First collection of late medieval English mystical writing, which has been newly edited with notes and glossary.

Originally published as an English translation in 1981, The Middle English Mystics is a crucial contribution to the study of the literature of English mysticism. This book surveys and analyses the language of metaphor in the writings of such mystics as Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and in such anonymous works as The Cloud of Unknowing and the Ancrene Wisse. The main emphasis of this comparative and stylistic study is not theological but rather the means by which theological concepts are communicated through language. The book sets the English mystics in perspective by establishing their place in the European mystical movement of the Middle Ages. It shows how intricate the relationship between English, and continental mysticism really is. The book suggests that there is clear links between English and German female mysticism, yet the mysticism is in the main due not so much to specific influences as to the common background of Christian theology and mysticism.

This book is an excellent introduction to the individuals, events and currents which shaped medieval English mystical texts.

This was the first full-scale history of medieval English literature for nearly a century. Thirty-three distinguished contributors offer a collaborative account of literature composed or transmitted in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland between the Norman conquest and the death of Henry VIII in 1547. The volume has five sections: 'After the Norman Conquest'; 'Writing in the British Isles'; 'Institutional Productions'; 'After the Black Death' and 'Before the Reformation'. It provides information on a vast range of literary texts and the conditions of their production and reception, which will serve both specialists and general readers, and also contains a chronology, full bibliography and a detailed index. This book offers an extensive and vibrant account of the medieval literatures so drastically reconfigured in Tudor England. It will thus prove essential reading for scholars of the Renaissance as well as medievalists, and for historians as well as literary specialists.

The European Middle Ages bequeathed to the world a legacy of spiritual and intellectual brilliance that has shaped many of the ideals, preconceptions, and institutions we now take for granted. An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe examines this phenomenon in vivid and scholarly accounts of the lives and achievements of those men and women whose genius most inspired their own and subsequent ages. These great mystics explored and consciously realized the relationship between human life and unconditioned transcendence. Representing both the contemplative and scholastic traditions, the mystics in these studies often found their solutions to ultimate questions in radically different ways. Some of them, such as Eckhart, Aquinas, and Cusa, may already be familiar, and here the reader will benefit from a new approach and summary of extensive research. Others, such as Smaragdus and several of the women mystics, are little known even to specialists. Finally, and unusually for a study of European mysticism, the influence of Spanish Kabbalists is discussed in relation to the Zohar and two figures from the mystical school of Safed, Cordovero and Luria. Though the essays focus on individuals, the cultural and social implications of their lives and work are never ignored, for the mystic way did not exist separately from the rest of medieval life; it functioned as an integral part of the whole, influencing the development of Christian and Jewish religions in both their internal and external forms.

Original and thought-provoking study of three medieval women mystics based on writings and biographical material.

Examines the extraordinary flowering of English spirituality in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.