This series facilitates new points of synergy and fresh theological engagements with Christian mystical traditions. Reflecting the plurality of theological approaches to Christian mystical theology, books in the series cover historical, literary, practical, and systematic perspectives as well as philosophical, psychological, and phenomenological methods.
Although the primary focus of the series is the Christian tradition, exploration of texts from other traditions also highlight the theological, psychological and philosophical questions that Christian mysticism brings to the fore.
Edited
By Sheila Gallagher, Lydia Shahan, Louise Nelstrop
July 25, 2025
This volume focuses on the interplay between metaphor, making and mysticism and sheds new light on the power of the metaphorical and creative dimensions of the mystical for the twenty-first century. It explores the ways a variety of mystical writers deal with metaphor and image by bringing together...
Edited
By Alexandra Verini, Abir Bazaz
December 18, 2024
This book opens up a dialogue between pre-modern women identified as mystics in diverse locations from South Asia to Europe. It considers how women from the disparate religious traditions of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity expressed devotion in parallel ways. The argument is that women’s ...
Edited
By John Arblaster, Rob Faesen
July 18, 2024
This book explores the rich and varied mystical writings by and about medieval – and a few early modern – women across Western Europe. Women had a profound and lasting impact on the development of medieval and early modern spiritual and mystical literature, both through their own writing and ...
Edited
By Edward Howells, Peter Tyler
April 12, 2024
This book explores the life and teaching of John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic who remains a major source of Western thought on spirituality, theology and mysticism. Leading academics discuss the importance and legacy of John from historical, theological, philosophical, pastoral, ecumenical, ...
By Robert Pelfrey
January 29, 2024
This book examines the theology of spiritual formation developed by fourteenth-century Flemish mystic John of Ruusbroec, arguing that his formational path clearly and consistently displays the characteristics of the archetypal narrative structure of the hero’s journey. To start with, a ...
By W. Ezekiel Goggin, Sean Hannan
September 25, 2023
This book argues that the rediscovery of mystical theology in nineteenth-century Germany not only helped inspire idealism and romanticism, but also planted the seeds of their overcoming by way of critical materialism. Thanks in part to the Neoplatonic turn in the works of J. G. Fichte, as well as ...
Edited
By Christopher C. H. Cook, Julienne McLean, Peter Tyler
December 12, 2019
In Mystical Theology and Contemporary Spiritual Practice several leading scholars explore key themes within the Christian mystical tradition, contemporary and historical. The overall aim of the book is to demonstrate the relevance of mystical theology to contemporary spiritual practice. Attention ...
By Louise Nelstrop
October 07, 2019
This book considers the place of deification in the writings of Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle, two of the fourteenth-century English Mystics. It argues that, as a consequence of a belief in deification, both produce writing that is helpfully viewed as sacred eloquence. The book begins by ...
By Ruben Angelici
August 21, 2019
This book offers Hugh of Saint Victor’s early scholastic thoughts on sacrament in order to re-discover the pre-modern theological understanding of ontological signification. The Christian understanding of sacrament through the category of ‘signs’ results in a theology that inherently shares in the ...
By George Pattison, Kate Kirkpatrick
December 05, 2018
At the time when existentialism was a dominant intellectual and cultural force, a number of commentators observed that some of the language of existential philosophy, not least its interpretation of human existence in terms of nothingness, evoked the language of so-called mystical writers. This ...
Edited
By John Arblaster, Rob Faesen
August 31, 2018
The notion of the deification of the human person (theosis, theopoièsis, deificatio) was one of the most fundamental themes of Christian theology in its first centuries, especially in the Greek world. It is often assumed that this theme was exclusively developed in Eastern theology after the ...
Edited
By Louise Nelstrop, Helen Appleton
June 14, 2018
From the visual and textual art of Anglo-Saxon England onwards, images held a surprising power in the Western Christian tradition. Not only did these artistic representations provide images through which to find God, they also held mystical potential, and likewise mystical writing, from the early ...