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.