The Milieu and Context of the Wooing Group

Susannah Chewning, Susannah Chewning

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781783163632
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa medievale

This book brings together the most current interpretations of the Wooing Group from scholars currently working on the fields of medieval spirituality, gender, and the anchoritic tradition, providing literary, theological, linguistic, and cultural context for the works associated with the Wooing Group (a collection of texts in English written by an unknown author in the late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries). These works are unique in their context - written almost certainly for a group of women living as anchoresses and recluses who were literate in English and were interested in guidance both in spiritual and worldly issues. The book discusses and explains the impact and significance of these works and situates them within the continuum of medieval theological and literary culture.

1

Introduction

SUSANNAH MARY CHEWNING

In a review of W. Meredith Thompson’s 1958 edition of Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd, the anonymous reviewer from the Times Literary Supplement describes the edition as possessing a ‘disciplined competence and a judicious enthusiasm’.¹ This description amounts to the only fully positive comment about the edition written by this reviewer, one who seems mainly to draw from other reviews rather than to make constructive criticism of her own. Other reviews comment on problems now very well known to readers of the Wohunge in Thompson’s edition, missed opportunities to cross-reference in the glossary, for example, and the diplomatic nature of the edition, which G. V. Smithers notes is intended for ‘those experienced in reading ME MSS … [and] scholars who cannot lay hands on any sort of reproduction of the MS’,² but which, as a result, is more difficult for ‘all other classes of readers’.³ Smithers, Phyllis Hodgson, Beatrice White, Elizabeth Salter and the anonymous TLS reviewer all reviewed Thompson within about eighteen months of the appearance of the edition, and none of the reviews is particularly surprising, although one major issue is left out of each review, and that is that the appearance of Thompson’s edition began a new chapter in early English medieval scholarship which has come to its fruition with the present volume (and with forthcoming new editions of texts within the Wooing Group and its associated works).⁴ Until the EETS volume was published, few scholars knew Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerde or even of its existence, and fewer still knew that there was such a thing as the Wooing Group.⁵ However, once the edition became available, a whole generation of new students and scholars was able to read and discuss these works within the context of Ancrene Wisse⁶ and beyond. Besides Thompson, the other names that have made scholarship of the Wooing Group possible for current scholars are Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson, who in their 1991 edition of what they called Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Related Works, brought about a revolution in scholarship of the Wooing Group, the Katherine Group and, for many scholars, Ancrene Wisse itself, which until then had not been published in a scholarly, affordable paperback edition of any kind. As a result, the majority of scholarship (with some important exceptions) on the Wooing Group has been produced since 1991, a momentous year for me as it was the first year of my own doctoral studies and the year I encountered the English anchoritic works for the first time. Since that time, there have been several books devoted to English anchoritic subjects, including three very useful collections: Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Marie Hughes-Edwards (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005); Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts, ed. Dee Dyas, Valerie Edden and Roger Ellis (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005); Rhetoric of the Anchorhold: Space, Place and Body within Discourses of Enclosure, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008); these will shortly be followed by Anchoritic Spirituality: Enclosure, Authority, Transcendence, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming). These collections represent a growing scholarly awareness of the significance of the anchoritic tradition in medieval English theology, literature, archaeology, linguistic studies and cultural studies, and represent only the beginning of what will certainly continue to be a growing scholarly focus on these works, authors and figures and their world.

Scholarship of the Wooing Group⁷ has grown into a very strong and enthusiastic enterprise, with five recent doctoral dissertations devoted to it,⁸ as well as a number of high-profile medieval scholars writing and publishing frequently about these works. Considering the brevity of the works, which in Thompson amount to fewer than forty pages in all, the vast number of scholars and students whose interest has turned to these works is remarkable and is, indeed, a tribute to the editions of 1958 and 1991, as well as to the rise in interest in female subjectivity, gender studies, Early English and anchoritism in general since the late 1980s.⁹ Ancrene Wisse has been the subject of a large body of scholarship, beginning with James Morton’s 1853 edition and translation¹⁰ and maintaining a steady stream of scholarship throughout the twentieth century (although it, too, did not become as important or frequent a scholarly choice until the last two decades). This volume, then, although devoted to specific works defined as the Wooing Group, represents a response to and participation in the growing circle of scholars whose focus includes the anchoritic tradition, female authorship and reception of medieval works, and hagiographic works such as those found in associated anchoritic works as well as the lives and works of such figures as Christina of Markyate, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.

The Wooing Group and its Context

What we now call the Wooing Group is a collection of seven works which are found in five manuscripts. In Thompson there are six works listed: On Ureisun of Ure Louerde, On wel swuðe God Ureisun of God Almihti, On Lofsong of Ure Louerde, On Lofsong of Ure Lefdi, Þe Oreisun of Seinte Marie and Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd. To this list, for the purposes of this collection and as an accepted addition among scholars of the Wooing Group is added A Talkyng of the Loue of God, a fourteenth-century ‘pastiche, of which the first part is paraphrased from the Ureisun of God Almihti and the last part from the Wohunge’,¹¹ making the total seven works.¹² The texts appear in six manuscripts: MS Lambeth 487, which contains On Ureisun of Ure Louerde (an incomplete version of On wel swuðe God Ureisun of God Almihti); MS Cotton Nero A.xiv, which contains On God Ureisun of Ure Lefdi, On wel swuðe God Ureisun of God Almihti, On Lofsong of Ure Lefdi, and On Lofsong of Ure Louerde; MS Royal 17 A.xxvii, which contains ‘a fragment of the Lofsong of Ure Lefdi there called Þe Oreisun of Seinte Marie’;¹³ MS Cotton Titus D.xviii, which contains Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd; and MSS Vernon (Bodleian 3938) and Simeon (Brit. Mus. Add. 22283), both of which contain versions of A Talkyng of the Loue of God. Þe Wohunge of ure Lauerd is the longest work (besides A Talkyng) in the Group and thus provides its name. Other works associated with the Wooing Group are, obviously, Ancrene Wisse,¹⁴ versions of which appear in three of the manuscripts, and the works known collectively as the Katherine Group,¹⁵ excerpts of which also appear in several of the Wohunge manuscripts.

The genre of literature into which the Wooing Group (and the Katherine Group)¹⁶ fit is the English anchoritic tradition, referring to works written by and for anchorites,¹⁷ religious solitaries whose presence in England flourished between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Anchorites are hermits whose location is fixed and permanent. This provided a geographical focus for the recluse, but also affected the spiritual and physical life of these people, as well.

By a process of internalization, both the physical martyrdom of the earliest Christian centuries and the search for the desert that had followed in its wake (and which was in itself a substitute for bloody martyrdom) became mental states. What had been actual became symbolic … the virgin, the martyr, the repentant sinner, the ascetic and would-be mystic, the pilgrim, the soldier – all found a desert retreat as well as a deserved or necessary prison in the anchorite’s cell of the Middle Ages.¹⁸

Although other forms of reclusive and solitary life existed throughout Europe in the early medieval period, ‘anchoritism evolved into a spatially fixed and physically restricted vocation, whereas the hermit, equally solitary ideologically, was freer to move about … thus the anchoritic life … rapidly became imbued with notions of a physically static environment’.¹⁹ The English anchoritic tradition begins, according to all scholarly accounts, with St Guthlac who retreated to rural Lincolnshire in approximately 699, living in a hut in the fens near Croyland (where an abbey was founded in his memory).²⁰ Guthlac wished to emulate the desert fathers but did so in a particularly English location, choosing his indigenous swamps and fens over the biblical desert. As McAvoy and Hughes-Edwards have argued, his reclusion in Lincolnshire represents ‘the caves of the desert fathers being transformed both literally and rhetorically into the nascent English anchorhold of much later tradition’.²¹ Two early English female anchoritic figures are Christina of Markyate and Ælfwynn; Ælfwynn is described as an anchorite in Christina’s Vita, which notes that Christina (born Theodora in about 1095) lived with Ælfwynn for about two years (1115–16). Christina was enclosed as a hermit from about 1116 to 1122, after which, in about 1131, she entered the monastery at St Albans. Ælfwynn is always discussed with respect to her having given shelter to Christina, but her presence as an anchorite (the Latin references to her are anachoretam and inclusa²²) in the first two decades of the twelfth century support the idea that the practice was fairly popular and that the twelfth-century audience of Christina’s Vita would have understood what an anchoress (or anchorite) was. Still, whether it is Christina or Ælfwynn who is under discussion, Christina’s Vita confirms the presence of women living as anchorites by the early twelfth century. Throughout the twelfth century the presence of anchorites grew in England; the next well-known figure is Wulfric of Haselbury who lived alone as a recluse in the wilderness of Somerset for a few years and officially as an anchorite, enclosed at the church in Haselbury Plucknett, where he died in 1154. Both Christina (and perhaps Ælfwynn) and Wulfric reinforce the data of the growing number of anchoritic cells and anchorites in England in the twelfth century, so the need for texts such as Ancrene Wisse and those of the Wooing and Katherine Groups is clear: as more people sought the enclosure of the anchorhold, guides and texts were necessary to provide them with structure and focus, as well as to reinforce the presence of the larger Church in their daily lives.

The evidence of Christina, Ælfwynn, the De Institutione Inclusarum and Ancrene Wisse certainly supports recent scholarly claims that there was a particular attraction to the anchoritic life among women of the period, ...