This large volume, containing forty articles, is presented as a ‘Companion’ to the study of Christian mysticism, a term which may raise expectations of comprehensive coverage. The individual articles, all by leading scholars in their fields, are certainly lucid, informative and solidly grounded in their material, so as to be helpful for the beginning student while often being analytically sophisticated and revisionist in a way that is of real value to the established scholar. The difficulty is that the Christian mystical tradition covers nearly two thousand years and several different geographical cultures. Consequently, to bestow coherence on such an enterprise is to embrace a challenging project. Add to that the interdisciplinary nature of the papers, and the absence of either a popular or a scholarly consensus as to what constitutes ‘Christian mysticism’, and one's first impression is of the sheer heroism of the editor, Julia Lamm, in undertaking such a task. It will be for future readers to decide whether this volume is indeed a ‘Companion’, but having mulled over its contents, I can certainly commend it as a possibly groundbreaking effort to give an overview of the subject as it stands at present. In the process it conducts a multi-faceted discussion of what we think we mean by the term mysticism and how we apply it to elements within the Christian tradition. Lamm's own compact but illuminating introduction points out that there is no essentialist definition of ‘Christian mysticism’. Consequently, this volume could perhaps be described as an engaging and energetic conversation between its contributors, addressing this lack and considering a variety of paradigms to help us explore our underlying assumptions concerning ‘mysticism’.

The chronological coverage, which forms the core of the book, is divided into three periods: early (before the twelfth century), medieval and modern. As a medievalist, I am grateful for a study which transcends the perceived hiatus of the Reformation. The sixteenth century is considered from both Protestant and Catholic perspectives, and the volume goes on to explore the succeeding centuries with commendable even-handedness between the different Christian traditions, and also with apologetic awareness of being largely eurocentric, mentioning developments in Africa or Asia rather briefly. The modern fascination with mysticism, particularly in Anglo-American culture, is carefully explored; this is important, as it has not only led to the modern study of mystical writings through the ages and across cultures, but helps to explain why our own largely secular culture gives a surprisingly positive set of meanings to the term ‘mystical’. Within each of the three periods is a welcome article on the Eastern Orthodox tradition. For a Western audience these particular articles need to be primarily informative, but also include welcome reframings and contextualisations of received, perhaps oversimplified, positions on the key differences between the Christian East and Christian West.

The chronological sections are bookended by an introductory section on recurring themes, such as the Song of Songs, Platonism and heresy, and a closing section on critical perspectives on mysticism. In the opening section, an article on gender follows the article on the Song of Songs, thus usefully drawing attention away from the gender of individual writers towards the phenomenon of gendered discourse, in which both male and female writers identify themselves with the bride of the Song of Songs and appropriate her language. Starting this section with the major scriptural text underlying Christian mystical discourse and its outworking in major Christian texts, and only then coming on to the influence of Platonism, makes an interesting statement in itself, in view of the attention usually given to Platonism as formative for the Christian tradition – studies such as Andrew Louth's The origins of the Christian mystical tradition (Oxford 1981) come to mind. The Platonist inheritance has also been the focus of Christian unease with the mystical tradition, from Luther through to to modern times. An interesting contribution on aesthetics perhaps helps to address this critique by exploring the use in mystical discourse of a particularly rich and embodied language of the senses.

The final section, on critical perspectives, is where the interdisciplinary nature of the collection comes into its own. As Bernard McGinn's The foundations of mysticism (London 1992) pointed out, there is no general survey of modern theories of mysticism. Such a survey would need a book in itself, but in its absence this section represents a step in that direction. It includes a very useful contribution from a psychological perspective, which is not reductionist, as was, say, much early criticism of Margery Kempe. But it does challenge the theistic basis of mysticism, looking for ‘an experience of union and dissolution which need not be identified with God’. This kind of investigation, which calls into question the basic framework of the study of Christian mysticism, is a particularly bold and engaging dimension of this collection. This article also reminds us that with modern investigative methods we can go beyond written accounts of mystical experience. I would also have liked a more purely anthropological article, which might have built on comments in several contributions about the ‘socially embedded’ dimensions of mysticism a well as the solitary aspects. But no doubt it is this section which will most attract comments about what is not there rather than about the topics actually included.

One suggestion for future editions would be to combine the bibliographies of each article into one comprehensive bibliography at the end of the whole volume. It is of course customary in a Companion for articles to have their own bibliographies, which form a guide to further reading on each topic; but a work of this magnitude will, hopefully, be used by established scholars, and for them being able to check a bibliographical entry without first searching the index for which article they might find it under would be a decided enhancement. As this comment indicates, I am assuming that this volume is going to assume a key place in the literature on this vast subject.