WHENWE SPEAK about the anchoritic body, what do we envision that body doing? In discussing the phenomenon of reclusive embodiment in its material context, we must remember that the primary activity of the recluse was prayer. This practical and ideological centrality should affect how we read texts for and about anchorites, and how we understand the vocation as it was conceptualized and practiced. This essay considers the Liber confortatorius (Book of Consolation, ca. 1080–82), the late eleventh-century Anglo-Latin epistolary treatise on the anchoritic life by Goscelin of Saint-Bertin (ca. 1035–ca. 1107), found in London, British Library MS Sloane 3103. Using the concept of “liturgy” elaborated by Jean-Yves Lacoste, I argue that this text envisions the anchoritic body at prayer through a series of images and imaginative exercises, offering its projected reader multiple ways to understand and perform her prayer life as an embodied spiritual practice, and indicating for modern scholars the multidimensionality of anchoritic prayer as a lived somatic experience.

For the medieval orant, the spiritual and the material were integrated in the bodily practice of prayer; neither aspect can be separated from the whole. This is particularly true for the anchorite, whose life was specially dedicated to prayer, her existence in space and time conditioned for this purpose. The particular character of her embodiment was thus intimately linked with her prayer practice. Our access to this prayerful embodiment is admittedly mediated to a great extent through its ideological construction in instructional literature, particularly in the case of the projected recipient of the Book of Consolation.

However, this is not so much a limitation as a necessary reminder that the medieval religious body was construed not only through everyday physical experience but through its spiritual dimensions, powerfully conveyed through scriptural exposition, metaphor, and the imagination. Essential primary evidence for anchoritic embodiment, including prayer practice, can be derived from archaeological and other attention to its material traces (as, for example, Victoria Yuskaitis's note in this volume demonstrates by highlighting the distinctive proximity of the anchorite's squint at Ruyton to the piscina, and thus to the physical actions of the Mass). But whether or not they include details of the specificities of anchoritic life, instructional texts also offer insight into how the reclusive body was understood and experienced: ideological construal is inseparable from physical experience, particularly in the case of the integrated embodied practice of prayer.