“The staggering erudition of McGinn’s latest volume is no surprise, nor is the lucidity of his expositions of the vernacular mysticisms that flourished in the Low Countries, Italy and England in the late middle ages. What dawns on you as you progress through McGinn’s magisterial retrieval of fourteenth and fifteenth century developments in ‘mystical theology’ is how seriously Ruusbroec, Catherine of Siena, Julian of Norwich and a host of lesser figures have to be taken as theologians. Much more than a history of western Christian mysticism, this volume calls for and supplies a major revaluation of theology in the late medieval Christian church.”