About the Book

A Journey into Love: Meditating with Piers Plowman is a small gathering of passages from the fourteenth-century poem, Piers Plowman, with brief commentary and thoughtful questions for private meditation or group discussion, and with beautiful photographic illustrations from art and architecture which are from the poet's own time.  The poem, a masterpiece of English literature, is now little known to the people for whom it was presumably written--those who want new insight into how to "do well" and come to know God as Love.  Written well before the Reformation, it belongs to both Catholics and Protestants because they had not yet divided; it praises Jews and hopes for the salvation of all people.

Its spirituality is peculiarly apt for our time because of its biblical, liturgical, and non-sexist character, its affirmation of nature, the body, and marriage, its emphasis upon the need for social justice, its ethics centered in love, and its extraordinarily beautiful language.  Its tones range from the earthy to the sublime, the comic to the poignant.  It reflects in vivid metaphors upon the deepest religious mysteries, such as the nature of God, the Trinity, the natures of Jesus, and the indwelling of Divinity in the human heart, without over-simplification or sentimentality.  Its sense of God is of an infinitely merciful Being searching the world for those who are lost.  Filled with word-play, plays on sound and logic, the original Middle English is here translated into modern English by the author.

Readers who find help in Julian of Norwich or Hildegarde of Bingen, in Eckhart or Tauler, will be introduced here to another medieval master of the spiritual life whose teaching is a journey into love.

Reviews:

"…a help in meditation and spirituality for anyone who is trying to live a better life… Those who appreciate the book’s content will also be wrapped up in its illustrations." – Neighbors Magazine 

"‘a joy to look at and beautiful to handle.’…It was a pleasure to open it and feast the eyes on what it had to offer… a delightful book to be read and pondered and gone bak to over and over again. It would provide good reading during a time of retreat but could be dipped into at any time." – Tom Jordan, Spirituality Journal

"…the most recent jewel I discovered… for the meditative and contemplative among us… It stops our hurrying. It calls for thoughtfulness." – Anne Marie Mongoven, Spectrum 

About the Author

Mary Clemente Davlin, O. P., is a Sinsinawa Dominican Sister and an emerita professor of English at Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois. She has written two other books on Piers Plowman: A Game of Heuene: Word Play and the Meaning of Piers Plowman B (Boydell and Brewer, 1989) and The Place of God in Piers Plowman and Medieval Art (Ashgate, 2001), and numerous journal articles. In addition to teaching, she gives workshops and retreats on the spirituality of the poem.