Guyon's theology and spiritual writing opened new doors to people from all walks of life who yearned for spiritual joy and wisdom. These new translations include her popular A Short and Easy Method of Prayer, as well as her biblical commentary on the Song of Songs. The Complete Madame Guyon also presents examples of her passionate poetry, some of which has never before been translated into English. Nancy James's historical introduction explains the events of Guyon's life first as an aristocratic wife and mother of five, and later as a wido traveling around Europe as an author, who ended up incarcerated in the Bastille by the direct order of Louis XIV. Guyon suffered ten years of incarceration, along with accusations of heresy. Cleared of all charges at the end of her life, in all of her writing Madame Guyon testified to the goodness and holiness of God.

This volume contains two timeless classics on inner prayer and experiencing God from the woman who "loved Christ too much": Experiencing Union with God through Inner Prayer and The Way and Results of that Union. In a time when her church focused on external works, Madame Jeanne Guyon looked into the heart of the matter and found that it's the prayers of the soul that God desires. For daring to teach this to the mass of people "who knew not God in their hearts," she was once imprisoned by her own church leaders for seven years--four of those years in the notorious Bastille in Paris, France.

Guyon's theology and spiritual writing opened new doors to people from all walks of life who yearned for spiritual joy and wisdom. These new translations include her popular A Short and Easy Method of Prayer, as well as her biblical commentary on the Song of Songs. The Complete Madame Guyon also presents examples of her passionate poetry, some of which has never before been translated into English. Nancy James's historical introduction explains the events of Guyon's life first as an aristocratic wife and mother of five, and later as a wido traveling around Europe as an author, who ended up incarcerated in the Bastille by the direct order of Louis XIV. Guyon suffered ten years of incarceration, along with accusations of heresy. Cleared of all charges at the end of her life, in all of her writing Madame Guyon testified to the goodness and holiness of God.

Madame Guyon was a French noblewoman who was born in an unprincipled time fated to its corruption. She grew up in a church as licentious as the world in which it was established: spiritually despondent and plagued by ignorance. Regardless of these tormenting conditions, she rose to the inimitability of Christian veneration. She had an unsteady and disorganized childhood, was tormented by sickness and abuse, and was imprisoned for years by the highest church authorities. She gave up her worldly goods at the demands of this church which led to her impoverishment. She survived her psychological and physical ruination by conquering pretentious royal conspiracies and reviling the malignancy of the papal inquisition. She committed her life to writing meditative books that illustrated profound truths lost to religious monarchs in a maze of their own confusion. She was finally condemned as a heretic, but her writings were so dynamic they shocked the whole country and even reached the indecorous palace of King Louis XIV. This is the story of a solitary woman whose pious diligence and dedication laid the bedrock of virtous obedience to the deeds of contemporaneous ministry.

Her writings and her ministry knew a brief period of popularity, making her a friend even of the wife of Louis XIV. She greatly influenced the life of Fenelon one of the two most famous clergymen in France's history, and earned the wrath of the other, Bossuet.