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Sarah Apetrei, Mysticism in Early Modern England, by Liam Peter Temple, The English Historical Review, Volume 138, Issue 592, June 2023, Pages 664–665, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ceab135
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Extract
Liam Peter Temple’s rewarding study of the evolving fortunes of ‘mysticism’ in seventeenth-century England provides, for the first time, a near-comprehensive and diachronic survey of the reception and perception of mystical divinity during the century of revolution. Temple has achieved an admirable synthesis, striking in both its range and depth, which draws on the insights of historians of radical spiritualism, anti-enthusiasm, Catholic spirituality and intellectual culture over the past century, together with some of the best recent scholarship, and his own fresh analysis of a wealth of devotional and controversial texts.
Temple’s central category of mysticism is defined here in seventeenth-century terms as ‘experimental’, or experiential, knowledge of divinity. Pedants will question the use of an anachronistic term in connection with early modern religion, but there is a careful and consistent avoidance of perennialist connotations, or later definitional associations. The central narrative of the book is that of the ‘downfall’ or ‘death’ of mysticism in seventeenth-century England and the irrevocable decline of its reputable status as an active participant in the production of theological understanding, or doctrine. As Temple notes, this is an account which resembles in its outlines the lapsarian structures of historical thought characteristic of twentieth-century Catholic commentators, and echoes discussions of wider European developments in both Protestant and Catholic worlds. Temple’s study (perhaps wisely) does not attempt the evaluative approach of the theologians, and does not emphasise European parallels, except suggestively in the Conclusion. It is focused instead on reconstructing painstakingly the process, internal to English religious discourse, whereby mysticism lost its credibility. This is done effectively, meticulously and largely persuasively.
