Anchorites were dotted around the cities and towns of western Europe and played a significant part in the spiritual life of the local community. A great city might have a small number of them; similarly, they might be found on the fringes of market towns. In recent times the profile of the anchorite has attracted a greater number of ecclesiastical historians, as the editors explain, commenting on the rich collaboration between scholars from England and Japan. This collection of texts and commentaries includes an introduction by the editors and ten contributions from scholars who participated in the International Anchoritic Society of Japan in 2008 (Bella Millet, Mari Hughes-Edwards, Fumiko Yoshikawa, Jane Chance, Juliana Dresvina, Sieglinde Harmann, Chiyoko Inosaki, Catherine Innes-Parker, Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa and Satoko Tokunaga). A sample of these contributions illustrates the merits of this attractive volume. The mendicants' links with the anchorite world are explored in ‘Carmelite spirituality and the laity in late medieval England’ by Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa. This article commences with the observation that the Whitefriars originated as a group of contemplative hermits on Mount Carmel. Some Carmelite writers, notably Richard Lavenham and Richard Maidstone, produced devotional texts for the laity in the fourteenth century. This impetus continued into the next century in the writings of Thomas Netter of Walden and Alan of Lynn, a doctor of theology who taught theology at different priories in East Anglia. When lecturing at Norwich he made indices of the revelations and prophecies concerning St Bridget of Sweden. The friars make a number of appearances in The Book of Margery Kempe. Their differing responses to Margery created divisions in the leadership of the British province. Alan of Lynn, lector at Lynn and Norwich, found himself at odds with his prior provincial, Thomas Netter, who at once stage forbade him to have any contact with Margaret. Despite the fact that the prior provincial enjoyed close links with female recluses, he was uneasy about aspects of the mystic's conduct and about 1415 he instructed his confrères not to encourage women who publicly proclaimed divine revelations. There was an anchorhold attached to the Norwich Whitefriars in 1421. ‘Hagiography and idealism: St Dympna of Geel, an uncanny saint’, by Juliana Dresvina, explores the portrait of this saint, whose flight from contemporary society, enclosure in a cell in the woods and her struggle against disruptive forces to preserve her vocation connects her with the anchorite tradition. Dympna's cult became popular in the thirteenth century, when some bones were discovered at Geel in Brabant. Its impetus was such that that the bishop of Cambrai commissioned Pierre, a canon of the church of St Aubert in Cambrai, to compile a vita, which was subsequently translated into the vernacular, where it acquired a new character and was subsequently translated back into Latin. Dympna was the only daughter of an Irish king who bitterly lamented the death of her mother. In his grief he turned his unwanted attentions towards his daughter, who fled to the continent with the assistance of her mother's confessor and two companions. These exiles embraced the anchorite life near Antwerp. Dympna was eventually found by her increasingly disturbed father who announced that he wanted to marry her in contravention of social and religious mores. When she steadfastly refused him, the king ordered her execution and that of his late wife's confessor. In later years Dympna was invoked as the patron saint of those afflicted with insanity and this is reflected in her iconography.