Love. It’s that thing everyone talks about but very few will ever truly put into action. It’s the fuel with which we are called to live, and it’s the very reason Jesus’ body was brutally broken upon that splintered cross. It’s unbeatable, unrestricted, and hands down the greatest attribute of God. It will transform the way you see life, and it will radically invade the way you see others. The question is, have you discovered and harnessed it the way God intended?

In cities and towns across northern Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a new type of religious woman took up authoritative positions in society, all the while living as public recluses in cells attached to the sides of churches. In Lives of the Anchoresses, Anneke Mulder-Bakker offers a new history of these women who chose to forsake the world but did not avoid it.

In Elf Queens and Holy Friars Richard Firth Green investigates an important aspect of medieval culture that has been largely ignored by modern literary scholarship: the omnipresent belief in fairyland.

Medieval anchorites willingly embraced the most extreme form of solitude known to the medieval world, so they might forge a closer connection with God. Yet to be physically enclosed within the same four walls for life required strength far beyond most medieval Christians.