After a longer than anticipated break in the series, the eighth Exeter Symposium took place at Charney Manor in Oxfordshire, between 17 and 20 July 2011. The twelve papers that formed the basis for discussions at the Symposium are collected here.

As always, the canonical ‘Middle English Mystics’ are represented: indeed, there is a ‘full house’ of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, the Cloud-author, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. The volume begins with Vincent Gillespie's exploration of light, colour and sight in Julian of Norwich. Over the past twenty years, literary scholars have been demonstrating the possibilities of medieval optical theory as an interpretative angle on Middle English poetry, but (even though contemplatio is at root a matter of looking) Gillespie's is the first sustained and detailed attempt to bring perspectival optics, theories of intromission and extramission (and various syntheses of the two), and distinctions between light as it is perceived and the transcendent Light, to one of our mystical authors. Julian, not for the first time, emerges as an extraordinarily well-informed, as well as theologically and philosophically subtle, thinker.

Gillespie's occasional collaborator in work on Julian (including the important and ever-stimulating essay on ‘The Apophatic Image’ in MMTE V), Maggie Ross, writes on beholding, a word often used as a thoughtless synonym for seeing, but which, in its biblical and medieval usage, indicates more than that, a kind of silent and reverent receptivity.