Three Mediæval Mystics by Evelyn Underhill

I. "THE MIRROR OF SIMPLE SOULS"

I. _The Mirror of Simple Souls_ -- a rare work on the spiritual life, of which manuscripts exist in the British Museum, the Bodleian, and one or two other public libraries -- has so far received little or no attention from students of religious literature. Yet it may turn out to possess great importance, as one of the missing links in the history of English mysticism: for it is a middle-English translation, made at the close of the fourteenth century or beginning of the fifteenth, of the lost work of a French thirteenth-century mystic. It shows, therefore, that the common View of French medieval religion as unmystical needs qualification; and further indicates a path by which the contemplative tradition of western Europe reached England and affected the development of our native mystical school.