Reviewed by: Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750 ed. by Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith Matthew Rivera Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750, ed. Sara S. Poor and Nigel Smith (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2015) 400 pp., ill. The authors of the volume Mysticism and Reform, 1400-1750 examine the place of mysticism within Reformation discourse. They seek to evoke themes within literature that paralleled the challenge to widely-held conceptions of power and authority that the Reformation posed. In the process, they identify several motifs, such as millenarianism, state intervention in the mystical tradition—either in its repression or propagation—and the gendering of spirituality. Euan Cameron’s piece provides a fine summary of how the Reformation was a watershed in European intellectual history. He argues that the Reformation was a moment when traditional epistemologies sustained forceful attack. As he explains, the ways of knowing were transformed by what he calls “the more objective sources of authority” encouraged by the Protestant Reformers (35, emphasis mine). The Protestants defined this objectivity as textual, and this at the expense of tradition that the Catholic Reformers argued was also a valid source of spiritual authority (36). But instead of making the well-worn—and erroneous—contrast between Protestant empirical rationality and Catholic “superstition,” Cameron casts the mystic impulse as a reaction to the stress created by rapidly shifting orthodoxies. As he astutely observes, “[m]ystical seeking will often, in one sense or another, arise as a reaction against dogmatic over-elaboration and over-definition” (45). Building upon Cameron’s notion of mysticism as a response to conflicting epistemologies, Alana King maintains that the shift would yield two spiritualities that were antithetical: intellectual spirituality and “supernatural cognition,” or the mystical impulse. Importantly, she finds a gendered component to the Reformers’ debates over mysticism, and associates it with feminine passivity in [End Page 314] contrast with intellectual spirituality understood as active and gendered masculine (64). The volume’s contributors transition from the theory underpinning mysticism to a discussion of the language used to describe it. Their analysis is instructive to understanding the mentalities that animated church reform and confessionalization. Two pieces, one by Kees Schepers and the other by Alison Shell, broach this topic. In both cases, language was critical to forming identity and praxis among Reformation-era mystics. For example, Schepers observes the use of spatial metaphors. At the Saint Agnes Convent, detachment (Gelassenheit) appears in the sisters’ writings in conjunction with the language of attachment to Christ through the practice of a “self-annihilation” characteristic of imitatio Christi. Schepers suggests that the use of the language of detachment-attachment was also politicized. The dual process of detachment from the world and fleshly desires and attachment to Christ was impossible barring a miracle. Although circular, church and lay grandees asserted that mystical union with Christ demonstrated the veracity of the Catholic faith, and thus mysticism became a puissant tool in confessionalization. On the theme of language, Shell perceives a link between the mystical tradition and the Psalms. Mystics found Scriptural warrant for their ecstasies in the soaring passion of the Psalmists’ verse. In addition, the gendered language of the mystical experience was often eroticized. For the mystic, to attach to Christ was to become one with him. As Franz Eybl notes, this understanding of attachment was particularly poignant for Catholics whose Eucharistic theology held erotic overtones of union with Christ’s body through communicating with the elements. Indeed, as Eybl observes, the passion evoked within the communicant was described as fire, a burning and consuming heat. For churchmen, however, the female communicant-mystic could be at odds with male authority, and by extension, Church hierarchy. Kristen Christensen, in her analysis of mystic Maria van Hout (d. 1547), finds such an example. If one with Christ, the female communicant was empowered to speak by virtue of his divine body coursing through her veins. And with transubstantiation the most tauted of theological distinctives during the Reformation, the weight of the conundrum that Catholic mystics posed was significant indeed. According to Arthur Marotti, Sarah Apetrei, and Genelle Gertz, mysticism was a popular outlet for many who perceived that its relative disadvantages with respect to...