The above passage, taken from a late-medieval vernacular translation of Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusarum, begins with ordinary water situated in an extra-ordinary metaphorical landscape. The ‘ryueres of cler water’ allow the ‘dredful dove’, or female anchoritic reader, to keep watch for ravenous predators in their clear surfaces, an explanatory image drawn directly from everyday life. However, it quickly becomes apparent that these are not just mundane, ordinary waters but also a rich, generative and flexible symbol. The ‘ryueres’ transform twice in a very short textual space. Firstly, they are revealed to represent Christian scriptures, a familiar religious trope dating back to the Song of Songs. Secondly, they become a different type of water altogether when their ultimate source is revealed: the ‘welle’ of wisdom that is Jesus Christ. The deliberate and simultaneous evocation of both these possibilities emphasises the richness not only of real rivers, which serve a pragmatic function, but also of their literary counterparts. Such waters can just as easily represent an aspect of heaven, for example the life-giving water of eternal life provided by Christ or the words of Holy Scripture, as they can of earth. Multifarious meanings and transformations jostle and intertwine in this short quotation, serving to illustrate the complex role water can play in devotional prose.

Whilst these rivers hold much spiritual promise, access to them seems restricted in this passage. The reader of De institutione inclusarum is encouraged to seek out clear waters and to ‘haunte’ them (return to them often); however, once she has reached them, she should only venture close enough to discern the reflection of the imagined hawk within their depths, not close enough to disrupt their ‘cler’ surfaces.