Tom Licence

Tom Licence sets out to discover why anchorites rose to prominence in the context of European monasticism and trends in spirituality. In the past, historians linked their rise to many different things: the impact of the Norman Conquest; a crisis of identity in the monasteries; the discovery of the toon meer individual; a reaction to the profit economy; and to a new need for 'holy men' (or holy women) to minister to a changing society. Investigating the avenues by which anchorites gained their reputation, and pinpointing their function in relation to society, this inquiry puts these hypotheses to the test in a study of English society in the central Middle Ages. toon minder