Entertainment / Literature / Mystics: In the word's most general sense, mystics are religious visionaries who experience divine insights. In medieval scholarship, the term 'mystics' or 'mystic writers' is often used as a collective term for a group of late fourteenth-century and early fifteenth-century eremites in England who wrote mystical works in Middle English and Latin. These include the anchoress Julian of Norwich, who wrote The Book of Showings, the illiterate mystic Margery Kempe, who dictated her autobiography The Book of Margery Kempe to two scribes, Richard Rolle, the author of 'Love is Love that Lasts for Aye', and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. On the continent, other famous mystics include Saint Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen, and Saint Francis of Assissi. The mystic writers are marked by the use of vivid (and sometimes confusing) imagery, intense emotional pathos (in the case of Margery Kempe), paradox (in the case of Richard Rolle), and an intense desire to verbalize what is largely a nonverbal experience (in the case of nearly every mystic). Mystics--regardless of religious background--are often marked by an experience in which they perceive the universe as a unity or in which they feel a sense of being one with the divine. We see signs of this tendency in Julian of Norwich's vision of Christ's blood, which transforms into raindrops falling from the side of a roof and then in turn transforms into the scales on a herring, as if God's physical form were embodied in the entire universe.
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