All ideals of Christian perfection, and mysticism is certainly one of these, are forms of response to the presence of God, a presence that is not open, evident, or easily accessible, but that is always in some way mysterious or hidden. When that hidden presence becomes the subject of some form of immediate experience, we can perhaps begin to speak of mysticism in the proper sense of the term. The responses of the subject to immediate divine presence have been discussed theologically in a variety of ways and according to a number of different models. Among them we might list direct contemplation or vision of God, rapture or ecstasy, deification, living in Christ, the birth of the Word in the soul, radical obedience to the directly present will of God, and especially union with God. All of these responses, which have rarely been mutually exclusive, can be called mystical in the sense that they are answers to the immediately experienced divine presence. Therefore, the mysticism of union is just one of the species of a wider and more diverse genus or group.

“Do you want to see new marvels (monstra)? Do you want to see strange ways of life, to find the sources of virtue or the causes of all evil; to sense the vast emptiness that commonly goes unnoticed?”

Cornelius Grapheus was responsible for this sales promotion. Along with other prefatory material, it introduced Thomas More's Utopia to readers in 1516. More's friend, Erasmus of Rotterdam, had collected endorsement, and either he or Peter Giles had approached Grapheus, then secretary to the municipal government at Antwerp. It is reasonable to assume that Grapheus jumped at the chance to associate his name with the new work. He had published nothing before this time, save for some devotional verse in 1514, yet careers were launched, patrons found, and reputations ennobled by promotional material as well as by the material promoted.

The Practice of Piety by Lewis Bayly was one of the most famous treatises ever penned by a Puritan. This devotional manual went through numerous editions and was translated into six languages, including into German by Philip Jacob Spener. Piety is the term that best expresses Puritan religiousness. Spirituality was a term seldom employed by Puritans, and when used it never referred to their essential religiousness. Today spirituality is used as a description of all forms of piety, though originally it referred to a particular kind of piety, namely that which developed out of monasticism. Roman Catholic spirituality, whether lay or clerical, has been shaped by the massive presence of monasticism. But Protestant piety has been shaped by the massive absence of that monastic ideal. Hence, the term piety will be used in an effort to delineate Puritan religiousness.

In a review published in 1849, Ephraim Peabody observed that “America has the mournful honor of adding a new department to the literature of civilization,—the autobiographies of escaped slaves.” As Peabody went on to point out, “these narratives show how it [slavery] looks as seen from the side of the slave. They contain the victim's account of the workings of this great institution.” As such, they have proved an invaluable resource for examining the religious life of Afro-Americans under slavery. Yet despite the fact that Peabody and others recognized “the peculiar hardships to which the female slave [was] subjected” during the nineteenth century, few recent studies of slavery have paid attention to differences in gender and none, to my knowledge, have explored the impact to gender differences on the religious life of slaves.

Science and religion both constitute vital dimensions of experience, but people differ in their views on proper relations between the two. In modern times, when science increasingly dominates the outlook of society, many regard science and religion as incompatible and strive to maintain them in watertight compartments. In 1972, for example, the National Academy of Sciences, responding to a demand that creationism be given equal time with the theory of evolution in biology classrooms and textbooks, adopted a resolution stating that “religion and science are … separate and mutually exclusive realms of human thought whose presentation in the same context leads to misunderstanding of both scientific theory and religious belief.” The battle over creationism continues, with the National Academy of Sciences and orthodox religious groups both insisting on the incompatibility of the two spheres.

With the possible exception of Sir Geoffrey Elton and Lawrence Stone, no present historian of Tudor and Stuart England has been more prolific or controversial than Christopher Hill, the former master of Balliol College, Oxford. The twenty-nine articles, lectures, and book reviews included in the first two volumes of his Collected Essays deal with many of the themes developed in his more recent books, beginning with The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (London, 1972). Although two of the pieces appeared as early as the 1950s, Hill has revised the essays for this collection, so that the total corpus reflects his mature judgment.