Schwanda's book asks the question, ‘Was Isaac Ambrose a Puritan mystic and can the contemporary Church retrieve any wisdom from his writings?’ Ambrose, an Anglican cleric who became one of the foremost Puritan writers, is not well known today, nor is the Puritan eroticisation of life in God. The second part of Schwanda's question depends on the first, but he only compounds the issues surrounding the vexed word ‘mystic’. None the less, this book has some value if only because it presents Ambrose to a wider public, while inadvertently exposing many of the ills that beset studies of so-called mysticism. In all fairness, the following critique is focused far more on the failings of the Academy and the current doctoral degree system than those of the author. In less constricting circumstances he might well have written a very different book. It is futile to try to decide whether a dead author is a ‘mystic’ especially when the word ‘mystic’ has become meaningless, never mind that such a judgement is presumptuous. Bernard McGinn's ‘mystical element’, on which Schwanda depends, is hardly a definition, and his own suggestion of ‘contemplative-mystical piety’ confounds. Schwanda examines Ambrose's texts through a Counter-Reformation lens that he traces back through McGinn to von Hugel – an anachronism when one considers that Ambrose's work is based on his own reading of patristics and medieval writers: Origen, Athanasius, Climacus, Gregory the Great, Bernard, Bonaventure and Gerson, among others. Although Schwanda cites J. I. Packer (‘Puritanism was essentially an experimental faith … [contemporary] interest focuses on religious experience … whereas the Puritans were concerned with the God of whom men have experience’ [italics mine]) he confuses today's narcissistic sense of ‘experience’ with Ambrose's use of ‘experiment’, which is the antonym of the modern word ‘experience’. Ambrose uses ‘experiment’ in the earlier medieval sense, possibly alluding to Gerson, in which all ‘experience’ is provisional, to be tested against Scripture, the elders, the tradition. Analysis of Puritan texts is further complicated by Luther's having inverted the language of contemplation to serve his experience-based theology.Footnote ¹ Contrary to currently prevailing assumptions, contemplation relinquishes all claims to experience. Similarly, in beholding – a key Puritan term – there is no object; writers such as Ambrose use the word ‘object’ metaphorically. Phrases such as ‘contemplative/mystical text’ or ‘contemplative/mystical theology’, above all, ‘contemplative/mystical experience’ are nonsensical, as all language is self-reflexive, and all experience is interpretation. Such texts would be better identified as devotional, abstract, didactic or anagogical. Another common error is that affective technically refers to motivation, not to experience. In his reading of Ambrose and his sources, Schwanda uses the existential anachronisms of the Cartesian subject. It is folly to apply a methodology that allows for only one epistemology (linear self-consciousness) to texts that assume two epistemologies (the second being the larger, more rational and objective deep mind, which is out of sight but not influence). It is folly to apply a methodology that looks for closure to texts that lead the reader into infinite openness.Footnote ² The author wrongly equates so-called spiritual direction, which grew out of the Counter-Reformation, with pre-Reformation practices of consulting the elders or having a confessor. He even attempts to put Ambrose on the procrustean grid of a modern system for categorising ‘experience’ called ‘the spiritual movement matrix’. To sum up, it is quite possible that Ambrose in his time stood outside the solipsistic experiential extravaganza that characterises much of today's studies of religious people and their texts, but he needs to be examined through a more independent, sympathetic and epistemologically accurate lens.