In 1649 Massachusetts minister Thomas Shepard published his Theses Sabbaticae, a work which reflected the importance of the Sabbath in New England Puritan religiosity. Yet in his opening remarks, Shepard complained that the ‘refined mystical divinity of the old Monks’ had been used to attack not only the Sabbath, but most of the doctrines of the New Testament, to the point they had been ‘allegorized and spiritualized out of the world’. Men now spoke of an inward Sabbath in Christ, the working of the ‘Inward word’ and an ‘inward Baptisme by the Holy Ghost’. They had been taught that a Christian must be ‘plunged, lost and swallowed up’ by those of ‘Monkish imaginations’, including Jacob Boehme, Nicholas of Cusa, Sebastian Franck, Raymond of Sebund, the Theologia Mystica of Pseudo-Dionysius and the anonymous Theologia Germanica. The influence of such ‘monk Admirers’ had also been felt in England. The third edition of John Wilkin's Ecclesiastes (1651), a work intended to furnish ministers with the skills of preaching, included a new list on mysticism. He warned of those ‘stiled Mysticall Divines’ who ‘pretend to some higher illuminations… for a more intimate and comfortable communion with God’. The writings of Teresa of Avila, Boehme, John Tauler, Francis de Sales, and John of Ruysbroeck had been ‘much cryed up and followed’ in previous years, but contained ‘little of substance… more plainly and intelligibly delivered by others’. In 1659 the Church of England apologist John Gauden complained of the variety of dangerous doctrines espoused by ‘mysterious Mountebanks’ who had drawn on the doctrines of Teresa of Avila, the Theologia Germanica, Hendrik Niclaes, Boehme and Pseudo-Dionysius. These men had plagued England by leaving the ‘fruitfull valleys and plain paths’ of simple Christianity, and had instead ‘turned Chymist in Divinity, & Allegorist in Religion’.

In Chapter 1 we explored the influence of many of these ‘monkish’ authors in the writings and doctrines of the Benedictine Augustine Baker. Even in a monastic setting, where we might expect a more ‘traditional’ enthusiasm for mysticism to be fostered, the pressure placed on Baker and his followers revealed a growing scepticism towards mystical experience and the threat to orthodoxy some believed it posed. This chapter moves on to explore enthusiasm towards mysticism in Protestant England in the mid-seventeenth century.