Notes

1. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987).

2. In this essay, I try to use "the body" or "body" to refer to a discursive concept and to use "bodies" or "one's body" to refer to humans' material substance.  The two constantly create and interrupt each other, yet I find it useful to attempt the distinction, partly so that "bodies" don't get lost in "the body" and so that the discursive power of "the body" is not trivialized.

3. See, for example, Anne K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons (Berkeley, 1985).

4. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford, 1991).

5. Jocelyn Price (later Jocelyn Wogan-Browne), "‘Inner' and ‘Outer': Conceptualizing the Body in Ancrene Wisse and Aelred's De Institutione Inclusarum," in Medieval English Religious and Ethical Literature: Essays in Honour of G. H. Russell, ed. Gregory Kratzmann and James Simpson (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 192-208, is also engaged in the project to explore the complexity of the "articulation" of the "territory" that is the body (207).  In this excellent essay Price does not focus on the role of the senses in articulating that shifting territory.

6. Catherine Innes-Parker, "Fragmentation and Reconstruction: Images of the Female Body in Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group," Comitatus 26 (1995), 27-52; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, "Chaste Bodies: Frames and Experiences," in Framing Medieval Bodies, ed. Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (Manchester, 1994), pp. 24-42.

7. All quotations are from The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle: Ancrene Wisse, Edited from MS. Corpus Christi College Cambridge 402, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien, EETS o.s. 249 (London, 1962).  I have modernized spelling and expanded abbreviations.  This citation is from fol. 3b 17-19.  Future citations will be identified by folio and line number parenthetically.  I have silently expanded contractions and used modern spellings to replace the Middle English letters thorn, yogh, and eth.

8. Translations are from Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson, Anchoritic Spirituality:  Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works (New York, 1991), here p. 50.  I will cite this excellent translation parenthetically throughout this essay.

9. Linda Georgianna, The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse (Cambridge, MA, 1981), pp. 141-42.

10. See Eric Jager, "The Book of the Heart: Reading and Writing the Medieval Subject," Speculum 71 (1996), 1-26, for an analysis of the ambiguous meaning of the word "heart" in the Middle Ages.  It embraced both physical and spiritual meanings, as the physical, intellectual, and moral center of humans (5).  Paradoxically, the Ancrene Wisse author would also like the anchoress to fly away from the world and the flesh like a bird, soaring in contemplation (fol. 38b 100).  This suggests that the heart ought occasionally to leave the flesh, but that the flesh itself does not constitute the person.

11. The Corpus text tends to use wakeman or weard as nouns for "guard."

12. An excellent analysis could also be done of the way the eyes create and cross boundaries of inner and outer in Ancrene Wisse, and thus help create subjectivity.  Sarah Stanbury has analyzed gazes on Christ and in the Clerk's Tale to begin to think about how the Middle Ages used the gaze and thought about subjectivity differently from the late twentieth century in "Regimes of the Visual in Premodern England:  Gaze, Body, and Chaucer's Clerk's Tale," New Literary History 28 (1997), 261-89.  Stanbury (p. 279) cites Kathleen Biddick's description of Christ's body in the Middle Ages, that ultimate representation of bodies, as "a fluid body that troubled any container":  Biddick, "Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible," Speculum 68 (1993), 389-418, at 410.

13. Anne Clark Bartlett also refers to this Bathsheba incident as an example of the misogynist elements of Ancrene Wisse.  She asserts, and I agree, that contemporary critics should not explain these elements away; misogyny is present in this text, but it is less strong than the love that the author shows to his readers.  See Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature (Ithaca, 1995), 71.

14. See, for example, R. F. Yeager, "Aspects of Gluttony in Chaucer and Gower," Studies in Philology 81 (1984), 42-55.

15. See Michael Camille, "Mouths and Meaning: Towards an Anti-Iconography of Medieval Art," in Iconography at the Crossroads, ed. Brendan Cassidy (Princeton, 1993), p. 49.  He is drawing on Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 43-44.

16. Alexandra Barratt, "The Five Wits and Their Structural Significance in Part II of Ancrene Wisse," Medium Aevum 56 (1987), 12-24, at 22.

17. Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers, pp. 69-70; Anne Savage, "The Translation of the Feminine: Untranslatable Dimensions of the Anchoritic Works," in The Medieval Translator 4, ed. Roger Ellis and Ruth Evans (Exeter, 1994), pp. 181-99.  For a different view, that Ancrene Wisse's author betrays his lack of respect for his women readers through his textual strategies, particularly his attention to earthly metaphors, see Elizabeth Robertson, "The Rule of the Body: The Feminine Spirituality of the Ancrene Wisse," in Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Julia Bolton Holloway, Constance S. Wright, and Joan Bechtold, (New York, 1990), pp. 109-34.

18. Anne Savage, "The Translation of the Feminine," p. 182, writes that she "include[s] the audience as an honorary author . . . since the writer addresses them personally"; this move has been made by the author of Ancrene Wisse as well.

19. See Jocelyn Price, "‘Inner' and ‘Outer,'" p. 205, for a careful explication of these lines and the image which follows, showing that the penance these women practice is depicted as protecting them from outside forces of evil, rather than torturing their own bodies.

20. Georgianna, The Solitary Self, p. 7.

21. Among others, Elizabeth Robertson, in "An Anchorhold of Her Own: Female Anchoritic Literature in Thirteenth-Century England," in Equally in God's Image, ed. Bolton Holloway et al., pp. 170-83, at 176, demonstrates how the text uses worldly experiences to teach the anchoresses.

22. Camille, "Mouths and Meaning," p. 48.

23. Castles and cities also have what seems like a clearly marked outside, but then multiple inner spaces.  Deborah S. Ellis has analyzed the instability of the purported safety of the internal space of a home in relationship to the Clerk's Tale in "Domestic Treachery in the Clerk's Tale," in Ambiguous Realities: Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Carole Levin and Jeanie Watson (Detroit, 1987), pp. 99-113.