Excommunication in Thirteenth-century England: Communities, Politics, and Publicity

spective on late-medieval and early-modern elaborations on the classical conceptions of the sensorium, or the long philosophical developments that influenced and possibly led to the idea of revelation in these periods of English history. The quasi-univocal nature of Davis’ religious approach to ravishment and divine revelation to the human senses is certainly compelling, and would have been even more so had he also showed the classical and non-religious components in the long process that led to these ideas. The most important aspect of Davis’ work, though, is its relevance to the present revival in the interest within academic circles of the ways in “God’s communication with human beings” (p. 153), leading to a “reinvigorated... study of testimonial claims of transcendent experiences” (p. 193). Opposing the philosophical/secular lexica to the religious discourses, both in the seventeenth century and today, Davis in fact refers to the “important blind spots within contemporary western thought” (p. 194), and to the “intellectual arrogance that is common in every age” (p. 194). This historical, compelling and fascinating excursus into raptus is therefore supported by the author’s religious endorsement of ravishment, conceived as a moment of divine revelation to the human cognition, and is clearly rooted in a genuine “chastising [of] our own society’s inflated confidence about what we think we know” (p. 194). Davis’ sincere endorsement of this understanding that modern “scholarship provides a framework for accounts of divine experience, even immediate revelation, to be taken seriously in our own day” (p. 194), is not only refreshing, but points to a full-hearted acceptance of the fact that academic scholarship is always already a matter of personal affairs.