The intense passion Margery describes as she grapples with her lust for men is transferred onto the vision of Jesus she repeatedly sees. She describes how he ‘ravages her soul’, calls her his wife, spouse, ‘a unique lover’, and when she receives his body during communion she will be ‘filled with him’. She even wears a ring engraved with the words ‘Jesus is my love’.27 While it may seem surprising today, sexualizing the relationship between Christ and his female devotees was not a new phenomenon. The thirteenth-century Ancrene Riwle (the monastic rule for female anchoresses) encouraged women to
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