ABSTRACT
The debate over whether Ancrene Wisse can be called a mystical text is long-standing. The “always incomplete” struggle against world, flesh, and devil makes ascetic existence always embodied and worldly in a sense, even when it involves the renunciation of the world and the mortification of the flesh. The fathers—and mothers—of the Egyptian desert serve as powerful role models in Ancrene Wisse. If ascetic ideologies begin by focusing on the embodied existence of the human being in the world, it is in order to subject the body to ordeal until, its moorings in time, society and culture, cast off, its innate spirituality stands revealed. The Biblical locus of the phrase, puritas cordis, is the sixth beatitude: “blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God”. Clearly, the Ancrene Wisse author thinks of his audience as part of a genderless tradition of ascetic contemplatives, whose lives of solitude and austerity mean the gain of intimacy with God.
