Good morning everyone,

Today we return again to that classic Fem Fri topic, the anchoress. I hope you enjoy it. This is an auto send as I am at Glastonbury this weekend! I feel like I have taken too many Fridays off lately and am honestly too embarrassed to ask a guest editor. Anyway I hope you like this today.

This article in the LRB is a bit uneven – at least I thought it was – but there are lots of good facts about the anchorite life and some Middle English as well, if that is your thing:Some writers of anchoritic guidance saw the space as confined only in a physical sense. In a letter to the recluse Eve of Wilton (c.1058-1125), who lived in an eight foot cell, Goscelin of St Bertin wrote, echoing Psalm 30, that God ‘has set you in a spacious place, for he has saved you from the afflictions of worldly desires … he has begun to close hell for you and open heaven for you, that you may walk with a spacious heart.’ What a beautiful image a "spacious heart" is.https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n10/mary-wellesley/this-place-is-pryson
Now for a specific anchoress, here's St Pega. I found out about her – a noblewoman of the ancient Anglo Saxon kingdom of Mercia – when I was searching for some enterprise software also called PEGA. I was delighted to find myself reading about a female saint instead, and so I am sure was everyone else in the meeting.
St. Pega belonged to one of the great noble families of Mercia, her brother being St. Guthlac, who set up his hermitage in the Peterborough Fens. [...] We know little of their family. They were of the Mercian nobility and close to the king, who later laid down his crown and himself became a monk. Women solitaries were rare in those days, and St. Pega seems to have had a grant from the king for her hermitage. Later a church would be built on the spot, named after her, Peakirk (Pega's church).
You can still visit it! It's near Peterborough.
http://www.ewtn.com/library/MARY/PEGA.HTM
I hope you have a lovely weekend whatever your surrounds,
Alex/🤖 xx.