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.

Arthur F. Marotti is a Professor at Wayne State University, USA

Contents: Introductory Note; The Spiritval Exercises of the most vertvovs and religious D. Gertrvde More of the holy Order of S. Bennet and English Congregation of our Ladies of Comfort in Cambray, she called them. Amor ordinem nescit. And Ideots deuotions. Her only Spiritual Father and Directour the Ven. Fa. Baker stiled them. Confessiones Amantis. A Louers Confessions. (1658).