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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.

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...

Abstract, Ancrene Wisse, "Guide for Anchoresses" A Czech Translation (2015) Klára Petříková Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses) is a remarkable work of the Middle English literature dating back to the first half of the 13th century. Its author (presumably a Dominican) conceived it as "spiritual life guidelines" for three sisters of a noble origin who decided to renounce the world. Besides its didactic purpose, its character is meditative and contemplative. Riveting in its style, its rich metaphors and heightened sensibility link it with the later tradition of the English mystical writers (Julian of Norwich), The work abounds in quotations, paraphrases of the continental monastic authors (St. Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux). Surviving in seventeen manuscripts, it had been quoted till the Renaissance and its importance is further confirmed by a contemporaneous translation into Latin and French. Present translation aims to introduce this work to the Czech readers and to put it in its historical, social and literary context.