This source book offers a comprehensive treatment of the solitary religious lives in England in the late Middle Ages. It covers both enclosed anchorites or recluses and freely-wandering hermits, and explores the relation between them. The sources selected for the volume are designed to complement better-known works connected with the solitary lives, such as the anchoritic guide Ancrene Wisse, or St Aelred of Rievaulx's rule for his sister; or late medieval mystical authors including the hermit Richard Rolle or the anchorite Julian of Norwich. They illustrate the range of solitary lives that were possible in late medieval England, practical considerations around questions of material support, prescribed ideals of behaviour, and spiritual aspiration. It also covers the mechanisms and structures that were put in place by both civil and religious authorities to administer and regulate the vocations. Coverage extends into the Reformation period to include evidence for the fate of solitaries during the dissolutions and their aftermath. The material selected includes visual sources, such as manuscript illustrations, architectural plans and photographs of standing remains, as well as excerpts from texts. Most of the latter are translated here for the first time, and a significant proportion are taken from previously unpublished sources.-- publisher.

This source book offers a comprehensive treatment of solitary religious lives in England in the late Middle Ages. It covers both enclosed recluses (anchorites) and free-wandering hermits, and explores the relationship between them. Although there has been a recent surge of interest in the solitary vocations, especially anchorites, this has focused almost exclusively on a small number of examples. The field is in need of reinvigoration, and this book provides it. Featuring translated extracts from a wide range of Latin, Middle English and Old French sources, as well as a scholarly introduction and commentary from one of the foremost experts in the field, Hermits and anchorites in England is an invaluable resource for students and lecturers alike.

This was the first full-scale history of medieval English literature for nearly a century. Thirty-three distinguished contributors offer a collaborative account of literature composed or transmitted in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland between the Norman conquest and the death of Henry VIII in 1547. The volume has five sections: 'After the Norman Conquest'; 'Writing in the British Isles'; 'Institutional Productions'; 'After the Black Death' and 'Before the Reformation'. It provides information on a vast range of literary texts and the conditions of their production and reception, which will serve both specialists and general readers, and also contains a chronology, full bibliography and a detailed index. This book offers an extensive and vibrant account of the medieval literatures so drastically reconfigured in Tudor England. It will thus prove essential reading for scholars of the Renaissance as well as medievalists, and for historians as well as literary specialists.

Nature Prose seeks to explain the popularity and appeal of contemporary writing about nature. This book intervenes in key areas of contemporary debate about literature and the environment and explores the enduring appeal of writing about nature during an ecological crisis. Using a range of international examples, with a focus on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writing from Britain and the US, Dominic Head argues that nature writing contains formal effects which encapsulate our current ecological dilemma and offer a fresh resource for critical thinking. The environmental crisis has injected a fresh urgency into nature writing, along with a new piquancy for those readers seeking solace in the nonhuman, or for those looking to change their habits in the face of ecological catastrophe. However, behind this apparently strong match between the aims of nature writers and the desires of their readers, there is also a shared mood of radical uncertainty and insecurity. The treatment and construction of 'nature' in contemporary imaginative prose reveals some significant paradoxes beneath its dominant moods, moods which are usually earnest, sometimes celebratory, sometimes prophetic or cautionary. It is in these paradoxical moments that the contemporary ecological crisis is formally encoded, in a progressive development of ecological consciousness from the late 1950s onwards. Nature prose, fiction and nonfiction, is now contemporaneous with a defining time of crisis, while also being formally fashioned by that context. This is a mode of writing that emerges in a world in crisis, but which is also, in some ways, in crisis itself. With chapters on remoteness, exclusivity, abundance, and rarity, this book marks a turning point in how literary criticism engages with nature writing.

A multi-disciplinary re-evaluation of the role of women religious in the Middle Ages, both inside and outside the cloister. Medieval women found diverse ways of expressing their religious aspirations: within the cloister as members of monastic and religious orders, within the world as vowesses, or between the two as anchorites. Via a range of disciplinary approaches, from history, archaeology, literature, and the visual arts, the essays in this volume challenge received scholarly narratives and re-examine the roles of women religious: their authority and agency within their own communities and the wider world; their learning and literacy; place in the landscape; and visual culture. Overall, they highlight the impact of women on the world around them, the significance of their presence in communities, and the experiences and legacies they left behind.

An examination of the importance of anchoritism to social, cultural and religious life in the middle ages.

Medieval stairs, galleries and upper chambers in cathedrals, abbeys, and parish churches have been an enduring source of fascination to historians and archaeologists since the eighteenth century, but their practical purposes have long been shrouded in mystery and speculation. From libraries to lights, clocks to dovecotes, from secret games of skittles played over the vaults to the daring exploits of the twelfth-century Flying Monk, Toby Huitson explores the lofty spaces, nooks and crannies of medieval upper spaces though the interrogation of a wide range of documentary, visual and archaeological materials. Evidence is revealed for over 30 different functions during the period from around AD 1000 to 1550. Generously illustrated and fully-referenced, the text is accompanied by a set of special features and a quick-reference section, making it indispensable to all those interested in medieval history and architecture. Dr Toby Huitson teaches at the University of Kent, Canterbury.