This study applies recent critical theory on gender and space to a wide range of Latin and Middle English anchoritic texts. The first chapter discusses the use of a masculine ‘discourse of military prowess’ (p. 8) in three early medieval works, Cassian's Collationes, the Rule of St Benedict, and Grimlaic's Regula solitariorum, to counteract the feminised nature of the solitary life. The second focuses on two fourteenth-century Anglo-Latin guides for monk-recluses, a short treatise by an abbot of Bury St Edmunds and the (probably Carthusian) Speculum inclusorum. McAvoy sees the monk-recluse in the Bury treatise as ‘a positively configured communal scapegoat’ (p. 44), based in a cell attached to a local church rather than within the abbey itself, and engaged in spiritual combat with the ‘unruly feminine’ (p. 55) of a now female-dominated vocation; the Speculum, although it includes repentant harlot-saints as role-models, similarly treats its primary audience of males as a spiritual warrior-élite. The third chapter compares the treatment of the feminine in Ancrene Wisse, an early thirteenth-century Middle English guide for anchoresses, with the more tolerant approach in two earlier Anglo-Latin works of guidance for religious women, Aldhelm's Prosa de virginitate and Goscelin of St Bertin's Liber confortatorius, characterising it as an ‘inherently misogynistic male-authored text’ (p. 8) and speculating on the alternative reading strategies which might have been adopted by its female audience. The fourth chapter looks at the writing of three fifteenth-century women, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe (included as ‘anchoritically minded’, p. 8), and the anonymous Winchester anchoress who composed A revelation of purgatory, tracing their development of a ‘non-phallic’ discourse that allows the feminine voice greater authority. The discussion of the anchoritic spaces of the desert and the cell in earlier chapters is supplemented in the fifth chapter by a more specifically geographical investigation (initially developed in association with the ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’ project) of anchoritic networks in the Welsh Marches, arguing that it was ‘the marginality and eccentricity of the Marcher lands that helped to nurture a female anchoritic impulse which was to spread rapidly throughout England during the later Middle Ages’ (p. 149). More traditional scholars may have reservations about the methodology of this study, as its consistent focus on those aspects of the medieval texts which can be aligned to modern critical theory sometimes works against a more holistic interpretation (so, for instance, the author's instruction in Ancrene Wisse, ‘Read some of this book in your free time every day, whether less or more’, does not in context ‘lay down the ground for selective readings of his texts’ by his female audience (p. 113), but rather invokes a monastic tradition going back to Augustine – whose Rule is being drawn on here – of regular re-reading by instalments of the rule as a whole). McAvoy's work, however, is substantial and well-researched, and should be of real interest to its intended audience.