Ascetic Desire and the Enclosed Body in the Middle English Patience

As many of its readers have acknowledged, the Middle English poem Patience owes much of its overall effects to late medieval ascetic and contemplative culture and its constructions of spiritual reform. So, too, were the ascetic discourses of enclosure, obedience, and desire by no means restricted to “official” ascetic literature, such as rules and hagiographical writing. This essay argues that the Jonah of Patience encodes and explores the relationship between ascetic desire and the obligation to serve a divine law through bodily enclosure. The poem articulates how the law of patient obedience, however burdensome, effectively generates and structures the desire of both Jonah and the ascetic, including the desire to resist the same obligations on which it is founded.