The enclosure of woman from romance to the Ancrene Wisse.

Abstract

Both the Ancrene Wisse's dialect, which closely matches that of the religious works commonly called the Katherine group, and a manuscript history that shows repeated use and wide dissemination, suggest the presence in the West Midlands of a textual community, as defined by Brian Stock. In a textual community, events and material surroundings are glossed for transcendent meaning. This study analyzes the process of assimilation and transformation of one such metaphor, the literary trope of enclosure, in the cultural milieu of the Ancrene Wisse. The author abstracts the metaphor from various medieval literary traditions, from cultural perceptions of the body, and from architecture of the early thirteenth century and before. The enclosure of woman, at once her chamber and her own body, performs a symbolic function in several genres. Chapter One juxtaposes linguistics, architecture, history, and literary criticism in order to answer questions about the textual community of the Ancrene Wisse. Chapters Two and Three examine the use of this allegory in selected French and Latin works that form a background for the Ancrene Wisse. While the romances of Chretien de Troyes manipulate a rather simple equation of women and buildings, the lais of Marie de France use countersigning to assert the power women retain in their position as enclosed and enclosing. Gayle Rubin's feminist approach to kinship systems helps to uncover the interaction between rites of exchange and metaphors of enclosure in misogynistic Latin comedies (Alda, Pamphilus, and Babio) that occupy the borderline between oral, performed ritual and literary textuality. Chapter Four examines the use of metaphor in friar miscellanies. The Ancrene Wisse is not only a product of the textual community. It also reshapes the community's understanding of itself. The anchoresses and their cells become object-texts for the surrounding laity. The idea of the anchoress enclosed becomes a physical symbol of spiritual enclosure for literate and unlettered to enact in their own lives. The connections the author draws between clergy and laity, literate and oral, and between ecclesiastical history and the living church gesture toward the renewed thirteenth-century emphasis on the place of the individual within the group.