The Materiality of Middle English Anchoritic Devotion

Anchorites and their texts, such as <i>Ancrene Wisse</i>, have recently undergone a reevaluation based on material circumstances, not just theological import. The articles here address a variety of anchoritic or anchoritic-adjacent texts, encompassing guidance literature, hagiographies, miracle narratives, medical discourse, and mystic prose, and spanning in date from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries. Exploring reclusion and materiality, the collection addresses a series of overlapping themes, including the importance of touch, the limits of religious authority, and the role of the senses. Objects, metaphorical and real, embodied and spiritual, populate the pages. These categories are permeable, with flexible and porous boundaries, demonstrating the conflation of ideas, concepts, and manifestations in medieval materiality. In fact, the permeability of these categories demonstrates how materiality can reshape our approach to medieval texts. It leaves room for directions for future study, including the application of material analysis to previously unstudied objects, spaces, and literary artifacts.

The Angel, the Confessor, and the Anchoress

Chapter 4 examines thirteenth- and fourteenth-century guidance texts for anchoresses, including Ancrene Wisse and Richard Rolle’s The Form of Living, as well as the Latin vita of Margaret the Lame (d. 1250), anchoress of Magdeburg. In these writings, as elsewhere, the Annunciation (Luke 1:26–38) functions as a remarkable and versatile textual resource that, with its dazzling array of metaphors, came to represent the routinely conflict-ridden relationship between angels, female penitents, and confessors. As visionary anchoresses faced insistent calls for subordination, their angelic capacity to resemble their confessors and to appropriate their spiritual knowledge and discernment undermined those same calls. I argue that these anchoritic writings, and even the many narratives of anchorites from Caesarius of Heisterbach’s thirteenth-century Dialogue of Miracles, draw on the Annunciation in negotiating the uneasy relations between personal inspiration and the imperatives of subordination.

The Expository Apposition Marker þet is and Punctuation in the Corpus MS of Ancrene Wisse

The aims of this essay are two-fold. Firstly, it seeks to providea semantic analysis of the expository apposition marker þet is as it is employed in the Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 of Ancrene Wisse. This is in order to provide comparative data with the research of Pahta and Nevanlinna concerning the expository apposition marker that is. Secondly, it seeks to establish the relationship between theexpository apposition marker that is and its accompanying punctus in order to reveal scribal attempts at the differentiating use of the punctus, depending on the first appositive.

Materiality, Documentary Authority, and the Circulation of the Katherine Group

Written in the decades before Ancrene Wisse, the Early Middle English hagiographies of the Katherine Group depict three virgin martyrs, Katherine, Margaret, and Juliana. Using touch and eyewitness accounts as measures of proof, the legend equates St. Margaret’s body with the textual corpus inscribed on animal hide. The manuscript’s documentary authority is verified through proximity to the holy body of the saint, and, in a similarly body-centred (and precarious) authority, the anchoress functions as the centre of an ephemeral textual community in the early thirteenth century. The Katherine Group narratives and codicological evidence indicate an anchoritic-lay literary culture operating adjacent to clerical manuscript culture, consistent with Catherine Innes-Parker’s theory about co-existing informal and formal vernacular textual cultures in the West Midlands. This “informal,” or ephemeral, textual community shaped lay literacy and manuscript use, including perceptions about the documentary authority of vernacular textual artifacts.

Mary, Silence, and the Fictions of Power in Ancrene Wisse 2.269–481

A work of spiritual guidance composed for English anchoresses, the thirteenthcentury Ancrene Wisse encourages its readers to imitate the Virgin Mary and her exemplary silence. In its attempt thus to manage the anchoritic voice, Part 2 of the text draws on and substantially reimagines the image presented of the saint in a sermon by the Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153). For women aspiring to channel spiritual power through their own voice, Mary becomes, as she was for many anchoresses, an object of imitation, though in this case one radically different from Bernard’s model. By reconceptualizing the imperatives of silence, Ancrene Wisse invites the counseling and teaching anchoress into a new relation with her body, in its vocal potentials, and the wider social networks wherein it operated. The work’s figuration of voice demonstrates how both the anchoress and her material environment were shaped through diverse forms of imitatio.

Bodies, Objects, and the Significance of Things in Early Middle English Reclusion: An Introduction

This essay traces the history of the “materialist movement” in medieval studies, working chronologically and thematically to provide a full context for the coedited volume as a whole. Having established the tradition, Bledsoe and Sauer tackle an expanded definition of materiality, one that includes voice and embodiment and sensory input, thereby centering not only objects, but also the many interactions of bodies and objects. This more complete vocabulary of materiality is applied to medieval Christianity, particularly reclusion and monasticism. Also providing an overview of the anchoritic vocation and major texts under consideration, including Ancrene Wisse, Bledsoe and Sauer engage with the principles underpinning their collected volume of essays and outline its connected themes and methodologies. Finally, the authors suggest several future directions for studies, including other possible extensions of materiality as well as additional geographical and cultural dimensions.

The Material of Vernacular English Devotion: Temptation and Sweetness in Ancrene Wisse and Richard Rolle’s Form of Living

This short essay looks at how language about the material world is used to describe the spiritual world and how that language is replicated and changed in the course of medieval devotional texts for anchoresses. It specifically discusses the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses) and Richard Rolle’s Form of Living.