Julian of Norwich
* * *
REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE
(Short Text and Long Text)
Translated by ELIZABETH SPEARING
With an Introduction and Notes by A. C. SPEARING
Contents
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
INTRODUCTION
Revelations of Divine Love
SHORT TEXT
LONG TEXT
NOTES
APPENDIX I: List of Showings
APPENDIX II: Original Texts of the Revelations
APPENDIX III: Margery Kempe’s Meeting with Julian
FURTHER READING
FOLLOW PENGUIN
PENGUIN CLASSICS
REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE
JULIAN OF NORWICH (c. 1342–after 1416) is the first writer in English who can be certainly identified as a woman. Nothing is known of her background, not even her real name. On 8 May 1373, when seriously ill and apparently dying, she received an extraordinary series of ‘showings’ or revelations from God, beginning when her parish priest held up a crucifix before her and she saw blood trickling down Christ’s face. After her recovery, she spent many years pondering the significance of the showings, which she believed to be messages to all Christians. They taught, among other things, that God is our mother as well as our father, that he cannot be angry with us and that no Christian will be damned – doctrines which Julian had great difficulty in reconciling with the Church’s teachings. She wrote two accounts of the showings: an earlier, shorter version of Revelations of Divine Love and a later, longer version, in which we can recognize her development from a visionary into the most remarkable English theologian of her time. In later life she lived as an anchoress at St Julian’s Church, Norwich (from which she adopted the name by which she is known), and became famous as a spiritual adviser. This volume includes both versions of the Revelations. They are major works of religious devotion, of theology and of English literature; their beauty and originality have won them many modern admirers (including T. S. Eliot), and in recent years they have attracted special attention for their female authorship and their attribution of feminine characteristics to God.
ELIZABETH SPEARING holds a D.Phil. from the University of York. Her previous publications include an edition of The Life and Death of Mal Cutpurse and articles on the Amadis cycle and on Aphra Behn.
A. C. SPEARING is William R. Kenan Professor of English at the University of Virginia and a Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge. He has published numerous books and articles on medieval literature.
Elizabeth Spearing and A. C. Spearing have collaborated previously on editions of Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and an anthology Poetry of the Age of Chaucer. They live near Norwich.
Translator’s Note
The manuscripts containing both texts of Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love all date from after her lifetime. ST survives in only one manuscript, copied in the mid-fifteenth century from an original dated 1413. This is British Library MS Add. 37790, an anthology of late-medieval religious writings, including selections from works by mystics such as Rolle, Ruysbroek, Suso and Saint Bridget of Sweden. My translation is taken from this manuscript, as edited by Barry Windeatt, whose chapter divisions I follow.1
LT survives in three manuscripts, all much later, made after the Reformation for English Catholics in exile on the continent. One of these, British Library Sloane MS 3705 (S2), is copied from another, Sloane MS 2499 (S1) (or else is an inferior copy of a common original), so the editorial choice is between S1 and the third manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds anglais 40 (P). S1 and S2 are seventeenth-century manuscripts. P may be somewhat earlier, but is more sophisticated; some editors prefer it,2 while others regard the sophistication as scribal. We take the latter view, and my translation of LT is generally basedon Glasscoe’s edition,3 which takes S1 as its copy-text. But the S1 scribe often had real difficulty in understanding the manuscript to be copied, and there remain numerous places where editors and translators will differ as to what Julian wrote and what she meant by it. It is not certain how many layers of scribal copying separate S1 from Julian’s autograph, nor how accurate the copyists were, nor how far scribal misunderstanding of a treatise difficult in both language and thought obscures Julian’s original words. Glasscoe presents a conservative text of S1; we believe that an ideal edition of a manuscript so manifestly corrupt would risk more emendation, and in various places, where the manuscript of ST (over a century closer to Julian herself) runs parallel and offers better readings, I have emended accordingly; occasionally too I have borrowed readings from P where these manifestly make better sense. An example of emendation of LT in accordance with ST is as follows: in LT chapter 65 (here: ‘it sets all other fears … apprehensions’) S1 reads ‘All our dreds he setteth among passions and bodely sekenes and imaginations’; the parallel passage in ST chapter 20 (here) reads ‘alle othere dredes sette tham emange passyons and bodelye sekeness and ymagynacions’; since Julian is distinguishing between the fear of God and other fears that have no spiritual value, our dreds must almost certainly be a scribal error for othere dredes, so I have translated ‘other fears’. An example of the substitution of a P reading occurs in LT chapter 56 (here: ‘he is the means … kept together’), where S1 reads ‘he is mene that kepith the substance and the sensualite to God’. P has togeder in place of to God; P’s reading seems obviously preferable, because Julian is referring to what prevents the two aspects of the soul from being separated, so I have translated ‘together’.
The chapter headings may or may not be by Julian herself; and in our view the afterword, with its determination to appropriate Julian’s teaching for orthodoxy, is probably by a writer other than Julian. But, given that complete certainty is unattainable, and that both headings and afterword have long been accepted as part of the text of the Revelations, I have not omitted them from the translation and have kept them in their traditional places.
The texts of the Revelations are written in an oral register; they may even have been taken down from Julian’s spoken words. When translating I have tried to keep the sound of a woman’s speaking voice, which runs constantly through the Middle English.4 Julian’s language is largely vernacular, and I have avoided as far as possible introducing Latinate words and phrases where she uses everyday ones – often concrete, simple and domestic. It would be all too easy to produce a text with overtones of a Victorian bishop. Nor have Julian’s words been changed for the sake of changing them; when the original presents no problems to the understanding of an average modern reader, I have done no more than modernize the spelling. It has occasionally seemed desirable to add or omit a few words for the sake of clarity, or to clarify the sense of a consciously used ambivalent word in the original. In some cases a difficulty arises not just from changes in the meaning of words, but from larger cultural changes. There is difficulty with the vocabulary of lordship, for example; Julian lived in a world where fear of and obedience to a superior could be perceived as natural and beautiful, and where ‘condescension’ had no negative tones.
A number of Julian’s words express crucial concepts, but have no one modern equivalent. As noted above,5 homely and various allied forms are frequently applied to God; the word is important to our understanding of Julian, for the fusion of the domestic and the transcendental is one of the most important elements in her vision; but ‘homely’ would often sound odd and misleading in modern English and American. I have tried to convey Julian’s meaning cumulatively by using such terms as ‘close’, ‘friendly’, ‘familiar’, ‘intimate’, as well as ‘homely’ itself; it seems more important to give an impression of what Julian may really
have meant than to choose one word throughout for the sake of consistency. On the other hand, changing a word in some instances can destroy the cumulative effect of a simple term used repeatedly in one passage. This repetition of key words can be very important, and sometimes has to affect the translator’s choice, even if the same word does not sound quite right at every occurrence. ‘Grace’ and related terms such as ‘gracious(ly)’ are repeated in this way; and while they can evoke secular meanings such as The Oxford English Dictionary’s sense 6.a, ‘favour or goodwill’, and sense 1, ‘the quality of producing favourable impressions; attractiveness, charm’, it is important to recognize, yet almost impossible for a translator to convey, that in Julian their fundamental reference is always to the important theological concept of the grace of God: ‘The divine influence which operates in men to regenerate and sanctify, to inspire virtuous impulses, and to impartstrength to endure trial and resist temptation’ (OED sense 11.b). Again, Julian’s word ‘kind’ incorporates the senses of a wide range of modern terms that I have often had to substitute for it: ‘generous’ and (secular) ‘gracious’, but also ‘natural’.
I have tried to keep as much of the original syntax as possible; it conveys Julian’s vision much better than modern syntax would. There are sometimes grammatical inconsistencies, but that is the nature of the spoken word, and indeed sometimes a consequence of the overflow of multiple significance from her showings. The distinctive rhythm of the original, especially in LT, comes partly from what nowadays seem very long sentences, with clauses accumulating one after the other, and frequent repetition of conjunctions; but this is part of Julian’s voice. A full stop and the break it brings would often disrupt the intensity and wonder of her vision, distancing the reader from her experience, and long though some of the sentences may be, they are rarely confusing. The accumulated clauses often have a deliberate pattern, working up to the most important point at the end. Julian very rarely ends with an insignificant word or phrase. Her words can modulate into language which is on the edge of poetry – metrical, rhythmic, alliterative: ‘for as the body is cladde in the cloth, and the flesh in the skyne, and the bonys in the flesh, and the herte in the bouke, so arn we, soule and body, cladde in the goodnes of God …’; ‘for all these may wasten and weren away’; ‘many mervel how it might be’; ‘fairhede of heavyn, flowre of erth and the fruite of the mayden wombe’.6 I have attempted to preserve the rhythm and flow and some ghostly echo of the original language. (I have, for example, added alliteration in some places to compensate for its loss in others.) Corresponding phrases in ST and LT are not invariably translated in precisely the same words, because in translating each text I have had to consider the flow of its own sentences and paragraphs. The punctuation, since it cannot be Julian’s own, I have felt free to change, sometimes to reflect the pace and emphasis of speech, and the work has been divided into paragraphs.
One translator suggested the desirability of pruning and giving paragraphs and sentences ‘a sharper edge’,7 but mysteries do not come with sharp edges. The work deals with mysteries and miracles and experiences which Julian herself found hard to follow and interpret, and it seems wrong to oversimplify, to make her book too easy and clear. The past struggle to understand and the present struggle to express sometimes merge together, and a certain degree of effort and confusion may be a necessary element in receiving the text. Saint Augustine described certain passages of Scripture as ‘covered with a most dense mist’, and suggested that this situation was ‘provided by God’, as what is grasped quickly is insufficiently valued.8 Julian too conveys what she believed to be God’s own utterances, and we should not be able to skim quickly through her writings.
In matters of gender, I have frequently made such changes as that of ‘men’ to ‘people’ to conform with modern usage, but have sometimes used ‘mankind’ and ‘man’ as Julian does, as a neuter noun, encompassing male and female, singular and plural. ‘Man and God’ has more impact than ‘people and God’ or other attempts to avoid a word which is now more gendered than it could have been to her. Similarly with pronouns: I have used non-gendered forms where this could be done without awkwardness, but have made no systematic attempt to impose modern sensitivities on a medieval writer.
Though translation must always be a matter of compromise, I have tried to preserve Julian’s text rather than making it my own, while removing obstacles to clear reception – not just obsolete language, but any quaintnesses added by the passage of time which might seem obtrusive enough to modify a reader’s response. I hope my version is close enough to the original to be of use as an aid for those who would like to read Julian’s own words and are not familiar with Middle English, and to make it accessible not just to those interested in literature, theological ideas or the voice of a medieval woman, but also as it was originally intended: a devotional text. Readers interested in the original will find two sample extracts in Appendix II.
Finally, it is obvious that Julian herself was extremely familiar with her material: she frequently quotes from other chapters and refers forwards and back; I hope that Appendix I will be a useful guide for such cross-references.
NOTES
1 English Mystics of the Middle Ages, ed. Barry Windeatt (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 181–213.
2 Notably Colledge and Walsh (see Further Reading).
3 Marion Glasscoe, ed. Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love, rev. edn. (Exeter, 1993).
4 Cf. ibid., p. xviii.
5 See Introduction.
6 Chapters 6 and 10; ed. Glasscoe, pp. 9 and 15.
7 Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Clifton Wolters (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 20.
8 On Christian Doctrine, II. vi, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis, 1958), p. 37. Julian describes the parable of the lord and servant as being mysty, which means ‘cloudy’ as well as ‘mysterious’.
Introduction
Julian of Norwich and her Book
Julian of Norwich is the first writer in English who can be identified with certainty as a woman. Before her, a few works survive written by women in other languages used in England – notable among them are the short romances and fables in French by the great twelfth-century poet Marie de France – and, since a large proportion of writing in medieval English is anonymous, some of it may have been by women of whom nothing is now known. But most medieval Englishwomen were not educated or even literate, and those who were would not generally have been encouraged to write works intended to outlive some immediate purpose. Julian’s period, the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, is now recognized as one of the great ages of English literature – the age of William Langland, John Gower, the Gawain-poet, Geoffrey Chaucer and his first major disciple Thomas Hoccleve in verse, and of Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love, the Wycliffite translators of the Bible and the anonymous writer of The Cloud of Unknowing in prose. These were all men, and it took some very unusual stimulus to impel a woman to write, and especially to write a work designed to teach others. What this stimulus was for Julian is revealed by the texts translated here – the two versions of her Revelations of Divine Love,1 her only known writings, an earlier short version (ST) and a later long version (LT).
Julian states in LT that ‘These revelations were shown to a simple, uneducated creature in the year of our Lord 1373, on the eighth day of May’ (chapter 2).2 She adds that she was then ‘thirty and a half years old’ (chapter 3) – about the age of Chaucer. Apparently at the point of death from a severe illness, for which she had earlier prayed as a means to be ‘purged by the mercy of God and afterwards to live more to God’s glory’ (chapter 2), she received a series of ‘showings’ (we retain the word she normally uses for each separate religious experience). These were extraordinary experiences conveyed in three modes: in sensory and especially visual imagery, in words perceived directly by the mind, and in the form of insight so far transcending the sensory and the verbal that ‘I neither can nor may show the spiritual vision as openly or as fully as I would like
to’ (chapter 9). On 8 May she experienced fifteen showings: the first ‘began early in the morning, at about four o’clock’ and the series continued ‘until it was well past the middle of the day’ (chapter 65). A sixteenth came ‘on the following night’, sandwiched between two dreamlike experiences of diabolic temptation, and was ‘conclusion and confirmation’ to the entire sequence (chapter 66). The showings were so compelling and so rich in meaning that Julian understood them to come directly from God and to be messages not just to herself but to all Christians. This led her to put them in writing and to convey her sense of their significance, as it was revealed in the course of many years of meditation, renewed by ‘flashes of illumination and touches, I hope, of the same spirit which was shown in them all’ (chapter 65). One supplementary showing came ‘fifteen years and more later’ – that is, about 1388 – and this she recounts in the final chapter of LT: it was that God’s meaning in the whole series of experiences from 1373 was no more nor less than love. Julian wrote for private readers; they rather than listeners would have needed the list of contents in chapter 1 of LT and the summaries heading the other chapters (if these are authorial). Her target audience was initially ‘all men and women who wish to lead the contemplative life’ (ST chapter 4), but in LT she drops this limitation and seems to envisage a broader public of devout laypeople – a public that was on the increase in her lifetime. Since her work was adapted into modern English in 1901, her readership has expanded to far greater numbers than could have known it in earlier times.3
What Julian meant by describing herself as uneducated (that cowde no letter) has been much discussed. Some have argued that it indicates that she was illiterate, so that her writings must have been penned on her behalf by someone else, presumably a man. The concept of literacy is not a simple one: in late medieval England the language of learning was Latin, known only to a few, nearly all of them men and those mostly clerics, but the ability to read and write in English was becoming more widespread. Many who knew no Latin had access to Latin culture with the assistance of clerics, and many who could not write or even read English could similarly enjoy some of the fruits of literacy with the help of those who could. (An example of the latter is Julian’s younger contemporary, Margery Kempe, of whom more below.) English culture was strongly patriarchal, and the ability to write even in the mother tongue was thought unsuited to women; on the other hand, by Julian’s time women were becoming increasingly interested in personal forms of religious devotion, and this encouraged ‘a textuality of the spoken as well as the written word’, originating in books, perhaps read aloud, but then ‘transmitted among the women by word of mouth’.4 Julian is manifestly a woman of exceptional intelligence, and she shows not just an understanding of theology, the province of learned male clerics, but a capacity for powerful new theological thought; moreover, her prose, while owing much to speech, is distinctive and distinguished. If she emphasizes her ignorance, describing herself as ‘a woman, ignorant, weak and frail’ (ST chapter 6), this is likely to have been both out of genuine humility and so as to avoid her contemporaries’ unease with female learning, especially in theological matters. She may have had little or no Latin (to know ‘no letter’ could well mean that) and nothing is known for certain of her reading, but there seems no reason to deny her authorship, in the fullest sense, of the work attributed to her.
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