ANCHORITES: ORIGINS AND TERMINOLOGY

WRITING TO HER FATHER from the desert at Kureifeh on Wednesday, 15 May 1900, Gertrude Bell attempts to articulate the extraordinary silence she had experienced there: ‘Shall I tell you my chief impression’, she asks him, ‘– the silence. It is like the silence of mountain tops, but more intense, for there you know the sound of wind and far away water and falling ice and stones; there is a sort of echo of sound there, you know it, Father. But here, nothing.’ In this extract, Bell experiences the silence and solitude of the desert in terms of an empty nothingness, a non-space waiting to be filled, a place-in-waiting where, liminal to the rest of the world, the human being actually has a chance of becoming or of achieving a new kind of selfhood. Many years later, Bell would embellish this description, identifying the desert as some kind of original homeland, a place where silence and solitude separate the human off from the world with its ‘impenetrable veil’, a veil behind which a different type of being is possible.

Such imagery of silence, solitude, homecoming and impenetrable veiling used here to summon up another state of being cannot help but evoke for the medieval scholar images of the medieval anchorite – a woman or a man, but more often a woman, who had opted for permanent solitary enclosure, usually in a small, purpose-built cell attached to a monastic institution or, more likely, a local parish church.