| This study illustrates how British writers during William Wordsworth's lifespan participated in redefining English words describing asceticism in a period when there were less than four dozen monks in Great Britain. The reasons for this change include the development of British historiography, the rise of antiquarianism, the growth of the public taste for Gothic fiction and drama, the marooning of French monastics on English soil during the French Revolution, the rise of the historical novel, the politicized responses to church history in the height of the Catholic Emancipation movement, and impulses directed by the Oxford Movement and the Cambridge Camden Society, among others. Their cumulative effect was to foster approximately ten patterns to describe the ascetic and the religious life, as discerned from a review of no less than six hundred works from Hume and Gibbon, to Wordsworth and Scott, through Browning and Tennyson. The significance of this study to the analysis of British literature, besides correcting some mistaken readings of “hermit,” is twofold: it provides a guide that shows how writers in this period were responsible for redefining words of religious retreat, and it serves to contextualize these lexical battles over monasticism's meaning, connecting them to the religious battles that would come to a head in Britain during the 1840s. The struggle over the meaning of monasticism reveals the shifting perceptions of religious devotion, of the way in which Georgian gentlemanly churchmanship yielded to the earnestness of Victorian religious sentiment. The lexical shift is a record of that struggle. |
