Why Did Medieval Women Choose to Be Walled In Alive in Spain?

In the Spanish city of Astorga, a small, irregular stone chamber wedged between two churches preserves one of medieval Europe's most severe forms of religious devotion — permanent, self-chosen enclosure. Known as the Celda de las Emparedadas, or Cell of the Walled-In Women, the space raises the question historians ask about this practice across Europe: why would anyone choose to be sealed inside a wall for life?

The practice, generally referred to in English as "anchoritism," was practiced across medieval Western Europe from at least the eleventh century onward, most extensively documented in England, France, Italy, and Spain. An anchorite, or anchoress in the feminine, was a person, overwhelmingly women, who withdrew permanently from ordinary life to live in a small enclosed cell, usually attached to a church, dedicating themselves to prayer, contemplation, and, in many cases, spiritual counsel to visitors. Historians trace the tradition loosely to earlier Christian eremitic customs, including the desert hermits of late antiquity, though unlike those wandering hermits, medieval anchorites formally bound themselves under a bishop's authority to a single fixed cell for the remainder of their lives.

The Astorga cell specifically, squeezed between the Church of Santa Marta and the Chapel of San Esteban, features an exterior wall with a narrow, barred window. Historians identify this as the anchoress's sole physical connection to the outside world, through which food, water, and conversation could pass.

Entering anchoritic life in medieval Europe generally followed a formal liturgical rite, sometimes referred to by later writers as a "vow of darkness" or enclosure rite, conducted by a bishop or local clergy. After the ceremony, the cell's door was sealed, in some documented cases literally walled shut, symbolizing the anchorite's death to worldly life.

Historians studying anchoritism note that, for women who had few sanctioned routes to religious authority or scholarly life in the medieval church, this practice offered one of the only recognized paths to an autonomous spiritual vocation and a reputation for wisdom, comparable in some interpretations to the authority granted to abbesses. Some anchoresses became trusted advisers to local nobility and clergy, exchanging letters or receiving visitors through their small window, which historians cite as evidence that enclosure did not always mean an anchoress had no influence over the community surrounding her cell.

Among the most famous examples for context is Julian of Norwich, an anchoress enclosed in a cell attached to a church in England in the late fourteenth century, who produced "Revelations of Divine Love," one of the earliest surviving English-language works attributed to a woman. Her case illustrates that anchoritic seclusion did not necessarily mean isolation from intellectual or spiritual influence.

Surviving guidance texts for anchorites, such as the English "Ancrene Wisse," describe strict routines of prayer, permitted contact through a small window with a servant or the public, and reliance on charitable donations of food. Historians note that the Camino de Santiago's passing pilgrim traffic would have made a roadside cell like Astorga's a plausible site for regular alms.

Anchoritism gradually declined across Europe from the sixteenth century onward, a change historians generally connect to the Reformation's reordering of religious life in Protestant regions and, in Catholic areas, to broader shifts that increasingly channeled female religious vocations into convents rather than solitary enclosure.

The Astorga cell survives today as an architectural curiosity rather than an active practice, one of a small number of physically intact anchorite cells identified in Spain. Heritage researchers cite it as physical evidence for a form of devotion otherwise documented mainly through written vows, chronicles, and church records rather than surviving structures.

Historians caution against reading anchoritism through a single modern lens. Some emphasize the coercive social pressures that could shape a woman's decision to enter permanent enclosure, while others point to contemporaneous accounts describing the choice as a deliberate pursuit of spiritual authority. The Astorga cell itself preserves no first-hand testimony from the woman or women who occupied it, leaving her motivations, like much of anchoritic history, known mainly through the institutions that recorded it.