Julian of Norwich

Abstract

Julian of Norwich seems to present an exceptionally unproblematic figure for a book such as this one, which undertakes the difficult task of reconstructing the history of a ‘creative female subculture in the medieval British Isles.1 Not only is she one of the few women writers of the period we can identify by name, date, and place but, remarkable among medieval vernacular writers of either sex, her works can claim a continuous reading history down to the present. A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love are respectively the earlier and the much expanded later version of the same description and theological explication of a series of visions Julian experienced in May 1373 at the age of thirty. A Vision, which seems to have been written in two stages, is apparently the product of the late 1370s or early 1380s, while A Revelation, which Barbara Newman has recently argued may also be a composite, was likely written in the 1390s or early 1400s.2 Two early copies of parts of this corpus survive from the fifteenth century alongside writings by high-prestige religious figures. One is based on a copy written in 1413, while four manuscript copies of the full text of A Revelation made by English recusant nuns and a printed edition of 1670 — all deriving directly or indirectly from at least two lost medieval exemplars — attest to intense interest in the work throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Variously re-edited and modernized on both sides of the Atlantic from the mid-nineteenth century on (the first American edition was published in Boston in 1864), A Revelation hasinmoderntimes become a focus of attention for poets (including W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot), novelists (H. F. M. Prescott and Iris Murdoch), and theologians (Charles Williams and Rowan Williams), as well as for increasing numbers of devout Christians encountering her writing in excerpted form in the dozens of modern anthologies that have been produced.3 Julian of Norwich is now the best-known Middle English writer apart from Chaucer.