From The Collector ‘The sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter, walled up like a recluse, illumination from the Pamplona Bible‘
I attended a talk this week hosted by Pints of Knowledge about anchoresses; women who, in the Middle Ages, chose to lock themselves away in a small room attached to a church for a lifetime. The lecture was given by Kristina Bauman, also known as @medievalmarginalia, and you can read the basis of the lecture here.
While listening to Bauman speak, I was struck by correlations between the way townsfolk visited anchoresses for advice and spiritual guidance and the way we visit social media influencers today. Back then, people would come and talk to the anchoress through her window. Today, we scroll Instagram or TikTok instead. Influencers are visited all day long for advice which is often akin to ‘the spiritual’ (ahem… mushroom micro-dosing, raw milk, bone broth brigade – I’m pointing at you). The evening made me think about how human beings are shaped by the dominant ideology of the day. The dominant ideology of the Middle Ages was provided by the Roman Catholic Church – with all its brimstone and fire. This powerfully influenced the way people saw themselves and the world in which they lived or didn’t live, i.e. by choosing to be ‘dead’ to it, as Bauman describes the radical choice of the anchoress (as opposed to being forced into it, as indicated in the image above).
We might believe that influence died with the anchoresses, as we became more Protestant (Henry, of beheading and divorcing several wives fame, banned the practice, says Bauman.) But perhaps it sedimented into our being, somehow. According to Joseph Henrich (2020), in his book The WEIRDest People in the World – WEIRD being Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic – the Church’s influence remains one of the most powerful shapers of how we see ourselves today, social media influencers an’ all; though perhaps in a less obvious way than you might expect. Not via the pulpit, but rather through its impact on clans and kinship, and imposed shrinking, therefore less powerful, family structures. When summarising the Church’s influence, he writes:
Why are WEIRD societies particularly unusual, so often occupying the extreme ends of global distributions of psychology and behavior? Answer: The sect of Christianity that evolved into the Roman Catholic Church stumbled onto a collection of marriage and family policies that demolished Europe’s intensive kin-based institutions. This grassroots transformation of social life propelled these populations down a previously inaccessible pathway of societal evolution and opened the door to the rise of voluntary associations, impersonal markets, free cities, and so on (2020, ch. 14, pp. 473–474).
Of course, today, it is said that our broadest church may be the shopping mall (online or off). Ok, ‘it’ didn’t say it – Marx and Engels did, and plenty influenced by them ever since have repeated the thesis, not least of all Guy Debord (1967 [1977], §42) in Society of the Spectacle, when he writes:
‘The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world.’
We are entirely commodified beasts. Commodity is all we see; and so, rather than retreat to a small doorless room built into a church, escaping the family altogether – as God-fearing beasts of the Middle Ages did – perhaps some of us retreat into social media, where we become a sellable image of ourselves viewed mainly through the aperture of Meta or whichever is our favoured platform. Could the window of the anchoress’s room be compared to the little glass-covered frame on our smartphones? If so, it may be worth heeding one of the rules that anchoresses were advised to follow:
‘No loving your window too much (aka, don’t get too gabby with the townsfolk)’ (Bauman, 2026). If there is any correlation, then, too, if ever there was a rule worth following today, that may be it!
A while back I posted a screenshot of Arendt’s The Human Condition as it made me think of social media and the way we are all walled up inside our own subjectivities in the modern world. Of course, Arendt was writing long before social media. The self-enclosure we all seem to go in for may be built into our culture, which is, I think, the direction Henrich takes us; more and more isolated, the more industrialised we become, and so hyper-individualistic until we barely recognise others at all. Do we enact a process of self-enclosure’s latest iteration – advertising our advice and moral certainties on Instagram – as a radical act, as Bauman describes the anchoress’s enclosure, or are we forced into a kind of economic and social immurement by the strictures of the day? I expect, as with so much in the world, we could argue for both positions.
After the talk, my friend and I went upstairs where we joined in some low-key, very relaxed karaoke. We sang Holding Out for a Hero in honour of Bonnie Tyler, whose death had been announced earlier that day, before heading out into an exceedingly warm Soho evening (more like Lisbon) to eat chips and drink 7-Up.
Further notes:
My first encounter with an anchoress was through the podcast In our Time hosted by Melvyn Bragg on Julian of Norwich, ‘the first named woman writer in English, even if questions about her name and life remain open’ (2023).
Refs:
Arendt, H., Allen, D.S. and Canovan, M. (2018) The human condition. Second edition. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press.
Bauman, K. (2026) ‘So You’ve Decided To Become Dead To The World’, Kristina Bauman, 8 January. Available at: https://medievalmarginalia.substack.com/p/so-youve-decided-to-become-dead-to (Accessed: 11 July 2026).
BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, Julian of Norwich (2023) BBC. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001rgs4 (Accessed: 11 July 2026).
Debord, G. (1967 [1977]) Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Black & Red. S.l.: Bread and Circuses Publishing
Henrich, J. (2020) The WEIRDest People in the World. S.I.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Available at: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/v1L1BmUAAAA2X/products/aed95372-8c46-493a-915f-6e2db8e463c2 (Accessed: 15 February 2021).
Renauld, M.-M. (2021) Anchorites: Medieval Women And Men Walled Up Alive, TheCollector. Available at: https://www.thecollector.com/medieval-anchorites-immured-walled-up-alive/ (Accessed: 11 July 2026).