The author of the Cloud of Unknowing never identifies himself, and scholarly guesses, a Carthusian monk and a secular priest with Carthusian sympathies are the most commonly proposed, remain unproven, so the text is read today exactly as its earliest readers received it, as an authoritative voice without a name attached.
The book stands within a wider flowering of English mystical writing in the same century, alongside Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and, slightly later, Julian of Norwich, though the Cloud's author also translated a version of Pseudo-Dionysius's Mystical Theology into English himself, and the apophatic, negative theology framework Dionysius established several centuries earlier runs directly through the Cloud's central teaching about the unknowability of God. The text circulated in a modest number of medieval manuscripts and remained a relatively specialist work until a substantial revival of scholarly and devotional interest from the twentieth century onward, when it became, alongside Julian's Revelations, one of the two most widely read works of medieval English mysticism among general readers rather than only specialists in the period. Several shorter related treatises, including one titled The Book of Privy Counselling, are attributed to the same anonymous hand and expand on themes only briefly touched in the Cloud itself.