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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 Most of the latter are translated here for the first time, and a significant proportion are taken from previously unpublished sources.
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Introduction The life of the hermit was less constrained than that of the anchorite, not only in the obvious sense – hermits were not confined within cell walls, but free to wander – but also in the absence of a rigid regulatory framework or precise set of expectations about what it should involve. (The late Middle Ages did see moves towards the regulation of hermits, and these are treated in the next
Introduction Some time in the 1320s the young Yorkshireman Richard Rolle dropped out of Oxford and returned home. Soon afterwards, he took two of his sister’s dresses and his father’s rainhood to a nearby wood and, with a bit of amateur tailoring, fashioned a kind of habit for himself. Putting it on, he arrived at ‘a confused likeness to a hermit’ [ 47 ]. The anecdote makes it clear
7 The function of material and spiritual roads in the English eremitic tradition Michelle M. Sauer Religious vocations in the Middle Ages took a wide variety of forms, from the traditional careers of cloistered monks and nuns to more unconventional choices, such as being a hermit or anchorite. While all shared the goal of becoming closer to God spiritually, the ethos and practices of each were different. Monks and nuns took formal vows, identified with an order and lived communally within established houses following established rules. Hermits and anchorites
thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries: with anchorites, who lived a life of strict bodily enclosure in a ‘cell’, usually attached to a parish church; and hermits, whose vocation was less clearly defined and subject to fewer constraints. It represents the first comprehensive look at the two vocations in late medieval England in more than a century. 2 The solitary lives in the West before 1200 Medieval solitaries
Street, in Aldington (Kent) and as increasing numbers of visitors (and income) were attracted to the chapel it was provided with a hermit-chaplain named William. Though Barton subsequently became a nun of Canterbury the hermit remained one of her confidants. Barton’s notoriety increased in 1532 when she prophesied that, if Henry’s divorce went ahead, he would die a villain’s death. She was arrested in 1533 and she and five
English church. These responses are especially available from the ways that Spenser and Shakespeare characterize hermits, wild men, and ritualistic sacrifices, and also in the ways that both authors explore the dynamics of communities in exile in the wildernesses of Faeryland and Arden. These literary elements carry with them specific referents to Catholic and anti-Catholic debates of the 1590s
penance as he unites with his harp to live harmoniously among wild animals, creating a salubrious inverse community of the human courtly household, one that models a regenerative alternative to the fairy king's dangerous court. The collection ends with the unique text King Edward and the Hermit (item 41), in which a scene of potential discord – dormant in deer carcasses that in a different climate would have generated royal ire – is prevented through the intervention of a game that, with the aid of alcohol, successfully reconstructs a relationship and thereby the
commitment to a religious order, the life of a hermit (although hermits could be very worldly) or the extreme of total seclusion in an anchorage. 7 For men, it was the fairly regulated life of the hermit – which might well involve physical labour on road building or bridge maintenance (see no. 25) – under the