This thesis focuses on the spiritual pedagogy of the anonymous fourteenth-century Cloud-author, the least studied of the great spiritual writers who flourished in late medieval England. This author teaches an extreme form of ‘apophatic’ contemplative practice that involves a suspension of the intellectual and cognitive faculties in order to encounter God. The thesis explores the original and surprising ways that the Cloud-author reinvents traditional pedagogic techniques to guide his disciples in this practice, which is highly individualised, theologically specialised, and consequently, a complex subject to teach. Scholarship on the Cloud has primarily focused on its author’s uncompromising resistance to ‘positive’ or ‘cataphatic’ forms of spiritual thought, technique, and even language in contemplative practice, and my thesis builds upon the work of Vincent Gillespie, Maggie Ross, Bernard McGinn, Daniel McCann and Eleanor Johnson, all of whom focus primarily on the Cloud-author’s apophaticism. My work here takes an alternative perspective, as it demonstrates his highly original, paradoxically practical and even ‘un-apophatic’ engagement with longstanding models for teaching.

The first chapter of the thesis explores the Cloud-author’s reconceptualization of the Classical and medieval rhetorical triad of ‘natura, doctrina, and usus’—originally a training model for public declamation—which the Cloud-author reconceives as a subtly but completely transformed framework for teaching contemplation, reformulated in Middle English as ‘disposicioun, techyng, and profe’. This chapter argues that this nuanced reworking reveals the author to be a self-conscious and self-theorising pedagogue who uses the triad to offer new descriptions of the contemplative’s pursuit of the divine. In my second chapter, I focus on the Cloud-author’s dynamic development of the medieval dialogue tradition, which includes texts such as Augustine’s Soliloquies, the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, and Aelred of Rievaulx’s Dialogue on the Soul, as well as later ‘simulated dialogues’ in the anonymous Ancrene Wisse, the Latin Franciscan Meditationes Vitae Christi, and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection. I suggest that the Cloud-author develops his own distinctive version of the pedagogic dialogue format to simulate the effects of an imagined contact situation: I explore his use of questions, humorous speech, the opportunity for pupil objection, and even surprise appropriations of the pupil’s words. This not only brings surprisingly ‘positive’ forms of humour and vitality to the difficult work of apophatic contemplation, but also emulates for his readers a sense of participatory learning in an otherwise very solitary process. In my third chapter, I consider the author’s engagement with monastic and devotional epistolary culture, namely the eleventh- and twelfth-century Latin letters of Bernard of Clairvaux and Anselm of Bec, along with those of the Cloud-author’s contemporary, Walter Hilton. The Cloud-author uses the epistolary format rhetorically, I argue, not just as a practical solution to the problem of remote pedagogy, but also as a format that allows him to simulate the ‘scene’ of one-to-one pedagogy, delivering careful observation and personalised counsel, which are built up over time through ongoing epistolary exchanges. Finally, my fourth chapter is a case-study in the reception of the author’s pedagogy. It explores what happens when the Cloud is read and translated into Latin in the fifteenth century by the Carthusian and contemplative Richard Methley. Methley is in many ways the Cloud-author’s ideal imagined pupil, and Methley’s reworking of the text transforms it into something far more affective, and in many ways at odds with its author’s fundamental teachings. Methley’s Caligo reveals a complex and contradictory reception history for the text and its pedagogy, in keeping with the new and fraught religious context of the fifteenth century.