Introduction

Interest in the eremitical and anchoritic life is enjoying something of a revival at present. Nor is this interest entirely academic: in Ireland at least five individuals have made profession as hermits since this category of religious life was again recognized in the 1983 Code of Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church. The life of the anchorite or recluse attracts fewer active practitioners but remains a temporary or permanent vocational option for monks and nuns belonging to the Camaldolese Benedictine tradition. At present one Camaldolese monk is living as a permanent recluse in the monastery of Monte Corona in Italy and Sister Nazarena Crotta, the last female Camaldolese anchorite, died in Rome in 1990.

If the practitioners of the solitary life are relatively few, this is more than compensated for by the high numbers of scholars prepared to cross land and ocean to lecture on stability and enclosure at academic conferences, a fact reflected in the wide range of relatively recent learned publications on anchoritic themes. As a number of the other contributors also note, the pioneering studies of Rotha Mary Clay and of Ann K. Warren continue to be touchstones for the study of medieval English anchoritism. Their conclusions have subsequently been qualified and developed by scholars such as Liz Herbert McAvoy, Mari Hughes-Edwards, Henry Mayr-Harting, Edward A. Jones, Bella Millett and Norman Tanner. The work of North American and European scholars such as Anna Benvenuti Papi, Susannah Chewning, Robert Hasenfratz, Paulette L'Hermite-Leclercq, Michelle Sauer and the other contributors to this present volume has provided important reassessments of the social significance, educational role and gendered experience of anchorites. Anneke Mulder-Bakker in particular has emphasized how largely male (and frequently clerical) scholarship has hitherto failed to recognize how the anchoritic life acted as a vehicle for female spiritual authority. The application of feminist, gender and queer theory as analytical categories has also resulted in many interesting perspectives. Similarly the adoption of anthropological concepts such as ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’ has helped clarify the paradoxical manner in which medieval anchorites were central to the communities on whose margins they existed. The publication of a volume of medieval English anchoritic writings in the Classics of Western Spirituality series, as well as recent critical editions of the writings of Julian of Norwich indicate that the subject retains the interest of theologians and literary theorists.