Steven Rozenski, Wisdom’s Journey: Continental Mysticism and Popular Devotion in England, 1350–1650. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022, 330 pp., 7 b/w ill.

What type of literary text was most popular with English-language readers in the late Middle Ages and well into the early modern era? To judge from the number of surviving manuscripts and early print editions, the answer is, didactic works, including guidebooks to devotion, the focus of this important new study. Up to now, as explained by the Steven Rozenski, this enormous class of works has been relatively neglected in the scholarship and teaching of medieval English literature in favor of genres more congenial to contemporary taste, such as the secular romance (1).