anchorite

Many writers are deskbound anchorites; Kurkov is a compulsively social animal with a deep bench of illustrious friends.

But Hardulph would not have been a hermit in the colloquial sense; he would have been an anchorite, meaning that he would have been anchored to the church and may have had disciples, Simons explained.

We see Moore and her mother living together in Greenwich Village “like anchorites.”

They’ve just been walled in, closed off, “like those anchorites” — medieval ascetics — “who used to build themselves into the walls of churches and see insane, terrifying visions and write about them.”

In the 1970s, commercial plywood caught Judd’s eye and he used it in a suite of boxy sculptures that look like a cross between shipping containers and anchorite cells.