A Home for the Soul: Materiality, Imagination, and the Medieval English Anchorhold Öffentlichkeit
Schlecht, Elise (Fall 2024)
Abstract
The medieval anchorhold was an austere space of physical and spiritual challenge in which anchoresses, religious women who removed themselves from public life and lived in perpetual confinement for the purpose of uninterrupted contemplation of the divine, imagined and acted out their devotions. Medievalists have written extensively on anchoresses from historical and textual perspectives, leaving the architecture of the enclosed relatively untouched and the impact of physical deprivation on the religious imagination unexplored. I utilize philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s analysis of the effect of the hermit’s hut on the poetic imagination, and Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s theories of embodiment, material relationships, and the architectural imagination, to address directly the architecture of the anchorhold. I examine the domestic guidelines found in the Ancrene Riwle (thirteenth century) and Richard Rolle’s Form of Perfect Living (fourteenth century) to identify and interpret how the designers of anchorholds implemented the textual directions.I rely primarily on architectural and textual evidence from Medieval England, since many of the best preserved examples lie in that territory, though I also alight in twentieth-century Rome to explore Sister Nazarena of Jesus’ cell, and touch on the architecture of Belgian beguinages. Despite the fact that anachoresis was practiced across Europe, this exploration of Medieval English anchorholds, in dialogue with their design guidelines, complements textual analysis with spatial analysis. Placing these medieval prescriptions for devotional space in conversation with Bachelard’s and Pallasmaa’s theories, I emphasize the active role architecture played as a physical and metaphorical mediator between the anchoress and the state of divine understanding to which she aspired.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
The Devotee: The Anchoress 4
The Space: The Medieval Anchorhold 7
The Design Process: From Rule to Preference 18
The Activated Space: The Embodied Anchorhold 32
The Goal: Heavenly Ecstasy 36
Bibliography 40
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