10. The Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Tradition and the Influence of Augustine Baker
10
The Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Tradition and the Influence of Augustine Baker
ELISABETH DUTTON
Although she wrote from the isolation of an anchoritic cell, Julian aimed at some form of publication, where ‘ “publication” is short for public conversation.’1 In her Revelation2 she insists on an audience: the visions are for the good of all her fellow Christians.3 But evidence about the circulation and readership of Julian’s text in the first two centuries of its life is extremely limited and ambiguous.4 And the Long Text presents particular difficulties:5 although the Short Text is preserved entire in the medieval ‘Amherst’ manuscript, London, British Library, MS Additional 37790, the only manuscript witness to the Long Text which might be considered medieval – Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4 – contains only a limited number of short extracts, in an order different from that in which they appear in the Long Text and, in the estimation of Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, written in ‘colourless’ English.6 It is not clear how easily medieval or Renaissance readers could have had access to the full Long Text, nor how closely any circulating text would have resembled what the medieval anchoress wrote.
The earliest manuscripts in which the Long Text survives in its entirety belong to the seventeenth century: at some frustratingly undeterminable point before this a copy, or copies, passed into the hands of Benedictine nuns. It is possible that A Revelation went into exile with religious communities during the Reformation, since the extant Long Text manuscripts were owned by and probably copied in English Benedictine houses in France. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale Fonds Anglais MS 40, is early seventeenth-century: it was preserved and possibly produced by the nuns of Our Lady of Consolation in Cambrai. British Library Sloane MS 2499 (Sloane 1) is also early seventeenth-century and is a much plainer manuscript, possibly in the hand of Clementina Carey who founded Cambrai’s daughter house in Paris, Our Lady of Good Hope. British Library Sloane MS 3705 (Sloane 2) is later seventeenth-century. These three manuscripts each contain the full Long Text of A Revelation, and that alone: together with a printed version published in 1670 by Serenus Cressy, based on the Paris manuscript, they are the earliest surviving versions of the full Long Text. The Long Text as it now survives is therefore a seventeenth-century text – or rather, texts, since the Paris manuscript preserves a markedly different version of A Revelation from that found in the Sloane manuscripts. Divergences between the Paris and Sloane textual traditions may perhaps be taken to indicate the considerable effect of scribes, compilers, glossators and readers in the years between the composition of A Revelation and its reappearance in France. It is also possible that some of the divergences are the result of authorial reworking of the Long Text.
Differences between Paris and Sloane are to do with both language and content. Linguistically, there are lexical differences which may be modernizations: Glasscoe has argued that Paris frequently modernizes readings in Sloane 1, citing: dwelleth for wonyth, verely for sekirly, great for mekil, drede for vggyng, undertake for underfongyn.7 Sloane 1 sometimes modernizes, sometimes preserves archaic forms: it is an ‘eclectic mixture’ but most of its modernizations are ‘well-informed and perceptive’.8 Sloane 2 also frequently modernizes readings in Sloane 1 – for example fellow christians for evyn christen, certain for sekir, here was I taught for here was I lernyd. Sloane 2 is otherwise identical to Sloane 1 and probably copied from it. Paris, however, differs from Sloane much more radically. Linguistic differences may also be the result of dialectal variation. Hoyt S. Greeson has argued that Sloane 1 was copied in Norfolk, in the vicinity of Norwich.9 Felicity Riddy notes ‘sporadic northern vowels and words’ in the Paris manuscript and ‘unmistakable northern features’ in the language of Sloane.10
Colledge and Walsh have drawn attention to the presence of Scottish and Northumbrian women among the Cambrai nuns who copied Sloane, and have suggested that the northern forms were introduced by the Sloane scribes.11 But it is more probable that Sloane’s northern features may also be taken with its preservation of older linguistic forms to support a different hypothesis: Sloane closely imitates a very early exemplar in a northern dialect, and either Julian or a possible amanuensis were from the north of England.12 Northern forms may then have survived in A Revelation until it was affected by a vital development in the history of the English language – the establishment of a more southerly form as the written standard. Watson and Jenkins argue that Paris presents A Revelation ‘not in its original local dialect, but in a version of the East Midlands dialect that by 1420 was becoming standard for the copying of works intended for wider circulation’.13 Processes of standardization may offer an alternative to modernization in accounting for some Paris readings. The shift towards standardization of written English in the first half of the fifteenth century may also account for the lack of northern forms in Westminster. Although it is the earliest extant witness to the Long Text, it was copied around 1500, after the establishment of a written standard, so its lack of support for the language of Sloane need not undermine the likelihood that Sloane’s northernisms may be Julian’s northernisms preserved. This likelihood may be strengthened by the consideration that Amherst, the earliest manuscript of all, though preserving the Short Text only, does preserve it with numerous northern forms.14 It can be argued, therefore, that Julian, a northerner who moved into Norwich, or possibly her northern amanuensis, wrote both Long and Short texts in northern dialect: Amherst and Sloane have preserved some of these, but the scribes of Westminster and Paris, or the exemplars from which they copied, have in most but not all cases standardized Julian’s dialect.15
Sloane may, perhaps, claim to be more authentically ‘Julian’ linguistically, and ‘many dialectal or untranslated forms seem important to the thought of A Revelation’.16 But Paris may have other claims to authority. Paris contains phrases and sometimes whole passages which do not occur in either Sloane manuscript. Sometimes these are phrases which seek to clarify ideas, rather than simply gloss individual words. Are these omissions from Sloane, or interpolations into Paris? On these questions rests the weight of the debate as to whether the Sloane or the Paris tradition should be viewed as closer to that elusive holy grail, the author’s original.
Watson and Jenkins make a compelling case, using supporting evidence from Amherst, for Paris’s preservation of authorial phrases and passages which Sloane has omitted: they argue of Sloane that ‘somewhere in the history of its text are scribes who (in the early chapters) abbreviated material deliberately, sometimes left material out accidentally, and had to reconstruct readings whose sense had been lost’.17 They cite several examples of Sloane’s apparently wilful abbreviations, alterations and omissions, including Sloane’s reshaping of , in which Paris’s brief phrase ‘The second was bodilie sicknes’, supported by Amherst, is expanded by Sloane to ‘The second was bodily sekenesse in youth at thirty yeeres of age’: Sloane then omits, at the end of the chapter, Paris’s phrase, also supported by Amherst: ‘This sicknes I desyred in my jowth, that I might have it whan I ware xxxth yeare olde’. This certainly looks like wilful scribal alteration, ‘as if a scribe had found the deliberate structure of Julian’s exposition irritating.’18 The ‘deliberate structure’ which Watson and Jenkins find in Julian is an aspect of their portrayal of her as a highly formal prose writer whose sentences display rhetorical and logical balance and whose exposition proceeds by carefully progressing points: in this portrayal they follow Colledge and Walsh and, like Colledge and Walsh, they draw their evidence from Paris.
Glasscoe, however, interprets Paris’s fuller sentences differently, arguing that many of them must be read as interpolations, additions which are often made at the expense of a prose rhythm ‘more felicitous’ in Sloane 1. She cites from the seventh chapter in Sloane:
our lord God shewed our lady Saint Mary in the same tyme; that is to mene the hey wisedom and trewth she had in beholding of hir maker [Paris adds: This wisdom and truth made her to behold her God] so grete, so hey, so mightie and so gode. This gretenes and this noblyth of the beholding of God fulfilled her of reverent drede. (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 8)19
The repetitious syntax of Paris – this wisdom … made, this gretenes … fulfilled – obstructs the flow of meaning even as it presumably seeks to clarify it: the ‘explanatory insistence’ of Paris ‘impedes the cadence’ of Sloane 1’s reading, in which the reader can ‘move easily from the statement of what was seen to its inward effect’.20 The suggestion may be that in such cases what Sloane 1 represents is closer to the Julian original – more difficult at a literal level, perhaps, but also more elegant – and Paris represents some form of interpreted version, with interpolated explanatory phrases. These interpolations would be unlikely to be the work of the Paris scribe: their language is medieval, and the Paris scribe was ‘a not very intelligent copyist, anxious to transcribe faithfully’;21 they would therefore have accrued to Julian’s text at earlier stages in its transmission.
But if Paris is the work of a plodding copyist carefully preserving what is before her, whether authorial or not, there can be no doubt that Sloane 1, or an exemplar at some earlier stage in its transmission, has been copied somewhat carelessly. There are many phrases and passages absent from Sloane 1 but present in Paris which may be accounted for by scribal carelessness, according to principles of homoeoteleuton, or ‘eyeskip’. The careless scribe who, at some point in Sloane’s transmission, lost thirty lines of Julian’s text because of eyeskip, is a highly probable figure, though not even the appearance of homoeoteleuton is entirely uncontroversial where the resultant reading still makes sense. Glasscoe quotes as an example of eyeskip from Sloane’s forty-sixth chapter:
But our passand lif that we have here in our sensualite knowith not what ourself is; [Paris adds: but in our faith. And whan we know and see, verely and clerely, what ourselfe is] than shal we verily and clerly sen and knowen our lord God in fulhede of ioy. (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 48)22
The passage omitted ends with the same words – ‘what ourself is’ – as those after which it started, so it is easy to see how a transcriber might have accidentally left them out, the eye skipping from one phrase to the other in the exemplar. The fuller text of Paris clarifies one aspect of A Revelation’s meaning here. It indicates that in this physical life we cannot know ourselves fully, and it explicitly connects our capacity to know ourselves with our capacity to know God. It does not, however, clarify what might appear to be the bigger question here, namely where and when we shall achieve such knowledge if not in this life. Implicitly, it seems we must assume that this knowledge is to come in some way after death or possibly at the end of time: both Sloane and Paris go on to indicate that we shall know ourselves fully only at ‘the last point, in which pointe this passing life and alle manner of wo and paine shall have ane ende’ (Revelation, 46.8–9; cp. Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 48). But the context of this passage does not invite a reflection on knowing ourselves so that we can know God, nor does it emphasise a learning process by which, when we have mastered one lesson (ourselves) then we can master another (God), although the syntax of Paris – ‘And whan … than …’ might suggest this. The context indicates clearly that Julian’s concern at this point is not with temporal development but with the shifting perspective between the mortal and the divine. Julian’s meditation here springs out of her interrogation of the ‘two judgements’, one of God and one of Holy Church, by which we are judged: the two, though different, co-exist – although we live now on earth ‘oure kindely substance is now blisseful in God, and hath bene sithen it was made’ (Revelation, 45.34–5). What is important at ‘the last point’ is not that we learn something, or even that anything changes, for all that woe and pain cease: what is important is that in a moment (‘than’), we shall be able to see things through God’s eyes.
Sloane’s briefer, simpler syntax emphasizes this through its juxtaposition of ‘here’ and ‘than’, and has strong Pauline echoes: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face’ (1 Corinthians 13:12). These echoes are probably not accidental, since Paul, like Julian, is contrasting earthly knowledge with the divine, and since the Pauline passage has been more directly quoted not much earlier, in Chapter 43: ‘And than shal we sen God face to face’ (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 46). Paul goes on to connect knowledge of God and knowledge of oneself, though in a rather different way from Paris – ‘but then shall I know even as I am known’ – and Paris’s additional phrases have obscured the syntactical echoes of Corinthians which help to interpret the Revelation’s meaning at this point. A few lines later, Paris again displays its interpretive drive to make knowledge of God follow knowledge of self:
And therfore it longeth properly to us, both be kinde and by grace, to long and desyer with alle oure mightes to know oureselfe [Paris adds: in which full knowing we shall verely and clerely know oure God] in fulhede of endlesse joy.
(Revelation, 46.10–12; cp. Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, pp. 48–9)
Since the simpler Sloane reading is an unlikely example of eyeskip, it seems that the differences between Paris and Sloane here are deliberate and interpretive – and it is by no means clear that Paris is superior.
The following passage may perhaps have been omitted from Sloane by a scribe who understood the meaning of ‘soule’ to be, as was common in Middle English, ‘food’ or ‘meal’, and the ‘purse’ as therefore an image of the bowels:
A man goeth upperight, and the soule of his body is sparede as a purse fulle fair. And whan it is time of his nescessery, it is openede and sparede ayen fulle honestly. And that it is he that doeth this, it is shewed ther wher he seith: ‘He cometh downe to us, to the lowest parte of oure nede’. (Revelation, 6.29–33)
This striking passage, which in Paris is contextually congruent and which resonates with Julian’s later comments on God’s goodness as evident in his intimate duties as mother in Chapters 55–62, may perhaps be authorial but omitted from Sloane by a censoring scribe in a milieu troubled by the association of excretion with the divine.23
There are also a very few passages present in Sloane 1 but not in Paris, and of them Glasscoe asserts that a very high proportion may also be explained by homoeotoleuton on the part of the Paris scribe or an earlier Paris exemplar.24 But, as Glasscoe also points out, there are some substantial differences which cannot be accounted for in this way,25 of which perhaps the most immediately obvious is Sloane’s more developed reading apparatus. While the first chapter in both Paris and Sloane is an annotated table of contents outlining the sixteen revelations, and both manuscript traditions divide the text further into eighty-six chapters, only Sloane provides expanded headings at the beginning of each chapter explaining that chapter’s contents. While both the table of contents and the division of the text into eighty-six chapters appear to be authorial,26 Sloane’s expanded chapter headings are unlikely to be Julian’s own. It is instructive to compare the heading to – the beginning of the First Revelation – and the description of the First Revelation in the table of contents. First, the table of contents:
Of which the first is of his precious crowning of thornes. And therin was comprehended and specified the blessed trinity, with the incarnation and the oning betweene God and mans soule, with many fair shewynges and techinges of endlesse wisdom and love, in which all the shewinges that foloweth be groundide and oned. (Revelation, 1.3–7)
The Sloane heading to , which ostensibly introduces the First Revelation, reads:
Here begynnith the first revelation of the pretious crownyng of Criste etc. in the first chapter; and how god fulfilleth the herrte with most ioy, and of his greate meekenesse, and how the syght of the passion of Criste is sufficient strength ageyn all temptations of the fends, and of the gret excellency and mekenesse of the blissid virgin Mary – the iiii chapter. (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 4)
Naturally this details the contents only of , while the summary of the First Revelation in the table of contents, although fairly general in expression, clearly alludes to material from the whole revelation. But the Sloane heading is also very different in character from the account of the First Revelation, although the ‘precious crownyng of thornes’ is the starting point for both. Whereas the table of contents offers a complex theological understanding of the First Revelation, with allusion to the Trinity, the unity of the souls of God and man, and the all-encompassing nature of these two concepts, the chapter heading offers a devotional interpretation of the fourth chapter, highlighting Christ’s Passion as strength, and Mary’s virtue as example for the believer.
Each chapter heading remarks devotional aspects of the text it precedes, and where the chapter begins a new revelation this devotional interpretation may be compared with the more theological, ordering nature of the table of content’s description of the revelation. The chapter headings might well have been prepared for a female religious community of the kind which may have produced the Sloane manuscripts,27 although it would have been an earlier community: the evidence of language and of textual variants in the headings of Sloane 1 and Sloane 2 indicates that they were extant long before these manuscripts were copied. The chapter headings were probably not, however, prepared by Julian as A Revelation’s author, and they may guide the reader in ways which were not those intended by Julian herself – that is to say more devotionally than theologically, perhaps.28 That each individual chapter is given a separate heading in the Sloane manuscripts places greater emphasis on chapter divisions throughout the Sloane text than on the more structurally fundamental division of Julian’s religious experience into sixteen showings. The chapters provide smaller gobbets for the reader, but if the chapter headings in Sloane are encouraging selective reading, they do so against Sloane’s own explicit warning:
And beware thou take not on thing after thy affection and liking and leve another, for that is the condition of an heretique. But take every thing with other […] And thou, to whome this booke shall come, thanke heyley and hartily our savior Crist Ihesu that he made these shewings and revelations for the, and to the, of his endles love, mercy and goodnes, for thine and our save guide and conduct to everlestyng bliss; the which Ihesus mot grant us. Amen. [Sloane 2 adds: Here end the sublime […] revelations […] vouchsafed to a dear lover of his and in her to all his dear friends and lovers whose hearts like hers do flame in þe loue of our dearest Jesu]. (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, pp. 135–6)29
The passage explicitly seeks to limit A Revelation’s readership to those who are in a position to read and understand the complete text. Passages are not to be selected for meditative reading independent of their context. Textually, the passage’s ‘I’ need not be Julian: the showings are said to have been made ‘to the’, not ‘to me’, and certainly the Sloane 2 addition seems interpolated: even given that mystical writers such as Margery Kempe do speak of themselves in the third person, it seems unlikely Julian would explicitly establish herself as a model of flaming love for God. That this passage appears only in the Sloane manuscripts also suggests that it is not authorial, but indicates something about the way in which a scribe early in the transmission of Sloane intended A Revelation to be read: that it is a reading model which seems to work against the textual apparatus unique to Sloane – namely the chapter summaries which might facilitate selective, devotional reading – may suggest that from very early in its history A Revelation was being edited and adapted for reading in many different ways.
The readers of whom the modern Julian scholar must be most aware are the seventeenth-century nuns who copied the extant manuscripts, for they are the readers who are identifiable and whose influence on the text is certain, though its character must be carefully traced. The evidence of MS St Joseph’s College, Upholland, is important here. The Upholland manuscript contains short extracts from the Revelation, copied by the Cambrai nuns between 1670 and 1684,30 alongside extracts from medieval and post-Reformation spiritual classics translated by Father Augustine Baker, OSB, spiritual guide to the Cambrai nuns. The Revelation extracts, being in English, are of course not translated but are modernized and adapted in various ways, possibly by Baker: since Baker died in 1641 he cannot have been directly responsible for the anthology in its present form, but it is possible either that he selected the Revelation extracts and modernized them, or that he modernized more of A Revelation and a later compiler selected the extracts represented. Whatever the precise degree of Baker’s involvement in the creation of Upholland – and it is likely that it was large – he was certainly a vital influence in the spiritual formation of those who read A Revelation and transmitted it to us: the selection of material in Upholland, and the nature of its adaptation, yield evidence as to how A Revelation was read by the exiled Benedictine nuns who preserved it.
Upholland constitutes four extracts from the Twelfth Revelation (Christ glorified, by which Julian is taught the joy which the soul shall have in God) and the Thirteenth Revelation (a consideration of how Julian is hindered by sin).31 Upholland includes Christ’s surprising statement that ‘Synne is behouely’, but Julian’s theological discussion of sin as having no substance is omitted. Upholland’s editor is uninterested in a philosophical characterizing of sin, except insofar as it is a cause of Christ’s compassion on us: the focus is on God’s ‘prive conncelle’ and human dependence on divine revelation. Upholland’s text is concerned with knowing – what can and cannot be known, and God’s will to reveal Himself to us; its appreciation of knowing, however, is focused on the human viewpoint, rather than the divine, Julian’s discussion of which it omits.
Baker’s numerous writings reveal an interest not in academic knowledge but in mystical ‘knowing’, a knowing which comes not from books but from the direct experience of God:
No man is able by profoundnesse of his Learning, by ye Subtilty or acutenesse of his Understanding, not by any meer Human industries, Perfectly to Comprehend or Understand; but it is only Learned & understood by experience by him, to whom ye Divine Goodnesse & liberality shall please to impart ye same experience & knowledg.32
To Baker, the image of divine privity is potent, although his focus on human knowledge ensures that his discussion of God’s secrets, which we may imagine might have drawn him to the passages of A Revelation in Upholland, would surely twist A Revelation’s image. At the beginning of his exposition of The Cloud of Unknowing, Baker explains the reason that he has called his commentary Secretum Sive Mysticum:
both because it Containeth Mystick matters (& Mysticum and Secretum are both of one Sence and Meaning), and such as S. Denis … forbiddeth to be Communicated to such as do more use their externall Senses then internall & Spirituall exercises; as also because it Conteineth / Certain Particular Passages wch the Author hereof doth not think fit to be made known to All.33
In Baker’s hands, then, the divine secrets are the preserve not uniquely of God but rather of a contemplative oligarchy. The ‘secret’ in which he is interested is not the mysterious thought of God’s mind by which all shall, in the end, be made well; it is the secret of the mystic’s knowing of God. For this reason, Baker might have commented upon A Revelation here in the way that we find in Upholland. The ‘I it am’ locutions are selected, but the penultimate locution – ‘I it am that holy church precheth the and techeth thee’ (Revelation, 26.7) – is removed: if A Revelation is to be presented as the articulation of a mysticum, then it is better to leave out anything which asserts that the knowledge it offers might be accessible to all through the teaching of the church. What follows in A Revelation would be much more in accord with Baker’s concern with mystical experience, and it is edited in Upholland to lend emphasis to this interest:
The nomber of the words passeth my wittes and my understanding and alle my mightes, for they were in thee highest, as to my sight. For therin is comprehended I can not telle what [Upholland adds: so that it cannot be expressed]. But the joy that I saw in the shewing of them passeth [Upholland: exceedingly surpasseth] alle that hart can think or soule may desire. And therfore these wordes [Upholland adds: (the meaning of them)] be not declared here. But every man, after [Upholland: one, according to] the grace that God geveth [Upholland: hath giuen] him in understandyng and loving, receive [Upholland: let them receaue] them in our lordes mening. (Revelation, 26.8–13)
The substitution of one for man is an innocent alteration such as might be made for the benefit of a female audience of Cambrai nuns; the expansion of passeth to exceedingly surpasseth modernizes but also emphasizes the loftiness of the visionary’s ecstasy as she receives her showings. The addition of the phrase ‘so that it cannot be expressed’ is unnecessary, but shows the editor’s particular interest in this point; the glossing of these words as the meaning of them is a clarifying gloss on the apparent paradox that words which have just been recorded are then said not to be declared; again, it shows an interest in this passage as a witness to the problems of recording mystical experience in words. The alteration of the grace that God geveth to a past tense, and of receive to let them receaue, functions less than innocently to reduce the optimistic inclusivity of all other Revelation witnesses at this point. Upholland’s readers, in order to understand the divine mystery of Christ’s locutions here recorded, must draw on the stock of grace in understanding and loving which God has granted them before they come to this text. The contemplative who has progressed enough in her way of life may be able to grasp the meaning when she begins to read revelations, but she who has not will not. This is in contrast to the present tense reading, which suggests that God will give grace for understanding as the reader reads – previous spiritual grooming is not required, and this is implied also in the immediacy of the imperative receive these words, as contrasted with Upholland’s distant jussive let them receive.
There may be a stronger reason than lack of interest for Upholland’s omission of much of Julian’s discussion of sin. Baker discusses sin as a pastoral rather than theological issue, insisting that the contemplative not allow the mind to become weighed down in a consideration of sin, because
during … the time tht ye Soul is in such Case about sins & in worthy remorse for them, She is not So apt for ye work of Immediate Love or Resignation towards God.34
Baker downplays discussion of sin in his spiritual counsel. Richard Lawes notes Baker’s advice, ‘extremely unusual in the Catholic Church of his period’, that only those who have committed mortal sin should confess more than monthly: weekly confession was the norm for seventeenth-century nuns. Baker’s counsel against frequent scrupulous examinations of conscience is based on a conviction that the cycles of anxiety-generation and reassurance-seeking in confession may prove ‘compulsive and unhelpful’.35
Upholland includes a passage from A Revelation in which Julian’s curiosity about sin is portrayed as unhelpful, if not dangerous. Upholland’s reworkings clarify some obscure Middle English syntax while interpolations emphasize the dangers of curiosity about sin:
And thus in my foly before this time, often I wondred why, by the grete forseeing wisdom of God, the beginning of sinne was not letted [Upholland: hindred or preuented]. For then thought me that alle shulde have be wele.
This stering was mekille to be forsaken [Upholland: Thys steryng thought in my mind I should haue forsaken, and not haue yealded vnto it], and [Upholland: yet] neverthelesse morning and sorow I made therfore withoute reson and discretion [Upholland: nevyrthelesse it caused me to mourne and sorrow withouʒte dyscrecion] (Revelation, 27.4–8)
Baker was concerned that meditation upon sin ‘hath in it images about Creatures’, and for this reason must be eschewed by the contemplative seeking the image-less cloud of unknowing; Julian realises, however, that sin of itself has no substance, and she notes that in all her visions she does not see sin (Revelation, 11.18). Julian’s statement that sin may be known by ‘the gret harme that is come by sinne to thy creatures’(Revelation, 29.3) seems to confirm Baker’s opinion about the imaging of sin, but since Julian has a rather different view of images from either Baker or the Cloud, for her this is not the reason why questions should not be asked about sin. For Julian, it is simply the case that her visions ‘enformed me of alle that me neded’ (Revelation, 27.9) and that, while it is therefore right to examine and interrogate closely those visions, to enquire beyond their scope is to trespass on the divine privity. Upholland edits out the discussion of sin which ensues: it presents as a prohibition of enquiry into sin what was written as a prohibition of overmuch enquiry into the thoughts of God.
A compiler may wield considerable influence on the reading of a text by the selection and arrangement of material, as Cré effectively demonstrates in her discussion of the Westminster compilation in the essay which precedes this one. The reader of Upholland is influenced also by interpolations, annotations and modernizations not entirely different in kind from those already observable in the Paris and Sloane manuscripts, though perhaps more marked: comparison of Upholland with Paris facilitates a more certain identification of particular phrases as later, non-authorial interpolations than is possible with the full Long Text manuscripts. In Upholland we may observe clearly processes of omission and interpolation by which Julian’s text is being edited to shape its reading by seventeenth-century nuns: the differences between Paris and Sloane make it clear that these processes were underway long before Upholland was prepared for the Cambrai community, but the extant evidence will not, alas, allow the reconstruction of an authorial original by the reversal of these processes. However, Julian insisted that her visions were for all, and even acknowledged that they might have more meaning for her readers than for herself.36 Divergences in the manuscript traditions of the Revelation, therefore, give valuable clues as to the ways the text has been read and interpreted since its ‘publication’ and so, perhaps, with the manuscripts as with individual readings we do well ourselves not to ‘take on thing and leve another’.
1 Felicity Riddy, ‘“Publication” before Print: The Case of Julian of Norwich’, in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700, ed. Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 29–49 (43).
2 All references to Julian’s writing, unless otherwise stated, 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.
3 Of the Revelation she writes: ‘I was lerned to take it to alle min evencristen, alle in generalle and nothing in specialle’ (Revelation, 37.5–7).
4 Riddy suggests that Julian’s book may follow a model of publication which mixes the ‘sea of talk’ with words on the page: ‘Julian spoke about love at the window of her cell … and someone asked for a copy of the book. Its author’s emphatic wish that “it schulde be to euery ilke manne the same profytte that I desired to my selfe” must also have been a licence to pass it on.’ She suggests that there may have been numerous copies of A Revelation which have not survived: ‘the domestic copies … were eventually discarded by uninterested heirs, or used to light the fire, or perhaps even read to bits’: ‘ “Publication” before Print’, p. 49.
5 On the relationship between the Short Text and the Long Text, see Windeatt’s essay in this volume. This present essay will deal almost exclusively with the Long Text.
6 A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, 2 vols (Toronto, 1978), p. 27. On the Westminster and Amherst manuscripts, see Marleen Cré’s essay which precedes this one.
7 Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter, 1976; various repr.), p. ix. All references to this edition will appear parenthetically in the main text.
8 Showings, ed. Colledge and Walsh, p. 26.
9 Hoyt S. Greeson, ‘Glossary to the British Library Sloane 2499 Manuscript’, in Julian of Norwich, Showing of Love: Extant Texts and Translation, ed. Sr Anna Maria Reynolds and Julia Bolton Holloway (Florence, 2001), pp. 627–82.
10 Felicity Riddy, ‘Julian of Norwich and Self-Textualization’, in Editing Women, ed. Ann M. Hutchison (Toronto, 1998), pp. 101–24 (111). For details of the northern features of the manuscripts, see Showings, ed. Colledge and Walsh, pp. 28–33.
11 Showings, ed. Colledge and Walsh, p. 28.
12 Whereas Margery Kempe repeatedly draws attention, in her Book, to her use of an amanuensis to overcome the problem of her illiteracy, A Revelation makes no mention of an amanuensis. However, amanuenses were employed not just by the illiterate but also by the upper classes: an amanuensis ‘separates reading and composition from the manual labour of writing and frees up time for prayer, study and meditation’ (Riddy, ‘Self-Textualization’, p. 109).
13 Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 11.
14 Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love: The Shorter Version ed. from BL Add. MS 37790, ed. Frances Beer (Heidelberg, 1978), pp. 19–20.
15 On northern forms in Paris see Riddy, ‘Self-Textualization’, p. 123 n. 37.
16 Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 40: they note the superiority of Sloane’s ‘oning’ over Paris’s more abstract ‘union’, which loses the numerical connection with ‘noughting’, another important Julian term; also Sloane’s ‘wonninge’ (being at home) as subtly different from Paris’s ‘dwelling’ (staying somewhere). For a fuller discussion of Julian’s theologizing diction, see the introduction to Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love, introduced, edited and modernized by Elisabeth Dutton (Plymouth, 2008).
17 Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 40.
18 Ibid., p. 38.
19 Cited by Glasscoe in Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. ix.
20 Ibid., p. x.
21 Showings, ed. Colledge and Walsh, p. 26.
22 Cited by Glasscoe in Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. x.
23 For a full examination of this passage, see Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘ “… a purse fulle feyer”: Feminising the Body in Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love’, Reading Medieval Studies 34 (2004), pp. 99–113.
24 Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. x.
25 Ibid., p. x.
26 Riddy, ‘Self-Textualization’, pp. 114–16.
27 See also the Sloane heading to Chapter 66, which may be compared with the summary of the Sixteenth Revelation in the table of contents: the chapter heading has the tone of someone entrusted with the cura animarum, and Riddy discerns a clerical voice, ‘Self-Textualization’, p. 118.
28 This is discussed further in Elisabeth Dutton, Julian of Norwich: The Influence of Late-Medieval Devotional Compilations (Cambridge, forthcoming 2008).
29 See Showings, ed. Colledge and Walsh, p. 734 n. 29 for textual variants.
30 For this dating see Elisabeth Dutton, ‘Augustine Baker and Two Manuscripts of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, Notes and Queries 250, 3 (2005), pp. 329–37 (331). This article also argues for Upholland’s derivation from a Paris-style exemplar (332).
31 The Upholland extracts are edited in Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, pp. 446–8.
32 Augustine Baker, Secretum, ed. John Clark (Salzburg, 1997), p. 1.
33 Ibid., p. 2.
34 Ibid., p. 139.
35 Richard Lawes, ‘Can Modern Psychology Help us Understand Baker’s Secretum Sive Mysticum?’, in That Mysterious Man: Essays on Augustine Baker OSB 1575–1641, ed. Michael Woodward (Abergavenny, 2001), pp. 245–59 (226).
36 ‘[I]n as much as ye love God the better, it is more to you than to me’ (Revelation, 9.1–2).