"Solitude is not separation." So wrote the Trappist monk and peace-activist Thomas Merton in 1961, shortly before his own withdrawal to a hermitage on the grounds of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, Kentucky. Merton’s words are more than an empty slogan: he himself came to demonstrate their truth over the final years of his life, cultivating a formidable network of correspondents while living in almost complete isolation. As he went on to record in his New Seeds of Contemplation, "the only justification for a life of deliberate solitude is the conviction that it will help you to love not only God but also other men." Embracing separation, paradoxically enough, often tightens and deepens connections with others.
Merton’s remarks seem especially pertinent in the aftermath of the Covid-era lockdowns. While they might already be receding into distant memory, we are still yet to understand their full social, economic and psychological ramifications; those of us who work with students and other young people can readily attest to the lingering shadow they cast even now. When we think back to the height of the pandemic, it is easy to forget that in their early stages the lockdowns created a strange sort of unity through disunity; isolation became collective, generating a sort of community out of scatteredness. Indeed, even violent opposition to the measures was only a logical extension of these circumstances, a group-identity made possible by all it railed against.
These paradoxes would certainly be appreciated by Simon Appulby, an early Tudor recluse whose Fruyte of Redempcyon (1514) I edited during lockdown, and whose life took on a queasy similarity to the world of 2020. Appulby is among the last of medieval England’s anchorites. He began a radical form of the eremitic life on June 26, 1513; on that date, in a ceremony conducted by the Bishop of London Richard Fitzjames, Appulby was bricked into a cell attached to the church of Allhallows London Wall. He remained there until his death in 1537, after twenty-four years of stringent devotion in strict seclusion. Even after death he remained confined to the same space: his will asks that his remains be interred ‘within the tombe alredy set and made within the ankerage’, presumably having been prepared by Appulby himself some time earlier.
Yet, as Merton remarked four centuries later, Appulby’s solitude in no sense separated him from the congregation he served. It should be remembered that Appulby was above all an urban recluse, staging his withdrawal in the most populous commercial centre of medieval England; not only that, but the site of his anchorhold, a church at the heart of a community of worshippers, meant that his separation was by definition a highly public one. Accordingly, Appulby did not cut himself off from the outer world, but was deeply enmeshed in it. The churchwarden’s accounts show him participating in the ritual life of Allhallows in several ways, contributing to church ales and to the upkeep of the building itself; they also show that he retained a servant to act as his agent and mediator. His presence also provided an important link between Allhallows parish and the world beyond, giving the church considerable prestige that attracted the notice of pilgrims and benefactors.
The contradictions in Appulby’s anchorism are laid out most clearly by his single known work, The Fruyte of Redempcyon. First printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1514, the very existence of the book speaks to Appulby’s involvement with his urban community. Drawing from the Antidotarius Animae of Nicholas Weydenbosch, and the visions of St Bridget of Sweden, it offered a lively and accessible rendering of the New Testament narrative, organized into a series of prayers on Jesus’s life and lessons. Yet despite its derivative nature, his book was shaped by the commercial environment its author inhabited. For instance, Appulby downplayed any conflict between money and Christian devotion, removing any reference to the Cleansing of the Temple and Judas’ thirty pieces of silver. His work also participated in the urban economy in less abstract ways; it proved a profitable venture, being printed five times in two decades, once by a disreputable printer notorious for poaching successful works from his contemporaries. The Fruyte therefore drives home the same lesson we have learned over the last four years, for good or ill, and the same point that Merton learned in the 1960s: it also shows that retreating from social bonds often entangles us further in them and that, in the words of Theodor Zeldin, solitude can itself become "immunisation against loneliness."
Two Middle English Prayer Cycles, ed. by Ben Parsons, is available now from Medieval Institute Publications.