Hermits around the web – Hermitary
news, sites, and pages of interest about hermits and solitude
The Tablet, a Catholic UK publication, recently offered a useful article on women hermits, authoritatively written by author and commentator Sara Maitland, author of A Book of Silence and How to be Alone. The title is “Palladius mentions 2,975 women living as hermits in the Egyptian desert.” (Full article available to registered users).
URL: https://www.thetablet.co.uk/columnists/3/21026/palladius-mentions-2-975-women-living-as-hermits-in-the-egyptian-desert
Historian Gordon Campbell, author of The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome, recently lectured on the poem “Il Pensamento” by British poet John Milton, specifically its reference to hermits. Campbell selected the last twenty lines of the poem, the title of which means “The Serious One,” or “The Pensive One.”
The poem represents a transition from Milton’s early Catholic thinking to his conversion to Anglicanism to his radicalization as Puritan — and back again to a Catholic or Anglican sympathy. The latter thinking was for Milton more compatible with his affinity to Melancholy, a popular eighteenth-century attitude among intellectuals and poets, which nostalgia further welcomed the historical hermit. Indeed, in his book, Campbell describes Milton’s poem as “the founding text of the eighteenth-century cult of melancholy.” The cultivation of melancholy conjured a romantic landscape of hermits, though it did not directly advocate eremitism.
URL: https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/public-lectures/summer-2021/milton-hermit/
Daily Mail (UK) features an update on hermit Emma Orbach, who lives in rural Wales. “A woman who left her former life behind to live in the woodlands of Pembrokeshire 20 years ago tells presenter Ben Fogle she doesn’t care if other people call her ‘crazy.'” Includes short video clip. From UK TV series “New Lives in the Wild.”
A feature of The Guardian on the coronavirus lockdown is an interview with Sara Maitland, author of The Book of Silence and How To Be Alone. he article is titled “Sara Maitland: Savour solitude – it is not the same as loneliness.”
Laura Freeman writes musings on life in lockdown in TheSpectator under the title “The Art of the Hermit,” reflecting on famous hermits and their understanding of their own isolation.The byline:”Holed up in her sixth-floor London flat, Laura Freeman finds solace in these paintings of self-isolating holy men.”
URL: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-art-of-the-hermit