Reading Medieval Anchoritism
Ideology and Spiritual Practices
Distributed for University of Wales Press
190 pages
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6 x 9
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© 2012
Medieval anchorites embraced the most extreme and punishing form of solitude known to the medieval world—enclosure in the same four walls for life—in order to forge a closer connection with God. As a way of understanding the lives, beliefs, and experiences of anchorites, Reading Medieval Anchoritism explores guides to the anchorite life that were published in England throughout the Middle Ages. Mari Hughes-Edwards surveys five centuries of the guides’ negotiations of four anchoritic ideals—enclosure, solitude, chastity, and orthodoxy—as well as two vital spiritual practices, asceticism and contemplative experience. The book explodes the long-standing myth of the anchorhold as solitary death-cell, revealing it instead as the site of potential intellectual change and spiritual growth.
Robert J. Hasenfratz, University of Connecticut
“In this impressive study, Hughes-Edwards writes a new history of medieval English anchoritism that rivals the work of Warren’s landmark Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England. She traces, patiently and sensitively, the evolution of five centuries of anchoritic ideology, placing it in the context of a wide range of rarely considered, but remarkably innovative, theological texts. The results are profound and surprising. No scholar of medieval anchoritism or indeed the history of medieval ascetism can afford to ignore this book.”
Derek Pearsall, University of York
“Reading Medieval Anchoritism is comprehensive, systematic, and thorough. The first study to trace anchoritic ideology over five centuries, it show s that the goal of the anchoritic was not extreme suffering and privation but heightened contemplative experience. It amasses important evidence that anchorites had a range of acceptable social functions and modifies scholarship’s current image of anchoritic enclosure as merely social death.”
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