SOURCE: Georgianna, Linda. “Self and Society: The Solitary Life.” In The Solitary Self: Individuality in the Ancrene Wisse, pp. 32-78. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981.

In the following essay, Georgianna examines the skill displayed by the author of Ancrene Wisse in balancing the different concerns of the spiritual and material worlds.

Solitaries, by definition, are those religious who have most radically withdrawn from the world. That the anchoresses addressed in the Ancrene Wisse have more in common, by way of a religious rule, with canons and friars than with cloistered monks seems, therefore, incongruous. Viewed historically, the solitary ideal is marked by the desire to become “dead to the world.” Severely ascetic and obviously antisocial, this goal implies an absolute denial of self and the world that extends beyond the renunciation of all physical pleasure to include the renunciation of even the most common of human and social...