The Late Medieval Era · c. 1330-1440 · England
The English Mystics and Devout
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About This Movement
Across a single century a scattering of English men and women began writing about the inner life of prayer in their own language rather than in Latin — Richard Rolle the Yorkshire hermit with his Fire of Love, Walter Hilton with the Scale of Perfection, and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, all writing for recluses and devout lay people rather than for scholars. Two of the voices are women's. Julian of Norwich, an anchoress enclosed in a cell beside a Norwich parish church, spent decades revising an account of sixteen revelations she had received during a near-fatal illness, arriving at the line she is still known for: that all shall be well. Margery Kempe, a brewer's wife and mother of fourteen from Bishop's Lynn who could not write, dictated to scribes a book about her pilgrimages, her uncontrollable public weeping and the heresy examinations she survived. The closest thing the period leaves us to an ordinary believer's own life story. That any of it reaches us at all is largely owed to Carthusian monks, who copied the texts and kept them safe.
Sources
- Julian of Norwich, Showings (trans. Colledge & Walsh, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1978; Short and Long Texts) (primary) — A named woman's first-person theological writing, revised over a lifetime, in the vernacular. A modern critical alternative exists: Watson & Jenkins, The Writings of Julian of Norwich (2006).
- The Book of Margery Kempe (trans. Barry Windeatt, Penguin Classics, 1985) (primary) — An illiterate townswoman's dictated life: pilgrimage, weeping, heresy examinations survived - among the richest surviving accounts of an ordinary medieval believer's life. It was dictated to two scribes, and the priest-scribe's shaping hand is part of the text.
- The teaching corpus: Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love; Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection; The Cloud of Unknowing (primary) — The movement's formation texts, written for anchoresses, recluses, and devout laity. Editions: Penguin (trans. Wolters); Hilton in Classics of Western Spirituality (trans. Clark & Dorward, 1991).
- The Carthusian transmission layer: the unique Kempe MS (BL Add. 61823, Mount Grace annotations), the Amherst MS of Julian's Short Text, The Chastising of God's Children; plus Arundel's Constitutions (1409) as counter-pressure (primary) — Physical evidence that Carthusians copied and preserved these texts, set against the era's censorship of vernacular theology.
- Bernard McGinn, The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism 1350-1550 (Presence of God vol. 5, 2012) (secondary) — Current standard frame; Nicholas Watson's censorship scholarship is the key work on the Arundel context.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 19 'Mysticism and transcendence' (Hollywood) (reference) — Coverage of the English vernacular mystics specifically within this chapter is inferred rather than confirmed page by page.