Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practices by Mari Hughes-Edwards (review)

In this study Mari Hughes-Edwards traces “normative English anchoritic ideology” over nearly 400 years of its history, from the late eleventh century through the mid-fifteenth, using eight guides written for English anchorites and anchoresses (1). Hughes-Edwards argues that a foundational anchoritic ideology based on values of enclosure, solitude, chastity, and orthodoxy, worked out through asceticism and contemplative piety, unites the guides and their writers, both early and late, though successive authors emphasized different parts and degrees of these ideals. She writes further in Part II, in which she places these English guides in a larger Continental context, that these shifting emphases reflected “wider changes in medieval culture” both at home and abroad (108). Her study is methodical and cleanly organized, thorough in its consideration of other scholarly work on the subject, and persuasive in its argument for a united rather than fragmented anchoritic tradition in England.

The Introduction briefly acquaints readers with the early Christian roots of anchoritism and its history in England, as well as the genre of anchoritic guide writing. The first three chapters comprise Part I and examine the guides in their insular context alone. In chapter 1, Hughes-Edwards introduces the eight English guides that form the foundation of her analysis: four from the early medieval period, Goscelin of St. Bertin’s Liber confortatorius (written ca. 1080), three Latin letters of St. Anselm of Aosta to recluses (ca. 1086, 1102, and 1105), Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum (written 1160–1162), the anonymous Ancrene Wisse (written in the early thirteenth century), and four from the later, Richard Rolle’s Form of Living (written ca. 1348), Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection (written ca.1384/6–1394/6), the Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 423 vernacular redaction of Aelred’s De institutione (ca. 1430–1440), and the Speculum inclusorum (possibly composed 1342x1382) and its vernacular translation The Myrour of Recluses (extant in one mid-fifteenth-century MS). Her introduction is thorough, offering a close discussion not just of the guides themselves but of “their contents and controversies, their manuscripts and editions, their authors and audiences” (31).

Chapters 2 and 3 are given over to analysis of the ideals of the anchoritic life: enclosure, solitude, chastity, and orthodoxy, examining their roots in early religious tradition and how they evolved from their roles in the early guides to those in the later. Overall Hughes-Edwards traces an arc of shifting thought that begins with earlier authors’ commitment to physical enclosure, though they express conflicted anxiety about its perils and privileges, then moves to the later authors’ greater emphasis on mental enclosure, with its attendant concerns. Among the memorable challenges to popular notions that Hughes-Edwards makes in these chapters, two stand out: first, the solitary religious life wasn’t solitary after all. Between servants, confessors, and visitors the anchoress was not quite alone despite being deposited in a dwelling with no door. Second, the dramatic, dark image of a woman bricked up in a living burial had a limited lifespan, and in fact reflects, as Hughes-Edwards argues, one moment, one stage of authorial concern (that of the earlier writers); a later image, one of a more urban anchor cell frequently consulted by the community at large, is just as valid.

In Part II (chapters 4 and 5), Hughes-Edwards shifts the context of her discussion from insular to continental, comparing the ideology expressed in the English guides to wider European currents of theological thought and contention, and argues particularly that the thinking of anchoritic guide writers followed that of theologians not concerned with writing about enclosure. Specifically she considers two primary spiritual practices common to anchoritic and nonanchoritic religious life, asceticism and affective contemplation. In chapter 4 she devotes a well-considered section to defining asceticism, a problematic term in scholarship, before going on to argue that while the earliest guide writers encouraged both passive and active asceticism, purifying oneself through bodily suffering, the later guides...