Experiencing God in Late Medieval and Early Modern England demonstrates that experiences of divine revelation, both biblical and contemporary, were central to late medieval and early modern English religion. The book sheds light on previously under-explored notions about divine revelation and the role these notions played in shaping large portions of English thought and belief. Bringing together a wide variety of source materials, from contemplative works and accounts of revelatory experiences to biblical commentaries, devotionals, and religious imagery, David J. Davis argues that in the period there was a collective representation of divine revelation as a source of human knowledge, which transcended other religious and intellectual divisions. Not only did most people think that divine revelation, through a ravishing encounter with God, was possible, but also divine revelation was understood to be the pinnacle of religious experience and a source of pure understanding. The book highlights a common discourse running through the sources that underpinned this collective representation of how human beings experienced the divine, and it demonstrates a continual effort across large swathes of English religion to prepare an individual's soul for an encounter with the divine, through different spiritual disciplines and devotional practices. Over a period of several centuries this discourse and the larger culture of revelation provided an essential structure and legitimacy both to contemporary claims of divine revelation and the biblical precedents that contemporary experiences were modelled after. This discourse detailed the physical, metaphysical, and epistemological features of how a human being was understood to experience divine revelation, providing a means to delimit and define what happened when an individual was rapture by God. Finally, the book situates the experience of revelation within the wider context of knowledge and identifies the ways that claims to divine revelation were legitimated as well as stigmatized based on this common understanding of the experience of rapture.

About the Author
David J. Davis is Associate Professor of History at Houston Baptist University. He specializes in early modern religious culture and intellectual history, and his publications include two books on early modern religious images as well as numerous articles, chapters, and essays on the English Reformation and the history of the book in Britain. He teaches courses in European history in the History Department at HBU and is a faculty member in the Honours College.

Reviews
Poetry and illustrations-abundant in this book-offer a valuable gauge for considering how people imagined the divine and divine communication, that is, not in opposition to the new challenging discoveries in science or mathematics, but rather as integrating them into a new whole. * Choice *
This outstanding work... deserves a strong reception that should inspire continued study in this important area of experiencing God through immediate revelation. * Tom Schwanda, Journal Of Ecclesiastical History *



Book Information
ISBN 9780198834137
Author David J. Davis
Format Hardback
Page Count 238
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 520g
Dimensions(mm) 241mm * 262mm * 20mm