The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism by Samuel Fanous

My newly published article in Women’s Writing argues that this construct has been highly damaging to the study of these ‘English mystics’ and calls for a wider awareness of the confessional origins of a term which is common currency in contemporary studies. Widely accepted and arguably overused, it is a phrase which has a suspect history, one which originates in studies of ‘mysticism’ written before the 1970s. One of the most noticeable is the concept of a group of ‘medieval English mystics’. Yet this earlier approach to the Reformation has left scars in several areas of historiography. Scholarly attention has now shifted from why and when to how England became a Protestant nation, a new nuanced direction in the study of a ‘long Reformation’. Scarisbrick and Eamon Duffy (among others) this narrative has been substantially revised, the vitality of the pre-Reformation English Church reinstated, and the continuation of Catholicism in England addressed (although not all of them agree on what form this continuation took!). Aveling, John Bossy, Christopher Haigh, J.J. Confessional stances and ideological viewpoints had generated a history of religion in England in which the country was Catholic, then suddenly Protestant. The history of pre-Reformation England was largely left to be written by members of the Catholic religious orders, and the history of Catholicism in England after the Reformation was, in the words of Alexandra Walsham, ‘a subfield, if not a ghetto occupied by the ancestors of those who had suffered for their faith’. Until that point the history of Protestantism was almost exclusively written by Protestants and dominated by the ‘whig’ narrative of progress the Reformation was characterised as the ‘midwife delivering England from the Dark Ages, papal and ecclesiastical tyranny to the threshold of modernity’, to borrow a phrase from Ian Hazlett.

Before the 1970s the study of the history of religion in England was bound by a ‘confessional straightjacket’.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Mysticism by Samuel Fanous