Search results
This source book offers a comprehensive treatment of the solitary religious lives in England in the late Middle Ages. It covers both enclosed anchorites or recluses and freely-wandering hermits, and explores the relation between them. The sources selected for the volume are designed to complement better-known works connected with the solitary lives, such as the anchoritic guide Ancrene Wisse, or St Aelred of Rievaulx’s rule for his sister; or late medieval mystical authors including the hermit Richard Rolle or the anchorite Julian of Norwich. They illustrate the range of solitary lives that were possible in late medieval England, practical considerations around questions of material support, prescribed ideals of behaviour, and spiritual aspiration. It also covers the mechanisms and structures that were put in place by both civil and religious authorities to administer and regulate the vocations. Coverage extends into the Reformation period to include evidence for the fate of solitaries during the dissolutions and their aftermath. The material selected includes visual sources, such as manuscript illustrations, architectural plans and photographs of standing remains, as well as excerpts from texts. Most of the latter are translated here for the first time, and a significant proportion are taken from previously unpublished sources.
meditations that these texts are intended to prompt. Using Rolle’s Meditations, the Showings of Julian of Norwich, and The Book of Margery Kempe, I explore the ways in which each text’s narrative persona employs individual experience to establish his or her sanctity and the strategies that the texts use to enable their audiences to follow the models of holiness that they illustrate. Where Rolle’s Meditations is a guide to affective contemplation and suggest a narrative perspective that is capable of being inhabited by any reader, Julian and Margery are both concerned – in
independent figures that people would turn to for advice, or merely to share a problem or a confidence. 15 The law of charity required that they should do their best to be good listeners. Julian of Norwich seems to have fallen into this category. She was visited towards the end of her life, in 1413, by Margery Kempe, who spent ‘many days’ telling her about her experiences, and in particular her ‘many
This fine and lovely word Mother is so sweet and so much its own that it cannot properly be used of any but Him, and of her who is his own true Mother – and ours. In essence, motherhood means love and kindness, wisdom, knowledge, goodness. 1 Julian of Norwich Motherhood and meaning Julian of Norwich, whose
. Plays are well suited to explore dialogue, which functions as a recurrent mode within the Book ; Margery speaks with many divine, clerical, and lay figures. One of those conversations has especially fascinated dramatists: Margery's visit with Julian of Norwich. The two women's lives were radically different, but they share intriguing commonalities as visionaries who became the first known women writers in English. It is easy to imagine that they had much to discuss, and several plays do just that, seeking to ‘resurrect the historic moment where – as writings record
the end of the world is at hand’, but with ‘repent ye and accept God’s will’. Julian of Norwich, writing at about the same time as the Gawain -poet, is able to express a conviction that God is free from anger, that he will see to it that all shall always be well, and that love was his meaning. The message of God’s love is present in Pearl, Cleanness , and Patience too, but the poet shows no confidence that people can grasp it. All they can grasp, so the endings of Pearl and Patience indicate, is the more sombre message of the need to submit themselves to God
Cornhill, St Benet Fink, St Clement Danes, and the Dominicans’ church of Blackfriars [ 6b ]; hermits in the parishes of St Clement’s, St Lawrence Jewry and Charing Cross, and solitaries dwelling in or near the city wall at Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate [ 40 ], [ 62 ], All Hallows in the Wall [ 6a ], [ 35b ], and at the Tower of London. 16 In Norwich between Julian of Norwich at the end of the fourteenth century and
Encountering the Book In this chapter I focus on one of the Book 's most salient features, namely Margery Kempe's systematic use of the third person (including the phrase ‘this creatur’) to refer to herself. 1 Kempe's closest contemporary, the English anchorite and author Julian of Norwich, whom Kempe visited in or soon after 1413, also refers to herself as a (not ‘the’) ‘creature’, but writes her spiritual memoirs in the first person
Kempe and Julian of Norwich; Kim supports her chapter with an immersive 360-degree video on YouTube that enables readers to use smartphones to explore the Via Dolorosa and the Holy Sepulchre. This sharp encounter between the Middle Ages and the twenty-first century harnesses evolving technologies which provide the mechanism for communication, interpretation, and textual encounter; then and now. Such technologies – reaching back to those of medieval parchment and manuscript production and forwards to the technologies of theatrical spaces and cyber spaces – provide
. Put to death by the waters and the earth itself, and deprived of life-giving air, Vitalis's restoration to the universal elements is confirmed by his posthumous, retributive harnessing of the flames in which his executor burns. But such a martyrdom by being buried alive would also have had resonances with the ‘death to the world’ of the medieval anchorite, ‘buried’ in her cell – not least Kempe's own adviser, Julian of Norwich. The anchoress is even advised in the Ancrene Wisse to dig her own grave with her fingernails: ‘ha schulden schrapien euche dei þe eorðe up