Elkins, Sharon K. “Advice to Recluses in the Early Thirteenth Century.” In Holy Women of Twelfth-Century England, pp. 156-60. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

[In the following excerpt, Elkins explores the distrust of friendships as expressed in Ancrene Wisse.]

Early in the thirteenth century, a small group of young women recluses received the Ancrene Riwle. A friend of theirs, a well-educated cleric, had composed this tract for them on their request. Partly because some versions of this text were written in Middle English and French, scholars have analyzed in detail the text of the Ancrene Riwle, prepared careful editions of the surviving manuscripts, published translations, and considered its content and context in numerous scholarly articles. After much speculation on the identity of the author and the female recipients, historians now agree that neither can be identified with certainty. The earliest manuscript, however, can be reliably traced to the southwest midlands of England and identified as a copy made between 1224 and 1230 of the urtext, or original, written a decade or two earlier. The author may have served as the master of the community he addressed.¹

The advice given recluses in this tract at the beginning of the thirteenth century does not represent a great change from what Aelred of Rievaulx offered his sister. Like Aelred's Rule, the Ancrene Riwle assumed that the recluse had chosen to devote her life to the love of Christ, the epitome of all human affections. “Four chief kinds of love are known in this world: the love between good friends, between man and woman, between mother and child, between body and soul. The love which Jesus Christ has for His beloved goes beyond these four and surpasses them all.” Using the familiar language of the Song of Songs, the Ancrene Riwle assured the recluse that she was waiting in solitude for the embrace of Christ. “Our Lord does not kiss with [the kiss of the mouth] any soul that loves anything but Him or those things which help it to possess Him for His sake.”²

Love imagery is so pronounced in this work that a recent study has called the Ancrene Riwle an example of “erotic spirituality.”³ However, although the love between the recluse and Christ was presented in highly emotional terms, there was less focus on the longing of the bridegroom Christ for his bride's virginity than in Aelred's letter to his sister several decades earlier, a work with which the author of the Ancrene Riwle was familiar.⁴ The bridegroom-bride imagery that Aelred favored became only one of many metaphors for the recluse's relationship with her spouse Christ. Instead of emphasizing Christ's longing for a virgin bride, the Ancrene Riwle stressed his faithfulness, devotion, sacrifice, and entreaties.⁵ Often the Ancrene Riwle had a homely spouse in mind, not a seductive lover. Departing from the lyrical language of the Song of Songs, the Ancrene Riwle compared the recluse to a lonely wife: “If a man had made a long journey and someone came and told him that his dear wife was grieving for him so much that without him she had no pleasure in anything, but had grown thin and pale with thoughts of love for him, would this not please him better than to be told that she was enjoying herself, amusing herself, flirting with other men and living a life of pleasure? In the same way Our Lord, who is the spouse of the soul and sees all that she is doing even though He sits on high, is very glad if she longs for Him.”⁶

Some of the advice in the Ancrene Riwle encouraged the anchoress to redirect to Christ the emotions she might have felt for a man: “Touch Him with as much love as you sometimes feel for a man.” But probably the most erotic passage in the work is a reference to receiving Christ in the eucharist, in imagery as evocative for a priest as for a female recluse: “When the priest communicates, forget the world, be completely out of the body, and with burning love embrace your Beloved who has come down from heaven to your heart's bower, and hold Him fast until He has granted you all that you ask.”⁷ While the Ancrene Riwle presented Christ as the recluse's spouse, he was also the perfect friend who laid down his life for another. Or the savior whose sacrificial death let humans live forever. Or the mother who was willing to give her own blood to save her child.⁸

Although the Ancrene Riwle encouraged the recluse to enjoy a love relationship with Christ, the largest portion of the tract was dedicated to penance.⁹ Death to the world was the dominant image; and the highest goal presented was to suffer with Christ.¹⁰ Ways to increase the recluse's sorrow for sins were recommended: meditations on Christ's sufferings, reflections on the seven deadly sins, and considerations of the temptations that assail each of the five senses. The Ancrene Riwle proposed morbid reflections for times of great temptations: “For example,” think “what you would do … if you heard that someone very dear to you had been suddenly drowned, or slain, or murdered, or that your sisters had been burned in their house. Such thoughts as these will often root out carnal temptations.”¹¹

The flesh needed to be chastised. The soul was “united to the flesh, which is mere mud and dirty earth,” because “God did not want it to leap into pride, … and therefore God tied a heavy clod of earth to the soul, like a man hobbling a cow or any other animal that is liable to stray.” Hence, the Ancrene Riwle recommended ascetic acts that would discipline the body: “Of two men who are both ill, which is the wiser, the one who goes without all the food and drink that he likes, and drinks bitter infusions of herbs in order to recover his health, or the other, who follows all his inclinations and pursues his desires in spite of his illness, and soon loses his life?” The tract's key advice was, “Let no one expect to go up to heaven in comfort.”¹²

Committed to a life of penance, devoted to Christ alone, the recluse of the Ancrene Riwle certainly had no room for close personal relationships with men. Some early-thirteenth-century recluses may have tried to maintain heterosexual friendships or simply hold conversations with men, but the author of the Ancrene Riwle deplored these practices: “Some anchoresses are so learned or can talk with such wisdom” that they not only are “ready with a reply” when a priest talks to them but sometimes set up as scholars, teaching those who have come to teach them. In contrast, the Ancrene Riwle recommended, “Give your advice only to women. … Through giving … rebukes, an anchoress has sometimes brought about, between herself and her priest, either a harmful love or a great enmity.”¹³

The fear of heterosexual celibate friendships in the Ancrene Riwle reflects the moment when relationships previously necessary for a recluse's survival had come to be seen primarily as opportunities for sin. Advising the recluse never to look at a man, the Ancrene Riwle defended its position: “‘But do you think,’ someone will say, ‘that I shall leap upon him because I look at him?’ God knows, my dear sister, more surprising things have happened.” Moreover, the recluse herself would be held accountable if any sinful conduct resulted: “If the man is tempted in such a way that he commits mortal sin through you in any way, even though it is not with you, but with desire for you, or if he tries to yield with another person to the temptation awakened in him through your doing, be quite sure of the judgment: you must pay” (emphasis mine). Blaming Bathsheba for “unclothing herself before David's eyes” and Dinah for getting raped, the Ancrene Riwle even advised the recluse to be cautious in making her confessions, not telling her “temptations of the flesh” to a “young priest.”¹⁴

Despite these warnings, the Ancrene Riwle did not mean for recluses to live totally alone. They were just to be isolated from men. Serving women were still necessary, to insulate the recluses from visitors and to care for their material needs. The recluses who received the Ancrene Riwle lived with other recluses, three of them in one version, twenty in another. The women were to encourage each other: “[Let] your dear faces … be always turned towards each other with loving looks and with an expression of sweetness, … joined together in unity of heart and will.”¹⁵ Required for spiritual and material well-being, such relationships with women would not distract the recluses from their primary focus on Christ.

Further evidence that the Ancrene Riwle reflects a period when the friendships of earlier years were increasingly distrusted comes from some related contemporary literature called the “Katherine Group.”¹⁶ Included in this collection is a thirteenth-century version of the life of St. Margaret of Antioch directed specifically to women: widows, wedded women, and maidens. In this version of the life of St. Margaret, there is a dramatic episode not found in any other known version of her life. In this added segment, the demonic dragon that St. Margaret has conquered explains how it has often ensnarled good people trying to lead clean lives. The dragon informs Margaret: “I let [cause] some whiles a clean man won [dwell] nigh a clean woman. … I let em talk and tattle of good and truely love em [one another], without evil willing … so that either of other as of his own be trusty, and truly to know [each other] and the securer be to sit together and game by em one [themselves alone].” The dragon delights to see the loving looks and words these friends exchange, for “then thump I into em loving thoughts,” the first stage of leading them into the pools and swamp of sin. Although such friends can still resist the devil, the struggle is difficult indeed.¹⁷ In the speech of St. Margaret's dragon, the attitude of the early-thirteenth-century literature for recluses is particularly explicit: heterosexual friendships are so dangerous they must be avoided.

This fear of close relationships between celibates appears not only in reworkings of saints' lives but also in chronicles of earlier events. When the thirteenth-century historian of St. Albans Abbey incorporated stories about Christina of Markyate and the hermit Roger, he either could not believe or would not accept that Christina had lived adjacent to Roger's cell and had joined him nightly for prayers. So the chronicle suppressed the account of their intimacy. According to the Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani, the version most widely known until Talbot's edition of Christina's life in the 1950s, Christina lived in a small building near Roger, and in her four years there Roger never consented to see her face.¹⁸

Henceforth recluses were warned against the types of relationships that had permitted their predecessors to flourish in the early twelfth century. No longer were hermitesses free to shape their own form of life and forge their own alliances, for they were to be strictly enclosed. The anchoritic way of life remained viable for women, but only if they accepted more restrictive norms. The tension women like Christina of Markyate had experienced between their desire to remain virgin and their need for heterosexual friendships was resolved: virginity was protected and the friendships abandoned. Thus the recluses' emotions and reflections could be focused exclusively on Christ.

Notes

1. The Ancrene Riwle's importance for female religious is attested by its numerous versions in French, English, and Latin, which are a sign of its popularity and influence as late as the sixteenth century. (The Ancrene Riwle and the Ancrene Wisse are nearly identical versions of the same urtext.) Early in this century, Godwyn, the hermit of Kilburn, was thought to have written it for the three women under his guardianship there. (Allen, “Author of the ‘Ancrene Riwle.’”) But on the basis of references, liturgy, and language, it is now dated at the earliest late in the twelfth century. See Talbot, “Dating of the Ancrene Riwle”; Dobson, “Date and Composition,” esp. p. 206; Dobson, Origins, pp. 48-50; Ackerman and Dahood, Ancrene Riwle: Introduction, pp. 4-6. On the manuscript tradition, see Dobson, “Affiliations.”

2. I quote from Ancrene Riwle, a translation by Salu of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS. 402, later published in a critical edition by Tolkien, English Text of the Ancrene Riwle. Passages cited are from Salu, Ancrene Riwle, pp. 44-45, 174.

3. Bugge, Virginitas, pp. 96-110, has some particularly intriguing conclusions. Arguing that the Ancrene Riwle is an example of “virginity sexualized” to the point of “erotic spirituality,” he asserts, “Christ begins to compete for the love of the English nun solely as a man.” Bugge continues, “As [Christ] grows more masculine and more sexually susceptible, the figure of the nun or anchoress becomes more realistically feminine.” The result of this tendency, Bugge claims, was “an unavoidable distinction as to gender in respect of Christ's love for the human race, his motive for undertaking redemption. The effect was in some sense to disqualify male monasticism from the fullest measure of that love.” Bugge, Virginitas, pp. 98, 107-9.

   In underscoring the intense emotionality of the recluse's love for Christ, Bugge is indeed correct. However, it is unwarranted to assume that medieval men felt excluded by references to Christ as bridegroom. The soul—both of men and women—had long been referred to in feminine terms. To assume that medieval people identified as exclusively with one gender as we tend to do seems unwise, especially since heroic holy women thought of themselves and were considered “manly.” An excellent study on twelfth-century uses of what we consider gender-specific words is Bynum, “Jesus as Mother.”

4. Virginity, once lost, could even be restored: “This kind of break may be mended afterwards, so that there is as much wholeness as before, through the medicine of Confession and repentance.” Salu, Ancrene Riwle, pp. 72-73.

5. In a well-known passage, Christ is compared to a powerful knight rescuing a damsel in distress. Ibid., pp. 172-73. See also Frost, “Attitude to Women,” pp. 242-45.

6. Salu, Ancrene Riwle, p. 162.

7. Ibid., pp. 14, 180.

8. Ibid., pp. 102, 175, where Christ is also compared to a mother playing with her “darling child.” Passages like these could invite men as well as women to a deeper love of Christ.

9. Love is the heading for only one chapter, but the penitential life is developed in chapters on “The Custody of the Senses,” “Regulation of the Inward Feelings,” “Temptations,” “Confessions,” “Penance,” and “External Rules.”

10. Death imagery abounds. The Ancrene Riwle asks, “What is her anchor-house but her grave?” Should the recluse eat with her guests? “One has often heard of the dead speaking with the living but I have never found that they ate with the living.” Salu, Ancrene Riwle, pp. 47, 183. Cf. pp. 51, 155-56, 167.

11. Ibid., pp. 107-8. Cf. pp. 47, 54, 57.

12. Ibid., pp. 62, 161.

13. Ibid., pp. 22, 27, 28, 31.

14. “Keep your hands inside your windows,” the cleric railed. “Touching with the hands, or any other kind of touch between a man and an anchoress is a thing so anomalous, an action so shameful … that … I would far rather see all three of you, my dear sisters, to me the dearest of women, hanging on a gibbet in order to avoid sin, than see one of you giving a single kiss to any man on earth in the way I mean.” Ibid., pp. 23-25, 27, 51, 152. For an argument that comments like these indicate that the author has “adopted, probably unconsciously, the dichotomy in the medieval Church's view of women” as either “wicked temptresses” or “redemptive saints,” see Frost, “Attitude to Women,” esp. pp. 237-39.

15. Salu, Ancrene Riwle, p. 112. Cf. p. 84.

16. Because of their common language, Tolkien linked the Corpus manuscript of the Ancrene Wisse with Bodley 34, a manuscript that contains the lives of three female saints—Juliana, Katherine, and Margaret (the “Katherine Group”)—and the homilies Hali Meidenhad and Sawles Warde. Arguing that the language of the two manuscripts was identical, even in minute details and spelling, Tolkien enabled both to be dated and placed. Both were penned between 1224 and 1230, in the western midlands, probably Herefordshire, and both were slight reworkings of an urtext from at most a decade or two earlier. Tolkien, “‘Ancrene Wisse.’” Cf. Dobson, “Date and Composition,” p. 206.

    Although the similarities have suggested to some scholars that all the works had a single author, the current assessment is instead that the texts reveal “a common religious feeling and literary tradition,” but “common authorship need not of necessity be assumed.” (See Mack, Seinte Marherete, p. xxiii.) In the words of d'Ardenne, the editor of the life of St. Juliana, “We are in the presence of a tradition, with one specially active and influential centre or school, rather than with one busy author and universal provider of devotional literature.” Seinte Iuliene, pp. xli-xliii. Edited for the Early English Text Society, all three female saints' lives in “the Katherine Group” have been published with the Latin texts that were either the likely source of the translation/adaptions or a parallel stemma. By comparing the Early Middle English and Latin versions, the peculiarities of the early-thirteenth-century renditions can be discerned.

17. I have followed the translation of Cockayne (Seinte Marherete, pp. 64-66), who identified the scene as unique (p. vii). For the critical edition, see Mack, Seinte Marherete, esp. pp. xix, xxx-xxxii.

18. Riley, Gesta Abbatum, 1:98-99. Matthew Paris, the author of most of the early part of the Gesta, was not the author of the portions concerning Roger, but either Walsingham or his anonymous predecessor made the additions.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Ackerman, Robert, and Dahood, Roger, eds. and trans. Ancrene Riwle: Introduction and Part I. Binghampton, N.Y., 1984.

Cockayne, Oswald, ed. Seinte Marherete, The Meiden ant Martyr. EETS, o.s. 13 (1866).

Dobson, E. J., ed. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle. EETS 267 (1972).

Mack, Frances, ed. Seinte Marherete, The Meiden ant Martyr. EETS, o.s. 193 (1934).

Riley, Henry Thomas, ed. Gesta Abbatum Monasterii Sancti Albani. Rolls Series 28-30. London, 1867-69.

Talbot, C. H., ed. and trans. The Life of Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Recluse. Oxford, 1959.

Tolkien, J. R. R., ed. The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Ancrene Wisse. EETS 249 (1962 for 1960).

Secondary Sources

Bugge, John. Virginitas: An Essay in the History of a Medieval Ideal. The Hague, 1975.

Dobson, E. J. “The Affiliations of the Manuscripts of Ancrene Wisse.” In English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Norman Davis and C. L. Wrenn, pp. 128-62. London, 1962.

———. “The Date and Composition of the Ancrene Wisse.” Proceedings of the British Academy 52 (1966):181-208.

———. The Origins of ‘Ancrene Wisse.’ Oxford, 1976.

Frost, Cheryl. “The Attitude to Women and the Adaption to a Feminine Audience in the Ancrene Wisse.” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, no. 50 (1978):235-50.

Tolkien, J. R. R. “‘Ancrene Wisse’ and ‘Hali Meidhad.’” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 14 (1929):104-26.