The wounded beloved: Affective wounding in Ancrene Wisse and the wooing group

Journal article

In her Seven Manieren van Minne (There are Seven Manners of Loving), the Flemish nun and prioress Beatrice of Nazareth (1200–68) describes the protracted violence that love inflicts on the heart:

at times love becomes so boundless and so overflowing in the soul, when it itself is so mightily and violently moved in the heart, that it seems to the soul that the heart is wounded again and again, and that these wounds increase every day in bitter pain and in fresh intensity.

This ‘fifth manner of loving’ is likened to a process of continual wounding. Affective wounds also mark six English texts composed during Beatrice’s lifetime: the anchoritic guide Ancrene Wisse, and a related group of lyrical meditations known as the Wooing Group.³ Whilst the guide and meditations should not be treated uncritically as a cohesive unit, they may be viably connected in a study on wound imagery. For the female readers of these texts, wound-images are at once signifiers, thresholds, weapons, bodily ‘effluvia’, protective alcoves, and points of intersection.⁴ The images form the borderline between penetration and sensation— between weapon and agony—yet also correspond with the weapon itself.⁵ A reader thinks upon images of wounds, inflicts imagined wounds on herself in sin and in penitence, and glimpses the potential for Brautmystik (‘bridal mysticism’) as she enters imaginatively into wounds. The first section of this article provides a framework rooted in the theory of conceptual metaphor and the anchoritic readership of the texts, while the second section offers an overview of wound devotion during this period. The third, fourth, and fifth sections will examine the wounds of Christ, the wounds of love, and the wounds of sin respectively.

Authors: Lazikani, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: University of Leeds
• Journal: Leeds Studies in English
• Volume: New Series 47
• Pages: 115-135
• Publication date: 2016-01-01
• ISSN: 0075-8566