NEW RESEARCH: Uncovering the ‘saintly Anchoress’: myths of Medieval anchoritism and the reclusion of Katharine de Audley
Katharine de Audley, a wealthy Marcher heiress, was the daughter of a baron, John Giffard, who had been a leading campaigner against the Welsh 1264 – 65. In 1299 her husband Nicholas of Audley died and she withdrew to an anchorhold at Ledbury. In this way she avoided to be forcefully married to another Marcher lord or – which was customary – to Welsh lords. Such dynastic exchanges of women were often part of the prevalent colonial strategy of forceful enculturation or assimilation of the Welsh into the world of the Marcher Lords.
However, Katharine of Audley, avoided this fate by refusing to remarry. Instead she presumably spent the next decade raising her three children and not least securing their wealth and inheritance. However, in 1308 her eldest son died and after that a series of grants and entries in the Close Rolls testify to her attempts to secure the future of her daughter and second son. Finally in 1313 her inheritance was – as witnessed by a series of senior clerics – secured for her children; at the same time she was ensured a substantial sum for her life as a future anchorite in Ledbury, whereto she according to legend was drawn by by the peeling of the bells of the church of St. Martin and All saints.
Here she lived the life of a living saint, the so-called death-within-life” in a liminal sacred space, the anchorhold, which may still be seen at the North of the Church. Unfortunately the £100 she was due each year gradually dried up, while her children died and shifting managers either mismanaged her estates or simply defrauded the woman. In the end, we hear about her on two final occasions: first when she inherits responsibility for an orphaned grandson, in spite of her enclosure; the second probably a last attempt to win back her lost inheritance, whether for the child or for her own future sustenance. Probably she died around 1326 – 27. Although practically nothing is known about her life as anchoress and the esteem, in which she might have been held, she must have left a reputation behind her. It appears that she later merged with the legends of the “real” St. Catherine thus inspiring a series of later authors and myth-makerse. g. William Wordsworth.
The lost history as well as the later myths of this early fourteenth-century religious recluse, Katharine de Audley, is uncovered in a new article by Liz Herbert McAvoy. According to her, “Kataharina de Audley was a woman whose life came to be both distorted and romanticised by legend and literary adaptation in the centuries that followed. Tracing first the various literary treatments of Katharine as medieval anchorite, and second, her lived history as it emerges from the records, and by placing both within the historical and ideological context of medieval anchoritism, the author argues for the female anchorite as forming part of a critical practice which continued to address socio-religious and personal needs both in her own day and long after she and her vocation had fallen from immediate cultural consciousness” (Text from abstract”)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Liz Herbert McAvoy is Reader in Gender in English Studies and Medieval Literature at Swansea University, UK, where she is also Associate Director of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research. She has published widely in the areas of medieval women’s writing and medieval anchoritism, including Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (2004) and Medieval Anchoritisms: gender, space and the solitary life (2011). In addition, she has edited a number of essay collections in both areas of research and is currently working on two anonymous and under-examined female-authored texts associated with the anchor-hold from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
SOURCE:
Uncovering the ‘saintly Anchoress’: myths of Medieval anchoritism and the reclusion of Katharine de Audley
By Liz Herbet McAvoy
In: Women’s History Review, Online 23. April 2013. Routledge 2013
DOI:10.1080/09612025.2013.769380