The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Exeter Symposium V: Papers Read at the Devon Centre, Dartington Hall, July 1992

Medium Aevum, Fall, 1993 by Bella Millett

In The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, John Clark explores the links between late fourteenth-century Cambridge theology and contemporary English mystics; Tarjei Park compares the role of the body in Walter Hilton and in Julian of Norwich, contrasting Hilton's distrust of the flesh with Julian's 'integrationist physicalism' (p.

33); Oliver Davies examines 'transformational processes' in the reception and textual communication of mystical experience in Julian and Mechthild of Magdeburg; Vincent Gillespie and Maggie Ross offer a post-structuralist analysis of the textual strategies used by Julian to express the inexpressible; Nicholas Watson argues that Julian's use of hermeneutic terminology in the Revelation of Divine Love shows that it is 'intended to be as well as merely to contain a revelation' (p. 94); Kathryn Kerby-Fulton refers to non-fictional mediaeval vision literature to support an autobiographical reading of Will in Langland's C-Text; Saskia Murk Jansen surveys the mystical theology of the thirteenth-century continental visionary Hadewijch, particularly her use of the term minne; Ulla Sander Olsen examines the place of manual labour in the nunnery of Syon Abbey in the fifteenth century; Veronica Lawrence discusses the authorship, date, and place in the English mystical tradition of A Looking Glace for the Religious (Syon MS 18); Gunnel Cleve suggests St Bridget of Sweden as Margery Kempe's main role-model; Sonya Sikkja takes a Heideggerian approach to via negativa in The Cloud of Unknowing; and Roger Ellis reassesses the textual tradition and possible authorship of the English translation of Richard of Saint-Victor's Twelve Patriarchs. Marion Glasscoe's foreword seems anxious to pre-empt criticism: 'It is sometimes objected that a collection of such conference papers may lack coherence. Yet it is also arguable that the considerable limitations of the overall theme ... are sufficient to render the variety of approaches to subjects within, and contingent on, it valuable to the interested reader ... These published symposium papers purport to be no more than a means of speedy dissemination to a wider audience of the kind of lines of enquiry currently being pursued by scholars in the field.' A cynical reviewer might be tempted to read this as a coded apology for the uncomfortable fact that the research assessment of university departments, combined with the over-cultivation of some fields of Middle English literature, is currently forcing mediaevalists to publish more and more about less and less; but it is fair to say that in this case at least the cynicism would be unjustified. The two papers (by Jansen and Olsen) which do not really fit under the symposium title are substantial and interesting in themselves, and the overall quality of thought and scholarship is high. It is perhaps significant, though, that the most traditional scholarly approaches are applied to the least-trodden areas; more recent critical strategies are most apparent in the four papers on Julian of Norwich (who seems to be in some danger of over-exposure) and in the 'New Historicism' of Kerby-Fulton's Langland paper (which is itself a response to earlier New Critical and poststructuralist readings of the narrator as a fictive persona). Sikkya's paper stands apart from the rest methodologically in its strictly 'philosophical' approach, but remains fairly accessible, although Heidegger's terminology does not take kindly to English translation ('The structural whole of Dasein's Being can then be defined as "ahead-of-itself-Being-already-in-(the-world) as Being-by (entities encountered within-the-world)'" (p. 182) -- oh, I see).