Eva’s Painted Tent: The Poetics of Interior Spaces in the Liber confortatorius

This essay examines closely a chapter of Goscelin of St Bertin’s advice book to the anchoress Eva (c. 1083), dealing with meditation practices, based on a reflection of the Ark of the Covenant as described in Exodus. In his theory of meditation, Goscelin counterpoints an image-poor tradition (from both Exodus and the Desert Fathers) with an image-rich one, and he plays productively on paradoxes of interior and exterior, small spaces and infinite inventio. The anchoritic topos of the cell as both a protecting shelter for the anchoress and a metonymy of her own body and mind allows him to develop a notion of self-building and collaborative literary authorship. To pinpoint Goscelin’s particular stance on the anchoress’s meditative work, I contrast his reflections with both Aelred of Rievaulx and the Ancrene Wisse, as well as texts from the Desert Fathers tradition.