6. Anchoritic Aspects of Julian of Norwich
6
Anchoritic Aspects of Julian of Norwich1
E. A. JONES
That we know next to nothing about our author has long been a truism of Julian studies. Serenus Cressy tells us that, for all his searching, he ‘could not discover any thing touching her, more than what she occasionally sprinkles in the Book it self’.2 For Colledge and Walsh she is ‘an enigmatic figure’; for Grace Jantzen she is likewise ‘an enigma’; for Christopher Abbott she has ‘a certain “disappeared” quality’, and in their recent edition Watson and Jenkins are able to offer only ‘a fragmentary biography’.3 The fragments for such a biography are admittedly few, as McAvoy also points out in her introduction to this volume: four wills (which, since the disastrous Norwich Central Library fire of 1994, have effectively become three), the account, in her Book, of Margery Kempe’s visit to consult ‘Dame Ielyan’ about her ‘wondirful reuelacyons’ in 1413, and of course the testimony of Julian’s book(s) themselves.4 All but the last identify Julian as an anchorite, as do the rubricators of the Amherst and Paris manuscripts of her Vision and Revelation.
What, though, does this mean? At one level, the response to this question ought to be, as Langland’s Ymaginitif might have put it: there are books enough to tell men what anchoritism is. There are indeed now a number of good general introductions to the anchoritic vocation in the Middle Ages.5 But studies of Julian seem not to have made much use of them – perhaps another instance of the tendency Nicholas Watson has discerned for critics too easily to think of Julian as just ‘a voice without a context’.6 For historicization, most writers turn instead to another literary text, whose relevance as ‘context’ ought to require more examination than it is sometimes given. At least since 1905, when Dean William Inge introduced both works to a wider public in one of his Westminster lectures on mysticism, Julian has been discussed alongside Ancrene Wisse.7 In some respects this is not unreasonable: though a product of the early thirteenth century, the Wisse was certainly still being read in the fifteenth (albeit most of the readers we know about were not in fact anchorites). That other early classic of anchoritic guidance, Aelred’s De Institutione Inclusarum, was likewise newly translated into English in the late fourteenth and again in the mid fifteenth century. No doubt these works had much to offer, mutatis mutandis, to the late-medieval anchorite. But it is precisely the mutanda – the subtle modulations required when reading the text in the new circumstances of a different period – that we need to know more about if the comparison is not to contribute to a flattening out of the texture of Julian’s anchoritic context.
In this chapter, accordingly, I am going to turn for illustration to the lived experience of other female anchorites of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For those aspects of the anchoritic life less accessible through the documentary record – what might be termed the anchoritic mentality – I will use a guidance text less well-known than Aelred and Ancrene Wisse, but more closely contemporary with Julian. The Speculum Inclusorum probably dates from the second decade of the fifteenth century, towards the end of Julian’s life and writing career. It was written in Latin for an audience primarily of male anchorites, but translated into English in mid-century for a new audience ‘naamly’ of ‘anchoresses’.8
Although I am going to argue that we have more context than is often acknowledged for Julian’s experiences as an anchorite, I want to preface this essay with some words of caution about three ‘facts’ that seem to me to be too often accepted and repeated uncritically. All three may be verified by further research, but further research there needs to be.
Julian’s cell. No visitor to the cell at the church of St Julian in Conisford can fail to be impressed by the materiality of this fact about Julian’s existence. It is worth recalling, however, that this is a reconstruction whose form is conjectural (stone does not appear to have been common, for example), and whose site is not accepted by all.9
The Carrow connection. Although the old view that, before becoming an anchorite, Julian must have been a nun at the Benedictine nunnery of Carrow (which was less than a mile from her cell) has lost ground, belief in a link persists. The commonly held view is put most baldly by Watson and Jenkins: ‘Julian’s cell was in the gift of the Carrow nuns’.10 This is a lot more than the evidence allows us to say. We know that the advowson of St Julian’s belonged to Carrow. That is, the Priory held the right of presenting their candidate to the bishop for appointment as rector whenever a vacancy should occur. Whether the nuns had any say in the process that led to Julian’s enclosure there is mere speculation.
Julian’s name. It seems to be universally assumed that Julian was not our author’s given name. It is stated that she would have taken a new name when she became an anchorite, choosing ‘Julian’ on account of the dedication of the church where she was to spend the rest of her life. The oddity of a woman’s choice of a male saint’s name is sometimes noted. There is not space here to examine the evidence for and against the practice, but my impression is that it was not normal but exceptional for an anchorite to take a new name on profession.11 The odd ‘choice’ of name becomes less odd when one recalls that ‘Julian’ was simply the equivalent of modern ‘Gillian’, and as such a common enough woman’s name in the Middle Ages.12
Rather than dwelling on what we do not know, however, I shall spend the rest of this essay reviewing those aspects of Julian’s anchoritic experience that we do know something about, and which may illuminate, and be illuminated by, contemporary anchoritic practice.
The legatee
There are three wills that certainly contain bequests to Julian: in 1404 Thomas Emund, a Norfolk chantry priest with connections in Norwich, left 12d to Julian, anchorite at the church of St Julian, and 8d to Sarah who lives with her; in 1415 John Plumpton, citizen of Norwich, left 40d to the (unnamed) anchorite at St Julian’s, 12d to her maidservant (ancille sue), and 12d to her former maid, Alice; and in 1416 Isabel Ufford, widow of the Earl of Suffolk, left 20s to Julian, recluse at Norwich.13 In addition, the bequest of the rector of St Michael’s Coslany in Norwich of 2s to ‘Julian anakorite’ in 1394 almost certainly also refers to our Julian. A chantry priest, a merchant, an aristocrat and a career cleric: the range of testators who remembered Julian is a perfect illustration of Ann Warren’s contention that material support for the anchoritic vocation was present ‘at every point in the medieval social system’.14
The householder
The bequests are particularly valuable for their reminder that the anchoritic life could not be lived in splendid isolation. The prescriptive texts give considerable attention to this aspect of the anchoritic experience: we recall Aelred’s advice as to the choice of servants (one young and strong, one old and sensible), and the provisions in Part 8 of Ancrene Wisse for their instruction and discipline. But records of anchorites’ servants are few and far between. In 1415 Henry Lord Scrope made a bequest to Elizabeth, formerly the servant of the anchorite of Hampole.15 Around 1300, the female anchorite of St Chad’s in Chester was represented in a lawsuit by her maid, Cecil.16 A bequest in 1496 of 12d to the ‘ancras’ of Faversham, included also 4d to ‘the ancaras’ women’, while in 1505 a bequest to the anchoress of 6s 8d was accompanied by 3s 4d to ‘her woman’ and 20d to her servant.17
The inclusion – and naming – of Julian’s maids in two of the four bequests to her is therefore unusual, and may imply that they enjoyed a degree of status by their association with her. They also allow us more of a glimpse than we usually get into the intimate world of the reclusory. No other source makes us ask just what might have been involved when an anchoress came to appointing a new maidservant. Above all, they remind us that the anchorite, in addition to her roles as spiritual athlete and intercessor for the world, was also the head of a small household. Julian’s whole theodicy, of course, turns on her rhetorically persuasive yet theologically daring ‘example’ of a servant whose eagerness to fulfil his master’s desire is simultaneously his undoing and the making of him. Ideas of lordship and service in Julian have been explored revealingly by Alexandra Barratt.18 Alongside the Lord and Servant exemplum, she draws attention to the Short Text’s early showing of Mary as ‘a simpille maidene and a meeke, yonge of age, in the stature that sho was when sho conceivede’ (Vision, 4.22–3), who says meekly, ‘Lo me here, Goddes handemaidene’ (4.29–30) (where ‘handemaidene’ translates the Vulgate ancilla) – and whose meekness exalts her above ‘alle that God made’ (Vision, 4.31). Service is not demeaning, but part of a ‘nexus of obligation, honour, service, love and reward’19 that Barratt situates specifically in the ‘Bastard feudalism’ of late-medieval social relations. She goes on to suggest that Julian herself must very likely have come from the aristocratic or gentry background in which such language would be natural. This is not in itself improbable, but for a material basis for some complex reflections on service and dependence, with a special focus on the relationship between superior and ancilla, Julian need have looked no further than her own anchoritic ménage.
The nature of the relationships within this household community is lost to us, though speculation in this area is tempting. Several authors have wanted to identify the ‘certaine person that I loved’ (Vision, 16.1), about whose welfare Julian tells us she was concerned, with her maid Alice. Felicity Riddy goes on to suggest that she – as likely as the male confessor who is usually assumed – could have been the amanuensis who helped Julian write her book.20 Alice, rather than Sara, tends to be the subject of such conjectures because of the appearance in a late fourteenth-century Norwich document of an Alice Hermyte.21 This is the only known reference to a woman hermit in medieval English sources. That the designation might be used for the sub-anchoritic status of one of Julian’s servants with spiritual ambitions is an interesting and not impossible suggestion, as again McAvoy points out in her introduction.22
For further insights into the anchoritic household (including its spiritual dimension) we must look to another example. Katherine Ditton was anchorite at St Michael’s church, St Albans, by 1421, when she was received into the fraternity of the Abbey there. She was the recipient of frequent bequests from local people over the next decade, most often to her alone, but in 1426 to her and her companions (consodalibus); in a will of 1424 her companions are named as Joan Gerard and Agnes Vertesaws, and in 1433 Thomas Lundon left money to her and Philip Gerarde her servant.23 On 11 June 1437 Ditton made her own will, leaving small bequests to the high altar, priest, lights and fabric of St Michael’s. The residue of her goods she left to her executors who were, besides a nephew named John, her servants and companions Joan Gerard and Agnes Verdesaus.24
The dynast
This is not the last we hear of one of these women. In 1452, Dame Agnes, anchorite of St Michael’s, received a legacy of a load of logs, provided she paid for their carriage; and in his will of 1472 a London lawyer, John Wardale, made several bequests to anchorites, including 6s to Agnes Vertesawce, anchoress of St Michael’s.25 Some fifty years after she had first appeared in Ditton’s household, Agnes had evidently succeeded her mistress as principal occupant of the cell. She died in 1478, but there continued to be anchorites at St Michael’s into the sixteenth century, our last reference being dated 1531.26
Such long sequences are unusual in the anchoritic record: most cells seem to have been occupied for the lifetime of a single occupant only. Another exception is Julian’s cell at Conisford.27 There are bequests to a female recluse at St Julian’s throughout the 1420s: these are probably not to Julian but to a successor. She is unnamed, as is the recipient of bequests (perhaps the same woman, perhaps her successor) in the 1440s. More details emerge in 1444, when Thomas Wetherby of Carrow left 10s to the anchorite of St Julian’s, and further sums to her two servants: 6s 8d to Agnes (presumably the senior) and 40d to Margaret.28 In 1449, however, Agnes the anchorite at Conisford and her servants were the recipients of bequests from John Chese.29 She is recorded there until 1475. This Agnes, like her Hertfordshire namesake, may have followed her mistress into reclusion.
The counsellor
Margery Kempe visited Norwich in 1413, anxious ‘to wetyn yf sche wer dysceyued be any illusyons or not’ (Book, ch. 18, p. 41). She came primarily to consult Richard Caister, who subsequently became her champion, and the Carmelite William Southfield, a noted visionary, whose words of reassurance left her ‘mech comfortyd boþe in body and in sowle […] and gretly strengthyd in hir feyth’ (Book, ch. 18, p. 42). The divine instruction to visit Julian came only subsequently (did one of the men refer her on?), but to her Margery seems to have poured out her heart, showing her
þe grace þat God put in hir sowle of compunccyon, contricyon, swetnesse & devocyon, compassyon wyth holy meditacyon & hy contemplacyon, & ful many holy spechys & dalyawns þat owyr Lord spak to hir sowle, and many wondirful revelacyons whech sche schewyd to þe ankres to wetyn yf þer wer any deceyte in hem, for þe ankres was expert in swech thyngys & good cownsel cowd ʒevyn.
(Book, ch. 18, p. 42)
The measured wisdom of the advice that Julian gives Margery in answer over the ‘many days that þei were to-gedyr’ (Book, ch. 18, p. 43) has drawn universal praise.
Margery’s most faithful supporter, though, was her confessor, who was an anchorite at the Dominicans in Lynn. Male anchorites may have played this essential role of spiritual direction and counsel more frequently than on the few occasions which have left a trace in the record. Margery’s consultation with Julian, however, provides a rare example of a female anchorite occupying a position of spiritual authority. But it is not unique. For another instance we can turn to one of the most illustrious personages of early fifteenth-century chivalry: Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. His first wife, Elizabeth Berkeley, died in her mid-thirties in 1422, having given him only three daughters. He remarried in 1423, and at the same time refounded the chantry at Guy’s Cliff (near Warwick) in the hope ‘that God wold send hym Eyre male’.30 The ‘Rous Roll’, which records the story, explains further:
He did hyt by the styrryng of a holy anchoras namyd dam Em Rawghtone dwellyng at all halows in the northestrete of york and for hyt to her apperyd our lady vii tymes in on yer and seyd that in tyme to cum hyt shuld be a regal collage of the Trinyte of a kynges fundacone.31
Emma Raughton is recorded as anchoress of All Saints North Street through the 1430s.32 Beauchamp did not only consult her on domestic/dynastic matters. The ‘Beauchamp Pageant’ repeats the Guy’s Cliff story as part of the text accompanying its illustration of the French coronation of Henry VI:
Of the which coronacion in Fraunce and also the said erle to have the rule of his noble persone unto he were of the age of xvj yeres, it was the will and ordenaunce of Almyghty God, as our Blessed Lady shewed by revelacion unto Dam Emme Rawhton, recluse at All Halowes in Northgate Strete of York.33
Nor was Raughton the only anchoress whose advice Beauchamp sought. In early 1421, he had sent one of his chaplains to speak with an anchoress at Winchester. We do not know the subject of the consultation, but Beauchamp was evidently impressed by what he heard, since in May of the same year, while he was in London attending the parliament, he sent for her and (extraordinarily) she came, he laying out £2 6s 8d for her travel and accommodation expenses and ‘in providing her with a suitable reward’.34
As important as the similarities between these cases, however, are the differences. Beauchamp goes to his anchoresses for guidance from God: Raughton’s communications sit squarely in the ‘feminine’ genre of visionary prophecy discussed by Diane Watt in the previous essay. Such deference to female visionaries carries some irony in a man who played a prominent role in the trial and condemnation of Joan of Arc.35 Kempe, by contrast, is interested in what Julian has to say. Playing Alphonse of Pecha to Margery’s St Bridget, Julian here takes on the clerical roles of spiritual direction and the discerning of spirits.
The visionary
The ‘Life’ of John of Bridlington (d. 1379) includes a well-known encounter between the saint and a visionary anchoress. Obliged to travel into Richmondshire on monastery business, John makes a diversion to visit a recluse there. On his arrival, she excitedly tells him about the vision she has had the previous night: an eagle of wondrous beauty had circled her dwelling, holding in its beak a document bearing the legend Ihesus est amor meus (Jesus is my love). She interprets her vision as presaging John’s visit: he is the eagle, who has transferred his affections from the things of this world to the love of God. The saint, exasperated at these ‘inane words’, leaves at once.36
That English sources are rather nervous of visions, especially when they are had by women visionaries, is well established.37 Although there are signs of a softening in clerical attitudes from the late fourteenth century (following the canonisation of Bridget), such nervousness is still in evidence in the early fifteenth-century Speculum Inclusorum. The author acknowledges that anchorites’ meditations might lead them to ‘have some foretaste of the sweetness of future bliss in enjoyment of God’s goodness and his exceptional beauty, in the revelation of things to come, in conversation with angels, and in some kind of vision of the Almighty himself and his ineffable consolation’.38 (We have already seen that Emma Raughton was sought out for her revelations ‘of things to come’.) But the anchorite so blessed should beware Satan transfigured into an angel of light, to ‘sotylly deceyve & leede folk into errour’, and should also take care ‘lest þe gretnesse of reuelacion or sum oþir gracious ʒefte or schewynge of God swelle or bolne so greetly in a man þat he sette ovir-mochil by hymself’.39 The remedies are (to the second) humility of heart and (to the first) a careful attention to the articles of the Creed, which should be understood and believed implicitly, so that ‘nothing þat longiþ to þe feyth be disputyd ne be othir-wise beleeuyd þan was byforn […] but euery man knytte hym stedefastly & myʒtyly, wiþ-oute hesitacion or doute, to þe byleve of oure modyr Holy Cherche’ (Myrour, ll. 1210–14). One is reminded of Julian’s famous apologia-cum-modesty topos-cum-protestation in A Vision, Section 6. The most suitable (and by implication the safest) subjects for meditation are:
þe werkes of Crist for mannes profyt, fro þe firste salutacion of þe angel to þe Blessyd Virgine vn-to þe sendynge doun of the Holy Goost. But among alle oþer þinges, ofte to remembre hertly on þe glorious passion of Oure Lord Ihesu moost prikkeþ and sterith synful man to compunccion of herte. (Myrour, ll. 830–6)
This is the world of affective Passion meditation that Julian’s revelations sound as if they are going to inhabit before Jesus (and they) change their chere. A reader who had persevered with Julian’s book no further than this might easily have written a description of one variety of mystical experience that occurs later in the Speculum:
Some in devout prayers before a crucifix or in meditation on his glorious passion have had their heart so filled with sweetness, and become so drunk with the delight of divine love, that for all the pleasures of the world they would not forego that spiritual joy.40
The reader
The question of Julian’s ‘intellectual formation’ has always been a vexed one: estimations of the degree of her participation in the literate culture of the late Middle Ages have ranged between the two poles marked out by her own description of herself as ‘a simple creature unletterde’ (Revelation, 2.1) and Colledge and Walsh’s woman of formidable biblical, theological and rhetorical learning.41 On the assumption that Julian received at least some of her intellectual formation within the anchorhold,42 how might it have taken place?
The author of the Speculum Inclusorum tells his audience of male anchorites that they are called to practise the contemplative life, which consists in three things: fervent prayer, devout meditation and edificatory reading (edificatoria leccione).43 When the text was translated for a female audience, these exercises were tellingly redefined as consisting in ‘feruent preiere, in deuout meditacion, and in edificatyf spekynge (þat is to sey, in speche strecchinge vn-to vertu)’.44 But evidence for book ownership by late-medieval anchoresses is not entirely wanting. In 1451, Thomas Cumberworth, a former sheriff of Lincolnshire, left to the recluse at Greestone Steps Lincoln, besides six yards of blanket, six yards of linen and thrice the alms that a prioress might expect, ‘my roll of prayers’.45 In 1425, Alice the anchorite by St Leonard’s Exeter was left a book of Sunday sermons written in English.46
In 1417 the London vowess Margery de Nerford left the anchoress outside Bishopsgate her choice from the books that she had not bequeathed elsewhere.47 Nerford was of Norfolk gentry origins and sole heir of property in Norfolk and Suffolk. She vowed chastity in 1383 at the age of twenty-five, and took up residence in a tenement in Threadneedle Street. She would have passed through Bishopsgate every time she left London to visit the country house she kept in Hackney. The anchorite to whom she made her bequest was almost certainly Margery Pensax. She had been enclosed at Hawton in Nottinghamshire, but in 1399 was given permission to relocate to another cell in a place of her choosing. She was enclosed at Bishopsgate within the year, and was still there in 1414, and probably for several years after. At her death she bequeathed one of the extant copies of the Scale of Perfection to Syon Abbey. The copy of the Scale may not have come from Nerford’s collection; indeed, Ralph Hanna has suggested that Pensax might even have been the woman recluse for whom Hilton wrote it (Hawton is only 10 km from Thurgarton).48
A generation later, the Bishopsgate reclusory was occupied by another book-owner and donor with connections south of the river. Joan the anchorite’s name appears in five books now in Oxford libraries, where she is identified as joint donor with John Dygon, who became the fifth incumbent of the reclusory attached to Sheen Charterhouse in the mid 1430s, and who wrote the donation notices.49 They gave a volume of miscellaneous excerpts from theological authors for the use of ‘those students … wishing to preach the word of God’ at Exeter College; three other books containing biblical commentary and preaching materials were given to Joan’s son Thomas Grenewode for life, and then to Magdalen College; and an incomplete copy of Bridget’s Revelations was destined for the next recluse of Sheen, with reversion to Magdalen. What the relationship was between the two anchorites, and what relation Joan had to the books distributed, is not known. The books that include her name represent only a portion of the nineteen that are known to have been Dygon’s. These others are similarly dominated by preaching material and general theology, of a sort one might expect to find in the private collection of an Oxford graduate, diocesan administrator and dedicated parish priest like Dygon. But a small subset matches the contemplative, and specifically solitary, interests represented in the joint bequests by Bridget’s Revelations, the Latin Ancrene Wisse and the later anchoritic guidance text ascribed to ‘Walter the Recluse’, Fishlake’s Latin Scale, Petrarch on the solitary life, and the earliest-known English translation of Thomas à Kempis. Hanna suggests with probability that this ‘apparent discovery and transmission of a sophisticated literature of the contemplative life’ should be attributed to the ‘intellectual deepening’ of Dygon’s retirement to the reclusory. That this intellectual deepening was shared with his fellow anchorite is a tempting thought, but if Dygon and Joan maintained a book-mediated relationship to parallel the Grenehalgh/Sewell liaison of a half-century later, they were (for us, sadly) more codicologically discreet about it.50
Whatever else he may have become, the Carthusian James Grenehalgh was Joanna Sewell’s spiritual director before she entered Syon. Arrangements for the spiritual direction of anchorites are generally obscure; we would certainly like to know more about this aspect of Julian’s anchoritic experience. A generation later, though, elaborate and careful provision was made for another Norwich anchoress. When Emma Stapleton was enclosed at the house of the Carmelites in 1421, the provincial of the order appointed a team of five friars – including a noted Oxford theologian – as overseers of her spiritual development.51
The author
Ashmole MS 59 in the Bodleian Library Oxford may (with due deference to Julian’s rival claim) contain the earliest-known piece of writing by an English anchoress. The volume is a miscellany of pieces in prose and verse, written throughout in the hand of the well-known scribe and pioneer of the London book trade, John Shirley. He gives the poem in question the title ‘A devoute and holy salutacion of oure ladye made by an holy Ankaresse of Mannsffeld’. The woman meant may well be the anchoress of Mansfield Woodhouse (Notts.) who was the recipient of bequests in 1403 and 1411.52 The five-stanza poem on the Joys of Mary is found in two other manuscripts, and in one of them appears to be ascribed to Lydgate.53 The copy in Ashmole 59 has no particular claim to textual authority, and indeed in a couple of places is almost certainly corrupt. Nevertheless, while it would be overstating the case to say that the authorship of the anchoress of Mansfield has the ring of truth about it, it does not seem to be the kind of attribution that would be made lightly – certainly not as casually, and as frequently, as are attributions to Lydgate. The poem begins thus:54
Heille, glorious Virgyne, grounde of al oure grace.
Heyle, mayde and moder in virgynitee.
Heyle, whame the Sone of God cheesse for his place,
Sent frome above þane frome the Faders see.
Heyle, with thyne ere conceyvinge, sente to thee
By Gabriell, he thus to thee seyinge:
‘Heyle, ful of grace, Marye, God is with thee.’
Heyle, with thine humble herte ther obeyinge.
Four further stanzas treat the remaining Joys (Nativity, Resurrection, Ascension and Assumption). The verse is as accomplished as Julian’s prose, but it is not exceptional.
Although the anchoress of Mansfield cannot compete with Julian on any terms except perhaps date, some familiar questions pose themselves. Her poem runs through the commonplaces of Marian iconography: where did she learn them, how and from whom? She displays full command of versification and enough rhetorical figures to satisfy even Colledge and Walsh: what was the ‘intellectual formation’ that made such techniques available to her and how did it take place? And how did her poem find its way to a wider audience?
Connections and conclusions
John Shirley, who recorded the work of the anchoress of Mansfield (or attributed the poem to her), was a member of the household of Richard Beauchamp, and served as his secretary at least from 1420, the year before Beauchamp consulted the Winchester anchoress. Isabel Ufford, who made a generous bequest to Julian, was Beauchamp’s sister. One of her executors was Sir Miles Stapleton, whose daughter Emma was enclosed, with careful arrangements for her supervision, at the Carmelites in Norwich in 1421. John Chese, who left money in his will to Julian’s successor Agnes, also remembered two other anchorites – one of them Joan Grenewode, the anchoress of Bishopsgate. The co-owner of Joan’s books, John Dygon, occupied the Sheen reclusory, with which the Speculum Inclusorum is probably associated. And there are a few hints that the author of the Speculum may have read or heard of Julian.
I am aware that the belief that everything is connected is a sign of delusion, and do not intend to develop these observations into a sustained argument. Nevertheless, the degrees of separation among many of the key figures in this essay are strikingly few. Whether these examples might offer support to Watson and Jenkins’s intriguing hypothesis of an ‘irregular community’ of ‘lovers of God’55 – from whose ranks, they suggest, Julian’s early readers and disseminators may have come – is something for further investigation. The evidence presented in this essay does, however, seem to me to demonstrate that Felicity Riddy’s comment, ‘To see Julian as a solitary is to ignore a central feature of her self-representation, which is relational’, is based on a false antithesis.56 But there is much still to be done before we reach a full understanding of the networks that helped to create and sustain Julian’s anchoritic identity.
1 Thanks to the Bodleian Library Oxford and Eve McClure at the Norfolk Heritage Centre for the supply of photographic material; Kate Harris at Longleat House and Roberta Gilchrist for answers to my queries; Ralph Hanna for a copy of his Dygon essay, and Fr John-Julian OJN and Cate Gunn for sharing unpublished material with me. My title is a ‘steal’ from Alexandra Barratt, whose ‘Anchoritic aspects of Ancrene Wisse’, Medium Aevum 49 (1980), pp. 32–56, similarly seeks to interrogate some of what ‘goes without saying’ in a canonical anchoritic text.
2 Quoted in The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (Turnhout, 2006), p. 450. References to Julian’s texts themselves will be to A Vision and A Revelation respectively and section/chapter and line numbers will appear parenthetically in the main text.
3 A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Toronto, 1978), p. 41; Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian (London, 2000), p. 3; Christopher Abbott, Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology (Cambridge, 1999), p. 2; Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 4.
4 The wills and Kempe’s visit are discussed below. For the quotations from the latter here, see The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS o.s. 212 (Oxford, 1948; repr. 1997), ch. 18, p. 42.
5 Rotha Mary Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London, 1914); Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, 1985); Roberta Gilchrist, Contemplation and Action: The Other Monasticism, The Archaeology of Medieval Britain (London, 1995), ch. 5; and my own ‘Hermits and Anchorites in Historical Context’, in Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts, ed. Dee Dyas, Valerie Edden and Roger Ellis (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 3–18. See also Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-Edwards (eds), Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages (Cardiff, 2005) and Liz Herbert McAvoy (ed.), Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within the Discourses of Enclosure (Cardiff, 2008).
6 ‘Julian of Norwich’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 210–21 (211).
7 William Ralph Inge, Studies of English Mystics: St Margaret’s Lectures 1905 (London, 1906), Lecture II. Ancrene Wisse is also used for illustration in the introduction to Revelations of Divine Love Recorded by Julian of Norwich, ed. Grace Warrack (London, 1901).
8 Speculum Inclusorum auctore anonymo anglico saeculi xiv, ed. Livarius Oliger, Lateranum n.s. 4/1 (Rome, 1938); Myrour of Recluses, ed. Marta Powell Harley (Madison, 1995). For the audience of the latter, see l. 395. I am working on a new, parallel-text edition.
9 Georgia Ronan Crampton, The Shewings of Julian of Norwich (Kalamazoo, 1994), p. 9; Roberta Gilchrist and Marilyn Oliva, Religious Women in Medieval East Anglia, Studies in East Anglian History 1 (Norwich, 1993), p. 76.
10 Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 4.
11 I investigate this subject more fully in E.A. Jones, ‘A Mystic by Any Other Name: Julian(?) of Norwich’, Mystics Quarterly 33, 3–4 (2007), pp. 1–17.
12 Elizabeth Gidley Withycombe (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, 2nd edn (London, 1950).
13 The wills are translated in Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, pp. 431–5, where references to the original texts will also be found.
14 Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 279.
15 Foedera, Conventiones, Literae, et Cujuscunque Generis Acta Publica etc., ed. Thomas Rymer, 20 vols (London, 1704–32), vol. IX, p. 275.
16 British Library, MS Harley 2162, fol. 61v.
17 Leland L. Duncan (ed.), Testamenta Cantiana, Archaeologia Cantiana (London, 1906), p. 128.
18 Alexandra Barratt, ‘Lordship, Service and Worship in Julian of Norwich’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium VII, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 177–88.
19 Ibid., p. 184.
20 Felicity Riddy, ‘Julian of Norwich and Self-Textualization’, in Editing Women, ed. Ann M. Hutchison (Cardiff, 1998), pp. 101–24 (108–9).
21 Norman P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich 1370–1532 (Toronto, 1984), p. 202.
22 It is made (inter alia) by Watson and Jenkins in Writings, p. 5; Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, p. 202 n. 55; Colledge and Walsh call it ‘a friendly nickname’ (p. 34). The name Alice was, of course, exceptionally common.
23 W. Brigg (ed.), The Herts Genealogist and Antiquary (Harpenden, 1895–99), i.106, i.67, ii.91. See also my ‘Christina of Markyate and the Hermits and Anchorites of England’, in Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-Century Holy Woman, ed. Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser (London, 2004), pp. 229–53 (233 and 245–6).
24 Hertford, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, 1AR, fol. 31v.
25 The first of these bequests was communicated to Rotha Clay by William Page for inclusion in the second edition of her Hermits and Anchorites. Although the details given here are preserved in her notes, the reference has disappeared. For Wardale, see The National Archives: Public Record Office, PROB 11/6, fols 41r–v.
26 For Agnes’s obit, see London, British Library MS Cotton Nero D 7, fol. 137r. For St Michael’s generally, see Jones, ‘Christina of Markyate’, as before.
27 See the lists in Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, pp. 200–1. There were anchorites at St Julian’s into the 1520s.
28 Norwich, Norfolk Record Office, NCC Wylbey, fol. 31r.
29 NCC Aleyn, fol. 24v.
30 The Beauchamp Pageant, ed. Alexandra Sinclair (Donington, 2003), p. 39. Henry Beauchamp was born in 1425. Beauchamp’s dealings with anchorites are also discussed by Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 203–6.
31 The Rous Roll: with an historical introduction on John Rous and the Warwick Roll, ed. Charles Ross (repr., Gloucester, 1980), no. 50.
32 Two squints in the west end of the south aisle of the church have been interpreted as having a connection with Raughton, and a reconstruction of her cell has been erected on the site.
33 The Beauchamp Pageant, ed. Sinclair, p. 144. Discussed in Nancy Bradley Warren, Spiritual Economies: Female Monasticism in Later Medieval England (Philadelphia, 2001), pp. 111–12.
34 Charles Ross, The Estates and Finances of Richard Beauchamp Earl of Warwick, Dugdale Society Occasional Papers 12 (1956), p. 15. For the Winchester anchoress see now Mary C. Erler, ‘ “A Revelation of Purgatory” (1422): Reform and the Politics of Female Visions’, Viator 31 (2007), pp. 321–45. In addition to detailing the milieu and social and spiritual networks in which the anchoress participated, Erler argues that she was probably the author of the earlier fifteenth-century A Revelation of Purgatory. My thanks to Professor Erler for a copy of her essay.
35 As noted by Warren, Spiritual Economies, pp. 163–4.
36 Nova Legenda Anglie, ed. Carl Horstman, 2 vols (Oxford, 1901), vol. II, pp. 71–2.
37 See, for example, Watson, ‘Julian of Norwich’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, Dinshaw and Wallace (eds), pp. 210–21 (218–19).
38 Speculum Inclusorum, ed. Oliger, p. 113; my translation (the Middle English text is defective at this point).
39 Myrour of Recluses, ed. Harley, ll. 1155–6 and 1168–70. Subsequent line references are to this edition.
40 Speculum Inclusorum, ed. Oliger, p. 128 (not in Middle English text). One of the author’s other examples is a thinly veiled allusion to Rolle.
41 The phrase ‘intellectual formation’ is borrowed from Colledge and Walsh’s discussion in Book of Showings, pp. 43–59.
42 This is now more or less universally accepted. For Colledge and Walsh’s discomfort on this point, see Riddy, ‘Julian of Norwich and Self-textualization’, pp. 106–7.
43 Speculum Inclusorum, ed. Oliger, p. 85.
44 Myrour of Recluses, ed. Harley, ll. 564–6; my italics. In the single manuscript in which the text survives, the two chapters of the Latin original which discuss anchoritic reading are absent. This seems, however, to be the result of damage to the manuscript.
45 Andrew Clark (ed.), Lincoln Diocese Documents, 1450–1544, EETS o.s. 149 (1914), p. 50. The recluse was a woman named Matilda. See Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 221 and n. 80.
46 G. R. Dunstan (ed.), The Register of Edmund Lacy, Bishop of Exeter, 1420–1455: Registrum Commune, vol. 4, Devon and Cornwall Record Society n.s. 16 (1971), p. 4.
47 Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 48–67, on which the whole of this paragraph is based.
48 Erler, Women, Reading and Piety, p. 170 n. 52. Ralph Hanna, ‘John Dygon, Fifth Recluse of Sheen: His Career, Books and Acquaintance’, in Imagining the Book, ed. Stephen Kelly and John J. Thompson (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 127–41 (136).
49 The whole of this paragraph is based on Hanna’s important recent survey.
50 For the now notorious Grenehalgh and Sewell, see Hanna, ‘John Dygon’, p. 135. The classic account is Michael G. Sargent, James Grenehalgh as Textual Critic, Analecta Cartusiana 85, 2 vols (Salzburg, 1984).
51 Clay, Hermits and Anchorites, p. 137; Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 213–14.
52 A. Gibbons, Early Lincoln Wills, Lincoln Record Society 1 (Lincoln, 1888), pp. 103, 118.
53 Carleton Brown and Rossell Hope Robbins (eds), Index of Middle English Verse (New York, 1943), no. 1046. See Alexandra Barratt (ed.), Women’s Writing in Middle English (London, 1992), pp. 277–9.
54 Barratt, Women’s Writing, p. 277. She replaces thorns with ‘th’. ‘See’ (l. 4) is an emendation of MS ‘place’.
55 Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 12.
56 ‘ “Women Talking about the Things of God”: A Late Medieval Sub-Culture’, in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 104–27 (115). In fairness, Riddy has done some of the work of righting this herself: see her ‘Self-textualization’, as before.