Medieval Anchorites in Their Communities 9781843844624

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The essays in this volume, stemming from a variety of cross-disciplinary approaches and methodologies, lay down a challenge to this position, breaking new ground in their presentation of the medieval anchorite and other types of enclosed solitary as playing a central role within the devotional life of the communities in which they were embedded. They attest also to the frequent involvement of anchorites and other recluses in local, national and, sometimes, international matters of importance. overall, the volume suggests that, far from operating on the socio-religious periphery, as posited previously, the medieval anchorite was more often found at the heart of a sometimes intersecting array of communities: synchronic and diachronic; physical and metaphysical; religious and secular; gendered and textual.

liz herbert Mcavoy is Professor of Medieval literature at swansea university. contributors: diana denissen, clare dowding, clarck drieshen, cate Gunn, catherine innes-Parker, e.a. Jones, dorothy Kim, liz herbert Mcavoy, Godelinde Perk, James Plumtree, Michelle sauer, sophie sawicka-sykes, andrew Thornton osb.

Cover image: a nun visiting a hermit. smithfield decretals. london, british library, Ms royal 10.e.iv, fol. 130v. © The british library board.

Studies in the History of Medieval Religion

Edited by cate Gunn and liz herbert Mcavoy

cate Gunn has taught in the continuing education and literature departments of the university of essex.

Medieval anchorites in their coMMunities

M

uch of the research into medieval anchoritism to date has focused primarily on its liminal and elite status within the socio-religious cultures of its day: the anchorite has long been depicted as both solitary and alone, almost entirely removed from community and living a life of permanent withdrawal and isolation, in effect dead to the world. considerably less attention has been afforded to the communal sociability that also formed part of the reclusive life during the period.

Medieval anchorites in their coMMunities 

Edited by cate Gunn and liz herbert Mcavoy

Studies in the History of Medieval Religion VOLUME XLV

medieval anchorites in their communities

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Studies in the History of Medieval Religion ISSN 0955–2480 Founding Editor Christopher Harper-­Bill Series Editor Frances Andrews

Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume

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medieval anchorites in their communities

Edited by Cate Gunn and Liz Herbert McAvoy

d. s. brewer

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©  Contributors 2017 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

First published 2017 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 978-1-84384-462-4   D. S. Brewer 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 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

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

This publication is printed on acid-free paper

For Dorothy Mary Gunn (1927–2015) and Richard Maxwell (1963–2015) In memoriam

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgements x List of Contributors xi Abbreviations xiv

Introduction: ‘No Such Thing as Society?’ Solitude in Community Cate Gunn and Liz Herbert McAvoy

  1 ‘O Sely Ankir!’ E. A. Jones

1 13

Part I. Religious Communities   2 The Anchoress of Colne Priory: A Solitary in Community Cate Gunn

37

  3 Anchorites in their Heavenly Communities Sophie Sawicka-Sykes

53

  4 Rule Within Rule, Cell Within Cloister: Grimlaicus’s Regula Solitariorum 68 Andrew Thornton OSB Part II. Lay Communities   5 English Nuns as ‘Anchoritic Intercessors’ for Souls in Purgatory: The Employment of A Revelation of Purgatory by Late Medieval English Nunneries for Their Lay Communities Clarck Drieshen

85

  6 ‘In aniversaries of ower leoveste freond seggeth alle nihene’: Anchorites, Chantries and Purgatorial Patronage in Medieval England 101 Michelle M. Sauer

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  7 ‘Item receyvyd of ye Anker’: The Relationships between a Parish and its Anchorites as Seen through the Churchwardens’ Accounts Clare M. Dowding   8 The Curious Incident of the Hermit in Fisherton James Plumtree   9 Was Julian’s Nightmare a Māre? Julian of Norwich and the Vernacular Community of Storytellers Godelinde Gertrude Perk

117 131

147

Part III. Textual Communities 10 Anchoritic Textual Communities and the Wooing Group Prayers Catherine Innes-Parker

167

11 The Anchoress Transformed: On wel swuðe god ureisun of God almihti and þe wohunge of ure lauerd in the Fourteenth-Century A Talkyng of the Love of God 183 Diana Denissen 12 Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours 199 Dorothy Kim Bibliography 221 Index 244

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Illustrations

E. A. Jones, ‘O Sely Ankir’. Fig. 1. Plan of the Tower, c. 1080 From a chapter by Edward Impey in The White Tower, ed. Edward Impey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), fig. 9 on p. 20. Drawing by Helen Jones. By permission. Fig. 2. ‘Recluses in Medieval Norwich’ From F. I. Dunn, ‘Hermits, Anchorites and Recluses: a study with reference to medieval Norwich’, in Julian and her Norwich, ed. Frank Dale Sayer (Norwich: Julian of Norwich 1973 Celebration Committee, 1973) Dorothy Kim, ‘Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours’ Fig. 1. Man making bed. © The British Library Board. London, British Library MS Egerton 1151, f. 93v Fig. 2. Decorated initial ‘D’. © The British Library Board. London, British Library MS Egerton 1151, f. 19v Fig. 3. Decorated initial ‘D’. © The British Library Board. London, British Library MS Egerton 1151, f. 42v Fig. 4. ‘Squatting man’. © The British Library Board. London, British Library MS Egerton 1151, f. 69v Fig. 5. ‘Naked Christian man’. © The British Library Board. London, British Library MS Egerton, f. 83r Fig. 6. ‘Naked Jewish man’. © The British Library Board. London, British Library MS Egerton, f. 155v

19

22

207 213 214 215 216 217

The editors, contributors and publishers are grateful to all the institutions and persons listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publishers will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

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Acknowledgements

T

he sociability of anchorites and their roles within the various types of communities with which they interacted have long been under debate within academic circles and at the forefront of our work, both as scholars and editors. Both of us, too, have been closely involved with the series of conferences on medieval anchorites, inaugurated in 2002 at Gregynog, Newton in Wales, where debates concerning anchorites and their material and spiritual environments began to take on greater momentum. This book reflects the latest in anchoritic scholarship, introducing new scholars alongside more seasoned ones to discuss the complex issue of anchoritic communal engagement throughout the Middle Ages. First and foremost, therefore, our thanks are due to all our contributors and to those other participants in the most recent conference on anchorites, ‘Medieval Anchorites in their Communities’, again held at Gregynog in 2015. Those contributing to this present volume have been remarkable in their rapid responses to editing requirements, requests for amendments and sometimes tight deadlines, making this c­ ollaborative venture a source of great pleasure. We would also like to express our thanks to Caroline Palmer for her continued interest in the work of anchoritic scholars and for her help and support in the production of this volume. Thanks are also due to the volume’s reader, both at proposal stage and in its final manuscript form. The constructive criticism, helpful suggestions and evidence of detailed scrutiny offered all served to strengthen the volume significantly, for which we remain most grateful. Gratitude is also due to the students at Swansea University, particularly at MA level, whose interested responses to anchoritic texts continue to provide new insights into old material and demonstrate the importance of listening to our student voices within the wider academic world. Finally, thanks are due to our families who, as ever, continue in their support as deadlines loom and personal pressures demand attention. Particularly in our thoughts are close relatives, Richard Maxwell and Dorothy Mary Gunn, who sadly died whilst this volume was coming to fruition. This book is dedicated to them.

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Contributors

Diana Denissen is completing her PhD project on late medieval devotional compilations at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). She is co-editor with Denis Renevey and Marleen Cré of ‘This Tretice by me Compiled’: Late Medieval Devotional Compilations in England (forthcoming, Brepols). Clare Dowding gained her PhD in late medieval English devotional literature from King’s College London in 2015. This study focused on the devotional text ‘The Fruyte of Redempcyon’, written by the London anchorite Symon Appulby (d. 1537). Clarck Drieshen completed an M. Res in Medieval Studies at Utrecht University with a thesis on devotion to the ‘auxiliary saints’ in late-medieval English manuscripts. He is currently completing a PhD at the University of Leeds, studying the function and transmission of visionary literature for devotional instruction between late medieval female religious communities. His research into devotional manuscripts now continues in an internship in Ancient, Early Modern and Medieval Manuscripts at the British library. Cate Gunn has published widely on devotional literature, including Ancrene Wisse: From Pastoral Literature to Vernacular Spirituality (2008), a monograph focusing on the early thirteenth-century English guide for anchoresses, Ancrene Wisse. She has also published essays on Edmund of Abingdon, Vices and Virtues and Julian of Norwich. With Catherine Innes-Parker she co-edited Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care (2009) as a festschrift for Bella Millett. She has taught in the Continuing Education and Literature Departments of the University of Essex. Catherine Innes-Parker is a Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Prince Edward Island. She has published widely on anchoritic literature and vernacular spirituality, including (edited with Cate Gunn) Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care (2009) and (edited with Naoe Kukita Yoshkiawa), Anchoritism in the Middle Ages: Texts and Traditions

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(2013). She has recently completed an edition and translation of the Wooing Group prayers and is currently working on an edition of the Middle English adaptation of Bonaventure’s Lignum Vitae. E. A. Jones is Associate Professor in English Medieval Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. He has published widely on the solitary vocations in late-medieval England, including most recently an edition of the Speculum Inclusorum/Mirror for Recluses for Liverpool University Press (2013). Dorothy Kim is Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College. She finished Jewish Christian Entanglements: Ancrene Wisse and its Material Worlds while at the Frankel Institute of Advanced Judaic Studies; it evaluates how the Middle English guidance text, Ancrene Wisse, rewrites the rise of English vernacularity in conjunction with the history of Jewish/Christian relations. She is also working on a second monograph entitled Crusader Rhetoric and the  Katherine Group and has published on the early Middle English manuscript, MS Royal 17 A.xxvii, and Matthew Paris’s Jerusalem itinerary in his Historia Anglorum manuscripts. As a digital humanist, she is project co-director for the Archive of Early Middle English, funded by an NEH Scholarly Editions and Translation Grant, and coeditor with Jesse Stommel of Disrupting the Digital Humanities (forthcoming, punctum books). Liz Herbert McAvoy is Professor of Medieval Literature at Swansea University. Her research interests include medieval women’s literature, female mysticism, enclosure and the anchoritic life. She has published widely in these areas, including Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (2004) and Medieval Anchoritism: Gender, Space and the Solitary Life (2011). She has also edited and co-edited a number of edited collection and special journal issues in these areas, including Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages  (with Mari HughesEdwards, 2005); Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure (2008); and Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe (2010). She is currently running a research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust, examining issues of gender and enclosure within the context of the m ­ edieval walled garden. Godelinde Gertrude Perk has recently received her PhD from Umeå University in northern Sweden. She has majored in both English and Psychology at the University of Amsterdam. Her PhD project investigated Julian of Norwich’s narrative strategies. Her research interests include northern European vernacular

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texts by women, medieval literary theory, visual and material culture, folklore and neuro-medievalism. James Plumtree is Assistant Professor at the American University of Central Asia (Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan) and a Central European University Global Teaching Fellow. He completed his PhD in Medieval Studies at CEU in 2014, focusing on theological and political biases present in chronicles depicting the death and burial of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman monarchs, 1066–1135. Recent and forthcoming ­publications concern medieval Hungary and its legacy. Michelle M. Sauer is Professor of English and Gender Studies at the University of North Dakota (Grand Forks, ND). She specializes in Middle English language and literature, especially women’s devotional literature and monastic texts, and publishes regularly on anchoritism, mysticism, hagiography, queer/gender theory, monasticism and Church history. Her publications include the books Gender in Medieval Culture (2015); with Diane Watt and Noreen Giffney, The Lesbian Premodern (2011); How to Write about Chaucer (2009); and The Companion to Pre-1600 British Poetry (2008), as well as numerous articles and essays. Sophie Sawicka-Sykes received her PhD from the School of History at the University of East Anglia in 2015. She studied English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, between 2007 and 2010, and received an MPhil in Medieval and Renaissance Literature from the same institution in 2011. Her PhD project examines topoi of choirs of angels and saints from late antiquity to the early twelfth century. Her research interests include hagiography, the liturgy and angelic song. Her forthcoming publication concerns demonic ‘anti-music’. Bro. Andrew Thornton, OSB, is a monk of Saint Anselm Abbey in Manchester, NH, and Associate Professor of German (Emeritus) at Saint Anselm College where he taught German language and ancient Chinese philosophy. He holds a PhD in German Studies and Humanities from Stanford University. He has translated the tenth-century Rule for Solitaries by Grimlaicus and the poems of the twelfth-century recluse, Ava, the first woman to write in a European vernacular.

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Abbreviations

CCSL EETS   e.s.   o.s HMSO JMRC MED MGH MLR ODNB PL RES VCH

Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina Early English Text Society Extra Series Original Series His/Her Majesty’s Stationery Office Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures Middle English Dictionary Monumenta Germania Historica Modern Language Review Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Patrologia Latina, ed. J-P Migne, 221 vols (Paris, 1844–64) Review of English Studies Victoria County History

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Introduction: ‘No Such Thing as Society’? Solitude in Community CATE GUNN AND LIZ HERBERT McAVOY

A

nchorites live a life in solitude. Solitude and community seem to be in opposition to one another; indeed, many early Christians withdrew from Roman society, a society founded on city life, in order to live in solitude in the desert.1 But this was not a total rejection of all society; as more Christians were attracted to the desert, monasteries formed, and although they remained removed from mainstream society, this withdrawal took place with the support of a community. For Cassian (d. 435), one of the first Christian ‘anchorites’, his period in the desert was a training for his vocation, which involved establishing monastic communities in France for men and women in the fifth century.2 In the sixth century, Benedict (d. c. 547) described anchorites as monks who, having been trained in the community, were able to pursue a solitary vocation.3 This type of interdependent relationship between solitaries and communities continued throughout the Middle Ages in complex and multivalent ways – as essays in this collection serve to illustrate. However, as many contemporary scholars have begun to point out, there is no impenetrable firewall between the Middle Ages and the modern period and while we inevitably study the Middle Ages through

Diana Webb, Privacy and Solitude in the Middle Ages (London, 2007), p. 21. For a detailed study of Cassian, his writings and theology, see Columba Hart, Cassian the Monk (New York and Oxford, 1998).  3 Much has been written on Benedict and his rule, but for a detailed overview see, for example, Adalbert de Vogüé, Saint Benedict: The Man and his Work, trans. Gerald Marlsbary (Petersham, MA, 2006). For an examination of both Cassian and Benedict in the context of medieval anchoritism and gendered language of enclosure, see Liz Herbert McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space and the Solitary Life (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 1–42.  1  2

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the prism of our present age, that study can also illuminate our own communities and societies.4 Margaret Thatcher’s infamous declaration in 1987 that ‘there is no such thing as society’5 and David Cameron’s more recent idea of a ‘Big Society’6 suggest a continuing interest and concern with the notion of society, what it means for individuals living within – or rejected by – that society, especially in the face of the expanding and constantly evolving societies and their communities now generated by explosions in digital and communications technologies, the internet and myriad new media platforms in recent years. Every day, sizeable and world-changing global communities are being produced by countless individuals in communication with countless other individuals, whether in densely packed urban centres or remote, isolated settlements; in busy airports and internet cafes or small, single bedsits. More than ever before, or so the story goes, whilst frequently physically alone, individuals are nevertheless grouping together to form – and find strength in – new communities and societies worldwide. While some individuals, especially those for whom relationships with virtual communities is replacing physical contact, may ultimately be alone and lonely, the overlap and interaction between the physical and the ‘virtual’ is highly complex, creating a nexus that we are only just beginning to comprehend. Belonging to a community as part of a wider ‘society’ therefore remains important for many, especially in terms of their own identity formation. In claiming that society was nothing but a collection of individuals, Thatcher rejected the notion of an entity greater than the sum of its parts while also denying the tension which allows individuals to exert their autonomy over and against the society in which they exist and within which they glean their identity. A study of medieval society, however, provides a different model; indeed, a number of the essays collected here demonstrate the extent to which the individual is defined in terms of his or her society, however active interaction with it may be. Whilst the very idea On the presence of the medieval past in the contemporary now, see, for example, Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham, NC and London, 1998); Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (Chicago, IL and London, 2005); and, more recently, Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC and London, 2012).  5 For Thatcher, society and the forms of communal living associated with it, boiled down to ‘individual men and women . . . and families [who] must look to themselves first’. Margaret Thatcher, the UK’s first female prime minister, made these comments on 31 October, speaking to Women’s Own magazine; the interview is available at: www. margaretthatcher.org/document/106689. Accessed 22 January 2016.  6 BBC News item, 10 July 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-10680062. Accessed 23 February 2016.  4

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introduction

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of ‘being’ a solitary suggests individuality, in Thatcherite terms the notion of the individual was a celebration and promotion of individual selfhood (ultimately attracting accusations of selfishness).7 In the Middle Ages, however, the solitary sought to transcend the self, rather than embrace it, ultimately shedding it in order to reach a state of perfection. In many of the essays in this volume, this apparent paradox, as well as that attached to solitude within community, is challenged, dissolved or resolved as the relationship between a solitary and his or her interaction with community is examined. To the medieval mind it was a commonplace that solitude is a state of being that can be readily attained within the social setting of community – and that communities ultimately evolve out of solitude. Such a growth of community out of solitude was a basic tenet of the early anchoritic life, as already mentioned above. In other influential religious contexts, too – demonstrated in the Confessions of Saint Augustine (d. 430), for example, or Bernard of Clairvaux’s (d. 1153) sermons on the Song of Songs – the need for a looking inward by the individual Christian in order to be able to look beyond the self in a changed way is also emphasised, whether that was an outward-looking towards the existing community or a transcendent gaze towards God. The confessional narrative exemplifying the need to transform the self in the light of both internal and external scrutiny is therefore anything but contemporary and was embraced by men and women alike (despite women’s being cast ideologically as fleshly, sinful, non-rational beings by generations of male exegetes).8 The capacity of medieval women for such inward contemplation has recently been highlighted by concerted examination of previously ignored femaleauthored writings, greatly increasing our understanding of the roles played by solitude and community within contemplative practices that were often gendered female.9 Such contemplation frequently led to episodes of heightened individual illumination and, ultimately, when pursued rigorously, fusion with the Godhead. Interestingly, the earliest entry for selfish in the OED (online) dates from the seventeenth century: ‘In Hacket’s life of Archbishop Williams, Scrinia Reserata (1693) ii. §136, the word is said to be of the Presbyterians’ ‘own new mint’; it is used in reference to events of the year 1641’: www.oed.com/view/Entry/175306?redirectedFrom=selfish&. Accessed 15 February 2016.  8 The literature on this is now extensive, but for a comprehensive overview, see Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1993); and Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA and London, 1990).  9 For the influence of women’s spirituality upon late-medieval affective religious beliefs and practices, see Sarah McNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia, PA, 2009). See also the essays collected in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c. 1100–1500, ed. Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout, 2010)  7

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Moreover, this deep level of contemplation was not confined to monastic environments: laywomen and, sometimes, laymen were also subject to contemplative ecstasies from the twelfth century onwards, experiences which seem also to have had a profound effect upon the history of late-medieval religiosity. Now, affective and bodily expressions of a personalised devotional piety allied themselves to the personalised practices of others, to take up centre stage in new communal configurations of Christian piety.10 The role – or even the possibility – of the ‘individual’ within medieval culture is something that has long been subject to scrutiny within academic circles, reaching a tipping point, perhaps, upon publication in 1980 of Caroline Walker Bynum’s pivotal essay, ‘Did the Twelfth-Century Invent the Individual?’11 In this essay, Bynum both questioned and problematised the arguments of previous commentators such as Colin Morris and R. W. Southern, both of whom regarded the twelfth century in the West as having produced a new awareness of the self that was ultimately deleterious to the life of community.12 This was also the century in which, according to Georges Duby, an increase in privacy in both domestic life and personal devotions can be detected.13 The main focus of these and similar studies challenged by Bynum’s work had tended towards the religious pieties of male monastic life, extrapolating out from that context a general ‘one size fits all’ conclusion that entirely overlooked the contribution made by groups of female religious and other women. Bynum’s essay, however, argued that new social groupings and burgeoning new religious orders and communities during the period meant that ‘people now had ways of talking about groups as groups, roles as roles, and about group formation’. For Bynum, this, in turn, meant that ‘[t]he discovery of self in all its aspects went hand in hand with the discovery of models and the discovery of community’.14 Viewed from this perspective, the individual and the surrounding community were commensurate as part of a process of mutual engagement, understanding Again, the literature on such women’s writing is too extensive to document here, but for an overview of women’s writing in Britain during the period, see The History of British Women’s Writing: Vol. 1 700–1500, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt (Basingstoke and New York, 2012). 11 Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Invent the Individual?’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31.1 (1980), 1–17. 12 Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual: 1050–1200 (New York, 1973); and R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London and New Haven, CT, 1953; rev. edn London, 2007). 13 Georges Duby, ‘Solitude: Eleventh to Thirteenth Century’, in A History of Private Life II: Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1988), pp. 509–33. 14 Bynum, ‘Twelfth Century’, 15 and 16. 10

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and development. To belong was both personal and communal – and belonging was clearly understood in those terms. Bynum’s perceptive essay in many ways also served also to unpick the type of paradox that later medievalists have come to recognise as fully inherent not only to medieval life and social structures but any life and social structure. Indeed, the Middle Ages spawned a delight in such paradox, along with its local resolutions: Christ as both God and man, humble and exalted; Mary as both virgin and mother, same and other; Christ’s and Mary’s bodily assumptions into heaven, both able to transcend the fleshly prison of humanity which they shared.15 This is especially true of the life lived by the medieval anchorite, whose prescribed raison d’être, as defined in the high Middle Ages in texts such as Ancrene Wisse, was an ideological solitude that was personal, perpetual and fixed, played out within a small, walled-up cell, with God as sole companion. While ‘anchorite’ is the term used in this introduction for this model of the solitary life, it is a term that has a history. Derived from a Greek word meaning ‘withdrawal’, Tom Licence has suggested that it is ‘an umbrella label for ascetics who embraced withdrawal, either at liberty (hermits) or in the confines of a cell (recluses)’.16 Some of these essays’ contributors use alternative terms: Andrew Thornton uses the term ‘recluse’ for a solitary enclosed within a monastery and Sophie Sawicka-Sykes follows this usage with reference to Eve of Wilton who, like the Grimlaicus of whom Thornton is writing, belongs to the early Middle Ages; at the other end of the historical spectrum, Clare Dowding uses the term ‘recluse’ to identify the secular solitaries enclosed at a city church in the sixteenth century, recluses who are nevertheless referred to in contemporary documents as anchorites. This suggests something of the complexity, indeterminacy and dynamism of the solitary life and its relation to community. Indeterminacy amounting to ambiguity is also apparent in James Plumtree’s account of the hermit in Fisherton: he may have been a false hermit, but he was still a hermit. Solitude itself was not necessarily permanent or absolute, then:17 whether the anchorite’s withdrawal was actual or largely symbolic it rarely involved total isolation. Rather, while being set apart, the anchorite also occupied a pivotal role at the heart of the local community: as role-model, confidante, intercessor and spiritual healer. In physical terms, too, the anchorite’s existence was utterly dependent upon the community’s response to those roles, not only in terms of patronage but

For an interesting and illuminating study of the complex language and paradox arising from the incarnation, see Cristina Maria Cervone, Middle English Writing and the Leap of Love (Philadelphia, PA, 2012). 16 Tom Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–1200 (Oxford, 2011), p. 11. 17 Licence, Hermits and Recluses, p. 16. 15

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also in terms of food provision, personal care and, in the case of women, spiritual supervision. To date, those significant studies of medieval anchorites undertaken have focused on issues largely extraneous to their communal identities. The formative work of Rotha Mary Clay and Ann K. Warren, for example, whilst fundamental to all later examinations of this extraordinary way of life, served to illuminate the anchorite within largely historical and topographical contexts;18 and, whilst Warren’s work, particularly on anchoritic patronage, identified those ways in which the anchorite sustained a living by means of individual donation and bequest, to glean a strong sense of the anchorite as an interactive – indeed, proactive – participant within the life of a much wider community or communities was not part of her principal endeavour. Later studies, however, began to build on the work of both Clay and Warren, inching towards the type of conclusions drawn by the contributors to this present volume. Some, for example, began to focus on anchoritism’s remarkable gender differentials, an aspect noted by Warren but left relatively closed in terms of discussion and analysis.19 In these studies, female anchoritism began to be viewed as rather distinct from its male equivalent, forming what McAvoy has termed ‘an inexorable “woman’s movement”’ from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries within the European West.20 These findings have also been supported by the exhaustive work of Anneke Mulder-Bakker on the anchoresses of the Low Countries whose influence upon both local and international communities – social, religious and political – she has carefully documented.21 More recently, in her detailed study of those guidance texts specifically written for anchoritic use between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, Mari HughesEdwards chose to include all the guidance texts that were originally for women ‘so that the book can make conclusive arguments about the basis of the ideological constructions of the vocation for at least one gender’, while also including some

Rotha Mary Clay, Hermits and Anchorites of Medieval England (London, 1914); Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, CA, 1985). 19 The first of these was Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-Edwards (Cardiff, 2005; new edn 2009), followed by Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure (Cardiff, 2008). 20 McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms, p. 179. 21 Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe, trans. Myra Heerspink Scholz (Philadelphia, PA, 2005). For further evidence of the preponderance of women taking up the anchoritic vocation in Western European regions, see Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, 2010). 18

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guidance intended for men.22 This study demands that we consider the anchoritic life as having been ideologically shaped by such texts, but that we should remain open to the fact that ideology and lived practices are very often at odds with one another – in fact, subject to the same type of paradoxes mentioned above. For Hughes-Edwards, the medieval anchorite had to be seen as individual, apart and isolated but had also to be readily available for the types of social interactions demanded of her by the community too. In Hughes-Edwards’s apposite words: ‘Despite the continued centrality of its comparative physical isolation, the [anchoritic] guides have been shown to site the anchoritic vocation within the wider Christian community, in terms of shared spiritual ideals and practices.’23 Building on these previous treatments of the topic, then, Medieval Anchorites in their Communities offers for the first time a broad examination of anchorites’ interactions with a whole range of different communities, whether immediate and tangible (as in the congregations of the church to which the cell – or ‘reclusory’ – may have been physically attached); textual (as in those who used the various anchoritic guides across the centuries or at any given time, or those who shared their own writings and those of others); or spiritual (as in those inhabiting a shared identity as lover of Christ, communicator with the angels and emulator of the saints). The aim of the volume is therefore to break new ground in demonstrating the extent to which anchorites in fact played a central role within the devotional life of the community and to attest to their frequent involvement in local, national – and, sometimes, international – matters of great importance. In so doing, it will reclaim the medieval anchorite as operating, not on the periphery as has generally been considered, but at the very heart of a variety of communities – synchronic, diachronic, physical, metaphysical, racial, religious, secular, textual and gendered. The particular strength of the essays here lies in their cross-disciplinary approaches and methodologies, combining in seamless ways evidence from literature, history, religious studies, archaeology, art history, theology and folklore, concentrating very often on lesser-known or hitherto unexamined sources to support their arguments. This wealth of evidence old and new demonstrates unequivocally that anchorites operated readily within both solitary and communal contexts, playing a central role within the rich complexities of medieval life, whether rural or urban. In this way, just as the traditional conflation of anchoritism with life-long solitude is brought into question as a lived ‘reality’, so traditional understandings of the medieval practices of solitude more widely Hughes-Edwards chose the guides for women since ‘female recluses commonly outnumbered their male counterparts’. See Mari Hughes-Edwards, Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practices (Cardiff, 2012), p. 9. 23 Hughes-Edwards, Reading Medieval Anchoritism, p. 109. 22

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are thrown into relief and are rethought, pointing towards the myriad ways in which a deep and intense ‘aloneness’ could nevertheless be pursued in the midst of the ‘white-noise’ of community. The volume opens with an essay by E. A. Jones that incorporates many of the above concerns, and deals with many of the themes which run throughout the volume examining the various collocations of aristocratic power and the solitary vocation in late-medieval English culture. Covering a wide range of sources, from courtly literature to architecture and material culture to hagiography, Jones’s discussion also includes copious information regarding the cells of those anchorites enclosed within the precincts of a busy castle – a phenomenon that, as he points out, has been almost entirely neglected within anchoritic scholarship. In so doing, Jones’s essay addresses the question raised by a good number of subsequent essays: whether the ideological liminality of the anchorite and his/her withdrawal into the cell at the heart of the aristocratic castle serves to critique the tenets of secular power or else reinforce them. Anchoritism as a type of critique (or, to use a term coined by John D. Barbour, a ‘critical practice’) that enables a society, by projection, to view its own practices from an entirely different perspective, also constitutes a recurring theme in the other essays contained in this volume.24 Far from being mere symbols or figureheads to any given community, the anchorites and their texts featured in all three Parts following on from Jones’s essay in this volume consistently demonstrate their ability to cast those communities in a new light. Part I, focusing on the anchorite’s interaction with and within religious communities. begins with Cate Gunn’s appraisal of an all but invisible anchoress who may well have been attached to the Benedictine community of Colne Priory in the thirteenth century. Drawing together the circumstantial evidence of manuscript traces and those material remains identified by modern geo-physical technology, Gunn reads this unnamed anchoress with comparison to other anchorites and with reference to contemporary guidance texts – Speculum Religiosum by Edmund of Abingdon, the early twelfth-century dialogue Vices and Virtues and the anonymous Ancrene Wisse, perhaps the best known of the extant texts written specifically for a group of anchoresses during the same period – while also acknowledging the place of this particular individual in a long history of anchoritism. In so doing, Gunn argues for anchoritic solitude’s being understood more as a withdrawal from selfhood into inward contemplation, rather than withdrawal from community into a physical isolation within a lonely cell. The question of what sorts of communal interaction take place when the John D. Barbour, The Value of Solitude: The Ethics and Spirituality of Aloneness in Autobiography (Charlottesville, VA and London, 2004), p. 201.

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anchorite has achieved a measure of contemplation is addressed by Sophie Sawicka- Sykes in the following essay. Here Sawicka-Sykes presents the reader with two models for the contemplative anchorite’s interaction with angelic and other heavenly entities: what she terms the ‘Spatio-Celestial’ and ‘Biblio-Celestial’ models of communing. In the first, levels of both meditation and contemplation must be attained in order to bring the anchorite in contact with the angelic; in the second, the reading of sacred literature positions the anchorite alongside those figures from holy scripture about whom they read, enabling them to effect contact via intense textual mediation and self-identification. The final essay of Part I, by Andrew Thornton, focuses on the earliest anchoritic guidance text known to us, dating from the late tenth century. It details the contents and direction of the guidance to institutional male recluses proffered by Grimlaicus in his Regula Solitariorum, a work based on Benedict’s Rule but adapted for those wishing to live a life of more concerted withdrawal and solitude. However, as a text comprising a mixture of exhortation, homily, personal insight and prescription, it is, in Thornton’s estimation, rather than being devised to guide the solitary desiring to live within a coenobium, ultimately more concerned with assisting the coenobite wanting to live a more reclusive form of the ­monastery’s own practices of observance. The book’s second part, ‘Lay Communities’, opens with an essay by Clarck Drieshen discussing a fifteenth-century visionary text known as A Revelation of Purgatory, hitherto thought to have been authored by a female anchorite in Winchester. This text details a visionary encounter of the anchoritic author with the soul of a friend in purgatory. Read to date alongside the writing of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe as another example of late-medieval women’s writing in England, Drieshen brings entirely new manuscript evidence to bear upon this assessment, claiming this as a formulaic text able to be adopted and adapted by religious communities of women to facilitate and enhance their intercessionary credentials and encourage lay donors to contribute money in anticipation of prayers to be said after their own deaths. For Drieshen, therefore, the ‘anchoritic’ protagonist of this text becomes a figure with whom religious women could identify, allowing also for the laity in turn to identify with the suffering soul. In both cases, the text would have been able to bring about new interactions between the laity and their local religious communities and/or solitaries. Michelle Sauer’s essay picks up where Drieshen’s essay leaves off, focusing on a variety of communities emanating from the laity with whom both the rural and the urban anchorite would have interacted. This essay examines in particular the hitherto ignored issue of friendship forged between anchorites and members of the lay community, focusing upon its mutual contractual obligations and transactional inclinations. Developing this idea with a carefully examined case study, Clare

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Dowding’s essay brings such obligations and transactions into strong relief in her study of the provisions to the community made by a series of anchorites attached to the church of All Hallows, London Wall, between 1455 and 1536. Focusing on the churchwardens’ accounts during this period, Dowding illuminates the type of paradox associated with the anchoritic life mentioned above by arguing that those wishing to withdraw into the solitary life actually ended up as much dependent upon the surrounding community as that community was upon them – and frequently in very tangible and pecuniary ways. Indeed, the inherent dangers of such mutual interdependence are dramatically illuminated by James Plumtree in the essay that follows Dowding’s. Here, Plumtree offers the example of a ‘false’ hermit who set himself up as priest in the small village of Fisherton Anger in Wiltshire in 1348, immediately after the Black Death began to wreak its destruction in the area. Using this hermit as a focus, Plumtree proceeds to examine the various social, ecclesiastical and geographical elements that allowed such ‘impersonation’ of the semi-regulated holy life to go unchecked, arguing ultimately for a ‘porous’ relationship between the hermit, the community and the church hierarchy. Forms of impersonation also loom large in the final essay in this part – that of Godelinde Perk – who argues for the encounter with the fiend, as recorded by the fourteenthand fifteenth-century mystic, Julian of Norwich (d. c. 1416), as being closely allied to folkloric beliefs about the māre or nightmarish attacks by what resembles, to all intents and purposes, an incubus. As Perk’s analysis demonstrates, this episode reveals Julian’s engagement with a variety of ‘discourse communities’ – including the official, orthodox beliefs of the church regarding demonic attack, those unofficial beliefs inherited from communal folkloric tales and the grey area in between the two positions. In discussing the development of Julian’s account of this episode between her Short and Long Text accounts, Perk argues for Julian’s delicate negotiation between these apparently conflicting but ultimately compatible communities of discourse where Julian can be seen at her most creative and authoritative. The final part of this book aptly turns to textual communities, with all three of its essays focusing on allied groups of texts emanating from, or connected with, the best-known anchoritic text of them all, the early thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse. Whilst covering a widely discussed group of texts, all three essays provide new and important inroads into our understanding of them, both in their original forms and in their appropriated and adapted manifestations as they appeared in the fifteenth century. First, Catherine Innes-Parker examines the circulation of the ‘Wooing Group’ of anchoritic texts, drawing upon research resulting from her recent production of a new edition and translation of these texts.25 Here, The Wooing of Our Lord and the Wooing Group of Prayers, ed. and trans. Catherine Innes-Parker (Peterborough, Ont., 2015).

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Innes-Parker argues for far wider circulation of the texts than has hitherto been understood, although it still remains unclear exactly who was reading them. Innes-Parker’s findings, however, suggest that, whilst the immediate audience was clearly primarily an anchoritic one, the texts nevertheless reached a wide lay readership during the later Middle Ages, presenting evidence for a much wider textual community than has been considered before. Next, Diana Denissen examines fourteenth-century borrowings from the Wooing Group texts, as they emerge in the late-medieval compilation, A Talkyng of the Love of God. Here Denissen demonstrates how close examination of the ‘compiling strategies’ of the later texts allows for valuable insight to be gleaned from the fourteenth-century reception of earlier anchoritic texts and their discourses, revealing also the intertextual links the compiler brought to the reading of his sources. Finally, Dorothy Kim asks entirely new questions of Ancrene Wisse, reading it for the first time alongside a mid-thirteenth-century Oxford Book of Hours (London, British Library MS Egerton 1151). In particular, Kim investigates the ways in which religious dialogues between the laity and female religious textual communities form and mutate in complex entanglements, and how these entanglements manifest themselves in text and image. Most importantly for anchoritic studies, Kim’s essay focuses on images of Jewishness inherent to both texts, with the graphic iconography of Jewishness in the Egerton manuscript demonstrating the dense theoretical ­complexities of thirteenth-century English Jewish–Christian relations. The new ground covered in all twelve essays contained within this volume speaks cogently to the so-called ‘ethical turn’ within all areas of medieval studies in recent years. As the volume’s contributors demonstrate, far from being concerns manifesting themselves during a period at the far end of a dark ‘spectrum’ before the onset of a more ‘enlightened’ modernity, the pressing paradoxes inherent to the synchronic and diachronic coexistence of solitude and community in the Middle Ages have much to say to a contemporary world. Within our own epoch, once again new technologies of the ‘virtual’ generate new paradoxical and entangled ‘communities’ on a daily basis, asking again for concerted reappraisal of the meanings of ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘solitude’ and ‘community’, along with ideas of individuality. Once again, too, these communities of discourse both join people together and simultaneously consolidate their isolation from one another. Whilst the internet has been blamed for problems associated with physical isolation, its use enables those who choose to live in solitude to remain in contact with a large community. In October 2015, the Independent newspaper published a full-page profile of ‘a very modern hermit’, Sister Rachel Denton, a Benedictine nun who sought the life of an anchorite, having rejected her former life as a novice within a Carmelite convent (‘Their tagline was “solitude in community”’ she tells us, adding: ‘I loved the solitude but not the community’). Sister Denton now lives

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in ‘solitude’ and ‘seclusion’ in a terraced house in Lincolnshire (‘For me, that silence is where I can best meet God’).26 She does, however, have a ‘window on the world’: and, although a comparison is made with the window through which Julian of Norwich communicated with the world, Sister Denton’s ‘window’ is the internet.27 The ‘critical practice’ of Sister Denton’s own individual expression of anchoritism, therefore, serves, amongst other things, to redefine for the twentyfirst century what it means to be simultaneously communal, silent and alone.

‘Facebook, Twitter, online shopping: the tools of a very modern hermit’, The Independent, 24 October 2015, p. 21. 27 www.stcuthbertshouse.co.uk/about.html/ 26

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Chapter 1

‘O Sely Ankir’ E. A. JONES

T

he poems of Charles d’Orléans (d. 1465) are well known for their employment of imagery – natural enough in their author’s circumstances – of exile, solitude and imprisonment. Many of the better known among them are also marked by a playful mix of religious forms with erotic content (one thinks of the much-anthologised ‘My gostly fader I me confesse. . .’). Thus, while it remains a surprise to find a courtly lyric making use of anchoritic imagery, there is a certain inevitability to Charles’s comparison of himself, in Ballade 97 of his English narrative-cum-lyric sequence Fortunes Stabilnes, to an anchorite in his cell. Here is the poem in full:   5

O sely1 Ankir, that in thi selle Iclosid [enclosed] art with stoon and gost not out, Thou maist ben gladder so forto dwelle Then y with wanton [undisciplined] wandryng þus abowt That haue me pikid amongis þe rowt [crowd] An endles woo withouten recomfort, That of my poore lijf y stonde in dowt. Go, dul complaynt, my lady þis report.

10

The anker hath no more him forto greue Then sool alone vpon the wallis stare, But, welaway, y stonde in more myscheef, For he hath helthe and y of helthe am bare, And more and more when y come where þer are Of fayre folkis to se a goodly sort –

The translation of sely is notoriously slippery. At this date, it includes senses of ‘happy’, ‘naïve’ and ‘blissfully ignorant’ – we think of the sely carpenter in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale.

 1

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e. a. jones 15 A thousand fold that doth encrese my care. Go, dull complaynt, my lady þis report. 20

It doth me thynke, ‘Yondir is fayre of face, But, what, more fayre yet is my ladi dere. Yond on is small, and yonde streight sidis has; Her foot is lite, and she hath eyen clere But all ther staynyd my lady [my lady would eclipse], were she here.’ Thus thynke y, lo, which doth me discomfort, Not for the sight but for y nare [might not be] hir nere. Go, dull complaynt, my lady þis report.

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Wo worthe them which þat raft [deprived] me hir presence! Wo worth the tyme to y to hir resort! Wo worthis me to be thus in absence! Go, dull complaynt, my lady þis report.2

The ballade uses anchoritic imagery in a particularly interesting way, but it is not unique in Charles’s English output. Charles d’Orléans is still perhaps not so familiar a figure to English readers as his historical importance and literary merits ought to require. He was born in 1394, the grandson of Charles V of France and nephew of Charles VI. In 1415 he was captured at Agincourt and spent the next twenty-five years in captivity in England. Released in 1440, he lived for another twenty-five years, and his son (born in 1462, when he was sixty-seven and his third wife Marie, thirty-seven) went on to become king of France as Louis XII. Though a captive in England, Charles was never imprisoned as such, but entrusted to the custody of a succession of aristocratic ‘keepers’ who included, most famously, William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk and husband of Alice Chaucer. During this period, he started to write English poetry, first translating or reworking poems he had originally written in French, but then increasingly composing in the language of his forcibly adopted country.3 Almost all of his English poems are contained in a single contemporary manuscript book, British Library, MS Harley 682. What was in earlier scholarship Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of Orleans’s English Book of Love, ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Binghamton, NY, 1994), B97 (lines 5784–811).  3 He is claimed for England by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: see the entry by Mary-Jo Arn, on which this summary is based. See also Arn’s Introduction to Fortunes Stabilnes. On Charles’s keepers, see William Askins, ‘The Brothers Orléans and their Keepers’, in Charles d’Orléans in England (1415–1440), ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 27–45.  2

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treated merely as a collection of Charles’s English poems has, since Mary-Jo Arn’s edition of 1994, been recognised as a single work: three lyric sequences (two sets of ballades either side of a collection of rondels) in a continuous narrative frame. Arn gives it the title Fortunes Stabilnes, though her subtitle is also important: Charles of Orléans’s English Book of Love. In the first sequence, Charles (or ‘Charles’4) falls in love in time-honoured courtly fashion: summoned by Youth to the royal castle of the God of Love, he is wounded through the eye and to the heart by Beauty before being accepted as feudal vassal into the God of Love’s service. Less conventionally, in Ballade 55 of this first sequence of 74, the Lady becomes ill and dies, and the remaining lyrics of the sequence are poems of mourning. The second section begins with a dream vision in which Age tells him that he should now put love behind him. On waking, he seeks out the God of Love and petitions to be released from his vow, asking that Love will ‘graunt him haue ageyne his sely hert’ (2768). Reluctantly the God of Love accedes and Charles retires to the castle of No Care, where he invites his friends to a banquet at which ‘Instede of mete,’ he says, ‘y fede yow shall with song’ (3115). As dainty dishes (like quail and lark) are the ‘swettist mete’ (3119), his songs will be short: the menu consists of ninety-six rondels, mostly on the theme of love. And so Charles might have remained, holed up in the castle of No Care, in a state of exquisite listlessness, mourning his dead lover, and producing the occasional complaint, ballade or rondel at a friend’s request. Having rehearsed one such complaint, however, he falls asleep and another transformative dream vision ensues. He is looking out over the sea when he starts to make out ‘A lady nakid all thing saue hir here’ [hair] (4760). At first he does not recognise her, until she calls him by his name and tells him she has come to repay the service that (like Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde) he has done for those who serve her. It is Venus, of course, and Charles, ashamed not only at having failed to recognise her, but at his prolonged neglect of her service since the death of his beloved, immediately submits himself to her mercy. She will not let him off so lightly, instead demanding brusquely, ‘how lede ye yowre lijf? Good, lete vs se.’ To this he responds, ‘As an ancre, Madame, in clothis blake’ (4801–2). This accords with Venus’s own observations. As she says: So thynkith me ye haue professioun take Or ellis ye cast to fonde sum ordir newe, For strike [struck out] ye are from Rosett [russet] out and blewe. (4803–5) How far the narrator of the poem is to be identified with its historical author has been a well-worn question within Charles d’Orléans studies (indeed, for a long time it seems to have been virtually the only question), but it is not important to my argument.

 4

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He agrees that he no longer has any use for the gay colours of the lover, but rather ‘to my deth in blak mysilf y bide’ (4812). ‘Whi so?’ she asks. ‘Dwelle ye not in No Care?’ And he answers: Soth, dwelle y so lijk as a masid [deranged] man That hath a bidyng [dwelling-place] and wot not where, For though y whilom [sometime] fer from Sorow ran Yet wol he lo for ought þat evyr y kan, Be with me, to and to, wil y or no, And as my frend thus cherisshe y my fo! (4814–19)

‘But how is hit?’ wonders Venus, ‘How cometh he to yow so? / Ye dwelle asondir fer.’ ‘Nay! sothely, nere,’ Charles responds, going on to detail how every place he visits reminds him of his dead love, and he spends his life in prayer, meditation and a Troilus-like veneration of relics of his beloved, kissing the bare walls: ‘Or ellis a glove or smokke y from hir stale’ (4853). ‘Vnto this paynfull ded ­professioun,’ he declares, Mi hert and y are swore vnto my last Withouten chaunge or newe opynyoun, (4855–7)

before concluding Thus haue y told yow my poore ancre lijf And what professioun that y am to bounde (4862–3)

adding only a sardonic ‘How thenke ye lo nys hit contemplatijf?’ [‘That’s pretty contemplative don’t you think?’] (4864). Needless to say, Venus does not agree, and recommends the taking of a new lover, which – with a little persuasion from Fortune – Charles duly does, thus instigating his new love affair, and the manuscript’s final ballade sequence. The comparison of the mourning lover with the anchorite is well taken, and many of the details in the extended metaphor hit the mark: the closing equation of the anchoritic with the contemplative life; the penitential ‘clothis blake’, and the daily devotions; the irrevocable profession, ‘vnto my last, / Withouten chaunge or newe opynyoun’; the alienation from others (‘Ye dwelle a-sondir fer’) and from self, in virtual madness (‘lijk as a masid man’) and death: ‘this paynfulle ded professioun’.5 ‘O Sely Ankir’ offers a more surprising take on the lover-as-solitary  5

Charles also uses imagery of the hermitage. See Fortunes Stabilnes, B43 (‘My poore hert bicomen is hermyte / In hermytage of Thoughtfull Fantase’), and a rondel that appears

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theme than this, acknowledging but moving beyond the easy identification of the anchorite as a prisoner. But if the whole ballade represents an elaboration of the question that ends Part I of that other study of love and imprisonment, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale (‘Who hath the worse’? – the imprisoned Palamon or the banished Arcite?), Charles, unlike Chaucer, leaves the answer to his demande d’amour in no doubt: ‘Thou maist ben gladder.../ Then y’ (3–4).6 This easy – even facetious – attitude to a vocation modern scholars are wont to approach with reverent dread – and non-specialists with little less than horror – is certainly striking, if not shocking. Charles doubtless meant it to startle his contemporaries too. But, perhaps, only up to a point. Charles’s comparison is certainly revealing in its witness to a consciousness of the anchoritic vocation at the heart of courtly culture, but it is a consciousness that runs only so deep. Once Charles has stated categorically in his second stanza that ‘Y stonde in more myscheef’ (11), the ‘sely ankir’ is quickly discarded; he is not mentioned again in the poem. In this courtly text, the anchoritic vocation never threatens to be anything other than subservient to courtly culture. When, however, we examine the converse instance – the use of courtly or feudal imagery in anchoritic texts – we find that the effect is not reciprocal. When Ancrene Wisse introduces its allegory of the lord wooing the Christian soul, or Julian of Norwich her example of a lord and a servant, it is not to suggest any lack or insufficiency in aristocratic lordship or the structures of bastard feudalism;7 nor is there any of the playfulness with which Charles is able to treat the hierarchy of aristocratic and anchoritic forms of life. Indeed, in their equation of temporal with eternal majesty, the anchoritic allegories privilege courtly culture every bit as much as ‘O Sely Ankir’ does. So what is the relationship between anchoritism and court culture or central power? This is the question that I intend to explore in this essay, in a range of cultural forms from the English late Middle Ages.

only in the autograph manuscript of his French poems, ‘Myn hert hath send glad hope in hys message’ (printed in an appendix by Arn, p. 387): ‘myn hert yn ermytage / Of thoght shalle dwele a lone.’ His use of the Middle English ‘desert’ may also have this reference (see the Old French desert, hermitage) in R94, B27. A longer study could take in these examples, too.  6 On the subgenre of medieval prison poetry more generally, see Julia Boffey, ‘Chaucerian Prisoners: The Context of the Kingis Quair’, in Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London, 1991), pp. 84–102, and The Kingis Quair and Other Prison Poems, ed. Linne R. Mooney and Mary-Jo Arn (Kalamazoo, MI, 2005).  7 For this, see Alexandra Barratt, ‘Lordship, Service and Worship in Julian of Norwich’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Exeter Symposium VII, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 177–88.

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I A hundred years ago, in her Hermits and Anchorites of England, Rotha Mary Clay was much concerned with the classification of medieval English solitaries. Her taxonomy of medieval hermits pays particular attention to their habitat. Thus, we have (to run through her chapter titles) ‘Island and fen recluses’, ‘Forest and hillside hermits’, ‘Cave dwellers’, ‘Lightkeepers on the sea coast’, ‘Highway and bridge hermits’ and ‘Town hermits’. When she comes to the most strictly enclosed of solitaries, however, they are dealt with in a single chapter entitled ‘Anchorites in church and cloister’. It is true enough that the majority of anchorholds were to be found either in a monastery or ‘under the eaves of the church’ in some rural or – increasingly – urban parish.8 But anchorites could be found in some more surprising places, including at the symbolic and actual heart of aristocratic power – in the medieval castle. That students of anchoritism have so far largely overlooked castle solitaries is a pardonable omission. The religious functions and pious provision of the medieval castle have been comparatively neglected in castle studies until recent times, even though a chapel – or, in the more important castles, especially in the later Middle Ages, several chapels – featured significantly in the castle complex. As Sarah Speight puts it, in a corrective essay published in 2004, ‘The religious role of chapels was as normal, as routine, and arguably, as integral to castles as any concern for symbolism and/or military strength.’9 It was not unusual for these chapels to have anchorites associated with them, as a quick review of the extant records will reveal. If we begin with the Tower of London itself, a fortress that owes much of the design we see today to Henry III, we will find a reclusory attached to the church of St Peter ad Vincula within the bailey, first mentioned in 1237 when it was conferred on William the recluse. At that time the church stood outside the palisade that enclosed William I’s White Tower but within the fortress’s outer bailey. Soon, however, it would be brought within the masonry curtain wall that was one of Henry’s principal contributions to the fortification of the Tower Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London, 1914). The phrase ‘under the eaves of the church’ comes from Ancrene Wisse 3.13, for which see Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter, 2009), p. 56. For this section of the essay I have benefited hugely from the expertise (and the library) of Ollie Creighton.  9 Sarah Speight, ‘Religion in the bailey: charters, chapels and the clergy’, Chateau Gaillard: études de castellologie médiévale 21 (2004), 271–80 (p. 271). See also N. J. G. Pounds, The Medieval Castle in England and Wales: A Social and Political History (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 224–31, and O. H. Creighton, Castles and Landscapes: Power, Community and Fortification in Medieval England (London, 2005), pp. 125–7.  8

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Fig. 1. Plan of the Tower, c.1080, from a chapter by Edward Impey in Impey (ed.), The White Tower (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), fig. 9 on p. 20. Drawing by Helen Jones. By permission.

(construction began in 1238). In 1252 the reclusory was occupied by a woman, Idonea de Bocland, before being granted to John of Apulia in 1256. Another reference in 1252 to the male ‘recluse of St Eustace’ may indicate an alternative name for the same site, or evidence for a second reclusory, otherwise unrecorded. Either way, by the end of Henry’s reign there was a single solitary: in 1272 Geoffrey, the hermit of the Tower of London, poor chaplain, wrote to ask Edward I for the continuance of his subsistence (we have no record of a response, nor of any recluses at the Tower during Edward’s reign).10 Anchorites are recorded at a number of other royal and baronial castles during Details of the documentary sources referred to here and in the rest of the essay will be found in the Hermits and Anchorites of England database at hermits.ex.ac.uk. The present chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower of London dates from 1520.

10

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the thirteenth century. In 1228 the bailiff of Bristol was ordered to supply the porter, watchmen, clerks and male recluse of the castle with tunics and cloaks lined with wool. The reclusory was attached to the chapel adjoining the Great Hall, and may have been built into one of the turrets. Emma de Sheppey was enclosed at the church of St Mary-in-Castro, located within the curtain walls of Dover castle, in 1234. She received 1½ d. a day in alms from the king, a customary gift that Henry confirmed to her for life a quarter-century later, in 1259, as he was about to set sail from Dover to sign the Treaty of Paris. The contemporary anchoress at Ludlow castle received a livery of the king, which was confirmed in 1241. The female recluse of Windsor who was granted an oak for firewood of the king’s gift in 1247 may have dwelt at the castle, though this is not certain. Meanwhile in Dublin a daily dole of 1½ d. plus an annual grant of a robe to the female recluse attached to the church of St Mary del Dam, adjoining the castle, initiated by Henry III in 1270 was continued by his successor until 1281. Charles d’Orléans was imprisoned in several of these strongholds (Windsor, Dover and the Tower), but (so far as we know) there were no recluses within the castles by his time. He could, however, have encountered an anchorite at Pontefract, where he was kept between 1417 and 1421. A succession of solitaries occupied a cell at the chapel of St Helen adjoining (‘juxta’/‘joust’) the castle between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Margaret Lakenby was enclosed there in 1402, together with a second anchoress, Emma Scherman, who had previously lived elsewhere in the town. Margaret received 1½ d. per day and a clothing allowance from the Duchy of Lancaster until about 1415, and there are bequests to the anchoress there in 1416 and again in 1433. And in London, just to the east of the Tower, there was a hermitage at ‘Swan’s nest’.11 Priest-hermits are recorded here during the second half of the fourteenth century, and Edward III heard mass at the hermitage several times in 1360. What to make of these castle solitaries? Noting the examples in and near the Tower of London, Norman Pounds in 1994 wrote that ‘The hermit and the recluse were just curiosities, like the elephant and the royal lion, which were their neighbours in the Tower.’12 But the insistence of the examples so far presented suggests that there is something more culturally complex going on. Our first instinct might be to see the anchorite in the castle as a memento mori – the presence of the figure who represents the ultimate rejection of temporal ties and structures at the heart of royal or baronial power acting as a critique of and check upon that power. But of course, the anchorite is there only on the king’s terms, and (as the This presumably was – or at least had been – a swannery: an artificial island used to raise swans for elite tables. 12 Pounds, Medieval Castle in England and Wales, p. 20. 11

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cautionary tale of Geoffrey the Hermit of the Tower in 1272 reminds us) at his cost and pleasure. Although the presence of the recluse gestures towards a higher power, her or his total dependence simultaneously serves to massage the castle lord’s sense of his own temporal power, and even to suggest an alignment of that power with something more transcendent. We may take that thought in some darker directions, to encompass (to borrow some terms from Foucault) not only ‘power over life’ but also ‘the right of death’.13 Though Pontefract castle was the place of dignified and surprisingly cultured confinement of the fifteenth century’s two most eminent prison poets – Charles d’Orléans and James I of Scotland14 – it was also the place where Richard II met his murky end and, five years later, where Archbishop Scrope was imprisoned before his summary condemnation and shocking execution at York. And the Tower, of course, still trades on its bloody reputation. We may justifiably speculate on the legitimating and sacralising effects of the presence of one enclosed, mortifying the flesh, and ritually dead in the place of incarceration, torture and execution. The anchorite, in other words, (willy-nilly) lends a spiritual value to practices designed primarily to subdue and destroy the bodies of political and personal opponents. At the Tower, the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula (Peter in Chains, lest we forget) overlooked the place of execution. If the reclusory abutted the south side of the chapel, as was the situation in the majority of cases, then it would have stood in direct view of the block. Where once Idonea de Bocland was enclosed are buried the remains of Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Lady Jane Grey.

II The Tower, as well as being a royal fortress, also formed part of the fortifications of the city of London. The original White Tower was constructed in the southeast angle of the Roman wall, and then under Henry III the new curtain wall became part of the city’s defences. But the recluses in the Tower were not the only solitaries associated with London’s walls. There were cells for anchorites or hermits at Aldgate, Bishopsgate and Cripplegate, and at All Hallows in the wall (an anchorhold discussed by Dowding in her essay in this present volume); in 1256 brother Jordan de Eston, hermit, dwelt ‘in the western corner within the walls of the city of London’. At All Hallows and Aldgate, and probably at Cripplegate, the

The phrases comprise the title of Part 5 of Volume 1 of the History of Sexuality. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (London, 1990). 14 Despite the common concerns of their poetry, there is no evidence that the two ever met. Indeed, the authorities seem to have taken pains to keep them apart. See Mooney and Arn, Kingis Quair, General Introduction. 13

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Fig. 2. From F. I. Dunn, ‘Hermits, Anchorites and Recluses: a study with reference to medieval Norwich’, in Julian and her Norwich, ed. Frank Dale Sayer (Norwich: Julian of Norwich 1973 Celebration Committee, 1973)

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solitary lived in one of the bastions or mural turrets that formed part of the city’s defences. Mural and gatehouse solitaries appear frequently. Medieval Toulouse had six reclusories, one at each of its gates. In Canterbury, the church of St Mary Northgate was built (as the name suggests) partly over the city gate. Below the chancel, at street level, it incorporated a hermitage. The South and East Bridges that led into medieval Oxford were both manned by hermits. At Norwich in the mid-fifteenth century, a hermit named Thomas lived in the turret above Berstreet gate. His was one of no fewer than eleven anchoritic or hermit sites ranged around the perimeter of the city in the late Middle Ages, see Fig. 2.15 Solitaries did not, of course, have these peripheral locations to themselves. Leper and other hospitals, Jewries, friaries and many nunneries were also built on sites just outside, against, or even straddling, town walls, for a variety of practical and symbolic reasons.16 But hermits and anchorites are peculiarly suited to such liminal situations on the thresholds (Latin limina) of the medieval city. Liminality is a term that finds its way readily into critical discourse, though sometimes as no more than a loose synonym for ‘marginality’.17 It may be worth taking ourselves back to its origins in the work of the social anthropologist Victor Turner. In a much-quoted definition from 1969’s Ritual Process, Turner wrote: The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (‘threshold people’) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, ­convention, and ceremonial.18

Followers of ‘semi-religious’ vocations, including hermits and anchorites – who fall in the gaps between clergy and laity, monastic and secular – are exactly this: ‘betwixt and between’. And if we allow the quotation to run on a little, we will Norman P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich 1370–1532 (Toronto, 1984), pp. 57–66 and (for Thomas the hermit) p. 201. 16 Oliver Creighton and Robert Higham, Medieval Town Walls: An Archaeology and Social History of Urban Defence (Stroud, 2005), pp. 173–5. 17 An important exception is Christopher Holdsworth’s ‘Hermits and the Powers of the Frontier,’ Reading Medieval Studies 16 (1990), 55–76, which to some extent anticipates my approach here. 18 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Ithaca, NY, 1969), p. 95. Much of Turner’s thinking was developed in partnership with his wife Edith Turner, though she is formally credited only in the later publications. 15

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recognise (inter alia) several of the tropes associated with anchoritic discourse in the Middle Ages: As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualise social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.

In times or places of liminality, the normal structure of society – indeed the very principle of structuration – is suspended. Categories such as rank, gender and sexuality are dissolved – often by means of transgressive or ludic inversions – to reveal beneath all such incidentals a shared human essence (in this respect there are obvious, though apparently coincidental, connections to Bakhtin’s carnivalesque).19 This quality of status-free togetherness Turner called communitas. In Turner’s work with tribal societies, liminality is always a transitional phase in (to refer to the title of his best-known book) a ritual process (we shall return to questions of process presently). But he was always interested in extending his analysis to complex societies, in which liminality could manifest as a permanent state. In particular, he was an astute interpreter of medieval religious practice, and several times returned to the question of the relationship between liminality in traditional societies and liminal persons in modern Western Christianity: What appears to have happened is that with the increasing specialization of society and culture, with progressive complexity in the social division of labor, what was in tribal society principally a set of transitional qualities ‘betwixt and between’ defined states of culture and society has become itself an institutionalised state. . . . Transition has here become a permanent condition. Nowhere has this institutionalization of liminality been more clearly marked and defined than in the monastic and mendicant states in the great world religions.20

Anchorites at the city gates, then, are in the fullest sense liminal persons in liminal locations. Suspended between the living and the dead, this world and Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World came out in English translation in 1965, but was first used by the Turners in the late 1970s. See Edith Turner, Communitas: The Anthropology of Collective Joy (New York, 2012), pp. 32–4. 20 Turner, Ritual Process, p. 107. See also the introduction to the Turners’ Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (Oxford, 1978). 19

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the next, they hover on the boundary between inside and outside, the city and its hinterland. Such anchoritic sites were invariably in civic patronage, and it is not difficult to see their value to the civic authorities. Their occupants played an important part in the sacralisation of the boundary between urban and suburban space, marking out the ‘city limits’. Moreover, the association of the civic authorities with anchorites serves those authorities’ own claim to stand outside (and above) the structures of society – the claim of the centre to be ‘that very thing within a structure which governs the structure, while escaping structurality’.21

III From the city gates we move now to what Jean-Claude Schmitt calls the great ‘interior frontier’ of the Middle Ages, between civilisation and the forest or wilderness. The forest, in medieval culture, is a liminal space, a place where social structures can be suspended and transformations accomplished. And it is the home of hermits, who live in the forest clearings: ‘“on the margin” of the forests’, as Schmitt puts it, making them the ‘marginal people par excellence of medieval Christianity’.22 Here, as voices crying in the wilderness, hermits (and as we move from the towns and settled land into the untamed forest, so our focus will be less on anchorites than their freely wandering cousins, the hermits) can talk back to power: we think immediately of the abrasive hermits of the Grail romances with their rebukes and challenges to Arthur’s knights and their courtly values. But the forest is associated also with royal power. David Rollason has recently demonstrated how often medieval rulers sited their palaces at the edge of regions of forest, deliberately seeking out the threshold between cultivated and uncultivated land.23 And Jacques Le Goff reminds us ‘the king was himself a man of the forest, which he visited from time to time to hunt or consult with hermits and to renew his contact with the sources of holiness and legitimacy’.24 The king and hermit topos is particularly widespread, especially perhaps in Arthurian literature, but also in chronicle and hagiographical sources. And it has its reflex in material culture, too. Restormel Castle in Cornwall is set in a large deerpark. Its stone shell keep, constructed in the later thirteenth century, Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London, 1978), pp. 278–94 (p. 279). 22 ‘L’Histoire des marginaux’, in La Nouvelle histoire, ed. Jacques Le Goff (2nd edn, Brussels, 1988), pp. 277–306 (p. 282). 23 David Rollason, ‘Forests, Parks, Palaces, and the Power of Place in Early Medieval Kingship’, Early Medieval Europe 20 (2012), 428–49 (p. 434). 24 Jacques Le Goff, ‘The Wilderness in the Medieval West’, in The Medieval Imagination, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, IL, 1985), pp. 47–59 (p. 58). 21

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has been provided with large windows and a parapet walk designed with an eye not so much for defence as to make the most of the fine views from the hilltop castle over the rolling countryside of its managed landscape. That landscape included, in a picturesque riverside location that was designed to be visible from the castle itself, a late thirteenth-century hermitage. The earls of Cornwall supported the hermits there with an annuity throughout the fourteenth century. No doubt their motives were complex (they may even have included piety), but Oliver Creighton is surely right that a key aim was to enhance ‘the mystique of the hunting environment’.25 The chapel’s founder was probably Earl Richard, whose interest in matters Arthurian is well known. Earlier in the century he had purchased the ‘island of Tintagel’ and built there a castle worthy of the Arthurian legends that the imagination of Geoffrey of Monmouth had already set in that dramatic coastal location. We may, perhaps, liken the Restormel hermit to the ornamental hermits whose grottoes added interest to a stroll through the gardens of eighteenth-century great houses. It was not just at Restormel that hermits and hunting went together. Royal or baronial support sponsored numerous hermits in royal forests and private chases. Henry III provided support for four hermits in the environs of his favourite hunting lodge at Woodstock (Oxfordshire), on the edge of the forest of Wychwood, and the stunning rock-cut hermitage at Warkworth (Northumberland) was built c. 1400 probably by Henry Percy, the first earl, to adorn the park of his castle of the same name. Most literary examples of the king and hermit topos likewise involve hunting and hunting landscapes. They typically turn on questions of jurisdiction, and involve an eremitic transgression. Sometimes this is poaching, as in the fifteenthcentury English tail-rhyme King Edward and the Hermit, which is set in Sherwood Forest. In this tale, King Edward (it is unclear which one), after a day’s hunting, finds himself unrecognised in a hermit’s hut where – after a cagey opening in which the hermit maintains a pretence of ascetic abstinence – a feast of the king’s own venison and a raucous drinking game ensue.26 In the liminal arena of the forest, king and hermit share essential bodily pleasures unencumbered by questions of status and hierarchy. It is at such moments that communitas comes closest to the carnivalesque. The story was taken forward in ballad form, and resurfaces in the nineteenth century in the ample person of Walter Scott’s hermit of Copmanhurst in Ivanhoe. In other sources, especially clerical ones (typically hagiography or monastic O. H. Creighton, Designs upon the Land: Elite landscapes of the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 16–23 and p. 140. 26 ‘King Edward and the Hermit’, ed. George Shuffelton, in his Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse (Kalamazoo, MI, 2008). 25

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chronicle), the transgression is a territorial violation: the king or lord, while out hunting in his forest or chase, happens upon a hermit’s unlicensed dwelling. Outraged by the trespass, he angrily demands its removal, only in the end to be ‘converted’; he allows the hermit to remain, and even becomes his patron. Basing his analysis on one such episode in the Life of St Robert of Knaresborough (c. 1160–1218), in which the part of the lord is played by the lord of Knaresborough and sheriff of Yorkshire, William de Stuteville, Brian Golding has argued that the topos reflects general clerical anxieties about the moral status of hunting; but also, more specifically and economically, is involved in the negotiation of the competing claims to uncleared land of lords and monasteries.27 (The hermit in such a reading stands as an alibi for the new monastic orders – most obviously the Cistercians – with their appetite for large estates of virgin territory.) The story’s outcome, of course, endorses the monks’ claim over the landholder’s, through their service to a superior Lord. But the lord does not suffer significantly from this minor defeat, just as the king is not seriously compromised by his appearance in a jest like King Edward and the Hermit. Both kinds of story work to naturalise and humanise the mechanisms of power, administering what Roland Barthes calls an inoculation:28 Look, they say, the forest laws – harsh as they undoubtedly seem – are in fact administered in the name of a king who is, it turns out, magnanimous, fair-minded and (at least in the Copmanhurst-type stories) a jolly good sport. Elements of both the territorial dispute and the inoculation reappear in an episode later in the Life of St Robert when Robert meets King John. The author of the Life bills the story as an almost miraculous example of the hermit speaking truth to power: Sirres, forsoth my hertt in sonder Me thynke bath wepes and wirkes [suffers pain] for wondir That he, þat was sway waike [so weak] a thynge, Durst spek sway saffly wyth hys kynge. Tyrauntes trembled þat did hym teyne [vex]; Slyke selcouth [marvel] was bath schewed and seyne.29 ‘The Hermit and the Hunter’, in The Cloister and the World: Essays in Medieval History in Honour of Barbara Harvey, ed. John Blair and Brian Golding (Oxford, 1996), pp. 95–117. 28 Roland Barthes, ‘Operation Margarine’, in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London, 1993), pp. 41–2. 29 The episode is chapter 20 in the Latin life and lines 735–806 in the English Metrical Life. Editions are ‘Vitae s. Roberti Knaresburgensis’, ed. P. Grosjean, Analecta Bollandiana 57 (1939), 364–400; and The Metrical Life of St. Robert of Knaresborough, ed. Joyce 27

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Robert’s fame (we are told) has reached the ears of the king, who goes to meet him in the company of Sir Brian de L’Isle, constable of Knaresborough castle and warden of the forest. When the party arrives, Robert is at prayer, and pays them no attention. Sir Brian quickly steps in: ‘Roberd, my brothir, rise vpe tyte [at once]. Here standes our comly kyng wyth croune To visett the wyth deuocioune.’ (744–6)30

‘Show me which of these is my king,’ demands Robert, and when John is indicated he challenges him: Yff thou be kynge, sir, kan þou oght Off corn maike slyke ane ere [ear] of noght? (755–6)

The others are horrified, but John recognises his wisdom and devotion to ‘Na suffrayne botte hys Sauioure’ (764), and offers him anything he should ask. Robert, however, replies: I haue nay nede of erthly thynge. Enoghe I haue, syr, graunte mercy. (772–3)

And with that the king takes his leave. The hermit can speak this plainly to the king because he stands outside the structures dependent on power – as does the king, who is the origin of power. But the hermit here functions as the exception that proves the rule; only he can speak like this to the king. Moreover, the king’s authority is hardly diminished by such an episode. In fact, the intercourse between hermit and king serves more to emphasise the king’s equivalent status as himself a man apart. Nevertheless, the Life of St Robert also manages to contain the potential subversion of the encounter, in a postscript in which both men snap back into their societal roles. First, as soon as the king has left, Robert’s fellow-hermit Ivo upbraids him:

Bazire, EETS, o.s. 228 (London, 1953 for 1947). The quotation is from lines 795–800 in the Middle English; references for subsequent quotations will be given in the main text. In the Latin life, this episode is connected explicitly with the earlier encounter with William de Stuteville. 30 The Latin life rather spoils the point of the ensuing exchange by having Sir Brian identify the king unequivocally: ‘Ecce presens est dominus noster rex Iohannes’ (p. 393)

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  Robertt, þoue wyll nott thryue. Off the kyng why wald þou craue na gode, Ne aske nay almos or he yode [went], To þi poralles [poor men] in this place? (776–9)

So Robert goes after the king and assumes the conventional role of humble petitioner: Certes, syr, I forgat to pray For som almos, flesshe or fysshe. (786–7)

To this King John, re-established as ‘suffrayn’ and originator of charity, is able to respond with magnanimity, granting Robert Als mekyll land in my forest Als thou may tyll the wyth a ploghe. (790–1)

The response establishes Robert’s status as feudal subject, and King John, while no more able than he was to produce an ear of corn ex nihilo, has reasserted his control over the rights of arable production. Moreover, the land granted is in ‘my forest’ (‘nemore meo’): the forest, John reminds us, is royal land.

IV Turning now to another hermit in a forest, the source this time is not hagiography but courtly romance. The romance in question is Chrétien de Troyes’s Yvain, written in the 1170s, and our focus will be on the interlude of the hero’s madness that occurs in the middle of the narrative. Yvain, having triumphed in all encounters and won himself a wife, Laudine, departs on further adventures with a vow to return within a twelvemonth. He loses track of time, of course, and only realises that the deadline has passed when one of Laudine’s damsels arrives to shame him publicly and announce that he has lost his wife’s love forever. Traumatised, Yvain flees courtly society and withdraws from the cultivated landscape into the forest, where ‘He lost all memory of what he had done until then’, and lives as a wild savage on raw meat. His madness persists until he chances upon a hermit’s hut where (though the two never meet face-to-face) the hermit provides him with basic food and the process of his rehabilitation can begin. In an extraordinary commentary on this episode, Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Vidal-Nacquet read Yvain’s madness in Lévi-Straussian terms. In the forest ‘Nudity replaces clothing. Raw foods replace prepared and especially cooked

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foods. Impulsive behavior and repetitive actions supplant memory. Yvain has abandoned culture.’ But the hermit offers instead of raw meat cooked venison – albeit it is served rudely, without salt, pepper or wine. The hermit thus ‘belongs to an intermediate status between the constituted orders of society and the chaos of barbarism’, and is therefore ideally placed to help Yvain take his first steps on the road to the recovery of his cultural sanity.31 The essay is a structuralist tour de force. It would, however, also be possible to read the episode as a rite de passage, employing – in place of the static binaries and homologies of Lévi-Straussian analysis – the ternary, processual structure that Victor Turner took over from the early twentieth-century anthropologist, Arnold van Gennep. In The Rites of Passage, van Gennep argued that all rituals accompanying a change in social or sacral state involve stages of separation, transition (or liminality) and reincorporation.32 It is easy to see how such a scheme might be applied to Yvain’s story. First, the hero wanders far from the tents of his entourage, leaving society behind and losing all memory of his previous life as he goes. His separation accomplished, he then enters the forest, the place of liminality, where all his civilised behaviour falls away, together with all signs of status, and his very identity. As Turner puts it: Liminal entities . . . may be represented as possessing nothing. They may be disguised as monsters, wear only a strip of clothing, or even go naked, to demonstrate that as liminal beings they have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system . . . It is as though they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life.33

It is only when he has reached this point that Yvain can begin his process of reincorporation into courtly culture and society. And the key figure in beginning that process of reincorporation, and making Yvain’s transformation possible, is the hermit. If we return now to Charles d’Orléans’s dream-vision of Venus, it will be evident that this episode, too, lends itself to a reading in these terms. The dream (and note that it is a dream, itself ‘betwixt and between’ sleeping and waking) Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Vidal-Nacquet, ‘Lévi-Strauss in Broceliande: A Brief Analysis of a Courtly Romance’, in Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, pp. 107–31 (here at pp. 114–15). 32 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago, IL, 1960). The French original appeared in 1909. 33 Turner, Ritual Process, p. 95. 31

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stands at a point of transition, between the second and third sections of Fortunes Stabilnes, and between old love and new. It begins with separation – Charles is in the castle of No Care where, as Venus tells him, ‘Ye dwelle asondir fer’ – and will end with him once more taking a lover, and thus becoming reincorporated into courtly culture. And again, the transitional or liminal stage is accomplished by means of an eremitic interlude: Charles’s own ‘ancre lijf’. The pivotal role of the solitary in facilitating other people’s (his social superiors’) rites of passage is striking. This may be because anchorites are themselves liminal persons – experts, as it were, in liminality. But there may be an element here, too, of what Turner analyses under the heading ‘the powers of the weak’.34 He describes how, in African societies which are dominated and governed by one tribal group, the ‘weaker’ group (often the aboriginal people who were conquered by the incoming tribe) frequently carry an importance in the culture’s rituals that is in inverse proportion to their political or military power.35 In particular, their representatives come to the fore during those rites de passage that accomplish the transition from one chief (drawn, of course, from the dominant group) to the next. And so to Charles d’Orléans’s captor, King Henry V. Henry was a notable supporter of the anchoritic vocation. We think in particular of his foundation not only of the quasi-anchoritic monasteries of Syon and Sheen, but of the Sheen reclusory he established in 1417, and also of his close connection with the anchorite of Westminster Abbey, whom he consulted on the night of his succession, to whom he gave a gift of money on the occasion of the coronation of his queen, and whom he remembered in his will. These are all, of course, moments of ritual importance. The pre-coronation consultation with the anchorite in particular bears closer examination. The Pseudo-Elmham Life of Henry records the visit, immediately after the death of his father Henry IV: Ipsa die funerea in planctu & gemitu consummata, dum nocturnae tenebrae terrae faciem occuparunt, lacrimosus princeps, noctis opacitate captata, quendam reclusum perfectae vitae virum apud Westmonasterium secreto adiit, eique tocius vitae suae occultata denudans, verae poenitenciae ablutus lavacro, contra virus praeassumptum absolucionis recepit antidotum, & exutus viciorum diploide, virtutum clamide redit decenter ornatus. [After he had spent the day in wailing and groaning, so soon as the shades of night covered the earth, the weeping prince, taking advantage of the darkness, 34 35

Turner borrowed the phrase from the anthropologist Iowan Lewis. See Turner, Ritual Process, p. 110.

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e. a. jones secretly visited a certain recluse of holy life at Westminster; and laying bare to him the secret sins of his whole life, was washed in the laver of true repentance, and receiving the antidote of absolution against the poison that he had before swallowed, so put off the mantle of vice and returned decently adorned with the cloak of virtue].36

The scale and significance of the transformation is underscored by the author of the first English Life, who writes: And in all things at that time he reformed and amended his life and his manners. So after the decease of his father was neuer no youth nor wildnes, that might haue anie place in him, but all his acts were sodenlie changed into grauitie and discretion. And in that he had grace of our Lord to accomplish in him that thinge that is written of Th’arch Bisshopp of Canterbury of whome it is saide Subito mutatus est in virum alium, w[hi]ch is to saye he was sodenlie changed into a newe man.37

Or, as Shakespeare’s newly crowned Henry tells Falstaff: Presume not that I am the thing I was; For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, That I have turn’d away my former self.38

Henry has clearly been through a rite of passage. Indeed, the processual stakes could not be much higher. Henry, with no time to lose, needs to make the transition from carefree youth to grave manhood, and from prince to king. His secret journey under the cover of night represents van Gennep’s first stage of separation; and his return, his reincorporation. And, as in Chrétien’s Yvain, the role of the solitary – himself a liminal, ‘weak’ figure – has been pivotal in the hero’s transformation.

Conclusion I will conclude with another king, and another interview with a Westminster anchorite. In 1381 Richard II turned fourteen, the age at which (according to Thomae de Elmham Vita et Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. T. Hearne (Oxford, 1727), p. 15; the translation is from A. J. Church, Henry V (London, 1891), pp. 44–5. 37 The First English Life of Henry V, ed. C. L. Kingsford (Oxford, 1911), pp. 17–18. 38 2 Henry IV, V.v. 56–8. 36

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medieval understanding of the life-cycle) an individual passed out of pueritia, or childhood, and into adolescentia, or young adulthood.39 That summer Richard was in London as the sequence of events we know as the Great or Peasants’ Revolt unfolded. The rebels entered London on 12 and 13 June, and sacked John of Gaunt’s Savoy palace on the afternoon of Thursday 13 June. Richard and the rest of the court took refuge in the Tower. The king met and attempted to placate the rebels at Mile End on the morning of Friday 14th, but that afternoon the Tower was breached and Archbishop Sudbury, the Treasurer Sir Robert Hales, and several others were dragged out to impromptu execution. The next morning the king went to Westminster Abbey to pray. ‘Afterwards,’ the Anonimalle Chronicle tells us, ‘he spoke with the anchorite, and confessed to him, and remained with him some time.’ 40 Directly afterwards, he set out for the decisive confrontation at Smithfield. There he was met by Wat Tyler, in an encounter heavily marked for its disregard for status: Wat Tyghler . . . approached the king with great confidence, mounted on a little horse so that the commons might see him. And he dismounted, holding in his hand a dagger which he had forcefully taken from another man; and when he had dismounted he half bent his knee and took the king by the hand, shaking his arm forcefully and roughly, saying to him, ‘Brother, be of good comfort and joyful, for you shall have, in the fortnight that is to come, forty thousand more commons than you have at present, and we shall be good companions.’

And he proceeds to outline the rebel demands for an end to lordship, expropriation of the clergy, and ‘that all men should be free and of one condition’.41 But Tyler’s dream of communitas does not last. Challenged, then stabbed by the mayor Walworth, before being run through by one of the king’s retinue, he falls to the ground in sight of the massed rebels. At this moment of crisis Richard, showing a sudden maturity and leadership that impressed the chroniclers as a transformation, seized the initiative, addressing the rebels directly and promising them, ‘I will be your king, your captain and your leader.’42 The rebels, persuaded, were led away and dispersed back to their homes. Richard returned triumphant, later that day telling his mother, ‘I have this day recovered mine heritage and the Mark Ormrod, ‘Coming to Kingship: Boy Kings and the Passage to Power in Fourteenthcentury England’, in Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Nicola McDonald and W. M. Ormrod (York, 2004), pp. 31–49 (p. 33). 40 From R. B. Dobson, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (2nd edn, Basingstoke, 1983), p. 163. 41 Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 164–5. 42 These words are reported by Walsingham, cited in Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, p. 179. 39

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realm of England, the which I had near lost.’43 In the ensuing weeks, as we know, the rebels were hunted down and subjected to bloody retribution. Like Henry V, Richard emerges from his consultation with the anchorite a new man. But while Richard is transformed, the structure of English society is emphatically not. Like the expendable anchorite of ‘O Sely Ankir’, the Westminster recluse has served his purpose, and royal power is able to reassert itself and carry on. By now, this should not surprise us. We have explored a wide range of different kinds of evidence – from courtly ballade to castle design; medieval town planning to hagiography, romance and chronicle – but repeatedly we have seen that the encounters of courtiers and anchorites, kings and hermits, solitary religious and the secular power, are inescapably one-sided affairs.

According to Froissart, cited in Dobson, Peasants’ Revolt, p. 198.

43

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Part I

Religious Communities

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Chapter 2

The Anchoress of Colne Priory: A Solitary in Community CATE GUNN

C

olne Priory in north Essex was excavated by the Channel 4 TV’s Time Team, broadcast in March 2012; in the programme, it was suggested that the cell of an anchoress may have been attached to the priory church.1 A paper I subsequently wrote for the Essex Society for Archaeology and History examined the evidence – slim as it was – for the existence of a female anchorite at Colne Priory; while there was evidence for the existence of an anchoress in the area, it was not possible to prove conclusively that she had been enclosed at the male Benedictine priory.2 However, the trace of a room that may have been an anchorite’s cell was found; the possibility that an anchoress lived there raises interesting questions about the spirituality of solitary enclosure and its relationship with the ­community, religious or parochial. The argument for the presence of an anchoress at Colne Priory is worth briefly revisiting. During the excavations featured on Time Team, a ‘mysterious room’ on the north side of the nave of Colne priory church, just to the west of the crossing, was seen in the geophysical survey; a trench was dug, but although the outer wall of the church to which the room was attached was found, there was no evidence of

I was invited to the site at the time of the dig to discuss this possibility and am very grateful to the present owner of the priory, Paul Whight, to members of Time Team and Wessex Archaeology for showing me round and discussing the site, and for sight of the ‘grey report’, Wessex Archaeology, Colne Priory, Earls Colne, near Colchester, Essex ref. 77503.01 (April 2012). I am also grateful to Liz Herbert McAvoy and Catherine InnesParker for their careful and attentive reading of an earlier draft of this chapter, and to all members of the International Anchoritic Society present at the conference in 2014 for their response and interest.  2 ‘Was There an Anchoress at Colne Priory?’ Essex Society for Archaeology and History: Transactions, 4th series, vol. 2 (2011/2013), pp. 117–23.  1

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the walls of the room itself.3 It may have been a wooden structure intended to last only the lifetime of one occupant: there is no mention of another anchorite occupying a cell at the priory at a later date. The evidence of the geophysical survey suggested that the cell measured just four metres by one-and-a-half; at first it was thought that this might be a private burial chapel. If it were an anchorhold, it was a small space in which to spend years enclosed, though not without precedent. The cell in which the early twelfth-century anchoress, Christina of Markyate, spent more than four years was even smaller, a room tucked in the corner between two walls: ‘amplitudo plus palmo semis inesset’ [‘the space was not bigger than a span and a half’],4 and Anne Warren gives two examples of very small, ‘restricted’ cells.5 There was insufficient evidence to date the room at Colne Priory, though it seems to have been a later addition to the church, which was built mostly in a single phase in the early twelfth century. At the end of the twelfth century William, prior at Colne, instigated a programme of building which included ‘alterations and improvements to the priory church’;6 the cell may have been built at this time. It was also at the end of the twelfth century that three charters of Colne Priory were signed ‘Roberto filio recluse’ [‘by Robert son of the female recluse’], among others.7 All the signatories are male; the others are known either by their occupation, where they are clerics, or the names of their fathers. It may be worth noting that, where other signatories are called ‘sons of’, their fathers’ names are supplied; the reclusa is not given a name. Nevertheless, the fact that Robert is known by this matronymic would seem to suggest that his mother was well known locally – and by those associated with the priory; it also suggests that his mother was a widow since Robert’s father is not mentioned. It is possible, therefore, that the mother of Robert occupied the cell attached to the priory church at the end of the twelfth century. Where there was a cell within the precincts of the religious house, Gunn, ‘Was there an Anchoress?’, p. 117. The Life of Christina of Markyate, A Twelfth Century Recluse, ed. and trans. C. H. Talbot (Oxford, 1987), pp. 102 and 103. Since a span is only about nine inches, this is presumably the width of the space in which Christina was hidden, so confined she could not even wear sufficient clothing to keep warm when she was cold.  5 Anne Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, CA, 1985), p. 32.  6 Douglas Merson, Colne Priory (Earls Colne, 2000), p. 8. See also Martin Heale, The Dependent Priories of Medieval English Monasteries (Woodbridge, 2004), s.v.  7 For example, Charter 43 is witnessed Roberto filio recluse; other signatories were William the son of Fulco, Robert son of Baldwin, clerics called Michael and Radulfus, William the son of Radulfus and his brothers Richard and Gaufridus, Cartularium Prioratus de Colne, ed. John L. Fisher (Colchester, 1946), p. 25. Here recluse is the genitive form (common in medieval Latin) of the feminine reclusa, that is, a female recluse or anchorite.  3  4

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it tended to be occupied by a member of that house,8 but since our knowledge of anchorites, particularly in the earlier centuries, is still partial, that does not preclude the possibility that a widow was enclosed in Colne priory. There may be little evidence of women living such a life within the bounds of a male religious house, but rather than the paucity of cases disproving the argument that Robert’s mother was an anchoress at Colne Priory, her case could be an important contribution to the developing picture of the multifarious lives of religious women in the Middle Ages. If this rural village in north Essex with its small priory on the banks of the River Colne accepted the presence of an anchoress as part of daily life, how many more anonymous female anchorites were there? Anne Warren provides figures for anchorites from the twelfth century, but points out that the issuing of licences by bishops for the enclosure of anchorites are only found from the thirteenth century and comments that a widow could easily have entered an anchorhold and been accepted as a recluse in the community without her enclosure leaving its mark in any records.9 Assuming that the ‘mysterious room’ was indeed a cell occupied by Robert’s mother at the end of the twelfth century, this essay considers the sort of woman she may have been. As mentioned in the introduction, the symbiotic relationship between solitude and community can be traced back to the Desert Fathers and is reflected in guidance texts for anchorites written at the time of the enclosure of Robert’s mother. By reference to three contemporary guidance texts and the earlier work influencing them, this essay explores the apparent paradox of a solitary woman living within a community of male religious. Anchoresses were supposed to consider themselves dead to the world and leave their families and all family ties behind them. Although there are rare cases of married couples who both became recluses,10 the mother of Robert would have been a widow who, freed from her marriage vows by the death of her husband, could profess the vows of an anchoress. While Robert who signed the charter at Colne Priory claimed identity and, it would seem, status through his relationship with the anchoress his mother, the anchoress herself remains silent and we have no way of knowing the nature of her continuing relationship – if there was Rotha Mary Clay notes that that ‘the great Benedictine communities . . . had their solitaries’, Rotha Mary Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London, 1914), p. 76, something corroborated – and, indeed, complicated – by Thornton’s essay in this present volume.  9 Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 56–63; figures for anchorite distribution by counties are given in Appendix 1, p. 292. The more recent work of Tom Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–1200 (Oxford, 2011), has added greatly to our k­ nowledge of the earlier period. 10 Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 27–8.  8

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one – with her son. The Colne anchoress was well-enough known in her own time to confer identity on her son and be inscribed within a surviving document, but her own name and identity have not survived. Clues to her existence may reside beneath the soil of Colne Priory, made visible through modern geophysical techniques, but there are no signs of her body. Her physical existence has, like the walls of her enclosure, been expunged, rubbed out. There were increasing numbers of female anchorites in the thirteenth century,11 but they seem to have been mostly lay anchorites attached to parish churches, or enclosed within female houses. While there is no proof that Robert’s mother was enclosed in the priory, as mentioned, there is no evidence – physical or textual – of an anchoress having being enclosed at the parish church either. The church of St Andrew was established in the parish now known as Earls Colne before the building of the priory and its church dedicated to St Mary; the parish church was donated to the abbey of Abingdon, and thence Colne priory, in return for daily celebrations of mass for the souls of the first Aubrey de Vere and his wife Beatrix.12 Names of the priests at St Andrews are known from 1040, including Ranulf at the time of the foundation of the priory.13 The present building was largely rebuilt in the nineteenth century, and there is no record of evidence of an anchorite’s cell. The enclosure of an anchorite required the permission of the bishop, a process that was being formalised at this period, but there are no relevant records for the bishop of London, in whose see Earls Colne fell in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.14 If we accept that Robert’s mother voluntarily entered an anchorhold in the priory, then we have the case of a lay anchoress in an enclosure in a religious house, rather than a nun who sought the more austere life of solitary enclosure within her own convent. Earls Colne is named after the earls of Essex, the title bestowed on the third Aubrey de Vere (d. 1194), but their main seat and stronghold was a few miles up the River Colne at Castle Hedingham. In the 1190s, at the same time as the expansion of Colne Priory under Prior William, Alberic (Aubrey) the fourth confirmed his father’s charter for the foundation of a priory Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 20. Essex is unusual, however, in having more known anchorites in the twelfth century (two females and three males at three different sites) than in the thirteenth century, when two female anchorites are recorded at two sites, this number reducing to one in the next two centuries. See ‘Appendix 1: Anchorite Distribution by Counties in Medieval England’, in Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 292. 12 Cartularium Prioratus de Colne, Introduction & p. 1. 13 Cartularium Prioratus de Colne, p. 5 and see Earls Colne: Church in VCH (London, 2001), pp. 99–102, accessed www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/essex/vol10/pp99-102, 5 September 2016. 14 Gunn, ‘Was there an Anchoress?’, p. 121. 11

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at Castle Hedingham, on the banks of the river that also flows past Colne Priory. The father – the third Alberic de Vere – was the grandson of the founder of Colne Priory.15 Castle Hedingham priory was a small house of Benedictine nuns; the first prioress, known because of her mortuary roll drawn up around 1230,16 was Lucy. There has long been a belief that Lucy was a member of the de Vere family; it is unlikely that she was a wife of Alberic, the founder,17 but Jane Greatorex speculates that Alberic’s second wife, Euseme, who died between 1153 and 1154, died in childbirth, but that the child was a daughter who survived to become the first prioress of Castle Hedingham priory.18 It is clear that Lucy was a woman of status; the noble foundation of Castle Hedingham priory may have precluded the acceptance of Robert’s mother, had she wished to enter a nunnery.19 Despite her status and position, little is known of Lucy beyond her name; she died without a husband or son to confer an identity upon her. There is evidence from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of monks being responsible for female anchorites, but this was often an institutional or financial arrangement, the anchorhold being attached not to the priory church but to a parish church belonging to the priory. There were also cases of women, usually widows, living in priories as corrodians, that is, they purchased their lodging and maintenance in a religious house for the rest of their life. Such arrangements were fairly common in the thirteenth century and the widow of the second Alberic de Vere, Adeliza (Alice), became a corrodian at St Osyth’s Priory in Essex in her widowhood according to her son William who was bishop of Hereford and who had himself been a canon at St Osyth’s.20 Here we therefore have another case of a female living in seclusion, at least, in a male house, but she would not have taken the vows required of an anchoress. Robert’s mother would have had to show that she could be materially supported before her enclosure, but a corrody had to be bought with a sum of money or the gift of property to the priory, so was probably Jane Greatorex, The Benedictine Priory of Castle Hedingham, Essex (n.p. Jane Greatorex, 2008), pp. 24–5. 16 London, British Library, Egerton MS 2849. 17 Sally Thompson, Women Religious: The Founding of English Nunneries after the Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1991), p. 180. 18 Greatorex, Priory of Castle Hedingham, p. 27. 19 For reasons why entry into a nunnery was not always possible, see Cate Gunn, Ancrene Wisse: From Pastoral Literature to Vernacular Spirituality (Cardiff, 2008), pp. 46–7, which discusses why the sisters for whom Ancrene Wisse was written entered an anchorhold rather than a nunnery. 20 Greatorex, Priory of Castle Hedingham, and see ODNB entry for William, Julia Barrow, ‘Vere, William de (d. 1198)’, Oxford DNB, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/95042, accessed 2 Sept 2016. Anchorites were themselves sometimes supported by corrodies, which acted as pensions; Gunn, ‘Was there an Anchoress?’, p. 121. 15

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not an option for Robert’s mother; she may also have had the devotional commitment and desire to take the vows of an anchorite. We cannot know whether her choice of the anchorhold was dictated by finances or vocation or some other need. While anchorites enclosed within religious houses were usually members of the order of the house, this was not always the case in the earlier Middle Ages, when arrangements were more ad hoc. Recently, Tom Licence has found evidence of female recluses within the precincts of male monasteries in the years before 1200, that is before the system of enclosure became formalised and fully documented; he has confirmed that the case of female anchorites being enclosed within male religious houses ‘was more common than the few records suggest’, adding that he ‘could see no reason why a priory in Essex would not have had a female anchorite in the late twelfth century’.21 Robert’s mother was not an aristocrat – there is no suggestion that she or her son had a title – so her obscurity is deeper than that of Lucy, but the fact that her son is named by his relationship to her suggests that she had status within the local community: she was not incarcerated in order to control or punish her. The term ‘cell’ suggests imprisonment to modern minds, and the disobedient could be immured within the convent. Liz Herbert McAvoy points out that ‘the reclusory could – and did – double-up as a prison when and if necessary’, while Warren has suggested that the theme of the cell as prison was ‘accepted and even utilized in the medieval period’.22 Dependent priories, such as Colne Priory, could be useful for dealing with ‘miscreant’ monks, and by 1303 ‘Colne Priory had apparently acquired the name of a prison’ for the monks of the mother house at Abingdon.23 There is no suggestion that Robert’s mother was imprisoned in her cell, a prison within a prison; anchorites entered their cells voluntarily. However, there is always a question about what counts as voluntary.24 A pertinent example, though from the fourteenth century, is that of Christina Carpenter. Christina appears to have freely entered the anchorhold at Shere (although we know of her motivation only through the letters of the bishop of Winchester who oversaw her enclosure), but Liz Herbert McAvoy notes that ‘there is a sense of Christina’s personal agency waning at the very moment of Personal communication from Tom Licence via email 28 June 2012, confirmed in conversations at the International Anchoritic Society conference at Gregynog, April 2014. 22 Liz Herbert McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space and the Solitary Life (Woodbridge, 2011), p. 25; Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 92. 23 Heale, Dependent Priories, p. 120. 24 An analogue may be marriage in the Middle Ages, which legally required consent but, as the case of Christina Markyate showed, extreme pressure could be applied to obtain that consent; Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 547 & 550. 21

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her enclosure’.25 It is also far from clear that, having left the enclosure during her probationary period, her subsequent contrition and return were at all voluntary. Indeed, as McAvoy points out, she was walled-up in a more secure enclosure – an enclosure that was now a prison in a real as well as metaphorical sense.26 Almost contemporary with Robert’s mother, Loretta de Braose (de Briouze) entered the anchorhold at Hackington near Canterbury in 1221. It is assumed that she took the vows of an anchorite for spiritual reasons and for protection27 but her entry into the anchorhold could also be seen as a continuation of the punishment and persecution of her family, even after the death of King John. The mother of Loretta, Matilda de St Valéry, was infamously starved to death in Windsor Castle in 1210, along with her elder son William,28 while much later, in 1230, Loretta’s nephew, also called William, was executed, an execution seemingly prompted as much by the hatred felt for the de Braose family in Wales as because of the affair he had with the wife of Llywelyn ab Iorweth.29 Punishment, however, is an inaccurate term for the experience of the anchoress; it should rather be thought of in terms of penance. Ancrene Wisse, a guide for anchoresses written in the first part of the thirteenth century, not long after Robert’s mother was immured in her cell, presents the anchoritic life as one of penance; Part Six opens, ‘Al is penitence, ant strong penitence, þet ȝe eauer dreheð, mine leoue sustren’ [‘Everything that you have to bear, my dear sisters, is penance, and hard penance’].30 Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘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 within the Discourses of Enclosure, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cardiff, 2008), pp. 111–26 (p. 121). 26 McAvoy, ‘Gender, Rhetoric and Space’, p. 123. 27 F. M. Powicke, ‘Loretta, Countess of Leicester’, in Historical Essays in Honour of James Tait, ed. J. G. Edwards, V. H. Galbraith and E. F. Jacob (Manchester, 1933), pp. 247–72 and Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘Medieval Widowhood and Textual Guidance: The Corpus Revisions of Ancrene Wisse and the de Braose Anchoresses’, Florilegium: Special Issue in Honour of Margaret Wade Labarge 28 (2013), 95–124. Loretta entered the anchorhold in 1221, see Susan M. Johns, ‘Briouze, Loretta de, countess of Leicester (d. in or after 1266)’, ODNB; online edn, October 2006, www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/47212, accessed 4 April 2015. 28 Matilda is often depicted as a victim of the enmity between her husband and the king, but Stephen Church points out that she was ‘a fearsome lord in her own right’ and that she was ‘complicit in her husband’s failure to pay’ money owed to John, the implication being that she was punished as much for her own actions as for those of her husband. Stephen Church, King John: England, Magna Carta and the Making of a Tyrant (London, 2016), pp. 170–2. 29 J. J. Crump, ‘Repercussions of the Execution of William de Braose; a Letter from Llywelyn ab Iorweth to Stephen de Segrave’, Historical Research 73 (2000), 197–212. 30 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, EETS os 325 and 25

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Ancrene Wisse was widely copied, translated and dessiminated during the thirteenth century; Catherine Innes-Parker has suggested that the lives of Loretta and her sister could be considered ‘as templates for the kind of audience imagined by the authors of the Ancrene Wisse Group and, in particular, by the author of Ancrene Wisse as he revised his original text’.31 We cannot know whether Robert’s mother had access to a guidance text such as Ancrene Wisse, or even whether she could read (though her son was sufficiently well educated to be a signatory to a charter), but the suggestions made in Ancrene Wisse for maidservants who were illiterate could also apply to an anchoress: she should ‘segge bi Pater Nostres ant bi Auez hire Ures’ [‘say her Hours with Our Fathers and Hail Marys’].32 Another work written in the first part of the thirteenth century, the Speculum Religiosorum of Edmund of Abingdon, suggests that those who cannot read should listen to sermons: ‘audi doctores ecclesie predicatores, et sic intelliges’ [‘listen to the teachers and preachers of the church so that you will understand’].33 Although apparently written for a member of a community, the Speculum Religiosorum is directed at an individual, maybe a canon at the Augustinian priory of Merton, and his pursuit of the perfect life; similarly an English text written at the turn of the thirteenth century, Vices and Virtues, which seems to have been written for someone with pastoral duties, maybe a canon living in a community,34 promotes the solitary life of solitude as perfect:

326 (Oxford, 2005 and 2006), vol. 1, 6.1, p. 132; all translations are from Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses; A Translation based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter, 2009), here at p. 132. The page numbers of the translation correspond to those in Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett. 31 Innes-Parker, ‘Medieval Widowhood’, p. 96. 32 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 8.31, p. 162. Millett points out that Part One of Ancrene Wisse provides a devotional routine of this kind, n. 8.116, Guide for Anchoresses, p. 276. 33 Edmund of Abingdon, Speculum Religiosorum and Speculum Ecclesie, ed. Helen P. Forshaw (London, 1973), Cap. 6, §25, p. 48, and see Cate Gunn ‘Reading Edmund of Abingdon’s Speculum as Pastoral Literature’, in Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. Cate Gunn and Catherine InnesParker (York, 2009), pp. 100–14 (pp. 106–7). 34 Vices and Virtues may have been written at the other side of Essex from Colne Priory, at Waltham Abbey; Waltham Abbey was refounded as a house of Augustinian canons by Henry II and was staffed with canons from other Augustinian houses, including William de Vere from St Osyth’s; see n. 20 above. We know very little about this work, but the list of vices is the Cassianic octad, and other references suggest an acquaintance with Cassian’s Conferences as used in a monastic setting, Cate Gunn, ‘Vices and Virtues: A Reassessment of Manuscript Stowe 34’, in Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: The Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, ed. Richard G. Newhauser and Susan J. Ridyard (York, 2012), pp. 65–84 (pp. 77–8).

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Munec mai ut-faren mid ileaue in to hermitorie, oðer in to onnesse35 te wunien, 3if he godd hafð to iwitnesse ðat he mid hlutter herte hit doð, for bett to donne. We findeð on 3ewrite þat eremite ne owh on wilderne36 to wunien, bute he arst bie 3efanded ðurh regule and ðurh maistre in ðan gastliche ofne ðe we ær embe spaken. Ancer is swiðe gastlich lif. Ðese twa lif, hermite and ansæte lif, ðe we nu clepeð anker, hie wæren hwile ferr fram mannen wuniende . . . Swa me mai 3iet sume finden - iþanked bie godd! - ðe swiðe gastlich lif lædet after ðare woreld ðe nu is. [A monk may go out, with leave, into a hermitage, or to dwell in solitude if he has God as a witness that he does it with a pure heart, in order to be more successful. We find it written that a hermit should not live in the wilderness unless he is first tried, through a [religious] rule and by a master, in the spiritual oven that we spoke about earlier.37 An anchorite’s life is such a spiritual one [anchoritism is a very spiritual life]. These two lives, that of the hermit and that of the recluse, that we now call anchorite, were formerly spent far from the dwellings of men . . . So one can still find some – thank God! – who lead such a spiritual life in keeping with the world as it now is.]38

These texts provide a written context for the possible spiritual and devotional life led by an anchoress attached to a priory in the early thirteenth century. Tom Licence notes that ‘many cells were set within cemeteries, causing their occupants to live among the dead’;39 the cell at Colne Priory may have been at the edge of a cemetery used for lay people. Anchorites, in their liminal existence, embodied the proximity of the living and the dead. Ancrene Wisse insisted that the anchoresses were dead to the world, and more than dead, ‘for al hare blisse is forte beon ahonget sariliche ant scheomeliche wið Iesu on his rode’ [‘because

See definition of onnesse in MED: (a) Oneness; union; unity of the Trinity; (b) concord, harmony; unanimity of purpose and behavior; (c) similarity, likeness; (d) loneliness; solitude. According to the online MED, Vices and Virtues is the first witness to the use of onnesse to mean loneliness or solitude, which is how I have translated it here. 36 The definition given by the MED for this term is ‘A deserted or an uninhabited place or region, a wilderness’; the word can also be used figuratively; MED sv. 37 The spiritual oven is mentioned at 73/12–13: ‘ðu scalt bien 3efonded on ða hali liue al swo is þe pott ðe is idon on ðe barnende ofne’ [‘you shall be tried in the holy life as is the pot that is fired in the burning oven’], translation mine. 38 Vices and Virtues, ed. F. Hothausen in 2 parts, Part 1 EETS o.s. 89 (London, 1888; rep. 1967), p. 73, lines 24–34, trans. p 72. The translation here and elsewhere of Vices and Virtues is mine, but made with reference to that given by Holthausen on facing pages. 39 Tom Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–1200 (Oxford, 2011), p. 125. 35

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all their joy is in hanging painfully and shamefully with Jesus on his cross’].40 Colne Priory itself was founded as a mausoleum and it continued to be used as a place of burial for the de Vere family. One of the charters to which Robert the son of the recluse was a signatory was in the name of Alberic de Vere (the third), Earl of Oxford (d. 1194); it confirms his grants to the priory and wills his body to the church for burial after his death.41 The recent excavations revealed a burial, believed to be a member of the de Vere family, dating to the fourteenth century, in a ‘probable chapel’ to the north of the presbytery, not far from the anchoress’s cell.42 The anchoress’s cell was also on the north side of the church, though to the west of the transept; this position suggests that the occupant of the cell was a layperson rather than a priest, which supports the argument that it was Robert’s mother not a monk who was enclosed (although the monks of Colne Priory were not necessarily ordained at the end of the twelfth century).43 The church was built in a pleasant and fertile valley, but in its shadows the anchoress would have seen little of that. She would, however, have had sight of an altar within the church, possibly a side altar, which allowed her participation in the celebration of Mass and, in particular, the elevation of the Host at the moment of consecration.44 Witnessing Mass, and observing the daily round of the Opus Dei performed in the priory church, allowed the anchoress participation in the communal rituals of Christianity; Ancrene Wisse instructs the anchoresses: ‘Toward te preostes Tiden hercnið se forð se 3e mahen’ [‘Listen to the priest’s Hours as far as you can’] and their witnessing of Mass was an essential element part in their daily routine.45 Community involvement, even for those living a solitary life, was considered an essential element in the Christian life. In the early days of the church, desert anchorites were required to participate in the eucharist,46 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 6.4, p. 134. Charter 43, Cartularium Prioratus de Colne, p. 25. 42 Wessex Archaeology, Colne Priory, 4.38 and 4.37. Remains believed to be of monks and radiocarbon-dated to 1040–1260 were discovered outside the Priory Church, ‘but as close to the High Altar as possible’. 43 Gunn, ‘Was there an Anchoress?’, p. 117. It is possible that a cell attached to the chancel of a church was occupied by a layperson (for example, at St Botolph’s in Hardham where the cell built for a male anchorite was willed to a female follower), but cases of cells attached to the nave of a church being occupied by a priest are more scarce; Michelle Sauer, with reference to her database of English anchorholds, personal c­ ommunication, 8 September 2016. 44 See Gunn, Ancrene Wisse, p. 31 for the centrality of the sacrament of the Eucharist in the spirituality of thirteenth-century anchoresses. 45 Millett, ed. Ancrene Wisse, I, 27 & 16–17, pp. 18 & 12–13. 46 Diana Webb mentions the importance of the synaxis, a meeting that centred on the Eucharist when brethren came together in the church on Saturdays and Sundays, in the early church; Privacy and Solitude in the Middle Ages (London, 2007), pp. 17 and 23. 40 41

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while later Carthusian monks, although living in solitary cells, were required to meet daily in church for Mass. The Carthusian way of life embodied – enshrined in stone – the apparent paradox of pursuing solitude within a community that was also at the heart of the life of an anchorite living in a priory. Carthusian houses were in essence communities of solitaries, since Charterhouses consisted of individual cells arranged around a large quadrangle, but participation in the essential communal rituals of Christianity was required by the whole community, which met daily in church for Mass.47 The association between community and solitude can be seen in the life of Cassian (d. 435), mentioned in the introduction to this volume. Cassian founded a monastery in Marseilles in about 415, and his Conferences were used as readings in monasteries, but his religious life began in the Egyptian desert and he can be considered a founder of anchoritism. The ideals of the Desert Fathers were the inspiration for medieval anchorites, their enclosure being conceived as a desert, and the writing of Cassian was an influence on the three texts – Ancrene Wisse, Speculum Religiosorum and Vices and Virtues – being considered as a spiritual background for the understanding of the vocation of Robert’s mother. While anchorites in medieval England often lived out their vocation in the centre of communities – attached to village, town or monastic churches – the imagery of the wilderness to characterise the withdrawal and asceticism of the anchorite was still employed. Cassian emphasised withdrawal rather than solitude per se; he used the images of birds from Psalm 101 to suggest a watchful withdrawal from society: ‘Similis factus sum pellicano solitudinis. Vigilaui et factus sum sicut passer solitarius in tecto’ [‘I am become like to a pelican of the wilderness: I am like a night raven in the house. I have watched, and am become as a sparrow all alone on the housetop.’ Psalm 101.7–8];48 the author of Ancrene Wisse also used the image of the pelican from Psalm 101: ‘Dauið eueneð him þer-to in ancre persone . . ., “Ich am pellican ilich þe wuneð bi him ane”’ [‘David compares himself to it in the persona of an anchoress . . ., “I am like a pelican that lives in solitude”’].49 The bird may be The first Charterhouse in Britain, Witham, was founded by Henry II in the 1170s; Janet Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain 1000–1300 (Cambridge, 1994), p. 80. Adam of Eynsham (d. after 1233) describes the attraction of the way of life of the Chartreuse: ‘They had separate cells but their purpose was one. They combined solitude with community life.’ Quoted in David Hugh Farmer, Saint Hugh of Lincoln (London, 1985; rep. Woodhall Spa, 2000), p. 7. 48 Conlatio XIX.8, quoting Psalm 101, 7–8, in Jean Cassien, Conférences XVIII–XXIV, ed. and trans. E. Pichery, (Paris, 1959), p. 46. This is the translation in Douay-Rheims; it is worth noting that solitudo is translated as ‘wilderness’. 49 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 3.5, p. 51. 47

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perched on the house, watching comings and goings, but is not part of the society of that house. Ancrene Wisse constructs the anchoritic life as one removed from society; the anchoresses are dead to the world and their cell is the equivalent of the desert to which early anchorites withdrew: ‘“Wildernesse” is anlich lif of ancre wununge’ [‘The “wilderness” is the solitary life of the anchoress’s cell’].50 For Cassian, solitude was the place, the location, for withdrawal, allowing the thorough renunciation that is required for the pursuit of the life of perfection. The Speculum Religiosorum of Edmund of Abingdon viewed the end of the religious life as the contemplation of God, for which total renunciation of and withdrawal from the world is required. In the mystical passages where Edmund discusses this state of contemplation he is clearly addressing an individual, not a community.51 The person he was addressing may have been a member of a community, but Edmund is concerned with directing him on a journey that, ultimately, has to be taken alone. The requirements of the anchoritic life – withdrawal, renunciation, asceticism, contemplation and penitence – did not necessarily require solitude, in the sense of being completely and always alone; nevertheless, the anchoritic life did require the rejection of the demands of the wilful self, and the cell within which the anchorite was enclosed recreated the desert as a place of both renunciation and withdrawal. This suggests that what is required is not only (or as much) a movement away as a movement within. The anchorite must reject her own outer, worldly self as well as the world of others. In Ancrene Wisse the cell acts as an imaginative correlative to the anchoress’s body; the spirit is enclosed in ‘twa huses. Þet an is þe licome; þet oþer is þe uttre hus’ [‘two houses. One is the body; the other is the outer house’].52 So the movement inwards into the enclosure is mirrored by the movement inwards to the interiority of the self, the place where she can encounter, not the self that she must reject, but the God who created her. When that cell is inside a monastery, it is doubly enclosed, and her interiority is also doubled. Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 4.16, p. 74. This passage is glossing a verse from Lamentations, 4:19 ‘in deserto insidiati sunt nobis’ ‘[our persecutors] lay in wait for us in the wilderness’; see note to Part Four lines 216–17 in Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, II, p. 144. ‘Wildernesse’ is translating the Latin ‘desertus’; Millett recognises the association between ‘desert’ and wilderness’ in her index to Guide for Anchoresses, where the entry for ‘desert’ reads ‘see wilderness’, p. 301. 51 Edmund, Speculum, 29.134, p. 108; trans. Helen Forshaw in ‘New Light on the Speculum ecclesie of St Edmund of Abingdon’, Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Litteraire du Moyen Age 38, 1971 (1972), 7–33, p. 19. 52 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 6.13, p. 142. 50

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In a discussion of inwardness in the making of the modern self, Charles Taylor places Augustine on ‘the way from Plato to Descartes’.53 In his Confessions, Augustine examined his self by looking within; even in his earliest memories he felt that his ‘wishes were inside’ him.54 At the moment of his conversion, Augustine felt a conflict of will, which he described as a great struggle ‘in my inner house’; his heart and his mind were in conflict within himself.55 In such images of inwardness and depth, Taylor sees a ‘radical reflexivity’: by looking within oneself, one can become aware not only of oneself but of one’s awareness of oneself, and in doing so acknowledge the source of that awareness, that knowingness, which is not onself, but God. Taylor claims that ‘Augustine makes the step towards inwardness . . . because it is a step towards God’.56 So turning inwards becomes not an affirmation of individuality but a discovery of commonality57 and unity with God. I would like to suggest that the anchoress used the enclosed interior of the anchorhold to explore her own interior in a movement of radical reflexivity that allowed her to draw closer to God. God is not contained within oneself, but looking within may be a first step towards discovering him, as it was for Augustine, who claimed he found God through searching his memory.58 In Ancrene Wisse, the anchoress withdraws into the solitude of her cell where she can embrace her lover Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 127. 54 ‘uoluntates . . . intus erant’, Sancti Augustini Confessionum Libri XIII, I.6 §8, ed. Lucas Verheijen, CCSL, 27 (Turnhout, 1981), p. 4; for a translation, see Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 25. 55 ‘Tum in illa grandi rixa interioris domus meae, quam fortiter excitaueram cum anima mea in cubiculo nostro, corde meo, tam uultu quam mente turbatus inuado Alypium’, Conf., VIII.8 §19, ed. Verheijen, p. 125; Pine-Coffin translates the sense without giving a word-for-word translation: ‘My inner self was a house divided against itself. In the heat of the fierce conflict which I had stirred up against my soul in our common abode, my heart, I turned upon Alypius’, p. 170 (Alypius is his friend with whom he was discovering the Christian message). In attempting to resolve this conflict and impose his better will upon himself, Augustine later wrote ‘Vbi uero a fundo arcano alta consideratio traxit et congessit totam miseriam meam in conspectu cordis mei’ [‘Where truly profound contemplation dragged all my misery from the secret depth and gathered it together within sight of my heart’]; Augustine, Conf., VIII.12 §28, ed. Verheijen, p. 130, my translation. Pine-Coffin translates the first part as ‘I probed the hidden depths of my soul and wrung its pitiful secrets from it’, p. 177. 56 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 132. 57 Taylor suggests that the truths there discovered (in what Augustine refers to as memoria) ‘represent common standards’; Sources of the Self, p. 133. 58 Augustine, Conf. X.17 §26, ed. Verhrijen, pp. 158–9; trans. Pine-Coffin, p. 224. Memory for Augustine seems to be more than recalling incidents of one’s own life: it is a broad landscape through which the mind wanders and passes through and eventually goes 53

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Christ. The anchoress invites him into the chamber of her heart: ‘þer in sperclinde luue bicluppeð ower leofmon, þe into ower broestes bur is iliht of heouene’ [‘there in burning love embrace your lover, who has descended from heaven into the chamber of your breast’].59 In her inward movement into the double enclosure of heart and anchorhold, the anchoress’s solitude becomes not so much alone-ness as one-ness with God. She finds within herself, not her individual self, but the self that is God-filled and God-beclosed.60 In Vices and Virtues the imagery of the wilderness to characterise the withdrawal and asceticism of the anchorite is employed, suggesting that anchorites maintained the spiritual essence of the life of the Desert Fathers by dwelling in onnesse, which I have translated above as ‘solitude’.61 The word onnesse is found again later in Vices and Virtues, in a chapter on fasting, where it also seems to mean solitude, or at least withdrawal from society: Crist self halȝede ðis fasten þo þe he faste fowerti daiȝes on ða wilderne, fram alle mannen. Ðar he 3aif ancres and hermites ðe luuieð onnesse gode forbisne ðe world to flene and onnesse to luuien, seððen he, ðe no mann ne mihte letten, fleih naðeles menn, ða ðe he fasten wolde. [Christ himself sanctified this fasting when he fasted forty days in the wilderness, far from people. There he gave anchorites and hermits who love solitude a good example of fleeing the world and loving solitude, since he, whom no-one could prevent, nevertheless fled from company when he wanted to fast.]62

Living in her cell attached to the priory church, Robert’s mother would have withdrawn from the world through fasting and privation. The word onnesse is found in the slightly later Ancrene Wisse, where it means



59



60



61 62

beyond; see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2008), p. 239. Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I 1.1, p. 13. Sheed uses the phrase ‘chamber of my heart’ in his translation of the passage from Book VIII part 8 of Augustine’s Confessions quoted at note 50; Confessions, trans. Sheed, p. 153. This term, which has a different tenor from ‘enclosed’, is used by Julian of Norwich; for example, ‘And the hye goodnesse of the trinite is our lord, and in hi we are beclosed and he in us’; ‘A Revelation of Love’, Ch. 54 in The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA, 2006), p. 297. See n. 35, p. 00. Vices and Virtues, ed. Holthausen, 137/8–12 (my emphasis).

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unity, and, interestingly, in the context of a number of anchoresses having a virtual fellowship: 3e beoð þe ancren of Englond, swa feole togederes (twenti nuðe oðer ma – Godd i god ow mutli), þet meast grið is among, meast annesse ant anrednesse ant sometreadnesse of anred lif efter a riwle swa þet alle teoð an, alle iturnt anesweis ant nan frommard oðer, efter þet word is. [You are the anchoresses of England, in such a large group (twenty now or more; may God increase you in virtue), that most peace is among, most unity and unanimity and community of united life according to a rule, so that you all pull together all turned one way and none away from each other, so it is said.]63

The three sisters for whom Ancrene Wisse was originally written withdrew into the solitude of their individual cells to pursue a life of penitence, but they maintained communication with their spiritual director and each other. The later ‘twenty or more’ anchoresses were part of a network – a virtual community64 – of women who maintained a unity – a one-ness with God and with each other – through their solitude. Ancrene Wisse also provides clear evidence of communication between the anchoress and her servant and other anchorites, as well as her confessor.65 In Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love (from the late fourteenth century) we find the term ‘onehede’, which can mean both unity and solitude, used to describe the unity of the community of fellow Christians: ‘But in general I am, I hope, in onehede of cherite with alle my evencristen. For in this onehede stondeth the life of alle mankind that shalle be saved.’66 Even this most famous of anchoresses did not seek complete solitude but felt a unity with her fellow Christians in God. This coincidence of terminology seems to point to a one-ness that is both

Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I 4.71, p. 96 (my emphasis). This is from a passage found only in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402. 64 Bella Millett uses the term ‘virtual cloister’ in ‘Ancrene Wisse and the Life of Perfection’, Leeds Studies in English 33 (2002), 53–76, p. 58. 65 Part Eight of Ancrene Wisse has many references to the anchoress’s maids, including the suggestion that her sisters’ maids might visit her (Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 8.37, p. 164) and, in Part Four, there is a suggestion that she should give her own property – including booklets – to others ‘especially anchoresses, your dear sisters’ – if they are of use to them (Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 4.90, p. 107). See Mari Hughes-Edwards, Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practices (Cardiff, 2012), p. 41 for the degree of sociability permitted to anchorites. 66 Julian of Norwich, ‘A Revelation’, chapter 9, Writings, p. 155. 63

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solitude and unity – unity with fellow Christians and ultimately with God through the inward journey that solitude facilitates. The existence of Robert’s mother is anomalous: she was a woman known to us now only through the prism of men, as the mother of a man whose name is found in charters signed by men for a male religious house. But she would not only have been a woman living among men: she was also a solitary living within a community. The mother of Robert is one of many anchorites of whom we know nothing but the fact of their existence; we do not know for sure whether she was enclosed in a cell attached to the church of Colne Priory or perhaps the parish church of Earls Colne. She may have needed the support of a secular community, or sought the seclusion and double enclosure that a cell in the priory afforded her. We do not know whether she chose solitude after a busy family life, or to avoid remarriage. Still less do we know anything about her motives, her devotions or her spiritual life, but we can draw some not unreasonable conclusions. She may not have been able to read herself but the teaching of contemporary guides may well have been known to her. While we cannot presume that she aspired to the levels of contemplation advocated in guidance texts composed soon after her enclosure such as Speculum Religiosorum, Vices and Virtues and Ancrene Wisse, the common language of wilderness and withdrawal drawn upon by the authors of those texts, a language influenced by the Desert Fathers especially Cassian, would have informed her understanding of her vocation. Certainly, the beliefs that supported the anchoritic vocation percolated down to even small villages, and the ideals of withdrawal from and renunciation of the world would have been a part of Robert’s mother’s decision to enter the anchorhold. She was not completely removed from her community, either that of the village or the priory, and would have been involved at some level in the daily life of prayer and sacrament in the priory or parish church. Nevertheless, in the quiet of her own cell and her inner solitude, we can hope that she achieved onnesse with her fellow Christians and, ultimately, her God. She herself remains unknown, silent as the grave, but to her community she was known and revered.

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Chapter 3

Anchorites in their Heavenly Communities SOPHIE SAWICKA-SYKES

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hile rarely the focus of critical attention, the angel has long since hovered beside the solitary in the history of anchoritic spirituality. According to the conceptualisation of the religious life known as the vita angelica, men and women who devoted themselves to contemplation of God and renounced the world lived in imitation of, and even association with, the angels of heaven. As Jean Leclercq states in his chapter on the angelic life in La Vie parfaite: The more a person is shut off from the world, the more he is open to heaven. The more he abandons the world, the more he enters again into the state which preceded sin, when man lived in familiarity with the angels. [plus on se ferme au monde et plus on s’ouvre au ciel; plus on quitte le siècle et plus on rentre dans l’état qui a précédé le péché, alors que l’homme vivait dans la familiarité des anges.]1

Does it follow, therefore, that the most physically isolated of all religious people – anchorites – had the closest relationship of all to the celestial beings they emulated? Leclercq certainly suggests that this was the case. Later in his discussion, he provides the following extract from Nicholas of Clairvaux’s sermon, On the dedication of a church:

Jean Leclercq, La Vie parfaite: points de vue sur l’essence de l’état religieux, Tradition monastique 1 (Paris, 1948), p. 23. Translated by Leonard J. Doyle, The Life of Perfection: Points of View on the Essence of the Religious State (Collegeville, MN, 1961), p. 18.

 1

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sophie sawicka-sykes [Hermits] hide themselves [. . .] in the mountain caves and in the hollows of the valleys, in order to associate with the angelic spirits. They are enraptured in the contemplation of the riches of glory… [Ils se cachent [. . .] dans les cavernes des montagnes et les creux des vallées, pour s’associer aux esprits angéliques: ils sont ravis dans la contemplation des richesses de la gloire . . .]2

Here, we seem to have evidence for the idea that worshippers retreated to far-flung places with the intention of seeking out celestial beings. Yet the phrase ‘in order to associate with angelic spirits’ [‘pour s’associer aux esprits angéliques’] distorts the meaning of the Latin, which implies not that hermits deliberately sought out angels, but that their highly contemplative mode of existence united them with angels, whose very function is to contemplate God. What Nicholas of Clairvaux in fact wrote was, ‘Hermits are the tenth [sacrament of the church], who, by hiding themselves in the caverns of mountains and hollows of valleys, having been united with angelic spirits [‘angelicis sociati spiritibus’], are seized in the contemplation of riches of glory…’3 Leclercq’s misreading, however, is telling. It rests on the notion that anchorites were visited by angelic spirits, which spoke to them and provided them with nourishment. More recently, Tom Licence has argued that the vita angelica acquires a special meaning when applied to recluses: ‘[they] invited angels to be their companions and ministers not so much by joining in their praises, but by putting themselves in their care’.4 In Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–1200, he draws on a variety of evidence to illustrate the belief that solitaries were sustained by angels, or that they should live as if they would be provided with angelic support.5 The anchorite’s geographical isolation from human society and his or her regular encounters with angels is one model late antique and medieval writers used to represent the angelic life of the solitary. In this essay, I term it the ‘SpatioCelestial’ model. This was not the only way in which anchorites were written into the society of angels and saints. Other works suggest that anchorites gained entry to a celestial community by reading sacred texts and communicating with God Leclercq, La Vie parfaite, p. 36 (Doyle, Life of Perfection, p. 27). Nicholas of Clairvaux,‘In dedicatione ecclesiae’ (PL 144: 901D–902A). For the misattribution of this sermon to Peter Damian, see J. Joseph Ryan, ‘Saint Peter Damiani and the Sermons of Nicholas of Clairvaux: a Clarification’, Mediaeval Studies 9 (1947), 151–61 (p. 154). All translations are my own unless otherwise stated.  4 Tom Licence, Hermits and Recluses in English Society, 950–1200 (Oxford, 2011; repr. 2013), p. 125.  5 Licence, Hermits and Recluses, p. 125.  2  3

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and his saints in prayer – the ‘Biblio-Celestial’ model. This essay will distinguish between these two ways of representing anchorites in their heavenly communities in early Anglo-Latin texts and their late antique sources and precedents. I do not mean to imply that the anchorite who dwelt in a geographically isolated area could not access the divine by reading Scripture, or that the solitary whose cell was lined with books was not physically cut off from the outside world, at least in theory. However, I do wish to emphasise that these two ways of representing the visionary and contemplative experiences of medieval anchorites carry their own narrative expectations, are constituted of distinct rhetorical structures and imagery, and need to be understood as different ways of conceptualising the angelic life.

The Spatio-Celestial Model In his sermon on the ‘Nativity of All Saints’, Ælfric the Homilist (d. 1010) lists categories of heavenly beings, beginning with angels and ending with virgins, and outlines the chief characteristics of each category. He describes anchorites as those who fled from the sight and praise of worldly men to hide in caves or huts, where they became the companions of beasts and were ‘accustomed to angelic speeches’ [‘to engellicum spræcum gewunode’]. He adds that some of the anchorites who feature in the ‘uita patrum’ were served by angels or birds, while others sustained themselves, until the time when they left the world and were borne up to heaven by angels.6 There is certainly no shortage of stories about angelic ministration and instruction in the Vitas patrum, a collection of Lives and Sayings of the fourth-century Desert Fathers and Mothers. Angels provide food for solitaries in The History of the Monks in Egypt (composed in Greek around the year 400) and in the early fifth-century Lausiac History by Palladius.7 The latter text also tells how an angel visits Pachomius of Tabennisi in his cave, commands him to establish a coenobitic monastery and provides a Rule to help him run the foundation.8 Once monks have reached the end of their earthly lives, angels come to bear their souls to heaven in a variety of texts including the Life of St Antony by Athanasius of Alexandria (composed between 356 and 358 and translated into Latin by Evagrius

Ælfric, Homily 36, Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The First Series: Text, ed. Peter Clemoes, EETS s.s. 17 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 486–96 (pp. 489–90).  7 Anon., Historia monachorum in Aegypto 12.3, trans. Norman Russell, The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia monachorum in Aegypto (London, 1980), pp. 90–1 and Palladius, Historia Lausiaca 71.3, trans. Robert T. Meyer, Palladius: The Lausiac History, Ancient Christian writers 34 (Westminster MD, 1965), pp. 153–4.  8 Palladius, The Lausiac History, pp. 92–3.  6

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of Antioch soon afterwards), the Life of St Paul by St Jerome (written c. 375), and The History of the Monks in Egypt.9 Not all accounts of desert monasticism represented the angelic life so literally, however. Aphorisms and exempla grouped under the title ‘De quiete’ in a thematic collection of the Sayings of the Desert monks, known as the Verba seniorum, demonstrate how solitude and quiet provided opportunity for reflection and self-correction and brought the anchorite closer to the ideal of the angelic mode of existence.10 Although these Sayings do not imply that solitaries met with angels in the wilderness, later readers understood this to be their deeper meaning. When Grimlaicus of Metz selected stories from the ‘De quiete’ section of the Verba seniorum for inclusion in his tenth-century Rule for Solitaries (a text addressed by Thornton in this present volume), he framed them with what appears to be a literal understanding of the vita angelica. The ‘ancient fathers,’ he explains, fled from the customs of people and their company and hid themselves in woodlands and caves, knowing that ‘the farther they separated themselves from the pleasures of the world, the more the angels would keep them company [‘tanto frequentabantur ab angelis’]; the more they withdrew from this age, the closer they would become to God’.11 This slippage between the spiritual and symbolic and the literal understanding of the vita angelica is characteristic of the Spatio-Celestial model. Despite the predominance of the topos in later writing, it is difficult to find a Saying or a story in the Vitas patrum which suggests that monks fled from people in order to encounter angels. Ælfric and Grimlaicus might have been influenced by an intermediary source, the Conferences of John Cassian, the importance of which has already been discussed by Cate Gunn in her essay in this volume. The third Conference (written before 427) features Paphnutius Cephalas, an anchoritic monk whom Cassian claimed to have met in the community of Scetis, Egypt. While he was in his youth, Paphnutius retreated into hidden, inaccessible places for long periods of time. There, it was believed, he delighted in and enjoyed the society of angels on a daily basis [‘angelorum cotidiano consortio delectari ac perfrui crederetur’].12 The account draws a strong link between anachoresis and angelic visitation. Another fourth-century Gallic text, Sulpicius Severus’s Dialogues of St Athanasius, Vita S. Antonii 60, trans. Robert C. Gregg, in The Life of Antony; and, the Letter to Marcellinus (London, 1980), pp. 29–99 (p. 75); Jerome, Vita S. Pauli primi eremitae 14, ed. and trans. Carolinne White, in Early Christian Lives (Harmondsworth, 1998), pp. 71–84 (p. 82); Russell, Lives of the Desert Fathers, pp. 97–8. 10 Verba seniorum 2 (PL 73: 858A–860C). 11 Grimlaïc, Regula solitariorum (PL 103: 591B–592C), ed. and trans. Andrew Thornton, Grimlaicus: Rule for Solitaries, Cistercian studies 200 (Collegeville, MN, 2011), pp. 50–1. 12 John Cassian, Collationes patrum 3.1, ed. and trans. E. Pichery, Conférences, Sources Chrétiennes 42, 3 vols (Paris, 1955), I, p. 140.  9

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Martin, contains a similar message, placed in the mouth of a hermit on Mount Sinai. When asked why he goes to such great lengths to avoid human society, the hermit remarks, ‘he who is frequented by men cannot be frequented by angels’ [‘qui ab hominibus frequentaretur, non posse ab angelis frequentari’].13 Indeed, the anchorite himself is rumoured to have been visited by angels. This suggests either that angels had a preference for meeting anchorites, or that they shunned crowded places and revealed themselves to witnesses only in quiet moments.14 In the Life of St Martin, Sulpicius Severus asserts that angels appeared to the busy bishop of Tours, ‘even going so far as to enter into conversation and talk with him’ [‘ita ut conserto invicem apud eum sermone loquerentur’].15 Although Severus does not draw a direct link between solitude and angelic visitation in the Life, it is notable that Martin retreats to his monastery outside Tours to enjoy eremitic solitude while he is serving as bishop of the city. The Lives of Antony, Martin, and other early monks had a profound impact on medieval hermits and their hagiographers.16 Two such hermits were Cuthbert of Lindisfarne (d. 687) and Guthlac of Crowland (d. 714).17 Cuthbert served as guest-master at Ripon monastery and prior of Melrose before the abbot of that house, Eata, transferred him to Lindisfarne. There, he progressed along the path of solitary life: first, he performed psalmody in remote spots, then, desiring more permanent solitude, he removed himself to a secluded place in the outer precincts

Sulpicius Severus, Dialogi 1.17.5, ed. and trans. Jacques Fontaine with Nicole Dupré, in Gallus: Dialogues sur les ‘vertus’ de Saint Martin, Sources Chrétiennes 510 (Paris, 2006), pp. 171–2. 14 Clare Stancliffe uses the above quotation in her explanation as to why the Lives of ascetic monks contain more encounters with angels than Lives of bishops: ‘The Miracle Stories in Seventh-Century Irish Saints’ Lives’, in Le septième siècle: changements et continuités, ed. Jacques Fontaine and J. N. Hillgarth, Studies of the Warburg Institute 42 (London, 1992), pp. 87–110 (p. 96). Richard Sowerby, however, argues that Sulpicius Severus’s ‘truism’ and expressions of it in eighth-century hagiography does not imply that angels only visited hermits, but that they waited until saints had escaped the crowds in medieval monasteries before making themselves known: ‘Angels in Anglo-Saxon England, 700–1000’ (PhD dissertation, University of Oxford, 2012), p. 173. 15 Sulpicius Severus, Vita S. Martini 21, trans. White, Early Christian Lives, pp. 129–59 (p. 153) (PL 20: 172A). 16 The Vitas patrum and the Conferences of Cassian appear as recommended reading in the Rule of St Benedict, chapters 42 and 73, ed. John Chamberlin, Toronto medieval Latin texts 13 (Toronto, 1982), p. 51 and pp. 72–3. 17 In this section, I will refer to the following texts (abbreviations in brackets): Anon., Vita S. Cuthberti, trans. Bertram Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (Cambridge, 1940; repr. 1985) (VCA), pp. 59–139; Bede, Vita S. Cuthberti, trans. Colgrave, Two Lives of Saint Cuthbert (VCB), pp. 141–307; and Felix, Vita S. Guthlaci, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge, 1956; repr. 1985) (VG). 13

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of the monastery. Finally, he retreated to the demon-haunted Isle of Inner Farne, where he built a hermitage, comprising an oratory and a guest house. Cuthbert may have been following in the footsteps of the former bishop of Lindisfarne, Aidan, who used to retire to Inner Farne ‘to pray in solitude and silence’, though when Bede states that Cuthbert talked of his own miraculous acts alongside those of his ‘forefathers’, it is conceivable that he was talking about the early monks of Egypt.18 Felix, Guthlac’s hagiographer, also tells how the hermit, inspired by ‘the solitary life of the monks in former days’, yearned to flee into the desert. For Guthlac, the wilderness took the shape of the dreary isle of Crowland in the Fenlands. It is possible that these portrayals were coloured by the hagiographers’ own evident interest in the Lives of the early monks – scholars have noted verbal parallels between the famous late antique Lives and the hagiographies of Cuthbert and Guthlac, and have identified Antonian and Martinian conventions in the texts.19 Heavenly figures, including angels, minister to Cuthbert and Guthlac when they are in need of aid, and at the end of their lives, they are transported by angels to their heavenly homeland.20 The texts also depict the hermits’ participation in their heavenly communities through their withdrawal from human speech and conversations with angels.21 Verbal exchanges between Cuthbert and heavenly Bede, Historia ecclesiastica 3.16, trans. Bertram Colgrave and R.A.B. Mynors, OMT (Oxford, 1969; repr. 1991), pp. 262–3; VCB 7, pp. 178–9. 19 For instance, Benjamin P. Kurtz, in From St. Antony to St. Guthlac: A Study in Biography, University of California publications in modern philology 12.2 (Berkeley, CA, 1926), argues that while the anonymous Life of St Cuthbert bears a superficial resemblance to the Life of St Antony, Bede’s version of the Life of Cuthbert and Felix’s Life of Guthlac directly imitate the hagiography (p. 40). See also Colgrave, Two Lives, pp. 4, 11, 12, 16 and 312, and VG, pp. 16–17. 20 Instances of angelic ministration in the VCA and VCB are discussed in the main body of the essay. Felix remarks that Guthlac is able dwell alone on the isle of Crowland by divine aid, and in confidence, with the help of St Bartholomew (VG 25, pp. 88–9). Bartholomew provides relief to Guthlac during demonic attacks in VG 29 (pp. 96–7), 32 (pp. 106–7) and 33 (pp. 108–9). While neither the anonymous author nor Bede depict Cuthbert’s soul being carried away by heavenly escorts at the end of the Lives, Bede informs us that Cuthbert and another anchorite, Hereberht, died at the same time ‘and together they were borne to the heavenly kingdom by the ministry of angels’ (VCB 28, pp. 250–1). Felix records that upon Guthlac’s death, his hermitage becomes filled with light, a tower stretches from earth to heaven, the air thunders with angelic songs and the whole of the island is filled with a sweet scent (VG 50, pp. 158–9). It is unclear whether these are signs of the presence of angelic escorts or indications that heaven is yawning open to receive the soul. 21 See Joseph Falaky Nagy, Conversing with Angels and Ancients: Literary Myths of Medieval Ireland (Ithaca, NY and London, 1997), for a discussion of how dialogues between angels and saints contributed to the literary character of early medieval texts 18

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messengers are not as important in the first prose Life of St Cuthbert (written by an anonymous author between 699 and 705) as they are in Bede’s later prose Life (721). The changes Bede made to his source material suggest that he considered conversations with angels to be of high importance to the portrayal of the eremitic vita angelica. The anonymous Life is more concerned with the ministration of angels than angelic speech. As a young boy, Cuthbert receives advice from an angel on how to reduce the swelling on his injured knee.22 The anonymous author explains that from that time on, God did not deny Cuthbert the help of angels when he prayed in times of distress. Indeed, God also sends an angel to provide him with refreshment while he is travelling along the River Wear as a young man, and when he is serving as guest-master at Ripon monastery.23 In the second instance, the author again characterises the encounter as a watershed moment – from then on, he states, God frequently provides Cuthbert with food when he is hungry. Although angels do not feature in his depiction of Cuthbert’s life as an anchorite on Inner Farne, the author does mention that Cuthbert considers himself to be ‘content with the conversation and ministry of angels’ [‘conloquio et ministerio angelorum contentus’] when he decides to return to the solitary life after two years of serving as bishop of Lindisfarne.24 Bede took careful note of the suggestion that Cuthbert engaged in angelic conversation as a hermit, and worked this aspect of Cuthbert’s experiences into the earlier episodes of his interactions with angels. In his prose Life, he elaborates on the account of angelic healing, claiming that Cuthbert ‘earned the privilege of being comforted by seeing and speaking with an angel’ [‘Cuthbertus [. . .] angelico uisu et affatu confortari promeruit’].25 Furthermore, while the significance of the miracle at Ripon monastery is, for the anonymous author, that God provides sustenance for Cuthbert from that day forth, for Bede, the miracle is all the more significant because Cuthbert is thenceforth able to communicate with citizens of heaven: ‘from that time he was often held worthy to see and talk with angels [‘Denique sepius ex eo tempore angelos uidere et alloqui’], and when hungry, to

24 25 22 23

in Ireland. Joad Raymond outlines the double meaning of conversing with angels – to enter into a dialogue with them, and to use them as a way of thinking about religious, cultural and scientific ideas – in the introduction to his edited volume on the topic, Conversations with Angels: Essays Towards a History of Spiritual Communication, 1100– 1700 (Basingstoke and New York NY, 2011), pp. 1–21. VCA 1.4, pp. 68–9. VCA 1.6, pp. 70–1, and 2.2, pp. 78–9. VCA 4.11, pp. 128–9. VCB 2, pp. 158–9.

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be refreshed by food prepared for him by the Lord as a special gift’.26 These early experiences prepare Cuthbert for the heavenly life of solitude that he undertakes in his more mature years. It is in the oratory of his hermitage that Cuthbert can truly participate in the praises of celestial citizens. In Bede’s prose Life, Cuthbert builds the hermitage with angelic aid [‘angelico [. . .] auxilio’].27 The divinely wrought building functions as a transitional space where Cuthbert awaits the end of his earthly life and anticipates his entry into heaven by engaging single-mindedly in prayers and psalmody.28 These oral acts of praise could only be perfected once Cuthbert had separated himself from the distractions of the world. ‘[F]or the sake of the sweetness of divine contemplation’, Bede explains, Cuthbert rejoiced to ‘sit in solitude’ and ‘to be silent and to hear no human speech’ [‘ab humanis tacere delectabatur alloquiis’].29 The phrase, ‘ab humanis [. . .] alloquiis’ perhaps suggests that the hermit was accustomed to hear non-human speech as he dwelt in apparent isolation. Felix’s Latin Life of St Guthlac, which took inspiration from Bede’s prose hagiography of Cuthbert, made the connection between solitude and angelic visitation all the more explicit.30 In chapter thirty-nine, Guthlac is visited by his friend, Wilfrid. The visitor is amazed to witness how two swallows fly into Guthlac’s cell and sing contentedly whilst perched on the body of the holy man. When Wilfrid expresses his incredulity, Guthlac replies in words that echo those spoken by the hermit of Sinai in the Dialogues of St Martin: Have you not read how if a man is joined to God in purity of spirit, all things are united to him in God? [A]nd he who refuses to be acknowledged by men seeks the recognition of wild beasts and the visitations of angels; for he who is often visited by men cannot be visited by angels [nam qui frequentatur ab hominibus, frequentari ab angelis nequit].31

VCB 7, pp. 178–9. VCB 17, pp. 216–17. 28 VCB 34, pp. 260–1. 29 VCB 1, pp. 154–5. 30 Colgrave, VG, has argued that Felix makes use of Bede’s VCB, pp. 18–19. 31 VG 39, pp. 122–3. The anonymous Anglo-Saxon translation of Felix’s Life of Guthlac, dating from the late tenth century, uses the more concrete and specific ‘spræce’ in place of the Latin ‘frequentatur’ and ‘frequentari’: ‘for he who desires the speech of worldly men cannot devote himself to angelic speech’ [‘forþon se þe woruldlicra manna spræce gelomlice wilnað, þone ne mæg he þa engellican spræce befeolan’]. The Anglo-Saxon Version of the Life of St. Guthlac, Hermit of Crowland, ed. Charles Wycliffe Goodwin (London, 1848), p. 52. 26 27

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When angels visited Guthlac, what did they say? As he approaches death, Guthlac reveals to his servant, Beccel, that every morning and evening, God ‘sent an angel to talk with me for my consolation [‘angelum consolationis meae ad meum colloquium Dominus mittebat’], who showed me mysteries which it is not lawful for man to utter, who relieved the hardness of my toil with heavenly oracles, and who revealed to me things which were absent as though they were present’.32 The passage is an allusion to 2 Corinthians 12:4, St Paul’s revelation that he knew a man who was caught up into paradise and ‘heard secret words, which it is not granted to man to utter’. Paul’s revelation contains no indication that the man in question learnt this arcane knowledge from angels, though in the apocryphal Apocalypse or Revelation of Paul, which dramatises 2 Corinthians 12:1–4 as an otherworld journey, the visionary is accompanied by an angelic guide.33 Felix also departs slightly from 2 Corinthians 12, shifting the locus of visionary power from the mind or spirit of man to the figure of a heavenly messenger. His revelations, moreover, are consolations, giving him the spiritual strength to battle the demons of the fenland. Guthlac persuades Beccel to keep his heavenly communications a secret from everyone except for his sister (Pega) and Ecgberht, another anchorite, adding, ‘for he alone will know that such things have happened to me’.34 Bertram Colgrave understood this to mean that Ecgberht only knew of these angelic visitations vaguely, and that Guthlac commands Beccel to reveal them fully.35 Alternatively, Guthlac’s speech may imply that Ecgberht knew about the heavenly interlocutor because he, too, was visited by an angel. The passage leaves open the possibility that Guthlac was not the only anchorite in the world of the text to possess the gift of conversing with angels. The emphasis on the dynamics of speech and silence in these early Anglo-Latin Lives seems to have developed organically as the texts were rewritten and translated: Bede expanded on a hint about Cuthbert’s conversations with heavenly beings in the anonymous author’s work, and Felix undoubtedly took inspiration from Bede’s prose Life of St Cuthbert in his own presentation of the interactions between hermit and angels. The spiritual effects of speech, silence and listening are, furthermore, integral to the Spatio-Celestial model. When Ælfric looked back to the Vitas patrum for evidence of the angelic life of early anchorites, he found histories deeply concerned with spoken words, whether imparted from angels to monks or from elders to novices, which were thought to help hermits attain salvation. Ælfric’s portrayal of the desert hermits ‘to engellicum spræcum gewunode’ VG 50, pp. 156–7. Anon., Apocalypse of Paul, ed. T. Silverstein and Anthony Hilhorst (Geneva, 1997). 34 VG 50, pp. 156–7. 35 VG, p. 193. 32 33

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encapsulates the ambiguity of the Spatio-Celestial model – hermits actually spoke to angels, and their speeches were themselves angelic.

The Biblio-Celestial Model What I have termed the Biblio-Celestial model first emerged at a time when women at urban centres such as Alexandria, Milan and Rome were beginning to embrace Christian asceticism with its ideals of chastity, humility and intense engagement with Scripture. In 377, Ambrose edited his first treatise on virginity, Concerning Virgins, from a selection of his sermons and addressed it to his sister, Marcellina, a consecrated virgin. The second book of the treatise reveals Ambrose’s indebtedness to Athanasius’s First Letter to Virgins, which was written for female ascetics living with their families or in communities of virgins in Alexandria.36 Both works present the life of the Virgin Mary as an example which other virgins should admire and emulate. The young Mary is cast as a house ascetic who sleeps and eats only out of necessity, performs good works and is reluctant to leave the house except to go to the Temple (even then, she is accompanied by her parents).37 Athanasius’s Mary is an inward-looking reader and scholar who ‘did not acquire eagerness to look out of the window, rather to look at the Scriptures’.38 Ambrose expands on this image, suggesting that solitude elevates Mary above earthly company and places her amidst the celestial companies she has read about in the Bible. His depiction of the Annunciation transforms Mary’s humble home into a heavenly space: She was found by the angel who came to her in the inmost part of the home, without companion, lest anyone break her concentration or make a noise [. . .] In fact, she seemed less alone when she was alone. For how could she be alone with so many books nearby; so many archangels, so many prophets [Nam quemadmodum sola, cui tot libri adessent; tot archangeli, tot prophetae]?39

Charles Neumann, The Virgin Mary in the Works of Ambrose, Paradosis 17 (Fribourg, 1962), p. 51 and p. 57. On the historical and social context of the First Letter to Virgins, see David Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism, Oxford early Christian Studies (Oxford, 1995), pp. 17–79. 37 Athanasius, ‘First Letter to Virgins,’ 13 and 15, trans. David Brakke in Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism, pp. 274–91 (pp. 277–8); Ambrose, De virginibus 2.2.7–9 (PL 16: 209A–210A). 38 Athanasius, ‘First Letter to Virgins,’ 13 and 15, pp. 277–8. 39 Ambrose, De virginibus 2.2.10 (PL 16: 210A). 36

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By reading holy texts and concentrating her efforts on her inner life, Mary is able to comprehend the message of the archangel Gabriel and bring forth the Word of God. At the end of her life, she takes her place in the heavenly community she has long read about, as the leader of a choir of virgins.40 Reading also formed part of an idealised image of chastity in Jerome’s letters to his female charges. In letter twenty-two (written in 384), Jerome exhorts Eustochium, a virgin, to eschew excesses of food and drink but to read voraciously and learn as much as possible.41 He suggests that such literary activity forms a natural counterpart to prayer. The two activities together enable a dialogue to take place between the earthly virgin and her heavenly spouse: ‘If you pray, you are speaking to your Spouse: if you read, He is speaking to you.’42 The letter ends with an image of the meeting between Eustochium and Christ in heaven, accompanied by the choirs of the chaste.43 The recluse’s demure behaviour on Earth earns her a place among the lively crowds of heaven. Her engagement with holy and learned writings is part of an ascetic regime designed to divert her attention from the world outside the house and direct her mind upwards. The physical act of reading demands bodily discipline, comprehension of the words on the page requires mental effort, and putting the lessons into practice necessitates a strong will. In quiet isolation, the recluse finds saints, angels and Christ himself between the pages of books and enjoys their silent company until, finely tuned by her practices of ascetic devotion, she can sing and dance in joy among the heavenly host. The late antique representation of female reclusion and its heavenly rewards was to prove influential on the English tradition of anchoritic guidance literature. The earliest extant anchoritic rule in the English tradition, The Book of Encouragement and Consolation (Liber confortatorius), is also the first text written in England to use the Biblio-Celestial model. The epistolary Book was written in Peterborough by the Flemish hagiographer, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (d. after 1114), in the early 1080s. Goscelin addressed the letter to his protégée, Eve, who had become a recluse in Angers after receiving her education within the nunnery of Wilton. The text illustrates the hardships of the life of an enclosed solitary, but nevertheless paints its rewards in bold colours. In a chapter entitled, ‘The happiness of scarcity’, Goscelin portrays the cell as a place of leisurely labour, an ark where the recluse can grow fat – not on meat, but on devotional reading.44 Ambrose, De virginibus 2.2.17 (PL 16: 211A-B). Jerome, Ad Eustochium 17, trans. F. A. Wright, ‘Letter 22’, in Select Letters of St. Jerome, Loeb Classical Library 262 (Cambridge, MA and London, 1933), pp. 52–159 (pp. 86–7). 42 Jerome, Ad Eustochium 25, pp. 108–9. 43 Jerome, Ad Eustochium 41, pp. 154–9. 44 Goscelin, The Book of Encouragement and Consolation (Liber confortatorius), trans. Monika Otter, Library of Medieval Women (Cambridge, 2004; repr. 2012), pp. 84-5 40 41

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Goscelin calls the Vitas patrum and the deeds of the saints a ‘storehouse fragrant with an array of aromatic herbs’, a closet containing ingredients that can be combined into a recipe fit for any occasion.45 To support his point, Goscelin selects two exempla from the ‘De quiete’ section of the Verba seniorum.46 While Grimlaïc interprets these exempla according to a Spatio-Celestial model, Goscelin selects the anecdotes in order to demonstrate that fleeing from the vices of the world bolsters the chances of salvation and enables the recluse to attain a more reflective state of mind. When he states, therefore, that ‘a true solitary becomes a familiar of God and a companion of the angels’ [‘Verus solitarius, Dei popularis et angelorum particeps efficitur’], he does not imply that angels frequent the solitary, but that she enters a contemplative mode of existence.47 The Vitas patrum are among the texts on Goscelin’s fairly extensive reading list. He also prescribes the Biblical commentaries of Jerome, Augustine, Gregory and those of other learned writers.48 Goscelin encourages Eve to follow the example of Jerome’s female students, Paula, Eustochium and Blesilla, whom Jerome reputedly called ‘Christ’s library’ [‘Christi bibliotec[a]’].49 Goscelin’s letter is shot through with allusions to Jerome’s letter twenty-two, from the idea that prayer and reading are channels of communication through which the recluse can talk to Christ, to the eschatological vision at the end of the Book in which Eve meets St Edith, the patron of her former community at Wilton and the heavenly Bride of Christ.50 In her wake is a choir of virgins, sisters who once lived and worshipped at Wilton. In this blessed state, the souls of human beings become part of a wider heavenly community, and everywhere, people and angels are joined together in throngs

(henceforth, Otter). Latin quotations are from Liber confortatorius, ed. C.H. Talbot, in Analecta monastica 3, Studia Anselmiana 37 (1955), pp. 1-117 (henceforth, LC). 45 Otter, p. 85. 46 Otter, p. 97. 47 Otter, p. 84; LC, p. 72. 48 Otter, pp. 95-6. For further discussion of Eve of Wilton as reader, see especially Rebecca Hayward and Stephanie Hollis, ‘The Female Reader in the Liber Confortatorius’, in Writing the Wilton Women: Goscelin’s Legend of Edith and Liber Confortatorius, ed. Stephanie Hollis, Medieval women: Texts and Contexts 9 (Turnhout, 2004), pp. 385– 99; and Gopa Roy, ‘Sharpen Your Mind with the Whetstone of Books: The Female Recluse as Reader in Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius, Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum and the Ancrene Wisse’, in Women, the Book and the Godly: Selected Readings from St. Hilda’s Conference, 1993, I, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 113–22. 49 Otter, p. 97. 50 Otter, p. 95 and p. 147. For Goscelin’s debt to letter twenty-two, see, for example, Rebecca Hayward, ‘Spiritual Friendship and Gender Difference in the Liber confortatorius’, in Writing the Wilton Women, pp. 341–53 (p. 349).

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[‘ubique angelorum et hominum gloriosa frequentia, ubique supernorum cum hominibus iunctissima contubernia’].51 Goscelin’s Life of St Edith (1078 x 1087) is itself concerned with the royal virgin’s place in the celestial community. The Life celebrates the merits of the young saint and her relationship with the divine spouse, and scholarship plays an important role in helping her progress towards Christ.52 Although Edith does not enclose herself in solitude within the ‘paradise of the cloister’ at Wilton, she keeps a menagerie of tame wildlife, which she visits ‘with the mind of an anchorite’ [‘mente [. . .] anachoritica’].53 In doing so, she emulates the Desert Fathers – Antony and Macarius – and also Mary of Luke 10:38–42, who represented the contemplative life. Yet while she is said to model herself on the figures of desert spirituality, her experience of the heavenly life is closer to that envisaged in the Book of Encouragement and Consolation than in the Lives of the desert monks. Edith is instructed by two tutors, Radbod of Rheims and Benna, canon of Trier. The men take turns to teach Edith through the window of the cloister ‘as was appropriate for the young pupil with her holy modesty’.54 She is soon able to progress beyond book learning and hasten towards God like the sighing bride of the Song of Songs. The extent to which sacred reading plays a part in her life differs between two extant versions of the text, one of which is contained in the MS Rawlinson C 938, the other of which is in Cardiff, Public Library, MS I.381. The Rawlinson manuscript remarks only briefly on her enthusiasm for reading about the lives of saints, and emphasises instead the inspiration that she drew from living examples of sanctity, such as her aunt, also called Edith.55 The Cardiff manuscript, however, recounts her relationship with figures of Scripture in much greater detail. It tells of how Edith increases her intimacy with God by praying to various heavenly groups including angelic messengers, apostles, martyrs and virgins, presumably the heavenly beings whom Edith encountered in her reading and liturgical observations. Out of all these groups, she chooses the apostles as LC, p. 115. I have not supplied Otter’s translation on p. 148 in this instance, as she translates ‘frequentia’ and ‘contubernia’ as abstract nouns (‘fellowship’ and ‘companionship’) when, in this instance, it would be more appropriate to translate them into the more concrete terms, ‘throng’ and ‘group of companions’. 52 See Haywood and Hollis, ‘The Female Reader’, p. 387 and p. 393. 53 Goscelin, Vita S. Edithae 7 and 11, trans. Michael Wright and Kathleen Loncar, in Writing the Wilton Women, pp. 23–67 (p. 32 and p. 41) (henceforth, VE). This translation is based on the version of the Life in Cardiff, Public Library, MS I.381. The Latin text is quoted from A. Wilmart, ‘La légende de sainte Édithe en prose et vers pars la moine Goscelin’, Analecta Bollandiana 56 (1938), 5–101 (p. 66). This edition is based on the MS Rawlinson C 938, though variant readings from the Cardiff MS are also given. 54 VE 7, p. 32. 55 VE 8, p. 35 n. 50. 51

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her ‘plenipotentiary intercessors’ [‘interventores legatorios’], whom Goscelin describes as ‘senators in the starry regions’ [‘senatores sidereos’] and ‘the fellow country-men and women and friends of God,’ [‘Dei populares et amicos’].56 Through their intercessions, she approaches the divine spouse. The Cardiff MS I.381 also suggests that she gains such intimacy with these powerful heavenly representatives through literary activity. Edith keeps a manual of devotions ‘in which the apostolic precepts shine out’, with prayers written alongside them.57 Edith’s close engagement with Scripture paves the way for the heavenly intercession of the apostles – the ideal virgin once again approaches heaven as an ideal reader. While the above examples suggest that the Biblio-Celestial model was part of the discourse surrounding female spirituality in Late Antiquity and the later Middle Ages, our final example reveals that the Biblio-Celestial model was not gender exclusionary. A letter from Herbert Losinga (d. 1119), addressed to a recluse called Guy (Wido), contains a remark that seems to hark back to the idea that anchorites are frequented by angels.58 Herbert begins his letter with a modesty topos, suggesting that Guy has no need of his advice, given that his conversation is in heaven and he speaks with the tongues of angels: ‘You seek the conversation [‘colloquia’] of our letters superfluously, dearest boy, since your conversation is in heaven [‘cum tua conversatio in coelis sit’], and, speaking with the tongues of angels [‘linguis angelorum loquens’], you little require human consolation.’59 The statement recalls Philippians 3:20, ‘but our conversation is in heaven’ [‘nostra autem conversatio in caelis est’] where ‘conversatio’ can be interpreted as association with heaven, a religious manner of life. In the context of Herbert’s letter, ‘conversatio in coelis’ is placed in parallel with ‘nostrarum colloquia’, suggesting that, in this instance, it refers to heavenly conversation, a reading which is reinforced by the following clause. Whether ‘speaking with the tongues of angels’ is to be understood literally (that is, as a suggestion that Guy exchanges words with angels, possibly in an esoteric language) or figuratively is ambiguous. Herbert then states that prayer is ‘one law’ and ‘one flower of eloquence’ and continues, ‘Reclining among prophets and apostles, you are refreshed with heavenly food and inebriated with heavenly drink. The modern administers of celestial feasts are not lacking to you; the greater their abundance, the more your love of reading blazes.’60 It is clear from this metaphor of spiritual nourishment that Herbert is evoking what I have termed the Biblio-Celestial model: Guy establishes contact VE 8, p. 34; Wilmart, ‘La légende de sainte Édithe’, p. 53. VE 8, p. 34. This is indeed how Licence interprets the passage in Hermits and Recluses, p. 125. Herbert Losinga, ‘Letter 56’ in Epistolae Herberti de Losinga, primi episcopi Norwicensis, ed. Robert Anstruther (Brussels, 1846), p. 95. 60 Losinga, ‘Letter 56’, p. 95. 58 59 56 57

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with heaven through prayer and also enjoys a banquet of sacred works served up by the prophets and apostles of Scripture and more recent writers. This idea is distinct from, yet complementary to, Herbert’s earlier nod to the tradition that anchorites associated with angels. Guy’s reclusion conjures up the image of hermits associating with angelic spirits, but, for Guy, this heavenly ‘conversatio’ also takes the form of commitment to prayer and dedication to reading sacred volumes. The Spatio-Celestial and Biblio-Celestial models offer two different ways of conceptualising the religious life of the anchorite. The dividing lines between them can be drawn in a number of ways: the Spatio-Celestial model looks back to the ideals of desert spirituality, presenting the anchorite as a (male) hermit in the wilderness who was inclined to pass his wisdom onto others through the spoken word; the Biblio-Celestial model imagines the (often female) anchorite as a recluse surrounded by sacred volumes, and is more influenced by the advice literature of the fourth century than early hagiography. While the Spatio-Celestial model was smoothly transmitted from the texts of Late Antiquity to the early Anglo-Saxon period and beyond, the Biblio-Celestial model does not appear in England until the last quarter of the eleventh century, in the work of Goscelin of Saint-Bertin. A more subtle difference between the Spatio- and Biblio-Celestial models lies in the way that they construct the vita angelica, and the kinds of readings that arise. In the hagiographies of hermits examined in this essay, their experiences of meeting and speaking with angels are to be read both literally and metaphorically. On one hand, angelic encounters are as real as interactions with men and women of the earthly realm in the world of the text. On the other hand, the encounters function as a metaphor for the vita angelica, a life of contemplation in imitation of the angels. According to the Biblio-Celestial model, the recluse may not be literally surrounded by heavenly citizens, but he or she can nevertheless participate in their society. The sacred text is a tool, which the recluse can use to craft his or her own sanctity. By reading and praying as the advice literature prescribes, the solitary can reserve a place around the high table of heaven or in a celestial choir. Both models are therefore to be understood on at least two levels, one literal (expressing either a historical or didactic truth), the other, figurative. Both, furthermore, reveal that a paradoxical relationship was perceived to exist between solitude and community, between silence and communication with God and his heavenly court. The quiet contemplation at the heart of the eremitic and reclusive forms of life was a meeting – a dialogue – between worlds. Without the white noise of communal life, the anchorite could hear the voices of the celestial citizens all the more clearly.

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Chapter 4

Rule Within Rule, Cell Within Cloister: Grimlaicus’s Regula Solitariorum1 ANDREW THORNTON, OSB

The Author of the Rule2

I

n the opening lines of his prologue, Grimlaicus, author of the Regula solitariorum, says that he is writing a rule for coenobitic solitaries [‘regulam solitariorum, videlicet coenobitarum’] at the suggestion of one who has that same name, ‘my dear father in Christ . . . Grimlaicus the venerable priest’ [‘dilectissimo patri in Christo . . . Grimlaico venerabili sacerdoti’].3 Grimlaicus’s remarks in the prologue, as well as his complete familiarity with the physical and spiritual circumstances of the life of an inclusus, make it clear that he had lived such a life himself for a good while. Just as clear is Grimlaicus’s thorough familiarity with the Rule of St Benedict, surely the fruit of years lived in a community that observed it. Grimlaicus ingeniously modifies this most communitarian of rules to fit the situation of enclosed solitaries, always drawing on its good sense and time-tested moderation.4 All English citations of the rule are from Grimlaicus, Rule for Solitaries, trans. Andrew Thornton, OSB (Collegeville, MN, 2011). The Latin text of the rule is found in: Grimlaici presbyteri regula solitariorum, in Codex Regula­rum Monas­ticarum et Canonica­rum. ed. Lucas Holstenius, vol. 1, critico-historical notes by Marianus Brockie (Augsburg, 1759; repr. Vienna, 1957), pp. 291–344 (hereafter HB). Holstenius’s text is found in PL 103, cols 574–664.  2 A somewhat fuller account of Grimlaicus, the author, and of coenobitic solitaries before him may be found in the introduction to Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton.  3 Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 25; HB, 292; PL 575. The latter Grimlaicus was himself was thinking of entering into reclusion. He may have been a priest of the monastery in which our author had begun his unique observance, someone perhaps to whom the abbot had mandated charge of the inclusus.  4 Not counting the liturgical and disciplinary codes (chapters 8–15 and 23–28), Grimlaicus cites or refers to roughly thirty-five per cent of the text of the Rule of St Benedict.  1

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Who was Grimlaicus? Although Karl Suso Frank acknowledges that the rule’s author cannot be positively identified, he conjectures that Grimlaicus may have written his rule after the time of Robert, bishop of Metz and abbot of Gorze, who died in 917.5 Réginald Grégoire also associates Grimlaicus with the monastery of Gorze in the diocese of Metz.6 Metz does seem a likely location, since in chapters 1 and 63, Grimlaicus praises Arnulf, bishop of Metz (d. 640) and twice cites the Rule for Canons of Amalarius of Metz (d. 850) in chapter 41. We can make an informed guess that Grimlaicus was a monk of a monastery in or near Metz who composed his rule for solitaries in the first quarter of the tenth century. Grimlaicus is careful to say what sort of solitaries he is legislating for: not anchorites, that is to say hermits who dwell all by themselves, but rather solitaries who dwell in the midst of a coenobium and follow the common horarium, but who live in quarters sealed off from almost all physical and visual contact with others. The cell’s situation within the monastic enclosure is simply stated, but the relationship between the solitary’s observance and that of the community is more difficult to determine, as we shall see. Since we are looking at Grimlaicus’s rule in the context of medieval anchorites and their functioning within multiple larger communities, we can pose a few preliminary questions. How did Grimlaicus’s rule fit within the Rule of St Benedict? How did his micro-cloister function within the larger cloister with its daily round of Divine Office, Mass, lectio divina, meals, chapter meetings, spiritual conferences and work? Why did Grimlaicus think it necessary to compose a rule for those who lived self-cloistered within the coenobitic cloister? In the prologue, Grimlaicus goes on to say that his work has consisted of collecting and collating; his own words amount to next to nothing.7 So that no one may confuse author and collator, Grimlaicus noted the sources from which he excerpted the many examples and sayings he borrowed, sometimes mentioning the author in his text, sometimes putting the name in the margin.8 Grimlaicus is not being falsely humble in calling himself a collector. He is careful to base his discussion of virtues and vices, regulations and conditions, upon accepted patristic and monastic authorities, the number and range of which is impressive. Grimlaicus refers to a dozen patristic and monastic writers by name, most Karl Suso Frank, ‘Grimlaicus, Regula solitariorum’, in Vita Religiosa im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Kaspar Elm, ed. F. J. Felten and N. Jaspert (Berlin, 1999), pp. 21–35 (especially p. 22).  6 Réginald Grégoire, ‘Grimlaic’, in Dictionnaire de spiritualité acétique et mystique, ed. M. Viller et al. (Paris, 1967), VI, cols 1042–3.  7 Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 26 (HB, p. 292; PL, cols 575–6).  8 The marginal notes in the printed edition of Holstenius refer only to scriptural citations but not to non-scriptural sources.  5

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prominently the Rule of St Benedict and the Lives of the Fathers of the Desert (cited some thirty-five times). Other authors whom he cites multiple times are Julianus Pomerius (under the name Prosper of Aquitaine), and Jerome, especially his letters, Basil, Cassian, Gregory the Great and Isidore of Seville. When he cites ancient sources, Grimlaicus nearly always has a wording different from that found in modern editions. He probably retrieved a good number of his quotations, not from copies of the original works, but from anthologies of passages gleaned by monks from their reading and arranged under thematic headings.9

Before Grimlaicus It is not this present essay’s purpose to survey the history of coenobitic solitaries before and after Grimlaicus.10 Likewise, it is beyond its scope to estimate how many European monasteries had solitaries living in cells within the monastic enclosure or attached to the church. Nonetheless, it may be useful to give some glimpses of the background against which Grimlaicus wrote and what usages or abuses he was addressing.11 It is safe to say that a mode of life similar to that envisaged by Grimlaicus was by no means rare. In the West, the first legislation for solitaries living within a monastery occurs in the acta of the local council of Vannes, which took place between 461 and 491: The following is to be observed concerning monks: they are not to be permitted to withdraw from the community into solitary cells, except in the case of those who have been proven after prolonged labours or because of the needs imposed by weakness, the rigor of the rule is relaxed by abbots. This is to be

For example, Grimlaicus uses the collection of sayings known as Liber scintillarum [The Book of Sparks], probably composed by Defensor, a monk of the abbey of St Martin at Ligugé, around 700. This compilation became extremely popular and is represented by 361 extant manuscripts. See the introduction to Defensoris Locogiacensis monachi liber scintillarum, ed. D. Henricus Rochais, OSB, CC, CXVII (Brepols, 1957). 10 For a description of the life of enclosed solitaries in southern Germany during the early Middle Ages, see Otmar Doerr, Das Institut der Inclusen in Süddeutschland, Beiträge zur Geschichte des alten Mönchtums und des Benedictinerordens, 18 (Münster, 1934), especially pp. 32–56. Much of Doerr’s description of solitaries living within coenobitic monasteries is based on Grimlaicus’s rule. 11 Needless to say, the much larger category of solitaries who lived apart, often in the wasteland or in tombs, cannot be dealt with here. The list of primary sources is enormous: the lives of the fathers and mothers of the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Cappadocia, as well as the lives of ascetics in the West, including Sulpicius Severus’ life of St Martin and Gregory the Great’s life of St Benedict.  9

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done such that they remain within the enclosure of the monastery yet are permitted to have separate cells under the abbot’s authority.12

Even though this very early legislation contains some elements that will be prominent in Grimlaicus’s rule, the Vannes legislation, as so often with conciliar decrees, aims to counter abuses, not to legislate for a style of life. Consequently, it does not address precisely the sort of life for which Grimlaicus wrote. There is no mention of permanent reclusion or of the cells being sealed. In fact, the council recognises that certain monks who may dwell in solitary cells are those for whom the strictness of the common rule has to be mitigated. The works of Gregory of Tours (c. 538–94), who wrote a century after the Council of Vannes, are populated by solitaries. The glimpses he gives of solitaries, including those who lived in the midst of monastic groups, can give us some idea of the excesses and problems with which Grimlaicus, writing shortly after the year 900, had to deal. Very often, we meet free-form solitaries, who live more or less idiorythmically within the limits – and security – of a coenobitic monastery. For example, a certain Leobard took up residence in a solitary cell in the monastery of St Majorus near Tours. He fasted, prayed, recited the Psalms and engaged in lectio divina. To keep harmful thoughts at bay, he wrote. Leobard had thought of moving on, but Gregory himself persuaded him to remain stable in his cell. Leobard was much sought after as a guide for laypeople and rulers and he constantly prayed for ecclesiastics. He did not pride himself on the length of his hair or beard and cut them at set times. Many miracles of healing were performed through him. He had an attendant who looked after his needs.13 All the features of Leobard’s life are later dealt with in Grimlaicus’s rule. Constant prayer, holy reading, manual work, stability, giving counsel, avoiding pride and presumption, a candidate’s maturity – these are the staples of any monastic life, whether communal or solitary. Even less central elements, such as shaving and haircuts, are of concern.14 One account from the works of Gregory contains nearly every element of the procedure detailed in the rule of Grimlaicus for receiving someone into reclusion. A young girl in the monastery of the abbess Radegund asks permission to be enclosed in a cell. Radegund questions her and determines that the girl in fact freely chooses to be enclosed. All the nuns gather, singing psalms and carrying lit candles. Radegund, holding the girl’s hand, leads her to the cell. The girl kisses Concilium Veneticum, in Concilia Galliae, CCSL, CXLVIII, ed. Charles Munier (Brepols, 1963), p. 153. My translation. 13 Gregory, Vitae patrum, PL 71, cols. 1092–5. 14 These topics will be taken up in detail below. 12

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each of her sisters and bids them farewell. She is then enclosed, the door of the cell then being blocked. The new solitary then gives herself to prayer and reading.15

Regimen The picture of life envisaged by Grimlaicus’s rule seems clear enough from a distance. Viewed up close, the details begin to get fuzzy. We learn in chapter 15 that someone who is seeking admission into reclusion must first knock for several days, following which: let his admis­sion be ap­proved either by the bishop or by his abbot. But without the consent of the bishop or of the abbot of the place and also of all the brothers of the monastery in which that brother was formed, the matter is not to be acted upon at all. [annuatur ei sive ab episcopo, sive ab abbate suo, ingressus. Sine licentia autem et consensu episcopi, aut abbatis proprii, atque omnium fratrum ejusdem monasterii, in quo idem frater educatus fuerit, nihil omnino de hac re fiat].16

Once the permission of bishop or abbot and of the monks is secured, the wouldbe solitary lives a one-year probation as a kind of practice for full enclosure. He does not leave cloister or church and comes under the guidance of a solitary who already lives in the monastery or nearby (an anchorite?) or of a monk modelled on Benedict’s portrait of the novice master, who is skilled in winning souls. At first glance, Grimlaicus seems to be talking about a professed monk who desires to become enclosed, one who has already lived the coenobitic life for some time, but confusion arises as the chapter continues. The applicant is described as ‘a newcomer to God’s service’ [‘noviter venientem quemque ad Dei servitium’]17 into whose past life inquiry is to be made to ascertain whether he is a fit subject for reclusion. Moreover, if the applicant has possessions (and a monk would not), he is to distribute them to the poor or donate them to the monastery, as the Rule of St Benedict says of a man at the end of the novitiate year. As chapter 15 continues, Grimlaicus seems to be talking, not about a monk but about a secular: ‘He ought to continue wearing the clothes he is entering with’ [‘Cum talibus

Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, liber VI, xxix, PL 71, col. 396. Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 54 (HB, p, 302; PL, col. 593). 17 Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 53 (HB, p. 302; PL, col. 592). 15 16

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autem vestimentis intret cum qualibus manere debebit’].18 This stipulation is later reinforced in chapter 49: We allow solitaries to have as much clothing as he (Benedict) allows monks to have. . . . If they are monks, they should have two tunics and two cowls. If however they have not yet taken on the monastic manner of life, they should not wear cowls but capes. [quantum ipse concessit monachis habere de vestimentis, et nos concedamus solitariis . . . si monachi sunt, duas tunicas et duas cucullas. Si vero nondum assumpserunt propositum monachale, cucullas non induant, sed cappas].19

Further confirmation comes from the end of chapter 16, where the arrangement of the cell precludes the solitary from looking at women. Such a safeguard is necessary ‘especially for those who had lived among seculars or who had been married’ [‘maxime his qui inter saeculares exstiterunt vel conjugati fuerunt’].20 So then, the one to be enclosed could be either a monastic or a non-monastic. Yet for nonmonastic applicants for reclusion, a single year of semi-seclusion would hardly seem sufficient. Given Grimlaicus’s devotion to the Rule of St Benedict, he surely would demand that they undergo a ‘long testing in a monastery’ [‘monasterii probatione diuturna’] so that ‘their observance is no mere novice-fervor’ [‘non conversationis fervore novicio’] and that they move into the cell of reclusion only after ‘this excellent training in the fraternal battle-line’ [‘bene exstructi fraterna ex acie ad singularem pugnam eremi’].21 Chapter 18 adds to the variety. An ordained priest from foreign parts or a monk on pilgrimage who desires to enter into reclusion is to be rigorously tested in humility and obedience for two years as he lives among the brothers in the monastic community. Even young adults, those who ‘have reached the age that seculars normally deem appropriate for getting married’ [‘ex quo jam quisque adultus fuerit, ex quo solent saeculares nuptiis apte deputari’], can make a firm profession of virginity and commence the testing process.22 Thus a two-year quasi-novitiate is demanded of both clerics and young men, yet only one year of testing is mentioned in chapter 15. The end of chapter 18 introduces yet another group: ‘someone of the Catholic faith who comes to us’ [‘aliquis ex catholicis venit Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 55 (HB, p. 303; PL, col. 593). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 135 (HB, p. 331; PL, col. 641). 20 Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 58 (HB, p. 303; PL, col. 595). 21 Translation from Benedict’s Rule: A Translation and Commentary, trans. Kardong (Collegeville, MN, 1996), p. 34. 22 Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 62 (HB, p. 305; PL, col. 597). 18 19

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ad nos’] and who wants to derive some profit from his stay.23 The text gives no help in determining if such a one is to live inside the monastery cloister, adjacent to the cell of reclusion, in the role of disciple, or outside the cloister with access through the church window. Amid the multiple categories of men who may be admitted into reclusion, at least one path into the cell is clear: a monk who wishes to become enclosed and who has already lived for a year in the monastery ‘in which that brother was formed’ [‘in quo idem frater educatus fuerit’].24 Such a one has shown that he can manage the discipline and restraints that such a year imposes. Hence one further year of testing suffices for him. The ceremony of reception, laid out in chapter 15, is modelled on the reception of the novice in chapter 58 of the Rule of St Benedict. The candidate promises stability and conversion in the presence of bishop and clergy. The promise is made ‘with words alone’ [‘verbis tantum’]. No vow document is signed on the altar. After the bishop and the assembled clergy and monks have prayed over him, the solitary enters his cell and it is sealed with the bishop’s seal. The whole procedure is carried out ‘gently and quietly’ [‘blande leniterque’] in true Benedictine fashion.25 The cell of the reclused man, as described in chapter 16, is to be small but have rooms that meet the solitary’s needs. The cell should also come with a little garden in which the solitary can do a bit of gardening and get exercise and fresh air. Sealed by the bishop, the cell’s door should remain closed except in case of serious illness, as we will see below.26 Chapters 34 to 37 make it clear that a solitary prays the Divine Office every day with the monastic community. Provided he is free of defilement in flesh and spirit, he may receive Holy Communion every day, and, if he is a priest, he may celebrate Mass daily.27 A priest needs to have the proper liturgical vestments and altar linens in his cell.28 As regards hygiene, a solitary, especially is he is a priest, is to bathe in a tub in the cell as often as he finds it necessary, and he is to give himself a shave and a haircut every forty days.29 The solitary’s participation in the community’s liturgical prayer is made possible by a window that opens into the church.30 This window allows the solitary to speak with those who come to him. To safeguard the solitary from needless distractions and to preclude even a hint 25 26 27 28 29 30 23 24

Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p.62 (HB, p. 305; PL, col. 598). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 54 (HB, p. 302; PL, col. 593). The ceremony is laid out in Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 55 (HB, p. 302; PL, col. 593). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, pp. 56–8 (HB, p. 303; PL, cols 594–5). Grimlaicus , trans. Thornton, pp. 103–111 (HB, pp. 320–3; PL, cols 623–7). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, pp. 133–5 (HB, p. 331; PL, cols 640–1). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, pp. 136–7 (HB, p. 332; PL, col. 642). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 56 (HB, p. 303; PL, col. 594).

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of impropriety, this window is to be hung with a double curtain. Thus, the solitary’s contact with outsiders is limited to hearing and speaking with those who come to him for counsel or, if he is a priest, for confession. Whether his liturgical ­participation is also thus limited is an open question. Chapter 17 maintains that a solitary, despite what the name means, should never live entirely alone; there should always be two or three solitaries residing in the same monastery. Their cells are to be so arranged that ‘they can speak to each other through a window’ [‘per fenestram ad invicem loqui possint’], presumably one that connects the cells.31 Chapter 24 describes how two solitaries abiding in the same place observe the canonical hours. When they hear the signal, probably the monastery bell, each goes to his own oratory. In addition, they should come together every day to speak about God’s service and to beg pardon for their faults.32 Such an arrangement mirrors the belief of the whole monastic movement that one can acquire and practise virtues and root out vices only if one lives in common with others. Fresh air, healthy food, a modicum of contact with those outside the cell of reclusion, and the provision that there should always be more than one solitary in a given monastery – these and similar rules aim to remove, insofar as possible, the temptation to go to extremes and to follow one’s own will. They also help to forestall the danger that the solitary will slip into insanity. The solitary is alone but not dispensed from obedience or from the charity and ­humility required of monks, indeed of all Christians. In the further chapters of his rule, Grimlaicus deals with all the details of living a monastic life within the unique context of reclusion. The arrangement of psalmody, manual work, the amount of food and drink, the kind of clothing and footwear – all such practical matters, along with chapters on prayer, compunction and the virtues are based firmly on the Rule of St Benedict and on the teachings of monastic authorities before him. Grimlaicus’s knowledge of human nature, moderation and concern for the wider community testify to the wholesome influence of Benedict’s rule, especially in its compassion for human frailty. The foregoing paragraphs imply that Grimlaicus is clear enough as he lays out the physical arrangements of the solitary’s life. Yet repeatedly we encounter details (or the lack of them) that lead us to wonder if his intention is so clear after all. Accommodating within a monastery’s enclosure a cell with an oratory, a door and (probably) two windows, one of them opening into the church and the other giving into an adjoining cell, as well as a small garden, presents not a Less probably, in view of what follows, fenestra might refer to the window that opens from each cell into the church: Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 58 (HB, p. 304; PL, col. 595). 32 Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 77 (HB, pp. 310–11; PL, col. 607). 31

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few architectural challenges. Grimlaicus leaves unaddressed many other practical matters. How and to what extent does the solitary interact with those who control the physical arrangements of the monastery, especially the abbot, the prior and the cellarer? Who supplies the solitary with books, both for the liturgy and for lectio divina? In chapter 28, Grimlaicus tells us that, when he began seriously to consider entering into reclusion, he worried about how he would get food, clothing, candles, etc.,33 yet he says practically nothing about how such needs are to be met. Solitaries, as stipulated in chapters 39 to 41, ought to devote the major part of the day to holy work. Physical work will help the solitary to avoid the pitfalls of idleness and boredom and even earn a little to relieve the lot of the poor.34 What sort of work, besides gardening, did he do? How and by whom were the products of his labour sold? The question of food is particularly unclear. Echoing chapter 4 of the Rule of St Benedict, chapter 19 admonishes the solitary not to be a big eater or a wine drinker,35 but did the solitary have easy access to food and wine? Chapter 41 says that solitaries ‘should get a reasonable amount of food and simple clothing either from their own labour or from the offering of the faithful’ [‘victum vero rationalem, et vestem simplicem, aut de proprio labore, aut de fidelium oblatione habeant’].36 The absence of any mention of the monastery cellarer or the kitchen staff is curious. How did donations of food reach him, through the church window or via his disciples or the cellarer? If there are two solitaries, they should, as chapter 24 recommends, ‘take turns providing each other with both spiritual and bodily food’ [‘pariter reficiantur utrisque et spiritualibus et carnalibus dapibus’].37 Does this refer to what comes from the monastery’s kitchen or what they grow in their gardens or what is given them by the faithful? Additional murk is added by this curious passage in chapter 41: ‘If there be some who do not want to have either their own or the church’s possessions, then prelates ought to exercise providential oversight and supply what they need out of the church’s resources’ [‘si tales fuerint qui nec suas nec Ecclesiae velint habere possessiones, horum necessitatibus providentissima gubernatione de facultatibus Ecclesiae praelati debent subvenire’].38 Is the abbot of the monastery a prelate in this case? Chapter 43 demands even more imaginative gymnastics. If a solitary has enough food, then he should invite the poor and pilgrims to his table. Failing that, he may, like the abbot in Benedict’s rule, invite whichever of the brethren he 35 36 37 38 33 34

Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 94 (HB, p. 317; PL, col. 616). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, pp. 113–20 (HB, pp. 323–6; PL, cols 629–33). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 63 (HB, p. 305; PL, col. 598). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 118 (HB, p. 325; PL col. 631). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 78 (HB, p. 311; PL, col. 607). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 120 (HB, p. 326; PL, col. 632).

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wishes!39 If these arrangements are taken literally, we are justified in asking what is solitary about this model of solitary life. If one may judge from puzzles raised by text, especially its later chapters, reclusion made the solitary fairly independent, less responsible to the community and it to him. The many ‘loose ends’ make it tempting to conclude that the stipulations of the rule underwent change and adaptation over years, or even that the ­situations envisaged by Grimlaicus were more imagined than actual.

Interactions Although it would be desirable to situate Grimlaicus’s solitary within the monastic community’s lattice of social interactions, yet, as with physical arrangements, this proves to be more difficult than it might seem at first. Apart from interaction with any fellow solitary(ies), the solitary’s most immediate relationship is that described in chapters 52 and 53.40 A solitary, here called a master [‘magister’], has one, two or even three disciples [‘discipuli’] whom he must instruct by word and example, whom he must correct, and to whom he gives orders. The disciples have charge of vessels and resources and are to provide for their master at the proper time what God has given. This is another one of those features of Grimlaicus’s arrangement about which we would like to know more. Who are these disciples? Were they monks of the community? Were they the neophytes seeking admission to reclusion, as described in chapter 15? How were they chosen? What interchange was there between the attendants and, say, the monastery cellarer? What did Grimlaicus mean by saying that solitaries should not want to have many disciples, because, as chapter 52 has it, they ‘can never overcome avarice when they are intent on supporting many people’ [‘nequaquam vincere avaritiam possunt quando ad multorum sustentationem intendunt’]?41 Cut off from contact as they were, how could solitaries ‘support’ anyone? To what extent was the solitary to rely on the offerings of the faithful or of the above-mentioned church resources to support himself and his disciple(s)? The solitary’s key relationships, to the abbot, prior, cellarer, other monastic officials and the monastic brethren, remains conjectural. Apart from chapter 1 on the kinds of solitaries, chapter 15 on reception into reclusion, and chapters 52 and 53 on the solitary’s disciples, we get only the most general of hints about how the solitary fits into the life of the monastery. For instance, chapter 48 mentions a brother who is to care for the sick. A solitary’s cell may be opened while the Grimlaicus, ed. Thornton, p. 122 (HB, p. 327; PL col. 634). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, pp. 138–41 (HB, pp. 332–3; PL cols 643–4). 41 Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 139 (HB, p. 333; PL, col. 644). 39 40

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solitary is sick, so that he may receive the ministrations of the infirmarian and also receive visits from other brothers. The chapter concludes with the admonition of St Benedict that superiors and cellarers not neglect the sick.42 Chapter 58, on obedience, is clear on the general principle but unspecific: ‘The solitary should gladly comply with everything that the one commanding him tells him to do for the sake of religion’ [‘omne quod solitario injunctum fuerit ab aliquo religionis gratia’].43 Who is issuing the order: the abbot, the bishop, or perhaps a monk so delegated by the abbot? Who oversaw and, if necessary, corrected the solitary’s celebration of the liturgy of the Mass? Even though, in the solitary’s interaction with others, there is no blanket prohibition of speech, the task is to preach by silence, to edify by example rather than words. The speech of solitaries, says chapter 20, ‘should be pure, simple and open, full of dignity and honesty, full of sweetness, grace and gentleness’ [‘debet esse purus, simplex et apertus, plenus gravitate et honestate; plenus suavitate, gratiaque, et lenitate’],44 yet marked by discretion and discernment. It is remarkable how much emphasis Grimlaicus places on the benefits of good speaking, even in chapter 61 on silence: ‘There should always be measure in their words and balance in their speech. Their words should be in moderation, and they should love listening more than speaking’ [‘maneat in verbo ejus mensura, in sermone statera. Semper verbo ejus sint moderata, et plus diligat semper audire quam loqui’].45 It might seem that we could look to the Rule of St Benedict to fill in some of the gaps that we have seen in Grimlaicus’s provisions for coenobitic solitaries. After all, a Benedictine monastery was (and is) no stranger to special groupings and living arrangements: guests, the poor, novices, children, the infirm, the old, the abbot’s table, the ordained, craftsmen and the occasional self-appointed hermit. Yet after the first chapter of Benedict’s rule, there is not a single reference to those brothers who have elected to lead the eremitical life; they have literally ‘venture[d] out to the single combat of the desert’ [‘ad singularem pugnam eremi’].46 Grimlaicus’s main source does help us to grasp the general features of the common life of the monastery, but it is no help with the details of an enclosed life within it.

44 45 46 42 43

Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, pp. 132–3 (HB, pp. 331–2; PL, cols 639–40). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 149 (HB, p. 336; PL, col. 649). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton p. 66 (HB, p. 306; PL, col. 600). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, p. 155 (HB, p. 338; PL, col. 653). Benedict’s Rule, trans. Kardong, pp. 33 and 34.

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Teaching Though this volume’s focus is the interaction between the anchorite and the surrounding and supporting community, a few words about Grimlaicus’s particular teaching may not be out of place. Some elements have already been touched upon in the survey of the regimen and interactions envisaged by his rule. In chapters 8 to 28 Grimlaicus relies far less on citations from acknowledged authorities than elsewhere in his rule. In fact, chapters 8 to13, 17, 23 and 24 are almost without identifiable citations. He speaks in his own words in these chapters, yet his teaching on the relationship of the active life (the pursuit of virtue and good works) to the contemplative life (abandonment of temporal concerns to focus on God alone, a foretaste of the joy of life eternal) is common coin. Grimlaicus has compassion for human frailty but knows to what heights that person can ascend who aims at the substance of virtue rather than at its trappings and who prefers nothing to the love of Christ. As we have seen repeatedly, his understanding of human nature, sense of moderation and concern for the wider community testify to the wholesome influence of the Rule of St Benedict. If we were to ask which part of the rule gives Grimlaicus’s particular teaching, the answer would be chapters 27 and 28,47 two of the longest chapters in the rule. Here Grimlaicus is not compiling or legislating but exhorting, even lamenting. In his day, virtue has vanished, and everything is going to wrack and ruin. People who should be scaling the heights of virtue and contemplation are worried about their own comfort. He knows what he is talking about. He himself has been tepid in devotion and overly concerned about creature comforts. He hopes that his rule may encourage those who are living or intend to live the enclosed life to aim at nothing short of total self-donation. Life in union with Christ in the Spirit in this life and everlasting life with God and the angels and saints in the life to come are the only goals worth pursuing. Grimlaicus urges all his readers to get on with this holy work, to let nothing frighten them, and never to despair of God’s mercy.

The Larger Church A prominent feature of Grimlaicus’s teaching that speaks directly this volume’s theme has been kept for last. Solitaries serve the whole body of the church, not only by prayer, but also by giving counsel and, in the case of priests, by hearing confessions. As we have seen, no one is formally committed to their care, but they teach and exhort those who come to them, and they preach especially by their silence. Beyond any particular advice they may give, solitaries build up the church Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, pp. 87–95 (HB, pp. 313–17; PL, cols 612–16).

47

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by giving good example, and, most immediately, by encouraging and supporting those few people with whom they have frequent contact: the one or two solitaries who are there with them, and their disciples. In chapter 69, the final one of his rule, Grimlaicus allows of no return to the world motivated by pride or concern for worldly affairs. He even advocates the penalty of excommunication for those who do so.48 Nonetheless, he holds that the solitary has serious responsibilities toward the larger community and of the church. Chapter 22 deals with the case of enclosed solitaries who are called to assume governance and who have the requisite talent.49 Grimlaicus is clear: such people must accept the burden of leadership, even though it draws them out of reclusion – to assume the office of abbot or bishop, for example. The reasons for his judgment are evangelical: gifts are for the benefit of all, not just of oneself; the Son came forth from the Father for the good of us all; the test of love is service; the humility that refuses to assume the responsibilities of leadership is false. Surprising as it may be to those who view the eremitical life as a total withdrawal from the ecclesial community, Grimlaicus’s position is not at all unique. Occasionally a monk who lived in seclusion governed a monastery or even a diocese. The account of Leonianus, although extreme, is instructive. For more than forty years, in the environs of Vienna and Augsburg, he was seen by no one, yet he took on responsibility not only for a community of monks but also a large monastery of nuns.50 Similarly, Gregory of Tours (d. 594) relates the career of Salvius, who lived many years under a rule in a monastery and became its abbot. Later, wishing to live a more hidden life, he bid the brothers farewell and had himself enclosed. He ministered to all who sought him out and was generous with prayers and healing. After many years, Salvius was drawn out of his cell and made a bishop against his will.51

Conclusion In his prologue, Grimlaicus says that, on the advice of the priest also named Grimlaicus, he is writing a rule for coenobitic solitaries [‘regulam solitariorum, videlicet coenobitarum’] which he himself is then to observe. Even though Grimlaicus does mention St Benedict or his rule some eight times in the course of his own rule, he passes over the fact that the Rule of Benedict forms the scaffolding Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, pp. 170–2 (HB, p. 344; PL, cols 662–4). Grimlaicus, trans. Thornton, pp. 71–2 (HB, pp. 308–9; PL, cols 603–4). 50 ‘Vita patrum Iurensium Romani, Lupicini, Eugendi’, in Passiones vitaeque sanctorum aevi merovingici, ed. Bruno Krusch, MGH Scriptorum rerum Merovingicarum, 3 (Hannover, 1896 repr. 1977), p. 156. 51 Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, liber VII, I, PL 71, cols 415ff. 48 49

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of the whole enterprise. He doubtless thought it unnecessary to highlight the centrality of the Rule of St Benedict for his own rule; he knew it by heart and presumed that his addressee and subsequent readers would also. Toward the end of his prologue, Grimlaicus thanks the other Grimlaicus for persuading him to compose a rule, and he hopes that his efforts may aid others who have it in mind to devote themselves to the life of an inclusus, among them the priest Grimlaicus himself. So then, was the Regula solitariorum meant to be a set of exhortations and prescriptions for the solitary added on top of the observance already in force in the monastery? Was it a kind of pact that granted the inclusus space for his exceptional form of life within the coenobium, a kind of customary upon which abbot and solitary could agree? Did it function both as a set of rules for living and as a source of encouragement and inspiration, as well as a contract between inclusus and abbey concerning sustenance, living conditions, expectations, and liturgical life? Or was it primarily a compendium of spiritual reading, short treatises on the virtues and vices to which solitaries are particularly prone, along with pieces of sound advice from the ancient sayings and items of legislation tested by the author’s own experience? Underlying such questions is a larger puzzle. The life of the solitary as laid out by Grimlaicus is enfolded within the common life of a monastery and open to contact with outsiders; it would be best if there not be a single solitary in the place but two or three; the solitary has frequent contact with one or more disciples. Given the apparent freedom that Grimlaicus’s solitary has with respect to food, resources and personal interaction, to what extent can his communis solitariorum vita be distinguished from an idiorhythmic observance sanctioned or at least tolerated by a monastery’s abbot (most monasteries then and now have had such)? How successful was Grimlaicus in his using the Rule of St Benedict, for which the common life is the way to run toward Christ, as the foundation of his rule for intra-community solitaries? A solitary’s having a written rule that applies within the larger monastery’s rule sits uneasily with the conviction of Benedict’s rule that the common life is the monk’s way to God, since it is life in common, under a rule and an abbot, that aids the monk in overcoming self-will and in cultivating selfless love. As we have seen, Grimlaicus maintains in chapter 17 that the solitary life lived in the midst of a community is just such a life. The very location and structure of the cell of reclusion, with its door and multiple windows, imply that the solitary is not alone. At least to some extent, he is under the oversight of the abbot, provided for by the cellarer, cared for by the infirmarian, served by disciples, and available to outsiders. Can we, finally, give a cut-and-dried answer to our question: what is this rule? It seems to be less for someone aiming at an extreme form of asceticism than for

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someone who wants to disencumber himself from the busy-ness of the coenobium, less for a solitary who wishes to live within a coenobium than for a coenobite who wants to live a more reclusive form of the monastery’s observance. The Rule of Grimlaicus, a composite of legislation, exhortation, traditional stories and wisdom, witnesses to the vitality of the ancient monastic tradition represented by the apothegms of the Desert Fathers and the Rule of St Benedict. Grimlaicus, while lamenting his own fallibility and the abuses to which solitaries can fall prey, is confident of God’s help. His aim is to contemplate the loving God who called him to a life of solitude within community. He regards himself and those who follow his way of life as solitary but not as separate. Grimlaicus wants to be among those whom, as St Benedict says at the end of chapter 72 of his rule, Christ leads all together [‘nos pariter’] to everlasting life.

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Part II

Lay Communities

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Chapter 5

English Nuns as ‘Anchoritic Intercessors’ for Souls in Purgatory: The Employment of A Revelation of Purgatory by Late Medieval English Nunneries for Their Lay Communities CLARCK DRIESHEN

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he late-medieval Christian believed that after death souls entered purgatory to expiate their sins, and that the prayers of the living – especially of reputable devout men and women, such as anchorites and anchoresses – could significantly reduce the period of their suffering.1 The early fifteenth-century visionary text A Revelation of Purgatory promotes the intercessory powers of a woman recluse who intercedes for the release of a soul from purgatory. Scholars have identified the first woman as a Winchester anchoress and the second as a former nun of the Benedictine convent of St Mary, also known as Nunnaminster.2 An examination of hitherto unstudied manuscript and testamentary evidence, however, urges a re-consideration of this historical identification and suggests that the shared textual ancestor of the three extant copies of A Revelation – in Longleat House, MS 29 (c. 1425–50), Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 91 (c. 1430–40) and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. th. c. 58 (possibly c. 1450–75) – may originate from an anonymous source, to which a scribe affiliated with Nunnaminster added local references in order to adapt the narrative for the convent. Consequently, these references may not reflect the work’s historicity, but, rather, the work’s historicisation. See, for example, R. N. Swanson, ‘The Burdens of Purgatory’, in Medieval Christianity, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein (Minneapolis, MN, 2010), pp. 353–80 (pp. 360–7). For the anchoress’s role as intercessor, see Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, ‘Lame Margaret of Magdeburg: the Social Function of a Medieval Recluse’, Journal of Medieval History 22 (1996), 155–69.  2 See A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown, Fifteenth-Century Woman Visionary: Introduction, Critical Text, and Translation, ed. Marta Powell Harley (Lewiston, NY, 1985), pp. 37–8 (future references to the printed text are to this edition); and Mary C. Erler, ‘A Revelation of Purgatory (1422): Reform and the Politics of Female Visionaries’, Viator 38.1 (2007), 321–45 (p. 325).  1

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I suggest that neither the potential anonymous source nor the historicised version of A Revelation were tied to a single historical context but were, on the contrary, designed to be adapted to any number of local situations in which late-medieval convents interacted with their extramural lay communities.3 In such a context, A Revelation could cater to both religious women and the laity; the former could identify with the woman recluse and the latter, identifying with the purgatorial soul, could ask the ‘recluse’ to intercede for their souls in purgatory by organising masses. As we shall see, religious women customised and disseminated copies of the work in order to associate their institutions with ‘anchoritic intercessors’ and present these institutions as powerhouses of intercessory prayer. This enabled them to compete for and attract testators who would leave substantial bequests in return for their spiritual intercession.

Identifying A Revelation’s ‘Anchoritic Intercessor’ A Revelation presents a three-part vision, experienced over three consecutive nights, beginning on 10 August 1422, in which an unnamed woman recluse tells of her encounter with the soul of Margaret, a deceased nun. Margaret explains that she is suffering torment in purgatory on account of her sins, and asks her former friend to request six priests to perform thirteen specific masses on behalf of her (Margaret’s) soul in order to hasten her release. On the second night, the woman, having organised the prescribed masses, sees Margaret undergo punishments for her sins and pass through purgatorial fire, after which Margaret informs her that the recited masses have effected her release. In confirmation, on the third night, she sees Margaret arrive at the earthly paradise, where a group of thirteen men leads her to heaven. None of the three extant copies of A Revelation names the witness (and presumed author) of the vision, nor, as Mary Erler argues, is it clear whether she is a nun or an anchoress. Alexandra Barratt considers her neither a nun, as she lives with a maidservant not with fellow nuns, nor a strictly enclosed woman, since she ‘was free to visit local priests and to make a pilgrimage to a local shrine’.4 Erler, however, points out that nuns and anchoresses sometimes had maidservants and that there is no evidence ‘that pilgrimage-going was more likely to characterize the author as one or the other’.5 This ambiguity has led to speculation that she was a Benedictine nun (Martha Powell Harley), a ‘non-institutionalised devout I am grateful to Diane Watt for her suggestion that A Revelation may have had a ­functional purpose.  4 Women’s Writing in Middle English, ed. Alexandra Barratt (Harlow, 1992), p. 163.  5 Erler, ‘A Revelation’, pp. 324–5.  3

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woman’ (Alexandra Barratt) or, as Mary Erler has recently argued, a Winchester anchoress whom Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, consulted in 1421.6 The Revelation-author’s identity as an anchoress is, therefore, not clear-cut. Indeed, a fixation on the text’s assumed historicity has ignored the possibility that the woman’s religious ambiguity may be deliberate, allowing various categories of women recluses associated with convents to identify with its protagonist. She could, for example, be identified as a lay anchoress living in a nunnery: on the Continent, at least, as Anneke Mulder-Bakker has argued, ‘incluses’ took a vow for life, followed a religious rule, were obedient to abbesses and whom, for all intents and purposes, ‘we have to consider . . . monastics’.7 She could be a nun who, in pursuit of religious perfection, had permission from her prioress and diocesan bishop to be enclosed as a solitary, like Margaret Kirkby, a nun of the Cistercian Hampole Priory, who asked for enclosure in a reclusorium in order to give ‘herself more freely and quietly to pious prayers and vigils’.8 After having lived as an anchoress at Lay Easton and then at Ainderby, Kirkby returned to an enclosure in her former convent, which suggests that her professions of nun and anchoress were complementary.9 However, as I demonstrate below, she could also be a strictly enclosed nun whose lifestyle was merely associated with that of an anchoress. Mary Erler considers it unlikely that the author was a nun because she makes no reference to Margaret as her religious sister, although this may mean that the author wanted her to be identifiable with nuns who were also anchoresses, living apart from other nuns.10 The ambiguity of her identity, therefore – whether lay or religious, anchoress or nun – could allow for religious women from a range of backgrounds to identify with, or to become identified as, her. Even though the table of contents of Longleat House, MS 29 refers to her as ‘a deuout woman A Revelation, ed. Harley, p. 38; Women’s Writing, ed. Barratt, p. 163; and Erler, ‘A Revelation’, p. 325.  7 Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia, PA, 2005), pp. 5–6.  8 Ann K. Warren, ‘The Nun as Anchoress: England 1100–1500’, in Medieval Religious Women, Volume 1: Distant Echoes, ed. John A. Nichols and Lillian Thomas Shank (Kalamazoo, MI, 1984), (pp. 197–212) p. 204.  9 Elizabeth Freeman, ‘The Priory of Hampole and its Literary Culture: English Religious Women and Books in the Age of Richard Rolle’, Parergon 29.1 (2012), 1–25 (p. 7). Anchoresses Celestria and Adilda, who, during the fourteenth century, lived in an anchorhold attached to the Benedictine convent of Davington Priory, are further examples of nuns who became anchoresses in their own convent. See Rotha Mary Clay, The Hermit and Anchorites of England (London, 1914), p. 223. See also Marilyn Oliva, The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich, 1350–1540 (Woodbridge, 1998), p. 156 n. 124. 10 Erler, ‘A Revelation’, pp. 323–4.  6

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solitary’ (fol. 2r), and the narrative’s explicit calls her ‘cuidam sancta mulieri recluse’ [a certain holy woman recluse] (fol. 165v), readers could have identified her with any of the above categories.11 What the author does want to make clear, however, is that the protagonist is an experienced intercessor and that her experiences – she claims that purgatorial pains ‘wer showed to me many tymes before’ (lines 14–15) – result from a life in enclosure. When Margaret explains the existence of three kinds of purgatory, the second, the ‘purgatory of mercy’ (line 773) is a place where one is purged already on earth ‘by sekenesse and grete tribulacions in þis wor[l]de and aftyr contricion þat þay hadde and aftyr þe pardon þat þay haue purchased’ (lines 765–8). This earthly purgatory corresponds with the purgatorial fire that, as Margaret explains, leads right up to heaven. To this fire are allocated those who have shown contrition and done penance on earth and are identified as ‘holy men and wommen of religions and ancrasses and ancras and al holy closed peple’ (lines 749–50). From the explanation of the purgatorial fire, readers may have inferred that the visionary, a recluse herself, is situated in this earthly purgatorial space and identifiable as an anchoress: like purgatory, the anchorhold represented an in-between space, separating heaven and hell and the worlds of the living and the deceased respectively.12 Its in-between state and alignment with a purgatorial space was anticipated in the very rituals of enclosure in which an anchoress’s death to the world was liturgically staged with prayers from the Office of the Dead, recited while she entered her anchorhold – often aptly referred to as a sepulchre.13 Readers, however, may also have identified her as a strictly enclosed nun whose ‘death to the world’ may have associated her with a similar in-between state.14 Whereas A Revelation may have given its readers the impression that its protagonist was an anchoress, most readers are unlikely to have identified her as the aforementioned Winchester anchoress. Harley’s argument for this identification rests on the identities of the six priests the text names, who are asked to sing the requisite masses. The first two are ‘Maister Fforest, my gostly fadyr’ (line A Revelation, ed. Harley, p. 26. See also Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘Envisioning Reform: A Revelation of Purgatory and Anchoritic Compassioun in the Late Middle Ages’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Exeter Symposium VIII: Papers Read at Charney Manor, July 2011, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 141–56 (pp. 143–4). 13 Susannah Mary Chewning, ‘Mysticism and the Anchoritic Community: “A Time ... of Veiled Infinity”’, in Medieval Women in Their Communities, ed. Diane Watt (Toronto, 1997), pp. 116–37 (p. 124). 14 See Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Dead to the World? Death and the Maiden Revisited in Medieval Women’s Convent Culture’, in Guidance for Women in Twelfth-Century Convents, ed. Vera Morton and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 157–80 (p. 157).

11

12

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231) and ‘Sir John Wynbourne, my oþer gostly fadyr’ (lines 234–5) – Winchester clerics who enjoyed strong connections with the aristocratic Beaufort family. Two others, Sir Richard Bone and Dom John Pery, were also Winchester clerics, but their names do not seem to have been widely known. The same applies to ‘þi fadyr, þe recluse of Westmyster’ (lines 112–13) and Petrus Combe, a monk at Westminster. The ‘recluse’ was probably John London, a monk of Westminster connected with the Bridgettine double monastery of Syon Abbey, but not, as far as is known, with Nunnaminster.15 The connection between most of the named priests and Nunnaminster may have been known only to an audience closely affiliated with the convent, therefore. However, scribes and owners of extant copies of A Revelation, such as Robert Thornton, the Yorkshire layman who was scribe and owner of the version in Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 91 (of whom more below), must have found the narrative much less marked by a ‘strong sense of its place, the city of Winchester’ than Erler claims.16 As I will demonstrate, the source for A Revelation may have been an anonymous work to which a scribe affiliated with Nunnaminster had at some point supplied the priests’ names. These names were so untraceable that this rendition – with the names of the priests included – could also serve the purposes of scribes and readers affiliated with other convents. The lay readers of the text, whether an ‘anonymous’ or an already historicised version, would identify its intercessor with whichever institution that made A Revelation available to them.

Testators and Thirteen Masses Convents may have explicitly identified the protagonist of A Revelation with their own institution when they gave laypeople access to the work in order to present themselves as highly competent in repaying donations with effective spiritual intercession.17 For example, Julian Lampet, an anchoress at the Benedictine convent of Carrow Priory in Norwich, attracted many substantial bequests from lay testators – who mention her by name in fifty-six extant wills – in return for intercessory prayers.18 That lay testators were part of the intended audience of A Revelation is suggested by both intratextual and contextual evidence. Although Erler, ‘A Revelation’, pp. 328–35. Erler, ‘A Revelation’, p. 322. 17 For the laity’s so-called pro anima donations to religious houses, see Arnoud-Jan A. Bijsterveld, Do ut des. Gift Giving, Memoria, and Conflict Management in the Medieval Low Countries (Hilversum, 2007), pp. 115, 119–20. 18 Carole Hill, ‘Julian and her Sisters: Female Piety in Late Medieval Norwich’, in The Fifteenth Century VI: Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Linda Clark (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 165–88 (pp. 173–5). 15 16

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Mary Erler asserts that the earliest extant copy of the work (in Longleat House, MS 29) is a letter sent to the Westminster recluse, its opening address indicates that its author expected it also to reach a wider audience, primarily religious, but also potentially lay.19 The author addresses both ‘Der brether and sustres’ and ‘al þat reden þis tretis’ (lines 3–4) or, as the Lincoln manuscript has it: ‘all oþer trew cristyne ffrendis þat redis this tretyce’.20 The author’s concern for the laity, I suggest, results from her intention to have the instruction for the thirteen masses introduced by the narrative function within a testamentary culture. Within this (testamentary) culture laypeople often requested male religious houses to perform masses for their souls after death. Underlying the popularity of the thirteen masses was, first, the belief that the mass was the most efficacious form of intercessory prayer and, second, the fact that Christ and his apostles also numbered thirteen.21 Testators regularly made provision for thirteen men to be present, and for thirteen masses to be sung at their funerals, thereby ritually re-enacting the apostolic community to help their souls’ safe passage to heaven.22 Catering to this testamentary culture, the Revelation-author ascribes a similar function to the thirteen men who receive Margaret’s soul after she leaves purgatory. One of them sings a mass for her, gives her the ‘croun of grace and mercy’ (line 886), the ‘septre of victory’ (line 887), leads her to the gate of heaven and instructs her to enter in order to ‘receyue þe blisse of paradise and of heuyn’ (line 894). Late medieval English testators, such as John Ryngfeld, who willed in 1439 that after his death, ‘I wol have xiij masses and xiij pore men and women seying oure lady sawter’, clearly hoped for similar treatment of their souls.23 Both continental and English religious houses may have attracted donors by answering to their demand for thirteen masses and disseminating instructions, such as the Tredecim missae pro peccatis that their priests could perform in return for the laity’s pro anima donations.24 An English version is extant in the Erler, ‘A Revelation’, p. 327. Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole, an English Father of the Church and his Followers, ed. C. Horstman, 2 vols (London, 1895–6), I (1895), p. 383. 21 Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), p. 28. 22 Ann W. Ramsey, Liturgy, Politics, and Salvation. The Catholic League in Paris and the Nature of Catholic Reform 1540–1630 (Rochester, NY, 1999), pp. 204–5. 23 G. H., ‘Four Ancient English Wills’, The Ancestor; a quarterly review of county and family history, heraldry and antiquities 10 (London, 1904), 13–21 (p. 16). 24 This Latin work was copied in a fourteenth-century Benedictine manuscript (Mainz, Stadtbibliothek, MS I 315, fol. 127v), perhaps by the Carthusians at Mainz, and a Cistercian breviary and votive missal (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. Liturg. 3, fol. 210) written in 1373. See Richard Pfaff, ‘The English Devotion of St Gregory’s Trental’, Speculum 49 (1974), 75–90 (p. 80). 19 20

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Winchester Anthology (1487), produced, and later also owned, by a Benedictine monk of St Swithun’s Priory in Winchester – only a stone’s throw away from Nunnaminster. This version promises that those who have a priest perform the instruction ‘shalbe delyueryd and haue there entente’.25 That these specific sets of masses attracted testators is evident from Agnes Hilton who willed in 1534 that a priest of All Saints’ Church in Northampton should recite a set of thirteen masses which by then, perhaps to make its appeal even stronger, was also connected with a revelation: ‘I will thatt ther be xiijth masses said for me thatt weare shewd to busshope Innocente be revelation by an aungell from allmytie God.’26 Within this context, the instruction for thirteen masses introduced by A Revelation and linked to a female religious house may have been in direct competition with the very similar intercessions male religious houses promoted to encourage donations from wealthy testators, though, conversely, in A Revelation it is a woman who is to organise the priestly recitation of the thirteen masses. The text could therefore serve to authorise religious women – prohibited from performing sacerdotal tasks, including, of course, saying mass – to become indispensable links in the process by which lay testators requested masses. The translation of A Revelation’s intercessory role into the reality of testamentary culture could thus gain a foothold for religious women in an aspect of that culture otherwise inaccessible to them.

Testators and Nuns The Revelation-author made the instruction for ‘xiij masses’ (lines 94–5) easily imitable with contemporary testamentary culture primarily in mind, facilitating testators to readily refer to it in their requests. The text records how the protagonist is ordered by Margaret to instruct the first priest to recite one Requiem and, on five consecutive days, Psalm 50 – of which the opening verse (Miserere mei, Deus) has to be repeated five times – together with the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus. The second priest is to recite three masses of the Trinity, followed by the recitation of the Psalm and hymn on the same number of days. The third priest is to recite three masses of St Peter and recite the Psalm and hymn on the same number of days. The fourth priest is to recite two masses of the Holy Spirit and, Edward Wilson and Iain Fenlon, The Winchester Anthology: A Facsimile of British Library Additional Manuscript 60577 (Cambridge, 1981), fol. 49r: ‘Thes xiii masses folowynge muste be devoutly sayde and begonne vppon the wednysday and euery dayly aftur the seyde wednysday subsequently tyll they be seyde all.’ 26 R. M. Serjeantson and H. Isham Longden, ‘The Parish Churches and Religious Houses of Northamptonshire: Their Dedications, Altars, Images and Lights’, The Archaeological Journal 70, 2nd ser., 20 (1913), 217–452 (p. 376). 25

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on three consecutive days, recite the Psalm and hymn. The fifth priest is to recite two masses of the Virgin Mary (Salve sancta parens) and, on three consecutive days, to recite the Psalm and hymn. The sixth priest is to recite two masses of All Saints (Gaudeamus omnes) and, on three consecutive days, make three commemorations of the Trinity and recite the Psalm and hymn like the other priests (lines 93–128). Margaret also emphasises how these prayers will ensure the release of a soul from purgatory. The first priest is to recite the Psalm while ‘castynge vp hert and eyghen to Godward, ffor þe more deuoutly he seith hit, þe more relecet [alleviated] shold be [my] peynes’ (lines 102–4); she explains that ‘als ofte . . . as þat psalme with þis ympne Veni creator bene seid for hyr, so many peynes sho shold be relessed of at þat tyme’ (lines 134–7). Contemporary manuscript evidence indicates that A Revelation’s advertisement of the instruction indeed resulted in its adoption by laymen and that they may have gained access to the narrative via convents situated in their localities, as we shall see. Robert Thornton (mentioned above), of East Newton in Yorkshire, a landowner of the minor gentry living around 1450, is the only known scribe and owner of a manuscript of A Revelation (Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 91, known as the Thornton Manuscript). Included in his miscellany of romances, religious and medical texts, A Revelation is embedded in the five quires of the third booklet apparently copied to provide devotional exercises for the Thornton family.27 Indicative of Thornton’s specific interest in the instruction for thirteen masses is that, directly after A Revelation, he wrote out both Psalm 50 and the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus (fols 258r and 258v) – the two prayers prescribed in the text in addition to the thirteen masses. Moreover, three of the few annotations he made to the text concern the instruction, highlighting passages about ‘þe vertue of þis spalme [sic] Miserere mei deus’ [the virtue of the psalm Miserere mei, Deus] and ‘þe vertu of þis ympne v[e]ni creator spiritus Qui paraclitus diceris etcaetera’ [the virtue of the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus] (fol. 252r), and the thirteen masses specifically (fol. 252v: ‘qualiter xiij messis debet dicire’ [how the thirteen masses should be recited].28 Had Thornton intended to have the prescribed masses and prayers performed for his soul via the process described in A Revelation, he would have needed a woman recluse affiliated with George R. Keiser, ‘“To Knawe God Almyghtyn”: Robert Thornton’s Devotional Book’, in Spätmittelalterliche geistliche Literatur in der Nationalsprache 2, ed. James Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana 106 (Salzburg, 1984), pp. 101–29 (p. 103) and George R. Keiser, ‘Thornton: Gentleman, Reader and Scribe’, in Robert Thornton and His Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts, ed. Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston (York, 2014), pp. 67–108 (p. 107). 28 For a facsimile edition of the Thornton manuscript, see D. S. Brewer and A. E. B. Owen, The Thornton Manuscript (Lincoln Cathedral MS. 91) (London, 1975). 27

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a convent to organise their recitation. The will of Richard Pickering testifies to Thornton’s potential connection with such a woman: Joan Pickering, a nun of the Benedictine priory of St Mary at Nun Monkton. In it he makes bequests to Robert Thornton, to his brother, and to ‘domine Iohanne Pikeringe moniali de Monkton sorori mee’ [lady Joan Pickering, nun of Nun Monkton, my sister]. From her, as George Keiser has suggested, he may have acquired ‘a substantial portion’ of the devotional writings of Thornton’s manuscript. Keiser suggests that A Revelation would have been of ‘special interest to a house of nuns’ and implies that it may have been transmitted from Nun Monkton to Thornton. I suggest that, if Thornton had indeed acquired his copy of A Revelation from St Mary – which housed women from wealthy, book-owning, literate families with access to this kind of material – he may well have sought the convent’s mediation for the performance of the thirteen masses.29 A previously unidentified text in Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Lat. 228 also witnesses to lay interest in the instruction appearing in A Revelation. Lat. 228 is a late fifteenth-century miscellany of Latin and English historical, prophetical, devotional and medical texts produced in Richmond, Yorkshire. Its inclusion of John de Kirkby’s survey of knights’ fees in Yorkshire suggests that its owner was also a member of the landowning gentry.30 The manuscript includes a combination of excerpts (edited in the Appendix to this present essay) evidently derived from a lost Latin copy of A Revelation. The Latin introduction to these excerpts recounts a vision of a certain (female) anchorite [‘cuiusdam Anachorite’] (line 1), whose gender is evident from the subsequent statement that it was made through the soul of another religious woman [‘per qua[n]dam Animam Alterius mulieris religiose’] (lines 1–2). It narrates how the latter requested this devout anchoress [‘deuota Anachorita’] (lines 3–4) to arrange for priests, each of whom is referred to simply as ‘a deuoute Preste’ (line 6), to say thirteen masses for the good of her soul. As soon as the instruction for these masses begins, the scribe switches to the vernacular, with a text that closely follows the instruction for thirteen masses in A Revelation – although in this case the anchoress is requested to find five instead of six priests and none of the priests is named. As soon as the instruction ends, the scribe returns to Latin and produces a second instruction issued by Margaret in A Revelation, followed by her aforementioned explanation of the three kinds of purgatory.

George R. Keiser, ‘More Light on the Life and Milieu of Robert Thornton’, Studies in Bibliography 36 (1983), 111–19 (pp. 114–16). 30 Robert Fawtier, ‘A Hand-List of Additions to the Collection of Latin Manuscripts in the John Rylands Library 1908–1920’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 6 (1921–2), 186–206 (p. 196). 29

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The language-switching here suggests that the owner (and possibly scribe) of Lat. 228 may have consulted a woman of religion. The fact that only the instruction for thirteen masses is in Middle English suggests that the scribe may have translated this part to reach an audience literate primarily in the vernacular, unlike the manuscript’s intended owner, who had at least a functional literacy in Latin. If the scribe thought the involvement of a female religious mediator necessary – as A Revelation prescribes – then he would have to take into account a category of reader whose profession and gender may have precluded a high enough level of Latin literacy for the understanding of non-liturgical texts.31 The scribe (and potential translator), therefore, may well have been concerned with making the text accessible to those who might be asked to carry out its instructions. He also further clarifies the specifics of performance, repeatedly emphasising, for example, that prayers have ‘to be said iij tymes’ (line 18). If the linguistic change to the instructions copied into Lat. 228 results directly from a consideration of those who were to carry them out, then it is no surprise that the second instruction was left untranslated. In A Revelation Margaret details instruction for a hundred masses of the Trinity, equal numbers of masses of the Virgin Mary and the Requiem, fifty masses of St Peter and fifty recitations of Psalm 50 and the hymn Veni Creator Spiritus (lines 155–60), not because she wants the woman recluse to arrange their performance for her, but merely to recommend them to all who are able to have them performed for their own souls or those of others (lines 151–76). This may suggest that these masses were to be requested directly of a priest (arguably more likely to have been literate in Latin), without religious women’s mediation. The instruction for thirteen masses, however, required translation because of its anticipated female religious audience.32 The anonymity of the priests may also be a feature of the original source of A Revelation. This anonymous source would have enabled lay testators to request any convent to freely select its own priests for the performance of the thirteen masses as long as they were considered devout. This, in fact, is suggested by a final piece of evidence in which a testator explicitly addresses a convent.

See David N. Bell, ‘What Nuns Read: The State of the Question’, in The Culture of Medieval English Monasticism, ed. James G. Clark (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 113–33 (pp. 119–22); Paul Lee, Nunneries, Learning and Spirituality in Late Medieval English Society: The Dominican Priory of Dartford (Woodbridge, 2001), pp. 136–8. 32 Margaret indicates that a priest can perform the masses in the beneficiary’s lifetime and that the latter will reap their value, after death, as soon as his or her soul enters purgatory (lines 802–5). 31

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Prioress Elizabeth Cressener as A Revelation’s ‘Anchoritic Intercessor’ The will of William Milett, a member of the minor gentry or a yeoman at Dartford, provides evidence that lay testators contacted actual religious women in order to recreate the process through which A Revelation’s thirteen masses are realised.33 Drawn up on 10 September 1500, the will demonstrates clearly how the narrative enabled nuns to identify with and be identified as its protagonist. Milett’s will dictates that its executors, of whom ‘Dame Elizabeth Cressyner’ – the penultimate prioress of the Dominican convent of Dartford Priory (1479–1536) – is mentioned first and most often, should arrange that, after the testator’s death, five good and virtuous priests should at once recite thirteen masses and prayers for the good of his soul. The instruction’s specifications leave no doubt that it originates from A Revelation, as it is almost identical to the latter’s instruction for thirteen masses: I will that myn executours incontynent / after my decesse doo to be said for my soule specially and for all christen soules xiij∙ massez with other certein deuociouns as hereafter folowith / that is to say / oon preest shall say iij∙ massez of Requiem ∙iij∙ daies / and also the same preeste shall say for me / ∙v∙ dayes / euery day the psalme of Miserere mei deus / And whan he begynneth to say it lett hym say thies wordes ∙ Miserere mei deus ∙v∙ tymes / with castyng vp hart and eyen to Almighty god as hartly as he can / and than lett hym say owte all the psalme / And also lett hym say to thende the ympne of Veni creator spiritus ∙ Qui paraclitus etcaetera /∙ Item I woll that another preest say for my soule / iij∙ massez of the blissed Trinitie / and the psalme of Miserere mei deus ∙v∙ dayes / and the ympne of Veni creator Qui paraclitus etcaetera ∙iiij∙ daies in maner and fourme before reherced ∙ Item I woll that / the ∙iijd∙ preest say for me / iij· massez of seint Peter ∙iij∙ daies / and v∙ daies the psalme of Miserere mei deus /∙ and the ympne of Veni creator spiritus ∙ Qui etcaetera in maner and fourme aforsaid ∙ Item I will that the iiijth preest say for me / ij∙ massez of our lady / and ∙iij∙ daies the psalme of Miserere mei deus /∙ and the ympne of Veni creator spiritus /∙ Item I will that the vth preest say for me ∙ij∙ massez of all seyntes the which begynneth Gaudeamus omnes in domino /∙ and iij∙ memoryes of the blissed Trynitie / and iij∙ daies ∙ Miserere mei deus /∙ and the ympne of / Veni creator spiritus /∙ Qui paraclitus etcaetera ∙ and lett thies preestes that thus shall say thies massez bifore written ∙ by goode and vertuous men / and let theym be said incontynent after my decesse /∙ Also I

For William Milett’s will, see Lee, Nunneries, pp. 99–106.

33

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clarck drieshen will that euery preest saying thies massez and psalmes aforewritten haue for their labours / for euery masse xij d 34

Milett’s will indicates an English convent’s role in the process by which A Revelation’s thirteen masses would have been requested, delegated and performed. Milett adopts the role of Margaret, the soul in purgatory, and also asks a woman recluse – in this case Elizabeth Cressener – to arrange the performance of the thirteen masses for his soul’s release. As Milett’s payments indicate, Elizabeth, in turn, was expected to select the five devout priests from among her institution’s friar chaplains, whose financial dependence on the priory would have guaranteed their cooperation.35 Milett could also further identify with Margaret’s relationship with her convent. He had his own chapel inside the convent during his life, made arrangements to be buried in a tomb in St Margaret’s Church inside the convent, and clearly enjoyed a close connection to the convent prioress. This is evident from the many bequests he makes to Elizabeth, whom he addresses as ‘my lady prioresse’, and her sisters that occupy the larger part of his will. He makes her responsible for the payment of priests and nuns for reciting and attending his prescribed masses.36 She is also given various sums of money as rewards for her diligence over his burial, and for the monthly and yearly commemoration of his soul, which is to continue for twenty years. Milett bequeaths a powder box, a carpet and a tapestry, oxen, sheep and horses, grain, wheat and barley to the prioress for herself and her sisters. He also allows them yearly to take rents, revenues, profits and commodities coming from and growing on the lands of his fiefs, and donates lands, woods, tenements, meadows, pastures and other premises to them and their successors. They, in turn, are requested ‘for euer to pray for my soule / and for the soules of all them to whom I am specially bounden’. Ultimately, almost all of the donations Milett makes to Elizabeth and her convent are, in his words, for the ‘releving and comfortyng of my soule oute of the peynes of purgatory’. The fact that he puts the care of his soul almost entirely in the hands of Elizabeth and A diplomatic edition of a black and white reproduction of PRO, Prerogative Court of Canterbury probate registers (PROB) 11/12, fol. 138. Principles of all editions: layout, capitalisation, punctuation and spelling follow the sources as close as possible. Abbreviations are expanded and italicised. Insertions above lines and in margins are placed between backslash and forward slash. Hyphens are used for uninterpreted signs and suggestions are made for illegible letters in square brackets. 35 Lee, Nunneries, p. 114. 36 PROB 11/12, fol. 138: ‘I bequeth to euery freie abiding and dwelling within the Monastery of Dertford the day of my decesse / iij s iiij d ∙ to pray for my soule [and] to the susters of the same Monastery for my Diriges and massez at my burying and moneths mynde xl s / to be devided by the discrecioun of the prioresse of the same place.’ 34

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makes her responsible for the delegation of the thirteen masses indicates that he had found a female religious mediator whose reputation was on a par with that of A Revelation’s protagonist. The testator’s confidence in the prioress’s intercessory powers and identification between the prioress and A Revelation’s visionary relies on the enclosure each observed. When Dartford Priory was founded in 1346 it was endowed with large properties that could be leased out to provide income with only minimal contact with the outside world.37 This is entirely in line with the convent’s strict traditions of enclosure: from its foundation until its dissolution, its prioresses were referred to as recluses in licences that allowed their appointed officials to represent them outside the convent. In this way, the prioress’s extramural affairs reaffirmed her anchoritic identity.38 Elizabeth, more than any of her predecessors, was actively involved with both the priory’s administration and interaction with the parish community and may have enjoyed a widespread reputation as an ‘anchoritic’ woman as a result. The intercessory powers associated with her identity could explain why she was the only prioress whom Dartford’s parishioners explicitly named as executor and overseer of their wills and they made substantial donations to her.39 Elizabeth’s identification as an ‘anchoritic’ woman may also have been supported by writings that her convent made available to its extra-mural communities. Dartford may have disseminated writings such as A Revelation in order to emphasise the crucial importance to testators of its intercession. Margaret’s purgatorial punishment for her attachment to earthly things (‘cursed and wikked coueitise’, line 316) may have encouraged wealthy gentry in particular to make substantial donations in return for post-mortem masses.40 The convent also owned a copy of the Revelations of Bridget of Sweden, in which the Virgin Mary assures Bridget that the soul of an anonymous aristocrat, who is being punished in purgatory for his preoccupation with worldly things, can be saved if donations are made on his behalf to monasteries and a public mass recited in their churches.41 Milett may have been influenced by this work; he commends his soul Lee, Nunneries, p. 48. For example, a namesake of Elizabeth, Dartford’s sub-prioress in the 1530s, signed herself in a letter to Thomas Cromwell as ‘your dayly oratrice [female petitioner] the pore recluse the priores of Dartford’. See Lee, Nunneries, p. 94. 39 Lee, Nunneries, pp. 104–5. 40 For requests for post-mortem intercession by gentry, see Christine Carpenter, ‘Religion’, in Gentry Culture in Late-Medieval England, ed. Raluca Radulescu and Alison Truelove (Manchester, 2005), pp. 134–50 (p. 136). 41 Lee, Nunneries, p. 169; The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, Volume 3: Liber Caelestis, Books VI–VII, trans. Denis Searby; intro. and notes Bridget Morris (Oxford, 2002), p. 30. 37 38

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to ‘seint Brugitt’, and makes extensive arrangements for a public ‘morowe masse in the parisshe churche of Dertford’ that Dartford Priory must maintain.42 A book owner, Milett may have received writings from the convent, inspiring him to undo himself of his worldly attachments and imitate the procedures specified by A Revelation and Bridget’s Revelations by which souls were released from purgatory, in the reciprocal bond between him and the convent. The evidence presented here fits with broader evidence for textual interactions and exchanges between convents and their lay communities. While most libraries of English female religious communities are entirely lost, the extant textual evidence for religious women’s interactions with the laity possibly represents the tip of an iceberg.43 Laymen and laywomen donated books to convents in return for intercessory prayer.44 A Revelation, however, probably travelled in the other direction; the narrative could cater to both parties, satisfying both religious women’s desire to present their convents as powerhouses of intercessory prayer and the laity’s wish for the most efficacious intercessory prayers. All kinds of religious women – even a nun who was a recluse only by title – could identify with the protagonist in A Revelation. At the same time, the laity were encouraged to position themselves as the soul who benefited from her intercession in the text, especially with regard to asking for masses. If there is no extant evidence that self-inscription in A Revelation was part of Nunnaminster’s programme to advertise its intercessional credentials, there is little doubt that both this version of the work and its likely anonymous source were used to tighten the bonds between convents and members of their lay communities – such as Robert Thornton, the scribe of Lat. 228 and, certainly, William Milett. Within the relationships identified in the text, the lay or religious woman identified as the recluse could function as intercessor for the souls in purgatory on behalf of members of their extended communities, whether already deceased or still living.

Appendix: Edition of Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Lat. 228, fols 177v–178v

[fol. 177v] ¶ Memorandum de vicione [sic] cuiusdam Anachorite facta [-] per

quamdam [sic] Animam Alterius mulieris religiose existentis in

penis purgatorij et auxilium petentis ab ipsa deuota



Anachorita In primum petebat vt faceret certos deuotos

See also Lee, Nunneries, pp. 105–6. Bell points out that manuscript records survive for only forty-six of the approximately 144 late-medieval English female convents: Bell, ‘What Nuns Read’, p. 115. 44 Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading, and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 27–47. 42 43

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  5 viros celebrare pro Anima praedicta cum omni festiuacione

xiij missas | videlicet a deuoute \Preste to say/ Messe ∙ of Requiem And



byd hym say ∙ by for þe said messe the Ympne veni



creator spiritus with the verse filiwing And after the



[fol. 178r] same messez ∙ the Psalme Miserere mei deus ∙ after euery

10 messe sayng þe first \verse/ v∙ tymes ∙ lifting deuoutely his hert  and mynde to our Lord god ∙ \And to say the said Ympne and Psalme iiij days   filiwing deuoutly∙/ And a nother deuoute Preste to [l. 12:]

say ∙iij∙ messez∙ of þe Trinite ∙ with the sayd Ympne and

Psalme and to be said in the forome [sic] afore rehersed And

a nother deuoute Preste to sayd [sic] ∙iij∙ Messez of ∙ Saint

15 Petir in the same forome with the said Ympne and

Psalme ∙ And a nother deuoute Preste to say ∙ij∙ messez



of the holy goste with the sayd Ympne and Psalme in þe ∙



sayd forome ∙ \to be said iij tymes/ And a nother deuoute Preste to say ∙ij∙



messez of our lady with the sayd Ympne and Psalme

20 as by fore \to be said iij tymez∙/ And a nother deuoute Preste to say ij∙ messez

of al[-]halowez with the sayd Ympne and Psalme with



the Office Gaudeamus etcaetera with Memoryez of þe ∙



Trinite ∙ \to be said ∙iij tymez/ and the said Ympne and Psalme to be sayd



iij tymez ∙ after the sayd messez dooun and perfourmed the

25 said sawle was deliuered of payne and went to heven

¶ Narrabat etiam praefata ∙ Anima ∙ praedicte Anachorite

quod quicumque velit pro se in vita ∙ sua celebrare vel ∙ facere celebrare per alios siue per alium vel si alij

post mortem alicuius fecerint ∙ celebrare \pro ipso mortuo/ Centum missas

30 de Sancta Trinitate ∙ Centum de gloriosa virgine Maria

\matre/ dei Centum de sancto Petro \et/ Centum de Requiem ∙



et Sexaginta vicibus praedictos Ympnum et Psalmum



in forma praedicta ∙ pro quocumque hec debite fiunt et deuote



siue pro quacumque anima [-] inmediate [sic] liberatur a penis

35 purgatorij quacumcumque [sic] grauia ∙ fuerant peccata eius et hoc sine dubio

[fol. 178v] declarabat eciam praefata Anima ∙ praedicte deuote mulieri diuersa



purgatoria videlicet vnum generale ∙ vocatur Ignis purgatorij Et



alius modus purgatorij est quando homo sustinet pacienter infir-



mitates tribulaciones persequciones [sic] et angustias sine murmure

40 vel querela ∙ Alius est modus ∙ quando aliquis in vita sua exist[ens]

in tartate [sic] et sine peccato mortali adquirit magnas et multas



Indulgencias que possunt esse tante et tales quod anima illa



moriens in via saluacionis nunquam senciet penas purgatorij

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clarck drieshen set transiet inmediate de morte ad gloriam et hoc est

45 dictum purgatorium misericordiae Alius modus est ∙ quando aliquis punitur

post mortem in illo \loco/ vbi frequencius peccauit in vita ∙



vbi multociens aparent aliquando in die aliquando in nocte



amicis suis siue alijs et monstrant eis qualiter possint



a penis liberari et sic auxilio ∙ Amicorum perueniunt ad gloriam

50 ∙ et hic modus est specialis gracie diuine ∙ Alicui Anime a

deo concesse ∙ etcaetera ∙

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Chapter 6

‘In aniversaries of ower leoveste freond seggeth alle nihene’: Anchorites, Chantries and Purgatorial Patronage in Medieval England MICHELLE M. SAUER

A

ccording to Jacques Le Goff, the use of the word purgatorium, ‘purgatory’, as a noun appeared somewhere between 1160 and 1180, giving rise to the idea of purgatory as an actual place. Although some have challenged this contention, Le Goff’s premise, particularly in connection to the spatial arrangement of the medieval afterlife, is an important basis for any examination of purgatorial strategy.1 Le Goff suggests that European culture underwent a shift from seeing the world as a series of binary structures to tripartite ones. Theologically, ‘people began to speak of the medium (mediocriter) good or medium wicked’, instead of the wholly good or wholly wicked, thus creating a category of people who needed both the cleansing of purgatorial fires and the intercession of others to escape such, and elaborate bookkeeping metaphors to keep track.2 Still, theologians did not officially define the doctrine of purgatory until the thirteenth century.3 Defined clearly or not, however, medieval people were generally taught that purgatory was a period in which the soul passed from death to salvation, and a place where sins were expunged by every kind of physical torment before final

Isabel Moreira has suggested that the idea of purgatory as a function existed much earlier. See Heaven’s Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2000). Similarly, see Peter Brown, ‘The Decline of the Empire of God: Amnesty, Penance, and the Afterlife from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages’, in Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman (Philadelphia, PA, 2000), pp. 41–59.  2 Jacques LeGoff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, IL, 1984), p. 222.  3 See Edward Foster, ‘Introduction’, in Three Purgatory Poems: The Gast of Gy, Sir Owain, The Vision of Tundale, ed. Edward Foster (Kalamazoo, MI, 2004), http://d.lib.rochester. edu/teams/publication/foster-three-purgatory-poems. Accessed 3 November 2015.  1

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redemption. As such, it was both a temporal state and a physical state.4 Indeed, while officially the suffering endured in purgatory stems from the separation of the soul from God, the difficulty in comprehending the ineffable led to descriptions of purifying flames and other torments. And, because purgatory was inevitable, preparation for intercession, especially through reciprocal obligation such as friendship, grew in importance. Allusions to purgatory begin cropping up in early Middle English literature, even before being formally named as such. For instance, Cate Gunn notes that ‘Vices and Virtues, a Middle English dialogue between the soul and Reason . . . written at the turn of the thirteenth century . . . does not contain any mention of purgatory, but it does refer to purgatorial cleansing and the possibility that the suffrages of the living can aid the dead.’5 However, the first known reference in English to purgatory as a noun meaning ‘a place or condition of temporal punishment for the spiritual cleansing after death of souls destined for heaven’, occurs in the thirteenth-century anchoritic guidance text, Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 402).6 Anchoritic literature is therefore situated at the heart of the burgeoning interest in purgatorial strategies for intercession and deliverance. This purgatorial connection was especially significant in medieval England, where anchoritic activity was widespread and the practice of chantry chapels was established. Both of these entail actual physical structures as well as spiritual concepts. Both are structurally and theologically liminal, yet simultaneously spiritually significant. Both are at once exceedingly individual yet communally important. Furthermore, both are dependent upon a particularly medieval form of ‘friendship’ – that of contracted patronage. And in certain ways, both provide strategies to escape purgatory, using spiritual tactics to defeat time and death through perpetual intercession. This essay pursues this connection, arguing that anchorites enjoyed a particular type of patronage from the common laity. Because they could not establish chantries, people with limited wealth supported anchorites and, in return, anchorites prayed for their benefactors and offered up their ascetic deprivation as expiation and intercession. Of course, the soul and body remain separated after death until the Final Judgement and, while God can make a spirit physically manifest, that is an unusual occurrence. Thus, the pains of purgatory are not literally pain inflicted on a physical body. Cate Gunn mentions ‘the paradox of the soul experiencing corporeal pain in purgatory’, with reference to Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York, 1995), p. 281 and p. 292, ‘Death and Judgment in Vices and Virtues’ (2014), www.academia.edu/6030432/Death_and_Judgment_in_Vices_and_Virtues, p. 1. Accessed 3 November 2015.  5 ‘Gunn, ‘Death and Judgment’, p. 11.  6 MED, ‘purgatorie’: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med/. Accessed 5 December 2015. In Ancrene Wisse the word appears as ‘purgatoire’.  4

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The foundation of perpetual prayer reached its zenith in the second half of the fourteenth century. Chantry chapels were the most important development of this movement; however, not everyone had the funds to participate in this system, and other methods were employed. People purchased blocks of time on a perpetual lamp. Obits, or anniversaries, usually involved a mass celebrated for an individual on a particular day (the recipient’s death date or his/her saint’s feast day).7 Others formed religious guilds, which provided intercessory prayer and proper burials for deceased members.8 Perhaps the single most inexpensive manner of obtaining perpetual prayer was the bede-roll, in which one’s name could be inscribed, and the roll then laid upon the altar during mass. Each of these options provided the opportunity to be remembered; however, none provided the personal touch, or the personal dedication, that a chantry chapel – or an anchorite – could. Purgatorial doctrine greatly influenced the development and concept of the medieval English community, creating a sense of transgenerational relationships and fostering a whole new system of patronage and gift-dependent friendship networks.9 The cultivation of anchorites as purgatorial patrons helped foster this communal identity. This has its roots in the earliest versions of anchoritism, wherein the Desert Fathers shared hoarded gold and foodstuffs with community members in times of need, and provided medical care or shelter as necessary.10 Much like supporting a chantry chapel, contracting friendship with an anchorite provided an opportunity for individual donors to harness the intercession of the church on a smaller scale, drawing the living and the dead (and in the case of the anchorite, the living dead) together in a localised and identifiable place – the anchorhold attached to the parish church – binding anchorite and patron together in a penitential community. The form and function of these cells indicate For an examination of the uses and forms of the anniversary, see Clive Burgess, ‘A Service for the Dead: The Form and Function of the Anniversary in Late Medieval Bristol’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 105 (1987), 183–211.  8 Reaching the height of their popularity during the fifteenth century, religious guilds came in a variety of sizes and make-ups. Peter Cunich sets the number of confraternities in England conservatively at 30,000. See Peter Cunich, ‘The Dissolution of the Chantries’, in The Reformation in English Towns 1500–1640, ed. Patrick Collinson and John Craig (New York, 1998), pp. 159–74 (p. 163). Also see Alan Kreider, English Chantries: The Road to Dissolution (Cambridge, MA, 1979), p. 6.  9 For more about parish connection, see, among other sources, Megan McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, NY, 1994) and Ellen Ketels Rentz, Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval England (Columbus, OH, 2015). 10 See especially Benedicta Ward, ‘Foreword’, in The Lives of the Desert Fathers: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, trans. Norman Russell (London 1980), pp. xvii–xxvii.  7

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the interrelatedness of individual and communal dimensions of spirituality, and reify the centrality of the anchoritic vocation to medieval parish life; that is, anchorites provided a number of specific benefits for communities, one of which was purgatorial intercession fostered through contractual friendship.

Purgatory and Friendship Even though all Christians were primarily responsible for their own souls, it became fairly clear that individuals needed help, both before and after death, to lighten the pains of purgation. Popular texts, such as the Revelations of St Birgitta of Sweden, provided clear imagery to fuel the imagination.11 These visions contain extensive references to purgatory, including encounters with Birgitta’s own relatives. In one, her late husband Ulf Gudmarsson, explained the ways she could expedite his release: having votive masses said for him, distributing goods to the poor, and offering chalices for the divine sacrifice.12 Such actions were achievable goals for most medieval Christians, especially charitable giving. Mirroring the idea of contractual friendship, charity, considered one of the corporal acts of mercy, became increasingly popular as a method of securing a reduced purgatorial sentence.13 For those not well off enough to endow a religious institution, there were always charitable donations to the poor and destitute known as miserabiles personae (wretched persons). Even though charitable contributions allowed greater latitude, under this system wealthier individuals could still procure greater security for their souls: the more you gave, the more you got. Since charitable giving was a kind of intercession, charity, friendship, and patronage all became necessary in order to escape purgatory and gain bliss. Even sceptics such as Augustine (d. 430) agreed that, long before purgatory was widely accepted, family intercession was helpful in securing salvation. In the seventh century, this view changed when Bede (d. 735) very deliberately widened the circle of salvation to include friends. In his letter On Isaiah, Bede suggests that the repentant sinner must take care of both himself and his own, which is The cult of St Birgitta was widespread in medieval England and translated copies of her text were available as well. See F. R. Johnston, ‘The English Cult of St Bridget of Sweden’, Analecta Bollandiana 103 (1985), 88–93. 12 See The Revelations of St. Birgitta of Sweden, Volume 4: The Heavenly Emperor’s Book to Kings, The Rule, and Minor Works, trans. Denis Searby, ed. Bridget Morris (Oxford, 2015), ch. 56, pp. 276–7. 13 The corporal acts of mercy, which are almost synonymous with almsgiving, pertain to bodily needs. Outlined in Matthew 25: 34–40, they include: feed the hungry; give drink to the thirsty; clothe the naked; shelter the homeless; comfort the sick; visit the imprisoned; bury the dead (from the Book of Tobit). 11

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a ‘community-driven statement’ important to the developing idea of purification and friendship.14 This theme of true or faithful friends is one to which Bede returns repeatedly. For instance, in his Homiliary, he further explains that the ‘faithful friends’ of the dead are responsible for assisting with the cleansing process.15 In his account of the visions of Drythelm (fl. c. 700), Bede further widens possible intercessory acts beyond prayers: ‘The prayers of the living, their acts of charity, fasts, and especially the celebration of Masses aid many so that they are freed even before the day of judgment.’16 Both prayers said on behalf of the dead and acts of charity undertaken in their name provided relief from temporal punishment in the afterlife. In turn, when they then reached heaven, it was anticipated they would provide heavenly intercession for their benefactor. In essence, Bede outlines a type of patronage system, or a sort of formally contracted friendship formed for the purpose of easing the purification process.17 This would become the template for later practices. There were varied types of medieval friendships, few of which resembled the modern concept of shared interests. Instead, as Isabel Moreira points out: ‘many types of friendship were accompanied by the giving and receiving of gifts whose material value might be great or small, but whose value as a token of friendship was often made explicit’.18 Friendship, furthermore, provides some sort of reciprocity in the relationship, which, in turn, harmonised with the medieval giftgiving culture. In fact, Moreira sees Bede’s firm belief in the benefit of intercessory prayers from ‘faithful friends’ as a natural extension of the medieval gift-giving culture. In addition to encouraging the actions of ‘faithful friends’, Bede also demonstrated how to go about securing such intercession. He contracted a number of friendships with other priests, distributing small gifts and tokens to them while on his deathbed, with the understanding that the gifts were both compensation for the future work they would undertake (prayers and masses said for him after his death) and an acceptance of an obligation of service. And, as Moreira notes, Moreira, Heaven’s Purge, p. 163. See Moreira, Heaven’s Purge, p. 168. 16 ‘Multos autem preces uiuentium et elimosynae et ieiunia et maxime celebratio missarum, ut etiam ante diem iudicii liberentur, adiuuant’, Historica ecclesiastica V. 12, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), p. 494; trans. by M. Thomas Aquinas Carroll, ‘An EighthCentury Exegete on Purgatory’, The American Ecclesiastical Review 112 (1945), 261–3 (p. 263). 17 Of course, Bede lived during the eighth century; however, his perception of contractual friendship based on gift-giving and reciprocity drew from Classical traditions, and continued to be the standard throughout the high Middle Ages. Patronage is an excellent example of this practice. 18 Moreira, Heaven’s Purge, p. 167. 14 15

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‘for such friendships, personal acquaintance was not necessary . . . friendship and gifts went together. To this, we may also now add, so did friendship, gifts, and preparations for the afterlife.’19 In the Middle Ages, friendships could be formally requested, sometimes of strangers, and as a result, friendships were routinely contracted between individuals and communities (monasteries, for example) or between an individual and a religious leader, and these contracted friendships could then be inherited (for instance, an abbess could assume her predecessor’s friendships would continue contractually).20 Such friendships were in line with the church’s position on purgatory and intercession, but also reflected the relationship between God and humanity. In 1350, Clement VI issued the papal bull cum natura humana, in which he suggests God saves humans out of friendship.21 The differences in station between human and divine point directly to the sort of contractual friendship available to medieval people, and just as clearly indicate how contractual relationships could provide salvation. Bede was one of the first to shift the language of salvation from kinship to friendship, from dependency through duty to obligation through choice. This change in perception laid the groundwork for the later medieval expansion of the scope of purgatorial assistance beyond family and even beyond ‘personal’ friends, to institutional and contracted intercessors. As Takami Matsuda explains: ‘exploiting the traditional practice of prayer for the dead, there grew out of the concept of purgatory an organised system of intercession for the souls sent there, performed by the living for the benefit of the dead as well as for themselves’. Moreover, again according to Matsuda, purgatory maintains some communication with this world by way of the efficacious intercession for the souls in purgatory performed by living persons . . . This not only made salvation accessible to a greater number and variety of sinners but also allowed them the possibility of passing through purgatory more rapidly and with less pain.22 Moreira, Heaven’s Purge, p. 167. See Julian P. Haseldine, ‘Friendship and Rivalry: The Role of Amicitia in TwelfthCentury Monastic Relations’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 44 (1993), 390–414; Julian Haseldine, ‘Monastic Friendship in Theory and in Action in the Twelfth Century’, in Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: Exploration of a Fundamental Ethical Discourse, ed. Albrecht Classen, and Maria Sandidge (Berlin, 2010); Julian P. Haseldine, ‘Friendship Networks in Medieval Europe: New Models of a Political Relationship’, AMITY: The Journal of Friendship Studies 1 (2013), 69–88. 21 See Diana Wood, Clement VI: The Pontificate and Ideas of an Avignon Pope (Cambridge, 2003), especially p. 32. 22 Takami Matsuda, Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Literature (Cambridge, 1997), p. 2. 19 20

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By the thirteenth century, anyone could help with salvation. More than that, however, the increasing need to secure individualised intercession led to the development and growth of chantry chapels. Anchorages, too, increased in number during this period, and it is my contention that the two structures share more than just similar architectural structures, but also a congruent role in salvific exchange.

Chantries Chantries had their roots in the system of monastic endowments, and their development reflects a privatisation of religion, as well as providing a more economical intercessory strategy. The English chantry quickly became one of the most common means by which wealthy members of the laity participated in providing purgatorial relief. By strict definition, a chantry was a perpetual ecclesiastical institution that received financial remunerations through such means as land endowments left by its founder. These endowments provided for masses and prayers offered in an endless succession by the chantry priest(s) for the intercession of the souls of the benefactor and his/her family; thus, the chantry delivered a continuous attempt at salvation, while also creating intimacy between the living and dead. The chantry chapel, created through portioning off a church’s internal space or by building an adjoining room, was therefore a physical representation of a doorway between the world of the living and the realm of the dead. Importantly, chantries represented a more egalitarian approach to large-scale intercessory prayers. The ‘rising price of piety’, as Karen Stöber terms it, was undoubtedly felt by potential lay patrons and meant that founding a monastery was once again no longer an affordable option for many a layman . . . The great monastic patrons such as the king, bishops and the upper levels of the nobility were already in charge of a plurality of religious houses and may have felt that their souls were sufficiently taken care of by those existing foundations. Bishops and other wealthy patrons were more inclined to invest in other, newer, more fashionable types of establishments, such as educational institutions, chantry chapels and hospitals.23

Stöber here suggests two inter-related ideas: chantries were an economical and fashionable way to secure intercession. Instead of banding together to back an ecclesiastical foundation, lay patrons increasingly put their money elsewhere, as is testified by the sheer number that were created. Karen Stöber, Late Medieval Monasteries and their Patrons: England and Wales, c.1300– 1540 (Woodbridge, 2007), p. 16.

23

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Howard Colvin estimates that in England chantries began to materialise during the later part of the thirteenth century (about 1279), although David Crouch sets the date of chantry emergence in England as early as 1193.24 Colvin attributes this advent to the overwhelming burden of intercessory prayer placed upon the monastic institutions, while both Colvin and Crouch refer to Dom David Knowles, who asserted that ‘[the] chantry may well have satisfied, in a way acceptable to the church, the deep-rooted desire for a religious establishment under private control . . . Its flexibility in terms both of endowment and of duration enabled it – unlike the monastic foundation – to be adapted to the means of all ranks of society.’25 Because of the rising demands for intercession, the number of chantries grew rapidly. While the records are not entirely clear as to the number, most accounts agree it was upwards of 2,100.26 What emerges from these records, too, is a sense of ownership, since founders could specify prayers and services in chantry deeds. People were willing to pay not only to relieve their purgatorial suffering, but also to retain a hand in their salvation even after death. Although it may be true that individual chantries were essentially private on behalf of the proprietor, they were integrated into the overall community’s celebrations, especially during Holy Week. This exploitation by the community may seem contrary to the essential purpose of the chantry foundation; however, testators knew that the establishment of chantries on their behalf provided ecclesiastical benefits to their local community – they were part of a mutually contracted spiritual friendship. This was an active relationship between the benefactor and the local parishioners who benefited from the chantry. Evidence points to chantry priests in several parishes elected but later removed when not providing sufficient services to parishioners. This represents a reciprocal relationship. In one sense, this community connection provided a more direct connection between chantries and charity. Charitable deeds were active ways of expiating guilt. Intercessory prayers, ‘purchased’ through charity, and contracted through gratefulness, further bound the living and the dead. The establishment of chantry chapels at places like charity hospitals provided a visible connection of this.27 Good David Crouch, ‘The Origin of Chantries: Some Further Anglo-Norman Evidence’, Journal of Medieval History 27 (2001), 159–80 (esp. pp. 177–8). 25 Quoted in Howard Colvin, ‘The Origin of Chantries’, Journal of Medieval History 26.2 (2000), 163–73 (pp. 164–6, p. 172). 26 The traditional figure of 2,374 is compiled from William Camden’s Britannia, citing suppressed foundations. Alan Kreider challenges this, arriving at a ‘conservative estimate’ of 2,182 (English Chantries, p. 14). Peter Cunich concurs with Kreider (‘The Dissolution of the Chantries’, p. 165). 27 For an in-depth discussion of chantries established at hospitals, see Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge, 1987), especially pp. 184–92. 24

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works were believed to benefit souls in purgatory, while also aiding people on earth.28 Unfortunately, however, chantries required more wealth than many laypeople had. Besides creating the space, the donor had to establish an annuity for a chantry priest. Christopher Daniell emphasises that although chantries grew in popularity, they were still unattainable for many.29 There were differing sorts of chantries, ranging from perpetual endowments to fixed-terms ones; however, even one year of dedicated masses could be financially ruinous to the average person. I suggest that anchorites filled some of this desire for individualised intercession. Members of the laity could, and did, provide bequests for local anchorites. In return, they could enjoy similar benefits to the endowment of a chantry. Moreover, it would have been easier to contract a friendship with, and to provide patronage for, the local anchorite. In turn, it was a vocational expectation, at least in the late Middle Ages, that anchorites would be open to securing friends and patrons for whom they would pray in return. In essence, then, anchorages could be seen as less costly substitutes for chantries, which, similarly, were less expensive substitutes for founding monasteries. The material connections between chantries and anchorholds are worth noting in this context. Chantry chapels were often, although not always, attached to or established inside existing churches. They were commonly niches carved along the side aisles, or small chambers attached to the side of the building. Many were compact, containing only the bare necessities for function and, perhaps, a few small ornaments donated by the benefactor. There was an altar. Many also had hagioscopes (small windows constructed to provide a view of the high altar and activities beyond the rood screen). On the other hand, some chantries were quite elaborate. A number were large chambers built against the church building or small wings added to the church. Stöber describes the elaborate chantry built by Margaret, sister of Edward Plantagenet, lord Montague, earl of Warwick, at Christchurch Priory around 1529 as ‘one of the grandest chantries around. Her chantry chapel, known today as the Salisbury Chantry, is a grandiose and very

This tie became so close that upon the Dissolution, ‘hospitals were included in the first Act for the Dissolution of Chantries but excluded from the act of 1547 . . . because of their importance in caring for the elderly poor and sick’. See Phillip Lindley, ‘“Pickpurse” Purgatory, the Dissolution of the Chantries and the Suppression of Intercession for the Dead’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 164 (2011), 277–304 (p. 280). 29 Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England (New York, 1998), p. 11. Daniell provides several examples of such expenses, which would have included living expenses for the priests (e.g. food, furnishings, etc.) as well as the necessities for mass (e.g. plates, vestments, etc.). 28

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intricate construction, which stands in the north choir of the priory church.’30 Although chantries were not originally intended as tombs, as burial space inside churches became scarce (the choir area was still the prime location), patrons of chantries often established the right to be buried within their confines as part of their endowment. Further, chantry priests were generally not members of the religious orders; rather, they were usually secular priests or canons. Overall, then, the similarities to anchoritism abound.

Anchorites and Purgatory Anchorholds were often, although not always, attached to churches. They contained a squint in order for the cell’s occupant to view the high altar without being seen. Anchorites did not have to be (and in most cases were not) members of religious orders. Anchorholds were usually small and plain, although some belonging to wealthier occupants were roomy and even boasted small gardens and grillwork. Finally, anchorites were often buried in their cells, which were subsequently bequeathed to their successor. This created, like the perpetual chantry, an unbroken tradition of prayer in that space. Since anchorites were expected to have enough money prior to enclosure to survive unaided, these monies could include pledges from sponsors who, in turn, expected the anchorite’s prayers on their behalf. Because anchorites collected patrons and offered prayers in exchange, I am suggesting that part of the anchoritic vocation is participation in a spiritual economy wherein contractual friendship is offered. If, as Brian McGuire asserts, ‘purgatory was only part of an awareness that the spiritual and material worlds were moving closer to each other and that the bonds between them were becoming more visible’, then discourse about purgatory and its relationship to anchoritism is reflected in material as well as spiritual ways.31 The anchoritic cell was not necessarily a private space reserved exclusively for an especially devout individual, but rather a place of self-imposed isolation in which the penitent sinner might profitably contemplate her own sinfulness and repent – or, more importantly, might use her liminal position as being ‘betwixt and between’ to provide intercessory assistance for other sinners.32 Anchorholds are liminal spaces, existing between the worlds of the living and the dead, just like purgatory. As Liz Herbert McAvoy points out, the anchorhold is also a penitential Stöber, Late Medieval Monasteries and their Patrons, p. 154. Brian Patrick MacGuire, ‘Purgatory, the Communion of Saints, and Medieval Change’, Viator 20 (1989), 61–84 (p. 83). 32 For the most relevant introduction to liminality, including the phrase ‘betwixt and between’, see Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago, IL, 1969), p. 101. 30 31

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space, and it is an actual place where salvation might be mediated and offer hope to the faithful.33 Anchorholds, like chantries, are visible markers of a spiritual existence in the secular world. The anchorhold itself is a quasi-sacred/quasi-secular space. It is at once a place of prayer, fasting and contemplation as well as a dwelling place for eating, sleeping and voiding. Unlike the chantry priest, however, the anchorite ideally did not leave the space of enclosure, assuring the patron that the purchased intercession would be unceasing. The fact that these cells dotted the countryside brought to life a geographic network of salvific intercession: A. S. Lazikani notes, ‘an anchoress is a cherished member of a penitential community, living within a town or village and praying for its members’.34 A visible reminder of this eternal parish membership can be witnessed in the memorial brass of William Thornbury, a priest-anchorite who dwelled in in a cell built into the churchyard at St Mary of Charity (Faversham, Kent). The inscription enjoins passersby to pray so that ‘hope of pardon for all may be mine’, presumably indicating a reduction in purgatorial sentence. Thus, as I have suggested elsewhere, anyone who reads the plaque, or even walks over it, prays both for Thornbury and for his parishioners even today in the twenty-first century.35 In his will, Thornbury left funds for perpetual annuities for the repose of his soul on the anniversary of his death directed to whatever male anchorite, presumably also a priest, would follow in his cell.36 These annuities secured his own soul while also providing for others who followed his vocation. All in all, a number of Thornbury’s actions were conducted with an eye towards purgatory. Wills are an important source of information for the connection between purgatorial intercession and anchorites. Ann K. Warren completed an extensive study of anchorites and patronage in medieval England, tracing support from various benefactors – royal, aristocratic, clerical, merchant and artisan – across a number of centuries. Patronage was an absolute necessity for these fully enclosed religious figures. In fact, no secular anchorite was allowed to undertake formal profession Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘Envisioning Reform: A Revelation of Purgatory and Anchoritic compassioun in the Later Middle Ages’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Exeter Symposium VIII, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 141–55 (p. 144). 34 A. S. Lazikani, ‘Liminal Performance in Hali Meiðhad’ (Special issue on Anchoritic Studies and Liminality, ed. Michelle M. Sauer), Journal of Medieval Religious Culture 42.1 (2016), 28–43 (p. 29). 35 Michelle M. Sauer, ‘Extra-Temporal Place Attachment and Adaptive Reuse: The Afterlives of Medieval English Anchorholds’ (Special issue on Medieval Afterlives, ed. Sarah Salih and Joshua Davies), Studies in Medievalisms XXV (2016), 173–96 (p. 185). Translation mine, based on personal observation of the plate. 36 See Anon., ‘Anchorites in Faversham Churchyard’, Archaeologia Cantiana 11 (1877), 24–39. 33

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without securing fiscal support in advance of enclosure – and this funding had to be confirmed by episcopal investigators. Royal and aristocratic backing was both plentiful and important, although it was often not necessarily couched in terms of direct intercession, like chantries. However, this trend changes in bequests made by merchant and artisan classes. Many of these people made both general and specific bequests in their wills, for example donating money to any anchorite in a particular region or stipulating an anchorite at a specific church. Some of these bequests point towards almsgiving to the poor: anchorites are often referred to as ‘pore ancre’ in wills, emphasising their complete dependence upon charity. As discussed earlier, this is certainly a strategy for purgatorial reduction, and a good portion of these documents point towards the bequest as another ‘good work’ for the salvation of the soul. Moreover, these bequests seem to mirror the rise of chantry chapels. Warren outlines the numbers. Between 1370 and 1553, eighteen per cent of lay wills made in Norwich included bequests to anchorites: ‘That percentage grew during the period under review: whereas only eight per cent of wills made such a bequest between 1370 and 1439, eighteen per cent did so between 1440 and 1489, twenty-one per cent between 1490 and 1517, and fully twenty-five per cent between 1518 and 1532.’37 Numbers of chantries increased during the same time periods, but were financially inaccessible for much of the population. This is not to say that the two forms could not overlap. Compare the will of ‘Roger Thornton of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, three times representative to Parliament, nine times mayor’ made in 1429, wherein he ‘chose John Lacy, the Dominican anchorite, as one of his chantry priests’ to another will made by a local merchant in 1408 in which the decedent ‘selected the local anchorite, John Lacy, the Dominican priest enclosed at the friary at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to be the celebrant of mass for an entire year and for this provided him with eight marks [as a sort of] payment for services rendered’.38 Thornton could afford both a personal chantry, and a ‘known quantity’ anchorite to service it. The merchant, while wealthy enough to afford a series of personal masses, could neither establish a perpetual schedule nor staff it. In yet another instance, anchorites and chantries are explicitly conflated through bequests. Rotha Mary Clay reports a number of sums left to the priest enclosed at the Augustinian friary in Northampton, with directions left for masses said on behalf of various souls. As she says, ‘At the time of the surrender of the house, Robert Barrett was anchorite. The cell, as Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, CA, 1985), p. 223. See also Norman P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370–1532 (Toronto, 1984). 38 Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons, p. 252 (Thornton) and p. 259 (Durham will). 37

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a recognized part of the chantry system, was doomed at the Dissolution of the Monasteries.’39 In each of these instances, we see anchorites contracted formally, much as one established a chantry. Still, as mentioned, patronage was seen as a type of medieval friendship. Indeed, anchoritic literature bears out the connections between friendship, purgatory and the anchoritic life. As mentioned above, it is significant that the first appearance of ‘purgatoire’ in English is in Ancrene Wisse. In fact, the term shows up four times throughout the treatise, and while none is an explicit contract, the idea is present. In each, purgatorial suffering is relieved not through prayers, but rather by specific penance. In Part 3, ‘purgatoire’ appears as part of a parabolic example of God’s grace and love and as part of the remedy against slander, with the withstanding of such treated as a way to expiate the debt of sin owed to God. In Part 4, the anchoress is warned not to avoid temptation, ‘for þet is ure purgatoire, ure cleansing-fur’ [for that is our purgatory, our cleansing fire].40 And in Part 5, the anchoress is instructed that of the nine things that rush a person to confession, the accrual of ‘interest’ in purgatory is by far the most threatening: ‘Þe niheðe reisun is, se he ear biginneð her to don his penitence, se he haueð to beten leasse i pine of Purgatoire’ [‘The ninth reason is, the sooner you begin to do your penance here (on earth), the less you have to atone for in the torment of Purgatory’].41 Although these purgatorial intercessions are solitary ones, the contractual nature of exchange is clearly laid out – humans must do things while on earth in order to lessen punishments after death. More explicitly, however, in Part 1, the anchoress is directed ‘in aniuersaries of ower leoueste freond seggeð alle nihene’ [‘on the anniversary of your dearest friends say all nine (lessons)’].42 This is followed by an enjoinder to replace the Gloria with the versicle and response from the Office of the Dead. Although the Ancrene Wisse author does not specify that the anchoress is directly affecting her friend’s purgatorial sentence, the implication is that praying for someone on the anniversary of his/her death, much like the formal obits, will provide assistance. The parable in Part 3 of Ancrene Wisse draws a parallel between the slandered anchoress and a prisoner who is ransomed by an unknown benefactor who flings Rotha Mary Clay, Hermits and Anchorites of England (London, 1914), p. 183. 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, EETS os 325 and 326 (Oxford, 2005 and 2006), vol. 1, 4. 44, p. 87. All translations are from Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses; A Translation based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter, 2009), here at p. 87. The page numbers in each case are the same. 41 Ancrene Wisse, 5.21, p. 124. 42 Ancrene Wisse, 1.5, pp. 9–10. 39 40

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the coins at his face, yet still gets him out of jail. The idea of ransom is extended in Þe Wohunge of ure Laured (The Wooing of Our Lord) and those works associated with this text (the so-called ‘Wooing Group’). In each one of these prayers, Jesus is likened to a merchant who purchases the anchoress with his blood and suffering, raising her up next to him in heaven, thus (presumably) removing purgatory from the equation altogether. He does this out of love, surely, since the anchoress is described as his beloved and he her ‘lemman’ (sweetheart) and ‘honiter’ (honey), among other terms of endearment. Nonetheless, he is also described – relatedly, and throughout all of the texts in the group – as her ‘freond’ (friend). In fact, he is her only true friend, and thus is the one who can, and should, bring her relief from the pains caused by her sins, and thus, presumably, from purgatorial suffering as well. These early anchoritic texts reflect a growing interest in purgatory and expiation, although they do not necessarily focus on it directly. This alters in later decades, paralleling the patterns found in bequests and the construction of chantry chapels. Later texts associated with anchoritic or anchoritic-related works offer commentary on purgatory and on the role friendship plays in salvation. For example, as Diane Watt states: ‘Margery Kempe received revelations concerning the fate of the dead and was able to advise friends and relatives of the deceased on how the sufferings of those in purgatory could be reduced by pious acts, such as almsgiving.’43 This did not always bode well for her, however. A Norwich widow protested when Margery revealed that her husband needed to spend a great deal of time in purgatory, and in revenge sought to terminate her relationship with her confessor. As McAvoy suggests: the ‘friendship’ 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.44

Kempe’s reactions solidify the anchoritic role in purgatorial intercession: she receives advice during her prayers that the widow should accept the anchorite as confessor as well as undertake penance on behalf of her husband’s soul. Similarly, Diane Watt, ‘Saint Julian of the Apocalypse’, in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 64–74 (p. 68). Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS o.s. 212 (Oxford, 1940; repr. 1997), pp. 46–7 and pp. 53–4. 44 Liz Herbert McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space and the Solitary Life (Cambridge, 2011), p. 131. 43

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the anchorite’s assurances that the widow’s husband’s soul is secure point to his having personal knowledge of some sort. Similarly, A Revelation of Purgatory, written in the early fifteenth century, seemingly by a lay anchoress (and discussed in some detail by Clarck Drieshen elsewhere in this volume), provides a brutal overview of the torments of purgatory, in this case undergone by Margaret, the visionary narrator’s friend, along with a list of actions (masses, prayers, pilgrimages) to undertake to release Margaret from these agonies.45 Margaret requests that six men, at least one of whom was an anchorite, say masses for her.46 The visionary dutifully leaves her anchorhold, approaches the men in question, and ‘told hym [John Wynbourne] 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’.47 This is a complicated set of contracts, but there is nothing but anticipation that they will accede to her wishes and pray for the relief of her soul. The role of friendship in salvation and purgatorial relief is also found in later devotional treatises with roots in the reclusive tradition. Some, as in the fourteenth-century The Chastising of God’s Children, assures its audience that friendship is a ‘reasonable affection’, particularly when realised from a person’s virtue, and should be treasured like a spiritual gift – one that will result in enrichment and ‘moving of souls’ (presumably towards heaven).48 In fact, all of the manuscript versions of The Chastising read: ‘[p]redestinacion is begunne bi þe ordynaunce of god, it is holpen be þe preier of seintes, and of goode men, and it is endid bi a mannes owne wirchyng’.49 Here, again, the proper place of friendship and its associated deeds is celebrated as a method of achieving heaven.

Conclusion Assuming that anchoritic friendship is an economy friendship built around the expiation of sin – similar in and of itself to purgatory, where the burning fire can Mary C. Erler identifies the woman as a lay anchoress in ‘“A Revelation of Purgatory” (1422): Reform and the Politics of Female Visions’, Viator 38 (2007), 321–45. 46 These six men are John Forest, the visionary’s confessor, John Wynbourne, an Augustinian canon, John Pery and Richard Bone, two local priests, and two Benedictine monks of Westminster, of whom one was also an anchorite (Erler suggests John London). See Erler, ‘A Revelation’ and A Revelation of Purgatory by an Unknown Fifteenth-Century Visionary: Introduction, Critical Text, and Translation, ed. Marta Powell Harley (Lewiston, NY/Queenston, 1986). 47 Revelation of Purgatory, ed. Harley, p. 67. 48 The Chastising of God’s Children, ed. Joyce Bazire and Eric Colledge (Oxford, 1957), p. 193. 49 Steven Rozenski, ‘The Chastising of God’s Children from Manuscript to Print’, Études anglaises 66.3 (2013), 369–78 (p. 372). 45

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only be slaked by the deeds and prayers of friends – such friendship is an integral part of the vocation. Anchoritism, like purgatory, allows for a patronage relationship with ordinary lay people as benefactors. Similarly, one of the pains of purgatory include exile from friendship, yet it is friendship that provides salvation – just as one of the pains of complete enclosure is removal of all earthly ties, yet it is friendship that saves. The patronage relationship of purgatory overtly connects the living and the dead into an interdependent community – patrons provide prayers and then the saved return the favour after gaining heaven. Likewise, anchoritism also connects the living and the dead into a complex gift-giving friendship network, where the main gift is salvation attained through prayers, perhaps purchased materially. What we see emerging is a particularly anchoritic notion of friendship that reflects economically motived friendships as defined within medieval culture, particularly referencing patronage and gift-exchange. Anchoritism allows for the accrual of spiritual capital, to some extent, and like purgatory, is a way of extending friendship even after death. In this, we have another way to examine anchoritic life as part of a network, rather than as isolation.

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Chapter 7

‘Item receyvyd of ye Anker’: The Relationships between a Parish and its Anchorites as Seen through the Churchwardens’ Accounts CLARE M. DOWDING

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mongst the different types of community considered in this volume with regard to relationships with anchorites, an important one is that which was often physically closest to those who chose the enclosed life, that of the people who lived and worked in close proximity to the place where solitaries were enclosed. Since between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries this was usually a church, and more often than not a parish church, the connections that could be made and maintained between a parish community and its anchorite are important ones, although ones which appear to have attracted comparatively little attention in studies either of anchorites or of parish life. This is not entirely surprising, of course, given that if little is known about most of the anchorites recorded in Britain in the Middle Ages, even less is known first-hand about how they interacted with those amongst whom they lived while enclosed. Yet where a record of such interaction survives, for example in the churchwardens’ accounts of a parish which hosted an anchorite or series of anchorites, insights may be gained into how both sides of this relationship benefitted. As will be seen, the opportunity for analysis of this type is rare, but can provide valuable material which is as yet mostly unexplored. This lack of exploration of the links between anchorites and the surrounding and supporting parish is unusual, since there has been much work in recent decades on English religion and spirituality in the pre-Reformation period that has looked in greater or lesser detail at community interaction, and at the relationships within and between different sections of society.1 Analysing churchwardens’ See for instance, The Parish in English Life 1400–1600, ed. Katherine L. French, Gary G. Gibbs and Beat A. Kümin (Manchester, 1997); and Katherine L. French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese (Philadelphia, PA, 2001).

 1

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accounts, records of feasts and festivals, wills and other such evidence helps to show that the parish was a significant element in the structure both of the church and of wider society, with an important focus on social interaction and corporate responsibility. There has also been a recognition in such analyses of the need for joint (although not necessarily equal) participation between clergy and laity in the work of the parish to sustain and build the community.2 However, despite the recognition of this collaboration, of the two-way working within the parish which seems to have enriched all concerned, the focus in discussions of medieval parish life is often primarily on the laity, and even where the clergy are brought into consideration, other religious figures such as anchorites are often omitted. Superficially, anchorites have often been viewed as being completely set apart from the rest of society, called to function on a level that cannot be reached by those surrounding them who do not share their need for seclusion – although, as will be seen, this view is being increasingly examined and corrected. It may therefore seem incongruous even to want to analyse an anchorite’s relationship with the local community, since the very act of enclosure was designed to shut the anchorite away from the outside world (as well as to shut the world away from the anchorite), so as to allow greater focus on interaction with God. This is despite the fact that attachment to a church, the usual anchoritic choice of a fixed location for solitude, as opposed to eremitical wandering, could itself imply a degree of need for contact with others. Yet there were many parish churches and parish communities across England in the Middle Ages that welcomed and hosted successions of anchorites, suggesting that this seemingly contradictory relationship was profitable for all parties concerned. Even though interaction between the enclosed anchorite and the surrounding community was apparently unavoidable, not least in order to ensure the anchorite’s survival for longer than a few days after enclosure, there was often uncertainty on the part of those undertaking to guide and counsel recluses as to whether or not this interaction was desirable, or even seen as being in line with the anchorite’s vocation. Rotha Mary Clay notes, with reference to the tenth-century Rule of Grimlaicus (discussed by Andrew Thornton elsewhere in this volume), that companionship ‘was permitted, and even encouraged, on the grounds that to live entirely apart from human converse was positively dangerous to the soul’,3 Even Eamon Duffy, in his The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT and London, 2nd edn 2005), minimises the role played by the laity in this capacity. Indeed, this is an omission which David Aers’s review of Duffy’s book identifies as ‘extremely peculiar’: see David Aers, ‘Altars of Power: Reflections on Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580’, Literature and History, 3rd series, 3.2 (1994), 90–105 (p. 92).  3 Rotha Mary Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London, 1914), p. 128; it  2

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but both Anneke Mulder-Bakker and Mari Hughes-Edwards have shown that there was a tension within the corpus of medieval anchoritic guidance writings as to how to reconcile withdrawal from the community while still remaining part of it. Mulder-Bakker sums up the situation thus: Beginning with Goscelin’s Liber confortatorius (c.1080) and ending with Walter Hilton’s late-fourteenth-century Scale of Perfection, these guidance writings acknowledge the potential sociability of the recluse, but do not celebrate it. . . . Indeed, the high-medieval texts, such as de Institutione Inclusarum and Ancrene Wisse, actively discourage reclusive sociability. Although the later-medieval guides, such as Speculum Inclusorum, Rolle’s Form of Living and Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, demonstrate that it has become increasingly acceptable for the recluse to have social contact, it is by no means shown to be the central interest of these writers, or the raison d’être of the vocation.4

Hughes-Edwards’s work shows in detail the contrasting and developing attitudes to anchoritic social interaction during this period. In the early thirteenth century, for instance, she notes that both the Ancrene Wisse and Aelred’s De institutione inclusarum ‘discourage contact with religious figures, even the confessor, and seek to limit interaction with the anchorhold’s servants’, and also ‘urge their recluses to cover and avoid their windows as much as possible’.5 However, a century and a half later, in The Scale of Perfection Walter Hilton allows the recluse to ‘stop her own activities to attend to visitors’, but qualifies this ‘with the commendation of silence as protective strategy, advising that conversations be short and broken off entirely if the caller seeks only to gossip’.6 Indeed, it is clear both from scholarly work on anchoritism over the last century and also from the medieval anchoritic writings as analysed by HughesEdwards that, as Michelle Sauer puts it, ‘what distinguishes anchoritism cannot be complete isolation from the external human community’.7 Ann Warren notes should be noted that according to Clay, Grimlaicus was advocating groups of solitaries living together, rather than specifically promoting interaction with the local community, for which see Andrew Thornton’s essay in this volume, pp. 68–82.  4 Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, ‘Foreword’, in Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari HughesEdwards (Cardiff, 2005), pp. 1–5 (p. 3).  5 Mari Hughes-Edwards, Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practice (Cardiff, 2012), p. 45 and p. 46.  6 Hughes-Edwards, Reading Medieval Anchoritism, p. 43.  7 Michelle M. Sauer, ‘“Prei for me mi leue suster”: The Paradox of the Anchoritic “Community” in Late Medieval England’, Prose Studies 26.1 (2003), 153–75 (p. 169), original emphasis.

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towards the start of her study of this area that ‘[w]hile the individual in medieval England had the freedom to choose a reclusive life and to pursue a solitary relationship with God, his ability to make that choice was conditioned by its social acceptability’, and that an element of this social acceptability was the existence of ‘a network of support that enabled the anchorite to exist and persist’.8 Denis Renevey’s overview of Ancrene Wisse underlines the need for there to be a spiritual community around the female anchorites for whom the text was first written, but he also highlights that this community is still one that is kept at a distance. The focus of the text is thus very much on the anchorites’ life of prayer, and on associated imaginative interactions with those for whom they pray, for example in the surrounding parish community, rather than allowing for direct interactions.9 The parish community under particular consideration here is that of the church of All Hallows London Wall, alluded to by E. A. Jones in his essay at the beginning of this volume. Anchorites were to be found at about twenty locations in the City of London from the end of the twelfth century until the period of the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s, half of which were on or near the London Wall, as the gates and the various churches built into or close to the restored Roman structure provided eminently suitable enclosures for recluses.10 All Hallows London Wall (which was rebuilt in the 1760s) was situated on the wall’s northern edge at the junction of London Wall with Old Broad Street, a couple of hundred yards west of St Botolph’s Church on Bishopsgate. From the early fifteenth century for nearly a century and a half, All Hallows hosted a number of anchorites, at least five of whom can be given names, although it is not certain if occupation of the anchorhold was always continuous. The last occupant of the All Hallows anchorhold was Symon Appulby, who achieved recognition in his lifetime as the author of the popular devotional text The Fruyte of Redempcyon, which was printed four times by Wynkyn de Worde between 1514 and 1532, with an additional edition by Robert Redman in 1531.11 Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1985), p. 15.  9 Denis Renevey, ‘Middle English Writings for Women: Ancrene Wisse’, in Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature, ed. David F. Johnson and Elaine Treharne (Oxford, 2005), pp. 198–212 (especially pp. 200–2). 10 See Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, pp. 230–1, and also my discussion of the location of anchorites around the London wall in ‘“a certain tourelle on London Wall . . . was granted . . . for him to inhabit the same”: London Anchorites and the City Wall’, in JMRC 42.1 (Special issue on Anchoritic Studies with a Focus on Liminality) (2016), 44–55. 11 See entries 22557 (1514), 22558 (1517), 22559 (1530), 22560 (1532) and 22559.5 (1531) in A Short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland & Ireland and of English books printed abroad 1475–1640, ed. A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, revised W. A. Jackson,  8

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As mentioned above, the examination of churchwardens’ accounts can be an important source of information for discussions and examinations of parish communities, as seen in French’s survey and also in Beat Kümin’s work on the parish in the later medieval period.12 However, the accounts considered in such discussions often do not begin until the mid to late fifteenth century, at a point when Warren’s analysis shows that English medieval anchoritism had faded in some parts of England, although it remained strong in the eastern counties of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk, London and Kent.13 As a result, the likelihood of accounts surviving from a time and a place where anchorites were present is not necessarily high. It is also worth noting that much of the documentation that has helped in these considerations of parish life may tend to survive best in urban environments (although some rural records also remain), but it is important to remember that for most of the period under discussion urban anchorites appear to have been less prevalent than their rural counterparts. Warren’s analysis of the location of anchorholds suggests that the number of those in towns and cities surpassed those in villages only in the early sixteenth century (although the total number of anchoritic sites decreased markedly at the same time, from a total of 130 recorded in the fifteenth century to forty-nine in the first four decades of the sixteenth century).14 Kümin’s study, which includes but does not focus exclusively on London, provides a list of twenty-six London parish churchwardens’ accounts, of which fewer than half (twelve sets) begin in the fifteenth century, and only one of these relates to a church that is known to have contained an anchorhold: that at All Hallows London Wall.15 The All Hallows accounts therefore provide a rare opportunity to glimpse not only the everyday life of a medieval parish, but also how generations of anchorites contributed towards that life, providing benefits for both sides of the relationship. Although indebted to Charles Welch’s analysis of the accounts,16 this F. S. Ferguson and Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols (London, 2nd edn. revised and enlarged, 1976–91). 12 Beat A. Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish c.1400–1560 (Aldershot, 1996). 13 Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 36–7. 14 Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, table 2, p. 38. 15 The churches in question are St Mary-at-Hill (accounts starting in 1420), St Peter Westcheap (1441), St Nicholas Shambles (1452), St Andrew Hubbard (1454), All Hallows London Wall (1455), St Michael Cornhill (1456), St Botolph Aldersgate (1466), St Martin Orgar (1471), St Stephen Walbrook (1474), St Stephen Coleman Street (1486), All Hallows Staining (1491) and St Dunstan in the East (1494); see Kümin, Shaping of a Community, p. 267, referring to Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 263–93. 16 The original accounts are now held at the London Metropolitan Archives (reference P69/ALH5/B/003/MS05090/001), and although the relevant entries in the manuscript

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present ­discussion also draws on work by Mary Erler, one of the few scholars to have looked in any detail at Symon Appulby or anchorites at All Hallows.17 The accounts cover a period of eight decades from 1455 to 1536, and since the anchoritic presence pre-dates the start of the accounts, it is not unreasonable to presume that by the 1450s the parishioners of All Hallows and the successive occupants of the anchorhold were (in general terms) used to each other’s presence, and that the latter cannot but have had an impact on the former. It is clear from examining the accounts that the All Hallows anchorites had in common a sense of generosity, and a willingness to get involved in the business of keeping the church and the community running. Welch observes that they ‘appear throughout these accounts as liberal donors both to the regular expenses and to the extraordinary necessities of the church’ (p. xxx), and indeed the contributions of the anchorites towards building and repair work were at times monetarily significant. When in 1474 ‘newe bolles [bowls?] of laton’18 were made for the beme-light (the light which hung permanently in front of the cross near the altar), the anchorite contributed 2s 8d,19 which together with a donation of 2s from a parishioner provided some of the total cost of these items, although the parish have been personally examined, for ease of reference quotations are from the transcription in Charles Welch, The Churchwardens’ Accounts of the Parish of Allhallows, London Wall, in the City of London. 33 Henry VI to 27 Henry VIII (AD 1455–AD 1536) to which is added a facsimile of ‘The Fruyte of Redempcyon’ by Symon the Anker of London Wall (London, 1912). Page references to Welch are included in the text, and differences between the manuscript and the transcription will be noted. 17 Mary C. Erler, ‘A London Anchorite, Simon Appulby: His Fruyte of Redempcyon and its Milieu’, Viator 29 (1998), 227–39; and Mary C. Erler, Reading and Writing During the Dissolution: Monks, Friars, and Nuns 1530–1558 (Cambridge, 2013). 18 The exact meaning of ‘bolles of laton’ is unclear, but may refer to some kind of candleholder; the phrase occurs here in the same spelling in the lists of both receipts and payments, and subsequently appears as ‘bollys of lettynge’ in the final list of receipts at the end of the accounts, in that case specifically for eight items which were sold to a nearby church for a total of 4s 9d (p. 66). The Middle English Dictionary entry for ‘bolle’,  http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED5450 (accessed 8 February 2016), gives ‘A round-bottomed vessel; bowl, basin, dish’ as meaning 2 (a), which may be the most appropriate definition here. The MED entry for ‘latoun’ (which has ‘laton’ as a variant spelling), http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/ med-idx?type=id&id=MED24786 (accessed 8 February 2016), has ‘An alloy of copper, tin, and other metals (identified with the orichalcum of the ancients)’ as meaning (a). The supporting quotations include reference to ‘a candelstik of lateyne’ in a 1454 will and ‘iij smale basens of laton’ in household accounts of 1466, so these items clearly had uses in contexts other than the solely ecclesiastical. 19 For centuries before decimalisation in the early 1970s, the British monetary system consisted of pounds, shillings and pence (the last abbreviated to ‘d’, from the Latin denarius); there were twelve pence to the shilling and twenty shillings to the pound.

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had to cover the balance (pp. 14–15). By the time that substantial repairs to the church fabric were carried out in the period from September 1482 to May 1485, the anchorite was William Lucas, one of the two who are named in the accounts, and he gave 3s 4d towards a total of 32s 1d. While not the largest single donation (the two churchwardens and another parishioner each gave 6s 4d, and a further individual gave 5s), this was a notable amount when other donors gave only pennies, and occurred in a period when Lucas also gave 3s 4d for the beme-light, and an uncertain but probably significant amount towards work to the organ (pp. 28–29). The manuscript entry referring to Lucas’s donation in this instance appears at the top of a folio, a piece of which is now missing; what remains indicates that the gift was of at least 1s 8d, but the exact number of shillings was probably more as there is space for more numerals before the visible ‘js’.20 The total receipts for the work on the organ are given as 36s 6d, although the sum of 35s 9d has been written and crossed out in the manuscript below this figure; the rest of the entries total 29s 10d, so Lucas’s contribution could therefore have been as much as 6s 8d. There was thus a tradition, not to say an expectation, that the anchorite would contribute generously to building and repair work undertaken at All Hallows. By the time the new aisle was built in 1528–29 (by which point, unlike in earlier years, the accounts regularly run from March to March), Symon Appulby, who is the only other named anchorite in the accounts, was occupying the anchorhold, and he was as involved financially as were his predecessors. He gave 8s specifically for scaffold poles, and also contributed 32s to the general costs of the building project. Although an entry in the expenditure for this year lists 8s being paid back ‘to master Ankere In part of paymend of xls’, which tallies with the amount of 32s detailed in the list of loans recorded a little before this entry, the fact that this same amount is noted against ‘Master Ankere’ in the ‘namys of thame that has gewyne money towards the beldynge of the new yll [aisle]’ suggests that Symon wrote off the debt, turning his original loan of 40s into a gift (pp. 57–59). Unlike William Lucas forty-five years earlier, however, on this occasion Symon was the largest single donor; ‘the wyffs’ (wives) of the parish combined to contribute 52s between them, but Symon’s 32s exceeded the 20s each given by the parson and three others, which were the other notable individual gifts (p. 59). Warren discusses in detail how anchorites throughout the Middle Ages were the beneficiaries of those from the local community who had the resources to provide charitable giving, often through gifts in wills.21 The All Hallows accounts show that the occupants of the anchorhold there appear to have channelled these donations back into the local community via the work of the church, in Welch transcribes this as ‘…s viijd’ (p. 28). Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, chapter 7, pp. 222–64.

20 21

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contributions in time of particular capital need as well as part of the general cycle of the parish. Whether it be for 4d in 1460–61 or 20s in 1477–78 (pp. 7, 20), the line ‘Item receyvyd of [from] þe Anker’ appears often enough for it not to be unusual. Of particular note may be the latter-mentioned donation, which Erler suggests may have come from William Lucas at the time of his absence from the anchorhold on pilgrimage to Rome (a break from solitude which was papally approved), and that it was ‘intended to replace the support All Hallows would miss while Lucas was away’.22 All Hallows was located on the northern edge of the City close to Bishopsgate, separated only by the wall from the marshlands of Moorfields and the original Bedlam hospital, and was certainly not one of the more prosperous parishes in London.23 Yet there is evidence of high-profile interest in All Hallows, or at least in its anchorites: quite early in the records, in 1457–8, the bishop of London is recorded as having given four marks ‘for Ancres’ (p. 4). This large sum (one mark equalled 160 pence, at a time when there were 240 pence to the pound, so four marks totalled £2 13s 4d) is exceeded in that year’s receipts only by a legacy of £3, and Welch suggests that the gift distributed by the bishop was also ‘perhaps a legacy or part of a royal or other gift made to the London recluses’ (p. xxx). Over two decades later, another high-profile donation is recorded when in 1480 ‘[a] man of my lady of bokyngham’ gave 6s 8d (p. 22). Although no reference to the anchorite is made in this entry, Welch shows that it agrees with the provision in the will of Anne, duchess of Buckingham, for that sum to be given to ‘the Anker in the Wall beside Bishopsgate, London’, who at that date was William Lucas (pp. xxii, xxix). This gift is also mentioned by Warren, who observes that in making this legacy the duchess followed the example of her uncle, Thomas Beaufort, who left a larger amount to the inhabitant of the same anchorhold in 1426,24 although that earlier legacy pre-dated the surviving All Hallows accounts by thirty years. Less high-ranking persons also gave to or for the anchorites. In the account for June 1488 to March 1490, 26s 8d was received ‘ffor the ankyr off [from] doctor Jane’ (p. 36),25 and in the same year that Symon Appulby contributed generously towards the building of the new aisle he also passed on 9s 3d which was ‘the Erler, Reading and Writing, p. 21, referring to Rotha Mary Clay, ‘Further Studies on Medieval Recluses’, The Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd series, 16 (1953), 74–86 (p. 80) concerning Lucas’s pilgrimage. 23 See Donald Findlay, All Hallows London Wall: A History and Description (London, 1985), p. 6. 24 Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 198 and p. 207. 25 Dr Jane is mentioned elsewhere in the accounts, although usually in respect of payments to him, and Welch concludes that he ‘seems to have been an ecclesiastical lawyer’ (p. xxi). 22

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gyft of dyuersse [diverse/various] men & women of ther dewocyon [devotion] at dyuersse tymys’ (p. 56). Since by this time (1528–29) two of the five editions of Symon’s text The Fruyte of Redempcyon had been printed, it is possible that – like Julian of Norwich before him – Symon was being sought out from beyond the parish by those who had read his book and who were seeking his spiritual advice in person, and who were happy to offer something financial in return. Whether or not this was the source of his generosity, it would seem that in contributing to his parish in this way Symon was not alone amongst anchorites. Financial engagement of this kind with parish communities was initially advised against by those offering guidance to anchorites, such as Aelred in the twelfth-century guide De institutione inclusarum, but as with other aspects of the anchoritic life the approach to almsgiving changed during the medieval period, so that, as HughesEdwards notes, ‘the later medieval recluse is encouraged to distribute practical aid’.26 Support of the parish in practical ways can also be seen in the inventory of church goods given at the end of the All Hallows accounts, placed after the entry for 1535–36 although compiled earlier. The first fourteen entries detail an inventory taken ‘at our lady day’ in 1501 (p. 68), while the remaining eight entries are in a different hand of a later date. The first of these later entries records ‘Item a chalys gevyn by sir Symon Anker Anno henrici octaui xiijo [in the thirteenth year of Henry VIII’s reign] wayenge viij vncs [ounces]’ (p. 68). Since Symon’s profession was in 1513,27 he was unlikely to have waited until 1521–22 to have donated a chalice brought with him into the anchorhold, so it was presumably something that he was given after his enclosure, or an item which he procured for the parish from his own means. As well as being significant contributors to the parish’s funds, at least two of the anchorites also played a direct role in administering these funds. Warren notes: Anchorholds were an ideal place to store precious goods, money, and papers in an era when there were no banks and few places for the safekeeping of valuables. The sanctity of the reclusory made it a place beyond easy access (the depositor hoped) …28

This observation is borne out in the case of All Hallows. In the record for the period from March 1509 to March 1511, 25s is listed as ‘Item Reste In Master Anker hands In Redy money for the chorche’, with Welch describing this as showing that Hughes-Edwards, Reading Medieval Anchoritism, p. 42 and p. 47. Clay, ‘Further Studies’, p. 82 and p. 86. 28 Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 111. 26 27

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the anchorite in occupation at the time was ‘acting as the Treasurer of the church’ (pp. 51, xxxii), a situation which would have been unthinkable to the writer of Ancrene Wisse, for instance. William Lucas also seems to have acted in this way, and although that particular relationship may not have been entirely successful (as will be mentioned below), the parish seems to have had enough confidence in his later successor to trust their anchorite with this responsibility once again. If the parish coffers of All Hallows benefitted from successive anchorites when they were alive, they could also profit from their deaths, as well as from the deaths of those connected with them. Throughout the eight decades covered by the accounts, there are many records of monies being received in relation to funerals, but in the context of this present analysis two entries in particular are worth considering. In 1488–90, 3s 4d was received ‘ffor ye beriyng off sir jon ye hanckorys pryst [anchorite’s priest]’ (p. 36). There is an important implication within this entry: not only that whoever occupied the anchorhold at this time was either female or not ordained, so had a priest allocated for the celebration of the Eucharist, but also that there was a pastoral connection strong enough for someone (and the presumption has to be that it was the anchorite) to contribute towards the cost of the priest’s burial rather than allow the parish to take the full financial strain. This impression is reinforced by a further entry some five or so years later, in 1495–96, when the sum of 20d was received ‘of maystere Awnkere [anker/anchorite] for berryyng of sir john mother’ (p. 40). In explaining the connection between these two entries, Welch decides that the situation cannot be as straightforward as might be presumed: Perhaps Sir John Mother was the Anker whose priest was buried in 1488–90, and in 1495–6 he was himself buried at the expense of his successor. But in this case we should expect to find him described as ‘the late anker’. It seems hardly probable that the burial was that of the ‘mother’ of Sir John. (p. xxxii)

However, this seems unlikely since Erler identifies the anchorite who succeeded William Lucas in 1487–88, and who also died during that accounting period, as ‘probably a man named Robert Lynton’, and then names his likely successor simply as ‘Giles’, who was certainly in residence in 1491.29 It is therefore doubtful that there was indeed an All Hallows anchorite named John Mother around this time, as that would be indicative of an exceedingly rapid turnover. It is more likely that the ‘Sir John’ whose burial was recorded in the earlier entry was the anchorite’s priest, and that the subsequent entry denotes a payment from the succeeding anchorite (probably Giles) towards the costs of Sir John’s mother’s Erler, Reading and Writing, pp. 23–4.

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funeral in her turn. The evidence so far of the financial involvement of successive anchorites in the life of All Hallows over many decades indicates that this was a community where the occupant of the anchorhold was an integral part of the parish, so Welch’s presumption that the anchorite would not have contributed financially to the funeral costs of those close to him (or her), and of their family members in turn, is mistaken. When it comes to the costs of funeral arrangements being made for the anchorites themselves, however, there is less evidence in the accounts, although what is present again suggests a close connection between anchorite and parish community. In the period from November 1486 to June 1488, the list of receipts includes 3s 4d for ringing the bell at William Lucas’s funeral, as well as 6s 8d five entries later for the same office for his short-lived successor, Robert Lynton, and a further 53s 4d ‘of the Executoures of the seid Ancker’ in relation to goods that he left to the church (pp. 33–34). No doubt this substantial legacy helped to offset the 15s 11d paid in the same year as part of a legal dispute ‘agaynst the executours of syr William lukas’ (p. 35). Erler notes that this involved Lucas lending the significant sum of £20 of parish money to a local tailor, Richard West, which – following a subsequent disagreement over a boy apprenticed to the tailor by Lucas – was not repaid in full, due to a difference of opinion regarding an apparent agreement by Lucas to forgive West’s outstanding debt to the church.30 If the interpretation offered above of the ‘Sir John Mother’ incident is correct, then William Lucas and Robert Lynton are apparently the only anchorites of All Hallows to have died in office during the period covered by the accounts, since there are no other ­references to anchoritic funeral income or expenditure in those accounts. More generally there appears to be little discussion, either medieval or modern, of the funeral and burial arrangements made for anchorites, although Clay observes that ‘[i]n early days it was customary for the cell to become the tomb of its tenant’, and later that ‘[d]uring the fifteenth century it seems to have become usual to bury the hermit in his parish church or in any other cemetery that he willed’.31 This lack of detail might be because the enclosure rite included a quasi-funerary element so that the anchorite was regarded as already dead once enclosed,32 although this speculative suggestion is to an extent contradicted by the evidence of Symon Appulby’s will. The last mention of him (or any anchorite) in the accounts is in the entry for 1528–29 (p. xxxiii), even though the accounts

Erler, Reading and Writing, pp. 21–2. Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, p. 113 and p. 114. 32 See, for instance, 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 (especially pp. 37–42). 30 31

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themselves continue for a few more years after this date. (Although the exact years for the final few sets of receipts and payments are not fully legible due to the condition of the manuscript, it is possible from what remains visible to calculate that the last set of figures in all probability relate to the period March 1535 to March 1536.) Symon Appulby’s will is dated 6 June 1537,33 and provides details which may or may not have been recorded in the parish accounts had these continued or survived after March 1536, and illustrates the end of the fascinating financial relationship between parish and anchorites over so many decades. Even though his enclosure rite twenty-four years earlier may have included a symbolic burial, Symon stated that on his death his physical remains should ‘be buried within the tombe alredy set and made within the ankerage’,34 and he obviously envisaged this as being carried out with some ceremony; provision was made for payment of members of the fraternity of St Augustine Pappey who attended the funeral, as well as payment of ‘xiiii children bearyng xiiii tapers’ at the funeral, who were to receive 2d each. In addition, Symon’s preparation of his grave can be seen not only as fulfilling one of his duties as an anchorite,35 but also as part of his responsibility to the parish, in undertaking this action and thereby relieving them of the need to do so.36 He also made provision for his presumed successor, leaving all his books and vestments to the next occupant of the cell, thus ensuring that the parish was not to be put to the expense of replacing these items. Clay and Erler both note that Symon would have had a reasonable expectation of being succeeded in the anchorhold, although his will also recognises the possibility that this may not happen37 – and which was, Erler, Reading and Writing, pp. 148–9 (in modernised English), and ‘A London Anchorite’, p. 236 (especially n. 46) and p. 239 (in its original spelling). In both cases, she cites Colin A. McLaren’s unpublished work, ‘An Edition of Foxford, a Vicars’-General Book of the Diocese of London 1521–1539, fols 161–268’ (MPhil thesis, University of London, 1973). 34 Erler, ‘A London Anchorite’, p. 239. 35 How widely this was performed is uncertain, since Warren notes that ‘[t]he practice of an open sepulchre within the cell’ was not spelled out as much in English anchoritic rules as in continental ones (p. 106 n. 32), and as ever the correlation between theory and practice is difficult to assess. 36 Building on Ellen K. Rentz’s observation that ‘[a] church’s possession of a cemetery meant . . . that the extended parish community would be kept intact, even in death’ (Imagining the Parish in Late Medieval England [Columbus, OH, 2015], p. 23), there could be a case for arguing that if one or more of Symon’s predecessors had also prepared their graves in the cell, then even though still separated, he – and they – became part of another community as their bones kept each other company in death, just as the wider community did in the parish graveyard. 37 See Clay, ‘Further Studies’, p. 84, and Erler, ‘A London Anchorite’, pp. 235–6, and Reading and Writing, p. 33. 33

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indeed, the eventual outcome, following the removal of the link between monastic institutions and parish anchorites after the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s. An awareness of the financial relationship between anchorhold and parish community can also be seen in Symon’s bequests of 2s 4d ‘unto xiiii pore people dwellyng within the said parish of Alhallowes’, and 8s 4d to ‘bee expendyd at the tyme of my buriall in bunes [buns/bread], chese and ale to and for the company beyng at my buriall’.38 In the latter case, Symon appears to have wanted to end his association with All Hallows in a similar way to that in which he began it, although elements of this conclusion are somewhat conjectural (but not entirely unreasonable, given the overall impression the accounts give of the relationship between parish and anchorites). Welch notes in his Introduction that the first reference to Symon in the accounts is ‘from an undated account early in Henry VIII’s reign’, when 4s 6d was recorded as being received ‘of the ankyr Syr Symon of the gaynes of A stande of ale whiche he gave to the cherche’ (pp. xxxii, 52). As is the case elsewhere, there is damage to the manuscript which makes determining the exact dates of this entry difficult, but the previous entry (a declaration by the churchwardens that these are true accounts) is dated ‘the xxviijti day of Marche . . . In the third yere of the Rayne [of] kyng harry the viijt’ (p. 52),39 thus dating it to 1512. Since the date of Symon’s profession was late June 1513, it follows that reference to him in the All Hallows accounts as the anchorite cannot be earlier than this. If the receipts that include the stand of ale presented to the parish by Symon do indeed cover the period from March 1513 to March 1514, it is therefore tempting to view this gift as Symon’s way of making himself welcome within the parish on his arrival, and suggesting that – in anticipatory contradiction of Shakespeare’s Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night some six decades later – for those who are virtuous there may indeed be both cakes and ale!40 Yet whatever may be the interpretations of these references to the beginning and end of Symon Appulby’s time as the anchorite of All Hallows London Wall, this examination of the churchwardens’ accounts has shown that this particular parish had a long and fruitful relationship with those who chose a solitary and yet paradoxically engaged life. In this, All Hallows may not have been untypical of parishes which hosted anchorites, although, as noted earlier, those scholars who have used other churchwardens’ accounts to explore the medieval parish do not seem to have encountered anchorites in the parishes they have surveyed. Notwithstanding the lack of evidence in this area, it has often been demonstrated, Erler, ‘A London Anchorite’, p. 239. The third ‘of’ occurs in Welch’s transcription, but not in the manuscript. 40 Twelfth Night, Act II, scene iii, lines 114–16. 38 39

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not least by other contributors to this volume, that by the later medieval period the urban anchorite had become a significant constituent element of certain English towns and cities, often in locations which were inextricably part of the fabric of those places, resulting in situations where an anchorite was both part of a city in being enclosed in the fabric of one of its buildings, and not part of a city in being separated by that enclosure from the people who made up the community of the city. The spiritual and financial responsibilities which could therefore be assumed by a parish anchorite precisely because of this dual connection and disconnection in many ways lie at the heart not only of what Erler calls ‘the cultural and economic complexity that defined anchoritism’,41 but of the wider and lasting significance of the contributions of anchorites such as Symon Appulby to the communities to which they were connected. Symon’s particular contribution to his community, which in this instance also comprised English-reading laypeople beyond the parish of All Hallows, was his book The Fruyte of Redempcyon. In part a translation of the fifteenth-­ century Latin text Antidotarius Animae, with additions from Bridget of Sweden’s Revelations, and partly original English writing, The Fruyte consists of thirty-one chapters of prayers and meditations on the events of Christ’s life, death, resurrection and ascension, with the majority of the text (chapters 14 to 28) focusing on the Passion, from the entry to Jerusalem to Christ’s death and burial.42 Its intended readership was ordinary people who wanted help in increasing their knowledge of their faith and in deepening their experience of the practice of that faith. The text is orthodox but not repressive, appealing without being subversive, and demonstrates that at a time of growing religious uncertainty it was possible to adhere to conventional subject matter without forgoing skill and sophistication in the process. It is impossible to know whether or not Symon would have written The Fruyte had he not been an anchorite, and thus in contact (while also not being in contact) with laypeople eager for a text such as this, but his place and position within and yet outside the society of early sixteenth-century London surely played an important part in the text’s contemporary popularity, which may in turn have helped to bring more funds into the parish coffers of All Hallows London Wall via those who came to seek guidance in the practice of their faith from the last of its anchorites.

Erler, Reading and Writing, p. 36. See Erler, Reading and Writing, pp. 26–7.

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Chapter 8

The Curious Incident of the Hermit in Fisherton JAMES PLUMTREE

T

he hermit was a familiar feature within the medieval religious landscape. Withdrawn from certain aspects of worldly affairs, hermits were actively dedicated to others: the functions ranged from the philanthropic (repairing roads, taking care of bridges, collecting alms for personal and public use), the religious (looking after shrines, celebrating divine office) and the pastoral (consoling and advising those who needed help).1 Though seemingly separated from society and existing on the margins, hermits played an important social role that the ecclesiastical hierarchy desired to regulate.2 From the mundanely practical to the charismatic, hermits were often the accessible entry-point for the laity to the religious life. Subsequently, the role of the hermit is often compared to other types of solitary religious vocation that fulfilled a similar function. Hermits are frequently compared – and at times the terminology is interchangeable – with anchorites. Though sharing origins, the two Rotha Mary Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London, 1914), pp. xvi–xvii. Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, CA, 1985). Earlier observations of the communal value of solitaries include F. D. S. Darwin, The English Mediaeval Recluse (London, 1944), Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, and, in wishing ‘to show, that hermits had public duties to perform’ (emphasis in original), James Ingram, Memorials of the Parish of Codford St Mary (Oxford, 1844), p. iv. Regarding the functions of holy men, see Peter Brown, ‘Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies 61 (1971), 80–101; H. Mayr-Harting, ‘Functions of a Twelfth-Century Recluse’, History 60 (1975), 337–52; and E. A. Jones, ‘“Vae Soli”: Solitaries and Pastoral Care’, in Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker (York, 2009), pp. 11–28. A secular priest, or member of the laity, opting for the eremitic lifestyle would receive a habit, a clear symbol of the hermit’s role, from the bishop; a monk, opting for the same, would require approval from his abbot.

 1  2

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categories of religious solitary life, eremitism and anchoritism, became gradually more distinct from each other, with the term anchorite specifically referring to an enclosed figure, withdrawn and retired from the world.3 Hermits, as their roles noted above suggest, had the option of greater liberty, if they so chose. As other contributors to this present volume also demonstrate, both groups of solitaries, though seemingly excluded, were, in fact, central to the community. The solitaries occupied a distinct social niche, albeit one that was open to error and abuse. One curious case is recorded in a 1352 mandate issued by Robert Wyvil, the bishop of Salisbury (1330–65). Addressed to the members of his cathedral and to the nearby college of St Edmund, Wyvil alerted them to an abuse of eremitic status. The text survives in a heavily abbreviated copy of the mandate recorded in the bishop’s register, WSA D1/2/3 v. 1, f.210v, kept at the Wiltshire and Swindon Archive in Chippenham.4 Specifically, the mandate informed the members of the cathedral and college of the existence of an unnamed man in the adjacent village of Fisherton accused by the bishop of leading honest believers astray by assuming the garb of clerical dress and pretending to be a hermit (‘sub pallio simulate religionis habitum gestans heremitam se confingens’). The figure, condemned as a ‘Jeroboam’,5 was accused of performing roles associated with a priest while deceiving the laity by ringing a bell (‘campanas pulsantes’) and offering years of indulgence to those attending mass (presumably said by him) (‘amplius indulgentiam et remissionem suorum consequerentur peccatorum’). The insinuation is that this man had usurped the role of a hermit for personal financial gain. Frustratingly, the unedited and unpublished register, aptly described as ‘confused in arrangement’, does not reveal the outcome of the mandate.6 Despite the lack of a resolution, the accusations of greed and duplicity levelled against the Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘Problems of Terminology and Definition’, in her introduction to Anchoritic Traditions of Medieval Europe, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, 2010), pp. 9–14, and Mari Hughes-Edwards, Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practices (Cardiff, 2012), pp. 3–4.  4 The folio is also numbered 190 in Arabic numerals by a modern hand. The second volume contains only Arabic numbering provided at a later date. No other copy of the mandate is known. I am grateful to the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, the custodians of the archive, for their assistance. In the full transcription of this document printed in the appendix to this present essay (pp. 143–46 below), all scribal abbreviations have been expanded and italicised, line breaks are indicated by a stroke (/), and modern capitalisation and punctuation have been followed.  5 To remove religious ties to Jerusalem, Jeroboam set up two golden calves to be worshipped (1 Kings 12: 25–33). Condemnation is apparent in the reoccurring phrase ‘who made Israel to sin’ (1 Kings 22: 53; 2 Kings 3: 3, 10: 20, 13: 2, 6, 11, 14: 24, 15: 9, 18, 24, 28, 23: 15).  6 David M. Smith, Guide to Bishops’ Registers of England and Wales: A Survey from the Middle Ages to the Abolition of Episcopacy in 1646 (London, 1981), pp. 189–90. Much of  3

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Fisherton hermit by the ecclesiastical authorities illustrate the tensions inherent to the eremitic status.7 Given the scarcity of the source material, scholarly understanding of the events at Fisherton has been limited, but a number of factors – geographical, historical and religious – can be scrutinised to determine what led to such a condemnation from Bishop Wyvil. The first known mention of the Fisherton hermit appeared in the History of Modern Wiltshire (1822–44).8 Because the work is arranged by location, the problematic hermit was placed alongside the less troublesome hermits and anchorites that succeeded him in Fisherton. This method was followed by later scholars, including Rotha Mary Clay, whose The Hermits and Anchorites of England (1914) included the Fisherton solitaries together in her discussion of town and city hermits.9 Recent scholars have moved away from this position, however; instead, they tend to view the problematic hermit as an example of abuse of the role. In his book concerned with five centuries of English church history, Andrew Brown suggests the bishop censured the Fisherton hermit because the hermit ‘attracted people (and funds) away from the parish church’.10 Edward Jones, however, in a closer study of errant hermits in the fourteenth century, places the Fisherton hermit’s actions alongside other troublemakers as having struck ‘nearer the heart of the institution itself’.11 In plotting the incident geographically, and sketching the context of the event, this present essay will demonstrate that it is possible to develop a clearer picture of the strains of eremitic status than previous the material from the late 1340s and late 1350s is seemingly either lost or never entered into the register.  7 An influence for this study in using the anomaly to reveal the features that were expected is William A. Christian Jr, ‘Toribia del Val and the Mysterious Wayfarer of Casas de Benítez’, in his Divine Presence in Spain and Western Europe 1500–1960: Visions, Religious Images and Photographs (Budapest, 2012), pp. 5–44, which uses a partisan account of an unsuccessful rain miracle published in an anti-clerical newspaper before the Spanish Civil War to examine the tradition of miraculous visitations.  8 John Offer and Richard Colt Hoare, The History of Modern Wiltshire: Hundred of Branch and Dole (London, 1825), pp. 159–63.  9 Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, p. 69. Offer and Hoare, Modern Wiltshire is also used by F. A. Carrington, ‘Facts and Observations as to the Ancient State of Marlborough’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine 7 (1860), 1–44 (pp. 6–7 n. 2); Ingram, Memorials, pp. 47–9 (erratically paginated); and the unpublished Historical Notes relating to St Clement’s and St Paul’s Churches, compiled by W. E. and R. H. Cossor (1931), pp. 16–18, kept at Salisbury Library (FIS.724). 10 Andrew Brown, Church and Society in England, 1000–1500 (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 160. The hermit does not appear in Brown’s Popular Piety in Late Medieval England: The Diocese of Salisbury 1250–1550 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 206–7. 11 E. A. Jones, ‘Langland and Hermits’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 11 (1997), 67–86 (p. 81).

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studies have managed. The examination of further contextual material questions the accepted view, following the mandate’s judgment, that the Fisherton hermit was clearly a fraud; instead, it raises the possibility that the hermit acted out of genuine religious concern, helping a community in a catastrophic period. To understand the Fisherton hermit, study of the geographical and social context is required. Fourteenth-century Salisbury was a burgeoning city, full of transactions both financial and religious. Ownership of the markets by successive bishops meant a vested interest in their success. Being a planned city, this relationship was deliberate.12 The city was marked by commerce: as well as the wide variety of produce and trades recorded in the street names there were also tradesmen, remembered because of their prominent houses.13 In addition to regional trade, access to the ports of Bristol and Southampton placed Salisbury in the midst of the international business of exporting wool and importing continental luxuries.14 As a consequence, the city possessed one of the highest tax assessments outside of London.15 Besides trade, broad swathes of society were also attracted to Salisbury for religious purposes. The cathedral, which boasted a cult of the Virgin Mary and housed the tomb of the popular Bishop Osmund, was also associated with Edmund of Abingdon, treasurer of the cathedral, who was canonised soon after his death in 1240 and commemorated in the name of the nearby College of St Edmund.16 Other relics held in the cathedral relating to St David, St Samson of Dol and St Petroc may also have attracted regional visitors.17 The cathedral was VCH Wiltshire, vi, pp. 138–41; John Chandler, Endless Street: A History of Salisbury and its People (Salisbury, 1983), pp. 20–30. 13 Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, Ancient and Historical Monuments in the City of Salisbury (London, 1977), pp. xxv–lxiv; also accessible in a 1980 edition and in a version at British History Online, www.british-history.ac.uk/rchme/salisbury. 14 John Hare, A Prospering Society: Wiltshire in the Later Middle Ages (Hatfield, 2011), pp. 150–9 (particularly pp. 152–3). 15 The Wiltshire Tax List of 1332, ed. D. A. Crowley (Trowbridge, 1989), p. 3, notes the total for the whole of the city of Salisbury was £74 6s 1 1/2d. Robin E. Glasscock, The Lay Subsidy of 1334, (London, 1975), p. 333 records Salisbury’s tax quota was £75 2d. 16 Nigel J. Morgan, ‘Marian Liturgy in Salisbury Cathedral’, in The Medieval English Cathedral: Papers in Honour of Pamela Tudor-Craig, ed. Janet Backhouse (Donington, 2003), pp. 89–111; Tim Tatton-Brown, ‘The Burial Places of St Osmund’, Spire: Annual Report of the Friends of Salisbury Cathedral 69 (1999), 19–25; A. R. Malden, The Canonization of Saint Osmund (Salisbury, 1901). 17 For lists of the relics held at Salisbury, see Christopher Wordsworth, Ceremonies and Processions of the Cathedral Church of Salisbury (Cambridge, 1901), pp. 33–41. The small amount of information about these minor cults has been contextualised in Karen Jankulak, The Medieval Cult of St Petroc, (Woodbridge, 2000), 150–1; and F. G. Cowley, ‘The Relics of St David: The Historical Evidence’, in St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation, ed. J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 274–95. 12

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nominated as the destination of penitential pilgrimages ordered by authorities from the continent empowered to impose penance.18 The financial development of Salisbury, allied to its religious significance, attracted the mendicant orders. The Franciscans and the Dominicans preached in the city and collected alms.19 Like medieval Norfolk, marked by its wool and cloth trade and its anchorites, Salisbury bustled with trade and religious activity. Since the two spheres could easily – and frequently did – overlap, concern could arise if money was seen to be a more important motivating factor than religion. The Fisherton hermit worked within this flurry of activity, and is likely to have taken advantage of the  propensity for rivalries to exist between established churches and monasteries and the popular mendicant orders. The actions of the Fisherton hermit were greatly aided by the location. The village of Fisherton was able to take advantage of its proximity to Salisbury, but the arrangement of ecclesiastical buildings in relation to the village meant checks on the local hermit may have been overlooked. Though erroneously called a suburb of Salisbury by several scholars, Fisherton was physically divided from the city by the River Avon.20 To profit from the connecting roads that linked the important trade towns of Wilton and Devizes to Salisbury via Fisherton Bridge, the village and its shops were situated along the route.21 The probable location for the chapel where the Fisherton hermit operated was to the north-east of Fisherton Street,22 a

Étienne van Cauwenbergh, Les pèlerinages expiatoires et judiciaires dans le droit communal de la Belgique au moyenâge (Louvain, 1922), pp. 222–3, prints a 1338 penitential tariff of Oudenaarde featuring Salisbury (in which the pilgrimage could be commuted by payment), and records people sentenced to travel to Salisbury from Ghent, Aalst, Oudenaard and Dendermonde (p. 142). 19 VCH Wiltshire, iii, pp. 329–30. The connection between religious houses and a town’s economy is examined in Jacques Le Goff, ‘Apostolat mendiant et fait urbain dans le France médiévale: L’implantation des ordres mendiants. Programme-questionnaire pour une enquête’, Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 21 (1968), 335–52. 20 The former village is now officially part of the city. 21 VCH Wiltshire, vi, p. 180. The modern roads are the A36 and A360. To illustrate economic size, seven Salisbury citizens individually paid more than the entire village contribution of 25 shillings in the 1332 tax list; Crowley, Wiltshire Tax List, p. 84; in 1334, Fisherton’s quota was £1 5s; Glasscock, Lay Subsidy, p. 342. 22 Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, p. 69, states the later hermit as being of St Anne’s chapel. VCH Wiltshire, vi, p. 192, presumes this chapel formed no part of St Clement’s. Assuming the 1352 hermit used the same chapel, it seems probable it was located in St Anne’s Stile. The 1790 inclosure award for Fisherton (WSA EA 53) states this field was also known as Littlefields. George Oakley Lucas’s 1833 map of Salisbury (WSA G23/1/165PC) shows the likely location under this later name. Possible confusion may be present: the Dominican friary had an altar to St Anne and an ‘Ankeres Garden’ (C. F. R. Palmer, ‘The Black Friars of Wiltshire’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine 18 (1879), 18

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site that would have been readily accessible to the villagers and to travellers. This location would have received little attention from the other religious establishments in Fisherton, which, despite proximity, had their own concerns. The village church of St Clements, associated with those working in the fish trade, was next to an earlier river crossing some distance away from the roads, the bridge, and the hermit’s likely chapel.23 The Dominican friary, which had relocated to Fisherton in 1281 to take advantage of the growth of Salisbury, was located near the bridge. To supplement material gifts received from wealthy patrons, the friary erected a preaching cross to attract passing audiences, which it was hoped would make monetary donations.24 With each of the different religious establishments concerned with their own local focus, the Fisherton hermit is likely to have attracted locals and passing visitors but with little attention from the other communities. Life on the periphery of a larger community often meant that rules and restrictions could be ignored without attracting due notice. A comparable figure to the Fisherton hermit is Thomas de Byreford, who, in 1311, in St Olave at Cripplegate on the border of the City of London, was chastised in a mandate for claiming that his visitors would receive fifty days of indulgence.25 The Fisherton hermit has been interpreted as a similarly fraudulent figure: operating as a hermit in sight of the cathedral spire, performing actions contrary to the rulings of the church. In such cases, the workings of the church require scrutiny. The severe tone of the mandate,

162–76, p. 167 and p. 175 respectively), and Anne Stiles was a later Fisherton resident involved in a witchcraft trial. 23 Offer and Hoare, Modern Wiltshire, p. 160 records St Clement’s was considered the oldest in the diocese. Except for the graveyard, the church was demolished in 1852. A late Norman font suggested an earlier date than the church fabric dated to the thirteenth century. Barbara E. Crawford, The Churches Dedicated to St Clement in Medieval England: A Hagio-Geography of the Seafarer’s Saint in 11th Century North Europe (St Petersburg, 2008), pp. 174–7, suggested an even earlier date owing to the location (where the conjoined Nadder and Wylie rivers join the Avon) and the Anglo-Danish association of the saint with fishing communities. 24 VCH Wiltshire, iii, pp. 331–3; Palmer, ‘Black Friars of Wiltshire’. During the Reformation, the preaching cross was moved to Dinton: see Steve Hobbs, ‘Dinton in the Sixteenth Century’, Sarum Chronicle 1 (2001), 53–6 (p. 55). For the other friaries and town crosses, see Christian Frost, Time, Space, and Order: The Making of Medieval Salisbury (Oxford and Bern, 2009), pp. 216–18. On mendicant friaries and urban communities, see Jacques Le Goff, ‘Ordres mendiants et urbanisation dans la France médiévale’, Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 25 (1970), 924–46. 25 ‘Contra Hermitam de Crepulgate’, in Registrum Radulphi Baldock, Gilberti Segrave, Ricardi Newport, et Stephani Gravesend, episcoporum Londoniensium AD MCCCIV– MCCCXXXVIII, ed. R. C. Fowler (London, 1911), pp. 141–2. For readings, see Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, pp. 66–7, and R. N. Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (New York, 2007), p. 199.

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the range of its intended recipients, the fact that such a text had to be issued in a location so close to the cathedral, as well as to someone operating in a place that should easily have come under the oversight of diocese and city authorities all suggest that the ecclesiastical hierarchy failed in checking that eremitic status was not being abused. This may have been because the relevant authorities were absent. The end of the mandate reveals that the bishop was working in comfort at his manor, overlooking his deer park, in the village of Potterne (‘Datum apud manerium nostrum de Poterne’), over twenty miles away from the cathedral on the other side of Salisbury Plain.26 His estate had extensive grounds, and a large labour force. The cleric at St Clement’s may also have been an unfamiliar figure in Fisherton: earlier entries in the bishop’s register show repeated dispensations permitting study leave for the incumbent.27 If that cleric were present, given that annual visitations were held at his church,28 his attention may have been on matters other than the checking of hermits. A more significant and widespread event likely to have influenced the Fisherton  hermit’s behaviour was the Black Death. A major outbreak had occurred in England a few years before in 1348–49, devastating the population, and it remained a disturbing presence (with another major outbreak occurring in 1361–62). The clergy lost significant numbers in the epidemic, the accepted figure being forty per cent mortality rates, in part owing to their required presence to assist the dying.29 The bishop of Bath and Wells proposed a short-term solution by asking the clergy of his diocese to make it known that people already afflicted with the disease should make a confession of their sins, if an ordained priest were not available, ‘to any lay person, even to a woman if a man is not

For the Potterne estate, see Naomi Payne, ‘The Medieval Residences of the Bishops of Bath and Wells, and Salisbury’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Bristol, 2003), pp. 165–72. 27 Thomas Phillipps, Institutiones clericorum in comitatu Wiltoniæ ([Middle Hill], 1825) has Henry Gille as the incumbent in 1335 (p. 31) and 1382 (p. 66). WSA D1/2/3 v. 2 contains two dispensations for absences (ff. 33, 49r). On f. 36, a Richard Gille (a probable slip) is given leave to study theology and canon law. 28 Offer and Hoare, Modern Wiltshire, p. 160. 29 The forty per cent figure appears in Christopher Harper-Bill, ‘The English Church and  English Religion after the Black Death’, in The Black Death in England, ed. W. M. Ormrod and P. G. Lindley (Stamford, 1996), pp. 79–123 (p. 79). For the ­epidemic and Salisbury cathedral, see David Lepine, A Brotherhood of Canons Serving God: English Secular Cathedrals in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 97–8, and Hemingby’s Register, ed. Helena M. Chew (Devizes, 1963), p. 37. Scholarship has raised the general mortality rate from under a quarter in Josiah Cox Russell, British Medieval Population (Albuquerque, NM, 1948), p. 216, to over sixty per cent in Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death 1346–1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge, 2004), p. 383. 26

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available’.30 The plague however did not trigger a crisis in faith, as vacant posts for ordained ministers (particularly priests) were filled with new recruits. Wiltshire had a rush of ordinations.31 In other dioceses, positions were filled with a relaxing of the rules: bishops ordained men who would typically be regarded as too young (twenty, not twenty-five years old), or illegitimate in deed (having been married) or birth, or on days not prescribed by canon law. Since many of the vacant positions included remote parishes with little financial reward, it seems unlikely that this was regarded as a profitable route; rather, the rush into ordination seems to be motivated by spiritual convictions (with the possibility that some, those marked illegitimate for instance, were proving their worth by assisting in times of struggle).32 Though St Clement’s does not appear to have been affected by the plague, with the incumbent priest remaining the same,33 it might be significant that The History of Modern Wiltshire notes a dispensation granted by Bishop Wyvil in 1348 to the ‘Hermit of Fisherton’ to celebrate divine worship in the chapel.34 The text of the dispensation is currently not known, leaving it uncertain as to whether the mentioned hermit was a replacement for a victim of the plague, or whether the new responsibilities reflected difficulties and concerns among the laity in response to the epidemic. With the chaos resulting from the Black Death, and the resulting rush to replenish ecclesiastical positions and parishes with clergymen, a man unsuitable for the eremitic life, or of one who went beyond the prescribed limits of the role (if, that is, the 1348 hermit is the same person as the 1352 one) would probably have been a minor concern, given the circumstances. The mandate is a record of the official response regarding the hermit. Bishop Wyvil had a reputation for stressing his authority, defending the privileges of his position, and asserting the rights and possessions of his cathedral.35 Since it was his responsibility to authorise secular priests and the laity to become hermits,36 The Black Death, ed. and trans. Rosemary Horrox (Manchester, 1994), p. 272. Francis Aidan Gasquet, The Black Death of 1348 and 1349 (London, 1908) records seventy-three for 1348 and 103 for 1349 (p. 189); the average for the three years before and after the outbreak was twenty-six. 32 The rule-bending of the archbishops of York, Armagh and Norwich, and the near-­ herding of Welshmen to be ordained by the bishop of Hereford, is described in HarperBill, ‘English Church and English Religion’, p. 87, who discusses motivations on p. 89. 33 See note 27 above. 34 Offer and Hoare, Modern Wiltshire, p. 163. The original text does not appear to be present in WSA D1/2/3. 35 VCH Wiltshire, vi, p. 93 notes Wyvil was the first bishop to use ‘Sarum’ on his seal (1330) and signet ring (1344). With the absence of a full-length biography, see the sketches in Hemingby’s Register, pp. 256–9, Oxford DNB, and Stephen Hyde Cassan, Lives and Memoirs of the Bishops of Sherborne and Salisbury (Salisbury, 1824), pp. 216–25. 36 Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, pp. 85–90. 30 31

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abuses of the eremitic life necessarily abused his dispensation; and, since he was residing far from Salisbury and the Fisherton hermit had operated at the heart of his diocese, his wrath is understandable. The complaint, however, is formulated in a curious manner. Jones has charted how official accusations against hermits in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries move away from charges of heresy to concerns about income.37 As an example, in 1334, a hermit in St David’s church in la Hamme in Totnes, south Devon (a man labelled by future scholars as peculiar and insane), was accused of disturbing the neighbourhood by preaching heresies and criticising the bishop.38 In contrast, in 1403, a man in the chapel at the hospital of St Anthony of Viennois in York (about whom scholars disagree as to whether he was an imposter or errant hermit)39 was accused of using, without licence, papal letters to appropriate alms intended for the saint.40 Concerns about incorrect doctrines being preached seem, therefore, to have been replaced by indictments against abuses of charitable (eleemosynary) status. The Fisherton hermit receives both accusations: being like Jeroboam in his leading of the people astray into religious error, and gaining money by deception. Whether this is reflective of the man himself, or an indication of contemporary ecclesiastical concerns (or merely conventional writing styles),41 is difficult to ascertain. The mandate attributes to the hermit two apparently contradictory reasons for his actions. Given the breadth of religious activity the hermit was accused of performing, seemingly in a single location over a length of time, it is difficult to see the Fisherton hermit as the living equivalent of the literary stereotype of the itinerant ‘false’ hermit. This type of deceiver, most famously presented in Piers Plowman, is typically presented as taking on the garb of a hermit to cover idleness.42 Jones notes that this resembles the concept of the undeserving poor rather Jones, ‘Langland and Hermits’, pp. 81–2. Register of John de Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter (A.D. 1327–1369), with some account of the episcopate of James de Berkeley (A.D. 1327) ed. F. C. Hingeston-Randolph (London, 1894–9), vol. 2, pp. 751-2 (supposition of insanity, vol. 3, p. xl); Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, p. 89. 39 The man is labelled a pretend hermit in Lilian G. Ping, ‘How Funds for “Good Causes” were Raised in the Middle Ages’, Hibbert Journal 34 (1935–6), 400–17 (p. 409), and false in Rose Graham, ‘The Order of St Antoine de Viennois and its English Commandery, St Anthony’s, Threadneedle Street’, Archaeological Journal 84 (1927), 341–406 (pp. 359–60) (which views his alms collecting as part of a territorial dispute). 40 Calendar of Papal Registers Relating to Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 5, 1398–1404, ed. W. H. Bliss and J. A. Twemlow (London, 1904), p. 549. 41 A. K. McHardy, ‘Some Reflections on Edward III’s Use of Propaganda’, in The Age of Edward III, ed. J. S. Bothwell (York, 2001), pp. 171–92 (p. 176) notes the indebtedness of earlier mandates of Wyvil to papal bulls recorded in the register of his predecessor Roger Martival. 42 Piers Plowman: The B Version, ed. George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson (Berkeley, CA, 37 38

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than the heretical.43 However, potentially heretical hermits could also assume the garb without official documentation. Clothes were the clearest indicator of a hermit’s position. Displaying a lack of conspicuous consumption, a hermit’s clothing differed from that of, say, a beggar, by being loaded with meaning: it was a uniform-like garment supposedly authorised by ecclesiastical authorities. The ceremony featured the dress of the earthly world being ritually removed, and the naked male – for being a solitary hermit, free to move about, appears to have been a male preserve – would don the costume of a hermit provided by the bishop. Notably, one of the major hermits of the period, Richard Rolle, did not receive official licence for becoming a hermit. Rather, with his sister’s help, he created the required costume from one of her robes, and, with this garb and suitable behaviour, won support from patrons who were convinced of his piety, and was accepted as a holy figure.44 This suggests that the actions of the Fisherton hermit, if he acted from his own motivation, may not have been the singular incident that it appears. Though official acceptance was clearly documented, the difference between Rolle and the Fisherton hermit may have been merely related to the relative wealth of their patrons. The financial condemnation of the Fisherton hermit appearing in the mandate is similarly problematic. There were far easier ways of accumulating wealth in the years following the Black Death. Given the higher demand for workers following widespread death, even honest labour could be financially rewarding. A little bit of guile, such as receiving higher wages than legally permissible, was a frequent occurrence in Wiltshire.45 In a list of entrepreneurial routes to easy money, assuming the role of a hermit would not seemingly rank that high. Therefore, though the location and the context can illuminate how the position of hermit could be open to abuse, the rationale and the motivation is less clear. An overlooked but important feature of the mandate is the community that the Fisherton hermit was said to have both led astray and swindled. As noted earlier, Fisherton, the small village situated on busy trade routes, would have meant the hermit was likely to have had dealings with both locals and passers-by. The mandate describes those deceived by the hermit as simple (‘simplices decipiat’) 1988), p. 228 (lines 20–30) and p. 230 (lines 53–7) presents both the honest and dishonest wearers of the garb. 43 Jones, ‘Langland and Hermits’, p. 82. 44 Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 40–4. 45 For context, see L. R. Poos, ‘The Social Context of the Statute of Labourers Enforcement’, Law and History Review 1 (1983), 27–52; for Wiltshire, E. M. Thompson, ‘Offenders against the Statute of Labourers in Wiltshire, A. D. 1349’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine 33 (1904), 384–409.

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suggesting that they were the laity. The view that the hermit was a troublemaker and his flock victims is perhaps too simple an interpretation of the situation. If the hermit was motivated by monetary or heretical beliefs, there are questions to be addressed concerning the level of religious belief in those he was regarded as duping. A man successfully posing as a hermit near a major Christian centre suggests his victims knew little about correct religious practices. However, their focus, like that of the hermit, may also have been monetary: the laity may have found it easier to meet and deal with a peripheral hermit than an urban recluse at the centre, and the hermit may have been less likely to ask questions concerning the alms. Likewise, the audience may have been less informed than urban dwellers and, perhaps, more gullible.46 The fourteenth century saw both the development of devout and literate laity (both male and female) more engaged in religious life, and a rise in the sale of indulgences. The laity was therefore an opportunity and a problem for the church. The support of holy men was an act of personal piety. Swayed by too-good-to-be-true offers of indulgences, members of the laity may have been moved towards people such as Thomas de Byreford and the Fisherton hermit (accused in the mandate of such offers), rather than towards more mainstream figures (and unique cases like Richard Rolle) in the patronising of ­unofficial hermits. The relationship between the Fisherton hermit and his community should not be assumed to be one of easy manipulation. In entrepreneurial fashion, like Chaucer’s and Langland’s pardoners,47 he may have provided what was wanted, undercutting the ecclesiastical rates. The context therefore tempers a purely cynical reading. In times of catastrophe, lay religiosity increases in response to the drastic change in situation: apocalyptic thought can provide comfort – with Sharon Farmer, ‘The Beggar’s Body: Intersections of Gender and Social Status in High Medieval Paris’, in Monks and Nuns, Saints and Outcasts: Religion in Medieval Society, ed. Sharon Farmer and Barbara H. Rosenwein (New York, 2000), pp. 153–71 (p. 161n. 27), concerned with mid-thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century discussion of deceitful false beggars, includes Humbert of Romans’ view that village women were prone to give goods to vagabonds and fake alms collectors. This assertion may indicate unfamiliarity with recognising ‘official’ solitaries. 47 The Pardoner’s description of the ‘lewed peple’ in his prologue reveals his relationship to his customers, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D Benson. (Oxford, 2008), p. 195, lines 392 and 437. The prologue of Piers Plowman features a condemnatory passage in which ‘Ther preched a pardoner as he a preest were; / Brouȝte forþ a bulle wiþ Bisshopes seles, / And seide þat hymself myȝte assoillen hem alle / Of falshede of fastynge [and] of Auowes ybroken. / Lewed men leued [hym] wel and liked hi[s speche]; / Comen vp knelynge to kissen hi[s] bull[e]. / He bonched hem with his breuet and blered hire eiȝen / And rauȝte with his Rageman rynges and broches. / Thus [ye] gyuen [youre] gold glotons to [helpe] / And leneþ it Losels [þat] leccherie haunten’, pp. 231 (lines 68–77). 46

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manic zeal providing believers with a sense of order among the chaos.48 The surge of religious feeling can result in changes in religious behaviour: in the face of apocalyptic concerns, small individual activities such as donations can become grandiose communal schemes.49 New cults, specifically relating to the calamity, can suddenly emerge and take hold and just as quickly disappear when no longer required.50 When the church is unable to provide assistance, the laity will step in without official authorisation to imitate its workings51 (the construction of a reproduction of a church in Russia being an extreme example of a response to a plague).52 Such behaviour should be regarded as acts of personal devotion. Angered by a sluggish response by established elites, the laity can turn to charismatic figures – be they frauds, marginal figures or flagellants – who, conscious of the hold exercised by religious rites, mimic them to varying degrees of comprehension to the satisfaction of their seduced followers. In such times, roles and responsibilities are blurred. The hermit may have fulfilled the function of a holy man for the community, providing it with what it wanted rather than what was officially allowed. Such a ‘sympathetic’ reading of the mandate, however, does not alter the fact that the authorities at least regarded the hermit, or pseudo-hermit, as a greedy schismatic. Bishop Wyvil’s mandate articulates clearly the official view towards the Fisherton hermit: condemnation. While the strength of the denunciation may mislead the modern reader into a romantic sympathy for someone who may have Robert E. Lerner, ‘The Black Death and Western European Eschatological Mentalities’, American Historical Review 86 (1981), 533–52. 49 Samuel K. Cohn, The Cult of Remembrance and the Black Death: Six Renaissance Cities in Central Italy (Baltimore, MD, 1992) plots the change from small disperse donations to major projects. For the use of processions in times of crisis, see Horrox, Black Death, pp. 111–17, and Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England, pp. 233–4. 50 For the surge of pilgrims to the relics of St Sebastian in Soissons, see Horrox, Black Death, p. 54. 51 Early examples of solitaries dealing with folk healing and occult practices were discussed by Tom Licence in his paper ‘Anchorites as Occult Practitioners in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, delivered at Medieval Anchorites in their Communities conference, 24 April 2013, Gregynog. 52 In response to later plagues in Russia, ‘more often than not, [coming] from a secular rather than an ecclesiastical quarter’ wooden churches were constructed as votive offerings, with local officials urging townsmen to take part irrespective of the views of the ecclesiastical elite; see Russell Zguta, ‘The One-Day Votive Church: A Religious Response to the Black Death in Early Russia’, Slavic Review 40 (1981), 423–32. The distinction being this type of construction is proactive rather than commemorative (for a contemporary version of the latter, see Emilia Jamroziak, ‘St Mary Graces: A Cistercian House in Late Medieval London’, in The Use and Abuse of Sacred Places in Late Medieval Towns, ed. Paul Trio and Marjan de Smet (Leuven, 2006), pp. 153–64). 48

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been a predatory charlatan,53 the text itself shows the problems inherent in the role of a hermit: issues regarding authority, position and function. By placing the incident in its geographical and historical context, it is possible to see far more clearly the tensions and ambiguities that the relationship between the hermit, his community and the church hierarchy generated. The incident with the Fisherton hermit shows that solitaries, for all their assumed rejection of worldly affairs, were seemingly judged by one group for their qualifications, and by another for their appearances. Given the later petition of a subsequent solitary at Fisherton, the hermit John, to become enclosed at the end of a chapel as an anchorite, and the measured response of the Salisbury ecclesiastical authorities to investigate whether there was any problem with this request, the changing religious desire of the solitary in the community may also reflect the pragmatic concerns of the religious authorities.54 Whether the ‘Jeroboam’ served Fisherton for good or bad, the historical and geographical contexts that allowed such condemnable actions to take place could easily have been replicated in other locations. With such a reading, the highly curious, individual incident recorded in Wyvil’s register may not be merely a unique survival, but an indication of a particular type of solitary: the highly problematic.

Appendix: Transcription of WSA D1/2/3 v. 1 f.210 In the following transcription of the sole known copy of Bishop Wyvil’s mandate, all scribal abbreviations have been expanded and italicised, line breaks are indicated by a stroke (/), and modern capitalisation (F for ff, etc.) and punctuation have been followed. The reading of some words, especially where there is abbreviation, is not always clear; I have attempted to give a reading that makes sense and have provided possible alternative readings and problems in the footnotes. The aim is to provide an available, and readable, version of the source of the Fisherton

The warning against sentimentality is neatly expressed in Carol Lansing, ‘Popular Belief and Heresy’, in A Companion to the Medieval World, ed. Carol Lansing and Edward D. English (Chichester, 2009), pp. 276–92 (pp. 287–8), following an account of the problematic career of the religious fraud and charlatan Giovanni di Jacobo Cherucci, ‘Brother John the Hermit and Friend of God’ (pp. 276–7), burnt to death by the commune of Florence in June 1345. 54 Later attempts to regulate clerical and lay behaviour in the parishes by the bishops and deans of Salisbury are examined in James Plumtree, ‘Sex, Lies, and Visitations: Secrets and Discovery in the Registers of John Waltham and John Chandler’, Proceedings of the 2013 FIDEM Porto Congress, Textes et Études du Moyen Âge (forthcoming). 53

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event mentioned in Rotha Mary Clay’s The Hermits and Anchorites of England. It is hoped that someone will continue to transcribe the entire manuscript, and supersede this edition of the text.55 mandatum contra heremitam de Fyshertone Robertus permissione diuina Saresbiriensis Episcopus dilectis filiis ecclesie nostre decani locum tenenti et Officio eiusdem / necnon archodiacono Sarum vel eius Officio et preposito domus sancti Edmundi ciuitatis56 nostre Sarum salutem, gratiam et benedictionem. Fama / publica referente et notorietate facti testante ad nostrum, quod dolenter referimus, peruenit auditum, quod quidam / laicus sub pallio simulate religionis habitum gestans heremitam se confingens quandam capellam infra parochiam / de Fischertone iuxta Sarum in loco ab antiquo turpibus feodis ac inhonestis57 aliis in actibus mancipato absque con/sensu seu auctorite nostra aut alterius cuiuscumque potestatem habentis in hac parte fecit erigi de nouo in ecclesie vniver/salis vituperium nostreque sponse Sarum ac singularum nostre civitatis etiamque parochialium preiudicium non modicum et gra/vamen altare ac ymagines, modo Jeroboam, qui peccare fecit Israel,58 ac reliquias nullatenus approbatas con/fingens vt simplices decipiat et aurum ac argentum subtili vel fallaci potius ingenio extorqueat ab eisdem / diabolica fraude, contra sacrorum canonum instituta constituit adorandas et preposuit in eadem, et hiis excessibus / detestabilibus non contentus in singulis plateis ciuitatis nostre predicte ac villa de Fischertone et locis vicinis / aliis per precones et nuntios ad publicandum mortes decedentium et intergenarorum59 et anniversarorum diebus memorias / defunctorum in ciuitate nostra deputatas pro orationibus infundendis, pro eisdem defunctis campanas pulsantes, / quas gestant in manibus suis sic deputati more solito generales procurantur et fieri fecit proclamationes sua/dendo, exhortando, et palam predicando, quod omnes et singuli, qui ad dictam capellam accederent seu accedere / vellent, in futurum causa missam audiendi, ibidem orandi vel offerendi quinque annorum et amplius indulgentiam et re/missionem suorum consequerentur peccatorum, expresse contra canonicas sanctiones, quosdam etiam questores motu / proprio pro questu miserabili bonorum et rerum obtinendo sibique applicando disposuit et ordinauit qui discurrentes / per nostram ciuitatem et diocesem abusiones non nullas in suis questubus et petitionibus falsas I am grateful among others for the advice and suggestions of the editors, Dániel Bácsatyai, Steven Hobbs, Pamela King, Nicolas Jacobs, Bella Millett and Bence Péterfi; all issues of judgment and remaining errors are my own. 56 This word is capitalised in the MS. 57 Appears as ‘in honestis’ in MS. 58 This word is not capitalised in the MS. 59 Meaning of this word not clear. 55

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mentiendo indulgentias / exponunt populo pariter et allegant infinitas animas subditorum nostrorum decipiendo et instigante humani generis / inimico in domum protrahunt et in profundum malorum. Preterea occasione permissorum nonnulli de ciuitate / nostra et maxime mulieres cuiuscumque conditionis vere Christiane religioni et fidei quam plurimum detrahentes et / maligno spiritum decepte ad dictam cappellam prophanam singulis septimanis et precipue diebus veneris cater/uatim peregrinantes confluunt ibidem orando missas audiendo et oblationes offerunt spretis et dimissis / ecclesiis Cathedralis et parochialibus suis supradictis et dictum locum prophanum et reliquias sicvt premittetur confictas / in eodem plusquam ecclesiam suam matricem adorare deuotius non formidant. Licet ecclesia militans veteris / testamenti patriarchas prophetas vel quoscumque baptismate non renatos de more non habeat specialiter adorare / in animarum suaum deceptionem et periculum graue et perniciosum exemplum aliorum. Non attendentes quod in ecclesiis / deo dedicatis et rite per Episcopos consecratis que domus dei sunt et non in aliis fieri debeant missarum solempnia / et oblationes diuino cultui dedicate que in aliis quam in ecclesiis episcopali ministerio consecratis tam de nouo quam de veteri / testamento expresse fieri prohibentur. Nos itaque subditorum nostrorum animarum saluti et ecclesie sponse nostre ac ceterarum / parochialium ecclesiarum predictarum preiudicio ex nostra pastorali60 officii debito prospicere et tot ac tantas nepha/rias presumptiones errores et pericula funditus extirpare volentes vt tenemur ne deinceps committant[?]61 quod / absit aut fiant sicut fieri inceperunt dictam capellam si talis dici debeat ex premissis causis et aliis / legitimis nos monentibus interdiximus et suspendimus interdictam et suspensam denuntiamus. Inhibentes districte in / virtute sanctis obedientie et sub pena excommunicationis maioris omnibus subditis et parochianis nostris ne62 ad dictum locum prophanum63 / et infectum[?] causa peregrinationis venerationis orationis oblationis aut pro dictis celebrandis vel audiendis ibidem sicut hactenus / fecerunt accedant quouismodo et si qui forsan contrarium acceptare presumpserint vltrix procedet contra eos dura / sinam que sibi delinquentes adeo grauiter puniet quod alios a consimili presumptione compescet. Vobis igitur contra / et diuisim et vnicuique per se conmitimus et mandamus quatenus in ecclesia nostra ac ceteris ecclesiis ciuitatis nostre Fischertone / et aliis vicinis diebus solempnibus dominicis et aliis festiuis omnia et singula premissa intra missarum solempnia / cum maior populi aderit multitudo publicetur et faciatur debite publicari et inhiberi secundum formam superius / annotatam. Certificantes nos citra festum 62 63 60 61

The scribal hand and abbreviation gives the impression of ‘pastorabus’. Unclear abbreviated word, with superscript t. Prior to this word is a symbol appearing like a bracket. Possible scribal error for ‘profanum’.

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sancti Michaelis quid feceritis in premissis et de nominibus illorum si qui / contra premissa venire presumpserint per litteras vostras patentes harum seriem continentibus. Valete. Datum apud / manerium nostrum de Poterne iiijto kalendas augusti anno domini millesimo ccc l ijto et consecrationis nostre anno xxiijo.

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Chapter 9

Was Julian’s Nightmare a Māre? Julian of Norwich and the Vernacular Community of Storytellers GODELINDE GERTRUDE PERK

T

he scene would not be amiss in a horror film: a young woman is shown sleeping peacefully, when suddenly a monstrous creature appears – half-human, half-animal, with an emaciated face and shaggy hair – that grabs the woman by the throat with his claws. Baring his many teeth at her with a mocking grin, he furiously tries to strangle her. Instead of a film scene, however, this nightmare is one of the visionary experiences of Julian of Norwich (c. 1343–c. 1416), found in her two writings, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman – written in the middle of the 1380s – and A Revelation of Love, written between the 1390s and 1416.1 Though describing the same scene, the two accounts also differ in a striking way: in the later A Revelation Julian expands her description, adding more vivid details, a trend discernible in the entire work.2 The earlier account, in A Vision, is brief and lacking in detail, or in the words of Liz Herbert McAvoy ‘muted and almost dismissive’; later, however, in A Revelation Julian creates a horrifying scene with highly specific details: the monster and his threatening actions are described by Julian in ‘some of her most vivid and concrete language’.3 At first glance, this expanding of a frightening experience in a later text may All quotations are 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 (University Park, PA, 2006), I will refer to these two writings as A Revelation and A Vision, respectively.  2 Elizabeth Robertson, ‘Julian of Norwich’s “Modernist” Style and the Creation of Audience’, in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 139–53 (p. 145); see also Barry Windeatt, ‘Julian of Norwich’, in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 68–79 (p. 67 and p. 73).  3 Jay Ruud, ‘“I Wolde for Thy Loue Dye”: Julian, Romance Discourse, and the Masculine’, in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York NY, 1998), pp. 183–206 (p. 194).  1

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appear counterintuitive: not only is it unusual that an author would describe her younger self’s nightmare in greater detail, but other negative moments, such as a vision of three ‘nothings’, have been removed in A Revelation. However, this scene in A Revelation shows Julian’s ability as a narrator to turn a scene suggesting lack of agency into one that reveals her mastery of storytelling and her control over her narrative. I suggest that already in A Vision, but even more so in A Revelation, these scenes evoke folklore narratives in which a supernatural creature tries to strangle a sleeper. A Vision and A Revelation thus illustrate how, in medieval religious culture, ‘folklore’ (or ‘unofficial’ belief) and ‘official’ belief formed part of a spectrum of beliefs, as Carl Watkins suggests: ‘[W]e need to think of medieval religious culture as a commingling of unofficial and official belief that varies over space and time – forming not a series of cultural compartments, but a spectrum. This spectrum comprehends, albeit at the opposite ends, the beliefs of peasant and prelate alike.’4 Watkins does distinguish two traditions in medieval culture, namely ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ beliefs, but emphasises that ‘all members of medieval society participated to a greater or lesser degree in both of them’.5 I argue that the increased echoes of a folklore narrative in A Revelation suggest a similar commingling, which blurs the distinction between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ beliefs. This commingling not only reflects how the anchorhold blurs the boundaries between sacred and secular space;6 these echoes also show Julian presenting herself as a member of a vernacular community of storytellers and contributing an original narrative to this community by means of her text. Additionally, these evocations reveal the increase in her skill as a storyteller, writer and editor in the years between the writing of A Vision and A Revelation, and the widening of the implied audience from those living contemplatively to all believers. In A Revelation, many frightening details have been added to the brief account from A Vision. My italicisation of the differences reveals how extensive these changes are: And I ley stille tille night, trusting in his mercy, and than I began to slepe. And ine my slepe, at the beginning, methought the fende set him in my throte, putting forth a visage fulle nere my face like a yonge man, and it was longe and wonder leen. I never saw none such. The coloure was red, like the tilestone whan it is new brent, with blacke spottes therein like freknes, fouler than the

Carl Watkins, ‘“Folklore” and “Popular Religion” in Britain during the Middle Ages’, Folklore 115 (2004), 140–50, p. 147.  5 Watkins, ‘Folklore’, p. 145.  6 Bob Hasenfratz, ‘The Anchorhold as Symbolic Space in Ancrene Wisse’, Philological Quarterly 84 (2005), 1–25 (pp. 12–18).  4

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tilestone. His here was rede as rust, not scored afore, with sidelockes hanging on the thonwonges [temples]. He grinned upon me with a shrewde loke; shewde me whit teth and so mekille [many], methought it the more ugly. Body ne hands had he none shaply, but with his pawes he helde me in the throte, and woulde have strangled me, but he might not. This ugly shewing was made sleping, and so was none other. And in all this time I trusted to be saved and kepte by the mercy of God. And oure curtesse lorde gave me grace to wake, and unnethes had I my life. The persons that were with me beheld me and wet my temples, and my harte beganne to comfort.7

In this description, which is nearly three times as long as the one in A Vision, the ‘fende’ is described in more detail, while his attempt at strangling is described more vividly too: whereas in A Vision the devil only grabs her by the throat, in A Revelation he holds her throat as well. The added details imply that this attempt at strangling Julian lasts long enough for her to observe the fiend’s appearance in detail. Furthermore, in comparison to A Vision, the dream nature of the experience is stressed more in A Revelation; Julian emphasises that this frightening vision (‘this ugly shewing’) differs from the rest of the visions by being the only one experienced while sleeping (‘was made sleeping and so was none other’). Simply put, the account in A Revelation is more nightmarish than the one in A Vision. Several features of both versions of the scene – the strangling, the oneiric nature of the experience, and the presence of a supernatural monster – are strongly reminiscent of contemporary narratives involving a supernatural nocturnal attacker. These allusions can already be discerned in A Vision, but in A Revelation Julian develops them further. Mapping Julian’s account onto the spectrum of official and unofficial belief, the following can be seen: in A Vision Julian treats her nightmare in a muted way, staying mainly within official beliefs; this suggests an audience consisting of those participating mostly in official belief systems. In A Revelation she seems more willing to communicate her extreme fear to the audience: she causes her narrative to be frightening by drawing not only upon official beliefs but also by using a well-known narrative of fear, addressing thereby not only a contemplative or monastic audience but a broad lay audience as well. In other words, Julian uses her nightmare both as a preacher might use a local tale as an exemplum, and as a layperson, devout or not, might tell a scary story to a friend. As a result, A Revelation shows an increased commingling of the two clusters of ideas on the spectrum of official and unofficial belief. Previous scholarly responses to Julian’s frightening experience have focused

A Revelation 67.1–12, p. 333. Italics added.

 7

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on its relation to A Revelation’s theology,8 on the motifs used,9 or on the fiend’s attack as a sexual assault.10 However, I would like to develop our understanding of this episode by contextualising Julian’s accounts within popular beliefs, claiming that she interacts with the lay community in two ways. First of all, Julian’s description in both texts resembles a cluster of contemporary folkloric narratives known to both clergy and laity regarding a demon physically oppressing sleepers, known as an incubus or māre. This supernatural being was thought to attack sleeping people by sitting down on the sleeper’s chest and causing him or her to feel suffocated.11 Sometimes referred to as an incubus, in Middle English literature this creature is most often referred to as the māre,12 in the South-English Legendary, for instance, and in a spell in Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale, instances which I discuss in greater detail below.13 I argue that the similarities between Julian’s account and narratives about the māre suggest that she draws upon stories familiar to both laity and clergy but mainly upon those associated with the lay community, i­mplying an interaction between her and a community of storytellers. Second, by stressing the māre-like traits of her attacker more in her later text, See, for example, David F. Tinsley, ‘Julian’s Diabology’, in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. McEntire, pp. 207–38.  9 See, for example, Ruud, ‘I Wolde for Thy Loue Dye’, p. 198. 10 Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘“Neb . . . Sumdeal Ilich Wummon & Neddre is Behinden”: Reading the Monstrous in the Anchoritic Text’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Exeter Symposium VII: Papers Read at Charney Manor, July 2004, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 51–68 (p. 66). 11 Maaike Van der Lugt, ‘The Incubus in Scholastic Debate. Medicine, Theology and Popular Belief’, in Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler (York, 2001), pp. 175–200 (p. 181). 12 The Middle English Dictionary conflates several of Van der Lugt’s categories, which my discussion adopts; the MED defines ‘incubus’ as a ‘spirit or demon which deludes and terrifies people in dreams, which has intercourse with women in their sleep, and which may drive men mad’ and ‘a nightmare’; Māre is defined as ‘a night goblin; incubus’ and ‘a sorcerer or sorceress’. MED, ‘incubus’ (n), http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/ mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED22443; MED, ‘māre (n.(2))’ http://quod.lib.umich.edu/ cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED26897. Accessed 7 March 2014. 13 Though no sustained study of Chaucer and folk belief appears to have been done in the past decades, several critics and the editors of the Riverside Chaucer give analogues for folk-belief elements found in the Canterbury Tales. David C. Fowler, The Bible in Middle English Literature (Seattle, WA, 1984), p. 131; Douglas Gray, Simple Forms: Essays on Medieval English Popular Literature (Oxford, 2015), p. 37; ‘Explanatory Notes’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd edn (Oxford, 2008), p. 841. The distinction between written narratives and folk beliefs becomes also less clear-cut in the light of the fact that many written narratives would be retold orally to others, or be recycled as sermon exempla; these narratives could therefore easily become folk beliefs.  8

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Julian can be said to be appealing directly to a readership familiar with the wellknown narratives about such creatures attacking sleepers and to an audience that liked fantastic, dramatic tales.14 As Watson and Jenkins observe, in A Revelation one finds more echoes of the register of secular storytelling, 15 for instance, Julian’s use of ‘hap’ and ‘aventure’ in a philosophical meditation.16 These terms often occur in the secular genre of romance but Julian discusses them in the context of God’s seeing all events as good. Furthermore, as Vincent Gillespie and Ena Jenkins have shown, the language of A Revelation incorporates a multitude of vernacular registers in a manner that A Vision does not.17 Similarly, in A Revelation Julian draws more on the register of ‘folk’ belief, but does so narratively rather than linguistically. In its brevity, the account in A Vision is still strongly indebted to a more orthodox cluster of ideas regarding dreams. According to medieval dream theory derived from Augustine (d. 430), Macrobius (early fifth century) and Gregory the Great (d. 604), dreams were thought to be similar in nature to waking visions, yet less authoritative.18 Dreams and waking visions were both considered a form of seeing: Frank Tobin explains that in medieval dream theory, strongly influenced by Augustine, there is no essential difference between dreams, visions and the normal cognitive experience of seeing; the sole difference between these experiences, according to Tobin, ‘lies in what causes them’.19 Demons were thought to cause frightening dreams, and these dreams were considered spiritually harmful deceptions. For instance, Gregory the Great’s six-part analysis of the causes of dreams places dreams on a scale from revelatory and arising out of benevolent motives (of God or angels) to deceptive and arising out of malevolent motives.20 Julian’s experience would be considered an inlusio, a deceptive dream caused by Tony Davenport, Medieval Narrative: An Introduction (Oxford, 2004), p. 59; Joseph Albert Mosher, The Exemplum in the Early Religious and Didactic Literature of England (New York, 1911), p. 16. 15 Watson and Jenkins, ‘Sidenotes’, in Writings, p. 162. 16 A Revelation, 11.6, p. 163. 17 Vincent Gillespie, ‘“[S]he Do the Police in Different Voices”: Pastiche, Ventriloquism and Parody in Julian of Norwich’, in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 192–207 (p. 196-97); Ena Jenkins, ‘Julian’s Revelation of Love: A Web of Metaphor’, in Companion to Julian of Norwich, pp. 181–91. 18 Watson and Jenkins, ‘Sidenotes’, in Writings, p. 332. 19 Frank Tobin, ‘Medieval Thought on Visions and Its Resonance in Mechthild von Magdeburg’s Flowing Light of the Godhead’, in Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 41–53 (p. 47). 20 Gregory the Great, Dialogues, ed. Adalbert de Vogüé, 3 vols (Paris, 1978–1980), vol. 3, Book 4, 50.2, pp. 172–3. See also Steven F. Kruger, Dreaming in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 47–8. 14

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demons; as Steven F. Kruger writes, ‘in Gregory, demonic dreams of “illusion” are, as their name indicates, not just demonic, but deceptive’.21 These deceptions were seen as more than simply delusive; they were also considered a threat to one’s spiritual well-being. According to Gregory, deceiving spirits use dreams to ‘plunge [their victims] into many empty cares’ [‘multis . . . vanitatibus inmergit’].22 This threat was exacerbated by the fact that dreams were thought to belong to the same category of sight as spiritual visions.23 Within the anchoritic context, Ancrene Wisse likewise warns against dreams as delusions from the devil: ‘Na sihðe þet ȝe seoð, ne in swefne ne in waken, ne elle ȝe dweole, for nis his bute his gile.’ [‘You should not regard any vision that you see, whether in a dream or while you are awake, as anything but a delusion, since it is nothing but his trickery.’]24 Similarly, the hymn sung during the nightly service of Compline, ‘Te Lucis Ante Terminum’, asks God to guard the speaker against nightly phantasms: ‘Procul recedant somnia | et noctium phantasmata’ [‘Let dreams depart from us, and the phantoms of night’].25 If the historical Julian was a nun at the Benedictine convent at Carrow before her enclosure, as Watson and Jenkins suggest, she would have heard this hymn every night.26 Thus, by describing the scene in so few words, Julian suggests in A Vision that she saw a spiritually harmful phantasm, which was nothing but a delusion. In the preceding scene, she had dismissed the visions as ‘raving’, a delusion produced by her sick body; by keeping the description of the nightmare brief, Julian presents her experience as a delusion, thereby emphasizing what a ‘gret sinne’ 27 it was to dismiss her God-sent vision as a delusion. Moreover, the brevity of the account implies that Julian encourages the evencristen reader not to dwell too long on this spiritually

Kruger, Dreaming, p. 47. Gregory, Dialogues, vol. 4, 50.6, p. 176; the modern English translation is taken from Jesse Keskiaho, Dreams and Visions in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge, 2015), p. 97. 23 Aurelius Augustinus, La Genèse au Sens Littéral en Douze Livres: De Genesi Ad Litteram Libri Duodecim, ed. and trans. P. Agaësse and A. Solignac, 2 vols (Paris, 1972), vol. 2, 23.49, pp. 410–15; Tobin, ‘Medieval Thought’, p. 47. 24 Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millet, 2 vols, EETS 325 and 326 (Oxford, 2005–06), vol. 1, 4.39, p. 86; the modern English translation is taken from Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses; A Translation, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter, 2009). The pages are the same in each instance. 25 Eleanor Parker, ‘Te Lucis Ante Terminum: Various Translations’, in A Clerk of Oxford (research blog), 13 September 2012, http://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/telucis-ante-terminum-various.html. Accessed 24 April 2015. 26 Introduction, Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 4. 27 A Vision, 21.17, p. 109. 21 22

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harmful but deceptive moment: unlike Julian herself at the time, they should not be fooled or even frightened by this nightmare. However, another, less orthodox cluster of narratives about bad dreams was available to storytellers in England and on the continent around that time as well:28 these narratives also see bad dreams as an assault by a supernatural creature, but as entailing a non-phantasmal, physical threat. English fourteenth- and fifteenth-century popular medicine, German fourteenth-century charms and Scandinavian fifteenth-century devotional texts show that nightmares were considered to be physical attacks upon sleepers by demons.29 As this evidence suggests, these demons were believed to lie on top of their victims, oppressing them and thereby trying to suffocate them. Julian’s descriptions suggest a similar attack: in both accounts, a supernatural creature is either sitting on her chest or lying on top of her and actively trying to stop her breath. These supernatural creatures harming sleepers by oppressing or strangling them were given different names. They were sometimes referred to as ‘incubi’, as already suggested; for instance, in a twelfth-century collection of Thomas Becket’s miracles, the saint heals a knight suffering from chronic nocturnal suffocation caused by an incubus.30 However, as Maaike van der Lugt points out, the term ‘incubus’ refers to ‘a cluster of concepts and traditions’, which sometimes overlap, sometimes take over aspects from each other and sometimes diverge.31 In other words, these narratives display the same commingling of discourses as Watkins describes. Catharina Raudvere, Föreställningar om Maran i Nordisk Folktro (Stockholm, 1993), pp. 57–101. 29 Hunt gives a charm from a fifteenth-century manuscript against ‘omnia genera demonum nocturna’ [‘all kinds of demons of the night’]. The fourteenth-century German charm Münchener Nachtsegen expresses the wish ‘noc mich dy maren druche… noc mich dy mare rite’ [‘do net let the māre oppress me… do not let the māre ride me’]. The early fifteenth-century Swedish devotional text Siælinna Thrøst exhorts the reader in an exposition of the Ten Commandments that ‘Thu skalt ey thro oppa maro eller elfwa’ [‘Thou shalt not believe in the māre or elves’]. Tony Hunt, Popular Medicine in Thirteenth-Century England: Introduction and Texts (Cambridge, 1990), p. 80; Theodor von Grienberger (ed.), ‘Der Münchener Nachtsegen’, Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altertum und Deutsche Literatur 41 (1897), 335–63; Siælinna Thrøst: Første Delin aff the Bokinne Som Kallas Siælinna Thrøst : Efter Cod. Holm. A 108, ed. Samuel Henning, Samlingar Utgivna and Svenska Fornskriftsällskapet, Serie 1: Svenska Skrifter 209, 211, 217, 3 vols (Uppsala, 1954–6), I (1954), p. 23. 30 Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. James Craigie Robertson, 7 vols (London, 1875–85), vol. 2, pp. 44–45; Maaike van der Lugt, ‘The Incubus in Scholastic Debate. Medicine, Theology and Popular Belief’, in Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler (York, 2001), pp. 175–200 (p. 193). 31 Van der Lugt, ‘The Incubus’, p. 183. 28

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These narratives were employed by both storytellers and dream theorists as different explanations of a phenomenon now called sleep paralysis, a sleep disorder consisting of feeling unable to move one’s limbs and body upon waking up, often accompanied by a sensation of heavy pressure on the chest, and often with a hallucinatory experience of sensing an evil presence close by.32 The term ‘incubus’ was used for different interpretations of this phenomenon. For instance, medieval medicine used ‘incubus’ to describe the complaints which were thought to be caused by the brain cooling off or by the supine position causing obstruction of vital organs.33 The fourteenth-century French professor of medicine Bernard of Gordon, for instance, claimed that this disease was likely to occur during sleep: ‘venit subito frigiditas, caput comprimens et oppilans’ [‘a cold arrives suddenly, compressing the head and stopping it up’].34 The experience of sleep paralysis was also read as, in Shelley R. Adler’s words, ‘a nocturnal visit of an evil being that threatens to press the very life out of its terrified victim’.35 In that case, ‘incubus’ referred to this ‘evil being’ rather than to a particular disease. The term could also refer to a sexual demon, as in Augustine’s The City of God: ‘Silvanos, et Faunos, quos vulgo incubos vocant, improbos saepe ex stitisse mulieribus, et earum appetisse ac peregisse concubitum.’ [‘Silvans and Pans, who are commonly called incubi, often misbehaved towards women and succeeded in accomplishing their lustful desire to have intercourse with them.’]36 This creature was thought either to seduce women when they were awake or rape them when they were asleep, and was only infrequently was linked to sleep paralysis.37 In such cases, a sensation of suffocation and oppression is only a side-effect of being attacked by a sexual demon: the main danger is the sexual attack itself. To make a brief preliminary excursion to A Revelation, both Ruud and McAvoy read the nightmare scene as a sexual assault: according to Ruud, the fiend tries to tempt character Julian to sin by means of lust, while McAvoy suggests that the episode depicts ‘attempted demonic rape’.38 These readings are plausible and convincing; however, in her account Julian also emphasises non-sexual violence, and in

R. Vetrugno, F. Provini and P. Montagna, ‘Sleep Paralysis’, in Sleep Disorders Part II: Handbook of Clinical Neurology, ed. P. Montagna and S. Chokroverty (Edinburgh, 2012), pp. 894–5; Shelley R. Adler, Sleep Paralysis: Night-Mares, Nocebos, and the MindBody Connection (New Brunswick, NJ, 2011), p. 9. 33 Van der Lugt, ‘The Incubus’, p. 187 and p. 193. 34 Bernard of Gordon, Lilium Medicinae (Lyon, 1559), ch. XXIII (p. 220). 35 Adler, Sleep Paralysis, p. 3. 36 Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. Philip Levine, 7 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1957–72), vol. 4 (1966), XV.Xxiii.1, pp. 548–9. 37 Van der Lugt, ‘The Incubus’, p. 180. 38 Ruud, p. 196; McAvoy, Authority, p. 160. 32

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particular the fiend’s attempt at suffocating her.39 The fiend thus mostly calls to mind a creature that, in Van der Lugt’s words, is ‘a non-sexual, suffocating demon or other evil being’;40 the main danger is of being suffocated. However, given the very few references to ‘incubus’ as an oppressing demon in Middle English texts and Latin texts from British sources,41 it is likely that in Middle English storytelling communities such creatures were known as māre or niȝtmāre, as Alaric Hall and Van der Lugt also have suggested.42 Māre, a term found both before, during and after Julian’s time, belongs to a group of cognate words, which, as Hall points out, denote supernatural beings ‘associated with nocturnal assaults on people’; these words are ‘etymologically related to an Indo-European root *mer-, to do with crushing, pressing and oppressing’.43 Two texts offer a glimpse of what the narratives told by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century storytellers about the māre were like: Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale,44 which features a charm against it and an extensive description in The South English Legendary.45 The Canterbury Tales was, in its first form, completed in 1390.46 According to Watson’s chronology, in 1390 Julian had finished writing A Vision but had yet to begin writing A Revelation.47 This tale by Chaucer therefore provides a highly contemporary snapshot of this cluster of concepts and narratives

The sexual aspect is for instance not as blatantly present as in Margery’s trials in The Book of Margery Kempe, or in the female saints’ lives in The Golden Legend. 40 Van der Lugt, ‘The Incubus’, p. 183. 41 In the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (which does not include the reference found in the collection of Thomas Becket’s miracles) only one instance of this use is found. 42 MED ‘māre (n.(2))’; OED mare, n.2.’  online at: www.oed.com/view/Entry/113993 (accessed 3 December 2014); Alaric Hall, ‘The Evidence for Maran, the Anglo-Saxon “Nightmares”’, Neophilologus 91 (2007), 299–317 (p. 299); Van der Lugt, ‘The Incubus’, p. 181. 43 Hall, ‘Evidence’, p. 299. 44 Chaucer, The Miller’s Tale and Prologue in The Riverside Chaucer, lines 3479–86, pp. 66–77. 45 The South English Legendary, ed. from Corpus Christi College Cambridge Ms. 145 and British Museum Ms. Harley 2277 with Variants from Bodley Ms. Ashmole 43 and British Museum Ms. Cotton Julius D. IX, ed. Charlotte D’Evelyn and Anna J. Mill, 3 vols (London, 1956–59), vol. 2, EETS os 236 (1956), lines 219–35, p. 409; and The Early SouthEnglish Legendary, Or, Lives of Saints, ed. Carl Horstmann, EETS os 87 (London, 1887), lines 219–35, p. 305. 46 Benson, ‘Introduction to The Canterbury Tales’, in The Riverside Chaucer, pp 3–22 (p. 3). 47 Watson, ‘Composition’, p. 678. 39

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in England at the time between the writing of A Vision and the writing of A Revelation, probably begun after 1393.48 In The Miller’s Tale, John, the cuckolded carpenter, believes his lodger, Nicholas, to have gone mad, causing John to panic and resort to practices from ‘unofficial’ belief systems. He first admonishes Nicholas to think of ‘Cristes passioun’, then makes the sign of the cross over Nicholas against ‘elves . . . and wightes’ (line 3478), and immediately casts a ‘nyght-spel’ on the four corners of the house and on the threshold (lines 3479–86). This is ‘a magic charm against the demons of the night’49 or ‘a spell for use at nights’.50 In the text edited by Larry Benson for The Riverside Chaucer, ‘nyghtes verye’ is used in this charm, a term which both has an uncertain meaning and of which no other occurrence in Middle English can be found.51 However, four other manuscripts of the Miller’s Tale have ‘the nyghtesmare’.52 The ‘nyght-spel’, also called a ‘white pater-noster’ in the Tale, asks that Christ and Saint Benedict bless the house against every ‘euyl wyght’ or ‘wikked wyght’, that is, against every evil supernatural being, and against ‘the nyghtesmare’, the nightmare.53 Though the carpenter is clearly meant to be read as a superstitious figure of fun, The Miller’s Tale nonetheless associates the māre with madness, other evil supernatural creatures (‘wightes’ and ‘elves’), unwanted entering of houses, and with the night: a ‘nyght-spel’ is used, the creature is called a ‘nyghtesmare’, and the events take place on a Sunday evening after sunset (line 3422). Furthermore, Chaucer using the superstition as a source of fun suggests that the fourteenth-­century audience must have been familiar with it, at least to some extent. However, no mention of dreams is made. Significantly, however, a similar marking of corners occurs in Ancrene Wisse: the Ancrene Wisse author tells anchorites to mark the sides of their bed with the sign of the cross and to say a rhyming prayer to make so that ‘fugiat procul omne malignum’ (‘all evil things flee away’).54 This parallel strikingly illustrates the commingling described by Watkins; in ‘The Miller’s Tale’ the carpenter’s action is meant to be read as laughably superstitious, whereas in Ancrene Wisse similar marking of corners forms part of the clerically recommended, orthodox routine. A more extensive description of the māre is found in the South English 50 51 52 53

Watson, ‘Composition’, p. 677, 678. Benson, ‘Explanatory Notes’, in Riverside Chaucer, p. 846. The Canterbury Tales, trans. Nevill Coghill (Harmondsworth, 2003), p. 96. Benson, ‘Explanatory Notes’, p. 846. Benson, ‘Textual Notes’, in Riverside Chaucer, p. 1124. MED, ‘night-māre (n.)’, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id= MED29512&egs=all. Accessed 6 March 2015. 54 Ancrene Wisse 1.29, pp. 18, 19, trans. Millett pp. 18, 19. 48 49

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Legendary, a collection of saints’ lives assembled in the second half of the thirteenth century. Extant in more than fifty manuscripts, it was a popular and widely circulated text; only Piers Plowman, The Canterbury Tales and The Prick of Conscience are extant in more copies.55 It was probably composed for a broad lay audience, perhaps as a handbook for preachers and pastors to instruct this audience56 and consisted of a group of narratives that would have been common among vernacular storytelling communities. The passage on the māre occurs in the legend of Saint Michael, prior to which the creation of humankind is contrasted with the fall of the devil and other angels. The narrator describes the state of the spiritual realm after this fall: Þe luþer gostes beoþ aboute – mid hore luþer poer To bitraie wrecche men – and bringe into hore panter And þe gode beoþ eke about – mid poer þat hore is Forto wardi man fram sunne – þat hi neworche amis Boþe þe luþer & þe gode –aliȝteþ ofte adoun And to men in slepe comþ – and in auision And sseweþ hom in metinge – moni a wonder dede Ac þe gode of gode þinge – & þe luþer euere of quede And derieþ ofte men in slep – & bodieþ sorwe & care And ofte hi of liggeþ men – þat me clupeþ þe mare (þe niȝt-mare) For þat is al hore delit – wanne hi moweþ do men wo Ac þeoues hi cheseþ aniȝt – aboute to fle[o] & go Mest hi greueþ selimen – wanne hi liggeþ upriȝt Op hom hi liggeþ heuie inou – nere hi nere so liȝt Hi of liggeþ as an heui stok – as hi wolde a man astoffe (þat wolde ane Man a-stoffe) Þat he ne ssel wawy fot ne hond – ne vnneþe enes poffe Dai þat such luþer chamberlain – þat awakeþ men so sore. [The evil spirits are about – with their evil power to betray wretched people – and bring them into their snare. The good ones are also about – with power that is theirs to guard people against sin – so that they do not act sinfully. Both the evil spirits and the good ones – often alight down and visit people in their sleep – and in enigmatic dreams show them in pictures – many a miraculous deed Karen A. Winstead, Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY, 1997), p. 71. 56 Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, p. 72. 55

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but the good spirits of good things – and the evil spirits always of wicked things and often hurt people in sleep – and forebode misfortune and trouble. And often they lie upon humans – that is called the (night)māre for that is their delight – doing humans harm. Like thieves they prefer the night – for hurrying/flying and going about. They most often hurt wretched men - when these are asleep/lie upright. They burden them completely; near them never so light (?) They lie upon the victim like such a heavy log – as might suffocate any man so that he shall not wave a hand or foot, nor easily gasp for breath. Damn that evil chamberlain, that wakes people so painfully].57

According to this narrative, evil spirits, commonly known as the māre or niȝtmāre, visit people in their sleep and dreams. Like the devil, these are fallen angels; in line 196 they are said to be angels that ‘somdel wiþ [Lucifer] hulde’, have supported the devil in his rebellion; they have therefore been cast out of heaven. Moreover, these spirits oppress their victims to such an extent that they cannot move, can hardly breathe and wake up in pain. The Legendary also claims that wretched or sinful people sleeping on their backs are most vulnerable to attacks from these evil beings, an element also found in to contemporary and later continental narratives about the māre.58 Because in Middle English the term ‘man’ is used generically for any human being, it is not clear whether the ‘selimen’ refers to men only, or also includes women. However, both the earlier context of creation and the general argument contrast humans and demons, which suggests that both men and women can be attacked by the māre. Both ‘The Miller’s Tale’ and the South English Legendary, then, imply that in the storytelling society Julian would have belonged to before her enclosure, a group of narratives may have been found in which spirits try to suffocate sleepers and dreamers in such a genuinely harmful way that it could cause a physical response.59 The popularity of the South English Legendary and The Canterbury South English Legendary, ed. D’Evelyn and Mill, lines 219–35, p. 409, with additions, in parenthesis, from Horstmann (ed.), p. 306. My translation, with additions by Virginia Langum (personal communication). 58 Raudvere, Föreställningar, p. 91; OED, ‘mare’; Middelnederlandsch Woordenboek (Middle-Dutch Dictionary), ‘mare’ (III): http://gtb.inl.nl/iWDB/search?actie=article& wdb=MNW&id=28042&lemma=mare. Accessed 27 February 2014. 59 Three other, less informative, instances occur in an English–Latin vocabulary, an English–Latin dictionary, and the moral treatise, Peter Idley’s Instructions to His Son, all from the fifteenth century ed. Charlotte D’Evelyn (London, 1935). In the Instructions, a hermit warns against dream interpretation, witchcraft and market-people crying ‘away the māre!’ 57

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Tales suggest that that it was likely that the Julian and her contemporary readers were familiar with these narratives. Turning to A Vision and A Revelation, several aspects of the māre-narrative can be recognised in Julian’s writings, although it should be pointed out that Julian never mentions the māre by name. In A Vision, a fallen angel tries to kill a sleeper by stopping her breath; he does so in such a threatening manner that it causes extreme fear, severe palpitations and results in the sleeper waking up feeling almost dead (‘unnethes had I my life’). The response from the people around Julian at the time of her experience and the reference to her heart calming down (‘my herte began to comfort’) suggests that Julian wakes up in a cold sweat, with her heart beating very quickly. Most contemporary readers would have taken at face value Julian’s statement about the devil attacking her,60 and therefore the physical response she describes as well. However, the attack of the devil could also be seen as the result of a frightening demonic deception, as her use of ‘methought’ suggests. Fumiko Yoshikawa reads this impersonal ‘methought’ as simultaneously intimating both the limits of human understanding and her conviction during the dream of the genuineness of the experience.61 Thus, Julian in A Vision interprets the experience of the devil strangling her as momentarily convincing, but ultimately not fully comprehensible. The nightmare, thus, is presented as an illusion which – fortunately – cannot be fully recovered mentally once it has passed. In A Revelation narrator Julian draws upon the ‘oppressing evil spirit’ tradition more explicitly and in such a vivid way that the experience can no longer be read as illusory. She emphasises the strangling even more, by referring to it three times rather than twice. Moreover, the added description also suggests two more traits from the māre-incubus-narrative. Like the victims in the South English Legendary, Julian lies on her back, evidenced by the fiend’s ability to grab her by the throat. He also appears to be putting his face very close to hers, blocking her view.62 Like the māre in the South English Legendary completely oppressing the wretched people, the fiend is sitting on her upper body. In short, the fiend’s attack in A Revelation is more frightening and more physical, so implying that Julian’s physiological response – severe palpitations and sweat – is caused by the fiend’s attempt to strangle her, dream or no dream.63 Tinsley, ‘Julian’s Diabology’, p. 213. Fumiko Yoshikawa, ‘Julian of Norwich and the Rhetoric of the Impersonal’, in Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of the Enclosure, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cardiff, 2008), pp. 141–54 (p. 146). 62 Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge, 2004), p. 161. 63 Strangling is not the same as suffocation by oppressing, but it has an identical effect, and it is the effect that Julian emphasizes. 60 61

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Both A Vision and A Revelation borrow two other traits from the māre-incubus narrative, as well. According the South English Legendary, sinful people are particularly susceptible to attacks from these evil spirits. In both writings, Julian describes herself at the time before the nightmare as sinful: she has told a priest that she has been hallucinating, which suggests she doubts or denies the veracity of her God-sent visions. She comments on her own doubts: ‘A, lo I, wrech! This was a gret sinne . . . here you may se what I am of myself.’64 According to the māre-incubus-narrative, such a sinful, unbelieving state brings on the māre. Additionally, in both accounts Julian wakes up in such a frightened, painful state, that she feels hardly alive.65 This evokes the statement in the South English Legendary that an attack by the māre leads to a very painful waking. Mapping Julian’s two accounts onto the spectrum of different clusters of narratives and concepts, a shift towards a greater use of multiple registers or clusters of narratives can be seen, similar to the Bakhtinian heteroglossia which Gillespie discerns in A Revelation’s language. In A Vision Julian treats the account of her nightmare in a muted way, staying mainly within ‘official’ beliefs. The reader is thus encouraged not to focus on her individual nightmarish experience, but rather on Christ, the ‘techare of alle’, as the apologia stresses.66 In A Vision, then, Julian is wary of her description of the nightmare acquiring the ‘unreste’ which she, in the concluding passage of A Vision, ascribes to supernatural experiences from evil spirits.67 In A Revelation, however, Julian deftly draws on two narrative registers simultaneously. On the one hand, her narrative alludes to more orthodox responses to frightening dreams, thereby validating the visions and authorising the text. Phrases like ‘me thought’ and ‘like a yonge man’, suggest a dream and phantasm; similarly, the description ‘this ugly shewying’ suggests spiritual vision. On the other hand, she draws more on the māre-incubus narrative: the vivid details suggest an actual, physical attack and corporeal vision, while Julian’s physical response indicates genuine fear of mortal danger. Consequently, the echoes from narratives from the folkloric, storytelling communities are as saliently present as those of more orthodox responses. Because of this increased commingling A Revelation appeals to a wider audience; Julian no longer addresses contemplatives only, but all familiar with these well-known narratives. In medieval religious culture, the commingling of ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ belief did not imply that there were no tensions between these cultures. Nor did it imply that the laity or the clergy participated in both cultures 66 67 64 65

A Vision 21.6, p. 109; A Revelation 66:21, p. 333. A Revelation 67.10, p. 333. A Vision 6.45, p. 75. A Vision 25. 29, p. 119.

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without being aware of the differences between them. For instance, the use of exempla and vivid narratives in general was associated with preaching to the laity rather than the clergy: it was thought that, in order to appeal to the laity and instruct them, sermons needed to contain exempla.68 These could be local and anecdotal, but could also include fantastic elements and resemble saints’ legends, romance, chronicles or folklore narratives.69 Written forms of religious communication, like Ancrene Wisse, also used exempla when addressing an audience that included the laity.70 In other words, those closely familiar with ‘official’ beliefs participated consciously in the culture of ‘unofficial’ beliefs with a strongly didactic purpose. Since both clergy and laity knew tales about the māre, Julian’s use of such tales in A Revelation suggests that she is attempting to appeal to as wide an audience as possible instead of only those ‘that desires to lyeve contemplatifelye’.71 This increased commingling and the resultant larger implied audience in A Revelation gives Julian a greater range of rhetorical possibilities as she developed her account originally found in A Vision. To begin, it allows her to recreate God’s actions towards herself: just as God allows the devil to frighten Julian into believing the visions again, so Julian allows the māre to frighten her readers, so that they will not doubt her visions as she did herself. In both texts, God allows the ‘ugly shewing’ to happen to Julian in order to convince her of the veracity and genuineness of her vision. When Julian tells the priest that she has hallucinated,72 it is stressed that God would not leave her in that state of unbelief: ‘herein walde noughte oure curtayse lorde leve me’.73 The chapter rubric in A Revelation likewise suggests that Julian’s statement about hallucinating generates the devil’s attack: ‘hir frelte and morning in disese and lyte speking after the gret comfort of Iesus, seying she had ravid, which, being hir gret sekeness, I suppose was but venial synne; but yet the devil after that had gret power to vexin hir ner to deth’.74 Judith Dale sums this up: ‘[i]n terms of plot, the arrival of the Devil is generated by the Narrator’s lapse in faith’.75 By giving the fiend traits that bring to mind well-known narratives, charms and perhaps even similar experiences, Julian provokes in the evencristen the fear that she herself experienced. She thus warns her Larry Scanlon, Narrative, Authority and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge, 2007), p. 67; Davenport, Medieval Narrative, p. 63. 69 Davenport, Medieval Narrative, p. 59; Winstead, Virgin Martyrs, p. 72. 70 Cate Gunn, Ancrene Wisse: From Pastoral Literature to Vernacular Spirituality (Cardiff, 2007), p. 156. 71 A Vision 4.37, p. 71. 72 A Vision 21.6, A Revelation 66:12, pp. 109, 331. 73 A Vision 21. 20 and 21; A Revelation 66.26, pp. 109, 333. 74 Watson and Jenkins, Writings p. 410. 75 Judith Dale, ‘“Sin Is Behovely”: Art and Theodicy in the Julian Text’, Mystics Quarterly 25 (1999), 127–46 (p. 131). 68

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readers or audience not to be a wretch nor deny the truth of the visions as she did, and thus make themselves vulnerable to attacks from the māre. This strategy also provides an explanation for the seemingly counterintuitive action of describing a frightening event in more detail: only by elaborating on the scene can she cause a similar response in the evencristen and thus, by means of a narrative, impress upon him or her the need for believing the visions and the text. Second, the drawing of inspiration from a familiar story and returning her version of the story to the community from which it came allow Julian to blend theology and storytelling more creatively. The addition of the many frightening details and the echoes of a familiar narrative give the dream-nature of the ‘ugly shewing’ more dramatic weight. Julian’s awakening and discovery that it is only a dream – that is, not part of reality, unlike the visions – become a more emotionally significant moment in A Revelation. Because the dream is more frightful, and the monster one that everyone knows from familiar but frightening narratives, the reader empathically experiences relief when Julian wakes up. By giving the end of the assault more emphasis in the narrative, Julian vividly illustrates a theological point made earlier, as others have also pointed out.76 Just as her extremely frightening experience ultimately lacks the reality of her visions, so sin and evil have ‘no maner of substance, ne no part of being’.77 By emphasising the inability of the devil to succeed in strangling her (‘with his pawes he helde me in the throte, and woulde have strangled me, but he might not’), she illustrates several of Christ’s and her own theological claims. Among these are Christ’s words that ‘the feende is overcomen’, and her own insight that the devil’s power is entirely locked up in God’s hand and that Christ eternally scorns the devil and despises him as nothing.78 Consequently, Julian’s version of a familiar narrative – though a frightening warning – is ultimately part of her theology of a caring mother God, and by extension, an expression of and a means for her own maternal care for the evencristen whom she addresses. The differences between the two accounts reflect Julian’s activity as an editor of her own work: the narrative only hinted at in A Vision is fully explored in A Revelation, by means of the addition of details that are not only frightening by themselves but which also result in the deliberate appeal to a lay audience. Finally, and most importantly, by means of these changes Julian depicts herself as a member of a folkloric storytelling community and as a contributor to the store of narratives available in this community, even though she probably no Ruud, p. 201; McAvoy, Authority, p. 155; Dale, ‘Sin is Behovely’, p. 131; Tinsley, ‘Julian’s Diabology’, p. 226–31. 77 A Revelation 27.22–23, pp. 209–11. 78 A Vision 8.32, 41 and 42, p. 79; A Revelation 13. 4, 5, 14, 19, pp. 169 and 171. 76

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longer was in direct contact with society as she would have been before her enclosure. The increased inspiration from a familiar narrative and the stronger appeal in A Revelation to a large community that loves stories reveal Julian’s increased self-confidence as a writer, storyteller and editor. In A Vision, she relies on explicit discretio spirituum warnings to convince the evencristen of the need for remembering her text. In A Revelation, in contrast, she uses her most evocative language to create a horrifying scene so that the reader becomes unable to forget the text. In fact, she states explicitly that her evencristen should read her visions as happening to themselves: ‘alle that I say of me, I mene in the person of alle my evencristen . . . it is Goddes wille that ye take it ye take it with as grete joy and liking as Jhesu had shewde it to you’.79 The reader is encouraged to insert him- or herself imaginatively into the narrative, and to imagine him- or herself getting attacked by the māre. A Revelation thus illustrates not only that ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ beliefs co-existed and were superimposed one another by storytellers and audiences, but also that no clear-cut boundary between these existed. Julian’s account unites a folklore monster and demonic deception into a single, frightening, supernatural being. As a result, all human beings, both laity and clergy, are included in the new community created by her narrative: her story goes beyond any apparent distinction created by belief systems. To sum up, this episode seems to depict a woman at her most vulnerable and most powerless, attacked by the devil and dependent on God to save her. But it also shows – because of the drawing on narratives from a folkloric, storytelling community – Julian at her most creative and most authoritative, and suggests the deliberate addressing of a larger audience consisting of both the laity and the clergy: all her evencristen. Even though the nightmare belongs to the fiend and the waking comes from God, it is Julian who ultimately tells the story.

A Revelation 8.31–37, p. 153.

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Part III

Textual Communities

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Chapter 10

Anchoritic Textual Communities and the Wooing Group Prayers CATHERINE INNES-PARKER

I

n the past thirty years, a great deal of scholarly work has opened up new vistas on the Ancrene Wisse Group, anchorites in general, and women’s devotional literacies.1 Along with their appearance together in a number of manuscripts, the Ancrene Wisse Group of texts has long been accepted as having linguistic and thematic connections.2 The implications of these connections have been studied with reference to both context and audience, in particular the audience of anchoresses addressed in Ancrene Wisse itself both in its original and revised versions.3 I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the funding which made the research for this chapter possible. Thanks are also due to my research assistant, Christopher Thompson, for his work on the details of formatting.  2 The Ancrene Wisse Group consists of Ancrene Wisse (AW), a guide for anchoresses, the Wooing Group (see note 4, below), and the Katherine Group: Hali Meiðhad (HM), a letter on virginity; Sawles Warde (SW), an allegory of the guarding of the soul; and three saints’ lives, Seinte Margarete (Saint Margaret, SM), Seinte Katerine (Saint Katherine, SK) and Seinte Iuliene (Saint Juliana, SJ). While the entire group never appears together in a single manuscript, each text appears in a number of manuscripts along with other texts of the group. For a description of the manuscripts containing the texts of the Ancrene Wisse group, see the headnotes to the translations in Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works (New York, 1991). For a more detailed description of the manuscripts containing Ancrene Wisse, see 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, EETS os 325 and 326 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005 and 2006), I, pp. xi–xxvii. For a more detailed description of the manuscripts containing the texts of the Wooing Group, see The Wooing of Our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers, ed. Catherine Innes-Parker (Peterborough, Ont., 2015), pp. 17–19. All references to the Wooing Group prayers will be from this edition.  3 The original text of Ancrene Wisse is no longer extant. However, we have a glimpse  1

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In addition, the reading practices of medieval women have been illuminated by the work of a number of scholars. The results of these studies have provided a context in which we can now take what we know about early thirteenth-century anchoresses and their reading, combine it with what we know about other medieval women’s literacies and habits, and make some informed speculations about the literary communities that are reflected in the composition of the Ancrene Wisse Group. In this chapter, I would like to indulge in such speculation, taking what we know about the Wooing Group prayers4 and their context and then pondering the question of ‘What then?’ along with a little ‘What if?’. I will focus on the four earliest prayers, found together as a group in London, British Library, MS Nero A. xiv (hereafter Nero). Whether written specifically for anchoresses in the first instance or not,5 the texts of the Katherine Group and the Wooing Group became part of the gathering together of textual support for the anchoritic life of their female readers, possibly at the request of the anchoresses themselves, who needed prayers to supplement their devotions.6 The Wooing Group is a microcosm of this process: as of its original audience in London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A. xiv (hereafter Nero), in a passage referring to three biological sisters who entered the anchorhold in their youth. See Millett, Ancrene Wisse, I, pp. xxxvii–xxxviii and 4.13, n. 4, p. 73. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 (hereafter Corpus) presents a revised version, referring to a growing community of anchoresses. Fascinatingly, London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra C. vi (hereafter Cleopatra) contains an ‘intermediary’ text, with the author’s annotations for revision in the margins (many of which are found in Corpus).  4 The Wooing Group prayers are Þe wohunge of ure lauerd (hereafter Wohunge), for which the Group is named, and four shorter prayers: On god ureisun of ure lefdi (A Good Prayer to Our Lady, UUL); On wel swuðe god ureisun of God almihti (A Most Excellent Prayer to God Almighty, UGA); Þe oreisun of seinte Marie (A Prayer to Saint Mary, OSM); and On lofsong of ure louerde (A Hymn to Our Lord, LUL). The abbreviations used here are those introduced by Millett, with the exception of UUL, which she excludes from the Wooing Group. See Millet, II, p. lvii.  5 Ancrene Wisse was written for anchoresses, although the author seems to have had a wider audience in mind; Þe wohunge of ure lauerd, the text for which the Wooing Group is named, was also written specifically for an anchoress. The Saints’ Lives of the Katherine Group, however, were likely not. See Innes-Parker, The Wooing of Our Lord, pp. 50–1.  6 See Bella Millett, ‘The Origins of Ancrene Wisse: New Answers, New Questions’, Medium Ævum 61.2 (1992), 206–28; Anne Savage, ‘The Communal Authorship of Ancrene Wisse’, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 45–56; Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘Reading and Devotional Practice: The Wooing Group Prayers of BL MS Nero A.xiv’, in Anchoritism in the Middle Ages: Texts and Traditions, ed. Catherine Innes-Parker and Naoe Kukita Yoshikawa (Cardiff, 2013), pp. 137–49; and Innes-Parker, The Wooing of Our Lord, pp. 66–72.

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I have argued elsewhere, when one considers the Wooing Group prayers in their historical and textual context, they become witnesses of the complexity of early thirteenth-century vernacular spirituality.7 Wohunge is found only in London, British Library, MS Titus D. xviii (1240s) with Ancrene Wisse and three texts of the Katherine Group: Sawles Warde, Hali Meiðhad and Seinte Katerine. The four shorter Wooing Group prayers are found together in Nero (also dating to the 1240s): On god ureisun of ure lefdi; On wel swuðe god ureisun of God almihti;8 Þe oreisun of seinte Marie;9 and On lofsong of ure louerde.10 Nero is the work of two scribes, both working in the 1240s:11 Scribe A, who copied Ancrene Wisse, and Scribe B, who added the Wooing Group prayers, an English version of the Creed, and two brief Latin texts. These prayers are gathered together in Nero as a coherent group, deliberately added to a copy of Ancrene Wisse by Scribe B, and carefully ordered to guide his audience’s devotional practice. Although we cannot identify the specific audience of Nero, the gathering together of the four shorter Wooing Group prayers reflects the development of anchoritic spirituality suggested in the reference to a reading community of ‘twenty or more’ anchoresses addressed in Corpus.12 However, the Wooing

See ‘Reading and Devotional Practice’, and The Wooing of Our Lord pp. 28-31. A fragment of Ureisun of God almihti is also found in London, Lambeth Palace, MS 487 (Lambeth ca. 1185-1224) in an addition that dates to the 1240s.  9 A fragment of Oreisun of seinte Marie is also found in London, British Library, MS Royal 17 A.xxvii (Royal, ca. 1225-30). 10 This is the order in which they are found in Nero; it is not, however, the order in which they were written. Ureisun of ure lefdi is not always included in the Wooing Group, because it is male-voiced. However, as I have argued elsewhere, there is no good reason to exclude it from the Wooing Group, amongst which it is found in Nero. The titles used here are all found in the manuscripts except for Lofsong of ure lauerde, which is not given a title in any surviving manuscript; this is the title used by Meredith W. Thompson, ed., Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, EETS os 241 (London, 1958). 11 See Ralph Hanna, ‘Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487: Some Problems of Early Thirteenthcentury Textual Transmission’, in Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker (York, 2009), pp. 78–88 (p. 85). 12 See ‘Reading and Devotional Practice’ and The Wooing of Our Lord, pp. 66–70. We do not, of course, know who actually read these prayers or owned the manuscripts in which they are found. In Nero, they are found with the only text of Ancrene Wisse that contains a reference to the original audience of three sisters; the reference to the expanded audience is found in Corpus. Nevertheless, Nero is not the original text, and it is important to remember that the Wooing Group prayers were added to it later. The prayers seem to be part of the development of a corpus of reading material for anchoresses, presumably as the community grew beyond the original three sisters, who did have some  7  8

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Group prayers also imply the development of a textual community of anchoresses who read and shared these texts.13

Ancrene Wisse, The Wooing Group and Devotional Literacy Ancrene Wisse itself reveals a great deal about the literacy and reading practices of its readers. The Ancrene Wisse author encourages his audience to read edifying texts, even above praying, for, as he states, reading is itself good prayer.14 The original audience of three sisters (referred to in Nero) seem to have been literate in both English and Anglo-Norman French, and the author refers to several texts that they had available to them, including an ‘English book of St. Margaret’, and texts that sound like Hali Meiðhad and Sawles Warde.15 In addition to these, the larger group of anchoresses addressed in the Corpus revision may also have brought books with them, psalters or other devotional works.16 However they acquired them, the Ancrene Wisse author assumes that his audience will have access to a variety of texts that will supplement the prayers outlined in Part 1: ‘verseilunge of Sawter, redunge of Englisc oðer of Frensch, halie meditatiuns …’ [‘versicles from the Psalter, reading in English or in French, pious

books available to them (see below p. 170 and n. 15). However, the requirement that the anchoresses have any prayers that they did not know copied out for them suggests that it is possible that the Wooing Group prayers, or at least the earliest of them, were composed for individual anchoresses. 13 Some of the material below appears in the Introduction to The Wooing of Our Lord, in an expanded form. 14 ‘Redunge is god bone. Redunge teacheð hu ant hwete me bidde, ant beode biȝet hit efter. Amidde þe redunge, hwen þe heorte likeð, kimeð up a deuotiun þet is worð monie benen.’ [‘Reading is a good way of praying. Reading teaches you how to pray, and for what, and prayer obtains it afterwards. During reading, when it satisfies the heart, a devotion arises that is worth many prayers.’] Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 4.92, p. 109. All quotations from Ancrene Wisse are from, Millett, Ancrene Wisse; all translations are from Bella Millett, trans. Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses, A Translation based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 (Exeter, 2009). The page numbers in Millett’s translation match those of the edition. 15 The reference to books in French and English is in Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 1.26, p. 18. The author also suggests here that his audience will have access to a Psalter and books containing meditations. For the ‘book of St Margaret’ see Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 4.55, p. 93; for the text(s) which resemble Hali Meiðhad and Sawles Warde, see Millett, Ancrene Wisse, I, 7.19, p. 154. 16 See Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘Medieval Widowhood and Textual Guidance: The Corpus Revisions of Ancrene Wisse and the de Braose Anchoresses’, Florilegium (Special Issue in Honour of Margaret Wade Labarge) 28 (2013), 95–124.

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meditations…’].17 We know that at least some of the anchoresses addressed in Ancrene Wisse were fully literate:18 in Part 1 the author refers to the Hours that the anchoress has written down19 and in Part 8 he explicitly forbids his readers to teach children or to write anything without leave.20 Part 8 suggests, however, that they were allowed to write and to send or receive letters with the permission of their religious advisor. They also shared and exchanged scrolls and booklets.21 The author assumes the accumulation of prayers and devotional texts as part of the devotional culture of his time; for example, he tells his readers, ‘Þe ureisuns þet Ich nabbe buten ane imerket beoð iwriten oueral . . . Leoteð written on a scrowe hwet-se 3e ne kunnen’ [‘Copies of the prayers that I have only referred to briefly . . . are available everywhere. Have any that you do not know by heart copied on to a scroll’].22 This has been taken to suggest that some anchoresses could read, but not write themselves, and indeed this was undoubtedly the case; however, it is also likely that even anchoresses who could both read and write needed to have prayers copied for them, due to lack of access to an exemplar. It is difficult to know just how much access to such texts the anchoress would Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 1.26, p. 18. The author seems to assume that his readers will have access to a Psalter; see, for example, Ancrene Wisse ed. Millett, I, 1.6, p. 10. 18 I use the term ‘fully literate’ here in its modern sense, meaning the ability to both read and write in their own language, i.e. the vernacular. However, the word is a fraught one, as there were many kinds of literacies in the Middle Ages. The Latin term ‘literati’ referred to those who could read Latin – in this sense, the anchoresses would be ‘illiterati’. It seems clear that a variety of literacies existed among the audience of Ancrene Wisse. It is worth noting that, while the author assumes that the anchoresses whom he addresses can read, he also instructs them to read the text to their maidservants (see below, p. 176). This may suggest that the maidservants could not read; but it may also be that, with only one copy of the text, it was necessary to read it aloud in order to share it. Indeed, the texts of the Wooing Group were designed to be read aloud. We can thus speculate that the anchoritic audience included those who could read and write (in the vernacular), those who could read, but not write, and those who could not themselves read but relied upon their mistresses to read the text to them. As well, as seen above, some of the anchoresses could read Anglo-Norman, and some must have had a basic grasp of Latin (for example, the readers for whom Nero’s Scribe B added brief Latin meditations); others may not. Finally, devotional literacy might include those who could interpret wall paintings or pictures in Books of Hours, understanding the devotional symbolism yet not the words in a text. ‘Literacy’, then, is a multivalent term when referring to the anchoresses who read the texts under consideration. 19 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 1.4, p. 9. 20 Ancrene Wise, ed. Millett, I, 8.25–26, pp. 160–1. 21 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 4.58/989–90, p. 94; 4.90/1511–14, p. 107. Here, ‘booklet’ is the translation for ‘cwaer’ or quire, ‘an unbound gathering of parchment sheets’ (Ancrene Wisse n. 4.178, p. 223). 22 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 1.24, p. 17. 17

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have. Certainly, she could have written out the prayers that she knew by heart, or copied those lent to her by another anchoress; or it is possible that one anchoress might have copied her own prayers for another. But it is also likely that her spiritual advisor would have copied some prayers and devotional material from exemplars to which he had access, either in his own religious house or through connections with others. For example, Ureisun of ure lefdi certainly originated in a monastery, although it could well have been written for a lay patron or patroness. However, it must have circulated separately from the anchoritic texts before it joined them in Nero; it is not addressed to a female audience and, being malevoiced, was likely originally produced for a male reader. Indeed, we know little about the context in which the Wooing Group prayers were composed. The first-person speaker of Ureisun of ure lefdi, addressed to the Virgin Mary, identifies himself as a monk (munuch, line 170).23 Oreisun of seinte Marie, also addressed to the Virgin Mary, is gender-neutral; although it has usually been understood to be female-voiced, there is nothing in the prayer to suggest the gender or identity of the speaker. But the two shorter prayers that address Christ directly are female-voiced: in Lofsong of ure louerde the speaker is characterised as a virgin (meiden line 88, cp. line 115); in Ureisun of God almihti the speaker is a woman who has renounced the world (lines 42–52).24 In contrast, Wohunge is more clearly addressed to an anchoress. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson, translators of Ancrene Wisse and related works, suggest that the four shorter prayers, while well written, could have each been composed quickly, at some individual request or for some particular need.25 However, as I have argued elsewhere, all of the Wooing Group prayers are complex, reflecting cutting-edge developments in the spirituality of the early thirteenth century.26 Furthermore, as noted above, the Wooing Group prayers were not added to Nero by its original scribe (Scribe A), but by a second scribe (Scribe B). The work of Nero’s Scribe B needs to be taken seriously. It is unlikely that Scribe B was merely filling up the blank leaves at the end of the manuscript; there is another full All references to the prayers of the Wooing Group are from my edition The Wooing of Our Lord and The Wooing Group Prayers. 24 See also Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, II.xi and n.10. 25 Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, pp. 335–6, n. 30. It is interesting to note that Savage and Watson organise the texts in their translation based on Titus, although they do not use it as the base manuscript for their translations. They suggest that Titus ‘attempts to be a one-volume library of the anchoritic works’ (p. 29). This indicates that the scribes and/or patrons of the manuscripts took their work seriously and the ordering of texts in any given manuscript must be carefully considered. 26 See ‘Reading and Devotional Practice’, and The Wooing of Our Lord, pp. 36f. 23

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gathering following the one in which Ureisun of ure lefdi (the first of the Wooing Group prayers added to Nero) begins.27 The ordering of the material in this gathering, including the Wooing Group prayers, an English version of the Creed, and two brief Latin texts, is careful and deliberate.28 The early circulation of the Wooing Group prayers is unknown. Unlike Ancrene Wisse and the rest of the Ancrene Wisse Group, these prayers almost certainly circulated first on scrolls or individual leaves, like the hours and prayers the anchoresses had copied for themselves.29 Wohunge itself is not long – it comprises only five and a half folios in the Titus manuscript.30 The other prayers, found in Nero, are even shorter: Ureisun of ure lefdi is approximately two and a half folios, Ureisun of God almihti is three and a half folios, Oreisun of seinte Marie three folios, and Lofsong of ure louerde three and a half folios. The dating of the manuscripts in which the texts survive, therefore, is even less a guide to the dates at which these prayers were composed than is usual with devotional literature. The manuscripts can only tell us the dates by which the prayers must have been composed and circulating: Oreisun of seinte Marie by 1225–30 and the rest by the 1240s. Other evidence, however, can help us infer the relative dates of composition, showing that they ‘frame’ the works of the Ancrene Wisse Group, making it possible to see the development of the entire group as part of a long process, the end result of which was a body of literature suitable both for anchoritic readers and for

For a detailed description, see The Wooing of our Lord, pp. 43–5. See Day, p. xvi. For the work of Scribe B, see also ‘Reading and Devotional Practice’. As Ayoush Lazikani pointed out in her paper at the conference on Anchorites and Their Communities, ‘Notably for the theme of communities, the Creed immediately follows Lofsong of ure louerede . . . suggesting that in this manuscript at least, the reader’s performance of private prayer is intended to be keyed to wider communal observances of faith’ (A. S. Lazikani, ‘Emotional Communities in On Lofsong of Ure Louerde’, paper delivered at Anchorites in their Communities: The 5th International Anchoritic Society Conference, Gregynog, Powys, Wales, 23 April 2014). The anchoress’s recitation of the Creed could be performed not only in the privacy of her cell, but also during communal services in the church to which her cell was attached. Caroline Cole suggests that the format of the manuscript creates ‘an intertextual dialogue’ between the texts: Caroline Cole, ‘The Integrity of Text and Context in the Prayers of British Library Cotton MS Nero A.XIV’, Neophilologisches Mitteilungen 104 (2003), 85–94 (88–93). I would like to thank Dr Lazikani for providing me with a written copy of her paper and pointing out the reference to Cole’s work. 29 See Savage and Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 29. The material below is explored more fully in my edition of the Wooing Group prayers. 30 Titus is written in double columns; the text of Wohunge begins at the top of col. 2 on f. 127r and ends in at the bottom of col. 2, f. 132v, thus taking up eleven columns.

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the devout layperson.31 At least three, and probably all four, of the Nero prayers predate Ancrene Wisse; three of them also predate Hali Meiðhad and possibly other texts of the Ancrene Wisse Group (Oreisun of seinte Marie, Ureisun of ure lefdi, Lofsong of ure louerde). Thus, while the texts of the Ancrene Wisse Group provide a crucial context for the Wooing Group, the earliest of the Wooing Group prayers also affect the context of Ancrene Wisse. Thompson points out verbal similarities between Ancrene Wisse and Oreisun of seinte Marie and Ureisun of God almihti, which suggests that the author of Ancrene Wisse may very well have been familiar with these two prayers.32 Indeed, these and Ureisun of ure lefdi and Lofsong of ure louerde may have been included among the prayers that formed part of the anchoresses’ devotional reading material to which the Ancrene Wisse author refers. The evidence thus suggests that the prayers of the Wooing Group circulated far more widely on scrolls or individual leaves or in booklets than the sturdier surviving manuscripts can bear witness to. Further evidence can be drawn from the manuscripts themselves. Oreisun of seinte Marie survives in two copies, one complete, one a fragment. But the two copies are significantly different, suggesting that they were copied from different exemplars. Similarly, as stated above, Ureisun of God almihti also survives in two copies, again significantly different, suggesting two exemplars. Furthermore, Wohunge and Ureisun of God almihti are sources for the fourteenth-century text A Talkyng of the Love of God, suggesting that they at one time circulated together.33 Given that Wohunge does not survive in either of the manuscripts in which Ureisun of God almihti is found, it is more than likely that neither of the exemplars for these manuscripts contained Wohunge. In this case, at least one more copy of Ureisun of God almihti must have been circulating along with Wohunge. And, since Ureisun of God almihti is not included in Titus, there were probably at least two copies of Wohunge in circulation – one with and one without Ureisun of God almihti. This suggests that by the 1240s there were at least four copies of Oreisun of seinte Marie in circulation, along with at least five, possibly six, copies of Ureisun of God almihti, and at least three copies of Wohunge (see Figure 1). If the shorter prayers of the Wooing Group circulated on scrolls or pamphlets, For the details upon which the following argument is founded, see The Wooing of Our Lord, pp. 28–30. For the rise of lay devotion in the early thirteenth century, see Cate Gunn, Ancrene Wisse: From Pastoral Literature to Vernacular Spirituality (Cardiff, 2008). 32 Thompson, Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, pp. xv–xvii. 33 Sr. M. Salvina Westra, ed., A Talkyng of Þe Love of God, edited from MS. Vernon (Bodleian 3938) and collated with MS Simeon (Brit. Mus. Add. 22283), with Introduction, Notes, Phonology, Grammar, Glossary and other apparatus (The Hague, 1950). 31

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the textual relations I have charted here show that it is not only possible but probable that they were the kinds of prayers that were copied out for anchoresses and shared between them. Indeed, I would argue that this would account not only for the circulation, but also the composition of the Wooing Group prayers.34 The dates of the texts suggest that the Ancrene Wisse author’s assumption that his readers would have access to such prayers could well have been predicated on his knowledge of the Wooing Group prayers themselves, among others. Nero, in which the four earliest Wooing Group prayers are found along with Ancrene Wisse, shows that these prayers were used in exactly this way, as part of the devotional and textual support required by anchoresses. The revisions to Ancrene Wisse found in Corpus suggest that the community of anchoresses addressed here was fairly close-knit, and shared reading material amongst themselves. The wider audience of the Corpus revision had formed close enough connections that the Ancrene Wisse author could refer to them as a metaphorical convent.35 As well, the growing community of anchoresses also seems to have required that their maidservants act as go-betweens, going from one anchorhold to another with messages, books and so forth.36 The rules concerning hospitality are relaxed especially for other anchoresses’ maids – the editor insists that the anchoress should invite them to stay, since they have taken such trouble on her account.37 This suggests that at least some of the anchorholds were close enough to be within walking distance, but far enough apart that the distance there and back might not be covered in a single day. Hospitality towards her sisters’ maids is important enough that the anchoress is advised to borrow or even beg in order to provide these visitors with meals; indeed, it seems that such maids’ visits are frequent and important enough for the reviser to add a substantial passage outlining the activities that the anchoress should, and should not, engage in with her visitors, and suggesting that two nights is long enough for a visit, and that rarely.38 If A Good Prayer to Our Lady, the one male-voiced prayer, was composed by a monk, there is nothing to prevent its having been composed for a patron – or patroness. It clearly circulated along with other texts in the Ancrene Wisse Group in one manuscript at least. The voice of the speaker in the prayers does not, clearly, preclude readers of either sex. 35 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 4.71, p. 96. 36 The material concerning the anchoresses’ servants in the following paragraph here was first published in Innes-Parker, ‘Medieval Widowhood and Textual Guidance’, 95–124. 37 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 8.8., p. 157. 38 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 8.37/327–28, p. 164. For the implications of the Corpus revisions for the kind of readers that may have been included in its audience, see ‘Medieval Widowhood’, where I argue that at least some of these anchoresses would have been aristocratic widows. This has important implications for the interpretation of the Wooing Group prayers, especially Wohunge. 34

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This, along with the evidence of the Wooing Group prayers, suggests that the anchoresses to whom the Corpus revision is addressed formed another kind of community – a literary/textual community shaped by the prayers and meditations that they shared. At least some of them seem to have lived in close enough proximity to share books and letters through their maidservants. They copied them; they loaned them to each other; but did they do more? The author of Ancrene Wisse directs the anchoresses to read Ancrene Wisse, particularly Part Eight, to their servants daily. Clearly, the anchoresses were responsible, at least in part, for the spiritual education of their maidservants, and, as Warren has shown, sometimes these servants inherited the anchorhold upon their mistress’s death.39 This suggests that in addition to the instruction concerning the Outer life found in Part Eight, the servants’ ‘reading’ (or listening) material would also have included the devotions outlined in Part One and the instruction concerning the anchoritic life found throughout the text. And so, I return to my speculation: what then? Did the anchoresses read the saints’ lives, devotional texts and prayers that they encountered to their maidservants in their daily sessions? Did they share prayers like those of the Wooing Group with their servants? Did they discuss their reading material with the servants who delivered their letters, books and scrolls between their anchorholds, especially if those servants were destined for an anchorhold themselves? Further, did they discuss their devotions in the letters themselves? And, what if? It seems clear that the prayers and devotional texts shared by the anchoresses to whom the Corpus revision is addressed were a significant part of their individual devotion. But what if they were more? Did these prayers form a bond of shared devotion that tied the anchoresses together in their love for their divine spouse and his mother? This seems not only possible but probable, as letters and scrolls passed between the anchoresses through the mediation of their maidservants. Furthermore, it seems likely that the maidservants themselves shared in some way in the literary and devotional community thus formed. Indeed, it is possible that the devotional community spread beyond the anchorhold into the lay community surrounding it. In order to explore these questions, it is necessary to look at what we know about medieval women’s reading practices.

Medieval Women’s Reading Communities A number of years ago, I explored the circulation of manuscripts containing Ancrene Wisse and works that drew upon it. The following argument uses the Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, CA, 1985), p. 26.

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material from these articles in order to trace the reading patterns of medieval women readers, especially in the traditions established by Ancrene Wisse and its descendants.40 While by no means exhaustive, the example of some of these manuscripts shows that such works did circulate amongst women readers. Indeed, in some instances, these readers could be classed as ‘reading communities’ of the kind that I have proposed for the Wooing Group prayers.41 Such reading communities were not limited to religious or lay women; indeed, many texts passed back and forth between religious communities and lay readers. Two manuscripts containing Ancrene Wisse itself provide evidence of the exchange of texts between women readers. Cleopatra contains a copy of Ancrene Wisse edited in the author’s hand and prefigures the revisions found in Corpus. The manuscript passed through a number of hands. Its original owner(s) cannot be identified, but it seems logical to suppose that it was owned by an anchoress who was known to the author, or to the house in which the author was working. It was copied using the pecia system, and is not the best witness to the text itself, containing a number of scribal errors.42 Nevertheless, the author’s annotations make it an important witness to the history of the composition of the revised text. It remained in the Welsh Marches during the early thirteenth century, passing into the hands of Matilda de Clare, countess of Gloucester. Matilda de Clare was a patroness of Canonsleigh, Devon, refounding it as a house of Augustinian canonesses. She donated Cleopatra to the canonesses sometime between 1284 and 1289.43 London, British Library MS Cotton Vitellius F.vii (Vitellius), dating from about the beginning of the fourteenth century, is the only surviving copy of the earliest French translation of Ancrene Wisse and is remarkably close to the sense of the original.44 Vitellius also implies a community of readers, this time consisting of lay women. A damaged inscription suggests that the manuscript was owned Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘The “Gender Gap” Reconsidered: Manuscripts and Readers in Late-Medieval England’, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 38 (2002), 239–69 and ‘The Legacy of Ancrene Wisse: Translations, Adaptations, Influences and Readers’, in A Companion to Ancrene Wisse, ed. Yoko Wada (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 145–73. 41 For references to other studies, see ‘The “Gender Gap” Reconsidered’ and ‘The Legacy of Ancrene Wisse’. More recently, see Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, NY, 2002). 42 See E. J. Dobson, ed., The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Edited from B.M. Cotton MS Cleopatra C.vi, EETS 267 (London, 1972), pp. x–xi. The pecia system involved dividing a manuscript into sections called peciae (perhaps based on the quires of the exemplar) so that more than one copyist could work on the manuscript at the same time. 43 Dobson, The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, pp. xxv–xxvi; Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, p. xiv. 44 See Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, p. xv. 40

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by Joan Holand, the wife of Thomas Holand, the 8th earl of Kent, and given to Eleanor Cobham, the second wife of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, sometime between 1433 and 1441 (when Eleanor was indicted for sorcery).45 Eleanor Cobham was a member of the same confraternity as Joan Beaufort.46 Joan Holand seems to have made a habit of giving books to female friends. She also owned, and probably commissioned, Tokyo, MS Takamiya 8,47 which contains, amongst other things, a copy of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (another text which indicates the abiding influence of Ancrene Wisse).48 Joan gave this manuscript to Allyse Belacyse, a gift that is recorded in an elaborate inscription.49 Alice passed the book on to her servant, Elizabeth.50 Together, these two manuscripts illustrate the kind of ‘reading circle’ which, it is becoming clear, was common amongst fourteenth- and fifteenth-century aristocratic women.51 However, the transmission of Takamiya 8 has interesting implications for the sharing of manuscript between recluses and their servants. Both Joan Holand and Alice Belasys spent much of their lives in religious seclusion, Joan from the time of her widowhood and Alice seemingly from her youth. J. A. Herbert, ed., The French Text of the Ancrene Riwle, EETS 219 (London, 1944), pp. xi–xiii. The manuscript was damaged in a fire at the Cotton Library, before it came to the British Library. Eleanor was found guilty, forced to do public penance, and confined to house arrest for the rest of her life. Nevertheless, the charges seem largely aimed at her husband, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, who was, at the time, heir presumptive to the throne. Indeed, there was a fine line drawn between female piety and heterodox practices, however genuine her devotion. I thank Liz McAvoy for making this point. 46 By the fifteenth century, confraternities offered new options for laywomen who wished to lead a devout life without withdrawing from the world. For Joan Beaufort, see below, p. 179. 47 Takamiya has recently donated all of his manuscripts to Yale University, but they do not yet appear on the Beineke catalogue website. 48 In his Mirror, Love refers to Ancrene Wisse in a way that assumes his readers’ knowledge of the text; the case of Joan Holand indicates that such an assumption is thoroughly justified. See Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition, ed. Michael G. Sargent (Exeter, 2005), Introduction, pp. 98, 52. 49 Professor Takamiya generously brought this manuscript to the conference ‘Mapping Late Medieval Lives of Christ’, held at Queen’s University, Belfast, in June 2010, where Michael Sargent read aloud from it. The opportunity to view this important manuscript was overwhelming, and I thank Professor Takamiya for his kindness to all the participants. 50 Carol M. Meale, ‘“oft siþis with grete deuotion I þought what I miȝt do pleysyng to god”: The Early Ownership and Readership of Love’s Mirror, with Special Reference to its Female Audience’, in Nicholas Love at Waseda, ed. Shoichi Oguro, Richard Beadle and Michael G. Sargent (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 19–46. 51 Meale points out similar circles of readers indicated by the passing of manuscripts between women; ‘oft siþis with grete deuotion’, passim. 45

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Joan spent the years from 1410 until her death in the Cistercian house of Beaulieu in Hampton, and it is there that she must have been living at the time of her gifts to Alice Belasys and Eleanor Cobham (Alice Belasys was born c. 1410 or slightly earlier).52 Takamiya 8, then, was shared between two women who were religious recluses (although not anchoresses), and then passed on by the second to her servant, much as I have suggested the Wooing Group prayers might have been shared between anchoresses and their servants. Other manuscripts of Nicholas Love’s Mirror also reveal reading circles of aristocratic women, some of them patronesses of anchorites and religious communities.53 Joan Beaufort, the first countess of Westmoreland, belonged to the same confraternity as Eleanor Cobham, Elizabeth Beauchamp, Eleanor Hull and Margaret, duchess of Clarence and owned a deluxe manuscript of the Mirror (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS e mus 35).54 Joan Beaufort and her second husband, Ralph Neville, were patrons of various anchorites in Durham, as well as several religious institutions.55 She also hosted Margery Kempe, an avid consumer of devotional literature, at Raby in 1413.56 Joan’s piety also seems to have extended to her family. Her daughter, Cecily Neville, duchess of York and mother of Edward IV, was a well-known patron of devotional literature. The matrilineal influence on patronage continued with Cecily Neville’s daughter, Margaret of York, duchess of Burgundy. These ladies show the continued activity of lay patronesses throughout the fifteenth century.57 The lives of both Joan and Cecily Neville provide evidence that women’s devout reading and piety shown in other ways (such as patronage of religious houses) are related, suggesting that affective devotion is part of an entire lifestyle for many lay women.58

Meale, ‘oft siþis with grete deuotion’. I have argued elsewhere that Wohunge may have been addressed to an aristocratic woman (or women) who entered the anchorhold upon being widowed. The kind of reading circle discussed here could very well have been similar to the women who read the Wooing Group prayers. See Innes-Parker, ‘Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd and the Tradition of Affective Devotion: Rethinking Text and Audience’, in The Milieu and Context of the Wohunge Group, ed. S. M. Chewning (Aberystwyth, 2009) and ‘Medieval Widowhood and Textual Guidance’. 54 Jonathan Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Woodbridge, 1988), pp. 122–3. 55 Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, p. 68. 56 Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, p. 100. 57 Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries, p. 102. 58 See Meale, ‘oft siþis with grete deuotion’. This suggests that devotional reading is intended to provoke a practical response, an argument detailed by Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God (Oxford, 1997). 52 53

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Another manuscript which is, as Meale points out, ‘richly suggestive of the kind of relationships, often encompassing a shared piety, which joined women together ...’ 59 (both religious and lay) is the Foyle manuscript.60 The manuscript belonged to Sybilla de Felton, abbess of Barking (d. 1419),61 and later passed from Margaret Scrope, a nun at Barking prior to the dissolution, to Mistress Agnes Goldwell, a gentlewoman in the household of her sister, Elizabeth Scrope Peche. The book-owning Scrope women were avid readers and patrons of vernacular literature, and their activities provide evidence of the extent to which manuscripts passed between lay and religious women readers. Margaret Scrope’s aunt, Agnes Scrope Boynton Ratcliffe, entered into religious seclusion at Marrick Priory after her second husband, Sir Richard Ratcliffe, was killed at Bosworth in 1485; an inscription, written by her daughter, on fol. 3v of New York Public Library MS Spenser 19, records that she gave the manuscript to the priory (probably upon her death).62 Agnes’s sister-in-law, Anne Harling Wingfield Scrope, owned London, British Library, MS Harley 4012, which contains, among other material suitable for female readers, the second extant copy of The Cleansing of Man’s Soul, and tracts from The Pore Caitiff.63 Elizabeth Scrope Beaumont de Vere, countess of Oxford, a cousin of Anne Scrope, was the owner of London, British Library, MS Harley 1706.64 There is some evidence (not indisputable) that Harley 1706 may once have belonged to Barking. Given the close relations between the Meale, ‘oft siþis with grete deuotion’, pp. 35f. The Foyle manuscript was formerly the property of Christina Foyle, Beeleigh Abbey. It was sold upon her death and is in private hands. The manuscript contains, among other things, Rolle’s Form of Living, Love’s Mirror and a Middle English version of Flete’s De Remediis Contra Temptaciones. 61 Since Sybilla de Felton died in 1419, the manuscript must have been copied very shortly after the licensing of Love’s Mirror by Archbishop Arundel in 1410, suggesting that the nuns of Barking were at the cutting edge of new developments in vernacular theology. See Vincent J. Gillespie, ‘Vernacular Books of Religion’, in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375–1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 317–44; A. I. Doyle, ‘Reflections on Some Manuscripts of Nicholas Love’s Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ’, Leeds Studies in English 14 (1983), 82–93. See also A. I. Doyle, ‘A Survey of the Origins and Circulation of Theological Writings in English in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries with Special Consideration of the Part of the Clergy Therein’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1954), pp. 2301–02 n. XX; David N. Bell, What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries (Kalamazoo, MI, 1995), pp. 75–6. 62 Erler, ‘Exchange of Books’, p. 364. This manuscript contains Grace Deu or The Pilgrimage of the Soul, a ME translation of Guillaume Deguileville’s Pélerinage de l’âme. 63 Doyle, ‘A Survey’, n. XXII. 64 Harley 1706 is a compilation similar to Harley 4012, containing, among other things, a Middle English version of Flete’s De Remediis, and fragments from both The Pore Caitiff and Þe Holy Boke Gratia Dei. 59 60

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female Scropes and Barking, it is not unlikely that a manuscript might have passed from one of the nuns to a lay friend or relative (as, indeed, is the case with the Foyle manuscript). The name of Elysabeth Rokewod (one of Elizabeth Scrope’s ‘maidens’) also appears in the manuscript.65

Conclusion Medieval women, both religious and lay, clearly shared books amongst themselves. What we know of networks of women readers in the Middle Ages enables some ‘informed speculation’ about the kind of textual community that might have owned and shared the Wooing Group prayers. Although we have no manuscript evidence for reading communities amongst the anchoresses for whom Ancrene Wisse was written, the internal evidence of the text itself suggest that they shared manuscripts and scrolls amongst themselves. The fact that the Wooing Group prayers must have circulated on individual leaves and scrolls suggests that they were likely among the texts shared by these anchoresses. What we know of the circulation of Cleopatra and Vitellius suggests that the reading communities through which Ancrene Wisse circulated were even wider, growing to include convents and laywomen who wished to live a devout life. These works, originally written to support the devotional lives of women who lived in solitude, constructed a textual community within and beyond the anchorhold. The reading of these texts together with their servants enabled one kind of community of prayer and devotion. However, the sharing of prayers and devotional texts with other anchoresses provided yet another kind of community within solitude, a community that bound the anchoresses together in devotion and love. Such sharing is encouraged so strongly by the author of Ancrene Wisse that he includes the refusal to do so within the sin of envy, contrasting the anchoress who denies another the loan of a booklet with Christ, who descended even to Hell to share what he had. The anchoress who shares with another turns the eye of faith towards Christ, who suffered all for the good of others.66 Furthermore, the Ancrene Wisse author calls upon the anchoresses to show their love and support of each other through sharing their possessions, including ‘scrowe oþer cwaer, hali monne froure’ [‘a scroll or a booklet, the comfort of holy men’].67 The solitude of the anchorhold, it is clear, did not exclude the bonds of community. That community was not limited to the ‘metaphorical convent’ identified in the Corpus

See further Doyle, ‘A Survey’, and Doyle, ‘Reflections’. Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 4.58/, p. 94. 67 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I, 4.89, p. 107. 65 66

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OSM

LUL

a a1

b

UUL

URG

c

a2

Woh

d d1

e

d2

d3

R

d+e

e1

e2

L

T N S + V (Talkynge) Lower case letters = hypothetical lost sources

 

L = London, Lambeth Palace, MS 487 (Lambeth) N = London, British Library, MS Nero A. xiv (Nero) R = London, British Library, MS Royal 17 A.xxvii (Royal) T = London, British Library, MS Titus D. xviii (Titus) S = London, British Library, MS Add. 22283 (Simeon) V = Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng.poet.a.1 (Vernon) Figure 1. Possible family tree of the Wooing Group prayers.

revision as the shared commitment to the life of solitude.68 Rather, the sharing of devotional works created a textual community of anchoresses, supporting each other in their solitary lives.

68

Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, I 4.71, p. 96.

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Chapter 11

The Anchoress Transformed: On wel swuðe god ureisun of God almihti and þe wohunge of ure lauerd in the Fourteenth-century A Talkyng of the Love of God DIANA DENISSEN

T

he fourteenth-century compilation A Talkyng of the Love of God (hereafter A Talkyng) is an excellent example of the incorporation of two texts from the ‘Wooing Group’ – On wel swuðe god ureisun of God almihti (hereafter Ureisun of god almihti) and þe wohunge of ure lauerd (hereafter Wohunge) – in a new textual and social context.1 Ureisun of god almihti, Wohunge and the related text Ancrene Wisse, associated by dialect and manuscript tradition, were originally written for anchoresses in the West Midlands in the thirteenth century. Both Wohunge and Ancrene Wisse are specifically addressed to anchoresses, but these texts nevertheless quickly passed into the hands of a wider group of readers. A Talkyng is included in the closely related fourteenth-century Vernon and Simeon anthologies. MS Bodleian Eng. Poet. a.1 (The Vernon Manuscript) contains the complete text, but in MS British Library Add. 22283 (The Simeon Manuscript) the beginning and end of A Talkyng are missing.2 Both Ryan Perry and Wendy Scase have demonstrated that the texts in the Vernon manuscript 1

2

This chapter is based on research as part of the Swiss National Science Foundation project ‘Late Medieval Religiosity in England: The Evidence of Late Fourteenth and Fifteenth-Century Devotional Compilations’, carried out at the University of Lausanne from 2013 to 2016. For more on the ‘Wooing Group’, see for instance, The Milieu and Context of the Wooing Group, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning (Cardiff, 2009). The texts from the ‘Wooing Group’ have been edited in The Wohunge of Ure Lauerd, ed. Meredith Thompson, EETS o.s. 241 (Oxford 1958) and more recently by Catherine Innes-Parker in The Wooing of Our Lord and the Wooing Group Prayers, ed. and trans. Catherine InnesParker (Peterborough, Ont., 2015). For more on the Vernon Manuscript, see Studies in the Vernon Manuscript, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, 1990) and The Making of the Vernon Manuscript. The Production and Contexts of Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet. a.1, ed. Wendy Scase (Turnhout, 2013).

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were thoughtfully edited and revised, and this leaves the question open as to whether possible versions other than the Vernon and Simeon copies of A Talkyng might have been substantially different.3 In addition to the anchoritic source material from the ‘Wooing Group’, A Talkyng is made up of a translation and free rendering of parts of some of Saint Anselm’s (d. 1109) ‘Prayers and Meditations’. Anselm’s texts in fact already underlie the thirteenth-century anchoritic texts, and Wohunge in particular. This text incorporates the Anselmian confession of the sinful soul, its tone of impassioned prayer and exclamation, and the idea of withdrawal into the chamber of the heart.4 Anselm’s texts were still very much in vogue in the fourteenth century, both in Latin, but also in Middle English translations.5 Both the Vernon and the Simeon manuscripts also contained Middle English versions of Anselm’s meditations. There is a Middle English translation of Anselm’s second meditation in the Simeon Manuscript, but unfortunately the translation that is announced in the fifteenth-century index of the Vernon Manuscript, under the title ‘Orisons off seynt Anselmes Meditaciouns’, is absent in the Vernon manuscript due to a loss of forty leaves. The extracts from the work of Saint Anselm in A Talkyng are not just used to provide authoritative quotations, but they are an inherent part of the text. Finally, A Talkyng also includes some unidentified inserted parts, possibly written by the compiler. The rhyming passages in particular within these unidentified parts seem to point to an attempt to create something new, although the compiler could have been influenced by Richard Rolle’s fourteenth-century works.6 Ryan Perry, ‘Editorial Politics in the Vernon Manuscript’ and Wendy Scase, ‘Some Vernon Analogues and Their Patrons’, in The Making of the Vernon Manuscript, ed. Scase, pp. 71–95 and pp. 247–68 respectively. The versions of A Talkyng in the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts are probably copies of an earlier version of the compilation, although Ralph Hanna suggests that A Talkyng could also have been compiled specially for the Vernon Manuscript. Ralph Hanna, Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XII: Smaller Bodleian Collections (Cambridge, 1997), p. xiii.  4 For a more elaborate discussion of Anselm’s influence on the Wooing Group texts, see Catherine Innes-Parker, ‘Þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd and the Tradition of Affective Devotion: Rethinking Text and Audience’, in The Milieu and Context of the Wooing Group, ed. Chewning, pp. 96–122; and Denis Renevey, ‘Enclosed Desires: A Study of the Wooing Group’, in Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England, ed. William Boening and Robert Pollard (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 39–62.  5 Anselmian passages from Meditatio ad concitandum timorem, for example, appear in the Prick of Conscience and Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale. See Evelien Hauwaerts, ‘The Middle English Versions of Saint Anselm of Canterbury’s Prayers and Meditations’, in Saint Anselm of Canterbury and His Legacy, ed. Giles Gasper and Ian Logan (Turnhout, 2012), pp. 258–75. For more, see also Margaret Healy-Varley, ‘Anselm’s Afterlife and the Middle English De Custodia Interioris Hominis’ in the same volume, pp. 239–57.  6 Cecilia Westra bases the date of the compilation on her judgement that the work reflects  3

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A Talkyng is a late medieval account of the compiler’s personal and affective response to his twelfth- and thirteenth-century source material as well as an independent text that was read by a new community of readers. Unpacking these two layers of meaning provides valuable insight into the textual and devotional intentions behind this late medieval text. The intimate style of A Talkyng as a first-person narrative in which the narrator describes his surroundings and personal religious experiences gives the impression that the compiler did not intend the text to reach a broad audience, but that it was either written for his (or her) own religious community or for a closely related one.7 The narrator of A Talkyng tells the readers that he entered a religious community at a very young age: ‘my Rolle’s fourteenth-century work, while Wolfgang Riehle argues for an earlier date of composition, closer to the ‘Wooing Group’ texts. Riehle suggests that A Talkyng inspired Rolle instead of the other way around. Cecilia Maria Westra, A Talkyng of Þe Loue of God. Tekst-Uitgave Met Commentaar (The Hague, 1950), p. xxvi and Wolfgang Riehle ‘Weibliche versus männliche Spiritualität?’, in Englische Mystik des Mittelalters (Munich, 2011), pp. 108–10. In this essay, I will be quoting from A Talkyng as edited by Westra. Page and line references will be placed in the body of the chapter. Westra’s edition has a facing-page translation and all translations are taken from Westra’s edition as well.  7 The compiler of A Talkyng adds two Latin quotations to his vernacular source texts: ‘so þat I mai verreyliche sigge wiþ the apostle Paulus. Viuo ego iam non ego viuit autem in me Christus’ (p. 10, lines 9–10) and ‘Factus est sudor eius sicut gutte sanguinis in terram decurrens’ (p. 46, lines 21–2), and moreover exhorts the audience to the practice of the monastic triad of lectio, meditatio and oratio. Denis Renevey therefore argues that A Talkyng was compiled for a male monastic community. See also Denis Renevey, ‘The Choices of the Compiler: Vernacular Hermeneutics in “A Talkyng of the Love of God”’, in The Medieval Translator 6, ed. R. Ellis, R. Tixier and B. Weitemeier (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 232–53. However, A Talkyng also contains some passages that might lead one to conclude that the text was composed for a female community, for instance, when profession is regarded as a wedding (see the quotation in the main text) and when the firstperson speaker expresses gratefulness, because Christ ‘woldest wedde me to þe & 3iuen euermore þi self al hol to be my owne’ [‘wanted to wed me to You and give Yourself to be for all future time entirely mine’] (p. 64, lines 22–3). Riehle, moreover, argues that the first-person speaker of A Talkyng should be thought of as female, because of the use of ‘courtly terms’ in the text, for instance, when the first-person speaker conceives of herself as a bird in a cage: ‘as I weore þin owne brid. Here in to þi cage’ [‘as if I was Your own bird, here into Your cage’] (p. 58, line 12) and later says ‘put me her priueli. to lere me louely. For to singen sweetly in þin oune cage. So þat þou beo al my song. wiþ loue teres euer a mong’ [‘put me here privately, to teach me lovingly to sing sweetly in Your own cage. That You are [the theme] of all my song, always mixed with tears of love’] (p. 66, lines 22–4). See also Riehle, ‘Weibliche’, pp. 108–10. Given that the compiler draws upon the devotional tradition of Anselmian prayer and adds references to scripture and the Church Fathers, I will assume that the compiler of A Talkyng is male. For reasons of convenience I will also refer to the first-person speaker of A Talkyng as ‘he’, although any conclusive evidence for this is absent.

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trouþe pli3tyng þat I made at chirche dore. whon I was a child. 3yng to þyn owne weddyng’ [‘for the pledging of my troth, which I made at the door of the church, when I was a young child to wed you’] (p. 66, lines 34–5). The reference to this religious order as ‘on my Rode sperred in my ordre. from worliche murþes. and fleschliche lustes’ [‘fastened in my order, as on my cross, barred from worldly joys and carnal lusts’] (p. 62, lines 7–8) also points to an enclosed life. So, the text was probably composed from within an enclosed fourteenth- (or perhaps even a late thirteenth-) century religious context. The compiler of A Talkyng immediately addresses the readers in the prologue of the text – a free translation from Anselm’s prologue to his ‘Prayers and Meditations’ – and gives them specific instructions on how to read it. They should read it ‘esyliche’ (‘at ease’) and ‘softe’ (‘gently’, ‘slowly’ or ‘quietly’ if one assumes that the text is read aloud) and not right through: ‘And þat not beo dene. But bi ginnen and leten in what paas so men seoþ þat may for þe tyme ȝiuen mest lykynge’ [‘And that not right through, but begin and finish at such a pace that, as one sees, can for the occasion give most delight’] (p. 2, lines 3–6). This suggests a deep sense of the ingesting of the words of the text by a meditative form of reading, either vocalised or in silence. The aim of the text is to facilitate ‘inward felyng’ and ‘deplich þenkyng’ [‘deep thinking’] (p. 2, line 4) and the compiler gives his readers the responsibility to judge for themselves how much they read in one go and at what pace. Anselm’s prologue to his ‘Prayers and Meditations’, on which the prologue of A Talkyng is based, provided an important model for vernacular religious reading.8 Comparable to A Talkyng, the Pseudo-Augustinian Soliloquies (1390–1420), a set of affective meditations containing material by Augustine and other writers such as Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141), also directly incorporate a part of Anselm’s prologue to his ‘Prayers and Meditations’ in Middle English.9 The prologue of the Soliloquies too elaborates on how the text should ‘not to be radde in grete hast and in grete tumultuosite [confusion] but in quyetnesse’, ‘moderately’ and ‘easely’ [in a relaxed and moderately paced way], ‘with amorouse and a wise intent’ and in

A comparable instruction on how to read the text can be found in the colophon to Wohunge. The anchoress is instructed to read it when she is ‘on eise’ (Innes-Parker, ed., Wooing, p. 110). On the process of devotional reading in the vernacular, see also Vincent Gillespie, ‘Luykynge in Haly Bukes: Lectio in Some Late Medieval Spiritual Miscellanies’, in Looking in Holy Books: Essays on Late Medieval Religious Writing in England (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 113–45.  9 The text is extant in two fifteenth-century manuscripts: Cambridge, MA, Harvard University MS Houghton Richardson 22 and London, British Library MS Cotton Titus C. xix.  8

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‘abyding [lasting] meditation’.10 Like the prologue of A Talkyng, it is furthermore stressed in the Soliloquies prologue that the text should not be read all the way through or from beginning to end: ‘Ne allwey it is not need to begynne at the begynnyng, but where it plesith hym best’.11 However, different from A Talkyng, the author-compiler of the Soliloquies prologue has a practical and pragmatic attitude to religious reading and adds to the reading instructions of the prologue that too much repetition will cause unnecessary ‘hevenesse’ (boredom) instead of ‘swetnesse’ for his readers. Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ (c. 1400) contains a comparable kind of attitude to devotional reading. Love – the Carthusian prior of Mount Grace priory – expanded the lay pastoral syllabus with this popular work by providing a text about the basic elements of contemplation. The Mirror also played a major role in Archbishop Arundel’s campaign against Wycliffite heresy, because he officially approved the text. Love initially adopts the hebdomadal structure of daily meditations in the original Latin text of which his Mirror is a translation. However, at the end of the cycle Love abandons this structure and advises his lay readers to stick to a freer reading routine and select their own fragments instead, adding that he thinks daily meditation is ‘not conuenient’ and ‘to tediouse’ for his lay audience.12 Contrary to the reading instructions in the Soliloquies and the Mirror, the instruction not to read the text all the way through and to select particular passages has a different and less pragmatic meaning in the prologue of A Talkyng. Instead of being afraid that his readers will be bored, the compiler stresses the need for ‘continuaunce’ (‘perseverance’) (p. 2, line 13) instead. The compiler’s The prologue and digression of the Pseudo-Augustinian Soliloquies have been edited in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans (Exeter, 1999), pp. 224–9 (p. 225, lines 3–6). All references to this text will be taken from this edition. 11 Soliloquies, p. 225, line 10. 12 Nicholas Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Full Critical Edition. Based on Cambridge University Library Additional MSS 6578 and 6686 with Introduction, Notes and Glossary, ed. Michael G. Sargent (Exeter, 2005), p. 220, lines 25–34: ‘þerfore it semeþ not conuenient to folowe þe processe þerof by þe dayes of þe wike after þe entent of þe foreside Bonauentur, for it were to tediouse as me þinkeþ (…) Wherfore it semeþ to me beste þat euery deuout creature þat loueþ to rede or [to] here þis boke. take þe partes þerof as it semeþ moste confortable & stiryng to his deuocion, symtyme one & symtyme an oþere’. For more on the readership of Love’s Mirror, see also Ryan Perry, ‘Some Sprytuall Matter of Gostly Edyfycacion: Reader and Readings of Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ’, in The Pseudo-Bonaventuran Lives of Christ. Exploring the Middle English Tradition, ed. Ian Johnson and Allan Westphall (Turnhout, 2013), pp. 79–126. 10

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advice to not always start at the beginning of the text is not meant to prevent boredom, but to allow the reader to meditate on a particular selection of text from A Talkyng. The compiler of A Talkyng thus stays closer to the monastic view on reading based on the triad lectio, meditatio, oratio in which only intense and repetitive reading will lead to contemplation. He therefore has more ambitious spiritual expectations of the readers of his text, which further suggests that the text was originally composed within and for a closed religious community. The idea that a devotional text should be read slowly and intently is also stressed in Speculum Devotorum (Myrowre to Devout Peple) (1415–25): Also the medytacyonys folowynge be not red negligently and wyth hastynesse, but dylygently and with good avysement that the redare maye have the more profyte therof. For hyt ys better to rede oo chapetele dylygently and wyth a goode delyberacyon thenne thre wyth negligence and hastynesse, for ye shul not consydere how myche ye rede, but how wel.13

Although Myrowre to Devout Peple addresses a more general audience in its title, this meditative prose life of Christ, made like Love’s Mirror by a Carthusian, was originally written for what he calls a ‘spiritual sister’ and who was maybe a Bridgettine nun of Syon.14 The author of Myrowre to Devout Peple also comments in the prologue of the text that he thought of abandoning his work when he became aware of Love’s Mirror: Also I have be steryd ofte tymys to have lefte thys bysynesse bothe for my unworthynesse and also for Bonaventure, a cardynal and a worthy clerke, made a boke of the same matere the whyche ys callyd Vita Christi, and most of alle whenne I herde telle that a man of oure ordyr of Charturhowse had i-turnyd the same boke into Englyische.15

The fact that the Carthusian author of Myrowre to Devout Peple continues his project indicates that he had something different to add and that he thought his meditative prose life of Christ would be more suitable for the ‘spiritual sister’ than Love’s Mirror. The activity of religious reading is connected to a concrete number Myrowre to Devout Peple in Idea of the Vernacular, pp. 73–8 (p. 75, lines 60–4). For an edition of the first two thirds of the text, see: The Speculum Devotorum of an Anonymous Carthusian of Sheen, ed. J. Hogg, Analecta Cartusiana 12–13 (Salzburg, 1973–4). For a brand-new edition of the full text, see: A Mirror to Devout People (Speculum Devotorum), ed. Paul Patterson, EETS, os 346 (Oxford, 2016). 14 Idea of the Vernacular, p. 73. 15 Myrowre to Devout Peple, p. 74, lines 18–22. 13

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of chapters in Myrowre to Devout Peple: it is better to read one chapter well than three in a hurry. Again, this prologue thus provides a practical form of guidance on how to exactly read this devotional text. Next to Myrowre to Devout Peple, the fifteenth-century manuscript of the earlier discussed Soliloquies (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, MS Houghton Richardson 22), which preserves what is probably the original version of the translation, was also addressed to nuns.16 Although we do not have any concrete evidence about the intended readership of A Talkyng, the Vernon manuscript also contains a strikingly large number of works written either specifically for women readers or about female religious models and has been associated with a female readership.17 So, (partial) translations into English of Anselm’s reading instructions in the prologue to his ‘Prayers and Meditations’ seem to have been of particular interest to women in the late medieval period. The compiler of A Talkyng explains in the prologue of the text that it ‘is mad for to sturen hem þat hit redden to louen him þe more. And to fynde lykyng and tast in his loue’ [‘has been made to stir those who read it, to love Him the more and to find delight and enjoyment in His love’] (p. 2, lines 1–3). While the compiler of A Talkyng only speaks about finding ‘delight’ and ‘enjoyment’ in God’s love, Anselm also stresses ‘fear of God’ and ‘self-examination’ in the original prologue on which the prologue from A Talkyng is based.18 Instead of incorporating Anselm’s entire theology, the compiler of A Talkyng thus picked particular elements from Anselm’s ‘Prayers and Meditations’ as the basis for the text. However, even though the prologue might suggest otherwise, Christ is represented not only as the object of desire in the main part of A Talkyng, but also as a mirror through which the narrator can see his own sinful self.19 The narrator of the text states that: ‘mi sunnes ben so gastliche grisliche and grete makeþ me so whatsum and stinkinde foule. that I ne dat him neih3en ne folwe my neode’ [‘My sins are so ghastly, grisly and great, make me so detestable and stinkingly foul, that I dare not approach Him, nor act in accordance with my need’] (p. 10, lines 31–3). MS London, British Library MS Cotton Titus C. xix has been revised to address a less specific audience. The Idea of the Vernacular, ed. Wogan-Browne et al., p. 225. 17 See Studies in the Vernon Manuscript, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, 1990), especially Carol Meale, ‘The Miracles of our Lady: Context and Interpretation’, pp. 115–36; Felicity Riddy, ‘Women Talking about the Things of God: A Late Medieval Subculture’, in Women and Literature in Britain 1150–1500, ed. C. M. Meale (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 104–28; and The Making of the Vernon Manuscript, ed. Scase, as before. 18 Benedicta Ward, The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm with the Proslogion (London, 1973), p. 89. 19 For the function of ‘drede’ as a tool for spiritual and emotional cleansing that encourages humility, see Daniel McCann, ‘Feeling Dredeful: Fear and Therapy in the Scale of Perfection’, in Emotion, Affect, Sentiment: The Language and Aesthetics of Feeling, ed. Andreas Langlotz and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet (Tübingen, 2014), pp. 89–107. 16

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The fear of approaching God, and the movement of withdrawal that results from this, also forms part of many of Anselm’s ‘Prayers and Meditations’. However, unlike Anselm, the compiler and composer of A Talkyng presents desiring Christ and mourning the self not as different stages in the contemplative process, but as interconnected parts of affective devotion: the more self-loathing the narrator feels, the deeper is also the desire for Christ.20 After the prologue, the compiler of A Talkyng continues the main body of his text with the opening lines of Ureisun of god almihti: ihesu soþ God. Godes sone. Ihesu soþ God. soþ mon. Mon Maydenes childe. Ihesu myn holy loue. Mi siker swetnesse. Ihesu myn herte. my sele. my soule hele. [Jesus, true God, God’s son. Jesus, true God, true man! Man, virgin’s child. Jesus, my holy love, my sure sweetness. Jesus, my heart, my happiness, health of my soul] (p. 2, lines 21–3) Ureisun of god almihti: Iesu soð god, soð godes sune. Iesu soð god. soð mon. and soð meidenes bern. Iesu min holi luue. Mi sikere swetnesse. Iesu min heorte, mine soule hele. [Jesus true God, true God’s son. Jesus true God, true man, and truly born of a maiden. Jesus my holy love. My sure sweetness. The passages of self-loathing in A Talkyng are more extreme in tone than their Anselmian counterparts. For a critique on this, see Benedicta Ward, ‘Inward Feeling and Deep Thinking: The Prayers and Meditations of St Anselm Revisited’, Anselm Studies 1 (1983), 177–82.

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Jesus my heart, my soul’s salvation.]21

After this quotation from Ureisun of god almihti the narrator responds by adding: ‘Ihesu, swete Ihesu. Ihesu. deore Ihesu. Ihesu. Almihti Ihesu’ [‘Jesus, sweet Jesus. Jesus, dear Jesus. Jesus, almighty Jesus’] (p. 2, lines 24–5). The preparation of the mind for affective prayer of Ureisun of god almihti thus mixes with the narrator’s own response to the devotion of the Name of Jesus, creating a kind of ‘dialogue’ between the narrator of A Talkyng and his anchoritic source text. This process repeats itself in the next lines. The next phrase from Ureisun of god almihti is: ‘My leof. my lyf. myn holy wey. Myn hony ter. Ihesu. al weldinde Ihesu. Ihesu þou art al þat I hope’ [‘my beloved, my life, my balm, my nectar. Jesus, all powerful Jesus, You are all that I hope’] (p. 2, line 24–p. 4, line 1).22 This is followed by the ­following response from the narrator of A Talkyng: Ihesu mi makere. þat me madest of nouȝt. And al þat is in heuene. and in eorþe. Ihesu my Buggere. þou bouȝtest me so deore. Wiþ stronge passion. Wiþ þi precious blod and wiþ þi peyneful deþ on Roode. Ihesu my saueour. þat me schalt sauen. þorw þi muchele Merci & þi muchele miȝt. [Jesus, my maker, who made me of nothing and all that is in heaven and on earth. Jesus, my Redeemer, You brought me so dear with Your grievous passion, with Your precious blood and with Your painful death on the cross. Jesus, my Saviour, who shall save me through Your great mercy and Your great power.] (p. 4, lines 1–6)

Therefore, it is clear from the start of the text that the compiler of A Talkyng actively engages with his anchoritic source text. He does not just copy it, but also writes down his affective and literary response. The fact that the compiler imitates the narrative style of his source texts and updates the thirteenth-century vocabulary of Ureisun of god almihti into fourteenth-century English creates a mixed idiom in which the anchoritic source text intertwines with the compiler’s own additions. The incorporation of Wohunge into the compilation differs from the

Wooing, ed. Innes-Parker, pp. 172–3, lines 1–9. Originally in Ureisun of god almihti: ‘Swete Iesu mi leof. mi lif. mi leome. min healiwi. min huniter; þu ert al þet ich hopie’ [‘Sweet Jesus my beloved, my life, my light, my healing balm, my honey-drop. You are all that I hope for’]; Wooing, ed. Innes-Parker, pp. 172–3, lines 10–15.

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incorporation of Ureisun of god almihti because Wohunge does not form a textual basis to which the narrator of A Talkyng responds, but instead fragments from Wohunge are quoted in a more free and non-chronological pattern. While the compiler adds an increasing number of interjections that refer to the name of Jesus, he also starts visualising Christ’s body as ‘leor flesh whit under schroud’ [‘white flesh under clothes’] (p. 26, lines 23–4), which seems to indicate that his desire for Christ is getting stronger and he is moving from a more text-based form of devotion to a visualisation of Christ’s crucified body in his mind.23 To express his increasingly intense feelings of devotion the compiler of A Talkyng starts adding numerous short verse passages to Wohunge. When the passage on Christ’s Passion in A Talkyng starts, the narrative slows down considerably and enters into great detail. This elaboration on the narrative of the Passion could have been influenced by the detailed account of the Passion in the popular text Meditationes Vitae Christi from the late-thirteenth century – of which Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ is a Middle English translation. As Christ is laid on the Cross, the compiler of A Talkyng describes this process in a very detailed way and adds for instance: ‘Now þei streynen out his lymes and his senwes al to bersten. His liþes breken out of Ioynt that non of hem may lasten’ [‘Now they stretch His limbs, His sinews burst asunder, His limbs break out of joint so that none of them can hold out’] (p. 50, lines 9–11). In the next added passage, the narrator of A Talkyng makes a connection between describing the torture to Christ’s body and his own feelings. While Christ’s skin, sinews and bones burst, the narrator’s heart breaks in his breast: ‘Nou bersteþ þi skin. þi senwes and þi bones. Min herte cleueþ in my brest. for reuþ of þi mones [‘Now Your skin bursts, Your sinews and Your bones. My heart breaks in my breast in pity of Your complaints’] (p. 50, lines 15–17). As the compiler’s visualisations of Christ’s tortured body build up, they gradually start to form the main focus of the text. The narrator of A Talkyng for instance describes how: I in my soule wiþ al holy muynde seo þe so reuþly hongen on Rode. þi body al on blode þi limes al to re3te þi Ioyntes al to pli3te Wohunge, ed. Innes-Parker, p. 80, line 14: ‘flesh hwit under schrud’. Innes-Parker comments on the use of the word ‘schrud’ which means garments or clothing, but also has the connotation of a ‘shroud’ as Christ’s human flesh (p. 117 n.6).

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þi woundes and þi leoue deor þat was so briht and so cleer ben now mad so grisly and þow lord so mekely tok hit al so louely for me þat was þin enemy. 24 [for when in my soul with a perfect intention I see you so piteously hanging on the cross, Your body all covered with blood, Your limbs wrenched asunder, Your joints twisted, Your wounds and Your sweet face, Which was so bright and fair, now made so horrible, and that You, Lord so meekly took it all with so much love for me, who was Your enemy.] (p. 60, lines 8–12)

By intently focusing on this image – Christ’s body covered in blood, his twisted limbs and joints, his wounds and his face – the narrator moves from reading words on the page to ‘reading’ Christ’s body. The creative input of the compiler is marked by the use of rhyme. The compiler adds to the prologue of A Talkyng that: ‘Men schal fynden lihtliche þis tretys in Cadence. After þe bigynninge 3if hit beo riht poynted & Rhymed in sum stude’ [‘One will readily find that after the introduction this treatise is in metre, if it is correctly punctuated, and that it rhymes in some places’] (p. 1, lines 16–18). It is thus apparent from the start that the compiler of A Talkyng uses literary devices to both express and generate affective stirring.25 The compiler’s addition of rhyming passages is both a creative and affective response to his anchoritic source material. I have adapted Westra’s layout of this passage in order to show the text’s rhyme and rhythm. 25 Sargent suspects that the word ‘cadence’ does not refer to its modern meaning of musical or metrical beat, but to the idea of ‘similiter cadens’, which can be connected to the Isidorian style of contemplative writing, in Michael Sargent, ‘What Kind of Writing is A Talking of Þe Love of God?’, in The Milieu and Context of the Wooing Group, ed. Chewning, pp. 178–93 (p. 191). Lois Smedick comes to the conclusion that the word ‘cadence’ cannot be linked to the Latin ‘cursus’ in a conclusive way in ‘Cursus in Middle English: A Talkyng of the Loue of God Reconsidered’, Mediaeval Studies (1975), 387–406 24

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Ureisun of god almihti and Wohunge do not just appear in isolation in A Talkyng, but they are placed in a textual framework partly inspired by Anselm’s three prayers to St Mary in his ‘Prayers and Meditations’.26 Contrary to the narrator in Anselm’s ‘Prayers and Meditations’, who is afraid to confess his sins before her, in A Talkyng St Mary is presented as a model of grief and compassion who can reconcile the narrator with God: þenk heer on þis wrecche. Moder and Mayden. þat falleþ þe to fote. in hope of þin helpe. cryinde reuþely after þi grace. Pese me ladi for þi muchele merci. to þi derworþe sone. þat Ichaue wiþ sunne schomeliche and lihtliche. so fele tyme a gulte. [Remember here this wretch, mother and virgin, who falls at Your feet in hope of your help, piteously crying for Your favour. Lady, for Your great mercy, reconcile me to Your dear Son, whom I have with sins shamefully and wantonly so many times offended] (p. 10, lines 27–31)

Mary becomes an intercessor in the reconciliation process between the narrator and God in A Talkyng. This builds up to a culmination in a highly affective passage in which Mary ‘offers’ Christ’s body to the narrator: Whon þin oune Moder so louely of chere þin owne bodi on þe cros. derworþe deore in þe selue liknesse. þat þou thenne were beodeþ me to cluppen. as myn owne fere.27 [When your own mother, so fair of face offers me Your own body on the cross, dear love exactly like You were to embrace it as my own companion.] (p. 60, lines 16–19) (p. 406). For more on the stylistic features of A Talkyng, see also M. M. Morgan, ‘A Talkyng of the Love of God and the Continuity of Stylistic Tradition in Middle English Prose Meditations’, RES 3 (1952), 97–116 and M. M. Morgan, ‘A Treatise in Cadence’, MLR 47 (1952), 156–62. The MED defines the word ‘cadence’ as ‘rhythm of prose or poetry; rhetorical periods; the use of rhyme or rhetorical periods’. 26 The compiler of A Talkyng acknowledges a debt to Anselm by suddenly interpolating the word ‘Anselmus’ (p. 20, line 5) in the text as an introduction to a passage inspired by Anselm’s second Prayer to St Mary. The acknowledgement of sources is restricted to Latin authoritative texts in A Talkyng, which could point to a hierarchy in source material. 27 I have adapted Westra’s layout of this passage in order to show the text’s rhyme and rhythm.

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The compiler of A Talkyng here again presents us with his own response to Anselm’s ‘Prayers and Meditations’ and the three prayers to St Mary from this collection in particular. In this passage, Mary fulfils the narrator’s desire for her compassion by reconciling the narrator with Christ. This reconciliation is strikingly corporal: I lepe on him raply. as grehound on herte. al out of my self wiþ loueliche leete. An cluppe in my armes. þe cross bi þe sterte. þe blood I souke of his feet. þat sok is ful swete.28 [I leap at Him swiftly as a greyhound at a heart, quite beside myself in loving manner, and fold in my arms the cross at the lower end. I suck the blood from His feet; that sucking is extremely sweet.] (p. 60, lines 22–4)

The emotional response of the narrator resembles a state in which the distinction between the physical object of the crucifix and the desired subject of the narrator’s creative imagination is erased. The narrator is explicitly active in his desire, while Christ remains passive. Christ is normally addressed as ‘You’ in the text, but there is a sudden switch to the third-person pronoun in this passage. The narrator thus seems to objectify Christ in these lines, perhaps quite literally by actually turning him into a devotional object. The hunting metaphor that introduces this passage characterises the narrator’s violent desire for Christ. It bestialises the narrator and turns Christ into a prey with wounds. The author of the Cloud of Unknowing warns his readers in chapter 46 for this kind of desire, which he views as ‘out of measure’: ‘abide curtesly [responsibly] & meekly [humbly] þe wil of oure Lorde, & lache not ouer hastly [too quickly], as it were a gredy grehounde, hungre þee neuer so sore [severely]’.29 The narrator of A Talkyng is in a state of ‘spiritual ecstasy’ in which he describes himself as ‘loue mad’ and his desire for Christ as insatiable. The narrator embraces, kisses and sucks the blood from Christ’s feet for a long time, but ‘whon I haue al don. 3it me luste more’ [‘when I am sated, I want yet more’] (p. 60, line 30). The narrator first sucks the wounds on Christ’s feet, before Layout my own. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counselling. Edited from the Manuscripts with Introduction, Notes and Glossary, ed. Phyllis Hodgson, EETS o.s. 218 (London, 1944), p. 87, lines 17–19.

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sucking from His side wound in the final paragraph of A Talkyng and thus works his way ‘up’ through Christ’s body.30 Instead of Christ – and perhaps to validate this form of affective piety – Mary is represented as an approving witness in the love scene between the narrator and Christ. The narrator describes how he pauses for a moment and ‘i loke on hire þat him bringeþ and heo biginneth to smyle as þau3 hire likede wel and wolde I dude more’ [‘I look at her, who brings Him, and she begins to smile, as if it pleased her and she wanted me to go on’] (p. 60, lines 26–8). The fact that the narrator ‘soukes’ (sucks) Christ’s blood links Christ to the Virgin herself in her role of the nourishing mother. With the word ‘souken’, which has as its primary meaning ‘to suck for milk’ or ‘to feed from the breast’, the narrator’s sensual and violent love for Christ is linked to Mary’s comforting and maternal love.31 Mary’s presence in A Talkyng ends with the representation of her mantle as a peaceful space of enclosure: heo openeþ hire Mantel þat ladi so kuynde. and happeþ vs þer under in þat muri fitte. 3if eni mon vs askeþ. þeer men may vs fynde as hem þat lykeþ þer þei ben & loþ is for to flitte. Swete lemmon leoue lyf Mony wo haue þei. þat are not holliche wiþ þe. in þin holi cluppyng. But wel is me þat I may euer more niht and day. al þis world forsaken. and beo wiþ þe al one. [She opens her mantle, that Lady so kind, and wraps us under it in that joyful experience. If anybody should want us, there we may be found, as people whom it pleases to be where they are, reluctant to go away. Sweet love, dear life, great suffering have those who are not entirely with You in Your holy embracing. But I am happy that I may for ever, day and night, leave this world and be with You alone.] (p. 60, line 33–p. 62, line 5)

Perhaps the compiler was inspired by the iconographic tradition of the Madonna della Misericordia (Madonna of Mercy) or Schutzmantelmadonna (shelteringcloak Madonna): the image of St Mary opening her mantle for protection. The oldest version known of this image is a small panel by Duccio (c. 1285–1300) with three Franciscan friars under the cloak.32 Mary is also depicted as a ‘Shrine ‘þer wol I souken of þi syde þat openeþ a 3eyn me so wyde. Wiþ outen eny fluttyng. Þer wol I a bide. As hit was opened for me. so blessed be þat tyde’ [‘There I shall suck of Your side, which opens towards me so wide, without moving at all, and there I will stay. When it was opened for me, so blessed be that time] (p. 68, lines 8–10). 31 I want to thank Camille Marshall for her helpful remark on the use of the word ‘souken’ in this fragment. 32 Duccio, Madonna of the Franciscans, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, tempera on wood, 23.5 x 16 cm, c. 1285–1300. 30

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Madonna’ in the medieval period: a statue of Mary that opens to reveal God the Father and the Cross as the Son in her womb. Sometimes the ‘Shrine Madonna’ was combined with the ‘Madonna of Mercy’ imagery.33 When the statue of the ‘Shrine Madonna’ is closed, the group of Christians sheltering under Mary’s mantle is then one with Christ. Comparable to this iconographic tradition, the narrator of A Talkyng is also wrapped in the mantle of the Virgin as an inner space. Yet, both the ‘Virgin of Mercy’ and the ‘Shrine Madonna’ imagery stress the idea of a devotional community under the mantle of Mary, while the narrator of A Talkyng is on his own and explicitly stresses that he wants to be with Christ alone. The final representation of Mary as the ‘Virgin of Mercy’ at the end of A Talkyng connects the structural and narrative Marian frame of the compilation with the two blocks of anchoritic source material included in the text. The image of the narrator, who is wrapped under Mary’s mantle with Christ and has forsaken the world, interacts with the anchoritic idea of enclosure also present in A Talkyng and based on Wohunge with some additional affective language on the Name of Jesus: A swete Ihesu. swete leof. my lyues loue. my swetyng. þou hast maad me of nouht. fro the deþ þou hast me brou3t. From þe world in to þi chambre. [Ah sweet Jesus, sweet love of my life, my beloved, You have made me of nothing, You have redeemed me from death, You have brought me, dear Lord, from the world into Your room.] (p. 58, lines 23–5) Wohunge: Broht tu haues me fra the world to bur of þi burðe [to the bower of your birth], steked me i chaumbre.34

Therefore, it is away from the world, by both inner and exterior withdrawal, that the goal of the compiler to ‘stir’ those who read the text can reach its full potential. Wrapped in the mantle of the Virgin as an inner space, the compiler of A Talkyng reaches a state of ‘sowlehele’ (or salus anime: the health or salvation of the soul), which is the ‘title’ of the Vernon manuscript in the rubric to its table of contents, and hence salvation.35

A good example is Shrine Madonna, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg, linden wood, 126 x 103 x 34 cm, c. 1309. 34 Wooing, ed. Innes-Parker, p. 106, lines 385–6. 35 For an analysis of the medical frame of ‘sowlehede’ or ‘salus’, see Daniel McCann, ‘Heaven and Health: Middle English Devotion to Christ in Its Therapeutic Contexts’, 33

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The compiler of A Talkyng first instructs his late medieval readers on how to read devotional material and then presents them with a result of this process, which ultimately moves beyond the text from reading to seeing and feeling. It seems that the kind of affective stirring produced by the performance of the compiler’s source texts – particularly the performance of the prayer of Wohunge before the cross – stirs the performer (in this case the compiler) not only to feel, but also stimulates him to add his own response to the text. In the last passage of Wohunge, the narrator – the voice of the meditating recluse – shifts to the voice of the author who asks the recluse to pray for him and explains that he has written the text for her to allure her heart to think about God.36 So, there is a distinction in Wohunge between the first-person narrative voice (composed by the author, but internalised by the praying and meditating recluse) and the external voice of the author who instructs her. In A Talkyng there is no such distinction, which means that even though the compiler addresses his readers in the prologue of the text, the compiler and narrator of the text are essentially indiscernible. The compiler of A Talkyng invites his readers on a spiritual journey (or rather a rollercoaster) on which they can join him and shows them how he reaches ‘sowlehele’ by a carefully planned process that engages both the rational and affective parts of the soul in reading, seeing and feeling. On wel Swuðe God Ureisun of God Almihti and þe Wohunge of Ure Lauerd thus found important new textual and religious ­significance in A Talkyng of the Love of God.

in Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life, ed. Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry (Turnhout, 2014), pp. 335–62. 36 Wooing, ed. Innes-Parker, pp. 110–11.

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Chapter 12

Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours1 DOROTHY KIM

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n examining the relationship between Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours, both of thirteenth-century provenance, this essay concerns itself with the entangled worlds of female Christian readers, male Christian book producers and illuminators, and the Jews living in their midst. In particular, it will raise questions about how we can conceptualise the entangled medieval process whereby Christian devotional art is realised and recalibrated in relation to Jewishness. In this way, my article discusses marginal and occasionally hidden communities connected to the Ancrene Wisse – rich, married lay readers, male artisan book illuminators and the Jewish communities of the West Midlands. As well as accounting for the gender dynamics in texts such as these – especially within the triangulated relation between female reader and (often) commissioner, male scribe and illuminator, and the image of male Jewishness – this chapter will draw upon the theories of entanglement and ‘intra-action’, as posited by Karen Barad, to deconstruct the totalising idea of a ‘grotesque hall’ of antisemitic images, particularly those appearing in the Egerton Hours BL MS Egerton 1151.2 Finally, it will evaluate how the interactions of these groups gather together for moments of ‘intra-action’ on the manuscript page in order to produce Christian material devotion for female lay communities. The queerness of this indeterminate, unfixed, constantly forming Jewish/Christian identity made possible by encounters between these different communities is at this essay’s foundation.

A very early discussion of the Egerton Hours and Jewish/Christian entanglements was published in Dorothy Kim, ‘Entangled Jewish/Christian Relations in the Middle Ages’, Frankel Institute Annual (2014), 34–6.  2 Karen Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, in Kvinder, Køn og forskning, Feminist Materialisms 1–2 (2012), 25–53.  1

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In Jewish/Christian Entanglements: Ancrene Wisse and Its Material Worlds,3 I argue that the beginning of Middle English literary production is inextricably entangled with Judaism. My exploration of the Ancrene Wisse manuscripts as well as the associated visual tradition in the Egerton Hours (London, British Library MS Egerton 1151) examines how the Jews, present in the thirteenth-century Welsh border area of England where Ancrene Wisse was probably composed, helped shape English literary production. In the twelfth century, there were established Jewish communities in Worcester, Hereford, Gloucester, Coventry, Bristol and Oxford, and while Ancrene Wisse’s early manuscripts date from before 1250, the Egerton Hours was produced in Oxford in c. 1260–70 just before the Expulsion.4 Whilst living in the same geographical and pre-expulsion location, the West Midland Jewish communities have not been considered in relation to anchoritic material produced in this region. Though the matrix of allosemitism, philosemitism and antisemitism is part of the critical lens in which Jews and Jewishness should be assessed in relation to the Middle Ages, I reframe the discussions of medieval Jewish–Christians relations further towards another paradigm. I consider how an ecosystem of relations emerges from the intertwined histories of these groups – particularly in relation to how Jews become witnesses to Christianity. I argue, moreover, that this particular emphasis opens up a new frame within which to examine Jewish/Christian relations. Indeed, this move from a dash (Jewish–Christian) to a slash (Jewish/Christian) shifts our focus away from thinking about Jewish/Christian relations in one-directional and fixed ways.5 Rather, it indicates a different kind of framework centred on separate entities still in the process of formation with unstable, ever-shifting ideas of the medieval categories of ‘Jew’ and ‘Christian’. For the purpose of this essay, and in keeping with the volume’s main focus, I will consider specifically the lay devotional reading community of anchoritic material and how Jewish/Christian entanglements reframe their gendered devotion.

Intra-action and Queer Materialism Manuscript materiality of the type I will be examining can be viewed as a moment of ‘intra-action’: according to Karen Barad’s ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, the phenomenon of intra-action ‘effects(ing) a separation between “subject” and Dorothy Kim, Jewish/Christian Entanglements: Ancrene Wisse and Its Material Worlds (Toronto, forthcoming).  4 Joe Hillaby, ‘Jewish Colonisation in the Twelfth Century’, in Jews in Medieval Britain: Historical, Literary and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Patricia Skinner (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 15–41. See the map on p. 14. Nigel Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts 1250– 1285, vol. 2 (London, 1988), p. 155.  5 Kim, ‘Entangled Jewish/Christian Relations’.  3

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“object”’ by what she terms an ‘agential cut’ that allows for a ‘“local” resolution’ – resolution here suggesting the space/time/matter moment of formation.6 ‘In explaining queer materialism and the question of identity, Barad explores the formation of group identities through the example of ‘social amoebas’, an example that helps explain critically my own points about Jewish/Christian devotional formations in the thirteenth-century West Midlands: What is or isn’t an ‘individual’ is not a clear and distinct matter, and that seems to be precisely the scientific sticking point: the question of the nature of identity is ripe here… Social amoebas queer the nature of identity, calling into question the individual/group binary. In fact, when it comes to queering identity, the social amoeba enjoys multiple indeterminacies, and has managed to hoodwink scientists’ ongoing attempts to nail down its taxonomy, its speciesbeing defying not only classification by phylum but also by kingdom.7

Barad writes against ideas of ‘crimes against nature’ and what is ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘unnatural’ by pointing out that nature itself is utterly queer: ‘It is my contention that the world in its exuberance is far more queer than all the numerous citations to Haldane’s quote seem to intend.’8 Here, Barad defines queer as a ‘radical questioning of identity and binaries, including the nature/culture binary’; she argues for the queerness of ‘causality, matter, space’;9 she is interested in finding a way to discuss ‘the nature of differentiating that is not derivative of some fixed notion of identity or even a fixed spacing’.10 As she explains it, ‘identity’ is ‘a phenomenal matter’ and, so, ‘phenomena are entanglements of spacetimemattering’, which leads to the idea of ‘intra-action.’ Thus, she writes: ‘the agential cut enacts a “local” resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy.’11 Barad urges us to think about these differentiations as instantiations across an ecosystem. An ‘intra-action’, then, is an instantiation in that horizontal ambiguous field that creates in a ‘spacetimemattering’ moment – an agential cut that produces entangled identities. Thus, the aim of my argument here is to consider how medieval Jewish/Christian identities emerge in a similar historical/spatial/ matter ‘ecosystem’ and to consider how these entangled intra-actions surface in these gendered devotional manuscripts. Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, 32. Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, 26.  8 Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, 29. J. B. S. Haldane writes: ‘the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose . . .’ in Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London, 1927), p. 286.  9 Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, 25 and 29. 10 Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, 32. 11 Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, 32.  6  7

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Framing how Jews are figured and the nuances and directions that happen in the context of each manuscript and in relation to the patron/devotee/reader who has ordered this English devotional text, helps us see how Jewish/Christian relations get painted on the page in entangled, indeterminate and queer ways. The number of hands and the number and types of bodies involved (Christian, Jewish, male, female, rich, artisan) also help us rethink how different kinds of gendered, religiously-marked, bodies matter. This queer materiality, this moment of Jewish/Christian intra-action, is what manifests within the material pages of the Egerton Hours. Because of the widely varying and specially bespoke qualities of the Book of Hours and its experimental form, I argue that the Egerton Hours’ specificity in depicting Jews suggests that the book’s patroness/reader/devotee was also reading Ancrene Wisse and that her textual preoccupations surface in her visual Horae. Ancrene Wisse’s focus on Jewishness emerges in its interest in Hebrew to English translatio and its use of unusual Old Testament Hebrew women as exemplars – Dinah, Bathsheba, Esther, Judith. Dinah and Bathsheba are exceptionally rare as figures in devotional material for Christian women readers in Britain during the thirteenth century (in Latin, Anglo-Norman French, English, or in the visual manuscript record). Thus, the Jewish influence on Ancrene Wisse can be seen through these exempla. Textually, Ancrene Wisse’s discussion, reformulation and use of Jewishness is a queer textual encounter – a radical questioning of identity binaries – in which Englishness, the anchoritic reader, and the Jew inhabit the same space. The text is borrowing, revising and often recycling Jewish exegetical forms and materials from the Babylonian Talmud amongst other sources.12 This material is coming both from clear Christian Hebraists and their contacts and exchanges with Ashkenazi rabbinic communities.13 It is also coming from the everyday contact, exchange and observations between the two groups (Jews and Christians) of both their religious rituals and everyday devotional practices.14 The use of Jewish exemplarities is a way to distinguish Ancrene Wisse’s English gendered devotion within a border space. In particular, I am arguing that Jewish exemplarity is used in this Because of the confines of space, I cannot expand here upon the specifics of these exegetical and religious commentary connections. However, I have a sustained chapter on precisely these Old Testament women exempla as they connect to the Babylonian Talmud in the second chapter of Jewish/Christian Entanglements. 13 See Pinchas Roth and Ethan Zadoff, ‘The Talmudic Community of Thirteenth-Century England’, in Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts, ed. S. Rees Jones and S. Watson (York, 2013), pp. 184–203. 14 Elisheva Baumgarten discusses these intersections for Ashkenazi continental Jewish and Christian communities in Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women, and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia, PA, 2014). 12

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text because of politicised and postcolonial geographies. Because this text has been generated in the West Midlands, its proximity to Wales plays a large, and I would argue hidden, role in fashioning Englishness.15 Thinking theologically through Judaism is a way to process the anxieties of this border zone in which a militarised, linguistic and racialised Welsh community lies just over the border. Jewishness and Jewish exemplarities form a less threatening minority presence and community with cultural cachet that allows English female devotion to distinguish itself from its Latin and Anglo-Norman French milieu.

Ancrene Wisse and the English Book of Hours The links between Ancrene Wisse and the William of Devon workshop’s Book of Hours called the Egerton Hours have rarely been discussed. To date, the most significant discussion outlining the association between the two originates in Nigel Morgan’s entry in Early Gothic Manuscripts (II).16 In describing London, British Library MS Egerton 1151, Morgan proposes two main features connecting the Ancrene Wisse text to this illuminated Book of Hours. First, he considers its content unusual because it contains two items typically not included: the Hours of the Holy Spirit and the Hours of ‘nun Jesu’. The latter he terms as ‘an Hours of the Passion, not the much later Hours of the Name of Jesus’.17 The Hours of the Holy Spirit is a text that Ancrene Wisse recommends to its readers: ‘Þe Ures of þe Hali Gast, 3ef 3e ham wulleð seggen…’ [‘If you want to say the Hours of the Holy Spirit…’].18 Morgan’s second field of connective evidence relies on geographical information. He asserts that the Egerton Hours must in its ‘Calendar and Litany… have some connection with a Victorine house in the West Midlands’.19 Morgan argues in favour of the geographical location triangulated by E. J. Dobson, who posits the originator of Ancrene Wisse as having been an Augustinian canon named Brian of Lingen of Wigmore Abbey, a Victorine house in the West Midlands.20 This is an argument also promoted by Liz Herbert McAvoy in the final chapter of Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space and the Solitary Life (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 147–77. 16 Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, vol. 2, pp. 155–7. 17 Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, vol. 2, p. 156. 18 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, EETS os 325 and 326 (Oxford, 2005 and 2006), vol. 1, 1.2 7, p. 18. For the translation, see Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses; A Translation based on Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, trans. Bella Millett (Exeter, 2009). The page numbers are the same in each instance. 19 Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, vol. 2, p. 156. 20 E. J. Dobson, The Origins of Ancrene Wisse (Oxford, 1976), pp. 322–3. However this 15

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However, Morgan also highlights specific details that weaken this thesis. He comments that ‘the other liturgical text provides conflicting evidence. The use of the Hours of the Virgin is not Victorine …The Office of the Dead is Sarum Use.’21 Nonetheless, he concludes that the Egerton Hours was made for ‘the lay woman kneeling before the Virgin on fol. 7 and on fol. 50,… The Ancrene Riwle, doubtless in view of its popularity as a text, acted as a model for lay piety.’22 In this instance, Morgan views the image of a kneeling woman as a donor portrait. Using the term ‘donor’ requires a little context. Current art historical scholarship suggests that we can call it the patron/devotee/reader image. As Adelaide Bennett has recently argued, we must consider French Books of Hours from this period as primarily the realm of female, married readers but often bankrolled by their husbands (that is to say, paid for and possibly commissioned by them).23 Even in this instance, ‘multiple indeterminacies’24 are the hallmark in this instantiation of manuscript production. Again, the lines of agency and control are constantly under negotiation, not fixed: and, therefore, queer. The framework Bennett discusses is further made more complex by the inclusion of the male illuminators, professional workshop and other material factors. However, in evaluating Morgan’s evidence, the tie between Ancrene Wisse and this Book of Hours is more tenuous. Morgan identifies the inclusion of the Hours of the Holy Spirit and the Hours of ‘nun Jesu’ in the Egerton Hours as a way to link this Book of Hours with Ancrene Wisse. He notes that another Book of Hours has the Hours of the Holy Spirit and the Hours of ‘nun Jesu’: London, British Library MS Additional 33385 (the Beatrice Hours). But, as Claire Donovan has shown, though the rubrics of the Hours of the ‘nun Jesu’ are the same in these two Books of Hours, the texts are different.25 In fact, the presence of an Hours of the Holy Spirit is not especially unusual to the Egerton Hours or even the Beatrice Hours; most thirteenth-century Books of Hours include an Hours of the Holy Spirit and their texts were, at this early stage, not fixed. Approximately eleven Books of Hours have survived from thirteenth-century has been thoroughly revised by Bella Millett. See Bella Millett, ‘The Origins of Ancrene Wisse: New Answers, New Questions’, Medium Aevum 61 (1992), 206–28. 21 Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, vol. 2, p. 156. 22 Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, vol. 2, p. 156. The donor portrait on fol. 7r is available online at: www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/ILLUMIN.ASP?Size=​ mid&​ IllID=4170. Accessed 5 August 2015. 23 Adelaide Bennett, ‘Issues of Female Patronage: French Books of Hours, 1220–1320’, in Patronage: Power and Agency in Medieval Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (College Park, PA, 2013), pp. 233–55. 24 Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, 26. 25 Claire Donovan, The de Brailes Hours: Shaping the Book of Hours in Thirteenth-Century Oxford (Toronto, 1991), p. 190.

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England.26 Four – de Brailes, Vienna, Egerton and Salvin Hours – are from Oxford workshops. The de Vere and Marston Hours have been located to the East Anglia/ Norwich/Fenlands area. The Murthly and Nuremberg Hours are from Parisian ateliers for English female patrons, and the Murthly Hours specifically for a West Midlands woman.27 The other Books of Hours do not have a fixed place of origin. In investigating the Egerton Hours in respect to these books, we can utilise the data to identify possible locations and see regional connections through image-types, texts or even which saints are named in its calendar and/or litany. Though geography is one way to establish a connection, there are more specific links between the Egerton Hours and Ancrene Wisse on the level of content. One possible connection that Morgan does not discuss is the unusual inclusion in the Egerton Hours’ litany of Saint Katherine, Saint Margaret and Saint Juliana, the Lives of all three saints form part of the ‘Katherine Group’ associated with Ancrene Wisse. Though Saint Margaret and Saint Katherine often are linked, especially in illumination programmes, Saint Juliana is not standard. Only the Egerton Hours, the Salvin Hours, Marston Hours, Nuremburg Hours and Oscott Psalter include Saint Juliana in the litany and calendar.28 All four were also produced in Oxford. However, the Marston Hours’ inclusion of Etheldreda in the litany connects it to East Anglia and to the Campsey Manuscript’s hagiographical program.29 In fact, Juliana’s presence in England has been exclusively literary – with one exception: Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 370 (c. 1280–1300) contains her image.30 Her rarity strongly indicates, therefore, that a text containing Saint Juliana may also be Donovan, The de Brailes Hours, p. 183; John Higgitt, The Murthly Hours: Devotion, Literacy and Luxury in Paris, England and the Gaelic West (London, 2000); Eleanor Simmons, Les Heures de Nuremberg (Paris, 1994). 27 Higgitt, The Murthly Hours, p. 6. 28 For the litanies in these manuscripts that include Juliana, see Simmons, Les Heures de Nuremburg, p. 119 for Nuremberg Hours; Donovan, The de Brailes Hours, p. 188 for the Salvin Hours; Egerton Hours on fols 78r and 78v; and Oscott Psalter (includes Juliana) on fol. 231r. 29 See The Campsey Manuscript, London, British Library MS Additional 70513 (formerly MS Welbeck I. C.I) on the Electronic Campsey project website: http://margot.uwa terloo.ca/campsey/cmphome_e.html. Accessed 28 July 2015; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Saints’ Lives and Women’s Literary Culture, 1150–1300: Virginity and its Authorizations (Oxford, 2001), pp. 6–12; Virginia Blanton, Signs of Devotion: The Cult of St. Aethelthryth in Medieval England 695–1615 (College Park, PA, 2007), pp. 173–230. 30 Sandler’s description of Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 370 misidentifies the end sequence of images: Margaret (fols 8v–9); Juliana (fol. 9v). The sequence is Katherine (fol. 8v), Margaret (fol. 9r), and Juliana (fol. 9v). Lucy Freeman Sandler, Gothic Manuscripts 2: Catalogue, A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in the British Isles 5 (London, 1986), p. 27. M. R. James, ‘An English Picture-Book of the Late Thirteenth Century’, Walpole Society 25 (1937), 23–32. I have discussed Saint Juliana in Dorothy Kim, ‘Female Readers,

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connected to the manuscript matrix and networks that produced Ancrene Wisse and the associated Katherine Group.

Visualising the Hours of the Holy Spirit While, as I have argued, the simple presence of the Hours of the Holy Spirit is not in itself evidence of a connection, the Egerton Hours contains a series of illuminations for the Hours of the Holy Spirit that directly resonates with the text of Ancrene Wisse. This pictorial sequence details the progress of a devotional day in what appears to be a direct response to Ancrene Wisse’s first section, which is itself unusual in its focus on the minutiae of a devotional day. Several scholars have commented on the ‘semi-liturgical’ quality of Part I of Ancrene Wisse and its similarities to the devotions in Books of Hours. George Sitwell first describes this correlation,31 and Bella Millett suggests that this similarity to the Book of Hours is related to the encouragement of the mendicant orders and, particularly in this case, the Dominicans’ devotional Constitutions.32 The Egerton Hours’ decorative programme for the Hours of the Holy Spirit is unique and is primarily a literal interpretation. It directly responds to Ancrene Wisse’s preoccupation with devotional time, especially in Part I, where the Guide asks its reader(s) to think very closely about time in relation to their activities and prayers for the day: ‘Her biginneð þe earste boc, of Ures and ureisons þe gode beoð to seggen’ [‘The first book, about Hours and prayers that are good to say, begins here’].33 The remaining six Books of Hours that include a decorative program relating to the Hours of the Holy Spirit are very different and do not comment or depict ideas related to the devotional day.34 Millett describes the ‘semi-liturgical’ devotional routine contained in Ancrene Wisse thus: Its central component is the Little Office of the Virgin; the anchoresses are advised to recite its seven Hours at the times prescribed for the Hours of Passion Devotion, and the History of British Library MS Royal 17 A. xxvii’, Journal of the Early Book Society 15 (2012), 153–214. 31 Gerard Sitwell, Introduction to The Ancrene Riwle, ed. Mary Salu (London, 1955), pp. xxi–xxii. See also Ancrene Riwle: Introduction and Part 1, trans. Robert Ackerman and Roger Dahood (Binghamton, NY, 1984), pp. 33–4. Donovan, The de Brailes Hours, p. 135. 32 Bella Millett, ‘Ancrene Wisse and the Book of Hours’, in Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, ed. Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (Cardiff, 2000), pp. 21–40 (p. 23). 33 Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, 1, p. 7. This discussion of the devotional day takes up the entirety of Part I in Ancrene Wisse. 34 The Beatrice Hours does not have images for this section, or at least none that have remained since decorative letters have been excised.

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Fig. 1. Man making bed British Library MS Egerton 1151, fol. 93v

the Divine Office. They also say the Office of the Dead, and may, if they wish, add the Hours of the Holy Spirit, reciting each Hour before the corresponding Hour of the Virgin Mary. Their other ‘semi-liturgical devotions’ include the suffrages of the saints, the Commendation, Pretiosa, the Litany, the seven Penitential Psalms and the fifteen Gradual Psalms. In addition to these, the author includes a number of what could be called ‘quasi-liturgical devotions’: these incorporate elements from the liturgy (psalms, hymns, collects, antiphons and versicles), non-liturgical Latin hymns and prayers and, in some cases, prayers in English. They include devotions to be said on rising, at midday, on going to bed, and for the sick and prisoners; salutations and other devotions recited before the Cross, and at the raising of the Host at Mass.35 Millett, ‘Ancrene Wisse and the Book of Hours’, p. 22.

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The images in the Egerton Hours of a ‘man in bed’ at Prime and ‘a man [makes] a bed’36 at Compline specifically correlate with Ancrene Wisse’s detailed prescriptions about what to do and say ‘Hwen 3e earst ariseð’ [‘when you first get up’], ‘abute middei’ [‘about midday’], ‘hwen-se 3e gað to ower bed’ [‘at whatever time you go to bed’].37 Thus, the Egerton Hours directly highlights Part I of Ancrene Wisse and its emphasis on specific activities for the devotional day.

The William of Devon Group and Contextualising Jewish Iconography The inclination to connect these two manuscripts has merit beyond the reasons Morgan has outlined. However, it is possible that Ancrene Wisse influenced the Egerton Hours in more complex ways than mere inclusion of an Hours of the Holy Spirit or a corresponding list of saints in its litany and calendar. The Egerton Hours’ Jewish iconography responds to the entangled nature of Jewish/Christian relations in the West Midlands during the period and especially in its urban areas (Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Bristol, Coventry), as evinced in Ancrene Wisse’s complex Jewish textualities. As mentioned at the start of this essay, based on my larger study of Ancrene Wisse, I contend that the text is profoundly interested in Jewish images, the Hebrew language and Jewish Old Testament exempla (Bathsheba, Dinah, Judith, Esther and the owl) and that its complexity reflects that of Jewish/Christian relations and the multicultural/multilingual setting of its composition. Ancrene Wisse’s textual complexities and ambiguous intra-action with Jewishness surfaces visually in the Egerton Hours. In this way, it is singular not just amongst the English Books of Hours produced in the thirteenth century but also in relation to the manuscripts of the William of Devon workshop in Oxford. The Egerton Hours is one of seven manuscripts connected to the Oxfordbased William of Devon workshop.38 Among these manuscripts – two Books of Hours, three bibles and two psalters – all vary in their depiction of the Jews. How Jewishness is illuminated in each manuscript reveals how this workshop Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, vol. 2, p. 156. Ancrene Wisse, ed. Millett, 1.1, p. 7; 1.17, p. 13; 1.29, p. 18. 38 The other six are London, British Library MS Additional 48985 (Salvin Hours); London, British Library MS Royal I.D.I. (William of Devon Bible); Blackburn, Museum and Art Gallery MS 091.21001 (Blackburn Psalter); New York, Pierpont Morgan Library MS M. 756 (Cuerdon Psalter); Cambridge, Emmanuel College MS 116 (2.I.6) (Emmanuel Bible); and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Auct. D. I. 17 (Bodleian Bible). Morgan, Early Gothic Manuscripts, vol. 2, pp. 150–62. 36 37

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operated and how its members catered to the different interests of each manuscript’s patron/reader/devotee. This does not discount the dynamic, constantly negotiated elements, bodies and communities at play in producing a manuscript and its devotional meaning. Jewishness was marked visually (most often pejoratively) in various ways in manuscript images, including hats, facial and bodily exaggeration or distortion (beards, hooked noses, etc.), and darker skin colour (generally browns and greys).39 These features could be used singly or in combination and such signs on the body paint the Jews visually in thirteenth-century English book culture as something dangerous and reviled. But context is also significant. For example, a range of headwear could be used to indicate Jewishness, representing anything from extreme antisemitic judgment to even a ‘holy’ or ‘good’ Jewishness. Likewise, non-Jews could be shown wearing ‘Jewish’ hats, though the hat often marked those figures’ difference as evil, foreign and/or ethnic others.40 Again, the hat as a sign of antisemitism and its range of possibilities can only be discerned through context. The headgear that visually marked Jewish communities in thirteenth-­century English iconography was wide and varied in appearance: pileum cornutum (‘horned skullcap’), Phrygian cap (folded), round hat (with or without a knob), coif, two-horned mitre.41 The pileum cornutum, and especially a version that looked like an inverted funnel, was a standard visual mark for a Jew. Likewise, the Phrygian cap (folded or unfolded, with or without a knob) was also frequently used as a Jewish mark, though it also denoted fools. The coif, or a cap with two side strings left untied, was also used.42 However, the most ambiguous hat in this range is the two-horned mitre (with points in the front and back). In thirteenthcentury Britain, this headwear marked Christian bishops despite also marking Jews. The two-horned mitre (back and front) began appearing on Jews in the late twelfth century. The iconography designated possible Jewish high priests (or episcopus judaeorum, ‘bishop of the Jews’ a title given to high-level Jews).43 It developed from the Moses iconography (i.e. the horned Moses) that also influenced

Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art in the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols (Berkeley, CA, 1993); Debra Higgs Strickland, Demons, Saracens, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art (Princeton, NJ, 2003). 40 Geraldine Heng, ‘The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages I: Race Studies, Modernity, and the Middle Ages’, Literature Compass 8.5 (2011), 258–74. 41 Heng, ‘The Invention of Race’, 105–6; Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness, vol. 1, pp. 111–78. 42 Strickland, Demons, Jews, and Saracens, p. 115. 43 Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness, vol. 1, p. 87. 39

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how Aaron was perceived: as a potential Jewish high priest (or bishop).44 These iconographic markers of Jewishness are specifically gendered since they distinguish only Jewish men. In essence, the degree to which the hat can mark Jewishness is not at issue; rather, the question is how severely could the hat mark the Jewish figure as evil, other and foreign? How far can the hat become an antisemitic mark? In the case of the William of Devon workshop and specifically the Egerton Hours, the headgear as marker must be contextualised within the manuscript image, within the manuscript’s iconographic programme, within the workshop’s iconographic style and, finally, within the genre’s iconographic cues. In terms of these comparative parameters, one can start to see a pattern emerging that reveals the ambiguous nature of how the Egerton Hours marks Jewishness. In this way, even in the iconographic field of medieval visual markers of Jewishness, what surfaces is a very complex series of visual signs that are frequently indeterminate.

Queer Performativity, Jewish/Christian Entanglement, and the Egerton Hours The Egerton Hours is rarely, if ever, critically discussed and certainly not by scholars working on medieval Jewish/Christian relations. However, this manuscript brims with queer ambiguity that suggests Christian/Jewish relations must be squarely confronted on its decorated pages. The Egerton Hours exhibits what would seem to be the most philosemitic demarcations of racial difference in the manuscripts from the William of Devon workshop. Its manuscript images depict the Jews as an almost direct iconographical mirror of Christians, relying on slight differences in headgear rather than racialised facial features. Indeed, this manuscript is visually defined by its queer indeterminacy in framing Jewish/Christian difference. Its iconography constantly queers Jewish/Christian identities. In this way, it directly mirrors what occurs with Hebrew/Jewish material in Ancrene Wisse, although Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours flirt with this ambiguity in different ways. Thus, I am arguing that with each instantiation in which fluctuating identities are queered (whether in Ancrene Wisse or the Egerton Hours), what is laid bare is how the pressures of local contexts and local resolutions allow agential cuts that produce a moment of intra-action. Since all the Oxford Books of Hours were made for women, the community of female book owners was clearly particularly invested in a devotional agenda that addressed the Jewish presence in Britain. I argue this was a sign of a more ambitious devotional practice: whilst part of a mendicant preaching profile, it also Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness, vol. 1, pp. 85–7.

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allowed for a more multifaceted way of examining Jewish/Christian relations in this manuscript. In the case of what is in the Egerton Hours’ particularly distinctive Jewish iconography, the illuminations reveal that the manuscript’s patroness/ reader/devotee considered the issue of the Jews (both contemporary and historical) in markedly queer ways. This also is in striking contrast to her contemporary female counterparts and their choices in other personalised devotional manuscripts. Simply put, the Egerton Hours makes very distinct iconographic choices, particularly in its decorated initials. The lay patroness appears to have requested a series of contemplative images in the decorated letters that visually display the entangled situation of Christians/ Jews. In particular, the female reader’s gaze is regularly focused on the male form – often, the Jewish male form. The Egerton Hours grapples with the indeterminacy discussed in Canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). This canon outlined the first Christian rules for marking Jews and Muslims distinctively through clothing.45 However, the reasons behind the distinguishing marks of clothing for the Jewish and Muslim communities centre on how difficult it was to differentiate Christians from these other religious and sometimes visually racialised groups. Canon 68 reflects an underlying anxiety that perhaps such distinctions among groups would not be apparent and that passing for Christian, Jewish, Muslim or vice-versa might result in entangled sexual coupling. In this way, Canon 68 lays out the religious and cultural background for both Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours in that it undergirds the foundational idea that religious/racial identity will always be a queer one – in essence, a queerness that always calls into question identities and particularly an idea of a radical calling out of nature/culture binary. This queering of racial/religious identities as multiple instantiations of constant indeterminacies is further heightened by the sexual encounters that Canon 68 discusses. The central purpose of the canon’s framework is to patrol and control interreligious sexual encounters.

Facing Out, Jewish/Christian Images and ‘Passing’ The Egerton Hours is arresting because it exhibits both a clear fascination with its Jewish iconography and a certain ambiguity about its stance on the Jews. In several decorated initials, this ambiguity is presented through a handful of images in which Jews could pass for Christian – they are painted identically aside from their hats. In this instance, I am thinking specifically of ‘passing’ and all it entails ‘Concilium Lateranense IV’, Conciliorum oecumenicorum decreta, ed. J. Alberigo (Basel and Freiburg, 1962), lines 5–23, p. 242. For the translation, see Readings in Medieval History, ed. Patrick J. Geary, vol. 2, 4th edn (Toronto, 2010), pp. 430–55 (p. 452).

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in relation to laws, visual markers of race and the fear of interracial coupling that accompanies this phenomenon.46 The dialogue occurring between the early manuscripts of Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours, and, in a larger context, the dialogues happening in these devotional books for female patrons/readers/devotees (both lay and religious) reveal a history of ‘passing’ that uncannily mirrors the twentieth-century contemporary hallmarks of this literary and legal trope. Thus, how to mark the Jew becomes the flashpoint that exposes a panoply of entwined issues that these women were discussing, commissioning and circulating in their books. Lucy Sandler has explained the ‘phenomenon of the head-filled initial’, particularly addressing the early fourteenth-century Lumere as lais, pointing out that the images frequently do not have anything to do with the text adjacent to them.47 In the case of the Lumere, Sandler argues that these ‘initial-filled heads represent the users or consumers of the manuscript, those who are expected to read the book and absorb its contents’. She considers them figures that would model attentiveness and be self-reflexive ‘surrogates’ for reading the devotional book.48 But in the context of the Egerton Hours, how does this work when we are presented with initials filled with male heads and naked, male bodies – certainly not the image of the original female, aristocratic reader kneeling in the ‘donor’ portrait page? I suggest that the manuscript’s iconographic programme reformulates Jewish/Christian identity and reflexive subject formation by presenting us with image pairs – Jewish and Christian – and by its fixation on the male (especially Jewish) body. In this way, these visual instantiations mediate and queer Jewish/Christian identities and thus, always leave multiple indeterminacies up for display, contemplation and slanted devotional practice. Because these thirteenth-century devotional manuscripts only mark men as Jews, the presence of the naked, male Jew becomes the site where the colliding fixations of the community of patrons/readers/devotees and their manuscripts on the male body, on marking racial otherness, and the shock of exposing the familiar neighbour are fleshed out. The Egerton Hours’ earliest images of the Jews present them almost entirely as ‘passing’ as Christians, with creamy complexions and golden locks under every hat – one of the few superficial signs of difference. Nella Larsen, Passing, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York, 2007). In critical race theory, Nella Larsen’s novel Passing is foundational in a discussion of a minority racial group passing as the majority hegemonic one, in this case, early twentieth-century black men and women passing as white. 47 Lucy Sandler, ‘The Lumere as lais and its Readers: Pictorial Evidence from British Library MS Royal 15 D II’, in Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces, ed. Elina Gertsman and Jill Stevenson (Woodbridge, 2012), pp. 73–94 (pp. 85–6). 48 Sandler, ‘The Lumere as lais’, p. 90. 46

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Fig. 2. Decorated initial ‘D’ British Library MS Egerton 1151, fol. 19v

In no other images but these headshots on the manuscript page are these ambiguous ‘passing’ Jews presented. In fol. 19v (Figure 2), a decorated ‘D’ appears to show the face of a Jew with curly hair, a beard and a hat, but with the complexion of a Christian. Likewise, the Jewish face in the decorated ‘H’ (fol. 32v) has the complexion and look of a Christian, but with the additional markers of curly hair, a beard and a Jewish hat. Jewish faces look strikingly similar to Christian faces. For example, a king with a golden crown depicted on fol. 34v (not pictured here) mirrors the aforementioned Jew on fol. 19v. Likewise, another decorated ‘D’ on fol. 42v (Figure 3) contains the head shot of a bishop with a mitred hat who looks uncannily like the Jew with the Jewish hat on fol. 19v. This last image pair exposes the similitude between male Jew and Christian: they differ only by the absence or presence of an extra hat-point. Thus, the haberdashery again becomes a visual arena for queer intra-action. Otherwise, these two decorated faces are remarkably the same. This queer ambiguity, this pattern of slippage, bolsters Lateran IV’s anxious subtext – that it is often difficult to tell Jew from Christian.

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Fig. 3. Decorated initial ‘D’ British Library MS Egerton 1151, fol. 42v

Further on in the Egerton Hours, the decorated initials become more overtly grotesque with images of hybridised animals and humans. In this setting, a series of four pictures (fols 69v, 83r, 107v, 155v) – variations of the same pose of a man squatting – exposes an unusual fascination with the male body, especially the Jewish male body. In the first image of a squatting man (fol. 69v) (Figure 4), a white-complexioned man in a loincloth, green wings and a gold conical hat – a Jewish hat that is used in other William of Devon manuscripts to mark Jewishness – stands inside another decorated ‘D’. This slippage between exposed Jew and exposed Christian correlates to the earlier slippage between distinguishing a Jew from a Christian with a hat, but now the stakes have escalated. Likewise, the focus is on the sexualised male body and, particularly, the male Jewish body. The fear spoken by Lateran IV, Canon 68 has come alive on this devotional book’s pages, crafted for a female reading community. And if these figures are akin to the manuscript’s grylluses (half-human/half-animal) and grotesques rampant in the marginal decorations, they have also escaped their textual boundaries and

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Fig. 4. ‘Squatting man’ British Library MS Egerton 1151, fol. 69v

are living their own life in the decorated initials. Marking the Jews in this manuscript has translated into an unleashing of these uncanny similarities and these unquiet personal ambiguities onto the pale pages of a heavily gilded devotional book. It has also unleashed the female patron’s/reader’s/devotee’s gaze onto the front-facing view of male, Jewish bodies in various stages of undress. And for the female lay reading community, the progression of images also points to a slow reveal, a devotionally-charged, meditative striptease. And in a world that highlights and encourages sensorial reading practices and meditation on glimmering and painted iconography, this undress entangles religious devotion and gendered sexualities in a way that Barad would recognise as intra-action, a sexually-charged agential cut that reveals a visual focus on the multiple indeterminacies of racial/ religious identity that is radically questioned with each revealed image. This is no better illustrated than in two final images that reveal how much gendered devotion has become all about ambiguous spaces and sightlines of material

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Fig. 5. ‘Naked Christian man’ British Library MS Egerton, fol. 83r

queerness. These unique images can be found on fols. 83r (Figure 5) and 155v (Figure 6) – two decorated initials in which naked men, Christian/Jewish, are prominently featured. The image on fol. 83r reveals a white, naked man squatting with his genitals exposed. He is marked as Christian in this decorated initial by two items: his haberdashery and his genitals. He wears a crown and his penis has been drawn as uncircumcised. Considering the size of the image in relation to the prayerbook’s petite size, the particular detail of the close paint work demonstrates the determined intent of both the patron/reader/devotee and the illuminators to mark Christian masculinity – that is to say, the illuminators endeavoured to visualise the uncircumcised Christian penis by means of the minute folds seen in the genital area. Doubly striking is the similitude between the marked Christian masculinity and the marked Jewish masculinity on fol. 155v. This slippage between exposed Jew and exposed Christian correlates to the earlier slippage of distinguishing a Jew

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Fig. 6. ‘Naked Jewish man’ British Library MS Egerton, fol. 155v

from a Christian with a hat, but now it appears that the stakes have migrated to exposed, gendered flesh. On fol. 155v, a naked man, wearing a gilded conical hat, squats with his hands up and exposes his gilded genitals. The gold on the vellum flesh of the manuscript actually creates a three-dimensional quality to the twodimensional naked image. This naked Jew and naked Christian are each other’s double in pose, size, skin colour and general expression. They are differentiated by the details of hats and genitals – though the gold in the genitals makes it difficult to distinguish if the Jewish male is circumcised. That question only further complicates the close, blurred and entangled constructions of Jewish/Christian difference. These manuscript and material intra-actions of medieval flesh – both its painted vellum and its depicted bodies – expose this manuscript’s superlative material queerness.

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Because so many illuminated English manuscripts were created for female patrons, the Jewish/Christian entanglements in manuscript production were often Jewish male/Christian female entanglements. The Egerton Hours is the only thirteenth-century English Book of Hours that reflects this uneasiness about interreligious sexual relations (discussed in Lateran IV, Canon 68) and that offers such a nuanced display of the instability of Jewish/Christian religious identities. The triangulated entanglements between these distinct communities of female patrons, male scribes and illuminators, and male visual subjects create an interesting moment to consider gendered power dynamics intersecting with religious/ racial markers. In this way, the female gaze, rather than the male gaze, has produced visual art that disrupts Christian/Jewish binaries and asks the question, what does it really mean to be a Christian/Jewish man? The indecent exposure of this Jewish figure demarcates the Jew in this decorated initial as sexually lascivious. Mellinkoff discusses how emphasis on the genitals – either through tight clothes, a codpiece or loose clothing with clear signs of penile erection – marks these Jews as sexual predators and sexually sinful.49 Nudity could signify neutral or even positive traits: for example, scientific portrayals, Adam and Eve, Last Judgement images, tortured or martyred saints; however, exposure or emphasis on Jewish bodies usually did not carry a positive signification. In fact, the church saw exposed male bodies as shameful to the point of explaining in one of the Irish canons, ‘If any cleric, from sexton to priest, is seen without a tunic, and does not cover the shame and nakedness of his body . . . he shall be alike despised by laymen and separated from the Church.’50 Susan L’Engle explains that visual images of bishops and priests naked and exposing their genitals were usually depicted to show punishment for crimes.51 The other moment in which women gazed upon naked men legally was during examination to discern impotency. This particular legal issue was part of pastoral exempla. It was included in Thomas of Chobham’s Summa Confessorum, which circulated widely after 1215 in England, as one ground for potential divorce.52 After Lateran IV, both Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours were books guided by mendicant orders that helped the laity shape their devotional lives. So, not surprisingly, the interests of the orders become filtered and refracted in these devotional books produced in the West Midlands and in Oxford for female audiences. Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness, vol. 1, pp. 203–6. John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer, Medieval Handbooks of Penance (New York, 1990), pp. 75–86 (p. 77). 51 Susan L’Engle, ‘The Naked Bishop: Baring the Body to Express the Law’, in Tributes to Lucy Freeman Sandler: Studies in Illuminated Manuscripts, ed. K. A Smith and C. Krinsky (London, 2008), pp. 111–23 (p. 116). 52 L’Engle, ‘Naked Bishop’, pp. 118–19. 49 50

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Hearing and reading the book, seeing or visualising the devotional image and reciting the prayers in these books allowed a conversation to surface about their community’s neighbours – the Jews. But this conversation also exposed how these readers could get dangerously close, bodily and materially. The mendicant orders were pivotal in encouraging lay devotion patterned on monastic religious devotion and thus had an impact on the production of religious books for women beyond the nunnery in thirteenth-century England. But the other main goal of the mendicant orders in England was to convert the Jews.53 In England, the crown encouraged the effort to convert Jews to Christianity: Henry III established the Domus conversum (‘House of converted Jews’) in 1232 in London.54 But even with all these encouragements, the contemporary Jews of England and their potential as future Christians were consistently under suspicion. Coupled with the fear that the Jews could potentially convert Christians with the seductiveness of their letters and the sexual lure of their bodies, the limits of exposure to their potential ‘contamination’ were perpetually under scrutiny. Yet the iconography of the Egerton Hours puts pressure on easy binaries – it queers relentlessly the possibility of religious/racial difference through the lens of gender. Instead, via a slight difference in paint strokes, it highlights the hair’s-breadth closeness of Jewish/Christian relations in thirteenth-century Oxford.

Conclusion This essay’s argument regarding the depictions of the Jews in Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours exposes an uneasy friction that occurs in both texts. These two connected texts present a set of textual and iconographic moments that push the limits of antisemitism and try to examine the complex tangle of seeing the reader’s English-speaking neighbour – the Jew – as simultaneously connected to Old Testament sacredness and the heinous sins of the New Testament Jews. These female devotional manuscripts have revealed a religious devotional world in which the pressures of multilingualism and multiculturalism pushed these texts into existence in their current form. They reveal a world where female devotional books have taken up the period’s intellectual debates in innovative and often devotionally experimental ways. And the sophisticated, aspirational devotional forms have pushed religious iconography and textuality into uncharted, ambiguous and Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, NY, 1982), pp. 246–57; John V. Fleming, From Bonaventure to Bellini: An Essay in Franciscan Exegesis (Princeton, NJ, 1982), pp. 145–53; Strickland, Demons, Saracens, and Jews, pp. 143–4. 54 Strickland, Demons, Saracens, Jews, p. 143; Trice Martin, ‘The Domus Conversorum’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 1 (1893–94), 15–25. 53

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queer materialities. Within these pages, the debate has been transformed into a shape that tests the edges of these multilingual and multicultural boundaries and categories regarding Englishness, Jewishness and the emergence and development of new English devotional genres.

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Index

Index

Note Medieval persons are indexed by christian name except where they are usually referred to by surname, e.g. Chaucer, Geoffrey. active life  79 Ælfric, the Homilist  55, 56, 61 Aelred, De institutione inclusarum  119, 125 Aidan, St  58 Alice Belasys  178–9 All Hallows, London Wall, church of  10, 21, 120–27 accounts of  121–30 anchorhold  121, 124, 125–7 anchorite of  10, 122, 123, 124–7 churchwardens of  10, 123, 129 parish community  120, 122, 127, 129–30 See also Symon Appulby almsgiving see under charity Ambrose, Concerning Virgins 62–3 anachoresis see anchoritism anchoress see anchorites, female anchorages [‘ankerage’] see cells, anchoritic anchorholds see cells, anchoritic anchorites  1, 13, 16, 18, 31, 48, 52, 53, 61, 67, 72, 74, 85, 87, 103–4, 109, 110, 111, 114–5, 117–8, 133, 135, 156, 167, 179 angels, and  54, 57, 63, 64, 66–7 aseticism of  50 bequests to  112, 124 disciples of  74, 76, 77, 80, 81 donations to  124 castles, in  8, 18–21 community, and  6, 39, 64, 68, 74, 79, 81, 118, 119, 121–7, 128–30, 143, 169, 175 contemplation, and  9, 16, 52, 64, 198 definition of  5, 69, 131–132 desert  1, 46, 48, 61, 78, see also desert female  20, 37, 38–40,41, 42, 45–6, 85, 86–8, 92–4, 96, 97, 98, 113–4, 120, 126, 171–2, 179 gates, at  23, 24–5 London, in  21, 120, 124, see also All Hallows, Tower of London, Westminster

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married 39 medieval  5–6, 18, 47, 55, 69, 125 modern 11–12 patronage  6, 102, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116 praying and interceding for  9, 86, 88, 89, 95, 97, 98, 102, 114, 198 prisoner, as  17, 42 priest  81, 111 religious community, in  8,9, 37–9, 42, 47, 56, 89, 97 spirituality of  45, 53, 169 urban  23, 25, 120, 121, 141 vows of  42, 43 See also: hermits, disciples; readers, anchoritic; solitaries and individually named anchorites: Christina Carpenter; Christina of Markyate; Ecgberht; Elizabeth Cressener; Eve of Wilton; Guy; Julian Lampet; Julian of Norwich; Loretta de Braose; Lucas, William; Symon Appulby; Thornbury, William anchoritic life  3, 7, 8, 10, 48, 97, 116, 125, 168, 176 contemplative 16, see also anchorites and contemplation penitential  43, 51 practical arrangements of  75–6 as withdrawal  8, 48, 110 See also spirituality, anchoritic; vocation, solitary anchoritic literature  102, 113, 173, 200 English tradition of anchoritic guidance literature 63 See also guidance literature and texts and individual texts: Ancrene Wisse; Goscelin, Liber Confortatorius; Grimlaicus, Regula Solitarium; Hali Meiðhad; Julian of Norwich; Wooing Group

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index anchoritic scholarship  6, 8, 11, 18, 119, 122, 133 anchoritism  7, 8, 12, 47, 110, 116, 130, 132 female  3, 6, 39, 40 female reclusion, 63 see also anchorites, female history  47, 103 medieval 121 See also imagery, anchoritic; readers, anchoritic; spirituality, anchoritic Ancrene Wisse  5, 8, 10, 11, 17, 43–4, 45, 46, 47–8, 49–50, 52, 102, 113, 119, 120, 152, 156, 161, 167, 170–1, 172, 173, 175, 176–8, 181, 183, 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206–8, 210–12, 218–9 author of  113–14, 126, 170, 174, 175, 176, 181 manuscripts of  169, 172–3, 175, 176, 177–8, 182 Fig.1, 200, 206 Ancrene Wisse group  167–8, 173–4 angels  7, 53–5, 57, 58–62, 62–3, 64–5, 66–7, 79, 151, 157–8, 159 angelic visitation  56–7, 61 Vita angelica  53, 56, 57 Anselm, St., ‘Prayers and Meditations’  184, 186–7, 189, 190, 194, 195 Antony, St.  65 Life of  55, 57, 58 archaeological excavation  7, 37, 42 geophysical techniques  8, 37, 38–9, 40 art, devotional  199 Arthurian literature  25, 26 Arundel, Archbishop  187 asceticism  26, 47, 48, 50, 62, 63, 81, 102 See also anchorites, asceticism of ascetics 5 female 62 Athanasius  55, 62 Augustine, St.  49, 64, 104, 151, 186 Confessions  3, 49 The City of God 154 authority 143 ecclesiastical  171, 138 king’s 28 Barad, Karen  199, 200–1, 215 Barking Abbey  180–1 Basil 70 Becket, Thomas  153 Bede  58, 59–60, 61, 104–5, 106 beliefs  52, 141 folk and popular  10, 148, 150–1, 156 religious and official  10, 148–9, 160–1, 163 Benedict, St.  1, 80, 82, 156

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Rule of  68, 69, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80–1, 82 benefactor  105, 107, 108, 109, 113 See also patron bequests  6, 20, 86, 89, 93, 96, 109, 112, 114, 129 See also wills Birgitta, St, Revelations  97–8, 104, 130 bishops  39, 40, 41, 42, 57, 69, 72, 74, 78, 80, 87,107, 124, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 209–10, 213, 218 See also named individuals: Aidan, Arundel, Cuthbert, Scrope, Wyvil Bridget of Sweden  see Birgitta, St. Black Death  10, 137–8, 140, 142 bodies  21, 40, 46, 48, 60, 102 n.4, 149, 152, 154, 159, 202, 217 Jewish  209, 215, 218, 219 male  212, 214 naked  212, 215, 218 See also Christ, body of Book of Encouragement and Consolation (Liber Confortatorius)  see Goscelin Books of Hours  see Hours Braose, de, family  see Loretta de Braose burial  46, 96, 110, 126–7, 129 burial chapel  38 Christ, of  130 symbolic 128 See also funeral Bynum, Caroline Walker  4, 102 n.4 Cameron, David  2 Canterbury  23, 43 Canterbury Tales, see Chaucer Carrow Priory see Norwich Cassian, John  1, 47–8, 52, 56, 70 Castle Hedingham  40–1 Priory 41 castles  8, 15, 19, 21, 31, 34 See also individual named castles: Dover, Pontefract, Restormel, Tower of London, Windsor Cecily Neville  179 cemetery  45, 127, 128 n.36 cell  8, 42, 45, 60, 63, 80 anchoritic  5, 7, 8, 13, 20, 21, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 46, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 71–2, 73–5, 77, 81, 103–4, 110–1, 112–3, 127, 128, 173 n.28 architecture of  76, 107 castle, in  8 monastery, in  38–9, 47, 69, 70–1 prison, as  42 solitary see anchoritic

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chantry chapels  102–3, 107–9, 110, 112, 114 Salisbury chantry  109 chantry priests  107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112 chantry system  113 charity  29, 75, 104, 105, 108, 112, 123, 139 alms collecting  131, 135, 139, 141 n.47 almsgiving  20, 104 n.13, 112, 114, 125, 141 See also donations Charles d’Orléans  13–17, 20, 21, 30–31 Fortunes Stabilnes  13–16, 31 ‘O Sely Ankir’  13, 16–17, 34 Venus 15–16, 30–31 charms  153, 155, 156, 161 Chastising of God’s Children 115 chastity  62, 63 See also virginity Chaucer, Alice  14 Chaucer, Geoffrey  141 The Canterbury Tales  155, 157 The Knight’s Tale 17 The Miller’s Tale  13 n.1, 150, 155, 156 Troilus and Criseyde  15, 16 Chobham, Thomas of, Summa Confessorum 218 Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain  15, 16 Christ  5, 7, 49–50, 63, 64–5, 68, 79, 81, 82, 90, 156, 160, 162, 172, 181, 189, 190, 192, 196, 197 body of  192–3, 194–5 crucified 46 death of  130, 191, 197 Christchurch priory  109–10 christianity  200, 219 medieval 25 rituals of  46–7 western 24 See also piety, christian christian life  36 Christians  1, 3, 202, 211, 213, 214, 216 ‘evencristen’  51, 152, 161–3 medieval  85, 104 See also readers, christian Christina Carpenter  42 Christina of Markyate  38, 42 n.24 Church  10, 44, 46, 54, 79–80, 106, 108, 118, 136, 141–2 hierarchy  10, 143 history 133 churches  7, 18, 20, 23, 47, 107, 109, 112, 135, 137, 186 city  5, 120 monastic  70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 96, 109–10 parish  40, 41, 52, 91, 98, 103, 117, 118, 127, 133, 136, 139

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See also All Hallows; Colne Priory, church of; Fisherton Anger, church of St Clements churchwardens 117 accounts of  117–8, 121 See also All Hallows churchyard 111 Clay, Rotha Mary  6, 18, 112, 127, 128, 133, 144 clergy  23, 33, 74, 118, 137, 138, 150, 160–1, 163 See also priests cloister  18, 51 n.64, 65, 69, 72, 74 clothing  15, 16, 20, 29, 30, 38 n.5, 72–3, 75, 76, 140, 192, 211, 214 See also hats Cloud of Unknowing 195 coenobitism see monasticism Colne Priory  8, 37–9, 40, 41, 42, 45–6 Robert’s mother, anchoress of   39–40, 41–44, 46, 47, 50, 52 church of  37–8, 41, 46, 50, 52 communitas  24, 26, 33 community  1–4, 5–8, 9, 37, 46, 47, 62, 80, 90, 98, 103–4, 105, 106, 108, 116, 117, 119, 130, 134, 136, 163, 199, 203, 209 christian  7, 51 devotional  176, 181, 197 female  62, 64, 98, 185 n.8, 210, 218–9 heavenly  54–5, 58, 63, 65 Jewish  199–200, 202, 209, 211, see also Jews lay  9–10, 86, 98, 140–42, 143, 150, 176 literary and textual  10, 130, 170, 173 n.2.8, 176, 181, 182, 199 storytelling  148, 150, 155, 157, 160, 162–3 local  42, 108, 118, 123 medieval 103 monastic  1, 39, 44, 48, 56, 68, 70, 73–5, 77, 79, 80, 177 parish  97, 117–8, 120–2, 125, 127, 129 penitential  103, 111 readers, of  169, 177, 181, 185, 200, 212, 214–5 religious  177, 179, 185, 188 secular 52 solitude and  3, 11, 39, 47, 52, 67, 81–2, 132, 143, 181 spiritual 120 virtual or metaphoric  51, 181–2 contemplation  3–4, 8–9, 48, 49 n.55, 52, 53–4, 60, 67, 79, 82, 110, 111, 187–8, 190, 212 anchorites, and  55 women, by  33 See also God, contemplation of

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index contemplative [n.]  160 audience 149 contemplative life  16, 54, 64–5, 79, 148, 161 ‘contemplatijf ’ 16 contemplative writing  193 n.26 convents  86, 87, 89, 92–4, 96, 98 See also named convents and nunneries: Barking Abbey; Castle Hedingham; Dartford Priory; Marrick Priory; Norwich, Carrow Priory; Nunnaminster corrodians 41 Cuthbert of Lindisfarne  57–60, 61 Life of  59, 60, 61 Dartford Priory  95–8 death  9, 15, 16, 21, 24, 46, 61, 85, 90, 95, 101–3, 104, 105, 108, 113, 116, 140, anchorite, of  88, 126, 176 Christ, of, see Christ deathbed 105 husband, of  39 See also Black Death; deaths of Henry IV, Joan Holand, Symon Appulby; Thornbury demons  58, 61, 150, 151–3, 154, 155–6, 158 demonic attack  10, 154 demonic deception  159, 163 sexual 154 Denton, Sister Rachel see anchorites, modern desert  1, 47, 58 enclosure as  47, 48, 78 fathers and mothers  39, 47, 50, 52, 55, 65, 70, 82, 103 monasticism 56 Lives of Desert Fathers (Vitas patrum) 56, 57, 61, 64, 65 See also anchorites, desert and spirituality, desert devotion  28, 63, 73, 79, 125, 142, 181, 192, 201, 219 affective  179, 190 Name of Jesus, to  191 personal  142, 176 See also piety devotional exercises and practice  92, 169, 202, 210, 212 devotional life  7, 45, 218 See also community, devotional devotional writings  93, 115, 120, 153, 161, 167, 170, 172, 173–5, 176, 179, 181, 182, 185, 188–9, 198, 201–2, 209, 211–12, 214–15, 218, 219–20

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Divine Office  69, 74, 131, 206 Office of the Dead  88, 113, 204, 207 Office of Mass  78 Office of the Virgin  206 See also liturgy donations  89, 90, 91, 97, 104, 123, 142 anchorite, to  6, 76 church, to  122–4 religious house, to  91, 96, 136 See also gifts donors  90, 103, 109, 122–3 lay 9 portrait of donor  204, 212 Dover Castle  20 dreams  33, 151–4, 156, 157–8, 159, 160, 162 deceptive 151–2 dream visions  15, 30, 149, 151 See also nightmares Earls Colne  40, 52 East Anglia  205 Ecgberht, anchorite  61 Edith, St  64 Life of see under Goscelin of Saint-Bertin Edmund of Abingdon  134 Speculum religiosorum  8, 44, 47, 48, 52 Egerton Hours see Hours Eleanor Cobham  178–9 Elizabeth Cressener  95–6 See also Dartford Priory enclosure  40, 41, 43, 48, 50, 52, 72, 87, 88, 97, 110, 112, 116, 152, 158, 163, 196 anchorites, of  39, 40, 111, 118, 120, 130, 197 rite of  74, 88, 127, 128 solitary   37, 40, 70–71 See also reclusion  eremitic life  78, 80, 138 See also hermits eremitism 132 See also anchoritism Erler, Mary  86, 87, 89, 90, 122, 124, 126, 127, 128, 130 Eucharist see Mass Eve of Wilton  5, 63, 64 See also Goscelin of Saint-Bertin exemplum  145, 149, 218 family  39, 52, 104, 106, 107, 127, 179 Felix, author of Life of St Guthlac  58, 60–61 Fenlands  58, 205 Fisherton Anger  5, 10, 132, 133, 135–6, 137, 140, 143 church of St Clements  136, 137 hermit of  133–4, 135–141, 142–3 mandate against  144–6

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folklore  7, 148, 161, 163 See also beliefs, folk forests  18, 27, 28, 29–30 King John, belonging to  29 liminal space, as  25, 26 Sherwood Forest  26 Wychwood, of  26 Fortunes Stabilnes see Charles d’Orléans friendship  9, 102, 103–6, 108, 109, 110, 113, 114–6 anchoritic  113, 115–6 funerals  126–7, 128 See also burial gender  6, 24, 66, 93, 94, 172, 199, 219 genitals  216, 217, 218 Geoffrey of Monmouth  26 gifts  41, 60, 123, 129, 178 anchorites, to  20, 31, 124 friendship, and  103 gift-giving culture  105, 116 spiritual 115 See also donations God  3, 5, 12, 32, 45, 49–50,51–2, 56, 59, 60–61, 64, 65–66, 67, 77, 79, 81, 91, 95, 99, 102, 106, 113, 115, 118, 120, 149, 151, 152, 160, 161, 163, 197, 198 contemplation of  48, 53, 54, 79, 82 fear of  189, 190 Love, God of  15 mother, as  162 prayers, in  152, 169, 172, 183, 190–92, 194, 198 word of  63 Goscelin of Saint-Bertin  63–4, 66 Liber Confortatorius (Book of Encouragement and Consolation)  63–5, 67, 119 Life of St Edith  65–6 Gregory of Tours  71, 80 Gregory the Great  64, 70, 151–2 Grimlaicus  5, 9, 56, 68–70, 72–3, 75, 77, 78, 79–81 Rule of (Regula Solitarium)  68, 69, 71–2, 73–5, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81–2, 118 guidance texts and rules  6–7, 8, 9, 10–11, 39, 44, 47, 52, 63, 67, 81, 102, 114,119, 172, 176, 184, 189, 191, 193, 197 See also anchoritic literature and individual texts: Ancrene Wisse; Edmund of Abingdon, Speculum religiosorum; Goscelin of SaintBertin, Liber Confortatorius; Vices and Virtues guilds, religious  103

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Guthlac of Crowland  57, 61 Guy (Wido), recluse  66–7 hagiography  8, 25, 26, 29, 34, 58, 60, 67, 205 hagiographers  57, 58, 63 Hali Meiðhad  169, 170, 174 Hampole Priory  87 hats  209–10, 213, 214, 217 heaven  5, 50, 53, 58 n.20, 59, 60, 66–7, 86, 88, 90, 102, 105, 114, 115–6, 158, 191 Christ in  63 gate of  90 See also angels hell  88, 181 Henry III, king of England  18, 20, 21, 26, 219 Henry IV, king of England, death of  31 Henry V, king of England  31–2, 34 hermitages  16 n.5, 20, 23, 26, 45, 58, 60 hermits  5, 21, 23, 29–30, 45, 57, 60, 61, 67, 78, 127, 131, 139, 140, 141, 143 ‘king and hermit’ topos  25, 26–7 ‘very modern’  11 See also anchorites and individually referenced hermits: of Fisherton; Restormel Castlel; Rolle, Richard; in Tower of London hierarchy 26 aristocratic 17 ecclesiastical  10, 131, 137, 143 Hilton, Agnes  91 Hilton, Walter, The Scale of Perfection 119 Holy Week  108 hospitals  23, 107, 108–9, 139 Bedlam 124 Hours  44, 46, 75, 171, 173, 206 Books of Hours  171 n.18, 202, 203, 204–5 Beatrice Hours 204 Egerton Hours  11, 199–200, 202, 203, 204–5, 206, 208, 210–12, 214, 218, 219 de Brailes, Vienna and Salvin Hours 204–5 de Vere, Marston, Murthly and Nuremburg Hours  205 French Books of Hours  204 Oxford Books of Hours  11, 204–5, 208, 210, 218–9, see also William of Devon Hours of the Holy Spirit  203, 204, 206–7, 208 Hours of the Virgin Mary  204, 207 See also Divine Office Hughes-Edwards, Mari  6, 7, 119, 125 iconography  215, 219 devotional 219

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index Jewish  11, 208, 209–12 style  210, 211 tradition 196–7 See also imagery identity  2, 7, 30, 39–40, 41, 103, 172, 201–2 anchoritic  7, 97 christian  199, 201, 212, 216 Jewish  199, 201, 210, 212 religious  211, 215, 218 queer  201, 211, 212 imagery  13, 47, 55, 104, 205 anchoritic  13–4, 17, 47, 49, 50, 55, 62, 67, 104 allegories 17 topoi  56, 66 tropes 24, 212 Jewish 199 Madonna 197 see also iconography images  49, 62, 67, 204, 205, 211, 212, 214, 218 birds, of  11, 47 contemplative 211 Christ, of  193 devotional 219 Egerton Hours, in  208, 210, 211, 214–7, see also Hours, Egerton Jews, of  208–9, 210, 212–4, 216 Mary, of  196–7 incluse (inclusus) see anchorite incubus  10, 150, 153–5, 159–60 See also māre individuality  2–3, 49 intercessions  9, 66, 86, 89, 91, 97, 98, 101–2, 103–9, 111–4 anchoritic role in  114 Isidore of Seville  70 James I, king of Scotland  21 Jerome, St  56, 63, 64, 70 Jesus  46, 114, 190–1 name of  191, 192, 197, 203 See also Christ Jewishness  11, 199, 200, 202–3, 209–10, 214, 220 Jews  199–200, 201–2, 209, 211, 212, 215, 218, 219 conversion of  219 depiction of  202, 208–9, 210, 219, see also iconography, Jewish and images, of Jews Jewish/Christian relations  11, 200, 202, 210–11, 218, 219 Jewish masculinity  216–7 ‘passing’ 212–3 Joan Beaufort  178–9

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Joan Holand  177–8 death of  179 John, king of England  27–9, 43 Judaism  200, 203 Julian Lampet  89 Julian of Norwich  9, 10, 12, 17, 125, 147–8, 149–51, 162–3 A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman  147, 148–9, 151–2, 155, 159–60, 161, 162, 163 A Revelation of Love  51, 147, 148–9, 151, 154–5, 159–63 Juliana, Saint  205–6 Katherine Group  167 n.1, 168, 169, 205, 206 kings  20, 25, 26–9, 32–3, 107, 213 See also hermits, ‘king and hermit’ topos and individually named kings: Henry III, Henry V, James I of Scotland, John, Richard II King Edward and the Hermit 26–7 Lacy, John, Dominican anchorite  112 laity  9, 11, 23, 45, 71, 86, 89–90, 90–1, 98, 102, 107, 109, 116, 118, 130, 131, 132, 138, 141–2, 150, 160–1, 163, 218 lay audience  149, 157, 162, 187 literate 141 See also women, lay and testators, lay Langland’s Pardoner  141 language  14, 52, 66, 94, 106, 147, 151, 160, 163, 171 n.18, 197, 208 Lateran Council, Fourth  211, 214, 218 laypeople see laity Le Goff, Jacques  25, 29, 101 Leclercq, Jean  53–4 Leonianus 80 Levi-Strauss 29–30 Liber Confortatorius see under Goscelin liminality  8, 23–4, 30–31 anchorites, and  45, 110 liminal people  23, 24–5, 30, 31–2 liminal space  25, 26, 102, 110 Lindisfarne  57–8, 59 literacy  94, 170, 171 n.18 illiterate servants  44 literate anchoresses  171 literate audience  94, 170 literate families  93 literate priest  94 women’s literacies  167–8 See also laity, literate liturgy  76, 207 mass, of  78 See also Divine Office

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Lofsong of ure louerde  169, 172–4 Loretta de Braose  43–4 Braose family of  43 Losinga, Herbert  66 See also Guy Love, Nicholas  187 Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ  178, 187 See also Meditationes Vitae Christi Lucas, William, anchorite  123–4, 126, 127 Lumere as lais 212 Macrobius 151 Madonna see under Mary, Virgin and imagery manuscripts Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402 (Corpus)  102, 167 n.3, 169, 170, 175–6, 177, 181–2 Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, MS 370 205 Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, MS Houghton Richardson 22  189 Chippenham, Wiltshire and Swindon Archive, WSA D1/2/3  132, 143–6 Foyle Manuscript  180, 181 Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 91 (The Thornton Manuscript)  89, 92 London, British Library, MS Add. 22283 (The Simeon Manuscript)  182, 183–4 London, British Library, MS Add. 33385 (The Beatrice Hours)  204 London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra C. vi (Cleopatra)  168 n.3, 177, 181 London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius F.vii (Vitellius)  177–8, 181 London, British Library, MS Egerton 1151 (The Egerton Hours)  11, 199–200, 202, 203–8, 210–20 London, British Library, MS Harley 682 14 London, British Library, MS Harley 1706 180 London, British Library, MS Harley 4012 180 London, British Library, MS Nero A. xiv (Nero)  168, 169, 170, 172–4, 175, 182 London, British Library, MS Titus D. xviii (Titus)  169, 172 n.25, 173, 174 182 Longleat House, MS 29  85, 87, 90 Manchester, John Rylands Library, MS Lat. 228 (Lat. 228)  93–4, 98–100

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New York Public Library, MS Spenser 19 180 Oxford, Bodleian, MS Eng. Poet. a.1 (The Vernon Manuscript)  182–4, 189, 197 Oxford, Bodleian, MS e mus 35  179 Oxford, Bodleian, MS Eng. th. C. 58  85 māre  10, 150, 153 n.29, 155–63 See also incubus Margery Kempe  9, 114, 155 n.39, 179 Marrick Priory  180 Martin, St  57 Dialogues of  56–7, 60 Life of 57 See also Sulpicius Severus Mary, Virgin  5, 62–3, 92, 94, 97, 172, 194–5, 196–7 churches and priories dedicated to  20, 23, 40, 85, 93, 111, 121 n.15 cult of  134 Madonna of Mercy  196–7 ‘Shrine Madonna’  197 See also imagery, Madonna and images, Mary of Mary, sister of Martha  65 masculinity 216 See also Jews, Jewish masculinity mass  20, 40, 46–7, 69, 74, 78, 90–1, 97, 98,103, 104, 105, 107, 109 n.29, 112, 115, 132, 207 Eucharist  46, 126 thirteen masses  86, 90–97 material culture  8, 25 Matilda de Clare  177 Matilda de St Valery  43 Meditationes Vitae Christi 192 See also Love, Nicholas medieval England  47, 102, 103, 111, 120 medieval life  7, 33 cities 23 town-planning 34 culture  4, 8, 25, 105, 116, 148 Norfolk 135 parish  104, 118, 121, 129 see also parishes people  101, 106 See also religion, medieval; society, medieval ‘medieval period’  47, 103, 111, 120 medieval texts   185 see also writers, medieval mendicant orders  24, 135, 206, 210, 218, 219 Metz  59, 69 Milett, William  95–6, 97–8

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index Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ see under Love, Nicholas monasteries and monastic institutions  1, 5, 9, 18, 27, 31, 42, 47, 48, 55, 69, 70–1, 78, 80, 81–2, 97, 106, 107, 108, 109, 129, 135, 172 dissolution of  113, 120, 129 monastic endowments  107 nuns, of  80 regime of  72–7 See also convents, nunneries and individual named monasteries: Castle Hedingham; Christchurch; Colne Priory; Dartford; Hampole Priory; Lindisfarne; Marrick Priory; Mount Grace; Norwich, Carrow Priory; Nun Monkton; Nunnaminster; Ripon; St Osyth’s; St Swithun’s; Syon; Westminster Abbey; Wigmore Abbey monasticism  56, 82 Carthusian 47 desert 56 monastic life  4, 71, 73, 75 See also writers, monastic Morgan, Nigel  203–5, 208 Mount Grace Priory  187 Mulder-Bakker, Anneke  6, 87, 119 Myrowre to Devout Peple 188–9 Nicholas of Clairvaux  53–4 Nicholas Love see Love, Nicholas nightmare  147–9, 152–3, 154, 156, 159–60, 163 niȝtmāre  155, 158 Norwich  22 fig.2, 23, 112, 114, 205 Carrow Priory  89, 152 anchoress of see Julian Lampet Nun Monkton  93 Nunnaminster  85, 89, 91, 98 nunneries  23, 41, 63, 87, 219 nuns  11, 40, 41, 71, 80, 85, 86, 87, 88, 93, 95, 96, 98, 152, 180–81, 188–9 Obits  103, 113 Office of the Dead see Divine Office Oreisun of Seinte Marie  169, 172, 173–4 Oxford  23, 200, 205, 208, 218, 219 Countess of  180 Earls of see Vere, de Books of Hours see under Hours, Books of Palladius 55 Paphnutius Cephalas  56

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parishes  97, 104, 111, 117–8, 121, 122–4, 125–7, 129, 130 anchorites and  128–9, 130 churches, see under churches See also community, parish parishioners 122–3 pastoral care and duties  44, 126, 131 pastoral syllabus  187 patronage  102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 111, 113, 114, 116, 179 patrons  27, 103, 109, 110, 111, 116, 136, 140, 179,180, 202, 204, 209 female  67, 177, 179, 202, 205, 211, 212, 215, 218 lay  107, 172 Paul, apostle  61, 185 n.8 Epistle to the Philippians  66 penis see genitals penance  43, 88, 113, 114, 135 penitence  48, 51 penitential practices  16, 110–1, 135 piety  26, 107, 140, 141, 179–80 affective 196 christian 4 lay 204 pilgrimage  73, 86, 115, 124, 135 pilgrims 76 Pontefract Castle  21 anchorite at  20 prayers  9, 28, 55, 60, 63, 64, 66–7, 71, 72, 75, 79, 80, 85, 86, 87, 92, 94, 95, 103, 106, 108, 110, 111, 114, 115, 116, 130, 156, 170–72, 175, 176, 181, 206, 207, 219 intercessory  86, 89–90, 98, 103, 105, 107–8 life of  16, 52, 120 liturgical  74, 88 Wooing Group prayers see under Wooing Group priests  40, 46, 73, 74–5, 79, 80, 81, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91–2, 93, 94, 95–6, 105, 110, 112, 126, 132, 137, 138, 160, 161, 218 anchorite 111 hermit 20 Jewish 209–10 ordinations of  138 See also chantry priests and clergy psalms  47, 71, 91–2, 94, 95–6, 99, 207 psalmody  57, 60, 75 psalters  170, 205, 208 Pseudo-Augustinian Soliloquies  186–7, 189 purgatory  9, 85, 86, 88, 90, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98, 101–2, 104, 106, 109, 110, 111, 113–6 ‘purgatoire’  102 n.6, 113 See also Revelation of Purgatory

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queerness  199, 201, 204, 211, 215–6, 217 queer materiality  201, 202, 220 queer nature  200–1 queer performativity  210 See also identity, queer rank see under status readers  11, 56, 62, 66, 79, 81, 88, 89, 94, 143, 152, 159, 161–3, 170, 171, 172, 175, 183, 185–8, 195, 198, 203, 206, 219 anchoritic  63, 67, 169, 173, 176, 202 female  168, 177, 180, 181, 189, 199, 202, 204, 211, 212, 215–6 lay  11, 89, 177, 187, 199, 130 See also community of; women as readership  11, 130, 151, 189 reading  9, 11, 63, 64, 65, 67, 70, 72, 81, 174, 175–6, 179, 189, 193, 198, 202, 212, 219 devotional  63, 174, 179 n.58, 187, 200 lectio divina  69, 71, 76, 188 practices  168, 170, 176, 215 reading circle  178, 179 religious 186–8 sacred  54, 55, 63, 65, 57, 71 recluses see anchorites reclusion  63, 67, 71, 72–7, 80, 81 solitary 37 See also enclosure Regula Solitariorum see under Grimlaicus religion  24, 78, 88, 107, 117, 135 medieval  4, 24, 131, 148, 160 religiosity  4, 141 religious world  131 religious (n.)  4, 34 religious life  47, 48, 53, 66, 67 religious practice  24, 141, 202 See also beliefs, religious religious houses  38–9, 40, 41, 42, 52, 90, 107, 172, 179 See also convents and monasteries religious orders  110, 186 monastic 27 See also mendicant orders Restormel Castle  25–6 hermit of  26 Revelation of Purgatory  9, 85–6, 88–9, 91–4, 95, 96, 97, 98, 115 author of  9, 86–7, 90, 91 Revelation of Love see under Julian of Norwich Revelations of Bridget of Sweden see under Birgitta Richard II, king of England  21, 32–3

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Ripon monastery  57, 59 rite of passage  30, 31, 32 Robert of Knaresborough, St., Life of  27–8 Rolle, Richard  140, 141, 184 romance 29, 34, 151, 161 Rome  62, 124 rules  45, 51, 55 anchoritic  63, 67 for solitaries  68, 70, 80 see also Grimlaicus, Rule of canons, for  69 religious 87 See also Benedict, St, rule of Salisbury  134–6, 139, 143 cathedral  134, 137 Chantry 109 See also Wyvil, Robert, Bishop of salvation  61, 64, 101, 106–8, 111, 114, 115–6 Sawles Warde  169, 170 Scott, Walter, Ivanhoe 26 Scrope, Archbishop  21 Scrope women as book-owners  180–1 self  3–4, 11, 16, 48–9, 50, 56, 79, 98, 189, 190, 212 discovery of  4 self-will 81 servants  17, 178, 179, 181 anchorites, of  51, 119, 176, 179 Beccel, servant of Guthlac  61 maidservants  44, 51 n.65, 86, 171 n.18, 175, 176 sexuality  24, 211, 215, 218 sexual assault  150, 154 See also demon, sexual Sheen, reclusory  31 Shere, anchorhold at  42 silence  12, 58, 61, 67, 78, 79, 119, 186 sins  32, 53, 85, 86, 101, 114, 113, 115, 137, 154, 157, 162, 181, 189, 194, 210 sinful people  3, 158, 160, 189, 218 sleep paralysis  154 society  1–2, 8, 24, 25, 29, 30, 57 67, 108, 117, 118, 130, 131, 134, 158, 163 angels, of  54, 56 English 34 medieval  2, 148 solitaries  3, 9,16, 23, 31, 32, 34, 39, 52, 53, 54–5, 63, 64, 67, 71, 72–8, 80, 81–2, 87–8, 140, 143 castle  18, 20 coenobitic 70 withdrawal of  30, 47–8. 50, 54, 131 See also anchorites, enclosure

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index solitary life  5, 10, 44, 46, 48, 57, 59, 71, 77, 81, 129, 132 See also anchoritic life; vocation, solitary solitude  1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11–12, 13, 39, 44, 45, 47–8, 49, 50–2, 56, 57–8, 60, 62, 65, 67, 82, 118, 124, 181–2 sowlehele  197, 198 Speculum Devotorum see Myrowre to Devout Peple Speculum Religiosorum see under Edmund of Abingdon speech  58, 59, 60, 61, 78 spirituality  37, 104, 172 anchoritic  37, 45, 53, 169 English 117 desert  65, 67 female 66 vernacular 169 See also religiosity St Osyth’s Priory  41 St Swithun’s Priory, Winchester  91 status  24, 26, 28, 29, 30, 33, 39, 41, 42, 114 aristocratic 42 eremitic  132, 133, 137 rank  24, 30, 108, 124, 140 storytelling  148, 151, 158, 162 See also under community, literary and textual Sulpicius Severus  56, 57, 70 n.11 See also Martin, St Symon Appulby, anchorite  120, 122, 123, 124–5, 127, 128–30 death of  128 Fruyte of Redempcyon  120, 125 Syon Abbey  31, 89, 188 Talkying of the Love of God  11, 174, 182 Fig.1, 183–8, 189–94, 195–8 testators  86, 90–91, 97, 108 lay  89, 91, 94, 95 Thatcher, Margaret  2–3 Thomas Becket see under Becket Thomas de Byreford  136, 141 Thomas of Chobham see Chobham Thornbury, William, anchorite  111 death of  111 Thornton, Roger, MP  112 Thornton, Robert  89, 92–3, 98 See also manuscripts, Lincoln, Cathedral Library, MS 91 topoi see under imagery, anchoritic Toulouse 23 Tower of London  18–19, 19 fig.1, 20, 21, 33 hermit in  20–21 Geoffrey, hermit  19, 21

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trade  134–6, 140 translations  10, 91, 94, 130, 177, 184, 186, 187, 189, 192 Turner, Victor  23–4, 30 31 Ureisun of God almihti  169, 172, 173, 174, 183, 190–92, 194, 198 Ureisun of ure lefdi  169, 172, 173, 174 Verba seniorum  56, 64 Vere, de, family, earls of Oxford  40–1, 46, 180 death of  46 See also Hours, Books of, De Vere Vices and Virtues  8, 44, 47, 50, 52, 102 virginity  62, 73 See also chastity virgins  55, 62, 63, 64, 65 visionaries  61, 88, 97, 115 visions  64, 86, 93, 104, 105, 147–9, 151, 152, 160, 161–2, 162 dream-visions see under dreams Vitas patrum see under desert vocation  1, 6, 17, 23, 42, 47, 52, 111, 116, 119 solitary  1, 8, 131 Warren, Ann K.  6, 38, 39, 42, 111, 112, 114, 119–20, 121, 123, 124, 125, 176 Watkins, Carl  148, 153, 156 Welch, Charles  121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 129 West Midlands  183, 201, 203, 205, 208, 218 Westminster Abbey  31, 32, 33, 34 anchorite of  31–2 recluse of  34, 89, 90 Wigmore Abbey  203 wilderness  24, 25, 47, 48, 50, 52, 56, 58, 67 William of Devon  203, 208, 210, 214 William de la Pole (Duke of Suffolk)  14 wills  31, 46, 89, 93, 95–6, 97, 111, 112, 114, 122 n.18, 118, 123, 124, 127–8 see also bequests, testators Wiltshire  10, 132, 133, 138, 140 Winchester 89 anchoress  9, 85, 87, 88 bishop of  42 Winchester Anthology  91 clerics 89 Windsor Castle  20, 43 Wohunge of ure laured  114, 169, 172, 173, 174, 179 n.53, 183, 184, 191–2, 194, 197, 198

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index

women  3, 6, 39, 41, 51, 53, 62, 66, 67, 73, 93, 141 n.47, 150 n.12, 154, 180, 202, 210, 212 aristocratic  178, 179 audience, as  170, 218 female religious audience  94 book owners  210–11, 219 lay  177, 179 men and  53, 66, 67, 85, 90, 125, 158 readers, as  168, 177, 180–1, 189, 199, 202, 204, 211, 212, 215 see also readers, female religion, of  1, 4, 9, 86, 91, 95, 97, 98 see also ascetics, female medieval  3, 168, 176–7, 181 See also anchorites, female; patrons, female; Scrope women; writers, women

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Wooing Group  10–11, 114, 167 n.2, 168–70, 171 n.18, 172–7, 179, 181, 182 fig.1, 183, 184 See also individual works: Lofsong of ure louerde, Sawles Warde, Ureisun of God almihti, Ureisun of ure lefdi, Wohunge of ure laured Worde, Wynkyn de  120 writers  medieval 54 monastic 69 Carthusian 187, 188 women 9 Wyvil, Robert, Bishop of Salisbury  132, 133, 138 mandate issued by  132 Yorkshire  27, 89, 92, 93, 121

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Other volumes in Studies in the History of Medieval Religion I: Dedications of Monastic Houses in England and Wales 1066–1216 Alison Binns II: The Early Charters of the Augustinian Canons of Waltham Abbey, Essex, 1062–1230 Edited by Rosalind Ransford III: Religious Belief and Ecclesiastical Careers in Late Medieval England Edited by Christopher Harper-Bill IV: The Rule of the Templars: The French Text of the Rule of the Order of the Knights Templar Translated and introduced by J. M. Upton-Ward V: The Collegiate Church of Wimborne Minster Patricia H. Coulstock VI: William Waynflete: Bishop and Educationalist Virginia Davis VII: Medieval Ecclesiastical Studies in Honour of Dorothy M. Owen Edited by M. J. Franklin and Christopher Harper-Bill VIII: A Brotherhood of Canons Serving God: English Secular Cathedrals in the Later Middle Ages David Lepine IX: Westminster Abbey and its People c. 1050–c. 1216 Emma Mason X: Gilds in the Medieval Countryside: Social and Religious Change in Cambridgeshire c. 1350–1558 Virginia R. Bainbridge XI: Monastic Revival and Regional Identity in Early Normandy Cassandra Potts

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XII: The Convent and the Community in Late Medieval England: Female Monasteries in the Diocese of Norwich 1350–1540 Marilyn Oliva XIII: Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages: Continuity and Change Debra J. Birch XIV: St Cuthbert and the Normans: the Church of Durham 1071–1153 William M. Aird XV: The Last Generation of English Catholic Clergy: Parish Priests in the Diocese of Coventry and Lichfield in the Early Sixteenth Century Tim Cooper XVI: The Premonstratensian Order in Late Medieval England Joseph A. Gribbin XVII: Inward Purity and Outward Splendour: Death and Remembrance in the Deanery of Dunwich, Suffolk, 1370–1547 Judith Middleton-Stewart XVIII: The Religious Orders in Pre-Reformation England Edited by James G. Clark XIX: The Catalan Rule of the Templars: A Critical Edition and English Translation from Barcelona, Archito de la Corona de Aragón, ‘Cartes Reales’, MS 3344 Edited and translated by Judi Upton-Ward XX: Leper Knights: The Order of St Lazarus of Jerusalem in England, c. 1150–1544 David Marcombe XXI: The Secular Jurisdiction of Monasteries in Anglo-Norman and Angevin England Kevin L. Shirley XXII: The Dependent Priories of Medieval English Monasteries Martin Heale

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XXIII: The Cartulary of St Mary’s Collegiate Church, Warwick Edited by Charles Fonge XXIV: Leadership in Medieval English Nunneries Valerie G. Spear XXV: The Art and Architecture of English Benedictine Monasteries, 1300–1540: A Patronage History Julian M. Luxford XXVI: Norwich Cathedral Close: The Evolution of the English Cathedral Landscape Roberta Gilchrist XXVII: The Foundations of Medieval English Ecclesiastical History Edited by Philippa Hoskin, Christopher Brooks and Barrie Dobson XXVIII: Thomas Becket and his Biographers Michael Staunton XXIX: Late Medieval Monasteries and their Patrons: England and Wales, c. 1300–1540 Karen Stöber XXX: The Culture of Medieval English Monasticism Edited by James G. Clark XXXI: A History of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, 1182–1256: Samson of Tottington to Edmund of Walpole Antonia Gransden XXXII: Monastic Hospitality: The Benedictines in England, c. 1070–c. 1250 Julie Kerr XXXIII: Religious Life in Normandy, 1050–1300: Space, Gender and Social Pressure Leonie V. Hicks

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XXXIV: The Medieval Chantry Chapel: An Archaeology Simon Roffey XXXV: Monasteries and Society in the British Isles in the Later Middle Ages Edited by Janet Burton and Karen Stöber XXXVI: Jocelin of Wells: Bishop, Builder, Courtier Edited by Robert Dunning XXXVII: War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture Katherine Allen Smith XXXVIII: Cathedrals, Communities and Conflict in the Anglo-Norman World Edited by Paul Dalton, Charles Insley and Louise J. Wilkinson XXXIX: English Nuns and the Law in the Middle Ages: Cloistered Nuns and Their Lawyers, 1293–1540 Elizabeth Makowski XL: The Nobility and Ecclesiastical Patronage in Thirteenth-Century England Elizabeth Gemmill XLI: Pope Gregory X and the Crusades Philip B. Baldwin XLII: A History of the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, 1257–1301: Simon of Luton and John of Northwold Antonia Gransden XLIII: King John and Religion Paul Webster XLIV: The Church and Vale of Evesham, 700–1215: Lordship, Landscape and Prayer David Cox

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9781843844624_Anchorites_PPC_22mmspine.qxp_Layout 1 30/03/2017 16:10 Page 1

The essays in this volume, stemming from a variety of cross-disciplinary approaches and methodologies, lay down a challenge to this position, breaking new ground in their presentation of the medieval anchorite and other types of enclosed solitary as playing a central role within the devotional life of the communities in which they were embedded. They attest also to the frequent involvement of anchorites and other recluses in local, national and, sometimes, international matters of importance. overall, the volume suggests that, far from operating on the socio-religious periphery, as posited previously, the medieval anchorite was more often found at the heart of a sometimes intersecting array of communities: synchronic and diachronic; physical and metaphysical; religious and secular; gendered and textual.

liz herbert Mcavoy is Professor of Medieval literature at swansea university. contributors: diana denissen, clare dowding, clarck drieshen, cate Gunn, catherine innes-Parker, e.a. Jones, dorothy Kim, liz herbert Mcavoy, Godelinde Perk, James Plumtree, Michelle sauer, sophie sawicka-sykes, andrew Thornton osb.

Cover image: a nun visiting a hermit. smithfield decretals. london, british library, Ms royal 10.e.iv, fol. 130v. © The british library board.

Studies in the History of Medieval Religion

Edited by cate Gunn and liz herbert Mcavoy

cate Gunn has taught in the continuing education and literature departments of the university of essex.

Medieval anchorites in their coMMunities

M

uch of the research into medieval anchoritism to date has focused primarily on its liminal and elite status within the socio-religious cultures of its day: the anchorite has long been depicted as both solitary and alone, almost entirely removed from community and living a life of permanent withdrawal and isolation, in effect dead to the world. considerably less attention has been afforded to the communal sociability that also formed part of the reclusive life during the period.

Medieval anchorites in their coMMunities 

Edited by cate Gunn and liz herbert Mcavoy