2 Introduction
INTRODUCTION
to any one house, but the variety of hands correcting and commenting on it suggest that it was written in a religious community and thereafter much used; and the note, already described in I 4, on f. igv, correctly glossing the noun and verb lack', suggesting (as does NED) that the word in Middle English may have been borrowed from Middle Dutch, and adducing as antonyms Dutch 'laaken' and 'prijsen', must have been written by someone concerned to make the language of a mediaeval
English spiritual writer comprehensible, and competent enough in Dutch to make this most accurate observation. Very clearly, this points to the circle of Augustine Baker and his successors, living and working in the border-towns between France and the Low Countries with their mixed French and Dutch-speaking populations. The inscription on f. ir of P suggests that it came to the Bibliotheque Nationale from private
French ownership; it may be that it was before in the conventual library of either Cambrai or Paris. The close affinities of the texts of Si and 82 suggest that 82 originated in the same house as Si.
In several places we have indications that P was copied from a manuscript in which words thought archaic had been glossed, and that the P scribe could not distinguish between archaism and modernization. 432.5-6, P reads '.for I was nott tho taught in thys tyme, 'for I was not then taught at this time'. C, SS omit 'tho', nor is the word found in A (252.15-16); but we may conjecture that the ancestor of the long-text manuscripts read Tor I was nott tho taught', and that 'in thys tyme' was later supplied as a gloss to 'tho'. That the corresponding short text agrees with C, SS suggests that the gloss was supplied from it. P seems to have copied the whole blindly, and it was probably a later hand which cancelled 'tho'. So too with 464.42, 43, interly inwardly (cf. note) ; and in this case there has been no subsequent cancellation.
We have some evidence to show that the nuns' libraries in Cambrai and Paris did possess such copies of Julian. What is now MS Colwich
Abbey 18, copied at Cambrai about 1650, bound in a piece of the same office book as supplied the cover for U, reads, p. 155: Thou hast saide,
O Lorde, to a deere childe of thine, Lette me alone, my deare worthy childe, intende (or attende) to me, I am inough to thee, reioice in thy
Sauiour and Saluation (this was spoken to Julian the Ankress of54 norw(ich), as appeareth by the booke of her reuelations)'. This is found in 'Gascoigne B', a work composed by Dame Margaret Gascoigne, born
1608, professed at Cambrai 1629, died 1637;" and it establishes that there was a text of the Revelations at Cambrai some time before 1637,
54 Ms: or.
55 Cf. Gillow, 'Records of the English Benedictine Nuns at Cambrai', 43.
II SCRIBES AND OWNERS
earlier (in the present editors' opinion) than the writing of P, and certainly earlier than Si. If it was under Baker's guidance that Margaret
Gascoigne was introduced to the text (that is, before he left Cambrai for Douai in 1633), it is very probable that he himself made a modernized, easily readable version, as he had done with the Cloud and the writings of William Flete and Walter Hilton.56 In the quotation (from chapter 36 — cf. 439.47), the informative comment in parentheses much resembles Baker's editorial style. As Hywel Owen has observed,
'If a Baker modernization of the Revelations is found in the treatise of a Cambrai nun before 1637, then it follows that the version in U, itself a Cambrai manuscript, is more than likely to be from the same Baker modernization, since the possibility of there being two such versions, independent of each other, is very remote'.57
But a glance at the present edition of P will show that it is no such modernization. It is the work of a not especially gifted antiquarian, more concerned, we may suspect, with appearance and form than meaning. This at once absolves Augustine Baker of having any hand in its preparation or circulation. MS Mazarine 4058, quoted below, specifies that the Julian manuscript in its catalogue is not by him.
It will be seen from the long text's critical apparatus that in a number of places (notably 302.36, 303-43. 3H-13, 333-81, 334-91. 335-95,
364.48, 411.27, 411-31. 474-65. 477-23, 509-44, 520.82, 521.98, 561.9, 57°-9, 572.20, 576.7, 589.4, 615.13, 619.6) P's readings have been emended by correctors. One of them, it seems, collated P after the appearance of C with the printed text, others with a text of the type of Si and Sg.
There is independent evidence58 that in Paris Julian's writings were available to the sisters. MS Mazarine 4058 (unfoliated) is entitled "A Catalogue of the Manuscript bookes belonging to the Liberary of the English Benedictine Nunnes of our B. Lady of Good Hope in paris'.
Among The Maniscripts which belongs not to the venerable Father Augustine Bakers Workes' is listed The Reuelations of Sainte Julian'.
Placid Spearritt points out that in deciding whether this could be P, Si or 82, 'one criterion would be the presence of the usual ownership formula on the fly-leaf: This Booke belongs to ye English Benedictine Nunnes ...; but none of the three manuscripts has such a mark. MS
Mazarine 4057, a catalogue of the nuns' library dated 1702, has, under 56 Cf. Hywel Owen, 'Another Augustine Baker Manuscript', 275-279.
57 Ibid., 280.
58 First brought to our notice by Placid Spearritt.
INTRODUCTION
press-mark 12. M. 27, 'Mo: Juliana XVI Revelations publish'd by F. S.
Cressy 1670'.
Doubtless other records would show that most Benedictine libraries, overseas and then, after the French Revolution, in England, possessed copies of Cressy. It was Benedictine devotion to Julian which preserved knowledge of her work (a few antiquarians such as Peck and Blomefield apart), and it was they who awarded her the 'beatificatio aequipollens', calling her 'Saint' and 'Blessed'. There may well be an unconscious reminiscence of her Revelations recorded in an anecdote concerning the deathbed of William Bernard Ullathorne, first archbishop of Birmingham, sixty-six years after he had first entered Downside, where he had been professed and ordained. A witness reported: 'When the prayers of the dying were being recited, at the words "From the snares of the devil deliver him, O Lord", he interjected "The devil's an ass'";59
Julian's story (cf. 228.41 e.s., 346.24 e.s.) of how knowledge of the devil's impotence made her laugh aloud, so that all who thought that they were assisting at her last moments laughed with her, is surely too singular and too close to this for mere coincidence. Furthermore, we have direct evidence that Ullathorne had studied some of the mediaeval
English mystics. The Benedictine Robert Ephram Guy tells us in his preface to his modernization of The Scale of Perfection that Ullathorne, when shown a specimen of it, expressed his approval both of Guy's choice of text: '... the Ladder of Perfection ... is perhaps the clearest, best balanced, and best adapted for wide circulation of any of them
('our old ascetic works')', and of his style, which the archbishop found more faithful to the original than Cressy's.60 And the Oscott copy of the Worde 1519 Scale (a considerable rarity, not found in Pollard and Redgrave or the BM Catalogue) was given to the college library by Ullathorne.61
Ill RELATIONS BETWEEN THE SHORT AND LONG TEXTS
The biographical information in the first lines of the short text seems to have been supplied by another hand and to witness to the editing to which the short text, no less than the long, was subjected. Julian herself gives us the following chronology: the revelations were received on May
!3> JWS (285.3), when she was thirty and a half years old (207.1, 289.2), i9 Cuthbert Butler; The Life and Times of Bishop Ullathorne, 2 295.
60 The Scale (or Ladder) of Perfection, xlvii.
61 Ibid., xxxix; Dorothy Jones, Minor Works, xxvi-xxvii.
Ill SHORT AND LONG TEXTS
after which she meditated upon them for fifteen years or more (732.14), before producing her second version. We may suppose, though we cannot prove, that the short text was recorded soon after the event. There seems no reason for her to attach special importance to the year 1413, or for us to assume that it was only later, more than forty years afterwards, that the long text was first recorded. Rather, the preface in A suggests a scribe with local knowledge producing copies as they were required; and that he was free still to copy the short text also suggests that he was not working under Julian's own direction.
We have no guarantee that in A there is a descendant of Julian's own first account of her visions, recorded without any comparison with the second, longer version.62 There is one place where the evidence seems irrefrangible that before A was copied there had been collation of the two versions. Where A reads ... £at sche behelde hyre god, that ys hir makere, mervelande with grete reuerence that he wolde be borne of hir that was a sympille creature of his makynge. For this was hir mervelynge, that he that was hir makere walde be borne of hir that was a sympille creature of his makynge. And this wysdome of trowthe ... the text has been emended (cf. 5214.30), since the second sentence is obviously the result of dittography, the careless repetition of what had already been written. But the same mistake is found in C, P and W
(though not in SS; cf. 297.34). Whether this result of scribal error was introduced into the long text from the short or vice versa we cannot say; but manifestly there has been 'lateral contamination', and the evidence of W shows that it took place in the fifteenth century. That the defective reading is not found in SS is probably because of the Si scribe's intelligent perception.
Within the manuscripts of the long text, Si (and this will apply also to 82, which seems to be a discreetly modernized transcript of Si) is independent of P and also of C. This can be demonstrated from cruces where the editors have had recourse to Si to restore to P the sense of the original. In the present text,yerning ($02.36), geyn (makyng) (330.55), foreseing (337.9) all make notable improvement upon P; and in dongyn
(357.10) we have the only witness (not excluding A) which has not reduced whatjulian must have written to nonsense. It has already been suggested that Cressy for his version, close though it usually is to P, may
" The suggestion that there may be long text' readings in A, never to our knowledge previously made, was first advanced to us by Frances Beer.
INTRODUCTION
have consulted a now lost modernization by Baker ; but Si preserves many archaisms which such a modernization might replace ; e.g. vnderfongyn (287.23), tempests (287.28), vnyd (300.20), sweeme (319.31). Si and P may well derive, though not immediately, from the same preDissolution manuscript of the long text, but neither derives from the other.
Beyond this, the editors find it as impossible as Hywel Owen did " to pronounce on the inter-relations between the witnesses of the long text, except that with the obvious exception of W they all, somehow, seem to derive from Cambrai or Paris.
In the short text we can perceive the rudiments of the structure which Julian would evolve more completely for the long. She has clearly in mind what was the sequence of the revelations, and their distinctions. But, except for two passing references to 'this fyrste schewynge' (217.4) and 'the fyrst syght' (218.18), there is no indication that the sequence was numbered, as is that of the chapters in the long text. But in twenty-five places in A the scribe indicates a new section by beginning a new line and leaving space for a coloured initial, which the limner, not always correctly, supplies. When we observe that in twelve instances these incipits correspond with those of new revelations or chapters in the long text (i = 2, ii=3, viii=III 11, x=VIII 16, xii = 22, xiii =X 24, xiv = 29, xv = 31, xix =XIV 41, xxii =68, xxiii =69, xxv = 74), we are left with little doubt that the A scribe is preserving an arrangement originally devised by Julian; and accordingly the editors have supplied these short-text 'chapters' with small Roman numeration.
There can be no doubt that in the long text the division into sixteen 'showings' is Julian's work, whilst she was so carefully scrutinizing and revising what she had first written. So long as she adheres to the sequence and the subject-matter of the short text, she does not employ cross-references; it is significant how many of such cross-references
(e.g. 331-64, 419-30, 427-9, 466.54, 566.11, 572-19, 580.52, 632.4, 692.32-33) occur in passages which have no correspondence with the first version. We may judge that it is not merely the greater length of the second version which accounts for the system which she employs in it. Such a passage as:
Plentuously, fully and swetely was this shewde; and it is spoken of in the furst, wher it seyde we be all in hym beclosyd, and he is beclosyd in vs.
And that is spoken of in the xvi shewyng, where he seyth he syttyth in oure soule ... (580.51), 63 'Another Augustine Baker Manuscript', 276-278.
Ill SHORT AND LONG TEXTS
testifies to the meditative processes which had endowed Julian with her perception of the unity of the revelations and the relevance of each to the others, so that finally she can write of the last that it is 'conclusyon and confirmation to all the xv' (632.4). To demonstrate this, she needed to number them, so that she could make such references as: and that shewde he in the ixth, where he sayth: It is a joy, a blysse, an endlesse lykyng to me that evyr I sufferd passion for the. And this is the blysse of Cristes werkes, and thus he menyth ther he seyth in the same shewyng: We be his blysse ... (419.30) and, where necessary, anticipate — 'in the xvi shewyng, as I shall sey'
(572.19 and note).
One aspect of the relations between the two texts must be considered, four major discrepancies between the two differently-presented narratives.
The first of these dislocations occurs in chapter 4 of the long text or in the corresponding portion of the short: and than Isayde: Benedidte domimis ... and agaynes ailegostelye enmyes (210.16211.27) corresponds with In this same tyme that I saw this sight ... that is made betweene my god and me
(299.2-300.22).
In this god brought owe ladye ... botte the biyssede manhede of Criste (213.24214.36) corresponds with In this he brought our ladie ... but the blessed manhood of Christ, as to my sight
(297.28-298.40).
This lytille thynge that es made ... me thought it myght hafe fallene for litiile
(214.36-39) corresponds with This tittle thing that is made, me thought it might haue fallen to nought for littlenes
(300.23).
It will be seen that in the short text the 'bodily sight' of the hazel nut comes first, and is followed by the 'ghostly and bodily sight' of Mary;
Julian says that she saw that Mary is greater than the rest of creation, Christ's humanity alone excepted, she implies that creation is symbolized by the hazel-nut she had been shown, and she repeats that it was so small that it could have perished. In the long text, however, the vision of Mary comes first; there is no allusion there to the hazel-nut,