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Augustine Baker (1575–1641) and the English Mystical Tradition

1975; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0022046900046297

1469-7637

David Lunn,

Early Modern Women Writers

The importance of Augustine Baker in the history of English devotional literature has long been recognised, but there has always been a major handicap to any proper understanding of him—the fact that most of his works have not been published, except in a onevolume digest, entitled Sancta Sophia , which one of his disciples, Serenus Cressy, produced in 1657. Thus Baker has recently been the subject of a full-scale monograph, which, though otherwise scholarly and accurate enough, suffers from the fact that the author has not consulted the Baker MSS., and has, therefore, together with almost every other expert in this field of study, begun and ended his work without knowing whether Cressy's digest truly reproduces his master's voice. What follows is an attempt to answer this hitherto unanswered question by reconstructing the circumstances of the book's publication and by comparing it with some of the MSS. But first, some definitions.