The fate of mysticism in seventeenth-century England, understood both as a discourse and a body of work, is the subject of Liam Peter Temple's fascinating book, Mysticism in Early Modern England. Temple provides a useful survey that explores key works and writers who either promulgated mystical knowledge or opposed it. Temple's story of mystic writing emphasizes both its vibrancy and vulnerability; he identifies extraordinary strands of mysticism while charting how the demise of such thinking was virtually assured when critics rebranded it as sickness or fanaticism. His work explains powerfully why the collapse of mysticism occurred at the end of the century, despite the great outpouring of mystic texts from monasteries abroad and the uncensored presses of the Interregnum.

The prolific Benedictine Augustine Baker is a fitting opening figure for chapter 1; he first used the word “mystick” as a descriptor for the authors he gathered for English nuns’ instruction at Cambrai, where he arrived as spiritual advisor in 1624. Baker determined the mystic canon through visiting Robert Cotton's library and requesting pre-Reformation English mystics Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton; he famously added Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations Serenus Cressy, a later defender of Baker's, published in 1670. Baker's mystic library also included Blosius, John Tauler, Francis de Sales, Catherine of Siena, and Theresa of Avila, along with others, and it was fodder for his own explanations of mystic teaching, as well as examples for texts that the nuns of Cambrai, or their sister house in Paris, penned. Temple emphasizes that Baker's “promotion of individual mystical journeys that were to take primacy over any external instruction or guide” (31) caused controversies with those who “relied on power structures to keep order within the convent” (37). Criticized from within by convent confessor Francis Hull, who objected to his methods of teaching, Baker was eventually removed from Cambrai, along with Hull, in 1633. The chapter conveys the magnitude and subject matter of Baker's corpus, measured by his own writings as well as those of his followers, including Gertrude More, Margaret Gascoigne, and Barbara Constable. Temple argues that Baker created the past and future of the mystic canon.

Chapter 2 details the writing of Francis Rous, a Puritan mystic, and John Everard and Giles Randall, Independents, finishing with discussion of the Ranters. Temple considers Rous a Calvinist mystic for his sense that “the unknowability of God was also ‘the root of Predestination’” (49); but Rous developed this mystic thought not from Calvin but from patristic and medieval writers Tertullian, Pseudo-Dionysius, Origen, Bernard of Clairvaux, Richard of Saint Victor, Harphius, and Jean Gerson, to name a few. Through “mystical and experimental divinity,” Rouse argued in his 1631 Mystical Marriage, the elect learned the secret of predestination, centered on the marriage of Christ and the soul (50, quoting Rouse). The Independent John Everard was also influenced by Pseudo-Dionysius, and “his sermons reveal that he was familiar with the systems of cataphatic and apophatic theology” (58). Temple argues that Everard was followed during the Interregnum by many mystical writers and influentially edited by one, Giles Randall. Randall was responsible for publishing several mystical texts that had an influence on radical writers; he printed the Theologica Germanica, Benet of Canfield's Rule of Perfection, Everard's sermons, and John Tauler. In turn, these texts influenced the Independent John Rogers and radicals like Abiezer Coppe.

After assembling mystic canons in the first two chapters, Temple moves to critics of mystics and mystic writing in order to identify how these mystic texts were quickly dismissed by detractors. Chapter 3 explores how the writings of Robert Burton and Meric Casaubon furnished arguments of dismissal in responding to either Catholic or Protestant mysticism. Burton developed a rhetoric of medical pathology for both Catholics and Puritans in his 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy, claiming that visions experienced in both traditions stemmed from poor diet. Temple argues that these and other critiques connected mysticism with religious melancholy, while the writing of Casaubon reaffirmed this and simultaneously introduced the argument that mysticism came to England by way of heathen philosophy (or pagano-papism); “it was carried into Christianity by monastics and fostered in the anti-Christian and superstitious Catholic medieval Church” (100). Though the Cambridge Platonists held more positive views of mystic texts, their thinking still included notions from Burton, such as the view that visions and dreams were induced by natural causes.

The growing skepticism articulated by Burton and Casaubon toward mysticism swelled greater after the work of Edward Stillingfleet, who is the subject of chapter 4, along with Augustine Baker's editor and follower, Serenus Cressy. Temple argues that whereas Cressy, who had once debated philosophy and religion with Lucius Cary at Great Tew but converted to Catholicism, defended mysticism by explaining its roots in pre-Reformation writing, Stillingfleet and others attacked it for having the same genealogy. Cressy's edition of Julian of Norwich's Revelations invited particular scorn from Stillingfleet, who dismissed it as fanaticism, not unlike that of the “enthusiasts,” or Protestant radicals. This undoing of Cressy's editorial project of defending mysticism meant that instead of standing as the “jewel” of Catholicism, it now became the source of modern-day enthusiasm and fanaticism (138).

Temple's last chapter, on the Philadelphians and the writings of Jane Lead, circles back to the interests of chapter 1, about establishing mystic canons, while also connecting to the third and fourth chapters, which cover attacks on mysticism. Lead's texts, published in the 1680s, were received much more positively in Germany, in part due to their affinity with mainland European mystic texts and groups. Philadelphians’ critics, like Stillingfleet, bashed them for claiming to be following in a mystical tradition, and for being connected with groups in the Holy Roman Empire, such as the Quietists and Pietists.

As a whole, Mysticism in Early Modern England assembles a body of work, as well as a mystic canon, that defines seventeenth-century mystical writing across the confessions. It offers useful criticism of previous landmark scholarship on mysticism and deftly examines how shifts in intellectual history determined changing perceptions of mystic writing. Though Temple's wide scope sometimes minimizes historical and political contexts for these stories, it effectively traces the shape and edges of mysticism, explaining especially the medieval roots of seventeenth-century thought. Historians and literary scholars will turn to this study as a definitive source for determining the status of mysticism in the period. It most powerfully answers why mysticism flowers and falls away over the duration of this surprising, turbulent century.