Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages (review)

An anchorhold is a space, a limited enclosure of stone of which we have only scant archaeological evidence, despite the large numbers of male and female anchorites that are attested to in literature and records. Yet, as the collection of fourteen essays in this volume demonstrates, it is a space in which we discover a rich and complex series of associations. Anchoritism is, McAvoy and Hughes-Edwards suggest in their finely argued introduction, 'an intensely malleable discursive entity…full of potential for adaptation to suit changing institutional, political, personal and social agendas' (p. 11).

This collection of essays is a welcome coalescence of the current situation of study in the area, demonstrating its nuanced readings of culture, language, and particularly gender. The arrangement of the essays into three thematic sections – 'Enclosure and Discourses of the Desert', 'Gender and Enclosure: Late Medieval Intersections' and 'Beyond the Tomb: the Question of Audience' – provides both a chronological schema and a helpful way of highlighting issues of commonality. Nonetheless, echoes ring throughout, and one of the pleasures of reading this collection is the way in which ideas spark against one another across essays.

That studies of gender in medieval literature have problematized the traditional binaries of male and female is well established. In this volume, both male and female enclosure are considered in detail, and provide some fascinating detail that gives flesh to images of enclosure. Santha Bhattacharji's essay, 'Guthlac A and Guthlac B: Changing Metaphors', takes us back to the tenth century to examine the gendered metaphor of death penetrating the saint's treasure-hoard. This provides evidence of feminization of the male mystic that precedes Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century, usually considered the first to use such ideas.

Elizabeth Freeman's gendered reading of thirteenth-century Cistercians in England, 'Male and Female Cistercians and their Gendered Experiences of the Margins, the Wilderness and the Periphery', complicates the feminized male image, demonstrating that the evocation of the feminized position can be used by men to reinforce centrality. The Cistercians employed the image of dwelling on the margin as a means of identifying with the desert eremitic tradition. Those monks living in Yorkshire created for themselves a 'history' of dwelling in hostile land, using a metaphor to centralize their position as part of the order. For female Cistercians, however, the marginal position was real, and therefore offered no opportunity to employ it as a means of identifying with the centre.

The ability of men to use to advantage feminized images of weakness, marginality and inferiority, while women already inhabit such territory, brings into focus the precarious territory to be traversed when considering mystics and the abject. In 'Dionysius of Ryckel: Masculinity and Historical Memory', Ulrike Weithaus argues that portrayals of fifteenth-century anchorite and writer, Denys of Ryckel, code his body as feminine, and his academic production as masculine. In the tension between these two, it is the masculine which wins out. When faced with the abject, the prospect of eating rotten food infested with slugs and worms, Denys' reported willingness to eat is read as the victory of a masculine rationality over the body, in contrast to the reading of self-humiliation placed over the stories of medieval female mystics consuming pus and scabs.

Susannah Mary Chewning's 'Gladly Alone, Gladly Silent: Isolation and Exile in the Anchoritic Mystical Experience', considers the anchorite as mystic, exiled both physically and spiritually from those around her, and whose identification with Christ's suffering as abjection is achieved through her own body. Yet abjection is an encounter with death and self-negation, and ultimately isolates her from all; she becomes, in this otherness, a threat to masculine power. Thus, Chewning asks, why does the exile seek isolation? Does she seek to shut herself off from the world, or...