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, in the parish of Conisford, to which her cell was attached, and her own name has not come down at all. What stands in the place where a biography would go is a building, a date, and a book — and the book, turned over for decades, became the life.

The enclosed life

An anchoress was a recluse who took a vow of permanent enclosure, sealed into a cell built against the wall of a church and given over wholly to prayer. The form belongs to the wider history of monasticism and to the contemplative ferment of the late Middle Ages in England, the same generation that produced the Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, and the fervent writings of Richard Rolle of Hampole — a cluster sometimes grouped as the English mystics, though that grouping is itself a later editorial habit more than a school the figures would have recognized. Julian’s cell had a window onto the church, by which she received the sacrament and looked toward the altar, and a window onto the street, by which she gave counsel to those who came. One who came was Margery Kempe, a laywoman from King’s Lynn, who records visiting an anchoress at Norwich for spiritual conversation around 1413 — the single contemporary notice of Julian outside her own pages, and the closest thing the record holds to a witness who met her. Everything else about the woman — her family, her birth name, whether she had been a nun or a wife or a widow before her enclosure, how she came by her evident familiarity with the contemplative tradition — has dropped out. The wills survive because money was left to Julian the recluse, or to the anchoress at St Julian’s; they fix her in time and place, and tell nothing more.

The showings of May 1373

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 for which she uses the English word showings. The illness had been asked for: she writes that she had earlier desired a bodily sickness to the point of death, so that she might be purged and drawn nearer to God, and a vivid mind of his suffering. The sickness came, and at the point where her sight was failing and the room going dark, the figure on the cross before her began to bleed, and the showings began.

There are sixteen of them, and they range from the unbearably concrete to the cosmologically vast. She sees the crown of thorns bleeding, the discoloring and drying of the dying flesh, in a sustained attention to the Passion that holds nothing back. She sees a small round thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of her hand, and is told that it is all that is made; marveling that so little a thing did not simply fall into nothing, she understands that it lasts, and ever shall, because God loves it — that it is kept in being by being held. She sees the nearness of God to the soul, and the soul as a place where God makes his home. The visions are not delivered as a code to be cracked but as scenes she is given to look at, and the looking is itself instructed: a voice within the showing tells her what she is seeing, or asks her whether she is well satisfied, or lets her sit with an image until its sense unfolds.

She recovered, against expectation, 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, plainly and with the freshness of report; a Long Text, written perhaps two decades later, expands them into sustained theological reflection more than three times the length. The expansion is the point. She describes returning again and again to a single showing — most famously to a parable of a lord and a servant that she did not understand when she first received it — until, twenty years on, its meaning opened. The Short Text is the vision; the Long Text is the thinking the vision set going, and the patience of that thinking, a contemplative slowness made into method, is among the most distinctive things about her.

All shall be well

Two features have drawn the 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 pretend the difficulty away. She knows the faith of the Church, holds it, and means to die in it; she also knows what she was shown, which is that love was without beginning and will not fail. Pressed by the gap between the two, she records being told that what is impossible to her is not impossible to God, and that there is a deed the Trinity will do on the last day, unknown to any creature until it is done, by which all shall be made well. She does not name the deed and does not claim to know it. The move is exact and careful: she neither denies what the Church teaches about loss nor surrenders what she was given about love, but holds them both open and trusts the resolution to a God who has not yet shown it. Sin, in her account, is real and grievous and the cause of all pain — and at the same time, in a word that has carried far, behovely: fitting, somehow necessary to the whole, though all shall yet be made well. She also sees that the wounds of contrition, compassion, and longing for God are not punishments but the very means by which the soul is healed.

Christ as mother

The second is her language of God, and especially of Christ, as mother — not a stray metaphor but a developed thread woven into the structure of her theology. The second person of the Trinity, in her account, is mother of all by nature: he bears the soul to new birth on the cross in pain sharper than any earthly labor, he feeds it not with milk but with himself in the sacrament, and he tends, teaches, and chastens it as a mother does a growing child. Motherhood for her is not a sentiment but a structure of relation — the giving of one’s own life and substance to bring another into being and keep it there — and she finds it proper to the work of the Incarnation itself. Maternal imagery for God was not unheard of before her; Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercians had spoken of the motherhood of Christ and even of abbots, and the figure has roots in scripture. Few, though, built it as far into the architecture of their thought, or held it so steadily against the grammar of a tradition that more usually addressed God as father and king. Her motherhood of God is not Marian devotion and is not a teaching about the mother of Jesus; it is a claim about how the second person of the Trinity acts toward the soul.

A vernacular theologian

Scholarship treats her as a major theologian writing in the vernacular, not a recorder of private raptures — a thinker working out, in plain Middle English, problems the universities were handling in Latin. This places her in unexpected company. The systematic ambition of her Long Text invites comparison with the scholastic Thomas Aquinas and the Franciscan Bonaventure; her sense of a God whose ground in the soul exceeds every name approaches the territory of apophatic theology and of Meister Eckhart, though she keeps to images and homely figures where they reach for negation and abstraction. Among visionary women she stands with Hildegard of Bingen, two centuries earlier and far more learned, as evidence that the visionary mode and the theological mind are not opposed. The affective devotion to the suffering Christ that pervades her Passion showings belongs to the same late-medieval current that runs through Francis of Assisi and the Franciscans — a piety of compassion for the wounded body of God — which she takes up and reasons from rather than merely feels. Her work belongs, in the end, to Christian mysticism and to the wider history of mysticism, but its temper is less the ecstatic flight than the long, returning examination of a few given images until they yield.

How learned she was is debated. The texts show familiarity with the contemplative tradition and a sure command of theological argument, yet she calls herself unlettered — a simple unlettered creature, in the formula that opens the Long Text. The phrase may be humility, a conventional disclaimer with real force in an age that did not expect women to write theology; it may be plain fact about her formal Latin schooling; it may be both at once, a true statement turned to rhetorical use, clearing the ground for a woman to teach by insisting she has no standing to. What is not in doubt is that she did write, in English, at a time when vernacular theology was under suspicion — the years of the Lollard controversy and Archbishop Arundel’s restrictions on religious writing in the mother tongue — and that she did so with evident care to stay within the bounds of the faith she meant to die in.

The text, its manuscripts, and its readers

Julian’s book survives in two recensions through several manuscripts, none of them in her own hand. The Short Text is preserved uniquely in British Library Additional MS 37790, the so-called Amherst manuscript, and was first printed by Dundas Harford in 1911. The Long Text comes down in the Paris manuscript (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fonds anglais 40) and in two British Library Sloane manuscripts (2499 and 3705). The first printed edition of any of it was Serenus de Cressy’s of 1670, made from the Paris manuscript by an English Benedictine in exile; it carried Julian into the modern era but with the errors of its tradition, including a famous garbling in which her scale of a herring, the small flake by which she measures the discoloring of the dying flesh, became a seal of her ring. The text that made her a twentieth-century presence was Grace Warrack’s — a transcription of the Sloane Long Text published in 1901 and expanded in 1907, modernized in spelling but returning to the manuscript rather than paraphrasing Cressy. It is through Warrack that Julian’s assurance that all shall be well reached T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, and through her and Evelyn Underhill that Julian entered the mid-century revival of interest in the English contemplatives. The whole of that revival, with its perennialist framing and its devotional warmth, is worth recognizing as a chapter in reception rather than a transparent window on the fourteenth century. The standard critical edition is the two-volume A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich edited by Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978). The principal recent scholarly editions are Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins’s The Writings of Julian of Norwich (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), which prints the Short and Long Texts side by side, and — for the Middle English in open access — Georgia Ronan Crampton’s The Shewings of Julian of Norwich in the TEAMS Middle English Texts series (1994). The most influential reframing of her as a constructive theologian rather than a mystic in the narrow sense is Denys Turner’s Julian of Norwich, Theologian (Yale University Press, 2011), which reads her alongside Aquinas, Bernard, and Bonaventure and takes seriously her wrestling with sin, evil, and the love of God.

The maternal and reconciling 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 — read as a proto-feminist, or as a teacher of universal salvation she never quite claims to be. 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 · Christian Mysticism · Mysticism · Apophatic Theology · Meister Eckhart · Bonaventure · Francis Of Assisi · Jesus Christ · Sin · Soul · Monasticism · Evelyn Underhill