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Reading Medieval Anchoritism: Ideology and Spiritual Practices (Religion & Culture in the Middle Ages) (Religion and Culture in the Middle Ages)
Author(s): Mari Hughes-Edwards (Author)
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Publication Date: 15 Jun. 2012
Language: English
Print length: 256 pages
ISBN-10: 0708325041
ISBN-13: 9780708325049
Book Description
Medieval anchorites willingly embraced the most extreme form of solitude known to the medieval world, so they might forge a closer connection with God. Yet to be physically enclosed within the same four walls for life required strength far beyond most medieval Christians. This book explores the English anchoritic guides which were written, revised and translated, throughout the Middle Ages, to enable recluses to come to terms with the enormity of their choices. It interrogates five centuries of the guides’ negotiations of four anchoritic ideals: enclosure, solitude, chastity and orthodoxy, and of two vital anchoritic spiritual practices: asceticism and contemplative experience. In so-doing, it explodes the myth of the anchorhold as solitary death-cell, revealing it, concurrently, as the site of potential intellectual exchange and spiritual growth.
Editorial Reviews
Review
In this impressive study, Dr. Hughes-Edwards writes a new history of medieval English anchoritism that rivals the work of Warren’s landmark ‘Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England’. She traces, patiently and sensitively, the evolution of five centuries of anchoritic ideology, placing it in the context of a wide range of rarely considered, but remarkably innovative, theological texts. The results are profound and surprising. No scholar of medieval anchoritism or indeed the history of medieval asceticism can afford to ignore this book . –Professor Robert J. Hasenfratz, University of Connecticut
Mari Hughes-Edwards’s ‘Reading Medieval Anchoritism’ is comprehensive, systematic and thorough. The first study to trace anchoritic ideology over five centuries, it shows that the goal of the anchorite was not extreme suffering and privation but heightened contemplative experience. It amasses important evidence that anchorites had a range of acceptable social functions and modifies scholarship’s current, fundamental, image of anchoritic enclosure as merely social death. –Professor Derek Pearsall, University of York
Mari Hughes-Edwards’s ‘Reading Medieval Anchoritism’ is a thoughtful and well-researched study that will be of interest to all those working on the English anchoritic tradition . –Professor Bella Millett, University of Southampton
About the Author
Dr Mari Hughes-Edwards is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Edge Hill University
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