Julian reveals little of her life, beyond certain details that authenticate her religious experiences. This reticence was evidently a matter of principle, and in LT she omits even some of the few personal items mentioned in ST. She urges her readers to concentrate on the revelation itself and ‘stop paying attention to the poor being to whom [it] was shown’ (chapter 8), and later explains that, when she desired to know whether a certain friend would ‘continue to lead a good life’, she learned that it was not to God’s glory to be concerned about ‘any particular thing’ (chapter 35; cf. ST chapter 16) – hence the omission of nearly all such particulars from her writing. External documents place her in Norwich in her later years; we cannot be sure that she was there in May 1373 (what can be discerned of her dialect in the scribal copies of her work suggests that she came from further north), but there is no reason to think otherwise. Norwich was among the largest and most prosperous English cities in the later Middle Ages, and East Anglia, the region where it is situated, was ‘one of the great centres of artistic creation in late medieval England’.5 Commercial wealth and religion were closely connected in the later Middle Ages, and, though Julian’s way of life indicates her wish to separate herself from the city’s bustling commerce, even the religious language she adopted was shaped by ideas of buying and selling, profit and loss. Religion was the focus of most cultural activity, and in East Anglia generous patronage supported enterprises ranging from the composition of elaborate poems, often by members of religious orders such as the Benedictine monk John Lydgate and the Augustinian canon Osbern Bokenham, to the building and decoration of magnificent churches. Norwich had over fifty churches, most of which still survive. East Anglia’s many ports (including Norwich itself, linked to the coast by the rivers Wensum and Yare) enabled close connections across the North Sea with continental Europe; the chief exports were wool and cloth, and imports included works of art and the latest forms of religious devotion. Julian’s account of the gifts she desired from God in early life (chapter 2) implies an exceptionally devout young woman with the leisure to devote herself to religious experience, thus presumably one from a background of material comfort. Some have thought she may have been a nun,6 but the details in ST of her circumstances in 1373 indicate a secular domestic setting: when she seemed about to die, her parish priest was sent for, he was accompanied by a boy, and later ‘My mother, who was standing with others watching me, lifted her hand up to my face to close my eyes, for she thought I was already dead’ (ST chapter 10). Probably then Julian was at this time either an unmarried daughter living at home or a widow. The centrality of motherhood in her religious thought might suggest that she had been a mother herself. Later, presumably influenced by the showings, she adopted a fully religious mode of life, becoming not a nun but an anchorite.
An anchorite was a person who had entered into an enclosed solitary life in a fixed place, in order to achieve greater spiritual perfection. (The thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse is an important English text offering guidance for such a way of life.7) Options of this kind, allowing for individual forms of devotion, became increasingly popular in late medieval England, and more anchorites and hermits are recorded in Norwich than in any other medieval English town.8 It has been suggested that such options, offering a ‘medieval version of Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own” ’, might have been especially appealing to women, ‘because there a woman could find privacy, autonomy, and a chance for intellectual development unavailable even in a convent’.9 Many anchorites lived in cells attached to churches, and Julian can be identified as the anchoress who occupied a cell at St Julian’s church in Norwich, within earshot of the busy quayside; her name was presumably adopted from the church. The cell, with an opening into the church from which to see the tabernacle containing the sacrament, did not survive the Reformation; the church was largely destroyed by German bombing in 1942, but has been rebuilt.
The manuscript of ST has a rubric describing Julian as ‘recluse at Norwyche’ and as still alive in 1413. She is similarly mentioned in wills dating from 1394 to 1416, but the most striking reference to her as an anchorite occurs in The Book of Margery Kempe. This, the first autobiography in English, dictated by a woman of passionate and eccentric religious devotion from the nearby port of Lynn, describes how in 1415 she visited ‘an anchoress … who was called Dame Julian’ and received what sounds like wise and tactful advice.10 (Though they lived in solitude, anchorites were expected to give spiritual counsel to others.11) The date of Julian’s death is unknown; she may have lived into the 1420s.
ST and LT form two distinct versions of Julian’s work.12 ST consists mainly of an account of the 1373 showings and Julian’s initial interpretation of their meaning, but it omits the parable of the lord and the servant recounted in chapter 51 of LT. Though this was part of the 1373 experience, Julian initially found it too baffling to set down alongside the other showings, ‘for a full understanding of this marvellous parable was not given to me at that time’ (chapter 51). As mentioned above, ST also omits the further experience of about 1388 recounted in LT chapter 86. All scholars agree that ST was composed earlier than LT, which incorporates most of ST’s material but with more about some of the showings and far fuller interpretation of what Julian originally saw (especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth showings): she ‘reads’ her memories of these showings over and over again, as if they formed a treasured book. Introducing the parable of the lord and the servant, she explains that the initial showing, the ‘inner learning’ she has subsequently gained, and the light thrown on it by the entire sequence of revelations ‘which our Lord God in his goodness often shows freely to the eyes of my mind’, are by now ‘so united in my mind that I neither can nor may separate them’ (chapter 51). Experience, memory and meaning could never be fully separable. Like her contemporary William Langland, author of at least three successive versions of his great religious poem Piers Plowman, Julian seems to have devoted her life to thinking and rethinking the meaning of her visionary insights. She was never satisfied that she had plumbed their depths, for the final chapter of LT opens, ‘This book was begun by God’s gift and his grace, but it seems to me that it is not yet completed.’ Like Piers Plowman, Julian’s work owes much of its difficult fascination to its status as a text of repeated new beginnings, lacking the final conclusion that for both writers would be possible only at the end of the world.
Most scholars have assumed that ST dates from shortly after the 1373 experiences and LT from 1393, in accordance with Julian’s explanation that understanding of the lord and servant showing was granted to her ‘twenty years after the time of the showing, all but three months’ (chapter 51). These assumptions have been questioned, however, in an important study by Nicholas Watson.13 Considering the likely historical context for Julian’s work, he suggests that ST would most naturally belong not to 1373–4 but to some years later, when the visionary writings of continental female mystics such as Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden had begun to circulate in East Anglia, and that Julian’s repeated insistence on her submission to ‘the teaching of Holy Church’ (ST chapter 13), especially in regard to ‘paintings of crucifixes … in the likeness of Christ’s Passion’ (ST chapter 1), seems appropriate to the 1380s or later, when the critique of images by Wyclif’s followers, the Lollards, had gained notoriety and been condemned. It could then have been the 1388 experience that stimulated the writing of ST, and Watson further proposes that LT may date from the early fifteenth century, perhaps after 1413 (the date mentioned in the ST manuscript) – for why would the ST copyist have disregarded the later, fuller version if it existed then? The question of dating cannot be regarded as settled, but Watson’s hypothesis is persuasive.
Medieval Religious Devotion
In both texts, Julian begins by telling of her desire for three gifts from God: imaginative identification with Christ’s sufferings on the cross, bodily sickness in youth to the verge of death and three ‘wounds’ of contrition, compassion
and longing for God. Six centuries later, in an age when Christianity has come to be centred in moral conduct and social concern, many readers, believers or not, may find an almost perverse egocentricity and masochism in such desires. Although current interest in Julian’s writing shows that she can speak directly to many modern readers, it may be helpful to sketch the tradition of religious devotion in which her desires could seem normal and praiseworthy.
Through most of the first thousand years of western Christianity, Christ was widely seen as a remote, awesome judge and hero, who had fought and conquered the devil to gain the possibility of salvation for the human souls seized as a consequence of Adam’s sin. In this struggle, human beings were little more than spectators. A famous English expression of this view occurs in the eighth-century Dream of the Rood, where the cross appears to the poet in a vision and tells how ‘the young warrior who was God almighty stripped himself, stalwart and resolute; he stepped on to the high gallows, bold in the sight of many, when he determined to liberate mankind’.14 That conception of Christ as divine warrior did not disappear in later centuries (it is present in Piers Plowman), but alongside it there grew up a different emphasis on Christ as suffering man, arousing compassion in his fellow human beings. In this new theology, developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by learned Latin writers such as Saint Anselm, Peter Abelard and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, God’s Incarnation as man was seen not primarily as a device for defeating the Devil but as a means of drawing human love towards God as an object for identification and imitation. Bernard remarked:
I think this is the principal reason why the invisible God willed to be seen in the flesh, and to converse with men as a man. He wanted to recapture the affections of carnal men who were unable to love in any other way, by first drawing them to the salutary love of his own humanity, and then gradually to raise them to a spiritual love.15
Bernard was preaching to Cistercian monks, but this focus on Christ’s fleshly existence and its appeal to fleshly love became the central feature of the less communal, more personal kinds of religious devotion that flourished from the twelfth century onwards. As the Church became more centralized and its teachings pervaded western society more effectively, this devotion attracted the laity as well as those committed to a religious life; the kind of meditations originally recommended for monks began to be practised by devout laypeople. The new devotion was more Christocentric and more affective than that of earlier Christianity: that is, it centred in God’s human nature and in the powerful feelings of love and pity aroused in men and women by his bodily sufferings. There was a longing to share imaginatively in the life of the Holy Family but above all in the experience of Jesus in his Passion. For the desired feelings to be continually renewed, Christ’s torments had to be evoked in ever-intensifying detail, to an extent that modern readers of Julian and other devotional writers may find repellent and even nauseating. Meditation on the Passion, often imagined with a gruesome hallucinatory realism, with the aid of details borrowed from apocryphal sources such as the Gospel of Nicodemus, was the central theme of later medieval devotion. This was where Julian’s showings began, with blood seeming to trickle down Christ’s face as she gazed at the crucifix.
From one point of view, the process just described might be called a feminization of devotion. The predominant ideology of the Middle Ages connected men with rationality and the spirit, women with emotion and the flesh. The change began with men like Saint Bernard, eliciting in themselves and their fellows the tender and passionate feelings traditionally attributed to women; but it went on to appeal to women also, and was subsequently associated with an increasing part played by women as readers and patrons, and ultimately as writers, of devotional works. From the thirteenth century on an increasing proportion of saints are female; and in Julian’s time the rood-screens of East Anglian churches displayed images of holy women old and new. In the late fourteenth century the writings of passionately devout continental women began to be read in England and were greatly admired. Whether or not Julian knew them, her milieu must have been dominated by this emotional and bodily piety of the later Middle Ages. For this piety, as Caroline Bynum puts it, ‘bodiliness provides access to the sacred’,16 and bodily sensations such as pain, heat and sweetness, and bodily fluxes such as blood and tears, were seen as signs of God’s presence and means to union with him. In this context, the three gifts that Julian desired would not seem abnormal; indeed what is striking is the way that her religious aspirations, without ever abandoning the bodily and the emotional,17 go beyond the gifts she initially desired to achieve penetrating and difficult intellectual insights – a process that has been described as ‘Julian’s transformation … from a visionary into a theologian’.18
A brief introduction cannot offer a comprehensive analysis of these insights and the means by which she expresses them. What follows concentrates chiefly on LT and considers two aspects of Julian’s work that have particularly interested modern readers: the ways in which her writing was affected by the fact that she was a woman, and the ideas about salvation that are focused in the longest chapter of LT, containing the parable of the lord and the servant. As will be seen, these two aspects are closely connected.
Julian as Woman Writer
Julian must have continued working on her Revelations over many years (especially if the later dates for the two versions are correct), choosing the exact words to record her showings and to convey their meaning as it gradually emerged. Her determination to represent and understand her experiences with scrupulous accuracy, indicated by repeated use of phrases such as ‘as I see it’ and ‘as I understand it’, makes for an exploratory style, in which even the most definite statement remains provisional. English, much used for devotional writing, was an unaccustomed medium for theology, and in her quiet struggles with her mother tongue Julian persuades it to release richnesses of meaning that careless readers might dismiss as imprecision or ambiguity. In LT especially, her prose can be memorably figured and patterned; but that may also be true of speech, and her writing resembles speech more closely than it resembles medieval Latin prose or even the learned English prose into which Chaucer had translated Boethius’ Latin. As Felicity Riddy puts it, ‘Julian’s text has the fluidity of talk, now brief, now expansive, moving in and out of autobiography.’19 This ‘fluid’ style is often seen as distinctively feminine, and with some justification: not because it constitutes an écriture féminine, a form of writing that expresses some transhistorical essence of femaleness, but for specific historical reasons. Some of these are expounded by Bynum in a general discussion of religious writing by medieval women:
… part of the reason for the more open, experiential style of women’s writings is the fact that women usually wrote not in the formal scholastic Latin taught in universities, but in the vernaculars – that is, in the languages they grew up speaking. The major literary genres available in these languages were various kinds of love poetry and romantic stories: the vocabulary provided by such genres was therefore a vocabulary of feelings … Furthermore, women’s works, especially their accounts of visions, were often dictated (that is, spoken) rather than penned – a fact that is clearly one of the explanations for women’s more discursive, conversational, aggregative, tentative, empathetic and self-reflective style. As Elizabeth Petroff has recently pointed out, the prose of a female writer such as Julian of Norwich, which tends to circle around its point, evoking a state of being, displays exactly those traits Walter Ong has seen as characteristic of oral thought and expression.20
Not just the style of Julian’s prose is at issue here but the style of her thought. The formal education received by male writers, based in Latin and practised in disputation, emphasized opposition, combativeness, triumph or defeat in argument, and tended to shape men’s thought accordingly; it was an intellectual counterpart to the martial training that produced medieval knights. In a disputation, you can uphold one view only by opposing its contrary, unhorsing your opponent as
if in a joust. Far from being carried away by emotion, Julian is always careful to analyse what she sees, feels and understands as exactly as she can, often in the form of numbered lists; but this disputative, adversarial quality is quite lacking in her writing. In that sense, while doubtless more learned than most women, she does write as a woman, and gains a real advantage by doing so.
Revelations of Divine Love Page 2
