This lively and stimulating collection of twelve essays, with a lengthy introduction by the two editors, works out different aspects of the thesis that mystical practices, created in medieval monasteries, universities, and lay contexts, continued to be referenced and taught during the Reformation era, specifically so in Protestant Germany, the Catholic Low Countries, and England. Not merely an academic exercise of remembrance and nostalgia, these mystical schools, particularly in their sensual, poetic, and prophetic dimensions, disproportionately attracted educated Protestant women and lay male writers at the frequently sectarian margins of power.

Most of the essays offer fresh readings of individual works and their authors, but a few essays attempt to generate more theoretical takes on the reasons for a Protestant survival of select medieval mystical traditions and the use of a mystical idiom in secularized rhetoric and the arts. Two articles in particular explore the nexus between mysticism and other cognitive and cultural modalities. Euan K. Cameron focuses on historical changes in such modalities that allowed for the reemergence of mystical discourse, whereas Niklaus Largier maps the rise of secular aesthetic experience from the bedrock of mystical sensibilities.

The most obvious reasons are perhaps the sheer availability of affordable book copies, an international publishing and book trade, and the concomitant rise of a literate but marginal class of public intellectuals and savants. This new class of readers could afford translating, buying, and reading print copies of the works of, for example, the medieval Rhineland mystics, or the mystical works of best-selling contemporaries, such as the German author Jakob Böhme. Their works were almost instantaneously translated into Dutch and English and were sold well beyond Germany. Böhme's outsider status as shoemaker-savant certainly added to the sensational appeal of his literary output.

Using mysticism's claims to the veracity and authenticity of knowledge systems external to ecclesiastical and political authority aligned well with the more radical and/or sectarian wing of Protestantism, which was suspicious of emergent Protestant hierarchies as much as of established Catholic chains of command. Alana King's contextual reading of Valentin Weigel, a Protestant pastor who lived through the transition of Protestantism from persecuted minority to state-sponsored majority in Saxony, highlights the productive political use of a key mystical concept developed by Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler, Gelassenheit, generally translated as spiritual poverty. Sarah Apetrei's innovative study of seventeenth-century English mysticism, as pursued specifically by Richard Roach and Edward Stephen, argues persuasively for the effective publicist usage of apophatic aspects of mysticism and its perceived Christian authenticity, which was claimed to have extended back in time to the earliest Christian communities. Roach, Stephens, and their communities leveraged their select interpretations of mysticism to heal the trauma of religious schism.

As the case study of Dame Gertrude More by Arthur F. Marotti articulates persuasively, mystical discourse could generate a sense of empowerment when highly gifted and self-assured individuals found themselves stuck in liminal social spaces. A language of the erotic offered intimate, Divine relationality performed in poetry and prayer, as is true for Maria van Hout, Catherina Regina von Greiffenberg, and John Austin, and a mystical language of prophecy empowered religious women in England before and after the Reformation. That such female empowerment was threatening to male representatives of a social status quo is demonstrated most explicitly in two of the twelve essays. Franz M. Eibl painstakingly documents a male editor's censorship of von Greiffenberg's poetry, excising from it all references to female sexual embodiment and jouissance. Bethany Wiggins tracks the removal of all references to Marie Christine Sauer, a renegade sister of the Ephrata community, from the Ephrata Sisters Chronicle.

A second reason for the geographically and socially specific Protestant survival and continued interest in theories and practices of mysticism is to be found in an underappreciated cultural and linguistic contribution of vernacular medieval mysticism. The mystical appreciation and exploration of subjective interiority generated an extensive new vocabulary for a wide spectrum of affective states, and the belief in an internally driven and desirable capacity to achieve and maintain exalted states of mind. Niklaus Largier's exploratory essay on the transfer of rhetorical elements in mystical prayer to the aesthetic technologies of a secularized “art of living” practiced by eighteenth-century intellectuals, and Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Hildegard Elisabeth Keller's preliminary study of the charged symbolism of the human heart, offer fertile ground for further exploration of mysticism's affective contribution beyond the Middle Ages and beyond religiosity.

The four essays dealing explicitly with Northern European Catholic mystical revitalization in between 1400 and 1750 share an emphasis on creative innovation. Euan K. Cameron, whose survey essay offers a longitudinal meta-framework for all other chapters, reminds the reader of the role mystical modalities have played in the history of the Christian epistemological quaternity of sacred scripture, hermeneutical tradition, reason, and mystical illumination. Cameron notes that mysticism rises to the fore when a corrective to an over-emphasis on the other three “ways of knowing” seems to be needed, and recedes into the background when a culture or sub-culture's identity depends on linguistic precision and acumen. Kees Schepers, well-known for his pioneering rediscovery of a treasure trove of mystical convent literature in the sixteenth century, makes a case for the female authorship of the Arnhem Mystical Sermons, a collection of 162 sermons. Well versed in their study of both the Rhineland mystics and speculative mysticism, the anonymous authors appropriated the genre of sermon literature to forge an innovative synthesis of both to fit their own spiritual needs and an insistence on mystical union with the Divine.

Kirsten Christensen analyzes commonalities between the works of Maria van Hout and the Sisters of Saint Agnes on Arnhem; all these women insist on the power of a purely spiritual Eucharist celebration, thus successfully circumventing ecclesiastical power. The final Catholic case study, Alison Shell's reading of John Austin's Original Psalms, demonstrates Austin's creative and subversive appropriation of a Catholic devotional genre and practice, in this case the breviary.

By no means intended to be a complete survey of mysticism's presence in Germany, the Low Countries, and England, the volume's essays nonetheless thus invite a profound interdisciplinary reevaluation of the thesis that mystical traditions came to a screeching halt in Protestant countries between 1400 and 1750.