Of all the excellent courses I took while an undergraduate at Columbia University, the best of all was Marilyn Harran's class on mysticism, taught at Barnard College. I was familiar with the adage that says mysticism begins rather misty and ends in schism, but this course was so much more than that, with consideration of the inadequacies of language in describing what may be direct experience of the divine, of how mystics did and did not anticipate the Protestant Reformation, of how mysticism crosses religious boundaries, and yet of how it may also strengthen or bolster particular religious traditions.

The book under review here is no less engaging. It was originally a dissertation submitted in both theology (Leuven) and literature (Antwerp), and is a fascinating case study of 162 sermons from a monastery of canonesses following the rule of Saint Augustine, sermons dating to the years ca. 1540–70, before the Dutch town of Arnhem, where the canonesses lived, mandated Protestant reform. Ineke Cornet shows how the mystical path from purification to illumination to union with God was a focus of these sermons, preached over the course of the liturgical year, in conjunction with the readings assigned for each day. All four senses of scripture, as distinguished by medieval exegetes (history, allegory, morality, anagogy), were utilized. The Mass itself was also a subject for the sermons, especially the Eucharistic prayer and the transformation of bread and wine into what was believed to be the body and blood of Christ. This transubstantiation of the bread and wine was presented as in some way comparable to the change that happens in a person who experiences union with God.

Union was also described as both a gift from God and as something requiring preparation, through imitation of Christ in various ways. There was a strong emphasis on receptivity and waiting for God, though not necessarily as passivity. Cornet points out that the sermons were not Quietist (259), though they were apophatic in speaking of God as hidden and beyond images. Yet multiple ways of depicting or imagining union filled the sermons: a becoming like God, a dwelling in God, a being eaten by Christ, a marriage with Christ, a giving birth to Christ. Several of these discourses had a distinctly feminine resonance, and the sermons may even have been preached by one of the sisters outside Mass. Cornet makes clear that the identity of the author(s) of these sermon manuscripts remains undecided.

Though some versions of Christian mysticism may see direct experience of God as unrelated to sacraments or celebration of liturgy, this study deals with sermons assuming that mystical experiences may well occur during liturgy, especially Mass, if God so wills it. For the sisters at Arnhem, their long hours in choir, at Mass, and in praying the Divine Office were depicted as not only official, communal worship, but also as a context and occasion God might well use to draw some into closer union with himself, a union that could include enjoyment of God, rest in God, and God indwelling in the human being. Cornet demonstrates multiple influences on the sermons, including the mystical writings of Ruusbroec, Eckhart, and Tauler. In the Netherlands, St. Agnes monastery also lay within the intellectual orbit of Cologne, and Cornet shows connections between ideas developed at St. Agnes and those at the Carthusian house in Cologne.

One thing missing in this study is any significant effort to place the sermons studied in the context of other preaching in sixteenth-century Europe, Catholic or Protestant. It is a topic on which serious studies have been published: one could thus ask how distinctive the Arnhem sermons were for that era. This book's subtitle speaks of “the context of Catholic Reform,” but does not explain how reform was a theme or goal of the sermons except perhaps for the individual reform or conversion of their hearers. Or does “Catholic Reform” here stand simply for what was not Protestant? That would seem a rather impoverished notion of sixteenth-century Catholicism in the Netherlands. This volume is, however, well worth the attention of historians of religious culture, of Dutch literature, of female religious life, of early modern Catholicism, of spirituality, and of preaching. It may well stimulate further careful study of heretofore largely unknown sources for such topics.