Anchoritic Studies: a background

This volume comes together as a result of a recent upsurge in scholarly interest in the medieval solitary life and its legacies, both in Continental Europe and the more anglophone regions of the world. Increasingly, those of us whose research areas lie somewhere embedded within the complex web of medieval religiosity have begun to recognize the pivotal role played by the reclusive way of life within much wider-reaching cultural contexts during the Middle Ages. This is something which was prefigured by the words of Dom Jean Leclercq in 1965 who saw the life of the medieval solitary as ‘exercis[ing] an influence, direct or indirect, on every manifestation of spiritual life’; moreover, for Leclercq, whilst the eremitic impulse that characterized the age ‘does not perhaps explain everything, yet there is hardly anything that can be completely understood without it’. Like many scholars of his day, Leclercq's interest was in the medieval solitary in a multifarious sense which encompassed traditional hermits, both solitary and communal, and what we would recognize as ‘anchorites’, all of whom were high-status figures – if, more often than not, anonymous ones – strewn across the map of medieval Europe. As Leclercq's work demonstrates too, the distinction between hermit and anchorite has not always been a clear-cut one, either in pre-modern categorizations or, indeed, within our own contemporary discussions (and this is something I will deal with in more detail later in this introduction); their roles, both public and private, have often been amalgamated in popular imagination, resulting in their occupying the shadowy ground beneath the overarching umbrella of ‘medieval eremitism’. In this context, the very specific way of life and role of the anchorite, as opposed to the hermit, has frequently been subsumed into the larger category and the socio-religious project of medieval anchoritism has thus frequently been occluded. When definitive categorization has been forthcoming, in traditional terms the hermit has been defined as a solitary who can both live alone or within a community of other hermits and who is very often peripatetic – indeed, his/her ability to move about is paradigmatic of the vocation.