IN THIS BOOK, I have attempted to unpick and interrogate some of the wider meanings attached to the anchoritic life in the Middle Ages, as well has how those meanings shifted and changed over time and within different epistemological spaces and gendered contexts. As stated in the introduction, its aim was not to be fully comprehensive: indeed, any in-depth study of this type and length must be selective and can only touch upon the wide range of texts written for or about anchorites within the European tradition, many of which yet await scrutiny, particularly from a socio-literary perspective. What I have tried to do, therefore, is to demonstrate the varied nature of the literature available, particularly within an English and/or Latinate context, in which the figure of the anchorite, or anchoritic discourse, looms large and which allows for an examination of the type of cultural work those representations are employed to undertake.

One of the most insistent of those cultural tasks to have been established by this study is that medieval anchoritism, both its theory and its practices, was deeply implicated in the policing of gender boundaries, whilst at the same time consistently experimenting by extending their range or reducing their hegemony. At the same time as the monastic anchorite felt – and tried on – a feminized self for size, that is to say, making an attempt at a desubjectivized self in order to relinquish that self to the divine, he was required to counter it in order to maintain his masculine privilege of authority.