The Faculty of Theology and Religion warmly congratulates Professor Jane Shaw on being awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship to support the completion of her forthcoming book, Seeking Infinity: Mystics in the Modern World, which explores the revival of medieval (and other) mystics in the early twentieth century.
Most histories of religion in the modern period have looked at institutional elements – such as reduced attendance at worship and the decay of traditional beliefs – and have arrived at a conclusion of decline. Professor Shaw’s project tells a different story based on people’s search for an authentic spirituality beyond the institutional, through the recovery of the medieval and other mystics who promised a direct relationship with the divine.
Spiritual seekers, looking for a viable faith and a way of assuaging their thirst for the divine, were the instigators of this revival, including Evelyn Underhill – the first woman to lecture on theology at the University of Oxford – whose seminal book Mysticism (1911) was the most significant work on the subject in the early twentieth century.
The book (contracted to Penguin Allen Lane) will trace those who wrote about the mystics and produced modern editions of their texts, and the ways in which the revival influenced the work of writers, artists, anti-imperialists and pacifists. It will show how people began to think of mysticism as the essence of all religions, transcending time, religious particularities and culture, and will also demonstrate that being "spiritual but not religious" (a phrase we so often hear today) was initially an early twentieth-century phenomenon rather than a product of the 1960s.
Professor Shaw has also been awarded a Fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, where she will spend part of the academic year working on her book.
