In seventeenth-century France, Madame Guyon wrote about the concept of "pure love." "Love pure and holy, is a deathless fire," she wrote, and is "ethereal fare." Her popular books spread quickly through Europe and the New World, drawing the attention of Louis XIV and the court at Versailles. The Inquisition attacked her writing and concepts, resulting in her decade long incarceration, including years in the Bastille. Archbishop F nelon defended Guyon while the leading cleric, Bishop Bossuet, demanded that the Vatican condemn F nelon and Guyon as heretics. A contemporaneous historian wrote a history of the "Great Conflict" between Guyon, Bossuet, F nelon, and the Vatican entitled Supplement to the Life of Madame Guyon, which is regarded as having been written in the eighteenth-century. Professor Nancy C. James's translation of this manuscript from the Bodleian Library at Oxford University is featured in this book, coupled with an analysis of the powerful theology of Guyon that influenced both the growth of the Quakers and Romanticism. This history addresses roots of our social conflicts as individual consciences struggle against destructive political power.

Guyon's theology and spiritual writing opened new doors to people from all walks of life who yearned for spiritual joy and wisdom. These new translations include her popular "A Short and Easy Method of Prayer," as well as her biblical commentary on the Song of Songs, where poetic imagery comes to life with its refreshing sense of God's desire to join with all humanity. Guyon always writes of the pure love of God, like a human kiss, that leads to the fulfilling union with the divine. "The Complete Madame Guyon" also presents examples of her passionate poetry, some of which has never before been translated into English. Guyon expresses the range of feelings involved with living in a relationship with God and her ideas about the real involvement of the divine within the human heart. Nancy James's historical introduction explains the events of Guyon's life first as an aristocratic wife and mother of five, and later as a widow traveling around Europe as an author, who ended up incarcerated in the Bastille by the direct order of Louis XIV. Guyon suffered ten years of incarceration, along with accusations of heresy. Cleared of all of charges at the end of her life, in all of her writing Madame Guyon testified to the goodness and holiness of God.

"Thanks to Nancy James's scholarly labors, Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Mothe, more widely known as Madame Guyon (1648-1717) will hopefully become a household word, at least among students of mysticism. By no means an uncontroversial thinker, twice imprisoned for her allegedly heretical ideas, and defended by one bishop (Fenelon) and attacked by another (Bossuet), Madame Guyon's ideas, especially her concept of self-annihilation in the soul's union with God, will likely arouse challenge, even today. We owe Dr. James an enormous debt for her translation of Madame Guyon's works and popularization of her ideas. Through Dr. James's work we can gain insights into not only mystical theology but also seventeenth-century French secular and ecclesiastical politics."
-- Dr. Peter C. Phan, The Ignacio Ellacuria Chair of Catholic Social Thought, Theology Department, Georgetown University