“A comprehensive and useful overview of guidance texts for anchorites, one that pulls together the substantial amount of work on anchorites and anchoritic literature produced in the last twenty-five years. . . . Hughes-Edwards brings relevant and up-to-date scholarship to bear throughout, and her bibliography is thorough, if not exhaustive.”

Lara Farina, West Virginia University | Speculum

“Reading Medieval Anchoritism is comprehensive, systematic, and thorough. The first study to trace anchoritic ideology over five centuries, it show s that the goal of the anchoritic was not extreme suffering and privation but heightened contemplative experience. It amasses important evidence that anchorites had a range of acceptable social functions and modifies scholarship’s current image of anchoritic enclosure as merely social death.”

Derek Pearsall, University of York

“In this impressive study, Hughes-Edwards writes a new history of medieval English anchoritism that rivals the work of Warren’s landmark Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England. She traces, patiently and sensitively, the evolution of five centuries of anchoritic ideology, placing it in the context of a wide range of rarely considered, but remarkably innovative, theological texts. The results are profound and surprising. No scholar of medieval anchoritism or indeed the history of medieval ascetism can afford to ignore this book.”

Robert J. Hasenfratz, University of Connecticut