Anchorite

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This paper considers the interplay between poetry, prayer, and liturgy in the early Middle English devotional texts known as the 'Wooing Group', and their potential use by the reclusive audience of Ancrene Wisse, the thirteenth-century guidebook for anchorites. It argues that poetic expression in this case becomes prayer, by progressively shaping the self in orientation towards God.

https://boydellandbrewer.com/9781843845966/addressing-women-in-early-medieval-religious-texts/

An investigation into texts specifically addressed to women sheds new light on female literary cultures.

From the tenth to the twelfth centuries in England and Scotland we have scant evidence of women's writing. How, then, can we access these women's experiences?
This book argues that by analysing texts deliberately written forand addressed directly to women we gain an insight into the horizons of possibility for their lives. It examines religious texts addressed to women, bringing together works that are more widely studied with others that are less well known, and demonstrates continuities across Old English and Latin texts written for female readers and patrons across the Conquest period. Case studies, ranging from Ælfric's sermons to Aelred's De institutione inclusarum, from the Life of Christina of Markyate to Goscelin's saints' lives for Wilton and Barking Abbeys, attend to the intimate scripts women were encouraged to inhabit through a close focus on the form of the textual address.By concentrating on address, the book illuminates how women were encouraged to live, and by following women's commissioning and copying of texts, it demonstrates which of these textual addresses women valued and attempted to follow.

This doctoral thesis (Université de Lausanne, 2017) highlights the role of Carmelite friars in the composition and circulation of religious texts in the vernacular in late medieval England, a mission undertood with energy but also consternation, because of the vexed religious and social climate of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

A particular theological concern to the Carmelites were the teachings of Oxford theologian John Wyclif (c.1328-84) and his ‘Lollard’ followers. Carmelite writers of ‘vernacular theology’ in the years 1375-1450 trod a fine line in balancing their Order’s reputation for, on the one hand, promoting religious renewal, and on the other hand the rooting out of heresy.

The first two chapters set out the context in which medieval English Carmelite writers and their audiences lived. Chapter One considers the interactions between Carmelites and pious laypeople, notably the testimony offered by Margery Kempe (c.1373-1438+) in her Book, and the symbolic imagery contained in the so-called Reconstructed Carmelite Missal. Chapter Two surveys early Carmelite history and historiography, with a particular focus on the Whitefriars’ approach to vernacularity, apostolate, education, and bibliographic culture.

The following chapters present in roughly chronological order the Carmelites known to have written in the vernacular, making reference to others who may have done so, or had a demonstrable interest in vernacular theology. Each Carmelite is first put in his social and literary context, before his life and work are considered.

Chapter Three presents Carmelite theologian Richard Maidstone (d. 1396), comparing his Latin works with his Middle English poem The Penitential Psalms. Chapter Four considers parallel interests in the Litil Tretys on the Seven Deadly Sins by Richard Lavenham (fl. 1399). Chapter Five considers the work of Thomas Ashburne and Richard Spalding, and a manuscript scribe who may well have been an East Midlands Carmelite. Chapter Six concerns Richard Misyn, who in the 1430s translated into English the De Emendatio Vitae and Incendium Amoris by Richard Rolle of Hampole (c.1290-1349), clearly articulating in a preface addressed to an anchorite the tension Whitefriars felt in promoting and policing religious thought in the vernacular. Misyn’s work is compared with confrere Thomas Fishlake, who translated Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection into Latin. Chapter Seven examines Thomas Scrope’s activities as a writer, translator, bibliophile, and promoter of Carmelite spirituality in both the Latin and English languages.

The conclusion traces the extraordinary experience of Carmelite Provincial John Milverton, provides a broad chronological survey of major themes and individuals, and presents a broad resumé of findings, suggesting areas for further research.

Appended to the thesis are: a chronology of Carmelite vernacular writers in medieval England; a list of their surviving, lost, doubtful, and rejected writings, including all known manuscripts, editions, and translations; the Carmelite Rule of Saint Albert in Latin and Modern English versions; and a comprehensive bibliography.

This study investigates one of the curious incidents noted in Rotha Mary Clay’s The Hermits and Anchorites of England (1914): the seeming usurpation of the role of a hermit by a layman in Fisherton and the condemnation of this occurrence by the nearby Salisbury Bishop in 1352. The study, in addition to examining the relationship of the 'pseudo-hermit' to his community (and seeing how such a claim could be regarded as acceptable), provides a transcription of Bishop's condemning Latin mandate (WSA D1/2/3 v. 1, f.210v)

"During recent rescue excavations conducted on Petra Zoranića
square in Zadar, the remains of an earlier-known church were
discovered, which has been identified as the Church of St. Peter of
the Windlass mentioned in medieval documents. A sarcophagus
with an engraved epitaph of Georgius, preist and recluse, was
found in the south-west corner of the church. The sarcophagus
fully corresponds to the formational and decorative standards of
identical monuments from the latter half of the eighth and first half
of the ninth centuries."

This article re-identifies the subject of Nicolas Poussin's 'Landscape with an anchorite saint' (c.1636-37, Museo del Prado, Madrid) as St. Paul the Hermit. Poussin's picture was one of a series of twenty-four large landscape paintings of anchorites in the wilderness commissioned in the 1630s by King Philip IV of Spain to decorate the Buen Retiro, the new palace for the arts on the outskirts of Madrid. There is no documentary evidence regarding the commission's iconography and scholars have traditionally accepted Anthony Blunt's identification of the saint as Jerome. Yet the painting almost certainly does not represent Jerome but St. Paul the Hermit. Poussin's imagery perfectly matches the visual traditions for this saint in contemporary Spanish and Italian art; his particular iconographic choices furthermore align with the artist's preference for poetic innovation defined in 17th-century art theory. Ultimately, Poussin's canvas deserves greater attention since he was evidently entrusted with depicting the first and perhaps most prominent hermit in the series devoted to anchorite saints.

This chapter looks at the work CAT staged by Ansuman Biswas at the South London Gallery in 1998. The piece consisted in a performance/experiment/demonstration of the famous quantum physics image/paradox of Schrödinger’s cat employing as means of investigation the 2,500 years old Indian technology of Vipassana meditation. The performance space consisted of a soundproof black box placed in the middle of the gallery space where Biswas lived for ten days and nights engaging in Vipassana meditation.
The multiple spatial potentialities of this restricted place is interrogated in this chapter by looking at the following cultural references: the spatial and symbolic locations of the hermit and the anchorite; the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment; and the theatrical space.
Eventually the analysis of Vipassana meditation as performance action, enquires into its modalities of operation in respect to spirituality, performativity, spectatorship and embodiment. The hypothesis proposed is that of an introspective theatre informed by the condition of spectatorship that Vipassana generates.

Blogpost on the history of sexuality for Notches Blog:
Aelred’s text challenges a strict binary view of sexual desire and temptation in a way that was unusual at the time, as well as today, and gives us a fascinating insight into his understanding of the similarities between male and female experiences of sex and sexual desire.