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Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe (Middle Ages Series) - Hardcover

Mulder-Bakker, Anneke B.

 
9780812238525: Lives of the Anchoresses: The Rise of the Urban Recluse in Medieval Europe (Middle Ages Series)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812238524 ISBN 13: 9780812238525
Verlag: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

In cities and towns across northern Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a new type of religious woman took up authoritative positions in society, all the while living as public recluses in cells attached to the sides of churches. In Lives of the Anchoresses, Anneke Mulder-Bakker offers a new history of these women who chose to forsake the world but did not avoid it.

Unlike nuns, anchoresses maintained their ties to society and belonged to no formal religious order. From their solitary anchorholds in very public places, they acted as teachers and counselors and, in some cases, theological innovators for parishioners who would speak to them from the street, through small openings in the walls of their cells. Available at all hours, the anchoresses were ready to care for the community's faithful whenever needed.

Through careful biographical studies of five emblematic anchoresses, Mulder-Bakker reveals the details of these influential religious women. The life of the unnamed anchoress who was mother to Guibert of Nogent shows the anchoress's role as a spiritual guide in an oral culture. A study of Yvette of Huy shows the myriad possibilities open to one woman who eventually chose the life of an anchoress. The accounts of Juliana of Cornillon and Eve of St. Martin raise questions about the participation of religious women in theological discussions and their contributions to church liturgy. And the biographical study of Margaret the Lame of Magdeburg explores the anchoress's role as day-to-day religious instructor to the ordinary faithful.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker is a senior lecturer in history and medieval studies at the University of Groningen. She is the author many books in Dutch, including Seeing and Knowing: Women and Learning in Medieval Europe, 1200-1550 and is editor of The Invention of Saintliness and Sanctity and Motherhood: Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages.

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Chapter 1
Bees Without a King

"For among bees there is a king," declared Bishop Robert of Thourotte in Liège in 1246, therefore holy women must live in communities under a leader.

At the Martini Church in Groningen, showpiece of a city still young in the thirteenth century, lived an anchoress. Enclosed in her cell, she was devoted to God in a highly conspicuous way. Directly on the Great Marketplace, visible and audible to those passing through the heart of the city, she lived the "life of angels" and functioned as a spiritual intermediary for the faithful of the town.

When a German merchant residing in Groningen once found himself in serious trouble, it was with her that he sought refuge. On one of his trips to the East he had managed to acquire a precious relic—the arm of John the Baptist, he claimed—and had it bricked into the masonry of his house. This made him feel invulnerable. When a large fire broke out in the city—probably the fire of the 1190s—and all the people made frantic attempts to rescue their possessions, he stayed defiantly in the tavern, sure that his house would be safe. This aroused the fury and suspicion of his fellow residents. Feeling that his life was in danger, he entrusted the arm to the recluse and fled from the town.

And so it happened, Caesarius of Heisterbach writes, that Groningen acquired its most precious relic, source of spiritual and material welfare of the city. Because the recluse "could not keep the secret to herself and told someone what had been entrusted to her, who in turn informed the citizenry, the latter immediately carried off the relic and brought it to the church." Subsequently the arm, displayed in a gilt reliquary and decorated with precious stones, attracted hundreds of pilgrims to the Martini Church. And the city owed all this to the anchoress who had proved herself a confidante to a merchant in need and an intermediary who brought blessings on the town. Although Caesarius's anecdote contains some gentle criticism of the recluse—typical that a woman couldn't keep her mouth shut—her fame as an anchoress forestalled any possible doubts about the authenticity of the relic.

For the rest, we know nothing about the recluse at the Martini Church. Caesarius remains the sole witness.

For modern readers an anecdote like this one raises many questions. How exactly should we picture a medieval anchoress of the kind we glimpse here, living in the shadow of a large city church? Was she an exceptional case or a phenomenon encountered more often? Was it only women who lived like this or men as well? What kind of lives did they lead, and what significance did they have for their surroundings? And why did certain believers opt for this form of life, which from our perspective seems rather bizarre? What could possibly have attracted people to the anchoritic life? Was it escapism, an attempt to flee from society? But the Groningen anchoress appears to have chosen the center of the town as the place to devote herself to God. She also seems to have played an active role in the community. A simple urge to escape is therefore out of the question. What was her motive, then? And why did she not choose to live in the forest or the mountains, like the hermits familiar to us from chivalric romances? Or was that option open only to men? Were there differences between men and women in this area? And if so, why?

Historians have raised these questions before, especially those about the relation between anchorites and their environment. Because the sources yield little in the way of answers-usually, as in the Groningen case, information is provided only indirectly—scholars generally do no more than repeat old answers, particularly those that emerged in the nineteenth century or even in the pious thought of the Counter Reformation. In the typical handbook or encyclopedia, often a collaborative product of theologians and church historians, we read that such women were deeply religious persons who abstained from marital life and motherhood for the sake of their spiritual bridegroom, Christ. They shared this ideal, we are told, with nuns and devout sisters who had also bid farewell to an ordinary life, but unlike them, anchoresses lived in total solitude. Isolated from the outside world, with the door of their cell bolted and the window covered with a black curtain, they lived as if at the gates of heaven, praying day and night in the seclusion of their cell. A Vita angelica it was called, a life of angels. Immersed in their meditation, anchoresses yearned for the moment when the bridegroom would take them by the hand and lead them into the heavenly bridal chamber.

The scholars who wrote these books, themselves without exception men formed by the nineteenth-century Victorian ideal of the good housewife who longs for her husband or father in the seclusion of her home, could not imagine anything different. For them, both nuns and anchoresses sublimated a conventional middle-class ideal onto the spiritual plane. They do not distinguish between enclosed anchoresses (often referred to as recluses) and female hermitesses in the forest. Nor do they describe the remarkable changes that took place in the course of the Middle Ages. The only real difference they see between nuns in a convent cell and recluses in an anchorhold is one of degree. Nuns pursued their ideal in the community of the cloister; recluses had to manage without that safety net. In total solitude, like bees without a king, they strove for perfect contemplation. The fact that the sparse information in the sources does not seem to support their ideas—witness our woman in Groningen, who was certainly not cut off from life in the city—apparently gave them no second thoughts.

Historical research of recent years has taken a different tack. Inspired by innovative studies such as Peter Brown's "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," French and Italian scholars in particular have approached the role of recluses and anchorites from a historical-social perspective, placing it in the context of the times. Under the leadership of André Vauchez, director of the École française in Rome, and Sofia Boesch Gajano, founder and great inspirer of the Italian Gruppo di ricerca "Santi e culto dei santi," historians, art historians, and anthropologists have freed themselves from the framework of church history and dogma to begin studying the holy in all its facets from what we might label a profane perspective. Research into anchoritism has also found a place in their program. Sofia Boesch herself wrote a pioneering study of Chelidonia, the female successor of Benedict in the cave of Subiaco, showing especially how the bones and veneration were subjected to the manipulations of power politics. Anna Benvenuti Papi inventoried the many recluses in Florence and Tuscany who lived as in a grave, Velut in sepulchro, and Gabriella Zarri did groundbreaking research into a group of living saints and recluses, Sante Vive, who were held in high esteem at the humanist courts of Italy. These women, Zarri maintains, combined mystical ecstasy, gifts of prophecy, and telepathy with thaumaturgical powers and political influence. They had "a preference for the mixed life, held to be superior to the cloistered life if not the contemplative one," which included a "sense of having a social and ecclesiastical mission." This study shows Zarri to be inspired by issues and approaches from Anglo-American gender studies, a fruitful route.

In England there is a much longer tradition of a more historical and literary-historical approach to medieval anchorites. Rotha Mary Clay's 1914 book still provides the foundation for all historical studies of hermits and recluses. Ann Warren supplemented her inventory and devoted special study to the...

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Verlag
University of Pennsylvania Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812238524
ISBN 13 
9780812238525
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
312
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