SOURCE: Beale, Walter H. “Walter Hilton and the Concept of ‘Medled Lyf’.” American Benedictine Review 26, no. 4 (December 1975): 381-94.

In the following essay, Beale focuses on An Epistle of Mixed Life and explores its message regarding merging a contemplative life with the an active life.

Examining texts in the light of their traditions and historical backgrounds is an inherently risky business, because traditions and historical backgrounds are partly defined by the texts themselves. Thus texts that do not conform to the historian's conception of “tradition” are valuable in a special way, because they provide the opportunity for testing and reordering the larger historical conceptions which inform individual interpretation. Such a text is Walter Hilton's Middle English treatise, An Epistle of Mixed Life It invites reexamination of a medieval tradition of writings on the topic of “active and contemplative life,” where something of a reordering may be called for in...