Anna McHugh and Liz Herbert McAvoy seek to uncover evidence of
anchoritism in Scotland and Wales respectively.
7-8; McAvoy," 'Closyd in an hows of ston': Discourses of Anchoritism and The Book of Margery Kempe" in Anchorites Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages, ed.
For a detailed discussion of anchoritism as well as its relationship to gender, see Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs.
Such work on the body and the anchorhold has illuminated the gendered nature of
anchoritism as depicted in Ancrene Wisse in a ground-breaking way, and its stress on liminality suggests other fruitful lines of inquiry.
Robertson points out that the comparative popularity of
anchoritism for the thirteenth-century female contemplative (for whom the texts were written) owed much to the gradual eclipse of women's legal and economic freedom in feudal post-Conquest England.
Pleasingly, the essays all illuminate the volume's overall theme, namely, the ways in which the rhetoric of anchoritism did or did not reflect anchoritic life and, further, the ways in which anchoritic rhetoric travelled to and from the anchorhold and the wider world.
Prompted in large part by the Gregynog conferences and University of Wales' publications such as this one, the study of medieval anchoritism has recently gained a new lease of life and a much more critical focus on the relationships between textual theory and lived practice.
Medieval
Anchoritisms: Gender, Space and the Solitary Life.
McAvoy, Liz Herbert, Medieval
Anchoritisms: Gender, Space & the Solitary Life (Gender in the Middle Ages), Woodbridge and Rochester, D.