If we think about the authors whose texts or books we read as compagnons de route, Michael Sargent has travelled long distances with Walter Hilton. Michael's 2017 EETS edition of Book II of the Scale of Perfection and his meticulous work on the manuscript tradition and reception of the Scale will be consulted by scholars for decades to come. Hilton's Scale is one of ‘those Middle English works that survive in large numbers of manuscripts’, as with its forty-nine extant copies it comes in eighth place in the list offered by Sargent, who points out that ‘we might critically deduce from the mere numbers not the “popularity or importance” in any direct, absolute sense, but at least the size of the possible readership’. It would be inaccurate to say that there is a contrast between this large number of surviving manuscripts and the scholarly attention that Hilton has received over the last decades, as Hilton's works have all been edited, and his works have been studied by, among others, Helen Gardner, Stan Hussey, John Clark and Michael Sargent, and anyone approaching a text by Hilton stands on the shoulders of these giants. I do believe it is accurate, however, to say that Hilton, in spite of having a faithful band of scholarly admirers, deserves even more visibility, both as an author and as a spiritual adviser. In addition, I felt that, as a scholar, but also as a reader, I did not know Hilton enough, and decided to set out and reread his texts. In this essay, I embark upon this journey, focusing on Hilton's earliest Latin letters, De imagine peccati and Epistola de utilitate et prerogativis religionis.

It is debatable whether, for scholars of literature, it is still allowed to look for the author in the work. Yet it is also undisputable that we, as scholars, are also readers, and that we may enjoy and be captivated by a text that we also analyse and contextualize. As texts are written by people, we read and hear their voices in the texts. For instance, when I read Julian of Norwich's A Revelation of Love, I can write an essay about how exactly she talks about illness and pain in the text, and about how pain becomes a metaphor for sin without losing its literal meaning.