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- This research project will generate new critical work on the Cloud corpus in response to major developments in the understanding of late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century religious culture in England over the last twenty years, paying especially close attention to the theology and rhetoric of the five minor treatises which have been particularly neglected.
- Using a codicological methodology, it will examine the fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century manuscripts of the Cloud-corpus, thinking through the implications of the texts they are copied alongside, and exploring their environments of reception and circulation.
- Innovatively, the project will also approach the Cloud-corpus as a major component of a broader English apophatic tradition, additionally comprising the Latin and vernacular writings of the late fifteenth-century Carthusian, Richard Methley, the Middle English translations of the apophatic continental mystics, Marguerite Porete, Jan Ruusbroec, Hugh of Balma, and Heinrich Suso, and a number of contemplative compilations and miscellanies.
- Work is badly needed to assess the number of manuscripts of Pseudo-Dionysius’s works in medieval English libraries in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, along with commentaries and sermons on Pseudo-Dionysius’s writings by Thomas Gallus, Hugh of St Victor, John Sarracenus, Robert Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, and it is unknown to what extent these Latin texts continued to circulate and to be recopied.
- Equally, while the oeuvre of the twelfth-century Victorine authors, Hugh and Richard, is often cited as a contemplative influence upon the Cloud-author, Richard Rolle and others, more work is needs to define their particular brand of apophatic theology (often conveyed through cataphatic structures), to ascertain to what degree these Victorine texts were available in late medieval England, and to understand how they were being read. The findings from these bibliographical investigations will enable us to sketch the perimeters and distinctive traits of an English apophatic tradition.