When Marion Glasscoe organised the first Exeter Symposium in 1980, study of the medieval mystical tradition was (at best) a marginal pursuit, whether one's vantage point was the field of literary studies, history or theology. What Marion realised was that the liminal nature of the ‘Mystics’ both demanded a broad-based interdisciplinary approach (of the sort that she was, at the same time, building into her undergraduate teaching at the University of Exeter) and enabled them to act as a conduit for the different disciplines to talk to each other.

That first Symposium brought together scholars from Britain, Europe and the United States; literary, historical, theological and psychological approaches to the texts; established and new names. It paid full attention to the five ‘Middle English Mystics’ (Hilton, Rolle, Julian (two papers), Kempe, and – though there was no paper devoted solely to his works – the Cloud-author), but also tested the boundaries of the received canon, and particularly those between mystical and other sorts of writing (Langland, homiletic literature, religious drama). For those of us who were not in Exeter in 1980, the papers read at the Symposium were published in the series Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies immediately afterwards, so that their work of stimulating further research could both begin at once, and continue to influence future generations of scholars.