38
BCD Special Report on
Historic Churches
19
th annual edition
Solitude and
Sociability
The World of the Medieval Anchorite
¹
Mari Hughes-Edwards
The ‘Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul’, by the Osservanza Master, c1430: Saint Anthony, who spent
much of his life as a desert ascetic, and Saint Paul, the hermit, were role models for recluses and other medieval
contemplatives. (Image: National Gallery of Art, Washington)
R
eligious men
and women have been
inspired to seek lives of solitude since
ancient times, moved by the belief that
spiritual fulfilment can be found in the rejection
of society’s expectations and encumbrances.
The desert fathers and mothers, the earliest-
known Christian solitaries, were inspirational
role models for the professional contemplatives
of the Middle Ages. They withdrew from
the world for the same fundamental reason
as their medieval counterparts did: that
they might better come to know themselves
and, through that self-knowledge, generate
a more intimate connection with God.
In England, during the Middle Ages, the
desire to experience religious solitude was
commonly mediated through physical enclosure
and could manifest as coenobitic withdrawal,
which is community-based, as eremitic
seclusion, or (certainly in the earlier Middle
Ages, at least) as an individualised combination
of the two. Medieval eremites, that is, hermits
and anchorites, experienced the harshest
forms of solitude known to medieval society.
The term anchorite comes from the Greek
άναχωρητής (anachoretes), itself derived
from the verb άναχωρειν (anachorein, ‘to
withdraw’).� Anchorites then, were men
and women who sought to withdraw from
the world as much as was practicable, often
(
although not always) to a small, four-walled
cell adjoining a religious building. Sometimes
referred to as the medieval world’s living
dead, many spiritual thinkers have written for
them and about them, inspired in part by the
deeply dramatic notion of grave-like spatial
fixity upon which the vocation is founded.
In contrast to the eremitic seclusion of
hermits who could, in theory at least, move
locations, anchorites were permanently
enclosed within the walls of their cell or
‘
anchorhold’. They remained in the world
and yet were manifestly not of it. They
retreated to a spatially restricted spiritual
arena, the better to confront the very worst
that was in them. They engaged in this
spiritual struggle not only for themselves,
but for the wider world which, paradoxically,
the vocation was developed to reject.
