[In the following essay, Watson contrasts Ancrene Wisse to works of devotional writing from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.]

I cannot pretend to detail for you the sundry stages of the Christian mystical life. Our time would not suffice, for one thing; and moreover, I confess that the subdivisions and names which we find in the Catholic books seem to me to represent nothing objective or distinct. So many men, so many minds: I imagine that these experiences can be as infinitely varied as are the idiosyncracies of individuals.¹

1

A number of works intended for anchoresses survive in six important early thirteenth-century manuscripts. Four of the manuscripts—Corpus Christi Cambridge 402 and three Cotton manuscripts, Cleopatra C.VI, Nero A.XIV and Titus D.XVIII—contain the best known of these works, the anchoritic manual Ancrene Wisse; in addition, the Nero manuscript preserves several prayers and Passion meditations from the so-called ‘Wooing group’, including On wel swuðe god Ureisun of God Almihti, while the Titus manuscript contains Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd itself, as well as a number of works from the so-called ‘Katherine group’: Sawles Warde (an allegory of self-rectification), Hali Meiðhad (an epistle on virginity) and The Life of Saint Katherine. The whole of the Katherine group—these three works plus lives of saints Margaret and Juliana—appears in Bodley 34, while the sixth manuscript, British Museum Royal 17.A.XXVII has the whole group with the exception of Hali Meiðhad and with the addition of one Wooing group work, Þe Oreisun of Seinte Marie—a work that also appears (without its title) in the Nero manuscript.²

These works are thus closely linked to one another in a way that invites us to study them as a whole, and allows us to use individual works in the group as an aid in the interpretation of the others. With the exception of the numerous copies of Ancrene Wisse in English, French and Latin and of a second copy of Ureisun added to some empty leaves of MS. Lambeth 487, none of the works is found in its original form outside this group of manuscripts.³ There are also other kinds of connections between them. Although only Bodley 34 and Corpus Christi 402 have just the same linguistic background, the language of all the manuscripts is clearly that of the west Midlands,⁴ while the vocabulary, style and phraseology of all the works has a good deal in common. In some instances, common ground is more specific. The saints' lives have influenced one another in a variety of ways, to some extent even sharing their plots. Ancrene Wisse mentions a vernacular life of saint Margaret,⁵ while Hali Meiðhad refers to Margaret, Katherine and Juliana as well-known exempla of chastity.⁶Hali Meiðhad also shares several passages with works in the Wooing group,⁷ while the works within that group show numerous signs of indebtedness to Ancrene Wisse, and are heavily interdependent;⁸ in particular, the structure of part of Wohunge is derived from a famous passage in Part VII of Ancrene Wisse.⁹ All the works seem to have been written within about a forty-year period (1190-1230),¹⁰ all address a similar anchoritic audience, and all (as I hope to show) embody the same distinctive attitudes to the spiritual life. It would be difficult to find a more coherent group of manuscript witnesses to any area of medieval English religious life.

These anchoritic works are of great interest in several disciplines—philology, stylistics, literary criticism, cultural history and the study of religious devotion. Yet the scholarship so far devoted to the works rather oddly does not reflect this wide-ranging importance. While there has been much philological study of all the works, and their stylistic qualities have been variously assessed,¹¹ it is only recently that a specially literary interest has been taken in them, and this has mostly been confined to Ancrene Wisse. (Two books on the structure and imagery of the work and some increasingly effective source-study are so far the main fruits of this interest.¹²) Furthermore, assessment of the importance of these works as a whole for the study of religious devotion in England is still in its earliest stage. A recent edition of the Introduction and Part I of Ancrene Wisse explores the liturgical background to that work very successfully,¹³ while Shepherd, Sitwell, Millett and others make some helpful remarks.¹⁴ In general, however, the upsurge of interest in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century religious devotion in the last eighty years has left these earlier works alone. Those scholars who do trace English spirituality as far back as the early thirteenth century (such as Pepler) tend to treat the anchoritic works as merely the harbingers of a later flowering of mystical writing, and tend like the literary critics to deal only with Ancrene Wisse.¹⁵

This paper provides a brief characterisation of the type of spirituality manifested in the anchoritic works as a whole, indicating what we should and should not expect to find in it, and focussing on what I conceive of as its most impressive and distinctive qualities. However, I approach this spirituality indirectly, by developing a contrast between thirteenth-century anchoritic spirituality and that of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English devotional and mystical writing. The purpose of this contrast is to bring out the alien quality of the anchoritic material, and to imply that an important factor in our neglect of that material as spiritual writing is an unwillingness to face or respect such a quality. While the English mystics themselves seemed exotic until quite recently, their basic conceptions of the religious life fit into categories for which the twentieth-century Christian reader is not unprepared; they think, for example, in terms of organised spiritual progress and of mystical ascent, concepts we also tend to assume are fundamental to Christian mysticism. Yet according to Butler, the concept of mystical ascent was not schematically presented in western Christianity until the time of Bernard;¹⁶ and it is mostly absent from the anchoritic writing. One implication of Butler's account is that if we are to regard Augustine or Gregory as in some sense mystics—and for many people it would be an absurdity not to—we may first have to recognise how conditioned and relative are our assumptions as to the forms taken by mystical experience. There is a tendency in critical discussions of Christian mysticism to conflate two definitions of the term: one, the theological, cultural and literary tradition which regards the ascent to God as involving purgation, illumination and union, a tradition classically defined by the sixteenth-century Spanish mystics; two, simply the zenith of any highly-elevated and demanding spirituality. Either definition is in a certain way satisfactory; on the other hand, the practice of assuming that purgation, illumination and union must form the three major stages of any elevated Christian spirituality is problematic, simply because it is manifestly inaccurate. While I do not wish to attempt anything so grandiose as a redefinition of mysticism here, I do hope to use the anchoritic works to point to the need for us to make up our minds as to what we mean by the term. From the perspective of the historian of the Christian tradition, there seems no a priori reason to assume that one culturally-determined mode of self-transcendence has more intrinsic dignity than another.¹⁷ The anchoritic material is challenging in this connection because while on the one hand it clearly lies outside the main development of late-medieval mysticism, on the other it implies a form of the spiritual life just as rigorous and demanding, and in some respects just as ambitious, as is presented by any of the later English mystics.

2

To begin with, then, I would like to make three fairly obvious generalisations about the nature of late medieval English spirituality—that spirituality of which Rolle is perhaps the earliest vernacular exponent, and which we tend to regard as inherently mystical. The first generalisation has already been anticipated; this is a spirituality of ascent or progress, and its literature describes and encourages spiritual development both by categorising it in various ways and by using images that express the idea of progress. Rolle's whole view of the religious life is posited on his conception of that life as an organised progress: from sin to conversion, from tears to joy, from earthly music to heavenly song, from ‘inseparable’ love to ‘insuperable’ love to ‘singular’ love. Works like his Meditations on the Passion cannot be understood unless one recognises that they are intended to contribute to a specific stage of the reader's development.¹⁸ Hilton's Scale of Perfection contains images of the spiritual life both as ladder and as pilgrimage, and is naturally in part structured around lower and higher degrees of prayer and contemplation.¹⁹ The Cloud-author, whose account of contemplation as a rare ‘blynde stering’ towards God might seem static to a modern reader, nevertheless assumes that his disciple has passed through various stages of the spiritual life before acquiring the capacity to contemplate.²⁰ With the twelfth- and thirteenth-century dissemination of the pseudo-Dionysius's influence and the additional influence of writers like Richard of St Victor, Bonaventure and Guigo II, all of whom describe the spiritual life in terms of a schematised progress, fourteenth-century English writers (even ones so contrasted as Rolle, Hilton and the Cloud-author) inevitably share this basic conception. Nor is it absent from the less specialised and organised works of the same period. The Middle English translation of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Stimulus Amoris known as The Prickynge of Love is based (albeit chaotically) on the notion that the soul is perfected through loving contemplation of the Passion.²¹ Nicholas Love's translation of the pseudo-Bonaventuran life of Christ, The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ admittedly simplifies its source at many points; but even Love's denial that elevated material on contemplation is suitable to his popular readership is made in terms that acknowledge the importance in other contexts of stages and degrees of contemplation.²² Similarly, one finds what might be called mystical material in a pastoral compilation like The Book of Virtues and Vices, in drama, and in the lyrics.²³ This widespread dissemination of a conception of the spiritual life as a progressive ascent to God does not, of course, imply that more than a few late-medieval Christians structured their lives in that way; indeed, even an intelligent and relatively well-read laywoman like Margery Kempe, who was certainly anxious to live her life according to the best available models, seems to me to have had only a vague intellectual understanding of what was meant by a phrase such as ‘the ascent to God’. What it does suggest is that a basic picture of how the religious life might ideally be lived—a picture that is still quite familiar in its main outlines—had become established.

My second generalisation is that late medieval English spirituality is almost exclusively a spirituality of the interior life. This is a slightly paradoxical claim to make for an age that saw the multiplication of external aids to devotion, and whose religious literature makes its appeal to the imagination by focussing it on the sights, sounds and even smells of Christ's Passion. Yet the Passion usually exists in late medieval art and literature to remove the meditator's mind from all thought of the world by engaging that part of the mind that would otherwise be occupied by it. Nicholas Love puts this neatly and with remarkable frankness when he commends to his reader the example of St Cecilia, whose rapt attention to her interior picture of the Passion makes her insensible to the pains of her own martyrdom; for Cecilia, the Passion acts literally as a substitute for the physical world, and her torture therefore means nothing of itself, not even as an external equivalent of Christ's.²⁴ In Love's work and elsehwere, there is no sense that the external world provides its own images and truths, and relatively little sense even of the symbolic importance of the liturgy and the sacraments.²⁵ Although both liturgy and sacraments of course remain the fundamental religious observances of the period—Books of Hours providing the devout lay-person with a liturgical framework for even the active life—these external symbols of divine truth seem to be interiorised by much of the literature. We read more of feeding on the wounds of Christ in highly sensual meditation than of drinking his blood in eucharistic wine. While a work like the popular Abbey of the Holy Ghost purports to supply an equivalent of the monastic life for those who dwell in the world by imaging the human psyche as a convent peopled by the virtues, such an interiorisation of the coenobitic ideal in practice fundamentally alters the Benedictine conception of the religious life as a communal affair, at the centre of which is the liturgy.²⁶ Indeed Rolle directly challenges the communal model of the religious life by asserting that the heavenly song in which the elect participate cannot coexist with earthly song (that is, the liturgy), since the exterior sound blots out the interior one.²⁷ His purpose was the exaltation of the eremitic life over the coenobitic, but such a claim was of general relevance and is one manifestation of an important late-medieval movement: the movement towards a laicised, individual and interior model of the devout life.

The existence of some such movement bridges the apparent gulf between my first generalisation and my last one. If the devotional literature of at least the fourteenth century portrays the spiritual life in terms of a schematic and ambitious ascent to God, the same literature is in another sense relatively unspecialised, making little distinction between the solitary, the monastic and the secular life. Of course, a number of texts only circulated within a particular professional milieu—one thinks especially of the few continental mystical works to reach England (such as Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls), which seem to have been the preserve of a small Carthusian readership.²⁸ But such specialisation was the result of deliberate policy; the texts themselves might well have been welcome to a far wider audience. A writer like the Cloud-author, who desired a limited circulation for his work, could copyright it only by adjuring the unprepared reader to stay away from it; he could not hope to confine it to a readership of professional contemplatives (monks and solitaries), or even assume that such a readership would be properly prepared.²⁹ Works that address themselves specifically to such a professional readership were often in practice very widely read. Rolle's Form of Living, written for the anchoress Margaret Kirkeby, reached a far more general public within a half-century of its composition—monks and nuns, the secular clergy, the devout laity.³⁰ Nor is this surprising, since its contents are almost the same as those of his Commandment, written for a nun, as well as his Latin Emendatio Vitae, probably written for a member of the secular clergy.³¹ Similarly, although the first book of Hilton's Scale of Perfection is addressed to an anchoress, the second book has been seen as an attempt to adjust the work to the demands made on it by its general popularity.³² A good example of what we might call this democratisation of devotional literature is provided by the Vernon and Simeon manuscripts. If the Bohun arms engraved on these do in fact suggest that one or both of them was prepared for (or at least by arrangement of) the devout laity,³³ we have the phenomenon of seculars taking an interest not only in a work like Piers Plowman, but in the Stimulus Amoris, The Scale of Perfection, The Form of Living, the popularising Abbey of the Holy Ghost—and, even more remarkably, in a meditation derived from two works in the thirteenth-century Wooing group, A Talkyng of the Love of God, and a version of the highly specialised Ancrene Wisse.³⁴ Late medieval English devotion was evidently as eclectic as it was individual and interior.

3

With these generalisations in mind, let us turn to the thirteenth-century anchoritic material. Here the picture will in most respects be a radically different one. If late medieval English spirituality is at once relatively popular and concerned at its most ambitious with a schematic interior ascent, the spirituality manifested in the anchoritic manuscripts is specialised, makes considerable use of the external world and is not organised around a concept of ascent. I would like to take these points of contrast in turn, allowing each of these tight-knit anchoritic works to assist in our interpretation of the others.

The first point of contrast is suggested even by the physical form of the anchoritic manuscripts. In spite of the texts both groups have in common, there is an obvious difference between the bulky, grand late fourteenth-century Vernon and Simeon manuscripts and the group of plain and cheaply produced thirteenth-century pocketbooks compiled for anchoresses³⁵—particularly when one considers that the users of both sets of manuscripts may to a large extent have been from the same social background.³⁶ Physically the anchoritic manuscripts are clearly professional tools with a particular funtion.

Such an impression of pragmatism and specialisation is reinforced by a look at the anchoritic works themselves. It is unforgettably true that Ancrene Wisse addresses itself to the daily details of the anchoresses' existence in a way that is entirely foreign to, for example, The Form of Living. Even when it is offering moral rather than domestic advice, Ancrene Wisse is dominated by images of enclosure or fixity—wombs, bodies, crucifixions, walls, castles—and is relevant in its entirety only to its intended audience. But this is equally the case for most of the other works in the group; all of them address the reader in her specific condition as an anchoress, and can be fully understood only when an anchoritic readership is assumed. The imagery of Ancrene Wisse often recurs elsewhere. In Wohunge, after a prolonged contemplation of the Passion, the meditator assures Christ that ‘Mi bodi henge wið þi bodi neiled o rode. sperred querfaste wið inne fowr wahes’.³⁷Sawles Warde is based on the image of the psyche as a house with walls, in which the most troublesome person is liable to be the housewife Will. In spite of the presence in the allegory of a husband Wit, it seems clear that the soul-house is intended also to represent an anchorage, while Will is perhaps a figure of the foolish and ill-disciplined anchoress and the other major female characters, the daughters of God, figure wise anchoresses.³⁸ In fact, the image of the four daughters of God dwelling in the soul-house is strikingly close to the situation implied in the earliest version of Ancrene Wisse, which was written for three sisters inhabiting the one anchorage. The procedure of this allegory is thus precisely the opposite of the interiorisation practised in The Abbey of the Holy Ghost. In a similar way, Hali Meiðhad envisages virginity as a ‘þe hehe tur of ierusalem’,³⁹ a stronghold which the married woman foolishly leaves for the cares of the domestic household. For the original readership, all images of the stronghold or the house must have acted to an extent as images of the anchorage.

It is important that we understand the anchoritic works as professional and specialised, since failure to do so can lead to bad misjudgements. This is most obviously the case with Hali Meiðhad, which has often been castigated for its narrowness and extremism about sex and the body. For example, Cottle recently writes that Hali Meiðhad's ‘strident mockery of God's arrangements for continuing humankind amounts to lewd obsession’.⁴⁰ But this is entirely to miss the point. Hali Meiðhad does not necessarily represent the whole view of sex held either by its author or by its audience. It is, rather, an exercise written for those who have already repudiated sexual activity and family ties, intended to confirm them in a sense of the rightness of their action, and to fortify them for the future. Its extremism is deliberate and strategic, like the lingerings of later Passion meditations over the details of Christ's pain. It was not intended to be seen by anyone who was not already in agreement with its premises and who was not vowed to celibacy and committed to solitude.⁴¹

To an extent, this remark holds true even for the saints' lives. All of these are directed in particular at a female anchoritic readership, as is clear from their female protagonists and from the common ground they share with one another and with the other anchoritic works. For example, in Ancrene Wisse and Wohunge, the reader is invited to choose Christ on account of his superior qualities as a lover: ‘Nam ich þinge feherest. nam ich kinge richest. nam ich hest icunnet’ and so on.⁴² Juliana makes the same choice when she refuses to marry her suitor, Eleusius, who is depicted as having in his earthly way many of the qualities which the Christ of Ancrene Wisse possesses; he is noble, wealthy and attractive, standing in much the relation to the emperor as does Christ to God the Father,⁴³ and addressing Juliana in much the way Christ does. …⁴⁴

But whereas Christ holds over the anchoresses' heads the sword of a just Judgement,⁴⁵ Eleusius tortures Juliana to gratify his anger at his thwarted lust—thereby justifying Juliana's rejection of him while attempting to overthrow it. It is in this prison-and-torture sequence—a sequence similar to those found in the lives of Margaret and Katherine, all of which follow very much the same story-line as Juliana—that the particular relevance of Juliana's life for the anchoress is brought out through a series of implicit parallels. Like the anchoress she has chosen Christ not an earthly lover, and like the anchoress she must be shut up in a prison and suffer physical pain and spiritual temptation as a result of this choice. In darkness and alone, she is removed from the world like the anchoress whose windows are properly covered in part 2 of Ancrene Wisse, and has forsaken her family as well as her earthly lover, as Hali Meiðhad implores the reader to do, and as the meditator in Wohunge states that she has done.⁴⁶ As a result of this virtuous passivity she acquires enormous power and insight, binding a demon in a way that expresses her own interior liberation, and converting hundreds by the example of her death⁴⁷—a death equivalent to the spiritual martyrdom lived out by the anchoress. Thus Juliana dramatises the choice the anchoritic audience has had to make in turning from the world, manifesting its costliness, its rightness and not least its heroic nature.

The anchoritic works, then, are deliberately specialised and manifest their commitment to a particular audience in a variety of ways: by adopting a narrow perspective (Hali Meiðhad), by focussing explicitly on anchoritic subject-matter (Ancrene Wisse), by using imagery that evokes the anchorage (Ancrene Wisse, Sawles Warde, Hali Meiðhad, the saints' lives), or by explicitly reminding the reader of her status as an anchoress (Ancrene Wisse, Wohunge). In a sense this last activity, ‘reminding’, is common to most of the works, which seem all to be concerned to present the anchoritic reader with different kinds of pictures of her chosen life.

This brings me to my second point of distinction between these works and the characteristic devotional writing of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England: the extent to which the anchoritic works refer to or imply the external world of their readers. We might profitably consider many of the anchoritic works as meditations or exercises, not far different in kind from the Passion meditations of later centuries. Ureisun and Wohunge of course fit explicitly into this category, but Sawles Warde is also a dramatised meditation on hell and heaven, in which messengers come from each place in turn to coerce and coax Will into obedience; one could describe the structure of this work as a meditation which includes allegorical instructions as to how it is to be read. Hali Meiðhad and the saints' lives are also to be approached by a reader desirous of strengthening certain attitudes and feelings within herself, and so are in a similar sense meditative; even Ancrene Wisse's ‘spiral structure’ encourages a ruminative reading close to meditation.⁴⁸ Yet whereas I suggested that a major function of the later Passion meditations (as exemplified by Nicholas Love's exemplum of saint Cecilia) is to absorb the imagination and hence to occupy the part of the mind which is most liable to earthly distraction, the anchoritic works habitually return the reader to a sense of her own external conditions by recalling the anchorage. As we have seen, at the end of Wohunge the meditator passes from considering Christ's Passion to renewing her commitment to the crucifying imprisonment within four walls; similarly, at the climax of all three of the saints' lives the imprisonment and torture of the protagonists acts as an image for the anchoritic life. The same thing happens at one of the most important and famous moments of Ancrene Wisse. …⁴⁹

In her meditations, Margery Kempe acts as a handmaid to the Virgin at the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, so vividly engaged she is in the sacred narrative.⁵⁰ Here, however, the narrative has been explanatory and didactic; the Maries represent bitternesses suffered by the anchoritic reader, and the latter's involvement in an emotional scene is initially a matter of intellectual understanding. Only with a brilliant change of focus, in which Christ first becomes dramatically animate, stretching himself out as a child would, and then becomes figuratively an anchorite (no longer at the Resurrection but at the Incarnation) does the scene acquire a real emotional intensity. Moreover, this intensity is not primarily centred on Resurrection or Incarnation, but on a reinterpretation of the anchoresses' condition in terms of those events—on what was for the original readers a sudden and illuminated return to an awareness of their own condition.

The anchoritic works thus function in a different way from later Passion meditation. They do of course exist to absorb and exercise the reader's imagination, an important function of literature for an enclosed and solitary readership living lives that were in many ways stultifying; in this regard, one of their tasks is compensation or comfort, the provision of a multitude of images that both replace and transfigure the world outside the cell.⁵¹ Yet for the most part it is life within the cell that the anchoritic works transfigure, and their most characteristic movement is not away from the reader's imprisoned state but back into it. This is presumably because for the intended audience the best possible image for spiritual reality is their own external circumstances; the anchoresses in a real sense embody spiritual reality as perceived by these works, and need not to forget their external circumstances but rather to understand the spiritual significance of their condition, and to maintain their internal commitment to that significance. Unlike the reader of Nicholas Love, the anchoresses are already as it were enclosed within a powerful imaginative structure, and require only a personal and affective realisation of its significance. The anchoritic works assist in and enact the process of realisation by presenting the life of the anchorage in a variety of images that possess an underlying and unifying coherence; there is a reciprocal relationship, an interpenetration, between these images and the anchoritic image which they ‘interpret’. A discussion of these images serves to bring out this coherence, and will bring us at last to my third point of contrast with later medieval spirituality, since it will involve pointing out that these works envisage the spiritual life not as an ascent but as ascesis.

The saints' lives (as we have seen) present the anchoritic life as a heroic and essentially active one. In a literal sense their protagonists act in ways quite the opposite of anchoritic; they preach and evangelise, they speak a great deal, they often move or are moved from place to place.⁵² Thereby the saints doubtless satisfied an imaginative desire in the readers for a less passive role, but more importantly they bring out what might otherwise be concealed in the mundanity of the anchoritic life, its status as a heroic battle against spiritual opponents and as a witness to the world. The saints make endurance active, turn their prisons into places of liberation and their tortures into proclamations; with God's aid they, not their enemies, are in control of the spiritual meaning of what happens to them, and thereby they encourage the anchoritic reader to exercise that same control in their own life. Hali Meiðhad attempts a similar message by means of almost the opposite paradox. Since it presents virginity as a tower or fortress which the worldly are so foolish as to leave, the anchorage comes implicitly to represent that tower and is thus no longer a place for those who have forsaken the world but on the contrary a place that the worldly have forsaken.⁵³ This is a static image in place of the active one found in the saints' lives, but is equally successful in its unexpectedness; instead of telling the reader to opt out, it adjures her not to opt in.

The most important image for the anchoritic life, however, is undoubtedly that of martyrdom or crucifixion. All three of the saints' lives are ‘passions’ of their respective protagonists, whose tortures both point up the relative ease of the anchoresses' lives and suggest a model for understanding those lives. A similar double response (in this case to Christ's Passion) is articulated in Wohunge. …⁵⁴

The image of the Passion is used in a complex way here. Suffered by Christ for the anchoress, it demands in response another passion, the life of enclosure lived until death. This is a sweet martyrdom, since it involves identification with Christ and also his companionship. But although such steadfastness is a satisfactory response, it is incomplete; there is a gap between the quality of Christ's gift and the quality of the return made by the anchoress. This gap leaves as it were a residue of generosity on Christ's side, which calls forth an inner response in addition to the outer one of physical martyrdom; it demands payment in love, unworthy as that coin may be. Such love is an expression of the continuing tension between the sense in which the anchoress is united with Christ through being identified with his suffering and that in which she is forever distanced from him by human frailty. It provides an inner dynamic which would seem to demand the continuing involvement of the anchoress in her own passion, and which thus transforms her life from a static and passive one into one which makes supremely active demands.

Yet it is clear that these demands are not those made by a progressive ascent to God; they rest instead on a simultaneous awareness of unity and disunity between the anchoress and God. The end of Sawles Warde indeed shows a positive caution at the idea of progress; it is insisted that the joyous message about the beauty of heaven brought by Liues Luue does not render Farlac's terrifying depiction of hell obselete. …⁵⁵

Perfect Love and the anticipation of heavenly joy may cast out fear, but fear is still necessary when the awareness of love fails. In spite of the structure of books in Ancrene Wisse, which moves progressively towards the seventh book of love, this refusal to treat the anchoritic life as a progress can be found there also. Part 6 describes the anchoritic life as a penance, and like Wohunge finds the best image for that life in the passion. …⁵⁶

The image of pilgrimage can clearly be useful to the anchoresses, and is developed at some length by the author; but it does not evoke any suggestion of the spiritual life as a gradual approach to a goal, such as we find in Hilton. On the other hand, the anchoritic life is no more satisfatorily described as death, for although the anchoresses are dead to the world, their mode of life has a far more positive meaning than this. The proper image is joyful crucifixion: the transformation of suffering into joy that deserves spiritual reward. We have encountered a narrative image of this joy in the saints' lives, where suffering brings its own reward for the protagonists even on earth. In those works as in Ancrene Wisse and in another sense Wohunge, the best image for the spiritual life is this constancy of suffering, this positive activity of the manufacture of joy out of pain. Such an activity is based on the ability of the anchoress to comprehend and to realise the spiritual reality which underlies her way of life, to penetrate the image which she is herself living. The anchoritic works assist her in this endeavour by surrounding her with other images—goads, comforts or lures—which reflect her condition back at her prismatically, and enable her not to move step by step up some spiritual ladder, but to accumulate ‘hure ouer hure’, an ever-increasing stock of spiritual capital.

As in Wohunge, in Ancrene Wisse the most effective lure—that which above all maintains the tension and dynamism of the anchoritic life, and which demands the most of the anchoresses' abilities to transfigure external reality—is the continuing need to love. Part 7 opens by stating that tribulation is useless without love, and shows that God's love is always greater than man's. God deliberately created an imbalance between his salvific act and our response by giving himself wholly, in a way that can never be compensated for.⁵⁷ The salvation of man is recounted in the famous story of the lover-knight, in which the lady of the castle is yet another image for the enclosed, threatened anchoress; then finally Christ speaks, wooing the reader by offering wealth, beauty, power, with an extravagant generosity that ignores the services he has already performed. For the first time, Christ enters the work in person; it is as though he figuratively enters the castle, or the anchorage; is he not to be invited also into the interior castle and anchorhold of the heart?

To some extent, this question seems to offer the possibility of a subjective, first-hand experience of Christ's presence and love. Ancrene Wisse offers no assurance of such experience of Christ's love in this life, but it nevertheless imaginatively conveys its effect in Christ's powerfully masculine appeal to the anchoresses, and elsewhere seems to assume it as a feature of anchoritic devotion.⁵⁸ In Ureisun, the meditator begs for an experience which blends her status as a crucified imitator of Christ with her aspiration to be his love. …⁵⁹

Again, the ‘heie cluppinge’ is ultimately deferred until heaven; but it is considered appropriate to ask for it on earth. Indeed, the anchoress, who is crucified in her cell, here reproves herself for her failure to offer a subjective, heartfelt inner abandonment to the crucified Christ, in a way that suggests (through the image of the ever-loving mother) a confidence in Christ's responsiveness.

This is affective mystical language of a sensual and commonplace kind. What is less than commonplace, however, is its concretion; the failure to seize Christ within is an internal failure, but is to be remedied by renewed commitment to the external passion of the cell. Images of the bower, or of the embraces of the bridegroom, cannot in this spirituality become disassociated from the external hardships of its practitioners. The bower is the anchorage as well as the heart; the bridegroom's embraces are the pains suffered by the anchoresses; on earth sharing in the love of Christ has to mean sharing in his pain. Thus the element of affective devotion is of a piece with the rest of this anchoritic spirituality; there is nothing rudimentary about it. Although it employs fantasy, it does not consist of fantasy; its roots are physical, existential.

4

In conclusion, I would like to raise again the possibility that we might regard this spirituality as in some sense ‘mystical’—always remembering that this is in large part a merely semantic decision. Shepherd—working with a historical and fairly narrow sense of the word ‘mysticism’—declares roundly that ‘there is little point in speaking of Ancrene Wisse as a mystical work’.⁶⁰ In support of this proposition, he points to the lack of Pseudo-Dionysian influence in the work, the absence of images of mystical ascent (available to the author, as they were to the fourteenth-century mystics, in the work of Bernard, Aelred and William of St Thierry as well as the Victorines), and the work's tendency to appeal to the reader's self-interest rather than to any form of love for its own sake. As we have seen, these are all legitimate observations, and could be applied to the whole group of anchoritic works. Love and the redemption of man are both viewed in a practical, almost mercantile way even in Wohunge, and the anchoresses seem to be discouraged from acquiring any of the spiritual self-confidence we find in Rolle or Bernard; even outside Sawles Warde, the cardinal virtues—and notably prudence—play as important a role as the theological ones. The fear of falling is too real for the anchoritic literature to preach love of God only for himself, while the devotion and love it does show him remains on a sensual rather than an abstracted level; it is love of the manhood more than the godhead of Christ, reaching out in physical suffering and need to Christ as he was in his physical form on earth.

We have seen, however, that this pragmatic, sensual love of God is not in this case a feature of a rudimentary spirituality, but a necessary concomitant to an ambitious and difficult form of the religious life unusually grounded in the physical and the everyday. For the anchoress to conceive of her life as a ladder leading progressively from the carnal to the spiritual would simply be inappropriate in view of the way her circumstances focus her mind and body on the fleshly as an image of the spiritual; for her to attempt a categoriseable progress at all would in a sense be paradoxical, since she is already enclosed within the most elevated possible image of human life, living again the life of the incarnate, crucified Christ. Shepherd is surely mistaken in his claim that ‘the sisters are beginners in the spiritual life’,⁶¹ a claim based on the declaration that by comparison with Bernard and William, Ancrene Wisse is unsophisticated in its depiction of the spiritual life. The anchoritic works are narrow in intellectual and emotional range, just as the lives of their readers were physically circumscribed; but within the space that is marked out for this form of the religious life, there is very considerable sophistication and evidence of spiritual maturity on the part not only of the writers but of their readers. Ancrene Wisse makes clear that the life of its audience is the most demanding and perfect of all; the crucified are most like to Christ, and are described as spiritual ‘mountains’ on which he is unafraid to plant his feet.⁶² I do not think that the tone of respect and deference that often creeps into Ancrene Wisse can merely be a rhetorical ploy; the writer presumably knew of the varieties of forms of the spiritual life being lived in the early thirteenth century, but could still regard his charges as surpassingly heroic—and we can surely see why. Moreover, the anchoritic works suggest a spirituality which demanded considerable self-knowledge and subtlety on the part of those who attempted it; the brilliance and humanity of the works should be seen as reflecting on their audience as much as on their authors.

The anchoresses are radically identified with the suffering, incarnate Christ, and must attempt to maintain an attitude of heroic joy in that suffering. We have seen that this attempt involves both the living out of an image of the Passion and a series of transformations of that image—recurring perceptions that the meaning of their lived experience lies deep within and is in some respects a paradoxical inverse of its humiliating, mundane appearance: it is a participation in the Incarnation, the Passion and ultimately the Resurrection of Christ. Might not such a life be in some sense an equivalent of the spiritualised unitive aspirations of the later English mystics? Whether or not we find it useful to discuss it primarily in terms of mysticism, it seems to me that it should at least evoke from us the same intensity of attention and respect. …⁶³

Notes

1. By ‘the Catholic books’, James is presumably referring to the numerous accounts of the mystical life being published in France while he was working on The Varieties of Religious Experience (which was published in London, 1902). Perhaps the most prominent of these were Abbe Auguste Saudreau's Les Degrés de la Vie Spirituelle, Angers, 1896 and La Vie d'Union à Dieu et les moyens d'y arriver, Angers, 1901, and Pere Augustin Poulain's Des Grâces d'Oraison, Paris, 1901. James' extreme ‘nominalism’ should probably be taken as in part a reaction to the tendency of these works to assume that the spiritual life has only a single model form.

2. The titles used here are those given in the manuscripts rather than the alternatives invented by editors (of which ‘Ancrene Riwle’ is the best-known and the most misleading). On wel swuðe god Ureisun of God Almihti is henceforth abbreviated to Ureisun, while Þe Wohunge of oure Lauerd is referred to as Wohunge; modern spelling is used for the titles of the three saints' lives. Most if not all of the manuscripts mentioned here would seem to date from the second quarter of the thirteenth century. For manuscript descriptions see especially Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd etc., ed. W. Meredith Thompson, Early English Text Society O. S., 241, London, 1958, pp. xi-xii (to which edition all future references to works in the Wooing group are made), together with the editions of the various manuscripts of Ancrene Wisse; see also A Facsimile of MS. Bodley 34, ed. N. R. Ker, Early English Text Society O. S., 247, London, 1960.

3. See Thompson, op. cit., p. xi. Manuscripts and editions of Ancrene Wisse are listed by Geoffrey Shepherd, ed., Ancrene Wisse Parts Six and Seven, Manchester, 1959, pp. xi-xii.

4. A convenient survey of the philological scholarship surrounding this group is A. Zettersten, Studies in the Dialect and Vocabulary of the Ancrene Riwle, Lund Studies in English, 34, Lund, 1965.

5. See Ancrene Wisse, Edited from MS Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien, Early English Text Society O. S., 249, London, 1962, p. 125, ll. 18-19, and the discussion in Þe Liflade ant te Passiun of Seinte Iuliene, ed. S. R. T. d'Ardenne, Early English Text Society O. S., 248, London, 1961, pp. xliv-vi. (Future references to Ancrene Wisse and to Saint Juliana are to these editions, in the latter instance to the Bodley 34 text.)

6. See Hali Meiðhad, ed. Bella Millett, Early English Text Society O. S., 284, London, 1984, p. 23, ll. 2-3. (Future references to Hali Meiðhad are to this edition.)

7. Millett, op. cit., pp. xx-xxi.

8. Thompson, op. cit., pp. xvi-xx.

9. See Ancrene Wisse, f 107b, ll. 7-15, and for commentary Shepherd, op. cit., pp. 61-62. There can be no real doubt that it is Wohunge that is indebted to Ancrene Wisse rather than the other way about, in spite of Thompson's scepticism (op. cit., p. xviii), for the title of the meditation suggests the context of the source in Ancrene Wisse more strongly than it suggests the subject of the meditation itself. In the meditation, Christ does not woo the anchoress nor the anchoress Christ; yet Christ's wooing is precisely the dramatic situation that calls forth the passage in Ancrene Wisse on which Wohunge is largely based.

10. Millett, op. cit., p. xvii, dates Hali Meiðhad between 1190 and 1220, ‘probably later rather than earlier in this period’, a good dating based on the work's sources. In general, the works in MS. Bodley 34 are linguistically too consistent to be far removed from their author(s), but the saints lives and Sawles Warde cannot be dated with precision—except that Margaret is earlier than Ancrene Wisse (see note 4). Even a cautious attitude to E. J. Dobson's arguments (in The Origins of Ancrene Wisse, Oxford, 1976, pp. 15-16, 238-41 etc.—a work henceforth abbreviated Origins) allows one to date Ancrene Wisse at 1210-1225 (Dobson has 1215-22). Wohunge is presumably later than this (see note 9), although the linguistic and manuscript evidence would seem to suggest that it is not much later (Thompson, op. cit., pp. xi-xiii, liii-lxi). Dobson, Origins, pp. 163f, would date the whole Katherine group between 1190 and 1215, with the saints' lives first, Sawles Warde second and Hali Meiðhad last. The order Katherine group, Ancrene Wisse, Wooing group, is certainly attractive, suggesting a gradual process of affectivisation in the literature; but this suggested order should not be given much weight. A major dating problem—and a fact to be born in mind throughout this paper—is that in these works composition and adaptation are often indistinguishable activities, and that in the forms we have them some of the works may at once have influenced and have been influenced by the same other works in various stages of the latter's existence.

11. For philological scholarship see note 2 and the various Early English Text Society editions of the anchoritic works (especially Seinte Katerine, eds S. R. T. O. d'Ardenne and E. J. Dobson, Early English Text Society, S. S., 7, London, 1981). The classic work on the style of the group is R. W. Chambers, ‘The Continuity of English Prose from Alfred to More and his School’, in Harpsfield's Life of More, ed. E. V. Hitchcock, Early English Text Society O. S., 186, London, 1932. See also D. Bethurum, ‘The Connection between the Katherine Group and Old English Prose’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 34 (1935), 553-64. More recent studies (e.g. Shepherd, op. cit., pp. lxvi-lxviii, Millett, op. cit., pp. lii-lvi) are cautious in making such claims for continuity, and tend to stress rather the Latin rhetorical background of the works.

12. See Janet Grayson, Structure and Imagery in ‘Ancrene Wisse’, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1974; Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1981. Recent source-studies include E. J. Dobson, Moralities on the Gospels, Oxford, 1975 and Alexandra Barrett, ‘Anchoritic Aspects of Ancrene Wisse’, Medium Aevum, 49 (1980), 32-45. See also Millett and Shepherd, op. cit.

13. Ancrene Riwle, Introduction and Part I, eds R. W. Ackermann and Roger Dahood, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 31, Binghampton, 1984.

14. See Shepherd, op. cit., pp. xxx-lix, which provides important starting-points and insights, the influence of which will be everywhere apparent in this paper; Dom Gerard Sitwell's introduction to The Ancrene Riwle, trans. M. B. Salu, London, 1955, pp. vii-xxvi, which attempts unsuccessfully to assimilate the work to fourteenth-century mystical categories; Millett, op. cit., pp. xxiv-xlv, which provides theological background to Hali Meiðhad. Unfortunately I have not been able to see Monks, Hermits and the Ascetic Tradition, ed. W. J. Shiels, Studies in Church History, Oxford, 1985, which might be of additional help.

15. Conrad Pepler, The English Religious Heritage, London, 1958. Pepler's one-chapter treatment of Ancrene Wisse, in which the work is portrayed as suggesting the beginnings of a mysticism which came to its full flowering in the fourteenth century, has analogues in various histories of English spirituality. See, for example, Peter Hackett, ‘The Anchoress' Guide’ in Pre-Reformation English Spirituality, ed. James Walsh, London (1965), pp. 67-80.

16. Dom Cuthbert Butler, Western Mysticism, London, 1922, 3rd edition London, 1967 (with Afterthoughts from the 2nd edition of 1926 and a new Foreword by David Knowles), p. 125f. I use Butler's main contention, that there is a pre-Dionysian and non-systematic stage of western mysticism which is pre-eminently presented in the work of Augustine, Gregory and Bernard, in a way of which he might not himself have approved—to open the door to a more pluralistic approach to Christian mysticism, rather than to return to what he conceived of as its pre-scholastic purity. Butler's work receives careful and critical appraisal in Knowles' Foreword (as in his book What Is Mysticism? London, 1967, pp. 12, 113-14). However in spite of Knowles' critique and counter-proposal—that we should view the history of Christian mysticism in terms of the contaminating but gradually diminishing influence of Plotinian thought, a suggestion I find puzzling and unconvincing—Butler's main historical case seems to me to remain useful. For an account of the pervasive influence of Plotinian thought on early Christian mysticism, see Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys, London, 1981.

17. For further discussion of these admittedly contentious remarks, see my ‘Mysticism and Modern Scholarship: Absolute Experience and the Relative Text’ (forthcoming), Kings's Theological Review.

18. See the two Passion meditations in English Writings of Richard Rolle, ed. H. E. Allen, Oxford, 1931, pp. 19-36. The English epistles also presented in this volume (especially The Form of Living) indicate as well as any of his Latin works Rolle's commitment to the idea of the spiritual life as a progess; the three grades of love (see The Form of Living, ch. 8, pp. 104f) are borrowed from Richard of St Victor and are only one of a series of structures of progression in these works.

19. See Walter Hilton, The Ladder of Perfection, trans. Leo Sherley-Price, Harmondsworth, 1957, e.g. chs 1-9; the image of the pilgrimage occupies Book 2, chs 21 ff.

20. See The Cloud of Unknowing and Related Treatises, ed. Phyllis Hodgson, Analecta Carthusiana 3, Salzburg, 1982.

21. See The Prickynge of Love, ed. Harold Kane, 2 vols, Salzburg, 1983, e.g. ch. 4 (‘In sixe maner wise. a man mai considere þe passioun of owre lord ihesu crist’, p. 26, ll. 6-7), chs 5-6 etc.

22. See Nicholas Love, The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, ed. Lawrence F. Powell, Oxford, 1908, p. 8 etc. For this work's relation to its source, see E. Zeeman (Salter), ‘Nicholas Love—a Fifteenth-Century Translator’, Review of English Studies, New Series 6 (1955), 113-27.

23. See The Book of Virtues and Vices, ed. W. Nelson Francis, Early English Text Society, O. S., 217, London, 1942, e.g. ‘the seven degrees of chastity’, pp. 223-30, 272 etc.; Ludus Coventriae, ed. K. S. Block, Early English Text Society, E. S., 120, London, 1922 (rptd 1960), 11, ‘The Parliament of Heaven’, pp. 97-130; the lyrics of ‘the school of Richard Rolle’, nos 77-86 in Religious Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Carleton Brown, 2nd edition, Oxford, 1952.

24. Love, op. cit., p. 8; with a fine metaphoric twist, Cecilia is spared pain by hiding in the wounds of Christ, his pain acting as a substitute for hers.

25. The division of the text into sections appropriate for the canonical hours may be intended to provide some equivalent of the office for the lay reader, or at least to present the text in suitably digestible chunks; but if so the work substitutes for the office rather than evoking it.

26. See The Abbey of the Holy Ghost in Yorkshire Writers, ed. Carl Horstmann, 2 vols, London, 1895-6, vol. 1, pp. 321 f.—a work popular enough in fifteenth-century England to be printed by Wynkyn de Worde as early as 1496. …

27. See e.g. Incendium Amoris, ed. Margaret Deanesley, Manchester, 1915, ch. 31. This is a slightly-veiled narrative of Rolle's refusal to become a monk, rather than merely an account of his unwillingness to sing in a choir.

28. See e.g. Michael Sargent, ‘Carthusian Transmission of Medieval Spiritual Writings in England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 27 (1976), 225-40.

29. See The Cloud of Unknowing, op. cit., p. 1 (the prologue).

30. This is clear from the manuscripts (as described by H. E. Allen, Writings Ascribed to Richard Rolle, op. cit., pp. 257-63 etc.). The work was owned by Syon monastery, appears in the Vernon manuscript (which may have been intended for a lay readership—see note 33 below) and was translated early into Latin.

31. See H. E. Allen, op. cit., p. 231.

32. For a recent discussion of the relationship between the two books of The Scale of Perfection, see David G. Kennedy, Incarnational Element in Hilton's Spirituality, Salzburg, 1982, pp. 231-2; see also Helen Gardner, ‘Walter Hilton and the Mystical Tradition in England’, Essays and Studies, 22 (1937), 103-27.

33. See A. I. Doyle, ‘English Books in and out of Court from Edward III to Henry VII’, in English Court Culture in the Late Middle Ages, eds V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne, London, 1983, pp. 163-82, especially pp. 167-8.

34. See Mary S. Serjeantson, ‘The Index of the Vernon Manuscript’, Modern Language Review, 32 (1937), 222-261.

35. The Corpus and Cleopatra manuscripts are the largest at circa 8.5" × 6" and 8" × 5.5" respectively; the other four are all around 6" × 5". All are carefully but cheaply produced.

36. Shepherd (op. cit., pp. xxi-xxii) and Dobson, Origins, op. cit., pp. 1-5, refer to the aristocratic nature of the original readers of the Nero and Corpus manuscripts. Unfortunately I have not been able to see the recent work, Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England, Berkeley, 1985.

37. Wohunge, op. cit., ll. 590-3: ‘Let my body hang with your body nailed on the cross, fastened, transfixed within four walls’. ‘Sperred’ is derived from Old English sparrian (to close or bar), with a probable pun on Early Middle English speren (to spear), to link the statement more clearly with the Passion; the grammatical structure of the original is altered in the translation to convey some of this density of meaning.

38. Whereas the equivalents of Wit and Will dominate the source of Sawles Warde, book IV of Hugh of St Victor's De Anima (essentially a psychological treatise), Wit is reduced to a cipher in the Middle English version, while the active characters become the four daughters of God, Will making an occasional appearance; this tends to diminish our awareness of the work as a personification allegory. As a result, the contrast between Will and the four daughters here reads like a variation on the Martha-and-Mary theme that occurs in several of the anchoritic works (Book 8 of Ancrene Wisse contrasts the two sisters, while in Hali Meiðhad the same theme is often implicit in the contrast between the contemplative virgin and the harassed housewife). While a strict reading of the personification allegory demands that Will's marriage to Wit be taken as signifying her supposed obedience to him, given the view of matrimony expressed in these other works it seems likely that their marriage is portrayed as disastrous with a partly satiric intent. Thus Will can be read either as the unruly anchoress or as the housewife of Hali Meiðhad—readings which depend on the knowledge we can assume the original readers of Sawles Warde had of some of the other anchoritic works, and which enrich what otherwise seems a somewhat monochrome allegory.

39. Hali Meiðhad, p. 2, 1. 4.

40. Basil Cottle, review of Millett's edition of Hali Meiðhad, Medium Ævum, 54 (1985), p. 137. The judgement seems particularly unfair given Millett's careful placing of the work in a patristic theological context (see especially pp. xxx-xxxviii), but is by no means unique. d'Ardenne uses a similarly negative view of the work as evidence against a common author for all the anchoritic texts, and while Dobson (Origins, op. cit., pp. 155-6) seeks to be more moderate, he seems in substantial agreement.

41. Since Hali Meiðhad preaches to the converted, it is probably misleading to call it a homily (as F. J. Furnivall does on the title page of his Early English Text Society edition, O. S., 18, revised edition London, 1922), and even more so to call it a tract (as does e.g. Shepherd, op. cit., p. xiii)—arguably an opprobrious term, and now usually applied only to evangelistic or propagandist works (see definition I.3 in the Oxford English Dictionary). As Millett points out (op. cit., p. lii), the work is formally an epistle in the Jeromian tradition, which is a further sign of the particularity of its intended audience.

42. Ancrene Wisse, f 107b, ll. 7-8: ‘Am I not the fairest thing, am I not richest king, am I not the highest born?’ See also Wohunge, ll. 1-269.

43. Juliana, ll. 26-9 etc., where Eleusius is described as beloved by Maximius, and ll. 58 ff, where the former is elevated to Maximius' second-in-command.

44. Juliana, p. 19 (emended text): ‘My life and my lover and lady, if you wish well, as a wise woman, consider that I am the richest in Rome and the highest born. Why do you cause us both this woe through your great ignorance, and bring about this wrath?’ There is of course a tone of cunning to this speech which is diabolic, subtly different from the direct appeal Christ's speech in Ancrene Wisse makes to the reader's prudence.

45. Ancrene Wisse, f 108a, ll. 12-17.

46. Juliana, ll. 215 ff, Ancrene Wisse, f 12b-15b, Hali Meiðhad, p. l, Wohunge, ll. 242-51.

47. Juliana, pp. 41-2 (emended version), where she binds and beats the demon with her own bonds; see also pp. 59-60.

48. The image of a spiral was first used by Shepherd, op. cit., p. lxii, to describe the structure of Ancrene Wisse; it is developed extensively by Grayson (op. cit.), as by Georgianna (op. cit.). In Part 8, the author recommends his charges to read in the book each day ‘leasse oðer mare’ when they are ‘eise’ (f 117a, l. 28), which suggests that the work fulfilled a similar function in the anchoresses' day as Wohunge, which is also to be read ‘hwen þu art on eise’ (ll. 650-1). (The instructions for the reading of Ancrene Wisse also recall the prologue to Anselm's Orationes sive Meditationes, which are to be read ‘in quiete’ and at whatever length is necessary to excite the mind to prayer; see S. Anselmus, Opera Omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt, Edinburgh, 1946, vol. 3, p. 3.) The purpose of calling this and the other anchoritic works an ‘exercise’ is to point out that the function of these works is essentially affective and mnemonic as distinct from (for example) evangelistic and instructive.

49. Ancrene Wisse, f 102a, ll. 20-f 102b l. 2: ‘These Maries, it says—these bitternesses—were coming to anoint our lord; they are coming to anoint our lord—those things we suffer for his love—who stretches himself towards us as one who is anointed, and makes himself smooth and soft to feel. And was he not himself a recluse in Mary's womb? These two things belong to the anchorite: narrowness and bitterness. For the womb is a narrow dwelling, where our lord was enclosed—and this word Mary, as I have said often, signifies bitterness. If you then suffer bitterness in a narrow place you are his fellows, enclosed as he was in Mary's womb.’

50. The Book of Margery Kempe, eds S. B. Meech and H. E. Allen, Early English Text Society, O. S., 212, London, 1940, ch. 81.

51. This transformation of the external world is well analysed by Georgianna, op. cit., Introduction, chs 1 and 3, pp. 55-78. Georgianna is concerned to show that although the anchoress is enclosed, she must continue to respond to her own intimate connection with the external world in order to achieve the individuation which is the ideal of Ancrene Wisse. My argument parallels this to some extent, but I am suspicious of Georgianna's reading of twelfth-century individualism.

52. Part 2 of Ancrene Wisse makes clear its disapproval of anchoresses who preach or instruct, and the Introduction insists on stability of abode. Only the saints' lives imply what must have been an important function of the anchoresses' lives, their presence as an evangelical image of Christ in a community; living as they did in cells adjoining churches—paradoxically placed in the very centre of the community by their decision to seek the ‘wilderness’ of solitude—such a presence would potentially be of enormous symbolic power. It would be uncharacteristic of Ancrene Wisse to give cause for pride by reminding its readers of this evangelistic function as living participators in Christ's death, yet such a relationship with the outside world could best be served by the silence it advocates. The anchoresses were to be like the evocatively dumb figures of Christ in fifteenth-century cycle drama.

53. Hali Meiðhad, pp. 1-2. The advice to remain in the tower of Sion inverts the verse with which the work begins, ‘Audi, filia, et vide, et inclina aurem tuam; et obliviscere populum tuum et domum patris tui’ (Psalm 44:11), replacing the command to action with one to stability and inaction.

54. Wohunge, ll. 582-619: ‘Lord, what may I repay you for all that you have given me? What may I suffer for you, for all that you have suffered for me? Ah, you must be easy to pay! A wretched body, and a weak one, I bear over earth—and that, such as it is, I have given and will give to your service. May my body hang with your body nailed on the cross, fastened, transfixed within four walls; and I will hang with you, and never more come from my cross until I die—for then shall I leap from the rood into rest, from woe to weal and into eternal joy. Ah, Jesus, so sweet it is to hang with you, for when I look on you who hangs beside me, the great sweetness of you snatches me strongly from pain. But sweet Jesus, how may my body be set against yours? For if I might give you myself a thousandfold, it would be nothing compared with you, who gave yourself for me. And still I have an unsteady and an unworthy and a destitute heart, and poor of all good qualities—and that, such as it is, take it to you now, beloved life, with true love; and never suffer me to love any other thing against your will. For I may nowhere set my love better than on you, Jesus Christ, who bought it so dearly.’

55. Sawles Warde, ll. 391-7, in Early Middle English Verse and Prose, eds J. A. W. Bennett and G. W. Smithers, 2nd edition, Oxford, 1974, pp. 246-61: ‘Each of you has his time to speak, nor is either to turn the other's tale aside in his time. You warn of woe, he tells of gladness. There is great need that we listen eagerly to both of you. Go away now though, Fear, while Love of Life is in here, and suffer with an unmoved heart the judgement of Righteousness; for you shall very joyously be welcomed in as often as Love of Life stops speaking’.

56. Ancrene Wisse, f 95b, ll. 10-26: ‘Look, beloved sisters, how this stair is higher than any of the others. The pilgrim in the world's way, though he goes forward to the home of heaven, he sees and hears foolishness—and speaks it from time to time—is angered by wrongs, and many things may hinder him in his journey. The dead has no more of shame than of honour, of hard than of soft, for he feels neither; and therefore he deserves neither woe nor joy. But the one who is on the cross, and has joy from it, turns shame to honour and woe to joy, and earns therefore a reward over all rewards. This is the one who is never glad-hearted but when she suffers some woe or some shame with Jesus on his cross. For this is joy on earth, when anyone may for God's love have shame and suffering. Thus lo, true anchorites are not only pilgrims, nor yet only dead, but are this third: for all their joy is to be hung painfully and shamefully with Jesus on his cross’.

57. Ancrene Wisse, f 106a, ll. 13-19: ‘But you say, Lord, why? Might he not have saved us with less grief? Yes truly, very easily, but he did not want to. Why? to take from us any reason for not giving him our love, that he so dearly bought. A thing bought easily is loved little. He bought us with his heart-blood—no dearer price, ever—to draw our love from us toward him; it cost him so sorely’.

58. See e.g. f 8b, ll. 18-23: ‘After the kiss of peace, when the priest consecrates, there forget all the world, there be all out of the body, there with sparkling love enfold our lover who has alighted from heaven into our breasts' bower, and hold him tight until he has granted you all that you ever ask.’

59. Ureisun, ll. 44-66: ‘Ah, Lord Jesus, your help! Why have I any delight in other things than in you? Why do I love anything but you alone? Why do I not see how you stretch yourself out for me on the cross? Why do I not throw myself between those same arms spread open so very wide, and open as the mother does her arms to enfold her dear child … Ah Jesus, your humility and your great mercy! Why am I not in your arms, so stretched and spread on the cross? And does anyone expect to be enfolded between your blissful arms in heaven unless he has thrown himself into them here, between your pitiful arms on the cross? No, truly no; let no-one ever expect it. Through this low embracing one must come to the high; he who wishes to embrace you there, such as you are there, lord of life, he must have embraced you here …’.

60. Shepherd, op. cit., p. lvii.

61. Ibid., p. xxxvii.

62. Ancrene Wisse, f 103a, ll. 7-28, in which the anchoresses are the mountains on which Christ treads rather than the little hills over which he skips (the allusion being to Song of Songs, 2:8).

63. Ureisun, ll. 63-67, 76-7: ‘Through this low embracing one must come to the high; he who wishes to embrace you there, such as you are there, lord of life, he must have embraced you here, as you made yourself here, a wretch for us wretches … Let no man expect to climb with ease to the stars’.