The Cloud Of Unknowing And Other Works by Anonymous

Paperback: In the fourteenth century there was a great flourishing of religious writings in English, both orthodox and heretical. Many of these works focused on Christ’s Passion and humanity, whereas The Cloud of Unknowing describes an abstract, transcendent God beyond human knowledge and human language.

The Cloud of Unknowing (2001) is a unique and enigmatic masterpiece of medieval English mysticism. It calls for intense contemplation, motivated by love and stripped of all thought, as the way to the Divine. Yet the author's powerfully concrete language is deliberately at odds with this spiritual doctrine, creating a rich work full of intriguing contradictions that speaks to us with liveliness and wit today.

The unknown author, thought to be a priest and Carthusian monk, is also believed to have written the other three works in this volume: The Mystical Theology of Saint Denis, The Book of Privy Counselling, and An Epistle on Prayer, which, together with The Cloud of Unknowing, are the four texts at the core of medieval mystical theology.

This Penguin Classics edition includes full explanatory notes, suggestions for further reading, an appendix that reproduces the Middle English text of a section of The Mystical Theology of Saint Denis, and an introduction that places the texts within the context of medieval religious writing.

This edition is translated with an introduction by A C Spearing.

About the author: The author of The Cloud of Unknowing and the group of writings associated with it chose to remain anonymous, but we can deduce that he was an English priest, and probably a Carthusian monk, who lived in the second half of the fourteenth century. In prose of poetic originality he taught ways to achieve union through love with a God whom he saw as totally transcendent, beyond the reach of human understanding and human language.

About the translator: A C Spearing is William R Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia and a Fellow of Queens' College, Cambridge. He has published numerous books and articles on medieval literature, including books on dream-poetry, on the Gawain-poet, and The Medieval Poet as Voyeur. He wrote the introduction and notes for Elizabeth Spearing's Penguin Classics translation of Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love.