It may seem unusual to begin a study of mysticism in early modern England with the life and work of the Catholic monk Augustine Baker, a mystic who spent large parts of his life on the Continent. Yet to understand the Protestant engagement with mysticism in England in the seventeenth century, it is vital to understand developments that occurred among English Catholics in exile. The two cannot be separated, nor indeed can one be understood without the other. The writings of Baker, as preserved by his loyal disciple Serenus Cressy, had an active and controversial afterlife in England among diverse Protestant groups. The posthumous digest of his teachings, published as Sancta Sophia in 1657, was the main driving force behind arguments over mysticism which occurred in England in the latter half of the seventeenth century, many of which we will return to in later chapters of this book. In order to reinforce the importance of Baker, we will begin with a brief overview of some of the Protestant readers of his doctrines.

Baker's Sancta Sophia was frequently cited by the Presbyterian divine Richard Baxter as part of a core of ‘true Papists’ who agreed with Protestants on the main doctrines of a holy life. He was one author Baxter frequently recommended as part of a canon of ‘Devotional Pious Writings of Papists’ which also included Francis de Sales, Thomas á Kempis and the Rule of Saint Benedict. These formed an ‘abundance of Fryars, and Nuns’ that, ‘though zealous for the Roman Concord’, were to be viewed as ‘godly excellent Persons’. Another reader of Baker was the Quaker Robert Barclay, whose Truth Triumphant (1692) used Baker as evidence of the fact that ‘the Name of Mysticks hath arisen, as of a Certain Sect generally commended by all’. The Anglican Edward Stephens, who published a stringent defence of Baker in 1697 that we will return to in Chapter 5, also lavished praise on the Benedictine monk. Manuscript citations were also frequent. Cambridge Platonist Henry More teased fellow scholar John Worthington over the latter's interest in Baker in a private letter from 1669. In response, Worthington admitted that Baker's mysticism was so pure and wholesome that ‘but few Protestants do better’.