The Secret Within: Hermits, Recluses, and Spiritual Outsiders in Medieval England by Wolfgang Riehle (review)

More than thirty years after the publication of The Middle English Mystics in 1981, Wolfgang Riehle revises and updates his own research on English medieval mysticism. If his previous work tended towards the metaphorical language of mysticism and relied fundamentally on philological analysis, The Secret Within seeks to interpret the main canon of English mystical works according to the authors’ own express intentions. To this purpose Riehle goes beyond the literary interpretation of early mystical texts in Medieval England and complements his previous analyses with an examination of their theological significance. While English mystics of the period between the twelfth and the early fifteenth century have usually been approached as an eclectic collection of individualities—Riehle’s book features the same case studies as Barry Windeatt’s English Mystics (1994) or Marion Glasscoe’s English Medieval Mystics (1993)—their distinctive theological nature as a group has been neglected in comparison. Riehle suggests that the assumption that English mystics were a disperse bunch of practitioners of a reclusive type of religious experience has hindered a deeper appreciation of the theology informing these practices, which was not only rich in exegesis and allegory but also inspired in the practice of contemplatio. The Secret Within delves into the nature of the contemplative experience as practiced by English mystics, and finds out that they share a theology around the theme of the human likeness to God. If mystical literature is characterized by its focus on the knowledge of God through the experience of the divine (cognitio Dei), it follows, according to Riehle, that “such a distinction allows for the inclusion of works by authors who write about mystical experience and knowledge of God without necessarily claiming to have been granted such experience themselves” (xiii). This is certainly the case with devotional writing at large and meditative texts. Whereas an unifying element in English and continental mysticism has been its enclosed character—the eremitical way of life as suggested by Riehle’s book subtitle–the experiential and secluded nature of mysticism is even more apparent in the English case. This is the secret within their walls as well as within their whole being. And it is not only to be found in the use of mystical language as a vehicle of mediation between God and humans—a line of enquiry that has dominated the scholarship of medieval mysticism—but in the assumption of the ineffability of the mystical experience. Thus, The Secret Within does not attempt to explicate the mystical or the religious experience itself, but to find the theological base for its reason d’être. With this approach, Riehle avoids any pretense to understand the experience of God, as each one of these individuals lived it, but concentrates instead on explaining the intellectual motivations behind an experiential approach to the divine.

The first two chapters highlight the historical and cultural context that favored the emergence of new religious orders: “The beginnings of vernacular mysticism in England, as on the Continent, can be traced back to the decisive transformations in theology, intellectual history, and the history of mentalities that have long been associated with the ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’” (1). If early anchorites dwelling in Britain wished to renew apostolic life by means of an ascetic lifestyle similar to the desert monks of the New Testament and the Church Fathers, the influence of English Cistercians in the spread and the theology of English mysticism cannot be underestimated. In their exploration of the soul as a vehicle that resonates with the essence of God, they develop the theme of dignity underlying canonical texts such as Ancrene Wisse (ca. 1225)—that would become a reference for feminine devotional discourses based on the notion of “nobility,” for example. Riehle shows the “critical role that England played in the formative years of this order of Reformed Benedictine monks” (15) which traces its origins back to Dijon in France. Under the supervision of Bernard...