Clothing and Female Reclusion in The Life of Mary of Egypt and The Life of Christina of Markyate

Over the past two decades, medieval feminist scholarship has increasingly turned to the literary representation of textiles as a means of exploring the oftensilenced experiences of women in the Middle Ages. This article uses fabric as a lens through which to consider the world of the female recluse, exploring the ways in which clothing operates as a tether to patriarchal, secular values in Paul the Deacon’s eighthcentury Life of Mary of Egypt and the twelfth-century Life of Christina of Markyate. In rejecting worldly garb as recluses, these holy women seek out and achieve lives of spiritual autonomy and independence.

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.

Framing Materiality: Relic Discourse and Medieval English Anchoritism

Relics carried great significance in medieval Christianity. Generally these relics, or at least first-class relics, were fragmented bodies, literal pieces of saints, where a part or parts represented the whole. This idea reverberates with what Robyn Malo has called “relic discourse.” She argues that as saints’ bodies became more and more elaborately enshrined in fancy reliquaries, they became less accessible to the people; similarly, the language of hagiographies and other devotional writings, with their characteristic rhetoric of treasure and brightness, provided a substitute for direct experience of the relic. Extending Malo’s idea to anchoritic literature, Sauer argues that anchorites, who are alive yet dead to the world, can themselves be read as living relics; therefore, anchoritic literature uses vocabulary and rhetoric that calls to mind relics and reliquaries. In this way, the position of the anchorite as a living relic, and thus a mediator among the living and the dead and the divine, is manifest.

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.

Stupor in John of Gaddesden’s Rosa Medicinae

Early medieval religious writers describe powerful and complex somatic and cognitive experiences as astonishment or stupor, drawing on medical discourse. The effects of stupor on the body’s faculties of sensation and movement are described in medical texts, such as English medical writer John of Gaddesden’s (fl. 1305–1348) Rosa medicinae or Rosa anglica (ca. 1313–20), where he reconciles Galen’s and Avicenna’s conflicting definitions of stupor. This note presents a case study of stupor in medieval medical discourse, especially according to Gaddesden, that informs our understanding of narratives about or by medieval anchorites, revealing more complex accounts of physical and spiritual experience.

The Archaeological Context of an Anchorite Cell at Ruyton, Shropshire

Current research analysing anchoritic archaeology focuses on the squint that allowed the anchorite to view the Eucharist. However, assessing archaeological evidence for anchorite cells using archaeological context, which involves interpreting the archaeology in relationship to other features or artifacts, is key to developing a more nuanced understanding. The anchoritic archaeology at St. John the Baptist in Ruyton, Shropshire, is an important case study, as this site has not been mentioned in the medieval textual record, and the anchoritic archaeology has only been briefly discussed in other scholarship. This short article demonstrates the value of using archaeological context to provide key information missing from textual sources and to better understand the lived experience of anchorites.

The Anchoritic Body at Prayer in Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Liber Confortatorius

Prayer was at the heart of the anchoritic vocation, as an integrated, embodied spiritual practice. Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Book of Consolation offers a complex and flexible model of the praying anchorite through images, exhortations, and recommended practices, reflecting the nature of reclusive prayer as a performative gesture or state. Applying the terminology of “liturgy” proposed by Jean-Yves Lacoste, this essay examines how Eve of Wilton is envisioned at prayer, and encouraged in her life of prayer. This life is inextricably connected, for Goscelin, to the eschatological vision which forms the horizon of the text: only through the embodied practice of prayer, metonymic of reclusion itself, can the transformation of the body be anticipated. Goscelin appropriates the transcendent connection between persons offered by prayer to collapse the limitations of space dividing him from Eve, and he pins his hopes for reconciliation with her on the ultimate redemption of both body and space.

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.

Relics and the Recluse’s Touch in Goscelin’s Miracles of St. Edmund

While Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses) has prompted discussions on the prohibition of touch in anchoritic devotional culture, the critical focus on the didactic literature of the high Middle Ages has left little room for exploring how anchorites used touch to initiate or heighten spiritual experience. This article attempts to address this imbalance through a close reading of Goscelin of Saint-Bertin’s Miracles of St. Edmund (ca. 1100). The text offers an insight into Seitha, a female recluse living in close proximity to the community of monks at Bury St. Edmunds in the 1090s, and her physical contact with St. Edmund’s secondary relics. Sawicka-Sykes argues that while the monks of Bury are punished for their audacious handling of the saint’s incorrupt remains, Seitha is granted privileged access to the saint’s clothing on account of her anchoritic virtues of purity, humility, and servitude.