The image of the late medieval English church has been convincingly redrawn not because researchers have broken new ground but because they have reached across, and sometimes removed, long-standing boundaries. The resilience of pre-Reformation religion has been revealed as based on cooperation and collaboration between monastic and secular clergy. Its inventive and widely popular devotional discourse has been identified in the crosscurrent between Latin and vernacular. A powerful communality, and at times a palpable agency in the face of institutional change, has emerged from the record of the transactions of elite and popular constituencies in a shared civic or parochial center or even within a monastic liberty. Eleanor Johnson continues to challenge the traditional separation of cultural, social, and textual spheres to shape a new view of the place and practice of contemplative, lively, and flexible late medieval piety. In complementary case studies—three of the best-known Middle English reflections on contemporary religious practice: Piers Plowman, Cloud of Unknowing, and the Revelation of Julian of Norwich; and three expressions of religious drama: the East Anglian Mary plays, Mankind and Wisdom—Johnson suggests that the act of contemplation and the tools of the art were taken up, explained, and modeled in these popular, pejorative, and performative works to represent a route to divine revelation that was open to all that chose to enact—to read, to perform or to share in—their instruction.

Johnson identifies three discourses of contemplation that connect within and across her two source groups. In the Cloud and the Revelation she uncovers a common purpose to evaluate the means by which the individual in contemplation may achieve a realization of the divine, what the Cloud's author describes as an experiential “onhede” or union with God (8.32.15). The Cloud author is at pains to emphasize that it cannot be an empirical encounter in which the exercise of human reason brings the “light of vnderstonding” (3.17.4–5). To realize the divine requires reflection that carries the mind outside of calculable time to the “athomus” or “leest partie” of the temporal frame, where momentarily the independent human will can arrive at an “accord” with existence, bringing an intimation of the eternity of God (4.17.18; 4.18.7). To be so transported requires repeated, monosyllabic expressions of prayer that the Cloud author impresses on the reader by his own practice. The “atomic accord” (37) that promises revelation is conveyed in the sensory experience, of reading, and sounding these very words. This, Johnson concludes, must explain the Cloud’s Englishness, the syllabic structure and resonance of the vernacular is the better language for the author's purpose.

She traces a comparable approach to language in Julian's Revelation, deployed to persuade her reader that timeless divinity may be experienced despite the limitations of human temporality. Contrary to the Cloud, for Julian, the familiar fixative of time and space can reinforce the reality of her revelations. The focusing of an eternal God in a human frame, is underpinned by the use of phrases expressing the difference of these realms: the presence of the divine appears “soddenly” in Julian's cell but then “continuely” she is “party” to his essence and the effect of her experience is “lastande” (Vision showed to a devout woman, 71.5.2; 77.8.3). Johnson draws attention to the two texts’ contrasting prescriptions for contemplation: the Cloud author doubts that any can follow this course save a “ful good” man able to become a “parcener in the hieghst pointe of this … act” (Cloud of Unknowing, prologue), yet Julian is sanguine, encouraging her audience that contemplation is an experience that can be shared by the Christian everyman, “evencristene” (Vision, 73.6.1).

How Everyman can come to know the divine is, Johnson suggests, the common concern of Piers Plowman in its B and (even more so, she argues) its C versions and the “Mary” plays of the East-Anglian “N” Town Cycle, to which, she contends, Piers itself is intimately bound. Will's journey is for knowledge of God: “kenne me kyndeley on Crist,” (Piers Plowman, A.1.79; B.1.81; C.1.78), and Johnson emphasizes the aspects of nature and kinship in its roots to read “kyndeley” as a lived experience of the Godhead, a “participatory” understanding. Some of the central encounters of the poem, Johnson argues, are intended to demonstrate that “kyndeley” knowing not only can be conjured from one's own self but also from the domestic context, in its daily labors and in the language of its people. That participation is the better way towards the divine is likewise, in Johnson's view, the overt message of the Mary plays. Here the character of Contemplacio, carries the audience towards an understanding of Christ as God by causing them to share in the experience of Mary herself through phrases skillfully and powerfully charged with her name, her speech patterns, her personal liturgy, and the Magnificat.

Plays of this period matched script with spectacle. In her closing case studies, Johnson explores how the full range of techniques and tricks of the late medieval dramatist might persuade an audience that the fruits of contemplation could be theirs. From the stage directions for the play Wisdom, she points to the use of costume to visualize meanings of self-knowledge and the soul embodied in the characters of Anima and Wisdom. Here dance and musical accompaniment also aid the audience in sensing their reality for themselves. Comedy, Johnson suggests, was deployed as a counterbalance to the intensity of the call to contemplation of incarnation and to convey reassurance that it was not an impossible challenge. In the play Mankind, scatological speeches and songs reach further to engage the audience but in the recall of their own sinful state and so of the ultimate purpose of knowing God.

It is only here, and only glancingly, that Johnson allows the discussion to turn to the context of these remarkable works. This is an adept and engaging display of close reading, notwithstanding the one or two verbal ticks and try-hard humor of her prose style. Even those intimate with these well-digested texts will be stimulated by her reinterpretation. But specialists in devotional literature or historians of medieval religious practice may be disappointed by the lack of connection to the cultural and social milieus in which the Cloud, Revelation, Piers, and the plays were received.