The elderly religious woman – wrinkled, white haired, huddled in a wrap she has borrowed for the occasion – smiles at the visitor whose questions she has been indulging. ‘My life at that time was a hard one. Food was so scarce I had to ration myself very severely and I saw no-one. But I was guided by Our Lady.’ She grows more candid. ‘The real problem was, I was simply filled with desire for fucking.’

The extended interview between St Mary of Egypt and the monk Zosimus does not generally take this form, of course. In making it understood that her former lifestyle was one of unbridled hedonism and licentious behaviour, Mary herself does not put too fine a point on it: she describes her vices and desires as unasecgendlic – unspeakable – and she is tormented by her thoughts of hamed – sex, or (to borrow a translation in Mary's own unvarnished style) fucking. Mary's desire is not contained in a sanitised or circumlocutory turn of phrase, though modern treatments of her vita sometimes find one. While Mary calls her sins unspeakable, the lesson of her life is that there are occasions when the only thing more important than constraining speech is not constraining it. It is confession that makes her admissions desirable, rather than unspeakable.

This chapter explores the uses of silence, speech and the unspeakable in the Old English version of the life of Mary of Egypt and the guide for anchoresses known as Ancrene Wisse. The first is a desert saint whose ascetic, isolated lifestyle is the inspiration and precursor to the second, the anchoritic subject who is figuratively cut off from the world. Speaking of oneself is central to both texts – how is the individual defined in relation to the outside world? How does one speak to and of God, of one's own religious experience? What must be expressed and what suppressed? Each text handles sin, confession and the best practice for holy life – ostensibly for a woman (or women) but also, by selective implication and extension, a man.