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.