Outputs

  • Doctoral thesis 
  • collaborative monograph, co-written by the project leader and senior researcher, provisionally titled The English Apophatic Tradition in Late Medieval England
  • Scholarly articles by team members addressing some of the more focused areas of investigation.
  • An international conference held during the third year of the project. Bearing the title ‘The Cloud-author and the English Apophatic Tradition’, the conference is envisaged as a key part of this project’s collaborative endeavour. Crucially, very little large scale work has taken place on the Cloud-corpus for over twenty years, and a newer generation of scholars has yet to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by the foundational scholars of the 1980s and 90s. The conference will actively seek to stimulate new research on this corpus, and will solicit contributions from a number of early- and mid-career scholars working in the field of vernacular religious writing, and from prestigious keynote speakers with a track record in vernacular mysticism. The conference will be interdisciplinary, engaging contributors from the domains of English medieval studies, medieval theology and philosophy, and medieval ecclesiastical and intellectual history. 
  • ‘Companion’ volume of essays on the Cloud-author, seeking both to replicate the success of similar volumes on Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Medieval English Mysticism, but also to update the aims and concerns of such a volume in relation to the 2020s. In order to give a coherent shape to the volume, some contributors will be invited directly to write essays on specific topics, while others may be selectively drawn from the international conference in response to some of the most pressing or innovative themes to emerge. This volume will have the potential to be wide-ranging geographically, temporally and thematically.
  • public interdisciplinary conversation with psychologists, therapists and spiritual directors, designed to attract a broad public audience beyond the academy. Fascinatingly, the techniques of the Cloud-author seem to chime with contemporary spiritual needs and practices much more than the affective and imaginative meditations that exercised such a strong hold in the late Middle Ages, possibly because of the largely implicit character of their Christology – they appear easily transferable to spheres of practice outside Christian doctrinal adherence. A number of popular contemporary religious and psychological practices (mindfulness, Christian centering prayer, some schools of Buddhist meditation etc.), advocate techniques of self-kenosis, the setting aside of thoughts and imaginations, and the use of a repetitive, one-syllable prayer word, in ways that apparently share much in common with the ‘work’ elaborated within the Cloud-corpus. This event would bring the team into conversation with the psychologists, therapists and spiritual directors who advocate such techniques in an attempt to determine why they exercise such a strong contemporary hold. The conversation would aim to share points of commonality (while retaining an appropriate sense of the historical and textual specificity of this corpus and tradition), and to hear about the practice of these techniques within experiential and therapeutic milieux. It would be hoped that a media report, and possibly a co-written article or video, might emerge from this engagement.
  • Interim results will be presented in years 2-4 of the project by the team at the major international medieval conferences, and through presentations to interdisciplinary centres of medieval and early modern studies in Switzerland. 
  • A customized webpage hosted by the University of Lausanne, providing information about the project for the international medieval community, and a Twitter feed. The team will post regular blogs offering accessible write-up of aspects of their ongoing research, they will also invite guest blogs by other scholars in the field.