A Biography of Ancrene Wisse

Abstract

In the wider field of narrative nonfiction and the narrower genre of biography, there is a trend in recent years to write of the “life” and cultural import of inanimate objects, from spoons to sugar. This has extended to works of literature, and it is in this tradition that I am writing a biography of Ancrene Wisse (A Guide for Anchoresses), a book with 800 years of influence over a variety of audiences. A precise date for the creation of this text is difficult to pin down, but the scholarly consensus has landed on 1220–1230. It was written mainly for an audience of anchoresses, women who lived a reclusive religious life inside a cell attached to a church. Its influence in England quickly grew, and as it did, the practice of anchoritism grew as well. I argue, in this biography of the text, that the popularity of the Ancrene Wisse and the anchoresses who were its initial (but not ever exclusive) audience grew in tandem until the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. While the practice of anchoritism all but died out, Ancrene Wisse has continued to have an active afterlife among scholars in several disciplines.