Julian of Norwich

The first English woman identified as an author, Julian of Norwich composed two accounts of the divine revelations she received on 13 (or 8) May 1373, as she lay dying at the age of thirty. She probably wrote the Short Text soon after her visionary experience, and later, around 1393, completed its revision into the Long Text, which expands all the showings, but especially increases Revelation Fourteen from the first three chapters on prayer to include the culmination of her resolution to the problem of evil by explaining how “alle shalle be wele” with the parable of the lord and servant and the analogy of Jesus as mother. Julian’s revision of the Short into the Long Text reveals her transformation from a visionary into an erudite theologian. Little is known about this woman’s life. A scribal note introduces the only surviving copy of the Short Text (British Library Additional MS 37790) as “a vision shown by the goodness of God to a devout woman and her name is Julian, who is a recluse at Norwich and still alive, A.D. 1413.” She is probably called Julian after the church in whose anchorhold she was enclosed from at least 1393–1394. Bequests to “‘Julian’ anakorite” in several wills from the last decade of the 14th century to 1416 verify that a female recluse occupied the cell. Margery Kempe also reports that she consulted with “Dame Ielyan” early in the second decade of the 15th century, “for the anchoress was expert in such things and could give good advice.” Only two witnesses to Julian’s texts are pre-Reformation: the sole manuscript of the Short Text and the excerpts from the Long Text compiled in Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4 around 1500. Four later manuscripts were copied at religious houses on the Continent around 1650 or later: Bibliothèque nationale fonds anglais 40 (Paris), in a “modernized” dialect; British Library Sloane 2499 (1) and Sloane 3705 (2), in a dialect closer to Julian’s East Anglian; and excerpts from the twelfth and thirteenth revelations in St. Joseph’s College, Upholland (Lancashire, England). In the 20th century, Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love found wide readership thanks to Grace Warrack’s Modern English translation of the Sloane Long Text published in 1901. Poets such as T. S. Eliot and prose writers like Annie Dillard echoed her words. Today, Julian of Norwich is the best known and most beloved of the medieval mystics.