An essay titled The Eccentric Hermit-Bishop: Bede, Cuthbert, and Farne Island, published in the 1999 proceedings of the Illinois Medieval Association, can be found at http://www.luc.edu/publications/medieval/vol16/aggeler.html
Guidebook on Eremitic Life
The Catholic Archdiocese of La Cross (Wisconsin, USA) has translated into English the statutes governing hermits in France promulgated by the Canonical Committee of Religious under the Bishops of France. The English translation dates from 1998 and is entitled Guidebook on Eremetic Life. Web site is: http://www.dioceseoflacrosse.com/ministry_resources/vocations/book/page9.asp
“St. Anthony in the suburbs?”
December 2001 article from the Christian Science Monitor about a variety of Christian hermits in the USA. One point made is that several living in urban areas are diligently saving money for rural isolation some day. Web page: http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1206/p15s1-lire.html
Hermits in Art: Getty Museum
Two paintings of interest on the Getty Museum Web site include Hubert Robert’s lush romantic Hermit Praying in the Ruins of a Roman Temple and Lorenzo Costa’s pen and ink depiction of the Thebaid in A Thebaid: Monks and Hermits in a Landscape.
For the Robert: http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/objects/o918.html.
For the Costa: http://www.getty.edu/art/collections/objects/o204.html.
Sweets of Solitude
The Sweets of Solitude by Amos Wilson, called the “Pennsylvania hermit,” was printed in Boston in 1822. The only copy of the book is in the Free Library of Philadelphia, and has been scanned and placed on the Web at http://www.seclusion.com. It can be downloaded in .doc format, the whole book being 21 pages. Yahoo! calls it a work of fiction, and surely the melodramatic account reads that way, but the Webmaster assures me that he toured the cave in Indian Echo Cavern, Pennsylvania, where Amos Wilson, a hermit calling himself a Christian, lived for 19 years.