Walter Hilton

Walter Hilton d. 1396, English religious writer, an Austin canon of Thurgarton, Nottinghamshire. His spiritual treatise The Scale of Perfection (ed. by Evelyn Underhill, 1923) is a general manual for holy living. Although it was addressed to a Carthusian recluse, it became popular among English laymen before the Reformation. Hilton also composed a shorter Treatise Written to a Devout Man. His mysticism, typically English, resembles that of Richard Rolle of Hampole .

Bibliography: See studies by J. E. Milosh (1966) and P. Hodgson (rev. ed. 1967).

Hilton, Walter (d. 1396), an Augustinian canon, the mystical author of The Scale of Perfection which is addressed to a single woman recluse. It is the most approachable and least esoteric of the celebrated 14th-cent. English mystical texts.

Hilton, Walter (d. 1396). English mystic. After a period as a hermit, he became an Augustinian canon at Thurgarton Priory, Notts. His principal work, widely read in medieval England, is his Ladder of Perfection, which traces the soul's ascent to God in terms of the reformation of the image of God in the soul in two stages: reformation in faith, and in feeling, the former being the correction of false notions, the latter appropriation of the truth at the deepest level.