Female anchoritic spirituality in Ancrene Wisse and Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich

This MA thesis explores one of the few religious vocations available to medieval women, that of an anchoress. Anchoresses, or recluses, exchanged their life in the world for a cell adjacent to a church, in which they spent the rest of their lives, keeping a daily schedule of prayers and meditations. As an aid in their daily life, several "rules" or "guides" were produced - one of them is Ancrene Wisse. This guide contains practical advice on running the anchorhold, as well as passages concerning spirituality. As a normative text written by a male author, it was compared with another text concerning spirituality, this time written by an anchoress -Julian of Norwich. Julian likely became an anchoress after receiving a series of visions when laying seriously ill; she later recorded these visions for profit of her fellow Christians. Both texts were analysed in connection to anchoritic spirituality and revealed several similarities - for instance, both tend to use the basic metaphors of enclosure as body, Christ as a mother, or Christ as a king or a knight. The image of spirituality that emerges from the two texts is often paradoxical, due to the incommunicability of the Divine, which makes both the anonymous author of the Ancrene Wisse and Julian utilise images with opposite meanings and often shift..