Both the Bible and devotional prose seem to prescribe a position beside water rather than in it. As shown in the previous chapter, readers of The Doctrine of the Hert and Ancrene Wisse are instructed to ensure that their metaphorical water is retained safely within the sides and edges of the body; readers of De institutione inclusarum are encouraged to imagine themselves at the edges of external, spiritual waters. Water, sides and edges are all integral to these tropes, whether the water represents dangerous women’s speech or the holy word of God. Nevertheless, a surprise reversal occurs during the Passion meditation of De institutione inclusarum; the permeation of these boundaries is used by Aelred to articulate a far more sublime spiritual experience than a vigilant protection of such boundaries can produce. This chapter will continue to investigate this paradox, identified in the previous chapter with regard to De institutione inclusarum but present in many late-medieval devotional texts authored by men but addressed to women. Focusing on images of bathing, immersing and dissolving in spiritual waters, it will argue that such immersion – contrary to guidance elsewhere in the very same texts – can actually produce a closer relationship with God as the reader is metaphorically softened by the liquid from his body, in the form of tears as well as blood. The flexibility of water as a metaphor, its ability to represent multiple different ideas at once, allows these two contradictory imageries to co-exist (albeit tensely) in devotional writings.

The first part of this chapter offers a survey of transformative waters in a wide range of medieval genres – from medical works such as Secretum Secretorum to travel writing such as Mandeville’s Travels – all of which express the miraculous, ambiguous, or even dangerous results of interacting with water. It showcases the element of water as a particularly potent site for change in the medieval imagination and explores how this understanding of water informs the surprise reversal in De institutione inclusarum, where advice to maintain the boundaries of the body through constant vigilance is replaced with a hint at how transformative the consequences of letting those boundaries dissolve can be, in the right spiritual circumstances.