9. ‘This blessed beholdyng’: Reading the Fragments from Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love in London, Westminster
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‘This blessed beholdyng’: Reading the Fragments from Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love in London, Westminster Cathedral Treasury, MS 4
MARLEEN CRÉ
Julian of Norwich’s writings have come down to us in a limited number of manuscripts, only two of which are medieval. London, British Library MS Additional 37790 (Amherst) was written around 1450, most likely in an English charterhouse. It is an anthology of five complete authorial texts in Middle English interspersed with shorter extracts and compilations.1 In this manuscript Julian’s Short Text, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, follows Richard Misyn’s Middle English translations of Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vitae and Incendium amoris and is itself followed by the Middle English translation of Ruusbroec’s Vanden blinkenden steen and M. N.’s Middle English translation of Marguerite Porète’s Mirouer des Simples Âmes, all of which describe and provide instruction regarding the contemplative life. The second medieval manuscript that preserves some of Julian’s writing is London, Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4 (W), a manuscript of unknown provenance datable to around 1500.2 The single text contained in this manuscript is a compilation which is entirely made up of fragments from existing texts: commentaries on Psalms 90 (Qui habitat) and 91 (Bonum est), probably by Walter Hilton,3 Books I and II of Hilton’s Scale of Perfection and A Revelation of Love, the long version of Julian’s text.
What both manuscripts have in common is that they place A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman (in full) as well as A Revelation of Love (in fragments) in context, aligning or juxtaposing the texts with other texts written by mainly contemporary contemplative authors. As neither the Amherst anthologist nor the compiler of the Westminster compilation account for their decisions in a prologue in which the intended readers are addressed,4 any information about their intentions needs to be gleaned from the texts themselves, and from the contents and placement of the adjacent texts.5 The Revelation fragments in Westminster have so far largely been treated in isolation.6 In this essay, therefore, I would like to reassess the compiler’s selections from A Revelation in the context of the compilation as a whole, following onto and interacting with the selections from the Qui habitat and Bonum est expositions and from the Scale of Perfection. This means seeing the compilation in positive terms, as a text with a clear focus on one particular theme – contemplation – written using fragments of existing texts chosen in the service of this theme,7 rather than in the negative terms of loss and simplification of the source texts, and repression of some of their material.8 In preferring ‘choice’ over ‘repression’ as an approach to the compilation, we come to focus on the compiler’s editorial activity in a different way, not defining his omissions as censorship of his sources, but his selections as appreciation of what the source texts have to say on the topics of his interest.9
The text-internal evidence of the Westminster compilation warrants treatment of it as one coherent text rather than as a haphazard collection of purple passages. With themes, motifs and metaphors recurring in the selections from all source texts, the compilation weaves a richly coloured and patterned textual tapestry. The formal characteristics of the manuscript corroborate the text-internal findings. The manuscript is written in one hand, and, as the Revelation fragments start on the verso side of folio 72, they were intended to form an integral part of the compilation, and were not coincidentally bound together with the Hilton material. In addition, marginal annotations occur throughout the manuscript, which means that its late seventeenth- to early eighteenth-century readers considered the compilation as one text. On the basis of the script, W is dated to around 1500. The dialect of the text suggests that the extant copy was made of an earlier original (the compiler’s autograph?) written around 1450 in south-east England, adjacent to London.10 The provenance of the manuscript is unknown, as are both its intended and actual readership. Thus the text itself will be the starting point of an analysis that attempts to recover the compiler’s editorial strategies.11
The Qui habitat exposition is, perhaps not coincidentally, the only text of which the larger part has been selected. Its relative weight on the compilation as a whole, therefore, is considerable. It is striking that the Qui habitat passages the compiler has left out are all on sin and temptation. He does not select verse or exposition (apart from the occasional relic passage) of 90:6 (‘ffro þe Arewe fleoinge in þe day, fro þe neodes goinge in þesternes: fro in-renninge, and fro þe mydday fend’: QH, 17.2–4), nor of 90:7 (‘A þousand schal fallen fro þi syde, and ten þousend from þi riht hand: soþliche, to þe þei schul not neihʒen’: QH, 23.14–16), and the second half of 90:10 (‘þe scourge schal not neiʒen in þi tabernacle’: QH, 32.9–10), and of 90:12 (‘leest happilich þou hurte þi fote at a ston’: QH, 38.5–6).
In some cases he selects the exposition, but not the verse itself, such as 90:3 (‘Ffor-whi he haþ delyuered me from þe snare of hunters: & from a scharp word’: QH, 7. 8–9, exposition on ff. 4v–6v). He includes the exposition of the first half of 90:5 (‘His soþfastnes schal vnbigo þe with a scheld’: QH, 13.14, exposition on ff. 9r–v), 90:8 (‘Soþliche with þin eʒen þou schal beholden: & þe ʒeldyng of synnes þou schalt sen’: QH, 25/13–14, exposition on ff. 10r–12v), and 90:16 (‘in lengþe of dayes i schal fulfille him: & I schal schewen to him myn hele’: QH, 48.15–16, exposition on ff. 24r–25r).
The compilation’s themes are triggered by the psalm verses and their expositions which the compiler does select. He borrows Qui habitat’s discussion of contemplation from the exposition of Psalms 90:1 (‘He that wonyth in þe helpe of the hyeste: in helyng of god of heuen he shall dwel’: f. 1r; cf. QH, 2.2–3), 90:2 (‘he shall sey to our lord: my vptakar art thou, my refute, my god, I shall hope in hym’: ff. 1v–2r; cf. QH, 3.8–9), 90:4 (‘Our lorde god shall with hys shulders vmbeshadowe the and vnder his feders þou shalt hope’: f. 6v; cf. QH, 10.8–9), 90:9 (‘Lord thou arte my hope, and þou haste sett me in my refute moste hyeste’: f. 12v; cf. QH, 29.7–8), the first half of 90:10 (‘Iuell shall not comm to þe’: f. 15r; cf. QH, 32.9), 90:11 (‘he hath sent his angels for to kepe the in all thy weyes’: f. 16r; cf. QH, 36.7–8), the first half of 90:12 (‘in their handis they bere þe vp’: f. 17r; cf. QH, 38.5), part of 90:14 (‘Sothly for he hopyth in me. Therfor I shall delyuer hym for he knoweth my name’: f. 18v; cf. QH, 43.8–9) and 90:15 (‘for he cryed to me, I shall here him. I am with hym in tribulacion. I shall delyuer hym, and I shal gloryfie hym’: f. 21r; cf. QH, 45.20–46.2).
The compiler, then, is concerned first and foremost with contemplation, defined in terms of enclosure and ascent, played out in the metaphors of Psalms 90:2, 90:3 and 90:9, as well as in sensory terms (seeing, being shown, feeling).12 In leaving out those expositions describing sins and temptations, he writes a text that is spiritually optimistic at heart, stressing the favourable workings of God’s grace and the possibility of union with God, the positive outcome of conversion and the contemplative’s humility and loving desire:
And þou art my god. I wyll haue noo god but only þee þat haste so moche done for me. For though I may not see þee as þou art, ne feele þee as þou art in thi blessed kynde, neuerþelesse, by the effecte of þi graciouse workyng in me þat þou hast doo so myche for me, I see þe and feele þee as I se þe sonne and fele þe hete of it by shynynge of þe beames. Ryght so I do se þee and feele þee by thi yeftis of grace, for sothely þat thyng þat toke me vp fro þe fylth of synne and hath strengthed me thorough swetnes of deuocion for to loue hym, that thynge is my god, what þat it be. (ff. 3v–4r; cf. QH, 5.3–6.1)
In the description of contemplation as the knowledge and (later) the receiving of God’s name, the Qui habitat fragments introduce the themes of the intricate relationship between knowledge and love of God and God’s gift of himself – here in this passage referred to as ‘the yeftis of the holy gooste’ – a God who is trinitarian, Father (might–memory), Son (wisdom–wit) and Holy Ghost (goodness–love):
I shall departe with hym the yeftis of the holy gooste, and I shall make hym free and wyllynge for to loue. And for he knowethe my name I shall defende hym […] He þat knowyth my full name, þat I am ihesu god, he knowyth me and he louyth me, for my name is both god and man. He knowyth my name through the lyght of grace yeuen vnto hym as souereyne goodnes, souereyne wysedom, souereyne might, endelesse beynge, and blessed life and ioy vnspekable. He knowith my name, for I am all this. I do all thyng þat I do wysely and godly, and ryghtfully.
(ff. 18v–19v; cf. QH, 43.13–16 and 44.6–13)
The scope of the compilation, largely defined in the Qui habitat fragments, is completed in the Bonum est fragments. The compiler has selected from the exposition of Psalms 91:1 (‘It is good to shryue to our lord god and synge to his name’: f. 25r; cf. BE, 51.2–3), 91:2 (‘for to shewe thy mercy at morowe and þi soþfastnesse by nyght’: f. 26r; cf. BE, 54.6–7), 91:3 (‘In a ten-stringed sautri: with song in þe harpe’: f. 29r; cf. BE, 57.11–12), 91:4 (‘ffor why, lord god, þou haste delyted me in thy makyng, and in the werkes of thy handys I shall ioye’: f. 31r; cf. BE, 60.11–12) and 91:5 (‘Lorde God hou wonder grete ben thi werkys and full depe ar thy thoughtis made’: f. 32v; cf. BE, 62.8–9). That the compiler selects only the exposition of these spiritually affirmative passages is in keeping with the optimism of the Qui habitat selections. The Bonum est fragments round off the compilation’s treatment of contemplation with their discussion of the apparent withdrawal of grace, and the necessity to accept it as one of God’s gifts:
He is not angri with god, demyng in hym hardnesse, ne he dispeyryth not in hym selfe for drede of his wyckednesse, for it is all for yevyn. But he a bydith in this derke nyght, and shewyth to our lord full trustily his sothfastnes. And he thynkith þat thus shulde it be here in this lyfe, ffor this is sothfastnes. He knowyth well þat grace is withdrawen for hym in on maner, but it is yeuen to hym on an oþer maner as god wyll, not so swetely nor so felably as it was, but more preuyly, more myghtyly and more godly. (ff. 28r–v; cf. BE, 56.9–57.5)
Thus, the compilation’s themes are set in these linear borrowings from the Qui habitat and Bonum est expositions, in which the compiler has gone through the text from beginning to end, copied the spiritually affirmative passages and left out the ones on sin, temptation and the lover of the world’s attitudes.
The compiler’s editorial choices in the Scale fragments show him working with his source text in a different way to ensure thematic continuity with the psalm exposition selections. He handpicks passages from Book I, Chapters 40 to 43, 68 and 70 and Book II, Chapters 27, 28, 30, 32 to 39, and 41 to 46, yet instead of presenting them in the order in which they occur in the full text, he jumps to and fro between books and shuffles passages between chapters.13 It is clear that the compiler knew Hilton’s Scale well (his effortless movement between Books I and II illustrates which passages he associated with one another), and it is significant that he chose passages from the text’s ‘more mystical’ chapters, which describe the soul’s ‘reformation in feeling’ (f. 56v; cf. Scale II, 3022). More than in the Qui habitat and Bonum est fragments, he made changes to the text to adapt it to his needs.14
The picture emerging from the compiler’s selections and omissions of sentences within those selections is not unambiguous. In some instances it would seem that he is indeed, as Kempster argues, adapting the passages for a lay audience. In Book I, Chapter 41, Hilton includes a sequence of four quotations from St Paul, which he translates and expounds to illustrate that contemplatives have to work with the gifts they have been given by God in order to be ‘safe’: that is, to ensure that they come to the bliss of heaven. The compiler does not select the Latin scriptural quotations here, but he does select the exposition, in which this passage gives examples of the kinds of spiritual work contemplatives might do:
As som by dedis and werkes of mercy, somm by grete penaunce, and som by dyuerse gracis and yeftes of deuocion shalbe saufe and com to þe blysse of heuyn. (f. 37v; cf. Scale I, 1101–3)
Lambeth Palace, MS 472 (L) has the following phrase after ‘penaunce’: ‘summe by sorwes and wepynges for here synnes al here lyiftyme, sum by prechynge and techynge’ (I, 1101–2). The reference to abundant sorrow and weeping for one’s sins may have been left out because of the perceived excess in such behaviour; the reference to preaching and teaching may have been cut because these are activities not usually performed by laypeople. W’s ‘Þe moste speciall prayer þat þe soule vsyth and hath moste conforte in is þe pater noster, and psalmes and ympnes and oþer seruice of holy churche’ (ff. 54v–55r) is a condensed version of a longer passage, which in L reads:
The moste special praiere that the soule useth and hath most confort in, I hope, is the Pater Noster, or elles psalmes of the sautier; the Pater Noster for lewid men, and psalmes and ympnes and othere servyce of Holi Chirche for lettred men.
(II, 3167–9 my emphasis signalling the phrases absent in W)
One might wonder, too, whether the omission of the distinction between prayers for the lettered and the unlettered in W is the result of a levelling of the field and the making available of devotional and contemplative material (including this compilation) to laypeople. Yet there are other editorial choices that seem to contradict this reading – choices indicative of a specialised audience. There is one passage that, taken in isolation and without previous contemplative knowledge and practice, might well confuse unprepared lay readers:
A Soule þat hath goostly syght of god, it takyth no grete hede of stryvyng for vertues. He is not besy aboute them specially, but he settyth al his besynes for to kepe þat syght and beholdyng of god that he hath, for to kepe his mynde stable þerto, and bynde his loue only to it þat it fall nat therfro, and forgett all oþer thyngis as meche as it may. And when it doth this, than god is maister in þe soule. (f. 50r; cf. Scale II, 2554–8)
The ‘forgetting’ of the virtues is not a condition of contemplation. It is the result of the soul’s spiritual progress, which makes it experience practising the virtues differently. As the full text of the Scale puts it:
Thanne bringeth love into the soule the fulheed of vertues, and turneth hem alle into likynge and softenesse as it were withoute wirkynge of the soule; for the soule striveth not mykil for the getynge of hem as it dide bifore, but it hath hem esili and felith hem restfulli, oonli thorugh the gifte of love that is the Holi Goste.
(Scale II, 2535–39)
Instead of simplifying their source text, decontextualized passages like these complicate the reading of the compilation. It is improbable that this is how a compiler working on a text for lay readers would serve his audience. An audience of readers committed to the contemplative life and with previous knowledge of it seems more plausible here. Indeed, for an audience of enclosed nuns (Bridgettines) or monks (Carthusians) – not unlikely, given W’s textual associations – the omissions of references to continual weeping, teaching and preaching, and to the difference between prayers for the lettered and the unlettered would make sense as well.
Overall, the Scale selections are thematically continuous with the preceding passages. Like the psalm commentary fragments, they describe and discuss knowledge of the soul and of God in visual as well as trinitarian terms and using the metaphor of God’s gift of himself (God being both the gift and the giver: see f. 44v; cf. Scale II, 2336–7). They also focus on the apparent withdrawal of God’s grace (ff. 57r–58v; cf. Scale II, 3025–41 and II, 1815–24), on charity as one of God’s gifts (ff. 59r–60v; cf. Scale I, 1923–31 and I, 1982–96, with omissions), on the soul’s following of Christ (ff. 60v–63v; cf. Scale I, 1997–2008 and II, 3240–67), and end with a description of the spiritual realities that can be seen when the eye of the soul is opened (ff. 66r–72r; cf. Scale II, 3452–9, 3463–98, 3500–9 and 3511–55, with omissions). They do differ from the preceding passages in tone, however. The Scale passages could be called the compilation’s most treatise-like part, speaking ‘of the knowledge of ourselves and of God’,15 the soul’s loss of the image of the Trinity through sin, its reformation-in-feeling through God’s grace leading to the recovery of the image in contemplation, all in dry and clear prose which is appealing in its analytical soundness as it allows the reader to see the underlying structure of contemplation in its constitutive elements and defining mechanics. Indeed, the function of the Scale fragments in the compilation seems to be the careful analysis of the spiritual phenomenon that the psalm commentary fragments suggest and announce and the Revelation fragments illustrate and make tangible. It is not coincidental that, whereas the Latin verses of Qui habitat and Bonum est are carefully excised in the psalm commentary fragments, Latin scriptural quotations followed by the translation into Middle English have been left in here. Thus, the doctrine of the Scale fragments is authorized by the ‘holy fadirs’ (f. 36v; cf. Scale I, 1077) and Saynt Paule (f. 37v; cf. Scale I, 1097) and not by the experiential feel of the psalmist’s poetry or by the underlying visionary experience in the fragments from A Revelation.
When read in the context of the Qui habitat, Bonum est and Scale fragments that precede them, the fragments from A Revelation cannot be described as a simplification of the full text. Of course, as so much of the text has not been selected, they do not convey a message as carefully nuanced and complete as Julian’s original, but even so, the internal logic of the compiler’s selections16 as well as their (most probably intended) effect as the culmination of the text, makes them much more than ‘a purely didactic text [constructed] from the full Long Text, which then nestles unobtrusively at the end of a collection of extracts traditionally ascribed to Walter Hilton’.17
Thematically, indeed, the Revelation fragments can be argued to follow seamlessly on from the Scale fragments, which, as has been pointed out above, end with an enumeration of spiritual realities the contemplative beholds when the eye of the soul is opened, starting with ‘the kynde of all resonable soulis’ (f. 66v; cf. Scale II, 3464) and ending with ‘a lytil of þe preuytees of þe blessed trynyte’ (f. 71v; cf. Scale II, 3550). The opening scenes of the Revelation fragments, of the first-person narrator being shown ‘þe wisdom and the trewthe of oure blessed lady saynt mary’ (f. 72v; WR, p. 418) and later ‘a lytil thyng þe quantite of a hasyl nott’ (f. 74v; WR, p. 419) also have trinitarian undertones in their echoes of Father (memory–might), Son (reason–wit) and Holy Ghost (love–goodness–will). Mary saw ‘her god so gret, so hygh, so myghty and so good’ (f. 73r; WR, p. 419); the showing of the hazelnut makes Julian see that God is ‘Sothly the maker, þe keper and þe louer’ (f. 74v; WR, p. 419). The selections return to the theme of the soul’s knowledge of God, who ‘wyll be knowen’ (f. 75r; WR, p. 419), and who gives himself to us in his goodness ‘that commyth downe to vs, to þe loweste party of our nede’ (f. 78r; WR, p. 420).18 They also address the soul’s feeling of spiritual barenness in ‘þe tyme þat he wyll suffer þe soule to be in traueyle’ (f. 81r; WR, p. 421). Yet they add more to the compilation than the thematic completion and elaboration of themes addressed before.
The compiler’s selections from A Revelation start with an interesting double mise en abîme.19 The first-person narrator describes how God showed her the wisdom and the truth of the Virgin Mary’s soul, which the narrator understands as Mary’s beholding of God at the Annunciation, marvelling that the Creator wanted to be born of a simple creature that he himself created. Mary the beholder is beheld by the visionary; the divine Father created Mary, who will give birth to the divine Son. This scene, powerful in its simplicity, plunges the readers into A Revelation on folio 72v, after a pause of half a blank page of vellum on folio 72r. The empty space signals that the showing, and the Revelation fragment group as a whole, in some way stands apart from the preceding text. The narrator’s ‘I’ reads differently from the same pronoun on the preceding pages as the didactic and meditative mode has been replaced by the language of first-hand experience.20 The vocabulary of seeing has taken on a startling directness that contrasts with the use of conventional visual metaphors in the earlier descriptions of contemplation.21 Stumbling over the threshold of half an empty piece of vellum, the readers happen upon a scene that cannot but catch their attention and make them aware that here they witness the experience of someone whose ‘goostely eye’ was ‘opened in beholdynge’ (f. 15v; cf. QH, 34.2). Thus, the readers behold the beholder behold Mary beholding her God that is her creator, who wanted to be born of her that was created: the mise en abîme is extended to include them.22
This meditative inclusion of readers into the text is replicated at the very end of the Revelation fragments, and of the compilation as a whole, in a sentence that explicitly invites them to meditate on ‘this blessed beholdyng’: ‘It is godis wyll that we sett the poynt of our þought in this blessed beholdyng as often as we may and as long’ (f. 112v; WR, p. 431).23 Strictly speaking, the ‘blessed beholdyng’ might only refer to the preceding locution from Revelation 15, but it can also be read to refer to all of the Julian fragments as well as to the text as a whole. The locution itself, too, takes the readers back to Qui habitat’s invocations of God – ‘my vptakar art thou, my refute’ (f. 2r; cf. QH, 3.8–9) – that conceptualize God as a high place in which they can be enclosed and be safe from all discomfort, whether occasioned by sin or temptation. Thus the text itself, in its thematic and verbal associations, supports its own call for meditative reading of it:
Sodeynly þou shalt be taken fro all þi peyne and fro all thy seykenesse, fro all þi disese and fro all þi woo. And þou shalt cum vp a boue, and þou shalt haue me to þi mede and rewarde, and þou shalt be fulfilled of ioye and of blysse. And þou shalt neuer more haue no maner of peyne, neþer no maner of seykenesse, no maner of myslykyng, ne no wantyng of wyll, but euer in ioye and blysse withouten ende. What shulde it þan greue the to suffer a whyle, sithen it is my wyll and my wurship.
(f. 112r–v; WR, p. 431; my emphasis)
The Revelation fragments, in addition to taking the text to its experiential conclusion, fold it back to its beginning, inviting the readers to read it again, to concentrate on its teachings, but also to draw its teachings together by ‘making them their own’ in the internalizing process that is meditative reading.24
The Revelation fragments hark back to the Qui habitat and Bonum est fragments in more ways than one, and it seems fair to say that the compiler’s choice of passages from A Revelation was determined by the themes and modes of the psalm commentary selections. Both include performative and locutionary passages absent from the Scale: first-person prayers that can be adopted by the readers as their own and passages representing the words of God, either quoted directly or represented ‘as if’ spoken by him (expository locutions).25 Triggered by the voices speaking in the psalms, and part of the showings given to the first-person narrator in A Revelation, these passages make both the contemplative and God present as active players in the spiritual relationship and, in the words of the Scale, ‘are nought else but swete letters sendyng made betwene a louyng soule and god’ (f. 66r; cf. Scale II, 3383–4). Indeed, whether intentionally or not, instead of being defined by the visions of the suffering Christ, the Revelation fragments in W are characterized by the less spectacular visions of Mary’s soul, the hazelnut and God in a point, but also, and perhaps to greater effect, by God’s locutions and Julian’s reaction to them.26
Another theme not found in the Scale passages, though dominant in the selections from Qui habitat, is enclosure:
The shuldres of oure lorde ben his mercy and sothefastenes, vndir the whyche he shall vmbeshadowe þee. And that is þe mercyfull foryeuynge of thi synnes, and sothfastly yeuynge the grace of vertuouse kepyng the safly fro þine enemyes as the henne kepyth her byrdis vnder þe shadowe of her wyngis.
(f. 6v–7r; cf. QH, 10.10–14)
In the Revelation fragments, too, the body of Christ is described as a safe enclosure in which contemplatives can rest:
Also with glad chere our lord loked into his syde and behelde, enioyenge. And with his swete lokynge he ledde furthe þe vnderstondyng of his creaturys by þe same wounde in to his syde, withyn. And þere he shewed a feyre, delectable place, and large I now for all man kynde þat shall be sauf to reste in pees and loue. (ff. 86v–87r; WR, p. 423)
Related to enclosure is the theme of the Motherhood of God, announced in the Qui habitat passage in the reference to the hen that keeps her chicks under its wings, and fully elaborated in the compiler’s selections from Chapters 59 to 64 of Julian’s Long Text on folios 103v to 111v (WR, pp. 428–31).27
As it opens and closes with fragments from texts that share an affective, effusive tone and address themes that are not dealt with in the Scale passages, the compilation could be said to be enclosed by the Qui habitat and Revelation passages and could itself be interpreted as its readers’ verbal enclosure. Through reading it and meditating on it, and by living its precepts in their everyday lives, they can place themselves in God’s protection. In the Qui Habitat fragments, the words of Scripture are described as providing protection, hence enclosure:
vnder his fedirs shalte þou hope. Þe fedirs of our lorde ar wordis of holy wryte endited by þe holy gost in conforte of chosen soules trauelyng in derkenes of þis lyf, the whiche wordes yf they be truely fastened in a meke soule, then they bere vp þe soule in to þe eyre. With thees wordis shalt þou defende thy selfe ayenst all sharpe wordes of euyll men, and ayenste all false wordes of þe fende.
(ff. 8r–v; cf. QH, 12.4–9 and 10–12)
The words of the compilation, too, could have been felt by its readers as a form of enclosure, reinforcing their material enclosure within convent, monastery or anchorhold walls, or substituting for it for lay readers, and could have ‘all wounden and lapped’(f. 27r; cf. BE, 55.6) them, bringing them closer to God, who ‘for loue wrappith vs and wyndith vs helpith vs and ablyth vs and hangith aboute vs for tender love’ (f. 73v; WR, p. 419).
The compilation in Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4 is a dense and rich text, as it draws its metaphors and discussions, its voices and locutions, from four source texts. The Revelation fragments make an important contribution to this richness as the experiential account that completes the compilation and at the same time tells its readers how to approach the compilation by directing them to the text again and inviting them to meditate on it. As an integral part of the text, the Revelation fragments can only be fully assessed when read in the context of the selections from the Qui habitat and Bonum est expositions and the Scale. Philologically interesting though an isolated analysis of the Revelation fragments may be, a contextual reading of them proves more revealing of their links with and echoes of themes in the other texts. It may also be more rewarding not only because it is how the readers of W would have read them but also because it gives present-day readers of Julian an idea of the spiritual and contemplative background, knowledge and interests from which her medieval readers approached her texts and appreciated what she had to say to them.
1 See M. Cré, Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse: A Study of London, British Library, MS Additional 37790, The Medieval Translator 9 (Turnhout, 2006).
2 Though the manuscript is owned by Westminster Cathedral, it is on temporary deposit in Westminster Abbey Library. For a description of the manuscript see H. Kempster, ‘The Westminster Text of A Revelation of Love’, Mystics Quarterly 23 (1997), pp. 178–9.
3 See An Exposition of Qui habitat and Bonum est in English, ed. Björn Wallner, Lund Studies in English XXIII (Lund, 1954), pp. xxxix–xliv. References to Qui habitat (QH) and Bonum est (BE) are by page and line numbers and will appear parenthetically in the main text.
4 This suggests that, like Amherst, the compilation was intended to be used in the same circle in which it originated. That none of the fragments in W are attributed to their authors may seem like an indication of the same, yet Hilton’s works are unattributed in most manuscripts, as is Julian’s Long Text.
5 For the place of A Vision in the Amherst anthology see Cré, Vernacular Mysticism, pp. 99–122.
6 See Kempster, ‘The Westminster Text’, and ‘A Question of Audience: The Westminster Text and Fifteenth-Century Reception of Julian of Norwich’, in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York and London, 1998), pp. 257–89, which only contain minor references to the Hilton texts making up the larger part of the compilation. In Watson and Jenkins’ new edition of Julian of Norwich’s writings, the introduction describes the Revelation fragments as integral to the compilation, but the edition included in Appendix A remains –understandably but regrettably – decontextualized. See 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), pp. 13–14 and pp. 417–31. References to this edition of the ‘Westminster Revelation’ (WR) are by page number. In the quotations from W, I reproduce the manuscript’s spelling. The compilation as a whole is transcribed and discussed in M. Cré, ‘Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4: A Fifteenth-Century Spiritual Compilation’ (unpublished MPhil diss., University of Glasgow, 1997) and ‘Authority and the Compiler in Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4: Writing a Text in Someone Else’s Words’, in Authority and Community in the Middle Ages, ed. Donald Mowbray, Rhiannon Purdie and Ian P. Wei (Stroud, 1999), pp. 153–76.
7 This is exactly the activity ascribed to the compilator (as opposed to the scriptor, commentator and auctor) in Bonaventure’s Prologue to his Sentences commentary. The compilator adds together, or arranges the statements of other men, adding no opinion of his own (addendo, sed non de suo). See A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1984), p. 94.
8 In focusing on the compiler’s omissions, Kempster inevitably defines the Westminster fragments in terms of loss. Kempster’s comment that ‘it is significant that neither of the two earliest extant copies of [Julian’s] work reproduce [the Long Text’s] unusual integration of mystical prose genres’ also, in fact, disregards the existence of the Long Text copy that the Westminster compiler worked from, which was apparently not the same as the ones that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ended up among Catholic exiles on the Continent. Kempster, ‘A Question of Audience’, p. 270 and ‘The Westminster Text’, p. 185.
9 I view with some caution Kempster’s interpretation of the Revelation passages as having been edited to be made easily digestible by lay readers committed to the mixed life. ‘A Question of Audience’, passim.
10 See Of the Knowledge of Ourselves and of God: A Fifteenth-Century Spiritual Florilegium, ed. James Walsh and Eric Colledge (London, 1961), p. vii.
11 Textual analysis of the Hilton passages suggests that W may have originated within (the sphere of influence of) Syon Abbey, and thus that it was not necessarily written for or used by a lay audience. From this analysis it could also be concluded that the decisions discussed as editorial strategies are indeed the compiler’s own.
12 The understanding of knowledge of God as ‘sight’ of him is deeply embedded in religious and mystical writing in general. See Santha Bhattacharji, ‘Medieval Contemplation and Mystical Experience’, in Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts, ed. Dee Dyas, Valerie Edden and Roger Ellis, Christianity and Culture: Issues in Teaching and Research 2 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 51–2. Therefore the use of metaphors of sight cannot just be traced back to 91:16 ‘I schal schewen to him myn hele’, only the exposition of which has been selected. See ff. 24r–25r; cf. QH, 49.3–50.4.
13 See table 3 in the Appendix to Cré, ‘Authority and the Compiler’, pp. 166–9.
14 Interestingly, W is one of three manuscripts Hussey could not assign to any group in his assessment of Book II manuscripts of the Scale. See S. S. Hussey, ‘The Text of The Scale of Perfection: Book II’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 65 (1964), pp. 75–92 (87). In what follows, the readings found in W will be compared those found in Walter Hilton: The Scale of Perfection, ed. T. H. Bestul, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, 2000), based on London Lambeth Palace, MS 472 (L). Reference to the Scale are by book and line numbers. There is evidence to suggest that the Hilton texts in W might derive from a manuscript copy antecedent to L.
15 This is a title written in the top margin of f. 35v, where the Scale selections start, in a late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century hand, adopted as the title of the compilation as a whole in Walsh and Colledge’s 1961 translation.
16 Apart from his shuffling of passages borrowed from Revelation 1, the compiler returns to linear selection from the full text. See Kempster, ‘A Question of Audience’, pp. 273–82 and ‘The Westminster Text’, pp. 186–95.
17 Kempster, ‘A Question of Audience’, p. 187.
18 The Revelation fragments play with the theme of the gift in a theologically subtle way: the redeemed soul is offered to the Father by the Son, yet is at the same time given by the Father to the Son in reward for his suffering. See f. 85r; WR, p. 422 and f. 100r; WR, p. 427.
19 The term originally derives from heraldry, and was used to describe the placement at the centre of an escutcheon of a smaller copy of the same escutcheon, at the center of which there could be another still smaller copy of the escutcheon, etc. Here the term is used more generally to mean the containment of a situation within another identical situation.
20 Though it is true that the word ‘vision’ does not occur in the Revelation extracts, the words ‘beholdynge’, ‘see’, ‘syght’, ‘shewyng’ retain a strong visionary undertone. That these words are indeed referring to the narrator’s visionary experience is made explicit in the phrase introducing the borrowings from A Revelation 9: ‘Also in the nyneth shewyng our lord god seyd to her thus’ (f. 83v; WR, p. 422), perhaps the compiler’s instruction to the scribe inadvertently copied, yet more likely a reminder of the source text for the compilation’s original audience.
21 See, for instance, two passages quoted earlier: ff. 3v–4r (cf. QH, 5.3–6.1), quoted on p. 119, and f. 50r (cf. Scale II, 2554–8), quoted on p. 121.
22 The creation–creature–birth mise en abîme may also be extended in the metaphor of contemplation as the birth of Jesus in the soul, implied in the theme of the pure soul being given the name of Jesus on f. 19v.
23 Kempster’s interpretation of this passage as ‘as often and as long as is possible in the hustle and bustle of an active life’ (‘The Westminster Text’, p. 202) can also be paraphrased as ‘as often and as long as is possible amid the duties of a monastic or anchoritic life’, in which personal devotions would also need to find a place beside manual work, the liturgy of the hours, meals and sleep.
24 See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 168–9.
25 The Qui habitat fragments close with a long expository locution stretching from f. 18v to f. 25r; cf. QH, 43.8–50.4 (with omissions).
26 The (expository) locutions in the Revelation passages are found on f. 74v; WR, p. 419 (‘It lastyth … of god’), f. 83r; WR, p. 422 (‘Se I am ... amys’), f. 83v; WR, p. 422 (‘Art þou … more’, repeated in part on ff. 86r–v; WR, p. 423 and on f. 105r; WR, p. 429), ff. 87v–88r; WR, p. 422 (‘loo how I louyd thee … loue thee’, partly repeated on f. 106r, WR, p. 429), f. 89v; WR, p. 424 (‘I am grounde besekist it’, partly repeated on ff. 90v, 92r–v; WR, pp. 424–5), f. 94r; WR, p. 425 (‘beholde and se … prayeste me’), ff. 102v–103r; WR, p. 428 (‘I it am … trew desyres’, partly repeated on ff. 105v–106r; WR, p. 429 and on f. 107v; WR, p. 430), ff. 111r–v; WR, p. 431 (‘I kepe þee full surely’) and ff. 112r–v; WR, p. 431 (‘sodeynly þou shalt … my wurship’).
27 The incorporation of this theologically subtle discussion is another argument against the judgment of the compiler’s activity as simplifying Julian’s message.