When I mention my fascination with Julian of Norwich to the many people who have never heard the name, their first response is usually: “Who’s he?”
A tricky foundation upon which to convince them that the she (not he) in question is a 14th-century mystic from Norwich whose book should be studied alongside Chaucer as one of the early English literary masterpieces.
Julian was the first known woman to write in English, an accolade that in itself should earn her text, the Revelations of Divine Love, recognition. But whether she was male or female, born in the 14th century or the 21st, the book she wrote was a literary achievement by any standard.
There are many reasons I think Julian is remarkable. First, she lived through some of the most turbulent decades in English history, which saw the aftermath of the Black Death, the Western Schism and the climax of the Hundred Years’ War with France. Secondly, despite the plague, horror and heresy that raged around her, she managed to find an optimism and hope that was not trite and conciliatory, but robust and determined. Thirdly, her writing is sublime and timeless.
Those who have heard of Julian may know of her famous phrase: “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” It is justly well known, since its potency resonates across the centuries. She would have learnt rhetorical devices like the Rule of Three not from a university lecturer (since women were denied such an education), but from the sermons of her priest. Yet Julian was a self-taught writer, quietly penning a masterpiece over decades while walled up in an anchoress’s cell next to a church in Norwich dedicated to St Julian.
The life of an anchoress seems suspiciously “Dark Age” to our modern sensibilities. The rituals of enclosure are dramatic: the woman is given the Last Rites – effectively dead to the world – and is then led into a room, the door sealed or bricked up, to spend the rest of her living days shut within. She would have a window on to the church, another curtained one on to the street, and a further one through which she interacted with a maid (who would take care of her physical needs). But she could not leave the cell on pain of excommunication.
This sounds incredible, but for a woman like Julian there was a surprising freedom that came from enclosure. She could be removed from the daily distractions of running a household or performing chores within a convent, free instead to contemplate, meditate and write.
In 1373, aged 30, she received 16 visions while incapacitated with illness. The image of the crucifix, which the priest held before her eyes as she apparently lay dying, formed the gateway through which Julian experienced vivid mystical encounters with the Divine: “All grew dark around me in the room, as dark as though it had been night, except that in the image of the cross there remained a light for all mankind, and I never knew how.”
Over the next four decades Julian would return to these visions again and again, choosing a life of enclosure for the opportunity to analyse them deeply and learn from them. She calls herself “unlettered”, which may mean she had little in the way of Latin or French. Yet the English prose she composed in her Revelations of Divine Love is not only poetic and enthralling, it is also steeped in the words of the Church Fathers and contemporary theologians.
Julian is no parrot. Her words often echo those of Augustine or Aquinas, not because she has read them in manuscript form – even the richest of households would only have owned 20 to 30 books. Instead, she absorbed the teachings of Mother Church through meditation and rumination, transcribing the ideas about love, sin, salvation into her own voice. She is that rare thing in medieval literature: original.
As a woman, she could not write in the verbose and eloquent Latin of contemporary male thinkers. Yet a new tradition of mystical writers, both male and female, were turning to their vernacular spoken tongue as a means of expressing the inexplicable: mystical experiences that were more concerned with heart and soul than with mind and body.
Julian barely even cites the Scriptures directly, and her book is not populated with multiple references to saints and martyrs. Instead, she teases out a web of intricate connections, which all ultimately lead back to her visions of Christ, and beyond that, to the central theme of love.
In her most profound moments, Julian writes with a sense of the universal that is remarkably modern. When contemplating existence she describes seeing it as a hazelnut held in the palm of her hand: “In this little thing I saw three properties: the first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; the third is that God cares for it. But what is that to me? Truly, the maker, the carer, and the lover.”
This resonates with astronauts’ descriptions of seeing the earth from space, or scientists examining cells under a microscope. Yet Julian found such a potent and spiritual way of expressing it more than 500 years ago, locked in a single room beside a church in Norwich. She was a remarkable thinker, and against the odds her book has survived down the centuries, allowing us to continue celebrating the work of a truly great writer.
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