary humanity, as quoted above. It is also particularly significant in this context that, whereas all recorded male anchorites (who are also monastics) connected to Chester lived outside the city walls (at St John’s; on the Isle of Chester; on Hilbre Island), those anchorites recorded as having been attached to churches inside the city walls were all female. BL, Harley MS 2162, for example, records that Cecelia, maidservant of the female anchorite attached to St Chad’s church in the town, was involved in a quitclaim law-suit in the year 1300.137 Other female anchorites of the city seem to have been imbued with an important enough status to have attracted the attention of both noble and royal patronage during the late thirteenth century. In 1284, for example, Queen Eleanor gifted the sum of £6 3s ½d for building a home and a chapel for the female recluse of St Martin’s Church within the city walls, as well as contributing towards her maintenance: ‘for a certain chapel and residence [and] for the works of the recluse of Saint Martin’s church, Chester’ [‘ad quamdam capellam et quamdam domum ad opus Recluse ecclesie sancti Martini Cestrie’].138 This again is something certainly worthy of note since, as Warren’s findings clearly demonstrate, royal support for anchorites throughout the rest of England appeared to wane rapidly upon the accession to the throne of Eleanor’s husband, Edward I, in 1274.139 We must therefore conclude that those recluses recorded as having been supported by Edward and Queen Eleanor were more than ordinarily important to them. Edward was also earl of Chester and both he and the queen, who had also accrued considerable lands in Cheshire,140 seem to have had a particular loyalty to those anchorites who lay in the earldom or on the queen’s lands. BL Harley MS 2162, fol. 61v. The use of servants by anchorites is well documented and, in some cases, a servant would follow her mistress into the anchorhold after her death. See Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, especially p. 26. 138 Tribute to an Antiquary, ed. Frederick Emmison and Roy Stephens (London, 1976), p. 117. 139 Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 167. Here Warren attributes the lack of evidence for extensive support of anchorites by both Edward I and Edward II as ‘essential indifference’ which, however, did not amount to ‘total disregard’ (p. 168). 140 Eleanor had, for example, been granted ‘the manor of Macclesfield with its hundred and forest’ by Edward in 1270 (CPR 1266–72, p. 459). Macclesfield is recorded as housing a female anchorite in 1301 in The Cheshire Sheaf, series 3, vol. 43, p. 12. 137

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Medieval Anchoritisms Of particular interest in this context is that in 1280 Edward is recorded as having bestowed 2 marks upon the recluse of St James’s church at Christleton, a small village just outside Chester itself,141 much of whose lands had been in the possession of the impoverished Chester nunnery since 1160, when one Mathilda de Roges had brought them with her upon taking the veil.142 According to Lucian, Christleton was known as the ‘Village of Christ’ because it lay directly to the east of Chester, lying between the roads to the Old Ford (Aldford) to the south and the sinister Valley of Demons (Hoole) to the north-east. In Lucian’s estimation, the road to Christleton was therefore both physically and allegorically the only road to be taken by the traveller who wished to remain safe from the dangers which lay on the roads to either side: intendat Cestrie habitator, exeunti portam orientalem, qualiter ei trinus viarum trames aperitur [. . .] Nam progressus paululum a civitate si directus incedit, statim a fronte venientem locus excipit, quem nominant Villam Christi.143 [Let the inhabitant of Chester notice how, exiting the east gate, a threefold branch of roads is revealed to him, and [. . .] having progressed a short distance from the city, if he continues directly, suddenly a place in front surprises the traveller, which they call the Village of Christ]

Attached umbilical-cord-like to the town of Chester, which, as mentioned, Lucian in the same breath has characterized as a feeding mother, Christleton and its church form part of a sacred female geography which can suprise and arrest the journeyer’s attention. This journeyer, after all, is not simply the physical traveller but the spiritual pilgrim too; and the presence of a documented female anchorite supported by the king himself in this Village of Christ less than ninety years after Lucian was writing would attest to the continued importance of the sacred female body to Chester, its supporters and associated communities. Thus, in 1283, three years after offering support to the Christleton anchorite, we find Edward I also offering simple protection for two years to Emma de Le, ‘recluse at Middlewich’ [‘inclusa de medio Wychio’], a village again directly to the east of Chester, this time by some twenty miles.144 Some years earlier, in 1274, he had similarly offered support to two others, one at Macclesfield145 and the other at Frodsham, a village ten miles from Chester.146 Edward’s gift of a penny a day to this latter anchorite, named Winmark, from 1274 until she died in 1278, suggests she was an anchorite of particular renown since her original sustenance had been established ‘for life’ many years earlier by the powerful Marcher lord, Ranulf III of Chester, before his death in 1232. At some stage in the intervening period, however, the payment had CCR 1279–88, p. 32. This almsgiving, as well as alms of 1 mark to the female recluse of Frodsham, is recorded at the very end of the ledger-book of Vale Royal Abbey, published as The LedgerBook of Vale Royal Abbey, ed. John Brownbill, The Record Society for the Publication of Original Documents relating to Lancashire and Cheshire 68 (London, 1914), p. 231. 142 Journal of the Chester Archaeological Society, New Series xiii, pp. 93–5 and pp. 97–8, cited in ‘House of Benedictine Nuns: The Priory of Chester’, Victoria County History, Cheshire, III, pp. 146–150, n. 22. 143 Fol. 112v, p. 63. 144 CPR 1281–92, p. 74. 145 CCR 1272–9, p. 209. 146 CCR 1272–9, p. 209. 141

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Mapping the Anchorhold fallen into arrears. Edward therefore ordered not only that the arrears be made up in full but that Winmark should be paid the said amount for the remainder of her life. The king clearly felt an enhanced sense of responsibility to maintain Winmark in the manner to which she had become accustomed during the reign of his father; indeed, for Winmark’s former patron, Ranulf III, the amount of 1d a day for life which he had originally pledged had been a hugely generous gift, one which matched royal rates for anchoritic support and which, in fact, constituted the most expensive single benefaction of his life.147 We can, then, only conclude that Winmark must also have been an especially significant figure for Ranulf, for Henry III, for Edward I and for the wider community. Interestingly, too, the very name Winmark, with its Anglo-Saxon echoes, connotes much of what I have been arguing in this chapter.148 As an idealized – and much loved – figure of purity and bodily containment, who was at the same time part of, and yet apart from the community, she no doubt served to reify the same type of elite spirituality which Lucian wished to present as so characteristic of the region. Like Werburgh too, the anchorite’s closing and sealing of her own female bodily borders helped to solidify and stabilize the shifting boundaries between pure and impure, pious and impious, same and other, and, in so doing, consolidate the position and identity of all who came into contact with her in an otherwise unpredictable physical and spiritual geography. RANULF III OF CHESTER AND THE ANCHORITIC LEGACY According to his biographer, James Alexander, ‘Ranulf of Chester was not generous with grants of land to the religious orders; neither was he a sacrificing donor of money grants’.149 However, as Susan Wood asserts in her study of the patrons of English monasteries, the patronage which he did extend was widespread and ‘a matter of affection, pride, and family tradition’.150 And it would seem that such an intense expression of family tradition towards anchorites, and female anchorites in particular, was carried over into future generations of Ranulf of Chester’s family and frequently the families – particularly the Marcher families – into which they married. Marriages between families in the Marches were often contracted young and were also frequently serial, widows and widowers tending to remarry quickly into other – or sometimes the same – Marcher families upon the death of their spouses, as I have already intimated. Thus the most powerful of the Marcher families – the de Lacys, the de Braoses, the Cliffords, for example – attempted to protect both wealth and power by consolidating their dynasties by intermarriage, although, as Max Lieberman points out, by the 1240s the male line in all of these families had all but disappeared, the legacy of which was clearly felt well into the fourteenth century.151 Alexander, Ranulf of Chester, p. 44. The Anglo-Saxon term wynmæg carries the meaning of ‘a beloved kinswoman’, although the name could also be derived from win (joy) and mearc (border or boundary). 149 Alexander, Ranulf of Chester, p. 42. 150 Susan Wood, English Monasteries and their Patrons in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 1955), pp. 159–60. 151 Max Lieberman, The Marches of Wales 1067–1300 (Cardiff, 2008), p. 107. See also Davies, Lordship 147

148

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Medieval Anchoritisms A similar pattern can be observed in the family of Ranulf III of Chester, whose marriages, first to Constance of Brittany in 1189 (dissolved in 1199) and then to Clemencia of Fougères (also in 1199), failed to produce any offspring.152 Ranulf himself was the uncle of Margaret de Quincy, whose mother was one of Ranulf ’s sisters, Hawise of Chester, who had married into the powerful de Quincy family.153 Margaret, the only child of that union, would eventually join another powerful Marcher family, marrying Lord John de Lacy in 1221. The daughter of that union, Mathilda (or Maud as she was better known), also retained her Marcher affiliations by marrying Richard de Clare in 1238, and it is this Mathilda de Clare, great niece of Ranulf III, who is recorded as having been the owner of the Cotton MS, Cleopatra C.vi manuscript of Ancrene Wisse, which was bequeathed by her to the nunnery of Augustinian canonesses at Canonsleigh in Devon at some stage between 1284 and 1289.154 Dobson considered this to be a manuscript with an input by the Ancrene Wisse author himself and, as such, a precursor to the Corpus revision which first makes mention of the religious communities of Shrewsbury and Chester with which I began this chapter.155 Indeed, Hope Emily Allen also traced the ownership of the French version of the text (extant in Cotton Vitellius F.vii) to a direct descendant of Mathilda de Clare, again suggesting the role played by these Marcher families not only in supporting female anchoritism but also in the disseminating and preserving of its most valued writings.156 Another of Mathilda de Clare’s great-aunts, Alice of Chester (another sister of Ranulf III), had married into the de Braose family via William de Ferrers, son of Sybil de Braose. This, of course, was the indomitable Marcher family that also produced at least two renowned anchorites earlier in the thirteenth century, as mentioned earlier, both of whom had also found themselves inextricably caught up in the national and border politics of the day and whose resultant widowhoods had propelled them into the anchoritic life. Indeed, Dobson also considers it possible that the Vitellius F.vii manuscript, containing a French translation of the text, was produced for the use of Annora de Braose during her enclosure at Iffley and that Annora’s husband, Hugh de Mortimer, may well have been the original patron of Ancrene Wisse.157 Whilst, like Eddie Jones, I am also aware that ‘belief that everything is connected is a sign of delusion’,158 I would nevertheless suggest that somewhere in this web of association and connection lie the tantalizing origins of Ancrene Wisse and its first audience.

152





153



154 155

158 156 157

and Society, p. 40: ‘It was almost unknown, indeed, for a Marcher family to have the great good fortune of an unbroken succession of male heirs of full age during the fourteenth century.’ Alexander notes that both of these marriages were political, rather than reflecting any type of love match. Both women proved useful to Ranulf for purposes of securing his Norman lands which lay adjacent to Brittany. On Ranulf ’s marriages, see Alexander, Ranulf of Chester, pp. 12–15. G. E. Cockayne; with Vicary Gibbs, H. A. Doubleday, Geoffrey H. White, Duncan Warrand and Lord Howard de Walden, editors, The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant, new edition, 13 volumes in 14 (1910–59; reprint in 6 volumes, Gloucester, 2000), VII, p. 676. Millett, Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, p. 51. E. J. Dobson (ed.), The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Edited from B.M. Cotton MS. Cleopatra C. Vi, EETS os 267 (London, 1972), p. ix. Dobson identified ‘Scribe B’ of this manuscript as the author of Ancrene Wisse, an assessment which Millett considers ‘strong’ (Ancrene Wisse, The Katherine Group and the Wooing Group, p. 21). Hope Emily Allen, ‘Eleanor Cobham’. Letter. Times Literary Supplement 22 March, 1934, p. 214. Dobson, Origins, p. 308. Millett is a little more skeptical of this, for which see ‘Origins’. Jones, ‘Anchoritic Aspects’, p. 86.

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Mapping the Anchorhold The anchoritic tradition of the Welsh Marches developed early, and its female adherents and their supporters were certainly numerous – and significant – enough to have constituted the types of informal communities which the Ancrene Wisse author had in mind in his interpolated address to his audience in the revised version of his text. Moreover, as I have shown, these recluses were more than uncommonly associated with the turbulent border-politics of their day, offering points of stability in a perilously unstable geographical and spiritual location. Like the Ancrene Wisse audience, and Emma of Stapleton, Harold and Godescall of Chester, the Christleton recluse and Winmark the anchorite, with their fingernails they are to inscribe a permanence and stability in the chimeric shape-shifting of the dangerous borderland soil itself, an act which announces an unmovable spiritual and physical resolve to the world beyond the anchorhold walls. And, whilst the Marcher families from whence many of the borderland anchorites of the later Middle Ages seem most likely to have emerged, or within whose world they were one way or another certainly caught up, responded with extreme brutality to the political and physical threats which assailed them,159 they also appear to have offered unprecedented levels of support to their anchorites, no doubt in an attempt to offset their worldly and hideously pragmatic violence in the swirling waters of troubled politics which they occupied. Thus, the anchorite recorded as living within the chapel of Ludlow Castle in 1241, situated at the very heart of the de Lacy family seat in the castle’s most sacred site which tipped over into the Welsh fastnesses themselves, becomes a paradigm for what I have been arguing here. Ingested and assimilated by both family and location, her protective and stabilizing influence merges with the fabric – the geography itself – of the family home and becomes one with it. Within the anchoritic spirituality of the borderlands, physical place transmogrifies into sacred space and ultimately into the geography of the mind of the border politics and the families caught up in their net. Little wonder, then, that Ancrene Wisse, this most urgent and informative of guidance texts for female adherents of the vocation, with its emphasis on female stability and its enthusiastic policing of its female bodies, should have emerged from within the hybrid maelstrom of the Welsh–English borderlands geography, myths and culture.

See, for example, Derek Draisey’s account of the de Braoses’ excesses in Gower in his A History of the Gower (Almeley, 2002).

159

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AFTERWORD

I

n this book, I have attempted to unpick and interrogate some of the wider meanings attached to the anchoritic life in the Middle Ages, as well has how those meanings shifted and changed over time and within different epistemological spaces and gendered contexts. As stated in the introduction, its aim was not to be fully comprehensive: indeed, any in-depth study of this type and length must be selective and can only touch upon the wide range of texts written for or about anchorites within the European tradition, many of which yet await scrutiny, particularly from a socio-literary perspective. What I have tried to do, therefore, is to demonstrate the varied nature of the literature available, particularly within an English and/or Latinate context, in which the figure of the anchorite, or anchoritic discourse, looms large and which allows for an examination of the type of cultural work those representations are employed to undertake. One of the most insistent of those cultural tasks to have been established by this study is that medieval anchoritism, both its theory and its practices, was deeply implicated in the policing of gender boundaries, whilst at the same time consistently experimenting by extending their range or reducing their hegemony. At the same time as the monastic anchorite felt – and tried on – a feminized self for size, that is to say, making an attempt at a desubjectivized self in order to relinquish that self to the divine, he was required to counter it in order to maintain his masculine privilege of authority. This he did by forcefully expelling the spectral presence of femininity by means of a hypermasculinized discourse, frequently militaristic, which allowed him to fight for and with the divine, instead of merging with it. This is particularly true of Goscelin of St Bertin, whose militarizing of the figure of Eve within her Angers anchorhold as miles Christi remains a desperate attempt to drive out from his thoughts any consciousness of her as the object of an erotic fixation. And, whilst this image of male – and masculine – anchoritism continued to prevail in texts written for its consumption, even into the late fourteenth century, it is not a characteristic of any of the female-focused or female-authored texts which I have examined. Indeed, in the writing of ‘anchoritic’ authors, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and the Winchester anchorite, it is female or feminized authority, whether the woman’s own or that facilitated by Christ or Mary, which becomes synonymous with anchoritic presence, prescience and subjectivity. Thus, as I have argued, the anchoritic spirituality which leeched out of the anchorhold into the wider community from the time of Ancrene Wisse onwards was deeply feminine in its affect and effect, spreading like a spiritual contagion from woman to woman, 178

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Afterword their families and those men with whom they interacted. As a result, as was clear from the reception of A Vision of Purgatory, the feminized insight of the anchorhold was eventually to become part of a much wider call for Church reform in the fifteenth century. With anchoritism having been such a highly elite spiritual vocation from the earliest days of Christianity well into the sixteenth century (and beyond in some European regions), it seems extraordinary that it has truly entered the cloud of unknowing within our own cultural consciousness. This is particularly true in view of the fact that, at its height, the vocation saw itself metamorphose into an inexorable ‘woman’s movement’, in spite of repeated attempts by the Church to curb its progress and despite a continued male presence within it.1 Perhaps, therefore, this study has uncovered another reason why, like much of the spiritual and material expressions of medieval Catholicism, English anchoritism fell foul of the iconoclastic excesses of the Reformation, its sacred spaces being transformed into vestries and, more recently, dilapidated store-rooms in isolated parish churches, which bear no memory of the extraordinary women – and men – who operated within. Every woman’s movement, after all, has to face its cultural backlash. Thus, its many female adherents disappeared from view, dispersed back into the community or perhaps joining those recusant communities of nuns which took up residencc on the continent and who were so pivotal to the copying and preservation of Julian of Norwich’s work. Within the spiritual consciousness of these nuns, at least, the female anchoritic life continued to resound and to resonate. It is hoped, therefore, that this present book will help that resonance reverberate again in the twenty-first century as feminism, once more, confronts its avatars of debate, crisis and backlash.



1

On this see, for example, Sensi, ‘Anchorites in the Italian Tradition’, especially pp. 80–9. See also Elizabeth Makowski’s full-length study of the statute Periculoso, published by Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303), which sought to severely restrict the freedom of enclosed women and render them subject to perpetual cloistration. Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: ‘Periculoso’ and its Commentators, 1298–1545 (Washington, DC, 1997).

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Medieval Anchoritisms Richter, Michael, Giraldus Cambrensis: The Growth of the Welsh Nation (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 1976). Riddy, Felicity, ‘“Women talking about things of God”: A Late-Medieval Subculture’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1150–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 104–27. Roberts, George, ‘Some Account of Llanthony Priory, Monmouthshire’, Archaeologia Cambrensis 3 (1846), pp. 201–45. Robertson, Elizabeth, ‘Women’s Networks’ in A History of British Women’s Writing, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2012). — ‘Savouring “Scientia”: the Medieval Anchoress Reads Ancrene Wisse’, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 113–44. Rogoff, Irit, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). Rosewell, Roger, Medieval Wall Paintings in English and Welsh Churches (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008). Ross, Charles ‘The Estates and Finances of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick’, Dugdale Society Occasional Papers 12 (1956), pp. 3–22. Rousseau, Philip, Ascetics, Authority, and the Church: In the Age of Jerome and Cassian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Rowley, Trevor, The Welsh Border: Archaeology, History, Landscape (Stroud and Charleston: Tempus, 2000). Roy, Gopa, ‘“Sharpen your Mind with the Whetstone of Books”: The Female Recluse as Reader in Goscelin’s Liber Confortatorius, Aelred of Rivaulx’s De Institutione Inclusarum and the Ancrene Wisse’, in Women, the Book and the Godly, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 113–23. Salih, Sarah, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001). — ‘Monstrous Virginity: St Aelred Writes the Nuns of Watton’, Mediaevalia 20 (2001), pp. 49–72. Salisbury, Joyce E., ‘Gendered Sexuality’, in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A Brundage (New York and London: Garland, 1996), pp. 81– 102. Salter [Zeeman], Elizabeth, Review of Þe Wooing of Ure Lauerd, ed. W. Meredith Thompson, EETS os 241(London: Oxford University Press, 1958), Review of English Studies, n.s. 13 (1962), pp. 166–7. Savage, Anne, ‘The Communal Authorship of Ancrene Wisse’, in Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 45–55. — ‘From Anchorhold to Cell of Self-Knowledge: Points along a History of the Human Body’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure’, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages (Cardiff:, Universeity of Wales Press, 2008), pp. 157–72. — and Nicholas Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1991). Sedgewick, Eve Kosowski, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Sensi, Mario, ‘The Italian Tradition’, in Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2010), pp. 62–90. Signori, Gabriela, ‘Anchorites in German-speaking Regions’, in Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), pp. 43–61. Solnit, Rebecca, What Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art (Athens, GA: Georgia University Press, 2003). Squire, Aelred, Aelred of Rievaulx: A Study (London: SPCK, 1969).

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Bibliography Staley, Lyn, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn­ sylvania State University Press, 1994). Stanbury, Sarah, ‘The Virgin’s Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion’, PMLA 106, 5 (1991), pp. 1083–93. Staples, Kathryn Kelsey, and Ruth Mazo Karass, ‘Christina’s Tempting: Sexual Desire and Women’s Sanctity’, in Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Holy Woman, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 184–96. Steinmetz, Karl-Heinz, ‘Eremita et Latro: Discourses of Hermits and Robbers and the “Rhetoric of the Outsider”’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005), pp. 179–210. Swan, Laura, The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives and Stories of Early Christian Women (New York: Paulist Press, 2001). Swanson, R. N., ‘Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (London and New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 160–77. Thompson, E. M., The Carthusian Order in England (London: SPCK, 1930). Treadway, R. Nash, Collections for the History of Worcestershire, 2 vols. (London: John White, 1799). Trotter, D. A., ‘The Anglo-French Lexis of Ancrene Wisse: A Re-evaluation’, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), pp. 83–101. Ward, Benedicta, The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, trans. Norman Russell (London/Oxford: Mowbray; Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1980), pp. 1–46. — Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1987). Warner, Marina, Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Picador, 1990). Warren, Ann K., Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Watt, Diane, Secretaries of God (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997). — Medieval Women’s Writing: Works by and for Women in England 1100-1500 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). — ‘Saint Julian of the Apocalypse’, in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 64–74. Whitworth, Margaret, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Williams, George H., Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1962). Williams, Gwyn A., When was Wales? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, ‘The Virgin’s Tale’, in Feminist Readings in Medieval English Literature: The Wife of Bath and all her Sect, ed. Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 165–94. Wood, Susan, English Monasteries and their Patrons in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955). Woolf, Rosemary, ‘The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight in Medieval English Literature’, Review of English Studies n. s. 13 (1962), pp. 1–16. Yamamoto, Dorothy, The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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Medieval Anchoritisms Yoshikawa, Fumiko, ‘Julian of Norwich and the Rhetoric of the Impersonal’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), pp. 141–54. — ‘“For I am a woman, leued, febille, & freylle”: Discourse Strategies to Avoid Suspicion in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe’ (unpublished paper delivered at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds 2009) . Yoshikawa, Naoë Kukita, Margery Kempe’s Meditations: The Context of Medieval Devotional Literature, Liturgy and Iconography, Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007).

ELECTRONIC SOURCES Aberdeen Bestiary, http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/intro.hti. Ancrene Wisse, ed. Robert Hasenfratz, The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, 2000). http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/awintro.htm. Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘In Praise of the New Knighthood’ [Liber ad Milites Templi: De Laude Novae Militae], trans. Conrad Greenia. http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/religion/ monastic/bernard.html. Chesterwiki, http://www.chesterwiki.com/Hermitage. The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Patrick J. Gallacher (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997). http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/cloud.htm. Douay-Rheims Bible. http://www.drbo.org/. ‘Houses of Benedictine Monks: Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’, in A History of the County of Suffolk: Volume 2 (1975), pp. 56–72. http://british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid +377880. Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911), X. 193–4. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Isidore/home.html. The Letters of Gertrude Bell (1927), Vol. 1, Project Gutenburg of Australia. http://gutenberg. net.au/ebooks04/0400341h.html. ‘The Life of Hilarion’, trans. W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W. G. Martley, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 6, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893). Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3003.htm. Mapping Medieval Chester: place and identity in an English borderland city c.1200–1500. http://www.medievalchester.ac.uk. ‘Religious Houses: Introduction’, A History of the County of Chester: Vol. 3 (1980), pp. 1124–7, n. 18. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=39973. Accessed 15.06.10. Tertullian, de cultu feminarum [‘On the Apparel of Women’], II.13. Online Latin Library edition, ed. Mari Turcan (1971). http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/tertullian/tertullian. cultu2.shtml. Whatley, E. Gordon, ‘Introduction’ to Saints’ Lives in Middle English Collections, The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004). http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/whjerintro. htm.

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INDEX Abba Moses 14–15, 16, 17–18, 19 Abbott Richard of Draughton 48, 49 Abbott Thomas of Tottington 49 abjection Julian of Norwich’s writings 117, 119, 120, 122–3 Kristeva’s writings 94, 94 n. 92 of Margery Kempe 126–7 redeeming 172, 172 n. 134 Adam 89, 144 Adam of Dryburgh 59–60 Aelred of Rievaulx De Institutione Inclusarum 46, 55, 66–7 Homilies on the Burdens of Isaiah 67 Aldhelm 80–4 Alexander, James 166, 175 Allen, Hope Emily 130, 176 anchorholds 1 female anchorites 108–9: Ancrene Wisse 103–4; architecture 102; Emma of Stapleton 159, 160; Eve of Wilton 91, 178; Julian of Norwich 121; Shrewsbury 157–8 Grimlaïcus’s Rule 54, 54 n. 64 male anchorites 71: architecture 30; ‘Bury recluse’ 47, 50; Carthusians 59 manor churches 50, 50 n. 41 representations 54–6, 111: as sacred space 53; as stable space 31 anchorite origin of term 2–3 origins 1–2 anchoritic scholarship 3–4 Ancrene Wisse 7, 8, 46 n. 16, 63, 66, 80, 92–8, 110, 111, 113 geographical narratives 147–52 monstrous body discourses 101–9, 141 Angers 90, 178 animal(s) bodies 106 as pets 141 Antony, Saint 14, 159–60 anxiety 43 about empty anchoritic performance 64–5 about female body 9, 63, 66, 76, 79–80, 93–4 about male body 74–5, 75 n. 176 male 39, 72, 79 apostola apostolorum 19, 117 Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury 163, 166, 167 Archbishop Murdac 67 asceticism 2, 16, 17, 44, 62, 65 Askwith, Tereli 81–2, 83

Audley, Katherine de 97 n. 106, 151 Augustine 164–5 authority, female 9, 119, 124, 126, 131, 143, 178 Bachelard, Gaston 5, 12, 32, 111 Baldwin of Canterbury 163, 166, 167 Barbour, John D. 5–6, 10, 13 Barratt, Alexandra 58 n. 95, 60 Bartlett, Anne Clark 113 Bartlett, Robert 163 Basil, Saint 37 Bataille, Georges 124 n. 49 Battle of Hastings 167 Beauchamp, Elizabeth 136–7 Beauchamp, Richard 135–6 Beaufort, Henry 138 Bede 80–1, 105 Bell, Gertrude 1, 4, 5, 9 Benedict, Saint 13, 22–3, 79 Rule of see Rule of Benedict Benedictine monasticism 23–5; see also Rule of Benedict Bernard of Clairvaux 69–70 Bhabha, Homi 153 Bible, books of I Corinthians 40, 63–4 Ephesians 14 Galatians 63 Genesis 26, 90 Isaiah 88 Luke 20, 90–1 Birgitta, Saint 139 blood-flow 35, 35 n. 130, 73 Bone, Richard 138, 138 n. 127 The Book of Margery Kempe 124–34, 138–9 borderlands Chronicle of Lanercost 154–7, 159–60, 161–2 Welsh Marches 97, 148–54, 156–7, 160: see also Chester; entries beginning Marcher; Shrewsbury Bossuyt, Stijn 110 Bourdieu, Pierre 13, 52–3, 54 brothels 62 n. 113, 66 Brown, Peter 16, 17 Bruno Hartenfaust 58–9 Bullough, Vern 15 Bury St Edmunds abbey 47–8 Reply to a Bury Recluse 45–7, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55–6, 73, 102

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Medieval Anchoritisms unrest (1327) 47–8 Bynum, Caroline Walker 35, 101–2, 106 calling, anchoritic 40, 70 Cannon, Christopher 97, 147, 148–9, 150, 154 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer) 141, 142 carcer 25 carnal sin 38 Carthusians 58–61, 65 Cassian, John 8, 13, 23 Collationes 13–20, 21–2, 33, 40 Cecelia, Saint 117–18, 119 Chadwick, Owen 13 Chapman, John 23 charterhouse 59 Chartreuse 59 chastity 17, 36, 68, 100, 127 Chaucer 141, 142 Chester 148, 166 anchorites of 167–8, 173–5 Gerald of Wales’s writings 166–8 Lucian’s writings 168–73 nunnery 174 Ranulf of 175–7 childbearing see pregnancy chora 12, 121, 121 n. 36 Christ Abba Moses and 19 brides of 96 crucifixion 73, 88, 172 Julian of Norwich and 116, 117, 120 Margery Kempe and 129, 130, 133 Martha and Mary and 18–19, 18 n. 39 as rival for Goscelin’s love for Eve of Wilton 92 as scapegoat 73 temptation 2 Christleton 174 Chronica Buriensis 48 Chronicle of Lanercost 154–7, 159–60, 161–2 Chrysostom, John 26 Church Fathers 8, 11, 30, 80 Church Preen 159 n. 62 churches manor 50, 50 n. 41 ownership 47 n. 25 Saint Chad’s church, Chester 173 Saint Gregory’s church, Sudbury 137, 137 n. 123 Saint James’s church, Christleton 174 Saint Margaret’s church, Norwich 129 Saint Martin’s church, Chester 173 Stapleton 159, 159 n. 62 wall-paintings 109, 109 n. 160 Cistercians 52, 58, 67 Cixous, Hélène 6, 26, 62–3, 77–8, 94, 111–12 Clare, Mathilda de 176 Clay, Rotha Mary 3, 158 Clifford family 175 Cloke, Gillian 80, 84 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome 106, 151, 152, 153–4, 163, 166

Collationes (Cassian) 13–20, 21–2, 33, 40 Combe, Petrus 138 Comestor, Peter 105 confession (of sins) 27, 79 Consuetudines Cartusiae 59 I Corinthians 40, 63–4 cross-dressing 78 crucifix 172 crucifixion, Christ 73, 88, 172 de Audley, Katharine 97 n. 106, 151 de Braose family 97 n. 106, 151, 175, 176 Annora 97 n. 106, 151, 161 n. 72, 176 Loretta 97 n. 106, 151, 152 n. 27 de Clare, Mathilda 176 de-gendering, desert recluse 17–18, 19–22 de Hungerford, Isolda 157 De Institutione Inclusarum (Aelred of Rievaulx) 46, 55, 66–7 de Lacy family 175, 177 John (Lord) 176 De Laude Cestrie (Lucian) 168–73, 174, 175 De Laude Virginitatis (Aldhelm) 101 de Le, Emma 174 de Mortimer, Hugh 176 de Pinchbeck, Walter 47 de Quincy family 176 de Roges, Mathilda 174 de Vogüé, Adalbert 22, 24 de Voragine, Jacobus 78–9 defecation 122 Derrida, Jacques 160 Descriptio Kambriae (Geraldus Cambrensis) 162, 163, 164 desert 1 Christian narratives 2, 4–5, 8, 11–12 desert anchorites 2 Cassian’s writings 13–20, 21–2, 33, 40 de-gendering 17–18, 19–22 Desert Fathers and Mothers 2 devils 37, 40, 84, 140, 141, 143 Discipline and Punish (Foucault) 25–6, 43–4 discretio spiritum 114 disguise 80 Dives and Pauper 65 Dobson, E. J. 148 n. 5, 176 Dominican friar, Margery Kempe and 129–30, 129 n. 79 doxa 43, 52, 54, 68 Durkheim, Emile 158 Ecclesiastical History (Bede) 80–1 Eden 77, 94, 103 Edward I 173–4, 175 Egyptian desert 5, 11, 14 Eleanor, Queen 173 Elijah 11, 18 Emma of Stapleton 159–62, 171 English Church, attempts at regulation of Welsh Church 163 English identity 153, 154

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Index ennobling love 85, 98 Ephesians 14 Erler, Mary 135, 137, 138, 139, 140 Eucharist 30, 43 n. 2 Evans, Michael 69 Eve 77, 78, 79, 89, 94, 103, 144 Eve of Wilton 46 n. 17, 84, 85, 86–92, 94, 98 anchorhold 91, 178 Fall, the 77–8, 103, 104, 144 female authority 9, 119, 124, 126, 131, 143, 178 female body Aldhelm’s writings 81–2 anxiety about 9, 63, 66, 76, 79–80, 93–4 fetishization 82, 115 n. 11, 116, 118, 118 n. 24, 120, 127, 149 Irigaray’s writings 115–16, 115 n. 11 Julian of Norwich’s writings 116, 117, 118–19, 120, 121 monstrous discourse 99–103, 106, 107 female gaze 119, 120, 139, 140, 144 female ‘matter-body’ 81, 82, 88, 100 female saints Birgitta 139 Cecelia 117–18, 119 Thaïs 62, 62 n. 113 Werburgh 170–1, 172 female subordination 78 female voice 114 femininity 7, 19, 28, 81 aberrant 67, 142 Aldhelm’s writings 81, 83–4 Cassian’s writings 20 Grimlaïcus’s writings 35, 36, 38, 39, 41 hypermasculinized discourse and 68, 82–3, 178 Julian of Norwich’s writings 121, 123 feminization 8, 18, 28, 78, 82, 88 n. 55, 178 Carthusian monk 60–1 Grimlaïcus’s writings 38, 40 Hilarion 61 n. 110 fetishization, female body 82, 115 n. 11, 116, 118, 118 n. 24, 120, 127, 149 FitzGerald, David 162 Flint, Valerie I.J. 53–4 Forest, John 138, 138 n. 127 fornication punishment 143 see also lechery Foucault, Michel 6, 25, 43–4, 111 Franciscans 159 friendship between men and women 37, 85, 129 between women 113, 139–40 Frodsham 174 Fuss, Diana 133–4 Fyschebourne, Thomas 136–7 Galatians 63 gaze 26 female 119, 120, 139, 140, 144

male 28, 43, 63, 72, 75, 108, 115, 118 gender differences author–audience 149 conceptions of 34–5, 76, 107 punishments 142–3 transcending 63 Genesis 26, 90 Gerald of Wales 162–6 Chester and 166–8 Descriptio Kambriae 162, 163, 164 Itinerarium Kambriae 162, 163, 164, 165, 166–7 Libri de Invectionibus 165–6 Germanus 14, 17 Gesta Stephani 152 Gethsemane 35 Giffard, John 97 n. 106, 151 Girard, René 6, 25, 41, 44, 45, 50 God, love of 37–8 Godescall 168 godlessness 152 Goscelin of St Bertin 46 n. 17, 84–92 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 160 Gransden, Antonia 47 Graystoke, Lady 139 Gregory the Great 23, 30, 33, 74 n. 166 Grimlaïcus of Metz 29 Regula Solitariorum 29–41, 44–5, 46, 54 Grosz, Elizabeth 50 Guy’s Cliff 136 habitus 13, 13 n. 12 Hagan, Susan K. 118 n. 22 Hali Meiðhad 99–101 Harley, Marta Powell 57, 135 harlot saints 62–3, 64, 67, 69 Harold of England, King 167, 167 n. 111 Hasenfratz, Robert 96, 101 haunting 35, 78, 111 Hawise of Chester 176 Hayes, Dawn Marie 158 Hayward, Rebecca 90 Heale, Martin 48, 50 Henry III 175 Henry V 58 n. 94, 168, 168 n. 112 Henry VI 136 Herefordshire 150 n. 18 The Hermits and Anchorites of England (Clay) 3, 158 herrenfrage 16 heterotopia 110 Hilarion 61, 61 n. 110, 69 Hilary of Orléans 90 Hollis, Stephanie 90 Hollywood, Amy 116, 118 n. 24, 119 homecoming 1, 4, 5 Homilies on the Burdens of Isaiah (Aelred) 67 Hungerford, Isolda de 157 hybridity 79, 111–12, 116, 117, 143 monstrous, female body 99, 100, 101–2, 104–7

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Medieval Anchoritisms illness Julian of Norwich 116–17, 119–20 Margery of Kempe 133 imago Dei 122 imitatio Christi 79 imprisonment Richard of Draughton 48 Thaïs 62 n. 113 Watton nun 67 Innes-Parker, Catherine 151 instability 9, 32, 68, 152 geographic 166, 167 Irigaray, Luce 6, 117, 123, 127, 128, 145 Speculum of the other Woman 27, 34–5, 128, 145 ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’ 39, 115, 115 n. 11 threshold site notion and 127 ‘Women on the Market’ 81, 82, 83, 100, 101 Isaiah, book of 88 Isidore of Seville 104–5 Itinerarium Kambriae (Geraldus Cambrensis) 162, 163, 164, 165, 166–7 Jacob’s ladder 26 Jacobus de Voragine 78–9 Jerome, Saint 37, 78, 105 Jestice, Phyllis 31 Jesus Christ see Christ Jews 19, 155, 156 John Cassian see Cassian, John John of Beverley 119 n. 30 John of Salisbury 152, 161 John the Baptist 2, 11, 18, 159, 162 Jones, E.A. 57, 57 n. 82, 176 Julian of Norwich 110, 116–24, 116 n. 14 anchorhold 121 Christ and 116, 117, 120 Isabella Ufford’s will and 137 Long Text see A Revelation of Love (Julian of Norwich) Margery Kempe and 114, 128–9 mother 119–21 Short Text see A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman (Julian of Norwich) sickness 116, 117, 119–20 Katherine Group 94–6, 94 n. 95 Kempe, Margery 8, 110, 114, 124–34 accusations of immoral conduct 126 Christ and 129, 130, 133 Dominican anchorite-confessor and 129–31, 129 n. 79 Henry Beaufort and 138–9 illness 133 Julian of Norwich and 114, 128–9 mystical experiences 129, 130, 131–2, 133, 139 occupation of anchorhold-like space 133–4 pilgrimage 126, 130 rejection by anchorites 126–7 widows and 130–1, 132

knights, of Christ 69, 70, 71 Knights Templar 69 Knowles, David 51 n. 52, 56, 137 Kristeva, Julia 6, 12, 117, 118, 121 Powers of Horror 94, 94 n. 92 ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’ 121, 122, 123 ‘subject-in-process’ theory 124, 124 n. 50 de Lacy family 175, 177 John (Lord) 176 ladder of spiritual ascent 27–9 Lanercost 154, 155 Chronicon 154–7, 159–60, 161–2 Lapidge, Michael 80 Le, Emma de 174 lechery 74, 100, 104, 108, 140, 142 punishment 142–3 Ledbury 97 n. 106, 151 Lefebvre, Henri 6, 15, 20, 28, 42, 53, 55, 134, 168, 169 The Letters of Gertrude Bell 1, 4, 5 Leyser, Conrad 68 Liber Confortatorius (Goscelin of St Bertin) 46 n. 17, 84–92 Liber de Quadripartito Exercitio Cellae (Adam of Dryburgh) 60 Libri de Invectionibus (Geraldus Cambrensis) 165–6 Lieberman, Max 175 Life of Macarius 37 Life of Saint Benedict 79 Life of Saint Jerome 78–9 Llanthony Abbey 165 Logic of Practice (Bourdieu) 13, 13 n. 12, 43, 52–3, 54 London, John 138 Long Text see A Revelation of Love (Julian of Norwich) love ennobling 85, 98 of God 37–8 Goscelin for Eve of Wilton 85, 86, 87, 88, 90: Christ as rival 92 Lucian of Chester 168–73, 174, 175 ludi 48 Ludlow Castle 176 Luke, book of 20, 90–1 Macclesfield 173 n. 140, 174 Maitland, Sarah 5 male gaze 28, 43, 63, 72, 75, 108, 115 male saints Antony 14, 159–60 Basil 37 Benedict 13, 22–3, 79: Rule of see Rule of Benedict Jerome 37, 78, 105 manor churches, anchorholds 50, 50 n. 41 Marcher anchorites 9, 97, 97 n. 106, 154 Chester 167–8, 173–5 Emma of Stapleton 159–62, 171

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Index Gerald of Wales’s writings 165, 167–8 Ranulf III of Chester and 175–7 Shrewsbury 157–8 Marcher families 97 n. 106, 175, 176, 177 marriages 175–6 Marcher widows 97 n. 106, 151, 175 Margery Kempe see Kempe, Margery marriage 98 Marcher families 175–6 Martha 18, 18 n. 39, 19 Mary Magdalene 20, 60, 61, 62, 103, 117, 141 Mary of Bethany 18–19, 18 n. 39, 60 Mary of Egypt 62, 62 n. 113, 103 masculinity 68–71 Benedict’s writings 28–9 Cassian’s writings 17–18, 20, 21 Grimlaïcus’s writings 41 masturbation 73–5, 73 n. 166 Mathilda de Roges 174 ‘matter-body’ 81, 82, 88, 100 McNamara, Jo Ann 15–16, 68 miles Christi 69–70, 71, 82–3, 82 n. 28, 88, 97, 100 militarism 15, 40–1, 69–70, 71 monks 8, 43–4 anchoritic space 53–6 Benedict’s Rule see Rule of Benedict Bury recluse (Reply to a Bury Recluse) 45–7, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55–6, 73, 102 Carthusian 58–61 Cassian’s writings 13–20, 21–2, 33, 40 Grimlaïcus’s Regula 29–41, 44–5, 46 Lucian of Chester 168–73, 174, 175 punishment 25 Speculum Inclusorum guidance text see Speculum Inclusorum monstrosity, female bodies 99–103, 106, 107 Mortimer, Hugh de 176 Moses 2, 4, 11, 18 mother(s) 39, 81, 82, 115–16, 115 n. 11 Julian of Norwich’s writings 119–21, 123 monstrous 104–5 see also pregnancy Mount Pisgah 4, 4n. 15 Murdac, Henry 67 Muslims 19 The Myrour of Recluses 57, 74 mystical experiences 35 n. 128 Aelred’s writings 67 Julian of Norwich 116, 117, 120 Margery Kempe 129, 130, 131–2, 133, 139 New Testament 11 see also Bible, books of non-phallic language 115, 116, 123 nuns Eve of Wilton see Eve of Wilton non-virginal 81, 81 n. 22 Watton 66–8 oceans 33 Of Grammatology (Derrida) 160

Old Testament 11 see also Bible, books of Oliger, Livarius 58 Origen 26, 26 n. 84 Paul the first hermit 61, 69 Pepwell, Henry 125, 125 n. 53 Periculoso 39 Pery, John 138, 138 n. 127 pets 141 phallus 21, 28, 41 pilgrimage Margery Kempe 126, 130 Winchester anchorite 135 Pinchbeck Register 49 Pinchbeck, Walter de 47 Poetics of Space (Bachelard) 5, 12, 32, 111 Powers of Horror (Kristeva) 94, 94 n. 92 prayer 58 pregnancy Aldhelm’s writings 81, 99 Margery Kempe 126, 126 n. 58 Watton nun 67 pride 83, 98 prison 25 The Production of Space (Lefebvre) 6, 15, 20, 28, 42, 53, 55, 134, 168, 169 Prosa de Virginitate (Aldhelm) 81, 82, 83 prostitutes, former 62 punishment Revelation of Purgatory 140, 141, 142–3 Rule of Benedict 24–5 purgatory 130, 131, 134, 137, 139, 143–4 Queen Eleanor 173 de Quincy family 176 Ranulf III of Chester 156, 175–7 marriages 176 patronage 174–5 Rawgton, Emma 136 reading, female 77, 109–12, 113–14 Regula Solitariorum (Grimlaïcus) 29–41, 44–5, 46, 54 religious conversion 62 Renevey, Denis 110, 125 ‘The Reply of a fourteenth-century Abbott of Bury St Edmunds to a Man’s Petition to be a Recluse’ 45–7, 49, 51, 52, 54, 55–6, 73, 102 A Revelation of Love (Julian of Norwich) 116, 116 n. 14, 119, 119 n. 30, 122–3 A Revelation of Purgatory 134–5, 137–8, 139, 140–1, 142–5 Richard of Draughton 48, 49 Riddy, Felicity 113–14 rivers 33 Chester 166, 170 Robertson, Elizabeth 109 n. 158 Roges, Mathilda de 174 Rogoff, Irit 6, 11, 111, 147, 149, 152, 156, 160, 167, 170, 171

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Medieval Anchoritisms Rosier, James L. 80 Rule of Benedict 23–5, 29, 43, 45, 54, 55 scala erecta 27–9 sacrificial scapegoat 45, 45 n. 11, 88 saints, harlot 62–3, 64, 67, 69 Saint Antony 14, 159–60 Saint Basil 37 Saint Benedict 13, 22–3, 79 Rule of see Rule of Benedict Saint Birgitta 139 Saint Cecelia 117–18, 119 St Chad’s church, Chester 173 St Gregory’s church, Sudbury 137, 137 n. 123 St James’s church, Christleton 174 Saint Jerome 37, 78, 105 St John the Baptist church, Stapleton 159 St Margaret’s church, Norwich 129 St Martin’s church, Chester 173 Saint Thaïs 62, 62 n. 113 Saint Werburgh 170–1, 172 Salih, Sarah 98 Salter, Elizabeth 95 satellite communities 110 Savage, Anne 110, 127, 134, 150 scala erecta 27–9 scapegoats 6, 8 Christ as 73 female 38, 88, 144 male anchorites 8, 25–6, 44–5, 51 sacrificial 45, 45 n. 11, 88 scorpions 78, 79, 91, 104, 105–6 selfhood 1, 134, 149 serpents 89, 90–1, 94, 94 n. 93, 103, 104–5, 143 sexual temptation 17, 75–6, 79 Sheen 58, 58 n. 94 Short Text see A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman (Julian of Norwich) Shrewsbury 148, 157 female anchorites 157–8 Shropshire 150 n. 18 see also Shrewsbury; Stapleton sickness see illness silence 1, 4–5 vow of 56 n. 76 sin carnal 38 female anchorites 100, 103, 108, 140 Goscelin’s writings 90 male anchorites 71, 72–5 sodomy 73 n. 166, 74 soil 160, 161, 177 solitude desert 1, 4, 11–13 theories 4–7 Song of Songs 38, 86, 96 Sopwell Nunnery 137 Speculum Inclusorum 56–8, 57 n. 82, 59, 61–6, 69, 70, 71, 72–5, 102 Speculum of the other Woman (Irigaray) 27, 34–5, 128, 145

spiritual ascent 26–9 sponsalia Christi 87, 92, 98, 101, 107 Sprenghose, Emma 158 Squire, Aelred 67–8 stability 9, 31, 32, 128, 154, 158 Stanbury, Sarah 120 Stapleton 159, 159 n. 62, 160 Emma of 159–62, 171 stigmatext 62 ‘subject-in-process’ theory (Kristeva) 124, 124 n. 50 Swanson, R.W. 17 Syon Abbey 137, 138 tears 35, 35 n. 131 temptation Christ 2 male anchorite 72, 73–4 sexual 17, 75–6, 79 Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (Rogoff) 6, 11, 111, 147, 149, 152, 156, 160, 167, 170, 171 Tertullian 28 Thaïs, Saint 62, 62 n. 113 Thomas of Tottington 49 threshold-body 127 tongue, female 66 Ufford, Isabella 137 urban anchoritism 8, 65–6, 76, 125 The Value of Solitide: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography (Barbour) 5–6, 10, 13, 22 violence 15, 25, 44 Bury St Edmunds (1327) 48 Violence and the Sacred (Girard) 6, 25, 41, 44, 45, 50 Virgin Mary 88, 121, 133, 144–5 virginity 80, 127 Aldhelm’s writings 80–4 Katherine Group texts 94 n. 95, 99–101 A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman (Julian of Norwich) 116, 116 n. 14, 117–18, 118 n. 26, 119–21 visionaries Rawgton, Emma 136 Winchester anchorite 135 see also mystical experiences vocation, visualization 63–6 Vogüé, Adalbert de 22, 24 Voragine, Jacobus de 78–9 Wales 153, 162 Gerald of see Gerald of Wales see also entries beginning Welsh warfare 15, 40–1, 69–70, 97 Warren, Ann 3, 44, 51, 131, 150, 158, 173 water imagery 32, 33, 170 Watt, Diane 113, 114, 125–6, 150 n. 15 Watton nuns 66–8

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Index Welsh Church, Gerald of Wales and 162–3, 164, 165 Welsh Marches 97, 148–54, 156–7, 160 see also Chester; entries beginning Marcher; Shrewsbury Welsh people 152, 153, 156, 157 Gerald of Wales’s writings 163–4 Lucian’s writings 169 Welsh Rebellion 156 Werburgh, Saint 170–1, 172 Westminster anchorite 137–8 Whitworth, Margaret 127 widows Marcher 97 n. 106, 151, 175 Margery Kempe and 130–1, 132 wilderness, post-Edenic 103–4 wilderness theology 8, 11 Wilson, James 154 n. 41, 155 Wilton Abbey 84

Winchester anchorite 110, 135, 136, 139 Winmark 174–5, 175 n. 148 Witham 59 womb 12, 20, 34, 123 Wood, Susan 175 Wooing Group 94–6, 94 n. 95, 172, 172 n. 133 The Writings of Julian of Norwich 116–24, 116 n. 14 Long Text see A Revelation of Love (Julian of Norwich) Short Text see A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman (Julian of Norwich) Wynbourne, John 138, 138 n. 127 Yamamoto, Dorothy 106–7 Yoshikawa, Fumiko 144, 144 n. 163 Zozimus 62 n. 113, 63

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Dr Liz Herbert McAvoy is Reader in Gender Studies and Medieval Literature at Swansea University. Her other books include Anchoritic Traditions of Western Europe in the Middle Ages, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe and A Companion to Julian of Norwich. Cover: Saint Wiborada in her anchorite cell. Stiftsbibliothek St Gallen, Cod. Sang. 602, p. 345.

Series: Gender in the Middle Ages

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd

PO Box 9, Woodbridge IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

MONSTERS, GENDER AND SEXUALITYMcAvoy MEDIEVAL ANCHORITISMS IN MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE

Originating in the deserts of northern Africa in the early years of Christianity, anchoritism, or the enclosed solitary life, gradually metamorphosed into a permanent characteristic of European religiosity. From the twelfth century onwards, and throughout the middle ages, it was embraced with increasing enthusiasm, by devoted laywomen in particular. This book investigates the wider cultural importance of medieval anchoritism within the different religious landscapes and climates of the period. Drawing upon a range of contemporary gender and spatial theories, it focuses on the gender dynamics of this remarkable way of life, and the material spaces which they generated and within which they operated. As such, it unites related – but too often discrete – areas of scholarship, including early Christian anchoritism, anchoritic guidance texts and associated works, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century holy women with close anchoritic connections, and a range of other less known works dealing with or connected to the anchoritic life.

MEDIEVAL ANCHORITISMS GENDER, SPACE AND THE SOLITARY LIFE

Liz Herbert McAvoy