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Ancrene Wisse, a guide for anchoresses written in the early thirteenth century,1 uses a number of provocative images to describe and theorize the small cell in which the anchoress was to enclose herself for life. In the course of Ancrene Wisse, the cell is described as a besieged castle,2 a prison cell (56), the city of Jerusalem, a fox hole (67), a nest in a high tree (70), Mary's womb (as Christ's anchor cell, 193), a grave (88), the cross (88), among many others. Such images map different symbolic architectures over what was in reality a small room or set of rooms crowded under the eaves of a village church, creating an expansive theological, psychological, and finally an intensely symbolic space. Potentially, each of these metaphorical re-imaginings creates different psychological spaces that interact both with each other and with the actual or assumed architecture of the anchoresses' cells. This article will explore some of the implications of such symbolic spaces in Ancrene Wisse from an interdisciplinary point of view, drawing on recent work in urban studies, archaeology, and church architecture.
The dominant symbolic space of part 2 of Ancrene Wissehas arguably attracted the most critical attention. This section (on the dangers of the five senses) maps the human body (the female body in particular) with its various apertures (eyes, ears, nose, throat, and skin) over the architecture of the anchorhold with its walls and windows. The apertures of the body are likened to the physical windows of the anchorhold, points of dangerous permeability. Far from being safely closed like a grave or a prison cell, the anchorhold, like the female body, is dangerously open and must be guarded, restricted, and controlled carefully. Following Carolyn Walker-Bynum, scholars such as Elizabeth Robertson have pointed out that in Ancrene Wisse, anchoresses (unlike men) are presumed to experience the divine mainly through their fallen and dangerous bodies. Robertson shows that contemporary views of women's ambiguous physicality, both medical and theological, underlie much of the advice of Ancrene Wisse* In this sense, a number of studies have explored both the permeability and liminality of the anchorhold.4 As a liminal space between the realms of body and spirit, the profane and the sacred, the devil and God, both the anchorhold and...