Cate Gunn – författare

This book is innovative in that it provides an introduction to Ancrene Wisse, one of the most important works in English of the thirteenth century. It offers a new contextualisation which engages with the history of lay piety and vernacular spirituality in the Middle Ages, thus extending analysis of the book beyond its original purpose as a guide for anchoresses. The placing of Ancrene Wisse within this context also allows comparisons to be made with other literature for semi-regular women, such as sermons preached to beguines – semi-religious women who formed communities in the Low Countries and France in the High Middle Ages. A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license and is part of the OAPEN-UK research project.

Essays challenging the orthodox opinion of anchorites as entirely divorced from the world around them.Much of the research into medieval anchoritism to date has focused primarily on its liminal and elite status within the socio-religious cultures of its day: the anchorite has long been depicted as both solitary and alone, almost entirely removed from community and living a life of permanent withdrawal and isolation, in effect dead to the world. Considerably less attention has been afforded to the communal sociability that also formed part of the reclusivelife during the period,The essays in this volume, stemming from a variety of cross-disciplinary approaches and methodologies, lay down a challenge to this position, breaking new ground in their presentation of the medievalanchorite and other types of enclosed solitary as playing a central role within the devotional life of the communities in which they were embedded. They attest also to the frequent involvement of anchorites and other recluses in local, national and, sometimes, international matters of importance. Overall, the volume suggests that, far from operating on the socio-religious periphery, as posited previously, the medieval anchorite was more often found at theheart of a sometimes intersecting array of communities: synchronic and diachronic; physical and metaphysical; religious and secular; gendered and textual.CATE GUNN has taught in the Continuing Education and LiteratureDepartments of the University of Essex; LIZ HERBERT MCAVOY is Professor of Medieval Literature at Swansea University.Contributors: Diana Denissen, Clare Dowding, Clarck Drieshen, Cate Gunn, Catherine Innes-Parker, E.A. Jones, Dorothy Kim, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Godelinde Perk, James Plumtree, Michelle Sauer, Sophie Sawicka-Sykes, Andrew Thornton OSB,

Essays on women and devotional literature in the Middle Ages in commemoration and celebration of the respected feminist scholar Catherine Innes-Parker.Silence was a much-lauded concept in the Middle Ages, particularly in the context of religious literature directed at women. Based on the Pauline prescription that women should neither preach nor teach, and should at all times keep speech to a minimum, the concept of silence lay at the forefront of many devotional texts, particularly those associated with various forms of women's religious enclosure. Following the example of the Virgin Mary, religious women were exhorted to speak seldom, and then only seriously and devoutly. However, as this volume shows, such gendered exhortations to silence were often more rhetorical than literal. The contributions range widely: they consider the English 'Wooing Group' texts and female-authored visionary writings from the Saxon nunnery of Helfta in the thirteenth century; works by Richard Rolle and the Dutch mystic Jan van Ruusbroec in the fourteenth century; Anglo-French treatises, and books housed in the library of the English noblewoman Cecily Neville in the fifteenth century; and the resonant poetics of women from non-Christian cultures. But all demonstrate the ways in which silence, rather than being a mere absence of speech, frequently comprised a form of gendered articulation and proto-feminist point of resistance. They thus provide an apt commemoration and celebration of the deeply innovative work of Catherine Innes-Parker (1956-2019), the respected feminist scholar and a pioneer of this important field of study.