5 - Remembrance and Time in the Wooing Group

Summary

In the third book of his Liber confortatorius, the Flemish cleric Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (c. 1035–1107) advises his beloved Eva, now an anchoress, to remember Christ’s suffering, resurrection and ascension in all hours of her existence. Goscelin encourages the anchoress to engage in a relentless process of remembrance: a process designed to be painful and all-consuming, stirring the heart towards love of Christ. In Aelred of Rievaulx’s (1110–1167) De institutione inclusarum, the author discourages his biological sister, also an anchoress, from becoming a schoolmistress. Aelred foregrounds the threat that such a profession poses to her ‘memoria Dei’ (‘remembrance of God’):

Qualis inter haec memoria Dei, ubi saecularia et carnalia, etsi non perficiantur, mouentur tamen, et quasi sub oculis depinguntur.

(There before her very eyes, even though she may not yield to them, the recluse has worldly and sensual temptations, and amid them all what becomes of her continual remembrance of God?)

As Aelred suggests, an anchoress’s existence is characterized by a never-ending remembrance of Christ as man and Christ as God. This is discernible in the Wooing Group, a group of thirteenth-century lyrical meditations on Christ and the Virgin Mary associated in manuscript and linguistic history with the anchoritic guidance text Ancrene Wisse. In the Wooing Group, it is made clear that Christ is absent to the anchoress: his distance in Heaven is compounded by his distance from her soul, burdened as it is with sins. But the anchoritic existence is also defined by a need to make Christ almost present – both spatially and temporally – through remembrance of him. Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan, among others, Patrick Fuery foregrounds absence ‘not as a nothing, or nothingness, which might in turn reduce things and subjects to nothingness, but as part of an active process’. In line with this concept, the anchoress creates herself as a ‘desiring subject determined by absences’, as she pursues Christ’s presence through meditation. In her 2010 monograph, which includes a chapter on the Wooing Group text Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd, Sarah McNamer observes that meditations from c. 1050 to 1530 demand imaginative presence.