Julian of Norwich

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Julian of Norwich was an English anchoress of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the author of a book describing sixteen visions she received during a near-fatal illness, and the first woman known to have written a surviving book in the English language. Almost nothing certain is known of her life apart from what the text reports and a handful of wills that left her small bequests. The name itself is borrowed: she is called after the church of St Julian in Norwich, to which her cell was attached, and her own name has not come down at all.

What the book records is precise about its own occasion. In May 1373, at the age of thirty and a half, she fell gravely ill, was given the last rites, and — as the priest held a crucifix before her dying eyes — received a sequence of visions she calls “showings”: of Christ’s suffering, of a small thing the size of a hazelnut held in the palm and standing for all that is made, of God’s nearness to the soul. She recovered, and spent the rest of a long life turning the experience over. The result exists in two versions. A Short Text sets down the showings close to the event; a Long Text, written perhaps two decades later, expands them into sustained theological reflection. The expansion is the point: she describes herself returning again and again to a single showing until its meaning opened.

Two features have drawn most attention. The first is her insistence, framed as something shown rather than reasoned, that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” — a confidence in a final reconciliation she holds even while granting that she cannot see how it squares with the Church’s teaching on sin and damnation. She does not resolve the tension; she reports being told that what is impossible to her is not impossible to God. The second is her language of God, and especially of Christ, as mother: not a stray metaphor but a developed thread, in which the second person of the Trinity bears, feeds, and tends the soul. Medieval writers before her had used maternal imagery for God; few built it as far into the structure of their theology.

Scholarship treats her as a major vernacular theologian, not a recorder of private raptures — a thinker working out, in plain Middle English, problems the universities were handling in Latin. How learned she was is debated: the texts show familiarity with the contemplative tradition, though she calls herself unlettered, a claim that may be humility, fact, or both. The maternal and universalist passages have made her a focus of modern interest well beyond her own setting, sometimes at the cost of the orthodox frame she was careful to keep. What the book itself holds to is narrower and stranger: that the showings were given, that their sense came slowly, and that love was their meaning from first to last.

→ In the library: The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912) — a contemporary English mystical text · The Cell of Self-Knowledge: Seven Early English Mystical Treatises (1910)

→ Related: Hildegard Of Bingen · Bernard Of Clairvaux · Thomas Aquinas · Middle Ages · Gnosis