Ancrene Wisseand the conditions of confession1

Abstract

The article traces the evolution of the 'topos' of the 'conditions of confession' used in Part 5 (on confession) of the early thirteenth-century West Midlands rule for anchoresses, Ancrene Wisse, and discusses the implications of this evolution for the date and institutional context of Ancrene Wisse itself. It also looks more generally at the use of the theme as an '"inflatable topos" which could easily be collapsed into its minimal form of three or four hexameters for easy portability, and later expanded to any size required with the help of a well-stocked memory, a few notes, and whatever reference books happened to be available.'

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.