Sex, Gender and the Sacred by de Groot Joanna; Morgan Sue; & Sue Morgan

Author:de Groot , Joanna; Morgan, Sue; & Sue Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 5: Wall painting of St Catherine of Alexandria across from squint in St Botolph's Church, Hardham, Sussex.

Other cells employed additional physical means, such as bodily positioning, to control the female anchoritic gaze. The cell at the Church of St Mary and St Cuthbert at Chester-le-Street in County Durham has an extremely narrow view of a side altar. Though originally constructed for male anchorites, the cell was occupied by a succession of both male and female religious. The cell is kept away from the high altar, thus distancing the polluting female body from the consecrated hosts, and the view is extremely controlled. The narrow angular channel allows for only a small slice of the side altar to be seen – the tabernacle and crucifix, but not much else. In this way, the anchoress's gaze is firmly controlled and distanced. In another version of bodily control, the cell at St Anne's Church in Lewes, East Sussex would only have allowed the anchoress to kneel or lie down.

There is no way for her to have stood up within the confines of the cell. The time spent by the anchoress in her cell, gazing out at the altar, would be forcibly spent on her knees in a gesture of prayerful respect. Or, as Roberta Gilchrist explains, she would have been kneeling in her own grave: ‘a female recluse was recorded in 1253…in order to view the high altar through the squint the recluse would have had to kneel daily in her own grave’.69 Constant penitence would certainly have mitigated any polluting effects of the female gaze, and further caused her to unceasingly consider the suffering of Christ (Figure 6).

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