"This living hand": Thirteenth-century female literacy, materialist immanence, and the reader of the Ancrene Wisse

Speculum

Volumn 78, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 1-36

  Robertson, Elizabeth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO   (United States)

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EID: 60949978240     PISSN: 00387134     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0038713400098961     Document Type: Article

References (144)

1. See Sally Thompson, Women Religious: The Founding of English Nunneries after the Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1991 ), p. 34. She writes in her footnote on that page, "Professor Dobson transcribes the Latin [of the Charter of La Derefaud] as 'sororibus quondam existentibus apud La Derefaud.' But an examination of the text shows that the word is 'fratribus' and that throughout the charter the reference is to brothers not sisters forming the community at La Derefaud. (BL Harl. MS 1240, fo. 40)." She tells us on the same page, "In the fourteenth-century cartulary of the Mortimer family, a charter of Roger de Mortimer, which can probably be dated 1252 x 1256, confirms land to the nuns at Limebrook." (Full references to the Nero and other Ancrene Wisse manuscripts cited in this essay may be found on page 60 of Bella Millett's bibliography, cited below, n. 4.
2. For a recent edition of Ancrene Wisse with extensive notes and general introductory material see Robert Hasenfratz, ed., Ancrene Wisse [Kalamazoo, Mich., 2000].)
3. J. R. R. Tolkien, ed., Ancrene Wisse: Edited from MS. Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402, EETS OS 249 (London, 1962), p. 130.
4. Bella Millett, "The Origins of Ancrene Wisse: New Answers, New Questions," Medium aevum 61 (1992), 206-28;
5. see also E. J. Dobson, The Origins of Ancrene Wisse (Oxford, 1976).
6. See his "Vernacular Books of Religion," in Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375-1475, ed. Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, Eng., 1989), p. 321.
7. See also the useful description of manuscripts provided by Bella Millett (with the assistance of George B. Jack and Yoko Wada), "The Manuscripts: An Annotated Alphabetical Checklist," in "Ancrene Wisse," the Katherine Group, and the Wooing Group, Annotated Bibliographies of Old and Middle English Literature 2 (Woodbridge, Eng., 1996), pp. 49-60.
8. J. R. R. Tolkien, "Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiohad," Essays and Studies 14 (1929), 104-26.
9. Mabel Day, ed., The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Edited from Cotton MS. Nero A. XIV, EETS OS 225 (London, 1952; repr. 1957), p. 85.
10. "Nabbe 3e alswa of Ruffin pe deouel beliales brooer in ower englische boc of seinte Margarete," Tolkien, Ancrene Wisse, p. 125 ("Haven't you also [heard] of Ruffinus, the devil Belial's brother, in your English book of St. Margaret?"). This reference is an important piece of evidence that the Katherine Group and the Ancrene Wisse shared the same audience. The fact that the book is described as English as well as in their possession furthers the likelihood that English works were being produced for this specific audience.
11. Referring to the joy of heaven, the author writes, "3e habbeo of peos blissen iwriten elleswher míne leoue sustren," Tolkien, Ancrene Wisse, p. 209 ("You have of these joys written elsewhere, my beloved sisters"). We do not know to what text this remark refers, or whether "iwriten" refers to copying or composition, but it does at least suggest that the anchoresses wrote. 9 This line of thinking in my essay was inspired by an astute question asked by Christopher Cannon when I delivered a version of this paper in Oxford in the fall of 1998.
12. John Burrow, "Fantasy and Language in The Cloud of Unknowing," Essays in Criticism 27 (1977), 284.
13. This essay is discussed in Jocelyn Price (now Wogan-Browne), "'Inner' and 'Outer': Conceptualizing the Body in Ancrene Wisse and Aelred's De institutione inclusarum," in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell, ed. Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge, Eng., 1986), pp. 192-208.
14. Nicholas Watson, disagreeing with Geoffrey Shepherd, argues that the readers of the Ancrene Wisse were hardly beginners in the ascetic life. See "The Methods and Objectives of Thirteenth-Century Anchoritic Devotion," in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium IV - Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1987, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Woodbridge, Eng., 1987), pp. 132-53.
15. The phrase "quotidian psychological realism" is explained in my book Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990) and discussed further in my essay on the Life of St. Margaret, "The Corporeality of Female Sanctity in The Life of St. Margaret," in Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski and Timea Szell (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), pp. 268-87.
16. See N. R. Ker's discussion of the paleographical issues in his introduction to Tolkien's edition of the Corpus manuscript, p. xv. Ker states here that although the script is consistent with scripts of the twelfth century, he would not want to date it that early because "Two of its features, the cross through z and the biting of back-to-back curving strokes, came into use only in the last decades of the twelfth-century. . . . Two occasional features, the v for u initially and the additional strokes in capital letters, have their origin in the current script used for documents. Their employment in bookhand is thirteenth-century rather than twelfth. The generalization of rounded d for Latin as well as for English and the absence of any of the distinctions between Latin and English observed by twelfth-century and earlier scribes point also to a date after 1200. The curved form of the common mark of abbreviation is traditional, but the angular form is typical of the thirteenth century. 'First half of the thirteenth century' is probably as near as one ought to go on palaeographical grounds." Folio 16v, line 13, mentions "Vre freres prechurs ant ure freres meonurs," a reference to Dominican and Franciscan friars, which suggests the text was written after 1225; see Tolkien, Ancrene Wisse, p. 36.
17. See also Roger Dahood's survey of the manuscripts, "Ancrene Wisse, the Katherine Group, and the Wohunge Group," in Middle English Prose: A Critical Guide to the Major Authors and Genres, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (New Brunswick, N.J., 1984), pp. 1-33.
18. E. J. Dobson, "The Affiliations of the Manuscripts of Ancrene Wisse," in English and Medieval Studies Presented to J. R. R. Tolkien on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. Norman Davis and C. L. Wrenn (London, 1962), pp. 163 and 129.
19. Roger Dahood, "The Use of Coloured Initials and Other Division Markers in Early Versions of Ancrene Riwle," in Medieval Studies Presented to George Kane, ed. Edward Donald Kennedy, Ronald Waldron, and Joseph S. Wittig (Woodbridge, Eng., 1988), pp. 79-97.
20. This is indicated by the inscription on folio 3r of the Cleopatra manuscript. See Dobson's discussion of the inscription in The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Edited from B.M. Cotton MS. Cleopatra C.vi, EETS OS 267 (London, 1972), p. xxv.
21. Dobson, Cleopatra, p. xi.
22. Dobson, "Affiliations," p. 133.
23. Bella Millett, "Women in No Man's Land: English Recluses and the Development of Vernacular Literature in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries," in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150-1500, ed. Carol M. Meale, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 17 (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), pp. 86-103, at pp. 98-99.
24. For a discussion of the evidence of female readership suggested by the Vernon Manuscript see Felicity Riddy, "'Women Talking about the Things of God': A Late Medieval Sub-culture," in Women and Literature, ed. Meale, pp. 106-7.
25. A. I. Doyle suggested that the Vernon Manuscript might have been assembled for a convent: The Vernon Manuscript: A Facsimile of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Eng. Poet. a.1 (Cambridge, Eng., 1987), p. 14.
26. For other brief discussions of the Vernon Manuscript and female readership see N. F. Blake, "Vernon Manuscript: Contents and Organisation,"
27. and Carol M. Meale, "The Miracles of Our Lady: Context and Interpretation," in Studies in the Vernon Manuscript, ed.
28. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), pp. 58 and 131 respectively
29. and Millett's summary of the arguments for the audience of the manuscript in Ancrene Wisse, p. 57. As Millett summarizes Doyle, "[A]lthough a number of the works it contains were originally written for women in religion, some seem to have been adapted or composed for a lay audience. Doyle . . . suggests (very tentatively) that its production may have been initiated by the Cistercian abbey at Bordesley, N. Worcestershire, for the large house of nuns at Nuneaton, Warwickshire."
30. See Millett's descriptions of the Latin manuscripts in Ancrene Wisse, pp. 58 and 54
31. and Charlotte d'Evelyn, The Latin Text of the Ancrene Riwle, Edited from Merton College MS 44 and British Museum MS Cotton Vitellius E vii, EETS OS 216 (Oxford, 1944), pp. xi and xiii. D'Evelyn, on page xiii, omits "suarum" from her citation of G. C. Macaulay's summary of the 1696 catalogue description. 24 See Ker's introduction to Tolkien's edition of CCCC 402, p. xvi.
32. For a discussion of the general tenets of Lollardy see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988).
33. This argument is referred to by R. W. Chambers in "Recent Research upon the Ancren Riwle," Review of English Studies 1 (1925), 4-23, at p. 5. The passage is taken from Tolkien's edition, p. 44. I was first prompted to review the evidence for an English original of the text by Margaret Ferguson, who astutely asked me why it was assumed to be so.
34. Millett, "Women in No Man's Land," p. 95.
35. See Tolkien's discussion of the shared dialect of the two manuscripts, CCCC 402 and Bodley 34 in "'Ancrene Wisse' and 'HaIi Meiohad.'"
36. James Morton, ed. and trans., The Ancren Riwle: A Treatise on the Rules and Duties of Monastic Life. Edited and Translated from a Semi-Saxon Ms. of the Thirteenth-Century, Camden Society Publications 57 (London, 1853; repr. New York, 1968), pp. viii-x.
37. David N. Bell, What Nuns Read: Books and Libraries in Medieval English Nunneries, Cistercian Studies Series 158 (Kalamazoo, Mich., 1995).
38. See Macaulay's discussion of the language of the manuscripts in several parts in G. C. Macaulay, "The Ancren Riwle," Modern Language Review 9 (1914), 63-78, 145-60, 324-31, and 463-74. Macaulay's arguments in favor of a French original are on pp. 63-70 and against the Latin on pp. 70-78.
39. Berta Grattan Lee, Linguistic Evidence for the Priority of the French Text of the Ancrene Wisse, Janua Linguarum, Series Practica, 242 (The Hague, 1974).
40. Chambers, "Recent Research," pp. 10-11. For the reference in the Corpus manuscript see Tolkien's edition, p. 125.
41. Dorothy Dymes, "The Original Language of the Ancren Riwle," Essays and Studies 9 (1924), 32.
42. Day, Cotton Nero A XIV, fol. 64r, p. 107.
43. M. L. Samuels, "Ancrene Riwle Studies," Medium aevum 22 (1953), 1-9.
44. Dana Symons, "'Here falleo a tale, a wrihe forbisne': Subordination in/of English Texts of the Ancrene Wisse," unpublished paper delivered at the Thirty-Third International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Mich., in 1998.
45. Chambers, "Recent Research." 45 Tolkien, Ancrene Wisse, p. 7.
46. Tolkien, Ancrene Wisse, p. 217.
47. See Hugh White, trans., Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses (London, 1993), n. 10, p. 209
48. See Millett, "Women in No Man's Land," pp. 94-95. 53 Ibid., p. 94.
49. Brian V. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice, Cambridge Studies in Oral and Literate Culture 9 (Cambridge, Eng., 1984), p. 97.
50. See Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton, N.J., 1983);
51. for another discussion of the literacy of the laity see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven, Conn., 1992).
52. M. B. Parkes, "The Literacy of the Laity," in Literature and Western Civilization: The Mediaeval World, ed. David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby (London, 1973), pp. 555-77.
53. M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: 1066-1307 (London, 1979). In his 1993 edition Clanchy offers more information about female literacy.
54. A selection of such passages can be found in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans, eds., The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-1520 (University Park, Pa., 1999), pp. 209-310.
55. See M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and Its Background (Oxford, 1973), p. 258: "In view of the fact that copies of the Life of St. Margaret were placed on the breast of women in childbirth to act as a charm, the demand for vernacular translations is easily understood."
56. See also Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne in Medieval English Prose for Women: Selections from the Katherine Group and Ancrene Wisse (Oxford, 1990), p. xxii, who briefly discuss St. Margaret's cult and association with childbirth. The Life of St. Margaret is in one case found bound with medical treatises and recipes.
57. Kathleen Ashley, "Medieval Courtly Literature and Dramatic Mirrors of Female Conduct," in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (New York, 1987), pp. 25-38.
58. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson et al. (Boston, 1987), 2.85-105.
59. For a discussion of the ways in which the text encourages a somatic and affective reading practice see Mark Amsler, "Affective Literacy: Gestures of Reading in the Later Middle Ages," Essays in Medieval Studies 18 (2001), 83-109, esp. pp. 88-92 (published electronically by the Muse Project at http://muse.jhu.edu).
60. Dahood, "The Use of Coloured Initials" (above, n. 15), p. 90.
61. See Seinte Margarete in Millett and Wogan-Browne, eds., Medieval English Prose for Women, p. 44.
62. See Stock's discussion of such communities in Implications of Literacy.
63. For a discussion of the ways in which male authors mediate female reading experiences see Anne Clark Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995).
64. See Annie Samson, "The South East Legendary: Constructing a Context," in Thirteenth-Century England, 1, ed. P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd (Woodbridge, Eng., 1985), pp. 185-95.
65. For a discussion of this and other vernacular manuscripts of the thirteenth century see John Frankis, "The Social Context of Vernacular Writing in Thirteenth Century England: The Evidence of the Manuscripts," in Thirteenth Century England, 1, ed. Coss and Lloyd, pp. 175-84. He discusses Harley 978 on pp. 176-77.
66. Elizabeth Salter, English and International: Studies in the Literature, Art and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zeeman (Cambridge, Eng., 1988);
67. see especially part 1, "An Obsession with the Continent," pp. 1-100.
68. Millett, in countering the assumption that the AB texts represent a link in a continuous English prose tradition, argues for the AB texts' dependence on Latin sources and influences in essays such as "Hali Meiohad, Sawles Warde and the Continuity of English Prose," in Five Hundred Years of Words and Sounds: A Festschrift for Eric Dobson, ed. E. G. Stanley and Douglas Gray (Cambridge, Eng., 1983), pp. 100-108. While Millett is too careful a scholar to be reductive in her conclusions, for others in the quest for Latin sources of the AB texts, there is a danger of reducing them to pale imitations of those sources.
69. Quoted in James Westfall Thompson, The Literacy of the Laity in the Middle Ages, Publications in Education 9 (Berkeley, Calif., 1939), p. 167.
70. Parkes, "The Literacy of the Laity," p. 557. He adds, "Moreover there is clear evidence that these aristocrats read the books they possessed. Constance Fitz-Gilbert owned a manuscript of a poem on Henry I, which she read in her room. From the 12th century onward there were didactic treatises addressed to women. One of them, written in the early 14th century, discusses whether it is proper that a woman should learn to read."
71. See also Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature, p. 28: "Gaimar says at the end of his work that she [Constance] had given a silver mark for the Life of Henry I written by David for Adeliza of Louvain, and kept it and read it in her chamber. The wording suggests that she could herself read, and there is no evidence as to the language of the poem."
72. See Thompson, The Literacy of the Laity, p. 167.
73. See also Salter's more detailed discussion of these learned women, English and International, pp. 12-15.
74. Nicholas Orme, English Schools in the Middle Ages (London, 1973), pp. 32 and 72. Orme's model of literacy is colored by his exalted vision of the virtues of an old-fashioned English education.
75. Vincent of Beauvais, De eruditione filiorum nobilium, ed. Arpad Steiner, Medieval Academy of America Publication 32 (Cambridge, Mass., 1938).
76. and Roberta L. Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge, Eng., 1993), p. 2.
77. and for a discussion of women readers in Yvain see Krueger, Women Readers, pp. 33-51.
78. Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535 (Cambridge, Eng., 1922), pp. 267-68. Most critics depend on this book for information about medieval English nunneries. It should be noted that Power's conclusion that Latin learning died out in the convents in the thirteenth century is based on her assessment of records of episcopal visitations, which, because they were performed irregularly and because they were disciplinary in nature, may give us a distorted picture of the actual condition of the nunneries.
79. Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran, The Growth of English Schooling, 1340-1548: Learning, Literacy and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese (Princeton, N.J., 1985), p. 69.
80. Moran, The Growth of English Schooling, p. 116.
81. C. H. Talbot, ed., The Liber confortatorius of Goscelin of Saint Benin, Studia Anselmiana 37 (Rome, 1955), pp. 1-117.
82. Power, Medieval English Nunneries, p. 239.
83. Wogan-Browne, "Women in Anglo-Norman Hagiography," in Women and Literature, ed. Meale (above, n. 19), p. 62.
84. Pauline Stafford, "Women and the Norman Conquest," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 4 (1994), 221-49, at p. 227.
85. See also her Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women's Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford, 1997).
86. Bruce L. Venarde, Women's Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890-1215 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997).
87. Two other standard recent works on female monasticism in England are Sally Thompson, Women Religious (above, n. 1
88. ) and Sharon R. Elkins, Holy Women of Twelfth-Century England (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988).
89. P. R. Robinson "A Twelfth-Century Scriptrix from Nunnaminster," in Of the Making of Books: Medieval Manuscripts, Their Scribes and Readers. Essays Presented to M. B. Parkes, ed. P. R. Robinson and Rivkah Zim (Aldershot, Eng., 1997), p. 73.
90. Aelred of Rievaulx, De institutione inclusarum, in Opera omnia, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot, CCCM 1 (Turnhout, 1971).
91. See Walter Daniel, The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, trans. F. M. Powicke (London, 1950), pp. xxxiii and 2.
92. See St. Anselm, Orationes et meditationes, in Opera omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt (Edinburgh, 1946).
93. Orme, English Schools (above, n. 81), p. 53.
94. Power, Nunneries, p. 286
95. Cited in English in Power, Nunneries, p. 248.
96. According to Mary Bateson, "In England the large number of royal ladies who entered monasteries, and in many cases became abbesses, is a peculiar feature. Their rank, however, will not in every case explain the system which placed them in authority over the monks. Again, in many instances the monasteries were handed on from mother to daughter, or from one sister to another. Princesses were dedicated to the monastic life from their earliest years; others entered convents after years of marriage, during which they adhered to vows of virginity, others entered who were mothers, and many entered at their widowhood": "Origin and Early History of Double Monasteries," in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, n.s., 13 (London, 1899; repr. 1971), pp. 137-98 at pp. 182-83.
97. Brian Golding, Gilbert of Sempringham and the Gilbertine Order, c. 1130-c. 1300 (Oxford, 1995).
98. For an account of this notorious event see Giles Constable, "Aelred of Rievaulx and the Nun of Watton: An Episode in the Early History of the Gilbertine Order," in Medieval Women, ed. Derek Baker, Studies in Church History, Subsidia, 1 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 205-26.
99. Although this is a late example, it is not atypical of what happened to convent property. Lina Eckenstein tells us: "The nunnery of St. Radegund's at Cambridge was among the first establishments appropriated in the interest of the higher religious education of men on the plea of decay and deterioration. It had supported a convent of twelve nuns as late as 1460, but in 1496 it was dissolved . . . by John Alcock, bishop of Ely. . . . The king's licence for the dissolution of the house contains words to the effect that it had fallen into decay owing to neglect, improvidence, and the dissolute dispositions of the prioress and convent, which were referable to the close proximity of Cambridge. . . . The bishop asked leave to declare the house dissolved in order to appropriate its possessions and revenues to the foundation of a college of one master, . . . six fellows . . . and a certain number of students. . . . The sanction of Pope Alexander III having been obtained, the nunnery of St. Radegund was transformed into Jesus College, Cambridge": Woman under Monasticism: Chapters on Saint-Lore and Convent Life between A.D. 500 and A.D. 1500 (Cambridge, Eng., 1896), p. 435. See also p. 434.
100. Bell, What Nuns Read, p. 77.
101. For a fuller discussion of male mediation see Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers (above, n. 69).
102. Walter J. Ong, "The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," PMLA 90 (January 1975), 9-21.
103. Rosamond McKitterick, ed., The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), p. 320.
104. For a superb analysis of how this work functions as regulation see Sarah Beckwith, "Passionate Regulation: Enclosure, Ascesis, and the Feminist Imaginary," in Materialist Feminism, ed. Toril Moi and Janice Radway, South Atlantic Quarterly 93 (1994), 803-24.
105. On the term interpellation see Louis Althusser, "Ideology and State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (London, 1971), pp. 221-27.
106. For a summary of the development of reader-response theory, see Jane P. Tompkins's introduction to her edited collection, Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore, 1980), pp. ix-xxvi.
107. For a discussion of gender and reading see Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore, 1986).
108. Hélène Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson and trans. Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson, Ann Liddle, and Susan Sellers (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), p. 3.
109. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
110. For a discussion of medieval reading see James Simpson, "Ethics and Interpretation: Reading Wills in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998), 73-100. My interest in the reading practices of the readers of the Ancrene Wisse was stimulated by hearing James Simpson lecture on this topic in the fall of 1998 at Cambridge.
111. and Richard de Bury's Philobiblon.
112. Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 1 (Berkeley, Calif., 1987).
113. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. John D. Sinclair (New York, 1939), 5.121-38;
114. Floire et Blancheflor, ed. Jean-Luc Leclanche (Paris, 1980), lines 235-242b.
115. William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London, 1995), 3.336-53.
116. Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington, Ind., 1978)
117. Patrocinio Schweickart, "Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading," in Gender and Reading, p. 53.
118. There are numerous alterations to the text of the Corpus manuscript. On paleographic grounds many of the alterations are believed to be of roughly the same date as the later thirteenth-century inscription at the end of the first folio, which according to Ker, "records the gift of the manuscript by John Purcel to the house of Augustinian canons at Wigmore in Herefordshire . . . at the instance of the precentor, Walter de Ludlow senior." In the sixteenth century another male reader, or at least handler, of the text wrote his name, John Mannyng, in a legal hand on fol. 112v. See Ker's introduction to Tolkien's Ancrene Wisse, pp. xvi-xviii. Ker attributes some of the late-thirteenth-century alterations to a male hand, although he gives no reason for his attribution of gender.
119. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, "Chaste Bodies: Frames and Experiences," in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester, Eng., 1994), p. 33.
120. Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?" in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard and trans.
121. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), pp. 113-38.
122. The Thirteenth-Century Female Reader and the Lover-Knight" in Women, the Book and the Godly, 1, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H.
123. Taylor (Woodbridge, Eng., 1995), pp. 137-48. Although I argued that the particular circumstances and perceived identity of the three anchoresses profoundly influenced the works produced for them, I in no way intended, then or now, to suggest that such aspects were "essential" to them or that the readers embraced these views as a form of self-loathing.
124. Karen Winstead on page 47 of her Virgin Martyrs: Legends of Sainthood in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997) similarly misconstrues the implications of my argument. She states, "Elizabeth Robertson argues that the Katherine Group writers' vivid descriptions of characters, settings, objects and conflicts may have stunted women's spirituality by locating it so securely in the material world." Although I argued that the AB texts' emphasis on the material springs from the authors' assumptions about the limited nature of their female readers, I in no way intended to suggest either that these assumptions about women were true or that the ideology produced for them was necessarily repressive. Winstead goes on to say, "It seems to me, however, that the Katherine Group legends invite more radical - and from a clerical perspective, more dangerous - interpretations than their Latin antecedents precisely because they are so preoccupied with the material world," which was a point I made in my book and is precisely my point now.
125. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (1953; repr. New York, 1970)
126. and Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l'autre femme (Paris, 1974).
127. I discuss further the relational qualities of the AB texts in Early English Devotional Prose.
128. Sarah Beckwith, "Problems of Authority in Late Medieval English Mysticism: Language, Agency, and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe," Exemplaria 4 (1992), 171-200.
129. See Early English Devotional Prose and my earlier essay, "The Rule of the Body: The Feminine Spirituality of the Ancrene Wisse," in Seeking the Woman in Late Medieval and Renaissance Writings, ed. Sheila Fisher and Janet Halley (Knoxville, Tenn., 1989).
130. Gopa Roy, "'Sharpen Your Mind with the Whetstone of Books': The Female Recluse as Reader in Goscelin's Liber confortatorius, Aelred of Rievaulx's De institutione inclusarum and the Ancrene Wisse," in Women, the Book and the Godly, pp. 113-22.
131. Aelred, De institutione inclusarum 20 (above, n. 102), p. 654.
132. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality (New York, 1991);
133. and the more abstract, but eloquent, translation of M. D. Salu, The Ancrene Riwle (London, 1955).
134. Salu, The Ancrene Riwle, p. 7;
135. White, Ancrene Wisse, p. 3.
136. Wogan-Browne, "'Inner' and 'Outer'" (above, n. 10).
137. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York, 1993).
138. I have used Salu's translation here rather than my own since hers is so eloquent: The Ancrene Riwle, pp. 51-52.
139. Wogan-Browne, "'Inner' and 'Outer'" pp. 192-208, uses Burrow's terms in her provocative description of the way in which the author of the Wisse negotiates the relationship between the spiritual and physical.
140. In his letter to Benjamin Bailey on November 22, 1817, Keats wrote, ". . . we shall enjoy ourselves here after by having what we call happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone and so repeated": The Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings (New York, 1982), p. 37.
141. This is the title of Keats's fragmentary poem "This Living Hand, Now Warm and Capable": Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. Miriam Allott (New York, 1978), pp. 700-701.
142. The incarnational emphasis of the Wisse has been discussed in Linda Georgianna's important study, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge, Mass., 1981), a book to which I am indebted. In his essay on the spirituality of the Wisse (above, n. 11), Watson similarly stresses its incarnational focus.
143. Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York, 1993), pp. 19 and 21-22.
144. Hélène Cixous, "The Author in Truth," in Coming to Writing (above, n. 123), pp. 148 and 149.