Vittoria Feola, The uses of German mystical texts in Elias Ashmole's collections and milieus: the languages of enthusiasm in Interregnum England, in Torrance Kirby and Douglas Hedley eds., The Reception of German Mysticism in Early Modern England (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2024).

This essay aims to show that the word ‘mysticism’ in seventeenth-century editions of German mystical texts in Interregnum England is more problematic than has been regarded so far. The first case study considers the polemic between George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, and the Society of Astrologers of London, whose patron was the antiquary and amateur natural philosopher Elias Ashmole (1617-92). While Fox’s mysticism can be regarded as in line with common understandings of the term, namely, the search for union with God through the spiritual senses, in the Society’s editions of mystical works, ‘mysticism’ was used as synonymous with ‘rational’. The second case study considers Ashmole’s edition of a Paracelsian alchemical work, the Way to Bliss, which he published in London in 1658 together with John Everard’s annotations at the same time as John Heydon brought out the same work without Everard’s gloss. The analysis of these two competing publications shows that Ashmole meant his own as the rational one against Heydon’s sensationalistic one. Both case studies, therefore, demonstrate the need to relate mysticism to the roots of the Enlightenment debate about enthusiasm, which began earlier than is usually thought, and which would benefit from a careful analysis of word usage.