Mary, Silence, and the Fictions of Power in Ancrene Wisse 2.269–481

Summary

THE SECOND PART of Ancrene Wisse (Guide for Anchoresses), a thirteenth-century text of spiritual guidance composed for English anchoresses, contains that work's most extensive teachings on the importance of maintaining silence and of refraining from excessive speech generally. In turning to the subject, Ancrene Wisse at once continues and brilliantly reorients a textual tradition that sought to manage the anchoritic voice by limiting and redirecting its several modes of expression. These in turn emerged within both spiritual and material contexts, from moral instruction to gossip, and from confession to the regular management of physical needs. Although they required periods of silent listening, such activities never excluded anchoresses’ active and vocal participation despite many textual reminders that, for example, they should be quicker to listen to sound instruction than to offer it. In this respect, Ancrene Wisse is not unique: few writers of late-medieval anchoritic guidance texts forewent the opportunity to address, and to curtail, the frequent visitations to the anchorhold by advice-seeking spiritual clients, as well as by local clergy and religious, who at times received such instruction from anchorites even when it was not requested.

Below I examine the text's response to this culture of visitation and to the compromises that it required from a regulatory prioritization of silence. This essay also intervenes in recent examinations of anchoritic reading as one of many points of intersection between the inner and intellectual lives of enclosed women, on the one hand, and the expressly material (here bookish) quality of their vocation, on the other. While the cell that enclosed anchoritic (as also monastic) bodies was an integral feature of medieval “Christian materiality,” as it has been examined by Caroline Walker Bynum, the access of enclosed women to books, and specifically biblical writings, reminds us of the close relationship between such women's spiritual and material lives. In addressing medieval religious women's literacy, ownership of books, and in particular their practices of scriptural interpretation, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne has observed that despite the challenge of tracing which texts women were assumed to have accessed, many writings directly “incorporate explicit reading models for [women’s] study of scripture.”