Anchorites, Wombs, and Tombs

Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages

Edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-Edwards

Anchorites, Wombs, and Tombs

Edited by Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-Edwards

Distributed for University of Wales Press

256 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper $25.00 ISBN: 9780708322000 Published April 2010 For sale in North and South America, Australia, and New Zealand only

Until recently, the figure of the medieval anchorite and the underlying ideological concepts that framed her day-to-day existence have escaped detailed examination, despite the anchorite’s importance to the study of medieval culture. This collection brings together leading scholars in the field of gender and anchoritic studies in order to examine anchoritic enclosure from a variety of different perspectives. In so doing, Anchorites, Wombs, and Tombs offers illuminating conclusions about how the phenomenon of anchoritism was affected by, and in turn, influenced contemporary notions of gender difference.

Contents
Foreword by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker
 
Introduction: Intersections of Time and Space in Gender and Enclosure by Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-Edwards
 
Context: Some Reflections on Wombs and Tombs and Inclusive Language by Alexandra Barratt
 
I. Enclosure and Discources of the Desert

Guthlac A and Guthlac B: Changing Metaphors by Santha Bhattacharji
 
Representations of the Anchoritic Life in Goscelin of St-Bertin’s Liber Confortatorius by Rebecca Hayward
 
Male and Female Cistercians and their Gendered Experiences of the Margins, the Wilderness and the Periphery by Elizabeth Freeman
 
The Whitefriars’ Return to Carmel by Johan Bergstöm-Allen
 
II. Gender and Enclosure: Late Medieval Intersections

‘Crepe into that blessed syde’ Enclosure Imagery in Aelred of Rievaulx’s de Institutione Inclusarum by Kristen McQuinn
 
Gladly Alone, Gladly Silent: Isolation and Exile in the Anchoritic Mystical Experience by Susannah Mary Chewning
 
Dionysius of Ryckel: Masculinity and Historical Memory by Ulrike Wiethaus
 
‘Wrapt as if to the third heaven’ Gender and Contemplation in Late Medieval Anchoritic Guidance Writing by Mari Hughes-Edwards
 
III. Beyond the Tomb: The Question of Audience

‘Efter hire euene’: Lay Audiences and the Variable Asceticism of Ancrene Wisse by Bob Hasenfratz
 
Beyond the Tomb: Ancrene Wisse and Lay Piety by Cate Gunn
 
The Anchoritic Elements of Holkham Misc. 41 by Catherine Innes-Parker
 
‘Closyd in an hows of ston’: Discources of Anchoritism and The Book of Margery Kempe by Liz Herbert McAvoy
Review Quotes
R.N. Swanson
“With its broad chronological range, extending from the ninth century to the fifteenth, and its extensive specialist variety, this is a collection more likely to be cherry-picked than consistently worked through, but that does not detract from the value of the individual essays.” –R. N. Swanson, University of Birmingham
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