Cloistered Virtue
"Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room" wrote Wordsworth, and references to the religious life often evoke ideas of solitude and enclosure.
The sculptor Elisabeth Frink, finding words to describe the work of an artist, said: "I feel that as religion is a vocation for many people — and nuns and monks are solitary people — so art is a comparable vocation for artists."
In "Il Penseroso", Milton invokes "divinest Melancholy" as "pensive nun, devout and pure". However, in Areopagitica he uses an image of the conventual life to suggest its limitations: "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary."
Centuries before Milton, two representatives of the religious life, one real and one fictional, show an energy quite at variance with the picture he evokes. "Sin is behovely [necessary], but all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well" declared the 14th-century anchoress Julian of Norwich, in words which were later echoed by T. S. Eliot. And from Julian's own time, we have her fictional contemporary, the Prioress of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. She is a notably uncloistered figure, with her coral and her gold brooch, and what we might think of as a typically British feel for foreign languages:
And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly
After the scole of Stratford ate Bowe
For Frenssh of Paris was to hire unknowe.
Elizabeth Knowles
01/02/2007
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