8. Julian’s Second Thoughts: The Long Text Tradition
8
Julian’s Second Thoughts: The Long Text Tradition
BARRY WINDEATT
This boke is begonne by Goddes gifte and his grace, but it is not yet performed, as to my sight. (Revelation, 86.1–2)1
The survival of two versions of the text of Julian of Norwich – both judged authentic by modern scholarship – provides an opportunity to chart the development of a mystic mind and a contemplative writer in their recording of how Julian responds to the challenge of interpreting her original revelatory experience.2 Only one mid fifteenth-century manuscript – London, British Library MS Additional 37790 – preserves the shorter form, in a compendium of contemplative reading (outlined by Marleen Cré at the start of her essay), while the fuller version, some six times longer, survives complete in three post-Reformation manuscripts.3 Development in form and content between these two extant versions of Julian’s text is so extensive that there may well have been intervening versions that do not survive. Some personal and circumstantial details about the showings as an event are included in the shorter version (A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman) but go unrecorded in the longer text (A Revelation of Love), arguably because the former is nearer in composition to the experience.4 Such internal evidence points to the Vision being an authorial recension of Julian’s work, and one that precedes the longer version (A Revelation of Love) rather than being abridged from it (even though A Vision is preserved in an anthology that includes abridgements of other contemplative works).
The showings, which start when a dying Julian sees the blood on a painted crucifix begin to trickle and spread, prompt her to a lifetime of subsequent meditation, of which A Revelation is the outcome. Julian’s visions focus on uniquely detailed insights – as in her First Revelation of the blood on Christ’s forehead – but in A Revelation this visuality is also enhanced by distinctively dynamic perceptions (Christ’s blood spreads like herring scales, for example, and it streams down like rain pouring over eaves: Revelation, 7.17–20). In her Second Revelation in the Short Text Julian records seeing ‘alle his blissede face a time closede in dry blode’ (Vision, 8.4–5), but in A Revelation this has become:
And one time I saw how halfe the face, beginning at the ere, overyede with drye bloud till it beclosed into the mid face. And after that the other halfe beclosed on the same wise, and therewhiles it vanished in this party, even as it cam.
(Revelation, 10.4–7)
What is first recorded as the face unchangingly covered in blood comes to be remembered through precisely detailed observation of how the two sides of Christ’s face discolour alternatingly. The fuller version rewrites a conventional devotional image – a static account of Christ’s bloodied face – into the uniquely dynamic experience of an arrestingly strange vision which focuses on the changing coloration of Christ’s suffering face. Whether or not the vision of the alternatingly blood-stained halves of Christ’s face formed part of Julian’s visions in the first instance which have simply been passed over in her less descriptive shorter text, the more detailed account develops in conjunction with Julian’s ‘feer whether it was a shewing or none’ (Revelation, 10.27) and her prolonged uncertainty in understanding it which, however, she candidly allows to remain part of her record of how she comes to interpret her revelation. As more is understood more is visualized and, overall, A Revelation presents images caught with a photographic precision by a painterly eye, along with the outcome of meditation on the fuller visual details that it records. Julian knows very well that she is not seeing the Passion (‘For I wiste welle he sufferede but onys, but as he wolde shewe it me and fille me with minde’: Revelation, 17.41–2), but is receiving instead a visionary insight – as in her Fourth Revelation – into the Passion’s implications: ‘the bleding continued a while till it might be seen with avisement’ (Revelation, 12.6). It is the pursuit of such implications through contemplative understanding that A Revelation represents in its content, style and form.
What had started in A Vision as the story of Julian’s visions becomes in A Revelation the history of how she comes to understand them. As an authorial re-edition of the earlier text – and something of a journal recording intervening meditation – A Revelation now includes within itself so much extended commentary analyzing the earlier narrative of Julian’s revelatory experience as to shift the balance and revise the focus of the earlier account and refashion its genre. In essence A Vision had presented a narrative self-account of an experience. In A Revelation, however, the unity of a narrative line gives way to the more exploratory continuum of a meditative commentary that foregrounds all the analytical subtleties of a contemplative and theologically informed mind that discerns patterns, categorizes and sub-divides. Indeed, it is commentary that comes to constitute the continuity of the text in A Revelation. Both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Revelations prompt Julian to such an extended excursus of commentary that a narrative history of the fifteen revelations received on the first day can barely re-establish itself before commentary on the completed revelations as a whole takes over until the text’s conclusion. With understanding come careful attempted categorizations of the different roles of bodily sight, spiritual sight and ‘worde formede in my understanding’ (Revelation, 9.24–5), distinctions already present in a Vision but much refined in A Revelation. Julian’s perplexing but key revelation of the lord and servant is presented inseparably from the anxious process of how she learns to interpret it and then applies the interpretation, but this is only the most prominent instance of a process that characterizes Julian’s text throughout and in which three levels are distinguished. First comes ‘the beginning of teching that I understode therin in the same time’ as the revelation (Revelation, 51.64). Crucially follows ‘the inwarde lerning that I have understonde therein sithen’, combined with an overview of the whole revelation which is brought ‘oftimes frely to the sight of my understonding’ (Revelation, 51.64–7), although Julian records difficulty in separating these phases of insight.
Although Julian dates her subsequent breakthroughs in interpreting that ‘love was his mening’ to ‘fifteen yere after and mor’ (Revelation, 86.12) and her decoding of the lord and servant example to ‘twenty yere after the time of the shewing, save thre monthes’ (Revelation, 51.73), she implies many other illuminations subsequent to the original revelatory experience. Of her first showing Julian records that ‘the bodely sight stinted, and the gostely sight dwelled in my understonding’ (Revelation, 8.19–20), and this is more largely true of how she stores and interprets her recollections. In retrospect, and before describing the Sixteenth Revelation, Julian declares only in the Long Text:
Now have I tolde you of fifteen shewinges, as God whitsafe to minister them to my minde, renewde by lighteninges and touchinges, I hope of the same spirite that shewed them alle. (Revelation, 65.29–31)
These ‘lighteninges and touchinges’ are alluded to in various contexts and fashions. In Julian’s extensive added meditation on her First Revelation, for example, she introduces a new subject with ‘And to the understonding of this, he shewde this open example’ (Revelation, 7.27), which is the honour a great lord does a poor servant by being ‘homely’ with him. ‘This bodely exsample’ (Revelation, 7.33–4), as Julian terms it, has apparently been ‘shewed’ subsequent to the original revelations. Her being ‘lerned in the gostely shewing of our lord God that he meneth so’ (Revelation, 8.32) also implies subsequent insights. Recording her anxiety over the Second Revelation, Julian remarks, ‘And then diverse times our lord gave me more sight, wherby that I understode truly that it was a shewing’ (Revelation, 10.27–9), and this hint of subsequent ‘lighteninges and touchinges’ is the context for her interpretation (‘It was a figur and a liknes …’: Revelation, 10.27–9). Towards the end of the Eleventh Revelation a sentence present in the Long Text but not in the Short is introduced with the words, ‘And to mor understanding, he shewed this exsample’ (Revelation, 25.26), which apparently refers to illumination received subsequent to the original revelations. During her extended meditative commentary on the Thirteenth Revelation Julian declares ‘And farthermore he gave special understanding and teching of working and shewing of miracles, as thus …’ (Revelation, 36.49–50) and reports Christ’s direct speech, which is not part of her shorter report in A Vision. In other places any subsequent ‘lighteninges and touchinges’ are seemingly withheld (‘And as to this, I had no other answere in shewing of oure lorde but this‘: Vision, 32.41), although more divine speech is reported. In such references Julian acknowledges the culminative nature of the process of meditation implicit in her text, to be taken alongside her record of understandings insisted upon as concurrent with the original experience of revelation (‘For thus as I shall say cam to my mind in the same time’: Revelation, 6.9; ‘And in alle that time that he shewd this that I have now saide in gostely sight, I saw the bodely sight lasting’: Revelation, 7.9–10).
In A Revelation the modern reader gains access to a work that – for all its formal textualization and its alertness to Julian’s fellow Christians – retains something of the layered, interleaved structure of a private working draft, perhaps never widely circulated. It has not been restructured into a logical linearity for the benefit of readers who have not shared its author’s experience and is criss-crossed with references to revelations not yet narrated (as when the meditation on the Second Revelation refers forward to the Eighth in 10.52–3). This sense of a commentary in progress is inseparable from the challenge to interpretation reflected in the accumulating content and impetus of Julian’s revelations as she revises them between the Short and the Long texts. In most of the revelations there are absent from A Vision but present in A Revelation (and presumably added as the outcome of intervening meditation) passages reflecting some transformative shift in understanding of the original revelation which is conveyed in changes of plane and in intensification of awareness as to how imagery may express this. Each revelation where this occurs is distinct in method and effect – although there is some reiterated symbolism of blood and lordship – but the impetus in revelation after revelation establishes a pattern characteristic of the stage of Julian’s text which A Revelation represents.
In the First Revelation the supplemented visual intensity of seeing the blood spreading out over Christ’s forehead (‘quick and lively, and hidous and dredfulle, and swete and lovely’: Revelation, 7.23–4), far from being vivid and gruesome for its own sake, comes to be understood as an ‘open example’ of divine favour:
It is the most wurship that a solempne king or a gret lorde may do to a pore servante if he wille be homely with him, and namely if he shew it himselfe […] both in previte and openly. (Revelation, 7.27–30)
In addition, this perception of privilege in intimate access prompts a rapturous transport of self-forgetfulness: ‘This bodely exsample was shewde so high that this mannes hart might be ravished and almost forget himselfe for joy of this grete homelyhede’ (Revelation, 7.33–5).
In the Second Revelation Julian’s realization – only recorded in the Long Text – of the seeing and seeking, both having and wanting God in this life, moves into her striking vision of what it is like on the floor of the sea (‘hilles and dales grene […] with wrake and gravel’; Revelation, 10.17–18), which she understands to signify that if we truly grasped God’s continual presence with us we should be safe, whether beneath the waves or in whatever element. Julian’s vivid and imaginative exploration into a different plane is a means of conveying a necessary transformation of spiritual awareness, just as her expansion in A Revelation of the Third Revelation (‘I saw God in a pointe’: Revelation, 11.1) strives to expand her readers’ alertness to the gap between divine and human perspectives (‘by our blindhede and our unforsighte, we say these thinges be by happes and aventure […] in the sight of our lord God is no happe ne aventure’: Revelation, 11.10–13).
In its prototype in A Vision Julian’s Fourth Revelation focuses on Christ’s profusely bleeding body, as at the Flagellation, with the follow-up thought that, just as God has made abundance of waters on earth, so we are to apply his plenteous blood to wash us of sin. In A Revelation this is transformed by a surreal visionary understanding of the potent blood streaming through hell, earth and heaven with a dynamic purposiveness: bursting the bonds of hell and delivering the saved; overflowing the earth and purifying sin; ascending into heaven ‘bleding, preying for us to the father’ (Revelation, 12.23). In comparable vein in her Sixth Revelation (‘our lorde saide: “I thanke thee of thy servys […] and namely of thy youth” ‘: Revelation, 14.1–2), Julian has added, after meditation, a passage recording a visionary transformation of insight into the original showing:
my understonding was lifted uppe into heven, wher I saw our lorde God as a lorde in his owne house, which lorde hath called alle his derewurthy frendes to a solempne fest. (Revelation, 14.2–4)
Here, Julian’s imagery of lord and servant works doubly, conveying not only the privilege in God’s favour but also the implicit worth honoured in the human soul by the same token. Always careful to offset any anthropomorphic visualizing of her revelations (‘I saw the lorde taking no place in his awne house, but I saw him ryally reigne in his house’: Revelation, 14.4–5), Julian’s understanding is of no material feast but of the solace of drawing near ‘with mervelous melody of endelesse love’ to the face of God, ‘which glorious chere of the godhede fulfilleth alle heven of joy and blisse’ (Revelation, 14.7–9). And it is to the divine countenance that Julian returns in an added passage that represents her meditative conclusion to her richly expanded and interpolated Eighth Revelation of the gruesome agonies of Christ’s dying and drying body. In A Vision Julian had simply recorded a change in Christ’s countenance and that ‘the chaunginge of his chere changed mine […] And I was fulle merye’ (Vision, 11.18–20). But, in the expanded version, this change of facial expression has been developed to reflect a transformation from this world to the next:
we, wilfully abiding in the same crosse […] sodeynly he shalle change his chere to us, and we shal be with him in heven. Betwene that one and that other shalle alle be one time, and than shall alle be brought into joy. (Revelation, 21.13–16)
If Christ were to show us now the divine countenance no pain could aggrieve us, and hence ‘for this litille paine that we suffer heer, we shalle have an high, endlesse knowing in God, which we might never have without that’ (Revelation, 21.23–4).
The meditative insights into some succeeding revelations recorded only in A Revelation present Julian’s comparably transformative realizations of the implications for spiritual understanding of the original showings. To her Ninth Revelation (where Christ declares, amongst other things, ‘If I might suffer more, I wolde suffer more’: Revelation, 22.21) Julian’s intervening meditations record how she wanted to learn ‘how often he wolde die if he might. And sothly the nomber passed my understanding and my wittes’ (Revelation, 22.24–5). With contemplation Julian comes to see that for Christ, who might effortlessly perform any marvel (‘if he saide he wolde for my love make new hevens and new erthes, it ware but litille in regarde’: Revelation, 22.30–1) this divine offer to die so repeatedly beyond our comprehension ‘is the highest profer that oure lorde God might make to mannes soule, as to my sight’ (Revelation, 22.30–4). Or, again, in the differences between the Short and Long Text versions of the Tenth Revelation are revealed some of the contemplative transformation in understanding that Julian has accomplished during the stages represented by the two texts. The core idea of this revelation in both texts is that ‘our goode lorde loked into his side and behelde’ while saying ‘Lo, how I loved the!’ (Revelation, 24.1, 11). For Julian in A Vision this is as if he had said ‘My childe, if thow kan nought loke in my godhede, see here howe I lette open my side’ (Vision, 13.2–3). Yet by A Revelation Julian’s contemplation records something altogether different in implication. First, Christ’s own gazing at his side guides Julian towards a perception that opens out into a mysterious transformation of spiritual dimension and miraculous space: ‘And ther he shewed a fair, delectable place, and large inow for alle mankinde that shalle be saved to rest in pees and in love’ (Revelation, 24.3–4). Even more remarkably, where A Vision offered solace (‘if thow kan nought loke in my godhede’), A Revelation records instead at the equivalent point: ‘And with this swete enjoyeing he shewed to my understanding, in part, the blessed godhede, as farforth as he wolde that time’ (Revelation, 24.7–8), before expanding A Vision’s brief locution into a rapturous prose poem in which Christ hymns his love for the human soul (‘as if he had saide: ‘Behold and see that I loved thee so much’: Revelation, 24.16).
Just as this Tenth Revelation goes back to, yet transcends, devotion to Christ’s wounded side among his five wounds, so the Eleventh Revelation ‘brought to my minde where our lady stode in the time of his passion’ (Revelation, 25.2–3), although, with intervening meditation, Julian adds in A Revelation a more spiritual understanding (‘But hereof am I not lerned to long to see her bodely presens while I am here, but the virtuse of her blissed soule’: Revelation, 25.15–16). Yet, after years of meditative reflection, the record in A Revelation of contemplative attainment is inseparable from an added sense of uncompleted process and inexpressibility. In the Twelfth Revelation ‘our lorde shewed him more glorified as to my sight than I saw him before’ (Revelation, 26.1–2) and, as Ena Jenkins also identifies in her essay later in this volume, voices a prose poem that defines himself in relation to the soul (‘I it am that thou servest! I it am that thou longest …!’). But, whereas the response to this revelation in the earlier text is to record confidence in what contemplation can attain (‘And in this was I lerede that ilke saule contemplatife to whilke es giffen to luke and seke God shalle se hire [i.e. Mary] and passe unto God by contemplation’) (Vision, 13.23–24), in A Revelation this has been revised into ‘Wherin I was lerned that oure soule shalle never have reste tille it come into him’ (Revelation, 26.2–3) and, after the divine locution, A Revelation has added a passage acknowledging its inexpressibility and wonder:
The nomber of the words passeth my wittes and my understanding […] For therin is comprehended I can not telle what! But the joy that I saw […] passeth alle that hart can think or soule may desire. (Revelation, 26.8–11)
Equally transformative is Julian’s rewriting of her final revelations in the sequence, changes that both draw upon, yet transcend, conventional devotional imagery and Julian’s own recurrent symbolism. In the record of her Fifteenth Revelation (‘Sodeynly thou shalte be taken … ‘) it is only in A Revelation that Julian includes both her vision of the soul leaving a decomposing body and her subsequent meditations:
And sodeynly oute of this body sprong a fulle fair creature, a litille child, full shapen and formed, swift and lifly and whiter then the lilye, which sharpely glided uppe into heven. (Revelation, 64.25–8)
However, Julian’s careful temporal introduction of this passage implies the concurrence of this later-recorded vision with the original showing (‘And in this time I sawe a body lyeng on the erth’: Revelation, 64.24). Just as the image of the soul as a child quitting the corpse derives from traditional iconography, so in her concluding Sixteenth Revelation (of Christ sitting enthroned in the city of our soul) Julian builds on her pervasive symbolism of divine lordship. In a meditation present only in A Revelation but recording insights ostensibly dated to the original revelatory experience, ‘understanding was geven in the same time by example of a creature’ (Revelation, 68.19–20) who is prompted by seeing the panoply of treasures and realms possessed by a lord to seek out that lord’s dwelling and presence:
And thus I understonde sothly that oure soule may never have rest in thing that is beneth itselfe […] yet may it not abide in the beholding of itselfe, but alle the beholding is blissefully set in God, that is the maker, wonning therin.
(Revelation, 68.23–7)
Despite all such signs of scrupulous revision between A Vision and A Revelation, Julian confronted problems in both form and content when moving from seeing into writing. These problems are compounded when accumulated insights from subsequent reflection become incorporated into her text, and still challenge us today when reading it. By comparison with the Long Text, the revelations in the Short Text are quite sparely recounted; they open with less by way of introduction or context and are unlocated in time. Julian’s account of the revelations in the earlier text does not present a connected thematic sequence. There, the showings may appear fragmentary and even disjointed: a succession of segments, without much foreground, background or overall perspective, and in no apparent order. Absence of sub-division in A Vision’s text may retain Julian’s earlier sense of her experience as a stream of revelatory consciousness within which boundaries between revelations are still merging and emerging to her perception, and with such boundaries an understanding of relative priority and significance that eventually enables the demarcation and numbering of revelations. As visions, Julian’s showings are strikingly dissimilar in length, type and content. Not all focus on the Passion, and in the Long Text Julian later categorizes these as a sub-group (‘For I had sight of the passion of Crist in diverse shewing: in the furst, in the secunde, in the fourth, and in the eighth’: Revelation, 33.14–15). Not all revelations are primarily visual, and much of A Revelation’s commentary is distinctively auditory, recording Julian’s understanding of what is attributed to divine direct speech not recorded in A Vision. Julian’s revelations prompt distinct kinds of contemplative revision and reflection, for part of the character of A Revelation may be understood as a pondered commentary upon, and exegesis of, the record of a vision in the Short Text that A Revelation has edited.
The words in A Vision document the core testimony of Julian’s revelations. These remain at the heart of A Revelation, but around the text of A Vision the later text frames the apparatus of an edition of the original version, an apparatus created both through formal textualization and through numerous interpolations of extended meditative commentary on the showings’ content (‘And in this swete word, as if he had said …‘: Revelation, 25.3–4). In A Revelation (but not in A Vision) are the division into numbered chapters and the numbering of the revelations. Absent from A Vision too is the opening chapter setting out a table of contents (although this may well derive from scribal editing, as may the chapter summaries in MS Sloane 2499).5 Together with such articulation of divisions comes more sense in A Revelation of a chronological continuum, smoothing over some of the transitions in the earlier account. Also in A Revelation a timetable of the two days’ showings is added in retrospect (‘the furst beganne erly in the morninge […] the goode lorde shewde the sixteenth revelation on the night folowing’: Revelation, 65.31; 66.1–2), which is significant in introducing an authorial overview, absent before, of how her experience shaped and paced itself to a climax (‘it lasted – shewing by processe, fulle fair and soberly, eche folowing other’: Revelation, 65.32–3). Interconnections between revelations are already being noted in A Vision but, by the phase of development represented in A Revelation, Julian’s meditations are interlinked by precise cross-references facilitated by numbering of the revelations: ‘And the ground of this was shewed in the furst, and more openly in the thirde, wher it seyth … ‘ (Revelation, 35.15–16, analyzing the Thirteenth Revelation). More largely, A Revelation’s text is shaped by an added sense of perspective and overview. The special significance of the First Revelation in itself and in relation to the whole sequence of subsequent showings is brought out explicitly (‘this was shewed in the first sight and in all’: Revelation, 4.10–11; ‘For the strength and the grounde of alle was shewed in the furst sight’: Revelation, 6.55). When Julian writes of her First Revelation, ‘and herefore was this lesson of love shewed, with alle that foloweth, as ye shall see’ (Revelation, 6.54–5), she seems to write in knowledge of her late understanding: ‘Thus was I lerned that love is oure lordes mening’ (Revelation, 86.16–17). In a passage not in A Vision, meditating on the Ninth Revelation, Julian perceives that ‘oure curteyse lorde shewed his passion to me in five manneres’ and recalls these as the First, Second, Fourth and Eighth Revelations, with the Ninth as the fifth manner (Revelation, 23.6–11). After an overview of the first day of fifteen showings Julian comments in the Long Text about her final revelation before she has narrated it, ‘which sixteenth was conclusion and confirmation to all the fifteen’ (Revelation, 66.2–3), and so lends shape and structure to her visionary sequence in this version.
The whole project of revising the shorter text into the altogether more analytical and patterned prose of A Revelation embodies in itself a kind of re-edition. The major part of A Vision’s shorter text is absorbed into the longer version: some passages undergo re-expression but much phrasing remains relatively unchanged and little material is positively discarded. Sounding closer to speech and possibly to dictation than A Revelation’s patterned periods, the often terse statements of Julian’s shorter version survive into the fuller text, although in revision Julian has surrounded these sentences with formulations of the understanding of those initial statements that she has come with contemplation to perceive. The terseness of A Vision is carried forward into new contextualizations, where it is framed by distinctions and qualifications. In moving towards A Revelation it is as if Julian works on and from a copy of A Vision in front of her (or an amanuensis might have done so, if Julian were dictating). Thus, the text of A Revelation may be imagined to have evolved through intensive accumulation onto a version of A Vision of interlineated expansions and interleaved commentary in the form of interpolation of new passages, of new sentences into existing passages, and of new clauses into sentences surviving from A Vision. Commenting on the Fourth Revelation, that we should wash ourselves in Christ’s blood, Julian amplifies:
For it is most plentuous as it is most precious and that by the vertu of the blessed godhead. And it is our owne kinde and all blissefully overfloweth us by the vertu of his precious love. (Revelation, 12.12–15, my emphasis)
The italicised words – present only in the later text – have set the brief, original statement in a more spiritual dimension, matched stylistically through more developed syntactical patterns. Julian’s expansion of her initial comments on Mary’s sorrows at the Passion similarly sets A Vision’s original observation within a more developed spiritual awareness and corresponding syntax in A Revelation:
For Crist and she was so oned in love that the gretnes of her love was cause of the mekillehede of her paine. For in this I saw a substance of kinde love, continued by grace, that his creatures have to him, which kinde love was most fulsomly shewde in his swete mother, and overpassing. For so mekille as she loved him more then alle other, her paine passed alle other. For ever the higher, the mightier, the swetter that the love is, the more sorow it is to the lover to se that body in paine that he loved.
(Revelation, 18.1–7, my emphasis)
Exploring and deepening her original visions’ analysis of love as of sin, such revisions between the texts point to ways of working that probably characterized intervening stages of Julian’s text between A Vision and A Revelation that happen not to survive, for the style created by Julian’s contemplative revisions pervades her work:
And for the tender love that oure good lorde hath to alle that shalle be saved, he comforteth redely and swetly, mening thus: ‘It is soth that sinne is cause of alle this paine, but alle shalle be wele, [Sloane adds ‘and alle shall be well’] and alle maner of thing shalle be wele.’ (Revelation, 27.26–9)
Such a technique of interpolating and commenting allows for noticeable qualification and realignment of problematic passages. This development in understanding by adaptive expansion in the later text can be seen in the Fifth Revelation, which shows how the passion vanquishes the malice of the devil. Julian tells how ‘I saw oure lorde scorne his malis and nought his unmight’ (Revelation, 13.19), but with meditation she evidently feels the need to correct potential misunderstandings of her vision of God’s scorning the fiend’s malice. Her original revelation of that scorning remains in her text, but Julian prefaces it in A Revelation with careful scruple (‘But in God may be no wrath, as to my sight’: Revelation, 13.14–15), and a little later in the chapter Julian again intervenes in the fuller text to clarify:
And ther I sawe him scorne his malis, it was be leding of my understanding into oure lorde: that is to say, an inwarde shewing of sothfastnesse, without changyng of chere. (Revelation, 13.25–7)
With subsequent meditation, the original showing’s visualization of God’s scorn has come to trouble Julian with its potential to mislead. Her resolution, however, is to retain the vividly visual core of her initial perception alongside the subsequent contemplative commentary that offsets it, and to round off her Fifth Revelation with a concluding section only present in the longer text. The original report in A Vision is presented as if narrating a particular historic moment (‘I saw our Lord’), but by interpolating a final section of contemplative commentary Julian builds in a transformative shift in dimension that recurrently characterizes the Long Text: her realization of the continuing and the endless which is in God that we can only endeavour to perceive within our time-bound context. This is the passage that begins ‘And ther I saide “he is scorned”, I ment that God scorneth him: that is to sey, for he seeth him now as he shall do withoute ende’ (Revelation, 13.34–5).
Many key differences that distinguish the Long Text from the Short are the outcome of moves to edit Julian’s visions for a readership wider than the audience implied in A Vision. Indication in A Vision that the text is directed at contemplatives (see, for example, Vision, 4.37–8) does not survive into A Revelation; throughout, references in the earlier text to ‘he’ or ‘thou’ have been transposed into the first-person plural in A Revelation. In presenting its record of the revelations, the later text moves beyond contexts where A Vision aligns itself defensively with orthodox church teaching and authority. Alertness to a sense of sin and to the devil are never far away in A Vision, along with some fear of the deceptiveness of visions. Just before Jesus declares that ‘Sinne is behovely’ in the Thirteenth Revelation, A Revelation records that Jesus ‘in this vision enformed me of alle that me neded’ (Revelation, 27.8–9) but omits a passage here in A Vision which declares more defensively: ‘I saye nought that me nedes na mare techinge. For oure lorde, with the shewinge of this, hase lefte me to haly kyrke […] I […] wilfully submittes me to the techinge of haly kyrke’ (Vision, 13.40–3). Comparably, near the beginning of the Fourteenth Revelation concerning prayer A Revelation drops a section in A Vision including ‘And that es as I hafe understandide be the techinge of haly kyrke […] And in this we say Pater noster, Ave, and Crede’ (Vision, 19.5–8). By the stage of A Revelation, Julian no longer feels the need to express such conventional orthodoxies.
Julian’s alertness to sin’s perils is seen throughout her text’s development, but her statements about sin in the Short Text tend to be more strident and disorganized than they become in A Revelation. With intervening contemplation Julian evidently gains control of what had previously seemed uncontrollably problematic, and this is reflected stylistically. In analyzing sin near the close of the Thirteenth Revelation A Vision gives the impression of a series of observations noted hurriedly, and driven by Julian’s urgent preoccupation with sin as danger:
For alle thinge is goode botte sinne, and nathinge is wikked botte sinne. Sinne es nowthere deed no liking. Botte when a saule cheses wilfully sinne – that is, paine – as fore his God, atte the ende he hase right nought. That paine thinke me the herdeste helle, for he hase nought his God: in alle paines a saule may hafe God botte in sinne. (Vision, 18.7–11)
In A Revelation these jottings have been refashioned into:
And to me was shewed none harder helle than sinne. For a kind soule hateth no helle but sinne […] And whan we geve oure intent to love and meknesse by the werking of mercy and grace, we be made alle fair and clene.
(Revelation, 40.33–6)
Here, Julian’s achievement of her mature view on sin is reflected in syntax that first puts into a nutshell the content of the earlier text and then expands on that teaching – expansive too in style and spirit – on the role of love and grace. Overall, A Revelation reflects how Julian comes to see that the very ignoring of sin by her revelations is a token of its utter insubstantiality, and hence she omits from the revised text her lengthiest explicit discussion of sin in A Vision, an outburst in which she apostrophizes sin indignantly (‘A, wriched sinne! Whate ert thowe? Thowe er nought. For I sawe that God is alle thinge: I sawe nought the’: Vision, 23.23–4). This can be dropped from A Revelation because Julian’s understanding of sin becomes implicit in a more assured analysis of the spiritual progress of humanity in her fuller text.
With comparable assurance Julian revises her discussion after the Sixteenth Revelation of the proper balance between love and dread of God, developing a confidence based on a refined understanding of the experience of love and grace. Of the various types of dread described in A Vision, the third is doubtful dread:
For though it be litille in the selfe, and it ware knawen it is a spice of dispaire. For I am seker that alle doutefulle dredes God hates, and he wille that we hafe tham departed fro us with trewe knawinge of luffe. (Vision, 25.11–13)
But in A Revelation this is revised into:
Doubtfulle drede, inasmoch as it draweth to dispair, God wille have it turned in us into love by tru knowing of love; that is to sey, that the bitternesse of doubt be turned into swetnes of kinde love by grace. (Revelation, 74. 11–13)
The fuller understanding explored in A Revelation characteristically turns upon a transformation accomplished by means of love, and through a realization that the two responses which seem at variance with each other are in truth interrelated within us (‘Love and drede are bredren, and they are roted in us by the goodnesse of oure maker’: Revelation, 74.17–18).
Near the heart of Julian’s reinterpretation of her showings into A Revelation lie her contemplative revisions of what, on the evidence of the rewriting they prompt, were her most problematic Thirteenth and Fourteenth Revelations (‘And in theyse same wordes, I saw an high, mervelous previte hid in God’: Revelation, 27.33). Here are found expansions of what may seem jotted outlines of thinking in A Vision. Meditating on the spiritual thirst of Christ, Julian simply records in the earlier text that this is ‘the falinge of his blisse, that he has us nought in him als haelye as he shalle thane haffe’ (Vision, 15.15–16). However, by the time A Revelation is written, the thirst as failing of bliss has been rewritten through intervening meditation into Christ’s ‘love-longing to have us all togeder, hole in him to his endlesse blisse, as to my sight’ (Revelation, 31.15–16). This, in turn, has prompted interpolation of a meditative sequence which, after cross-reference to previous showings (‘namely in the twelfth […] And that shewde he in the ninth’: Revelation, 31.21–5), concludes: ‘For as verely as ther is a properte in God of ruth and pite, as verely ther is a properte in God of thurst and longing’ (Revelation, 31.34–5) before rejoining the original argument retained from A Vision (‘And alle this was seen in shewing of compassion’: Revelation, 31.42). Over succeeding pages, single sentences from A Vision provide cues for contemplations now recorded through interpolated sections exploring the understandings Julian has attained on the interface between orthodoxy and the universalist optimism of her revelations. In a passage from A Vision which is replaced in A Revelation, Julian has already accepted what she cannot know now:
I am well payed that I wate it noght […] It is Goddes wille that we witte that alle shalle be wele in generalle. Botte it is nought Goddes wille that we shulde witte it nowe, botte as it langes to us for the time. And that is the techinge of haly kyrke. (Vision, 15.27–31)
In A Revelation the corresponding sections reflect a far-reaching rethinking of this state of unknowing, with an added section opening mysteriously: ‘There is a deed the which the blisseful trinite shalle do in the last day …‘, and closing: ‘This is the gret deed […] tresured and hid in his blessed brest, only knowen to himselfe, by which deed he shalle make all thing wele’ (Revelation, 32.19, 26–9). Enlarging with contemplation on an assurance from A Vision that ‘the same blissed trinite shalle make wele alle that es nought wele’ (Vision, 15.22–3), A Revelation develops a section recalling church teaching on condemnation of heathens and others to hell, and worrying that therefore ‘methought it was unpossible that alle maner of thing shuld be wele, as oure lorde shewde’ (Revelation, 32.39–40). Yet here Julian also meditates her way to recognition that what seems impossible to us is not impossible for God’s great deed, ‘in which dede he shalle save his worde in alle thing and he shalle make wele all that is not welle’ (Revelation, 32.47–8). Recurring to her earlier text for a sentence (‘It is Goddes wille that we hafe grete rewarde to alle the dedes that he has done’: Vision, 15.23–4), Julian develops from it with the outcome of intervening meditation, adding a further section on acceptance of what we cannot yet know and understand: ‘But evermore us nedeth leve the beholding what the dede shalle be […] Than shalle we only enjoye in God and be welle apaide both with hiding and shewing’ (Revelation, 33.24–8).
‘Both with hiding and shewing’ in its intensely inward focus as a personal testimony in first-person narrative, the text of A Revelation cannot but have an intrinsically autobiographical quality, while striving to transcend individuality and present itself as the progress of a soul. Julian’s studied anonymity and self-effacement give her text a distinctive voice, at once individual yet universal. Any context in place, circumstance or social status had already been occluded from A Vision, so it is ironic that with a few added words the scribal colophon to A Vision which names Julian ‘that is recluse atte Norwiche’ has undone all her self-abnegation and enabled her identification. All reference in this text to the author’s being a woman disappears from A Revelation, which retains Julian’s self-denigrations as a simple creature ‘unlettered’ or ‘that coude no letter’. Although these features may reflect contemporary anxieties about women’s authorship, they also form part of a larger trend between A Vision and A Revelation to dwell less on the author than the message, and to universalize that message. Nonetheless, the actuality of Julian’s exact age of thirty-and-a-half years at the time of the showings is retained in A Revelation from A Vision, while the precise dating of the revelations to a day in May 1373 – and later to the hours (‘aboute the oure of four […] tille it was none of the day or paste’: Revelation, 65.32–3) – lends the historicity of a documentary deposition to an account of what transcends time and defies description. Any overt or overarching metaphors of spiritual progress as a journey or ascent are eschewed, and Julian does not analyze advancement for herself or her readers through progressive stages of contemplation. Her text is not structured by teaching any meditative programme for Julian’s readers to follow and apply for themselves. It is as an uncompleted project shared with the reader that A Revelation subsumes any more direct claim to didactic intent in A Vision, instead providing the record of a contemplative movement towards greater understanding. In essence, Julian offers her own experience as a witness, and her only claim on her reader lies in her conviction that her testimony’s value lies not in any endorsement of herself but in its import for all.
Today, when most readers of the Long Text will be ‘tho that be hethen – and also man that hath received cristondom and liveth uncristen life’ (Revelation, 32.36–7), to chart the movement between A Vision and A Revelation enables us to explore the record of a painful inward pilgrimage, which accommodates without compromise a self-authenticating personal vision that seemingly conflicts with authority and convention. Inseparable from Julian’s visionary insights into the courteous homeliness towards humanity that God showed in taking on human flesh is her revelatory understanding – worked through between A Vision and A Revelation – that the Incarnation carries ennobling implications for humankind. It is only in the later text that Julian adds the transformative example in John of Beverley of a saint who, despite a youthful fall, is rewarded ‘overpassing that he shuld have had if he had not sinned or fallen’ (Revelation, 38.27–8). It is also in A Revelation that Julian records her insight into her Sixteenth Revelation’s implication concerning divine satisfaction at the making of man’s soul:
For I saw in the same shewing that if the blisseful trinite might have made mannes soule ony better, ony fairer, ony nobeler than it was made, he shulde not have been full plesed with making of mannes soule (Revelation, 68.30–3).
It is in A Revelation that Julian’s lord and servant example draws these themes into triumphant synthesis, serenely occluding a whole tradition of human self-blame and guilt for the Fall. It is also in A Revelation that an undeveloped draft in A Vision about how all creation is desolated at the hour of the Crucifixion (‘thay that luffed him nought sufferde paine for failinge of comforthe of alle creatures’: Vision, 10.48–9) is transformed into a numinous account of devotional process. A pagan observer of this desolated creation (and one who will become a saint) – convinced that a suffering universe witnesses to its self-sacrificingly suffering creator – takes a first step in devotion and ‘did write on an awter: “This is an awter of the unknowen God”‘ (Revelation, 18.25).
Just such a spiritually transformative awareness is conveyed in the Second Revelation by Julian’s vision (absent from her shorter text) of being led down to the bottom of the sea and there understanding that, if only we had a sense of God’s constantly being with us, it would be like inhabiting a different plane or element (‘if a man or woman were there, under the brode water, and he might have sight of God – so as God is with a man continually – he shoulde be safe in soule and body’: Revelation, 10.18–20). To this an anecdote in Gervase of Tilbury’s Otia Imperialia offers some parallel, in recalling the widespread folk belief that our sky forms the surface of the sea in another world overhead, from which the inhabitants occasionally swim down. As Gervase relates, one day a congregation ‘straggling out of their parish church after high mass’ are dumbfounded to see a ship’s anchor caught fast on a tombstone in the churchyard, ‘with its rope stretching up and hanging in the air’.6 In some versions of the legend a sailor swims down to free the anchor, but cannot survive in our element and drowns. Yet in another tradition, developed in a poem by Seamus Heaney, the sailor is enabled to ascend again, having experienced – like Julian of Norwich, and hence her readers – a visionary change of plane from a foray into another world:
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’
The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.
‘Lightenings’, viii (Seeing Things, 1991)7
1 All references to Julian’s texts will be taken from The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (Turnhout, 2006) and will be cited by section or chapter and line.
2 On the two versions, see: Denise Nowakowski Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton, NJ, 1994); Marion Glasscoe, ‘Visions and Revisions: A Further Look at the Manuscripts of Julian of Norwich’, Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989), pp. 103–20; Barry Windeatt, ‘Julian of Norwich and Her Audience’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 28 (1977), pp. 1–17; ‘“Pryvytes to us”: Knowing and re-vision in Julian of Norwich’, in Chaucer to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of S. Ando, ed. Toshiyuki Takamiya and Richard Beadle (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 87–98; ‘Julian of Norwich’, in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 67–81.
3 On the manuscripts, see: Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love: The Shorter Version from B.L. Add. MS 37990, ed. Frances Beer (Heidelberg, 1978); A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, 2 vols (Toronto, 1978); Julian of Norwich: Showing of Love: Extant Texts and Translation, ed. Sr Anna Maria Reynolds and Julia Bolton Holloway (Florence, 2001). These manuscripts are also discussed by Elisabeth Dutton in this present volume.
4 The priest who brings a crucifix is accompanied by a child and addresses Julian as ‘daughter’ (Vision, 2.20–2); the posture of Julian’s head and hands on her sickbed are described (Vision, 2.33–5); and Julian’s mother is at her bedside (Vision, 10.26–8).
5 The summaries preceding chapters in the Sloane MS (but absent from the Paris MS) occasionally refer to the author in the third person: ‘Of the mekenes of this woman ...’ (ch. 9); ‘This blissid woman saw God ...’ (ch. 81; cf. also chs 51, 66, 69), although this may indicate only that summaries deriving from Julian have been edited, rather than wholly invented.
6 Gervase of Tilbury, Otia Imperialia, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford, 2002), p. 81.
7 Seamus Heaney, Open Ground: Poems 1966–96 (London, 1998), p. 364.