Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs

Until recently, the figure of the medieval anchorite and those underlying ideological precepts which framed it have escaped detailed examination, allowing the phenomenon of anchoritic enclosure to remain on the margins of consciousness within the various disciplines which comprise medieval studies. Those studies which have been undertaken to date have made very little allowance for the ways in which notions of gender have shaped its ideologies and practices. This volume therefore brings together for the first time a collection of essays by some of the leading scholars in the fields of gender and anchoritic studies who examine anchoritic enclosure from a variety of different perspectives.In so doing, "Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs" offers some illuminating conclusions on how the phenomenon of anchoritism was affected by and, in turn, actively influenced contemporary notions of gender difference. Ranging from studies of the influence of desert eremiticism upon a variety of expressions of religious enclosure in England to the sexualized spirituality of the high Middle Ages, and the spilling of anchoritic rhetoric into the laity during the fifteenth-century, these essays demonstrate how discourses of anchoritic enclosure were repeatedly utilized to different ends at different periods throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. In so doing, they unpick those physical and metaphorical implications which anchoritic life presented for its adherents and their contemporaries and trace its shifting manifestations from pre-Conquest times up to the Reformation.