12 - Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours

Summary

IN examining the relationship between Ancrene Wisse and the Egerton Hours, both of thirteenth-century provenance, this essay concerns itself with the entangled worlds of female Christian readers, male Christian book producers and illuminators, and the Jews living in their midst. In particular, it will raise questions about how we can conceptualise the entangled medieval process whereby Christian devotional art is realised and recalibrated in relation to Jewishness. In this way, my article discusses marginal and occasionally hidden communities connected to the Ancrene Wisse – rich, married lay readers, male artisan book illuminators and the Jewish communities of the West Midlands. As well as accounting for the gender dynamics in texts such as these – especially within the triangulated relation between female reader and (often) commissioner, male scribe and illuminator, and the image of male Jewishness – this chapter will draw upon the theories of entanglement and ‘intra-action’, as posited by Karen Barad, to deconstruct the totalising idea of a ‘grotesque hall’ of antisemitic images, particularly those appearing in the Egerton Hours BL MS Egerton 1151. Finally, it will evaluate how the interactions of these groups gather together for moments of ‘intra-action’ on the manuscript page in order to produce Christian material devotion for female lay communities. The queerness of this indeterminate, unfixed, constantly forming Jewish/Christian identity made possible by encounters between these different communities is at this essay's foundation.

In Jewish/Christian Entanglements: Ancrene Wisse and Its Material Worlds, I argue that the beginning of Middle English literary production is inextricably entangled with Judaism. My exploration of the Ancrene Wisse manuscripts as well as the associated visual tradition in the Egerton Hours (London, British Library MS Egerton 1151) examines how the Jews, present in the thirteenth-century Welsh border area of England where Ancrene Wisse was probably composed, helped shape English literary production. In the twelfth century, there were established Jewish communities in Worcester, Hereford, Gloucester, Coventry, Bristol and Oxford, and while Ancrene Wisse's early manuscripts date from before 1250, the Egerton Hours was produced in Oxford in c. 1260–70 just before the Expulsion.