medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
thought this might be of interest to some here.
of course, what caught my eye was "her ...earlier studies dealt with
...normative and monstrous gender positions."
which sounded like a Hot Topic i needed to pursue.
turns out, it wasn't what i thought it was.
be that as it may, here's a 201 page book for only $95.00.
c
------ Original Message ------
Received: Tue, 08 May 2012 09:44:40 AM EDT
From: The Medieval Review <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: TMR 12.05.07 McAvoy, Medieval Anchoritisms (Camp)
McAvoy, Liz Herbert. <i>Medieval Anchoritisms: Gender, Space and the
Solitary Life</i>. Gender in the Middle Ages 6. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.
S. Brewer, 2011. Pp. ix, 201. $95.00. ISBN: 978-1843842774.
Reviewed by Cynthia Turner Camp
University of Georgia
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Scholars of medieval anchoritism will be familiar with Liz Herbert
McAvoy through her studies of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe as
well as her contributions to and editorship of several volumes on
medieval gender, experience, and anchoritism. These earlier studies
dealt with female space and embodiedness, with normative and monstrous
gender positions, and with the <i>longue durée</i> of the medieval
anchoritic tradition, topics that <i>Medieval Anchoritisms</i> extends
significantly. Different portions of the book appeared in prior essay
collections, but this work is more than the sum of its parts, for
McAvoy has synthesized these ongoing interests to produce a holistic
examination of how male and female writers work within and against the
dominant feminization of solitary ascetic space.
In <i>Medieval Anchoritisms</i>, McAvoy argues for reading the
anchoritic life as "a vocation particularly haunted by a femininity
that was often reified and just as often subliminal," a gendering of
the calling--and the space that defined that calling--that haunted the
discourse of the male recluse and would be, in time, embraced and
modified by later female anchoritic writers (7). In McAvoy's study,
the enclosed, solitary "desert" of the cell, a traditionally feminine
space of seclusion and renunciation, must be re-negotiated in every
anchoritic text: by monastic writers seeking to preserve the male
solitary's masculinity within the anchorhold's feminizing space; by
male writers imagining enclosure as a protection for the otherwise-
monstrous female body; by female anchoritic writers who refashioned
the cell as a space enabling a female imaginary; by chorographers who
imagined the female anchorhold as stabilizing a dangerously fluid
Welsh March geography.
In her explication of gendered anchoritic space, McAvoy turns to
poststructuralist feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray and Julia
Kristeva as well as theorists of space like Henri Lefebvre and Michel
Foucault. One of the strengths of McAvoy's work is her sensitive use
of <i>écriture féminine</i> as a heuristic for examining a discourse
that, as she shows in her first chapter, was rooted in patristic
concerns about the feminizing potential of eremitic renunciation. By
considering how these texts discursively produce ideal subject-
positions for their anchoritic readers, McAvoy performs a historically
informed explication of the latent, suppressed, overt, or deflected
fears concerning normative gender roles and gendered spaces. McAvoy's
use of poststructuralist feminist criticism is supple, nuanced, and
ultimately enlightening. Through this lens, McAvoy not only finds that
which one would expect such an approach to unearth (i.e., Cassian's
insistent gendering of the male recluse as a <i>miles Christi</i>, the
<i>Ancrene Wisse</i>'s creation of a "monstrous" female body to be
contained by ascetic practice)--but also uncovers the unexpected (a
Carthusian identification of the male recluse with female harlot
desert-saints; Goscelin of St Bertin's self-emasculation in the face
of Eve's absent, enclosed body) in ways that prevent any simplistic
reading of anchoritic discourses of gender and space.
As may already be clear, the book's other major strength is its scope.
McAvoy ranges widely over the literature of enclosure and solitude,
drawing from both well studied and lesser-known (sometimes unedited)
texts in roughly chronological progression. She begins with patristic
and early monastic treatment of male eremiticism as an extension or
perfection of cenobiticism, examining the gendered imagery in John
Cassian's <i>Collationes</i>, Benedict's <i>Rule</i>, and the tenth-
century <i>Regula solitariorum</i> by the German monk Grimlaïcus of
Metz. This focus on male eremitic practice is continued in the second
chapter, which considers the presence (and sometimes absence) of the
"spectral" feminine in English advice to later medieval
hermits: <i>The Reply to a Bury Recluse</i>, Aelred of Rivaulx's
<i>De institutione inclusarum</i>, and the <i>Speculum
inclusorum</i>, possibly written originally for Carthusian recluses
and later translated (partly for a female audience) as the <i>Myrour
of Recluses</i>. The third chapter moves into male-authored treatises
written (at least ostensibly) for female anchoritic readers, as McAvoy
pairs her treatment of the <i>Ancrene Wisse</i> and related texts with
a consideration of Goscelin of St Bertin's <i>Liber confortatorius</i>
written for (although not necessarily received by) Eve, a nun of
Wilton who retired to a continental anchorhold. This chapter functions
as a pivot-point in the book. Goscelin's inversion of typical gender
roles culminates the earlier section on the construction of
masculinity in the face of potentially feminizing enclosure, while the
<i>Ancrene Wisse</i>'s polarization of the female body as both abject
and transcendent, and of the cell as the site of contest between these
two states, establishes a discursive norm against which McAvoy reads
the female-voiced anchoritic texts in the subsequent chapter.
That fourth chapter covers texts and concerns most commonly
encountered in the criticism: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and
the question of how the devout woman writer can "avoid male
interpellation,...achieve endorsement and...gain ultimate authority"
by refashioning established discursive practices (114). Pairing these
familiar (and arguably "special case") texts with <i>A Revelation of
Purgatory</i>, recently identified as the work of a fifteenth-century
Winchester recluse [1], allows McAvoy to argue that late medieval
female anchorites had established a discursive space and devotional
language that resisted the abjecting imagery of the <i>Ancrene
Wisse</i>. <i>Medieval Anchoritisms</i> ends by moving away from the
ideal subject-creation of the earlier chapters to the creation of a
stable geographic and social space in the anchorholds of the Welsh
marches; both writers (like Gerald of Wales, Lucian of Chester, and
the <i>Chronicle of Lanercost</i>) and rulers of this contested space
imagine female enclosure to "anchor" a stable national and spiritual
identity within a borderland otherwise characterized by flux.
This critical approach to these widely ranging sources is coupled,
on the one hand, with deep explication of select passages. McAvoy's
close reading of the <i>Liber confortatorius</i> and its negotiation
of Goscelin's carnal and spiritual desire for the absent, superior Eve,
for example, was for this reader one of the book's most compelling
moments precisely because it displayed the interpretive suppleness of
McAvoy's chosen critical approach. Her detailed assessment of the
(ungendered) horrors of purgatory in <i>A Vision of Purgatory</i> is
similarly effective; its distance from the <i>Ancrene Wisse</i>'s
tendency to make monstrous the female body, when paired with Julian
and Margery's feminizations of the divine, makes persuasive McAvoy's
claims that late medieval anchoritic discourse fully enabled the
female "gaze" or subject-position. On the other hand, McAvoy balances
her poststructuralism with forays into the historical situations
behind certain (often less broadly studied) texts. For instance,
she contextualizes the <i>Letter to a Bury Recluse</i> within its
manuscript witnesses and within the practice of monastic <i>ludi</i>
or retreat at satellite granges. Her fifth chapter on the recluses of
the Welsh marches looks in detail at the sociopolitical relationship
between Wales and England alongside the discourses of nationalism and
identity instability (drawing on the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen)
circulating in these borderlands. As such, McAvoy's book both depends
on and complements more historically framed studies, such as Ann
Warren's historical and documentary work on English anchoritism. [2]
McAvoy's use of poststructuralist feminist theory to unpack this
wide range of texts will not appeal methodologically to all readers,
and the study's weaknesses are those endemic to this theoretical
approach: a dependence on oppositional binaries, a reduction of all
experience to discourse, and a tendency to make diffuse rather than
precise, exact claims. Yet these weaknesses are mitigated by her
supple, non-dogmatic treatment of such a diverse range of texts and by
her ease of movement between "theoretical" and "historical" approaches
(demonstrating indeed that there need not be any opposition between
them). Scholars of both male and female anchoritic life will welcome
McAvoy's compilation and synthesis of concepts she has aired in other
contexts, and those interested in poststructural feminist criticism
will find much to admire in her work.
--------
Notes:
1. Mary C. Erler, "'A Revelation of Purgatory' (1422): Reform and
the Politics of Female Visions," <i>Viator</i> 38.1 (2007): 321-83.
2. Ann K. Warren, <i>Anchorites and their Patrons in
Medieval England</i> (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986).
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