Anchoritic studies have enjoyed something of a vogue in the medieval literary field over the last twenty years, expanding the attention long directed towards Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich's Revelations. This vogue is represented by an ongoing conference series devoted to anchoritic themes (initially held in Wales, but now circulating internationally), the publication of related essay collections and monographs by Liz Herbert McAvoy, Cate Gunn, Tom Licence, and others, and the foundation and flourishing of the International Anchoritic Society, presently curated by Michelle Sauer. Important new editions and translations of Ancrene Wisse (Bella Millett), the Wooing Group Prayers (Catherine Innes-Parker) and multiple editions and translations of Julian'sRevelations (Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins; Denise Baker; Barry Windeatt) additionally demonstrate a contemporary fascination with female reclusion which shows no signs of abating.
While the reach of these conferences and volumes has been notably inclusive and creative, most papers and publications have tended to focus on the inner regimes of anchorites and hermits: their devotions, prayers, and visions. As E. A. Jones writes himself, Hermits and Anchorites in England, 1200-1550, the latest addition to the Manchester Medieval Sources series, serves as a complement to this literary and spiritual emphasis (11), presenting an extraordinarily rich range of extracts translated from Latin, French and Middle English primary sources, which collectively illuminate the more external and material aspects of the solitary vocation. Here we can access snippets from the formal enquiries instigated by bishops prior to the enclosure of anchorites checking their financial provision, view architectural diagrams showing the position of anchoritic cells in parish churches, read a fifteenth-century episcopal rite for professing a hermit, and evaluate royal letters of protection providing named hermits with a licence to beg. All of these extracts come accompanied by helpful explanatory commentary, so that, rather than feeling bogged down by medieval ecclesiastical administrative records, we are given the tools necessary to make sense of them and see them for what they are: remarkable snapshots of medieval experience.
The volume opens with an authoritative introduction explaining the evolution of the vocation of solitude from its earliest manifestations in the Bible and among the Desert Fathers, to the beginning of the Reformation. We learn the fundamental difference between hermits and anchorites: "hermits wander about alone, while anchorites are strictly enclosed" (Gerard of Wales), and discover that this exacting modus vivendi was largely a lay vocation: as Jones puts it, a testament to "spiritual ambition among the laity" (6). We also learn that, whereas the regulations surrounding anchoritic enclosure and daily regime had become firmly established before 1200, those determining the examination and profession of hermits were only put in place in the early 1400s, leaving the status of the hermit (workshy beggar or itinerant holy man?) a focus of tension for much of the period in question.
Following the general introduction, the book is divided into eight thematic sections: "Becoming an Anchorite", "A Cell of One's Own", "A Day in the Anchoritic Life", "For the Whole Term of This Life", "Scenes of Eremitical Life", "Rules and Regulation", "Renegades, Charismatics and Charlatans", and "Dissolution", each with its own introduction charting a roadmap through the assembled extracts. "Becoming an Anchorite" offers a series of sources arising from the ecclesiastical enquiries made prior to enclosure, and the rite of enclosure itself. Here, we learn about diocesan variation: the Bishop of Exeter, for example, stipulates a period of probation to check the candidate is well suited to the life ahead of them. "A Cell of One's Own" assembles textual sources, diagrams and photographs enabling us to visualise the anchoritic cell and its surround: several had gardens, others were intended to accommodate a couple of servants on site. It also maps the reciprocal relation between anchorites and their aristocratic patrons in which prayers were exchanged for annual allowances of foodstuffs and fuel.
"A Day in the Anchoritic Life" turns to the practical issues of diet, clothing, spiritual reading and prayer life within the cell, selecting extracts from a series of late medieval Rules. Here, better-known material from Richard Rolle's Form of Living is set alongside passages from the Speculum inclusorum, the Dublin Rule, Walter's Rule, and a rule of life for a Benedictine anchorite at Bury St Edmunds. Few readers would have expected to find such so many late medieval rules directed towards such a specialised vocation, eloquent testimony that numbers of solitaries remained healthy and continued to attract ecclesiastical attention up until the end of the Middle Ages. As well as reading saints' lives, passions and meditations, and even perhaps copying books within the cell, as John Lacy, a Dominican recluse, did, some anchorites also experienced visions. Julian's Revelations are neatly set in context by extracts from the dynastic visions of a York anchoress obligingly predicting a male heir for the Earl of Warwick, and the purgatorial visions of a Winchester anchoress. "For the Whole Term of This Life" concludes the life cycle by assembling extracts concerned with the termianation of the anchoritic existence, either through death, apostasy or practical exigencies. Death, indeed, haunted the anchorite from the moment of their arrival in their cell when they were enjoined to dig themselves an open grave. One of the most powerful passages in the collection, an extract from the little-known Walter's Rule, comprises a rhetorical address by the anchorite (gendered male in this instance) to the gaping grave alongside him: "O earth, earth, towards you I turn. And you are always ready to lead me into the darkness. Your jaws make me cry out with fear when, in human likeness, they stretch themselves to my length and breadth, and offer me a place, leaving me no hope of escaping your looming walls" (95). This is clearly a text that would repay much more extensive study.
The second half of the collection turns to the eremitic vocation. "Scenes of Eremitical Life" gives a flavour of the kinds of labour commonly undertaken by hermits. Fascinatingly, many seem to have assisted travel and communication, begging for alms to mend roads and bridges, manning wayside chapels, and even building and maintaining lighthouses. A selection of churchwardens' and chamberlains' accounts from East Sussex in the 1530s show just how menial such labour could sometimes be: here, the hermit of Rye is paid for mending the churchyard and alleys, paring grass from the church walls, throwing sewage from the cliffs into the sea, and "making clean the shitting house" (129). The pungent cast of many of these jobs, and the urban circumstances in which they were often undertaken, stand as an important corrective to the forest sages populating the pages of medieval romance. In reality, most hermits were ill-educated and were neither monastics nor priests.
"Rules and Regulation" balances out the section on anchoritic profession by assembling documents recording eremitic professions, together with an example of the rite used to make a hermit in one fifteenth-century pontifical. Again, we gain insight into the unexpected variety of "rules for hermits" from the late Middle Ages: the Cambridge Rule, and the Rules of St Linus and Celestine. And we learn from Archbishop Arundel that it was possible for a hermit to remain married! He was simply obliged to remain chaste within his marriage. "Renegades, Charismatics and Charlatans" opens a window on the more dubious exponents of the two vocations. A hermit's habit, it seems, could be cover for various kinds of fraud and skulduggery. In addition, there was clearly an anxiety within the ecclesiastical establishment regarding the heterodox potential of these solitary vocations. Half a century before the Wycliffite controversy, Henry de Staunton, hermit, is banned from preaching on the streets of York, attracting followers, and beguiling married persons away from their spouses! William Swinderby, a Lollard hermit, is similarly cautioned for preaching against commerce and clerical corruption in the 1390s, and is driven from diocese to diocese (an interesting context for Margery Kempe's penchant for open-air teaching), while an anchoress in Northampton turns out to head a secret network of Lollard heretics from her cell.
The final section, "Dissolution", feels a little more open-ended than the preceding sections; as Jones admits, the fate of anchorites and hermits after the 1530s remains a subject in need of further research. However, the selection of extracts do an admirable job of suggesting where one might begin. Although the solitary vocation was not formally abolished during the Reformation, nonetheless we are shown vignettes of deserted hermitages and anchorholds, commissioners' letters questioning what should be done with the resident anchorite, hermits who rage against the Dissolution, and anchoresses who convert. A will from the 1540s in Norwich, making bequests to the former occupant of the anchorhold at St Julian's, Conisford, alerts us to the fact that a later lineage of anchoresses continued to occupy Dame Julians's cell.
A model of clarity, non-showy expertise and exemplary explanation, this volume deserves to become required reading for anyone with a scholarly interest in the vocation of solitude. Bringing together the too-often disjoined fields of medieval history and literary studies (with brief forays into archeology for good measure), it sets canonical poems, such as Piers Plowman (with its outburst against good-for-nothing hermits), and devotional epistles, such as those by Richard Rolle, in their important administrative and ecclesial contexts. Furthermore, even though we never directly encounter the voices of Margery Kempe or Julian of Norwich, it also gives us a valuable new set of tools with which to return to those texts. Jones wears his learning lightly, and his lively commentary animates the many medieval life-circumstances he presents to us. At the same time it is clear that an extraordinary depth of research, learning and linguistic expertise underpins this readable book. Already highly respected for his work on the medieval English mystical tradition, on Syon and Sheen Abbeys, and the archives of Rotha Mary Clay, the great early twentieth-century scholar of reclusion, whose Hermits and Anchorites of England (1914) lies behind the title of this book, Jones has also recently edited theSpeculum Inclusorum and its Middle English translation, A Mirror for Recluses (Liverpool, 2013), one of the anchoritic rules to feature in this book. This unparalleled command of the field makes him the ideal expositor of these complex, often obscure sources, allowing him to shape them into a series of coherent narratives. The international community of anchoritic scholars will be indebted to this work and the insights it enables for many decades to come.