Gender, Sodomy, Friendship, and the Medieval Anchorhold

Abstract

This essay confronts the relative lack of attention paid by scholars of the Middle Ages to friendship between women, and the possibility that female friendship might possess, or be thought to possess, an erotic or even ‘sodomitical’ component. Focusing in detail on a devotional handbook now called Ancrene Wisse, which was designed originally as reading matter for female solitaries or anchorites in thirteenth-century England, I trace discourses of female fellowship in the text; show how these discourses are occasionally susceptible to the kinds of anxiety more regularly associated with male friendship in the period (notably regarding accusations of sodomy); and uncover precedents for a language of specifically female sodomy in writings designed for enclosed religious. The argument is firmly situated within recent historiographic debates concerning the significance of female amity in medieval and early modern Europe (notably studies by Alan Bray and Valerie Traub).

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