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In the Middle Ages, reclusoirs or recluseries were narrow cells (no larger than 9m2), that had their entrance doors completely walled up.
You can still see them attached to certain churches, vestiges of a form of supreme devotion. A crucifix as decoration, a bed of wood as hard as stone as the only object for rest, a floor of icy slabs, bare walls, barely a ray of light… These cells once housed “‘spiritual sentinels’ whose constant prayer was supposed to repel epidemics of plague and invaders”, reports Slate.
The sentinel, or recluse (a woman in the vast majority of cases), takes an oath before remaining in her cell for the rest of her days. She promises to devote herself to prayer and penance until her last breath. She prays for the city and its wealth, for the church and its protection, for the dead and for the opulence of the lands. “She honors a society that no longer concerns her: by crossing the threshold of the recluse just before the entrance is sealed, she has entered her own tomb,” Slate points out. A ceremony that resembles a burial, with the same rites, is also organized before the final confinement. “The recluse receives extreme unction, hears a requiem and becomes, from then on, ‘dead to the world’ in the eyes of her contemporaries.”
If the word reclusion today refers to a criminal punishment, at the time it was nothing of the sort. It was in no way a punishment, an act of torture or an “anticipated grave” as Victor Hugo wrote, but rather a voluntary withdrawal from the world, granted to very few people.
For women, this isolation was also a way to protect themselves from society and its vices, including gang rape, which was commonplace.
