Mysticism and Reform, 1400–1750 ed. by Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith (review)

Accounts of Western modernity by historians and theorists have repeatedly framed the transition from the religious culture of medieval Europe as a kind of rupture, one wherein the modern self has definitively severed its ties to pre-Reformation (and thus decidedly Catholic) subjectivities. The editors and contributors of Mysticism and Reform show that in a similar way Protestant reformers from the sixteenth century onward, in disavowing wholesale the legitimacy of Catholic spirituality, often cast aside a late medieval mystical tradition even as it played a vital part in shaping the politics of reform. This volume traces the tradition's survival well into the early modern period and beyond and argues that the history of Western mysticism is "one in which relationships of continuity within transformation occurred" (5). As the editors observe, the suggestion that the literature and culture of medieval mysticism—a suggestion that, one might note, bears suspicious resemblance to early modern reform politics—did not survive into the early modern period is "not only unwarranted but misplaced" (5). Mysticism and Reform marshals a host of historical and textual evidence to demonstrate that, often in response to the politics of reform among individuals and communities, late medieval mystical traditions not only survived but thrived well into the eighteenth century. Far from displacing mystical communities, subjectivities, and experiences, early modern religious reform became a space wherein these flourished in direct response to reformist culture and its emphasis on the written word, doctrinal conformity, and the boundaries between confessions. The book argues that mystical thought persisted well into the modern period as an integral part of ongoing "debates about how best to love God" (6)—debates that have fundamentally shaped postmedieval subjectivities.

The opening essays begin with an account of sixteenth-century writers, among them Protestants, who found refuge in the mystical tradition, which not only secured against a culture of confessional antagonism but could actively mediate between the confessional strife. As the essay by Euan K. Cameron shows, some theologians turned to the mystical tradition "as a reaction against the excessive quest for dogmatic definition" that strongly marked Protestant theology (41). One such author, the theologian Johann Arndt (1555–1621), "called the mystics into play in order to redress the imbalances of a dogmatic, catechetical theology dominated by the intellectual apprehension of doctrine" (43). Likewise, Alana King demonstrates that for the Lutheran minister Valentin Weigel (fl. 1567), who adapted the mystical category of Gelassenheit from the fourteenth-century German mystic Meister Eckhart, "the only true reform is the reformation of the soul" (68). Challenging the very notion of reform, theologians even from the outset were actively engaged with the relationship between knowledge acquired through the spirit and that which was acquired through the written word.

This is not to deny that mysticism was itself enlisted in polemical and interpersonal battles, which frequently involved women in contests of authority. The essays by Kees Schepers and Kristen M. Christensen present female mystics and their communities at the center of the mutual hostility between Catholic and reformist groups. Both essays show these women involved in the process of textual production, often in collaboration with male supporters. In Schepers's analysis we see that such religious texts as The Evangelical Pearl (1535) and the Arnhem Mystical Sermons (ca. 1550), which emerged out of the community of Saint Agnes in Arnhem, formed part of the broader Catholic response to Protestantism several years prior to the official Counter-Reformation. According to Christensen, this community promoted "models of interiority and sanctity for a church that needed, most of all, to turn inward if it was to survive" (126). Moreover, both Christensen and Schepers show a vibrant culture of textual production and exchange that linked the sisters with the Carthusian charterhouse in Cologne. The convent in Arnhem existed as a point of convergence between not only Dutch and German mystical circles but also their respective mystical traditions (107–9). Yet...