This MA thesis explores one of the few religious vocations available to medieval women, that of an anchoress. Anchoresses, or recluses, exchanged their life in the world for a cell adjacent to a church, in which they spent the rest of their lives, keeping a daily schedule of prayers and meditations. As an aid in their daily life, several "rules" or "guides" were produced - one of them is Ancrene Wisse. This guide contains practical advice on running the anchorhold, as well as passages concerning spirituality. As a normative text written by a male author, it was compared with another text concerning spirituality, this time written by an anchoress -Julian of Norwich. Julian likely became an anchoress after receiving a series of visions when laying seriously ill; she later recorded these visions for profit of her fellow Christians. Both texts were analysed in connection to anchoritic spirituality and revealed several similarities - for instance, both tend to use the basic metaphors of enclosure as body, Christ as a mother, or Christ as a king or a knight. The image of spirituality that emerges from the two texts is often paradoxical, due to the incommunicability of the Divine, which makes both the anonymous author of the Ancrene Wisse and Julian utilise images with opposite meanings and often shift...

One of the most peculiar developments of the wave of women's spirituality that swept across Europe during the thirteenth century was the popularity of the anchoritic lifestyle in England, a lifestyle that had a particular appeal for women. The anchorhold seems to epitomize the medieval (male) desire to enclose and control a woman's body to the maximum degree possible; it is an amazingly accurate metaphor for the tightly circumscribed lives of medieval religious women. Why, then, did so many women eagerly seek out and embrace such a confining lifestyle? Did women internalize the endless medieval rhetoric about bodily control and woman's lustful nature, to the point where they sought lifelong incarceration to avoid temptation and possible loss of control? Or is it possible that they had a higher motivation - that they sought a more intense experience of union with the divine, and believed that only in strict isolation could such a union be achieved?The popularity of anchoritic spirituality led to the creation of a specialized literary genre in Middle English: vernacular devotional prose for women. These mostly male-authored texts included guidebooks for enclosed life, meditations and prayers, lives of saints, and treatises on virginity. They describe and encourage a religious life for women that is both relational and mimetic: the bride of Christ is also encouraged to emulate Christ through her life of solitary penance and suffering. These two roles are analyzed through an examination of the texts of the Katherine Group, alongside the two themes that dominated medieval religious discourse as it applied to women: virginity and enclosure.Approaching the task from a broad interdisciplinary perspective, I employ a variety of theoretical tools, including cultural/historical, theological, linguistic, and feminist theories. My study analyzes medieval constructions of gender and virginity, and examines the anchoress as both a spiritual person and an embodied creature. In challenging traditional scholarship on and accepted views of medieval English women, I pose new questions about embodied spirituality from a medieval perspective, and offer a different perspective on a period of English history in which women recluses set the standard for holiness and sanctity.

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This dissertation offers the first full-length study of medieval England’s literary tradition of manuals for penitents—texts describing the sins, and other essentials of the faith, that address penitents preparing for confession. This tradition includes works that were among the most popular in medieval England. Some of these—including the Parson’s Tale and Ancrene Wisse, which is an important precursor to this body of writing—have been studied in depth, but the tradition in which they participate is still not well understood. This dissertation shows that this tradition emerged in a significant way in the second half of the thirteenth century, although it took root in an existing body of self-examination writing. Insofar as it reflects a new emphasis on reading as a means of interrogating oneself rather than as a means of preparing oneself to interrogate others, the development of these manuals represents a widening range of reading practices and a shift toward private confessional education. The first two chapters describe the characteristics of manuals for penitents, including their material and formal qualities. Among other contributions, the first chapter explores a feature of commentaries on the essentials of the faith that often goes unnoticed: that when they appear in manuals for penitents, they are not, as is often thought, digressive, impersonal, or strictly didactic, but instead encourage and promote self-reflection. The second chapter examines the implied and actual audiences of manuals for penitents. On the basis of this more precise characterization of these manuals, the final three chapters offer insight into three interlinked texts chosen from different stages of the development of these manuals: Ancrene Wisse, the Compileison, and the Parson’s Tale. In addition to shedding light on these three texts, these concluding chapters highlight some of the tensions that emerged surrounding the shift to asynchronous penitential learning that was enabled by these manuals.