HMC Principal awarded Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship

 
​ Black and white photograph of a female. Head and shoulders shot.

HMC Principal Professor Jane Shaw

Black and white photograph of a female. Figure seated in a chair reading a book.

Evelyn Underhill, in a portrait hanging in the College

 

Harris Manchester College is delighted to announce that our Principal, Professor Jane Shaw, has been awarded a prestigious Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship to complete her new book, Seeking Infinity: Mystics in the Modern World, an exploration of the revival of medieval (and other) mystics in the early twentieth century.   

Most histories of religion in the modern period have looked at institutional elements – such as reduced attendance at worship – and have arrived at a conclusion of decline. Professor Shaw’s project tells a different story based on people’s search for an authentic spirituality beyond the institutional, through the recovery of mystics who promised a direct relationship with the divine.

Spiritual seekers, looking for a viable faith and a way of assuaging their thirst for the divine, were the instigators of this revival, most notably Evelyn Underhill, whose major book Mysticism (1911) was the most significant work on the topic in this period. Underhill will be a key figure in the book and has a connection to HMC: she was the first woman to lecture in theology at the University of Oxford when she gave the Upton Lectures on The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today at Manchester College in 1921-22.

The book (contracted to Penguin Allen Lane) will trace those who wrote about the mystics and produced modern editions of their texts, and the ways in which the revival influenced the work of writers, artists, anti-imperialists and pacifists. It will show how people began to think of mysticism as the essence of all religions, transcending time, religious particularities and culture, and will also demonstrate that being "spiritual but not religious" (a phrase we so often hear today) was initially an early twentieth-century phenomenon rather than a product of the 1960s.

Professor Shaw has also been awarded a Fellowship at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, and will spend part of the academic year in residence there working on her book.