ity

Cap. VII. How Joy of Inward Sweetness riseth in the Affection

Cap. VIII. How Perfect Hatred of Sin riseth in the Affection

Cap. IX. How Ordained Shame riseth and groweth in the Affection

Cap. X. How Discretion and Contemplation rise in the Reason

II. Divers Doctrines Devout and Fruitful, taken out of the Life of
that Glorious Virgin and Spouse of Our Lord, Saint Katherin of
Seenes

III. A Short Treatise of Contemplation taught by Our Lord Jesu
Christ, or taken out of the Book of Margery Kempe, Ancress of Lynn

IV. A Devout Treatise compiled by Master Walter Hylton of the Song
of Angels

V. A Devout Treatise called the Epistle of Prayer

VI. A very necessary Epistle of Discretion in Stirrings of the Soul

VII. A Devout Treatise of Discerning of Spirits, very necessary for
Ghostly Livers

INTRODUCTION

FROM the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the fifteenth
century may be called the golden age of mystical literature in the
vernacular. In Germany, we find Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. 1277),
Meister Eckhart (d. 1327), Johannes Tauler (d. 1361), and Heinrich
Suso (d. 1365); in Flanders, Jan Ruysbroek (d. 1381); in Italy,
Dante Alighieri himself (d. 1321), Jacopone da Todi (d. 1306), St.
Catherine of Siena (d. 1380), and many lesser writers who strove, in
prose or in poetry, to express the hidden things of the spirit, the
secret intercourse of the human soul with the Divine, no longer in
the official Latin of the Church, but in the language of their own
people, "a man's own vernacular," which "is nearest to him, inasmuch
as it is most closely united to him."[1] In England, the great names
of Richard Rolle, the Hermit of Hampole (d. 1349), of Walter Hilton
(d. 1396), and of Mother Juliana of Norwich, whose Revelation of
Divine Love professedly date from 1373, speak for themselves.

The seven tracts or treatises before us were published in 1521 in a
little quarto volume: "Imprynted at London in Poules chyrchyarde at
the sygne of the Trynyte, by Henry Pepwell. In the yere of our lorde
God, M.CCCCC.XXI., the xvi. daye of Nouembre." They may, somewhat
loosely speaking, be regarded as belonging to the fourteenth
century, though the first and longest of them professes to be but a
translation of the work of the great Augustinian mystic of an
earlier age.

St. Bernard, Richard of St. Victor, and St. Bonaventura--all three
very familiar figures to students of Dante's Paradiso--are the chief