Wolfgang Riehle, an Austrian medievalist, first published The Middle English mystics in 1981. Thanks to the explosion of work on them in the intervening decades, he now revisits the subject with a much richer, riper volume, entitled Englische Mystik des Mittelalters in its original German version (2011). The difference between that blandly comprehensive title and the evocative American one, with its whiff of the forbidden, says much about the distance between those two academic milieux. In dialogue with both German and Anglo-American scholarship, Riehle aims to read his texts ‘according to the authors' own express intentions' (p. xv), eschewing what he sees as the tangential questions and overly speculative readings of some interpreters. A profound historical theologian, he has an integrity and balance reminiscent of Bernard McGinn.
Riehle's canon includes the usual suspects: Richard Rolle, The cloud of unknowing, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. But he widens this canon at one end with accounts of eremitical and Cistercian mysticism in England, Ancrene Wisse and related texts, and the Monk of Farne. At the other end, he closes with a discussion of popularising mysticism: Nicholas Love, The Abbey of the Holy Ghost, the morality plays. A central chapter treats the Middle English version of Marguerite Porete's Mirror of simple souls, rightly viewed as a major text in the English mystical tradition. Despite that focus, Riehle is sceptical of the idea that ‘vernacular theology’ has any distinctive populist or universalist slant. His lengthy chapter on Rolle engages in constant if subtle argument with Nicholas Watson, and his highly learned, Latinate portrayal of Julian is closer to that of Colledge and Walsh than of Watson or Marion Glasscoe. While paying due attention to gender and embodiment, Riehle firmly rejects all assessments ‘on the basis of gender criteria which postdate, and are therefore not centrally relevant to’, the medieval texts (p. 276).
England, he reminds us, was central to the Cistercian movement, contributing such prominent figures as Stephen Harding, Gilbert of Hoyland, John of Forde, the anonymous composer of ‘Iesu dulcis memoria’ and Aelred of Rievaulx, whose Rule for a recluse inaugurated the affective tradition that culminates in Ps.-Bonaventure's Meditations on the life of Christ. Conversely, it was the Cistercians, far more than the mendicants, who set a lasting stamp on English spirituality. This influence becomes a leitmotif of the book. For instance, the ‘ultimate purpose’ of Ancrene Wisse, a text here reassigned to the twelfth century, is said to be ‘appropriation of mystical spirituality as practiced by the Cistercians' (p. 51). Similarly, ‘Rolle's language bears the stamp of the Cistercians down to the smallest detail’ (p. 95), and Hilton too reveals a deep grounding in the theology of Bernard – though also in the ‘towering, still very recent figure’ of Rolle (p. 183), whose mysticism he has often mistakenly been thought to reject.
Riehle's detailed, intricate readings defy summary, so I will highlight only a few of his more notable and controversial theses. Rolle, who probably studied in Paris and may have been self-castrated, took as his ‘great theme’ the double manifestation of love ‘as caritas ordinata and amor sine modo’ (p. 82). Though he turned to the vernacular late in his career, we cannot distinguish between his Latin and English writings on the basis of intended audience, since both the vernacular and the far more influential Latin texts directly address female readers. Making some provocative comparisons, Riehle finds a parallel to Rolle's experience of canor in the beguine mystic Douceline of Digne, and he notes many similarities between Julian and Gertrud of Helfta. Strikingly, he points out that Hilton, sometimes viewed as an anxious arbiter of orthodoxy, actually encouraged lay Bible reading. Indeed, ‘the mystics and Lollards concur in the intensity of their recourse to Paul’, if not necessarily for the same reasons (p. 196).
Apropos the Cloud author, Riehle stresses the influence of Thomas Gallus, a Victorine interpreter of Ps.-Dionysius. Despite the Cloud's apophaticism, that work proves to be more affective and sensual than it is usually given credit for. Nevertheless, Riehle has some difficulty with its author's devaluation of the body as a ‘well of stinking sin’ (p. 165). On the opposite end of the spectrum, for Julian, human corporeality has an unprecedented, wholly positive significance. Of particular interest is Riehle's explication of Julian's ‘modernity’. Appreciation of her depth and originality has grown exponentially, not just because of her treatment of divine motherhood, but also because so much of her thought seems fundamentally modern. With her astonishing self-assurance, her psychological account of sin, her rejection of divine wrath and penitential asceticism, and her untroubled acceptance of the body, the boldness of her vision ‘looks far into the future’ (p. 242). Biographically, Riehle speculates that Julian was enclosed as a recluse from childhood, yet may well have made a pilgrimage to Rome.
Turning to Margery Kempe, Riehle sees Julian's influence as crucial to her spiritual formation. If Margery was in some sense a fool for Christ, she was also much wiser – and better educated – than her readers have often thought. Riehle repudiates his earlier, once-common view of Kempe as ‘neurotic and sick’ (p. 280), while validating her legitimate claim to authorship against A. C. Spearing. Yet he finds her lacking in the ‘inner joyfulness' typical of other mystics. Kempe's own brand of modernity may lie in her mercantile mentality, her immersion in a spiritual consumerism that seems more familiar than commendable to readers today.
With its admirably lucid prose, this book does not read at all like a translation. For this Charity Scott-Stokes deserves great credit. Nevertheless, The secret within is not a book for casual readers. Far from alluring ‘spiritual outsiders', it will be most rewarding for those who already know the mystics' texts and desire a fuller, more precise understanding of their theologies.
