With this book Liz Herbert McAvoy proposes to examine anchoritic sources “through a historico-literary lens and, moreover, one which took into account issues of gender” (4). The book is, she writes, “the result of many years of thinking about the ways in which a complex alchemy of gender and spatial dynamics are imprecated within the medieval reclusive life, and what the investment was of a wider society in its rituals, practices and hermeneutics” (4). She would demonstrate that “anchoritism's insistently feminine hermeneutics allowed, if only for a short time, the otherwise silent woman to speak out from behind her culturally imposed veil as if she were . . . genuinely in her own place” (9).
This agenda begins its realization with a study of John Cassian. In this first chapter, the author argues “for an inherent tension between his attempts to retain a sense of masculine prowess for the anchorite as a spiritual warrior and the insistent feminization of the anchoritic life” (8). This, she claims, is exemplified in the Rule of Saint Benedict and the tenth-century Rule of Grimläicus of Metz, whom I have not previously met.
Chapter 2 examines the representation of the male anchorite in fourteenth-century texts, though the twelfth-century writers, such as Aelred of Rievaulx and some of the early Carthusians who somehow appear under this heading. In the third chapter, the author tells us: “I necessarily turn to Ancrene Wisse, examining it as an inherently misogynistic male-authored text” (8).
Chapter 4 sees Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and the female author of the fifteenth-century A Vision of Purgatory countering the previous “misogynistic interpellation” of previous anchoritic authors. In chapter 5, McAvoy studies “how two of the primary discourses of anchoritism, that of stability of abode and the vocation as inherently feminine [are] deployed” by authors from the Welsh-English borderlands. She suggests that Marcher anchorites were envisioned as political tools through which to impose stability on a region torn by “uprising and warfare” (9).
There are two major difficulties with McAvoy's work. The first is her consistent confusion of gender and sex. Hence, the distinction between “male” and “masculine,” “female” and “feminine” is ignored, though the second of each pair is, in keeping with her title, usually employed. Sex is a matter of biology, gender a matter of grammar. Long ago my mother taught me to remember this through reciting the phrase agricola est nauta. Surely most Roman farmers and sailors were male, though the first declension's gender is feminine—not female. Similar examples can be drawn from several languages.
The second problem with the book is a matter of methodology. McAvoy attempts to fit all her primary source data into abstract theories derived from her (extensive) readings of authors such as Foucault, Bachelard, and Irigaray. In short, she works from a priori causes to effects in a proper Platonic fashion. I hope I shall not be considered old-fashioned in asserting that, whatever the historian's personal philosophy, as a historian she or he must adopt an Aristotelian approach, an a posteriori method. One must start with the data, the facts, and attempt to make valid generalizations or theories from them. Thus, despite the author's often interesting reading of certain primary texts, the book fails to be convincing.
