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.

<p dir="ltr">When one thinks of the medieval past, one might think of knights with their shining armor and swords; these are warriors. My dissertation seeks to examine and expose how “warriors” are gendered as masculine; a person or character categorized as a warrior might be assumed to be a man unless otherwise specified to be a “woman warrior.” The need for the qualifying adjective (“woman” or “female”) illustrates that the maleness of warriorhood and violence is understood as implicit. This governing assumption affects how women’s actions, particularly women’s violent actions, are interpreted. This dissertation takes women’s violence as a starting point, examining characters from Judith to Chaucer’s Dido. I show how and why the violence these women enact cannot be relegated to, say, maternal instinct or spirituality. The spiritual warrior is herself impressive, of course; she is a tool, a weapon of God, through whom God fights. The idea of the spiritual warrior then allows for discussions of women without painting them as inherently violent or aggressive. Instead, the spiritual warrior is the martyr, an extension of maternal instincts and the idea that women are caretakers and, when necessary, protectors. But these self-sacrificial ideals, often associated with maternity, are not, nor should they be, a requirement for womanhood.</p><p dir="ltr">I argue that in order to create a capacious enough definition of “woman” and even femininity, we must prize definitions of femininity from the grip of the patriarchy. What if we took these women on their own terms, instead? I seek to do exactly this: to examine, throughout this dissertation, both the ways that violent women act and what they say, without considering how their behavior might, nonetheless, be understood to conform to limiting ideas of femininity (such as the virgin or the whore). I thereby invite us to think about what it means when violent women enact their will on the world; and I also attend to the physical, in addition to the spiritual, effects of this violence (like killing someone). My work suggests that, in order to take gender seriously, we must pay attention to these moments when women hurt or kill either someone else or themselves.</p>