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The Mysticism of Augustine Baker, OSB: A Reconsideration

ABSTRACT Augustine Baker (1575–1641), an Anglo-Welsh Benedictine in the post-Tridentine era, is remembered for the ‘saintliness’ portrayed in the posthumous digest of his mystical doctrines, Sancta Sophia (1657). This article argues that Sancta Sophia disguised much of what made Baker controversial during his own lifetime, subsequently misleading scholars engaging with Baker's life and doctrines. In order to resolve this problem, this article returns to Baker's original manuscript sources, as well as those of his followers and critics. By exploring these works, it suggests that Baker's critics were right to challenge the potential disruptions his mysticism could bring to the Continental convents of English Benedictine nuns, with Baker himself advocating that inner mystical experience stood above the influence of convent confessors. While Sancta Sophia explained these criticisms away as ‘jealousy,’ it is argued here that they were, rather, the product of deeper anxieties concerning power and control within early-modern Catholic convents.