AUTHOR: JULIAN OF NORWICH
DATE: LATE FOURTEENTH/EARLY FIFTEENTH CENTURIES
Revelations of Divine Love catalogues a series of religious visions which the author believes to have imparted a greater understanding of the true nature of Jesus Christ, his sacrifices and the reasons behind them. Although such revelatory material is remarkable in itself, it was hardly unique in its time. But what sets this volume apart is the identity of its author. Julian was a woman and her Revelations are considered the oldest-known surviving literary work by a woman in the English language.
Very little is known of Julian herself. She was born in 1342 in Norwich, then a thriving commercial and religious hub in the east of England, but we are not even sure of her real name. ‘Julian’ is widely thought to be derived from the patron saint of the Church adjacent to which she lived in a cell as an anchoress – that is to say, someone who sets themselves apart from the secular world in order to live a life of ascetic religious devotion. She is sometimes referred to as Juliana or Mother Julian, too.
Julian lived in a time of great religious and social turmoil. The dominant Catholic Church was in the midst of an internecine war, and her early years would have been marked by the horrors of the Black Death that overtook Europe in the 1340s and 1350s. In England, the resultant social upheaval would also lead to the Peasants’ Revolt in the 1380s.
The Revelations are based on sixteen visions, or ‘shewings’, that Julian experienced over two nights in 1373. She was about thirty years old at the time and was confined to bed with an illness that she feared would end her life. Her sight was failing and she was struggling to breathe but as she endeavoured to focus on the crucifix that hung above her bed, she reported a sudden feeling of painlessness and calm. As the visions came upon her, she saw among other things Christ, blood trickling from his crown of thorns at the time of the Passion (those events at the end of Jesus’s life and prior to the resurrection), as well as Mary, a figure of ‘wisdom and truth’ in Julian’s words.
The ‘shewings’ confirmed in Julian’s heart the loving nature of God, who she said represents all that is good for humanity. She wrestles in Revelations with complex philosophical questions, such as the nature of God’s identity and why a benevolent deity allows the existence of sin and evil in the first place. She examines in detail Christ’s suffering and pronounces her desire to suffer alongside him. But, ultimately, she comes to the conclusion that divine love is the driving force of everything. Strikingly, she also refers to Christ in terms of ‘Mother’, a gender role-reversal that was extraordinary for the time, linking Christ to the idea of ‘the divine feminine’.
Her understanding of God’s love and compassion is perhaps most famously explored in the following extract:
And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, it seemed, and it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and I thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for I thought it might suddenly fall to nothing for little cause. And I was answered in my understanding: ‘It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it; and so everything has its beginning by the love of God.’ In this little thing I saw three properties; the first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; and the third is that God keeps it.
Julian recovered from her illness within a few days, at which point she wrote down her account of the revelations in a short form. But she continued to revise the work over the forthcoming decades, producing a ‘long version’ of some eighty-six chapters – a work produced not in the Latin of church clerics but in the Middle English that ordinary people spoke. ‘This is a Revelation of Love,’ it begins, ‘that Jesus Christ, our endless bliss, made in Sixteen Shewings, or Revelations particular.’ She referred to herself as ‘a simple creature unlettered’, perhaps wary of offending the church authorities with what were, in truth, her radical words. Clearly, she was literate but it is highly possible that she was self-educated, since girls were routinely deprived of the educational opportunities afforded to boys (and then only boys of a certain class).
Julian probably died some time in the 1410s, and the Revelations did not enjoy a wide readership in her lifetime. Nonetheless, although her own manuscript was lost many centuries ago, in an age before printing, it was sufficiently in circulation that hand-written copies were made. Three comprehensive copies are known to have survived. Two reside in the British Library and a third, produced by a group of exiled nuns in Antwerp in the late sixteenth century, is housed in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
In 1670 an English Benedictine monk called Serenus de Cressy translated the ‘Long Version’ of the work from the Paris Manuscript, publishing it under the title XVI Revelations of Divine Love, Shewed to a Devout Servant of Our Lord, called Mother Juliana, an Anchorete of Norwich: Who lived in the Dayes of King Edward the Third. A spate of further translations appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as interest grew in Julian.
HERE COME THE GIRLS!
Julian was not entirely a female voice alone. Among those she helped to inspire was the Christian mystic, Margery Kempe, who visited Julian in her cell in 1413 and stayed for several days. They discussed Kempe’s own religious visions and wider aspects of faith. In the 1430s, Kempe recorded an account of her life and spirituality, dictating it to scribes who wrote it down. The resulting Book of Margery Kempe has subsequently been regarded by some as the earliest known autobiography in the English language.
Julian died little heralded. Even where she was buried has not come down to us. But her legacy is significant. Her work continues to challenge and resonate. She provides us with an insight into the medieval mind but also considers the nature of faith and love in ways that matter as much in the twenty-first century as they did in the fourteenth. Crucially, she is a distinct female voice echoing back from an age when such voices were all but deprived of a platform. While Julian was devout in her faith, the very existence of her words posed a challenge of sorts to the dominant patriarchal ideology and structure of the established Church. She is a voice for the unvoiced, resounding down through the centuries.
T. S. Eliot is among those who considered her words worth repeating, using one of her observations in his poem ‘Little Gidding’. (See The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems; Faber & Faber, 2015.) Words that are, perhaps, a fitting memorial to Julian herself: ‘All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.’