Walled In: The Anchorites of Medieval England
Religious Reclusion in the Middle Ages

About this book:

They chose to die while still alive. In a ceremony that mimicked their own funeral, medieval anchorites walked into cramped stone cells built against parish church walls and were bricked inside—never to leave again. To the modern mind, it looks like madness. To the medieval world, these walled-in recluses were spiritual nuclear reactors: the holiest people in the community, whose perpetual prayers held back the darkness and whose counsel drew peasants and kings alike to the black-curtained window of the cell.

*Walled In* opens the squint and invites you inside. You'll shiver in the damp twelve-foot square where Julian of Norwich received her visions of divine love, smell the herbs in the maidservant's kitchen, feel the weight of the bishop's license, and hear the Lollard accusations whispered through the wall. From the desert fathers who inspired this "white martyrdom" to the Henrician Reformation that shattered the cells and scattered the bones, this is the first comprehensive portrait of anchoritic life in all its gritty, luminous reality—architecture, economics, mysticism, law, gender, and the daily battle against demons both psychological and supernatural.

History has never been this intimate. Here are the noblewomen who traded silks for sackcloth, the priests who heard confessions through a slit in the wall, the patrons who funded cells as spiritual insurance policies, and the anonymous thousands who lived and died with a grave already dug into their dirt floor. *Walled In* transforms a bizarre footnote into a mirror: a society so certain of the unseen that it built portals to eternity on every high street, and a humanity that will go to any length—even walls—to touch the divine.