Note from the Editors

As incredible as it may seem, forty years have now passed since Ritamary Bradley and Valerie Lagorio founded the 14th-century English Mystics Newsletter, the grandmother in a real way to the Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures (JMRC), in 1973. Looking over the Newsletter today, we are struck by how much energy, vitality, and creativity rise from its yellowing, mimeographed pages: it has the cultish feel of a samizdat street publication. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to name a scholarly journal with as loyal and even at times fanatical a following as the Newsletter and its next iteration, Mystics Quarterly (MQ; from 1984 forward), enjoyed. With some anguish we decided, when JMRC took over from MQ in 2010, to retire the prominent logo of the phoenix that dominated the title page of the Newsletter and continued as an element in the design of MQ. We hope that, phoenix-like in its own way, JMRC has risen from the ashes of the two parent publications. We certainly have put some effort into honoring the different focuses of the Newsletter (work on Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Walter Hilton, etc.) and MQ (a consideration of mysticism from a religious studies point of view) as well as adding another element (a new focus on comparative work across religious traditions and conventional boundaries). For this anniversary issue we are excited to publish four essays on women visionary writers that honor MQ's tradition.