I first met Catherine Innes-Parker in the late 1990s at the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, MI. I was excited to meet her: she and I were two of only three people in the late twentieth century to write a dissertation that addressed anchoritic texts. Each of us took a broadly similar approach, with interests in women, religion, gender, and materiality, but with our own twists – and I was anticipating some great discussions.

I begin with this memory of Catherine because her essay, ‘The Legacy of Ancrene Wisse: Translations, Adaptations, Influences and Audience, with Special Attention to Women Readers’, found in Yoko Wada's A Companion to Ancrene Wisse (1993) has inspired me to write several essays, including this one. In this piece, Innes-Parker asserts it is ‘likely that [Julian of Norwich] read Chastising [of God's Children].’ In the course of her overview of The Chastising, Innes-Parker asserts that it was popular among women's houses, women readers, and even women book-owners. In doing so, she draws upon Julian scholarship and textual and manuscript history, deftly weaving together a woman-focused approach. As a result, she highlights how the cornerstone text of English anchoritism, Ancrene Wisse, provides a core part of late medieval texts prepared for, read by, circulated by, and owned by women.

I would like to take a slightly different tack here, while still acknowledging the inspiring template Innes-Parker provided. I want to engage with the anchoritic elements in The Chastising of God's Children, focusing on those portions drawn from Jan van Ruusbroec's The Spiritual Espousals. I propose here that Ruusbroec's approach was anchoritic in nature, since he lived similarly to the Desert Fathers, the forerunners of medieval anchoritism. This shared affinity manifests in the language found in the selections taken from Ruusbroec, which, in turn, resonate with Ancrene Wisse and its associated works. This is most strongly reflected in The Chastising compiler's choice of including sections from The Spiritual Espousals on the metaphor of the bees as industrious gatherers of sweetness and on how to distinguish between false idleness (laziness) and spiritual idleness (waiting for God). Similarly, he returns time and time again to themes such as embracing solitude for spiritual improvement rather than for fear of temptation. Thus, context, manuscript, vocabulary, and content contribute to what I call ‘anchoritic interplay’: that is, the adaptation of anchoritic works for a lay, or at least non-anchoritic, audience.