Essays challenging the orthodox opinion of anchorites as entirely divorced from the world around them.

Much of the research into medieval anchoritism to date has focused primarily on its liminal and elite status within the socio-religious cultures of its day. The anchorite has long been depicted as both solitary and alone, almost entirely removed from community and living a life of permanent withdrawal and isolation: in effect dead to the world. The essays in this volume, stemming from a variety of cross-disciplinary approaches and methodologies, laydown a challenge to this position, breaking new ground in their presentation of the medieval anchorite and other types of enclosed solitary as playing a central role within the devotional life of a whole range of complex and multifaceted communities: ones that were simultaneously synchronic and diachronic, physical and metaphysical, religious, secular, textual - and gendered. It therefore offers its readers a new way of understanding the operations of thesolitary life in the Middle Ages and its interdependence with a whole array of communities, ultimately adding to our knowledge of how spiritual "aloneness" could be pursued ardently, even in the midst of communal interaction. Contributors: Diana Denissen, Clare Dowding, Clarck Dreishen, Cate Gunn, Catherine Innes-Parker, E.A. Jones, Dorothy Kim, Godelinde Perk, James Plumtree, Michelle Sauer, Sophie Sawicka-Sykes, Andrew Thornton OSB,