‘Redunge is god bone’: The Practice of Prayer in Thirteenth-Century Anchoritic Texts

This essay explores the Ancrene Wisse’s claim that ‘reading is good prayer’. Prayer represents a challenge to both the Affective Fallacy and modern conceptions of authorship The repetitive aesthetics of prayer – both of and within the texts - are central to their practical devotional purposes. The Wooing Group prayers and the Ancrene Wisse constitute an anchoritic ‘emotional regime’, which encourages habits of affective sincerity via meditative reading. Textuality, however, foregrounds the distance between the individual and God, which ‘pure’ prayer aims to close. These texts retain a certain latency of meaning, awaiting instantiation in the lives of their readers.