Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. By David J. Davis

Abstract

In Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, David Davis considers discourses of divine revelation, and he includes in that term a variety of phenomena that late medieval and early modern English men and women reported as giving them a sense of direct connection with God. He considers accounts of mystics’ experiences from before and after the Reformation, devotional literature that offered aids to meditation, devotional poetry, and visual representations of manifestations of God (particularly those narrated in the Bible). The most dramatic experience of God, and the one given most space in this book, is a mystical experience where the senses (especially sight) or the emotions (particularly of love or joy) are said to encounter God directly. The term most often used by contemporaries is that the believer was ‘ravished by’ or ‘rapt up’ in the Spirit, making reference to 2 Corinthians 12 on Paul being ‘caught up to the third heaven’. The terms ‘ravished’ and ‘rapt up' in the Spirit are followed by Davis through a great number of varied sources across the period considered. An impressive number of primary sources have been consulted in the writing of this book, but that range of sources does not impede the argument or the clarity of exposition.