Gertrude More

Gertrude More belongs to a tradition of mystical writers who believed in the value of the via negativa, a path to union with God by way of total self-abnegation and the emptying of the mind of set ideas and images. Her only book-length work, THE SPIRITVAL EXERCISES (Paris, 1658), is a collection of her writing assembled by Dom Augustine Baker, OSB, and published some thirty-three years after her death. Some of More's other verse and prose appears in the biography that Baker composed, but her SPIRITVAL EXERCISES remains the main text she has bequeathed to her order and to posterity. It is reprinted here in full with Arthur F. Marotti's introductory note outlining Gertrude More's life and work.