Right from the dustjacket, with its detail taken not from some medieval illustration but from one of Paul Klee's angels, it is clear that this will not be a regulation contribution to angelology or anchoritic studies (or, indeed, to the literature on late medieval England). Joshua Easterling's book ranges much more widely and restlessly than that, and the anchorites—and even to some extent the angels—are there to provide an embodied (or, in the case of angels, ambiguously embodied) focus for the book's complex arguments around the “persistent tensions within medieval religious culture between charismatic power and that of the church, between inspired individuals and ecclesiastical authority” (2).
Just as it is not only about angels and anchorites, nor does Angels and Anchoritic Culture restrict itself to “late medieval England.” Students of Middle English anchoritic literature in particular may be surprised to find themselves pitched from the outset into the Gregorian reform of the eleventh century, which found a figure for its newly sexless clergy in angels—a process that Easterling calls the “angelicizing of the clerical image” (112). The ideas set in motion in these early chapters form the intellectual center of Easterling's study and inform a series of readings of encounters between angels/clergy and anchorites/holy men and women. These moments of engagement (both dramatic and written) crystallize an ongoing negotiation between charisma and the rational-legal authority of the institutional church. Easterling is interested in “the ways that charismatic power put pressure on the church's carefully controlled boundaries and its narratives of clerical authority” (34) and comes back repeatedly to the disciplinary mechanism of discernment that remained the privilege of the institution's authorized experts: after all, it was axiomatic that Satan could (and when assailing holy men—and, especially, women—often did) transform himself into an angel of light (2 Cor. 11:14).
The book pursues its argument through a succession of “cultural spaces of orthodox authority” (139), including preaching, confession, the eucharist, and “spiritual perfection,” while simultaneously moving forward from the eleventh through to the fifteenth century. The reader looking for English anchoritism—and in particular for Middle English anchoritic literature—will need a certain amount of patience. Although Wulfric of Haselbury is mentioned in the Introduction, Chapter One has only a single sentence near the end on Ancrene Wisse (46). Thereafter, however, a spine of English texts runs through the book: from Aelred's De Institutione Inclusarum and Wulfric again in Chapter Two; moving forward to the to the Regula Reclusorum sometimes known as Walter's Rule and probably of the thirteenth century (Chapter Three); to the fourteenth century and Rolle's Form of Living (Chapter Four) and Hilton's Scale of Perfection (Five); and finally the fifteenth-century Speculum Inclusorum in Chapter Six. It is no weakness that, alongside these texts of English origin, Easterling's instinctive frame of reference includes so many continental examples—including Athalisa, anchoress in the diocese of Le Mans, Flora of Beaulieu, Herluca of Epfach, Jutta of Disibodenberg, Liutberga of Wendeshausen, Wilbirg of St Florian—as well as better-known figures such as Angela of Foligno, Clare of Montefalco, Birgitta of Sweden, Heloise, Mechtild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, whom Easterling defines as “para-anchoritic” (18–20); nor that the chapters include extended discussions of Dorothea of Montau, Elisabeth of Schönau, Ermine de Reims, Aude Fauré, Ida of Louvain, Margaret the Lame, Yvette of Huy, and the Welsh anchorite Wechelen. At the same time—and especially, perhaps, in the later chapters, as we get further away from the coherence of the material centred on the Gregorian reform, and the intellectual and socioreligious contexts of the texts discussed expand and differentiate—the frequent shifts of focus can be a little dizzying. This, coupled with a somewhat intense style of writing, makes Angels and Anchoritic Culture a demanding read, but it is a rewarding one.
