In the last chapter, we explored the way that medieval monastic thinkers understood the ideal process of meditation and prayer. But, in practice, did monks and nuns really engage in straightforward, progressive ascents towards God through prayer and meditation? How did medieval monks and nuns actually experience their meditative and prayerful efforts in their lives?

When considering the category of religious “experience,” many medievalists and scholars of religion reach directly for their collections of late medieval mystical writings, equating religious “experience” with ecstatic union, rapture, and mystical “vision.” Many deem ineffability and passivity to be the only signs of “genuine” religious experience, since this quality was particularly important to William James, who famously described “religious experience” as an encounter with the divine that happens to a subject, rather than one instigated by them. While James’ idea does reflect the medieval Christian notion of grace (which medieval monastics thought was bestowed upon a devotee as an unsolicited gift from God), it also exposes a bias against the cultivation and instigation of religious experiences—a bias that seems to have infiltrated modern scholarship as well. The regulated and prescribed nature of the medieval liturgy, for instance, or other devotional celebrations externally “imposed” by the medieval Church, are regularly seen by scholars as a kind of institutional mind control (as opposed to spontaneous experience) of the devotee. Moreover, with a few key exceptions, those authorities doing the prescribing of religious practice and the writing of devotional scripts in medieval society—clerics, theologians, and, most important for our purposes, abbots and monks—are questioned as “experiencers” of religion themselves. Part of this is because abbots and monks are often depicted by scholars as manipulative authoritarians, more interested in controlling their audiences with their regulations than feeling authentically connected to their own ideas. But it is also because, with the influence of social and cultural history, medieval historians often wrongly separate sources for reli gious “experience” from theological productions of the institutional Church, mischaracterizing experience as the domain of extra-institutional individuals in medieval society, and leading to a “dichotomous still-life picture with often inherently judgmental or devaluative underpinnings.”