Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Lists of Diagrams and Figures
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- The Colours of Contemplation: Less Light on Julian of Norwich
- Behold Not the Cloud of Experience
- Walter Hilton on the Gift of Interpretation of Scripture
- Numeracy and Number in The Book of Margery Kempe
- Religious Mystical Mothers: Margery Kempe and Caterina Benincasa
- Authority and Exemplarity in Henry Suso and Richard Rolle
- Mortifying the Mind: Asceticism, Mysticism and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114
- The Meditaciones of the Monk of Farne
- Envisioning Reform: A Revelation of Purgatory and Anchoritic Compassioun in the Later Middle Ages
- Walton's Heavenly Boece and the Devout Translation of Transcendence: O Qui Perpetua Pietised
- Reformist Devotional Reading: The Pore Caitif in British Library, MS Harley 2322
- Richard Whytford, The Golden Epistle, and the Mixed Life Audience
- Afterword: Future Prospects
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Lists of Diagrams and Figures
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- The Colours of Contemplation: Less Light on Julian of Norwich
- Behold Not the Cloud of Experience
- Walter Hilton on the Gift of Interpretation of Scripture
- Numeracy and Number in The Book of Margery Kempe
- Religious Mystical Mothers: Margery Kempe and Caterina Benincasa
- Authority and Exemplarity in Henry Suso and Richard Rolle
- Mortifying the Mind: Asceticism, Mysticism and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114
- The Meditaciones of the Monk of Farne
- Envisioning Reform: A Revelation of Purgatory and Anchoritic Compassioun in the Later Middle Ages
- Walton's Heavenly Boece and the Devout Translation of Transcendence: O Qui Perpetua Pietised
- Reformist Devotional Reading: The Pore Caitif in British Library, MS Harley 2322
- Richard Whytford, The Golden Epistle, and the Mixed Life Audience
- Afterword: Future Prospects
- Index
Summary
After a longer than anticipated break in the series, the eighth Exeter Symposium took place at Charney Manor in Oxfordshire, between 17 and 20 July 2011. The twelve papers that formed the basis for discussions at the Symposium are collected here.
As always, the canonical ‘Middle English Mystics’ are represented: indeed, there is a ‘full house’ of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, the Cloud-author, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. The volume begins with Vincent Gillespie's exploration of light, colour and sight in Julian of Norwich. Over the past twenty years, literary scholars have been demonstrating the possibilities of medieval optical theory as an interpretative angle on Middle English poetry, but (even though contemplatio is at root a matter of looking) Gillespie's is the first sustained and detailed attempt to bring perspectival optics, theories of intromission and extramission (and various syntheses of the two), and distinctions between light as it is perceived and the transcendent Light, to one of our mystical authors. Julian, not for the first time, emerges as an extraordinarily well-informed, as well as theologically and philosophically subtle, thinker.
Gillespie's occasional collaborator in work on Julian (including the important and ever-stimulating essay on ‘The Apophatic Image’ in MMTE V), Maggie Ross, writes on beholding, a word often used as a thoughtless synonym for seeing, but which, in its biblical and medieval usage, indicates more than that, a kind of silent and reverent receptivity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Medieval Mystical Tradition in EnglandPapers Read at Charney Manor, July 2011 [Exeter Symposium 8], pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013