11. Julian of Norwich’s ‘Modernist’ Style and the Creation of Audience
11
Julian of Norwich’s ‘Modernist Style’ and
the Creation of Audience
ELIZABETH ROBERTSON
Given the prominence of Julian of Norwich’s writing in the canon of English literature, it is surprising how little we know about her audience in general. Neither historical nor manuscript evidence reveals much about her contemporary audience. To determine who read or heard her work, either as a written or oral composition, we need to consider such questions as who Julian was, who wrote down her story in its short form and then in its longer and more considered version, for whom she intended these versions, and who actually received them. Despite the fact that these questions yield only fragmentary and ambiguous answers, we can still learn about Julian’s audience by looking carefully at the accounts themselves. Not only does Julian tell us to whom she addresses her work – to her ‘evencristen’ (although who these might be is itself not as clear as it might seem) – but also the idea of an audience is very much part of Julian’s formulation of her account of her visions. She describes an audience that is both general and universal rather than particular and individual and that imagined audience, everywhere inscribed in her accounts, is fundamental to the text’s meaning. Julian’s goal, especially in her Short Text (also in a somewhat different way in the Long Text), is to recount a series of visions she had of Christ in such a way that we, the audience, experience those visions just as she did – and she invents a variety of stylistic strategies to achieve this goal.1 These stylistic techniques, as I shall argue, have much in common with ‘modernist’ style as defined by Eric Auerbach, and have the effect of dissolving the distance between both Julian and her vision and Julian and her audience. It is apt to call Julian’s work a ‘Showing,’ the word she so often uses in her text, since Julian’s modernist style, one shaped by her understanding of what it means to see, is committed above all to showing rather than telling her audience what she has seen.
Julian’s Actual Audience
Historical and manuscript evidence tell us so little about who Julian was and about her intended audience that we can only finally make conjectures about the actual audience of the accounts of her visions.2 If we knew whether or not she entered her anchorhold from the secular life or from a convent we might be able to narrow her primary audience down to enclosed religious or, more specifically, to enclosed nuns.3 Since it was nuns who preserved her accounts even through the vicissitudes of the Reformation, the manuscripts that remain (none of them Julian’s original) suggest that her primary and most enduring reading audience consisted of nuns.4 However, although her extant manuscripts are associated with enclosed religious and even though she at times directs her thoughts specifically to those who are ‘contemplative’ we still do not know that nuns were her only audience.5 Indeed, her repeated address to her ‘evencristen’ suggests she intended both of her accounts to be available to everyone and anyone.
Most significant to an understanding of Julian’s audience is the fact that she was an anchoress.6 Margery Kempe’s is the only name we have of an actual contemporary audience member: her visit to Julian in her anchorhold tells us that Julian was known as a visionary beyond her local community.7 However, whether or not Margery and her advisors knew her written accounts is unknown. The visit also tells us that one of Julian’s fundamental activities was advising lay spiritual audiences. An anchoress is always on the border between two communities, as signalled by her two windows, one looking into the Church and one looking out to the community. Julian may well have been beloved by both the enclosed spiritual community to which her anchorhold was attached (the advowson of St Julian’s at Conisford belonged to the Benedictine convent at Carrow, and perhaps these nuns were among her first audience) and the variety of laypeople, from the spiritually committed to the idly curious, who visited her. She probably intended her visions to be shared by both those communities.
Julian’s status as an anchoress also points us to a different context for assessing her literacy, for her primary engagement with the world might have been as much through oral communication as through the written text.8 Julian’s extensive intellectual range, from her deep knowledge of Augustine to her acquaintance with philosophical debate (perhaps even that of Duns Scotus), suggests that she read widely.9 However, the fact that her writings are remarkably devoid of direct reference (as Vincent Gillespie demonstrates later in this volume), might suggest a secondary knowledge of her sources gained not through reading written works, but rather through listening to speakers and advisors reading texts to her and/or discussing them with her. That she describes herself as ‘a woman, lewed, febille and freylle (Vision, 6.36) and as ‘a simple creature unletterde’ (Revelation, 2.1), may simply mean that she does not know how to read Latin, or that she may be downplaying her more extensive knowledge either out of humility or in order to avoid being accused of being a Lollard woman preacher. She may, however, merely be telling us that she was indeed unlettered – that is, unacquainted with the written text. Her ruminating meditations on simple biblical phrases might suggest a nun’s experience with lectio divina, but a spiritual advisor may also have taught her the habit of rumination. Even if Julian could not read or write, she could have received a superb education aurally by listening avidly to her spiritual advisor and to the visiting theologians and preachers who poured through the unusually sophisticated religious community of Norwich.10
It is also possible that she learned to read and write only after she entered the anchorhold; her comparison in the later text of pondering the image of the lord and servant to learning the ABC suggests that the process of learning to read was in the forefront of her mind even when that version was composed.11 Most critics also agree that her writing shows no signs of the presence of an amanuensis. The Short Text, however, seems rhetorically closer to speech than the Long Text, and much of its simplicity in comparison to the Long Text implies that it could easily be Julian’s own work. Nonetheless, as Barry Windeatt has suggested, the text may not have been written down by Julian, but rather dictated to a scribe; he and Felicity Riddy also raise the possibility that a male spiritual advisor may have collaborated with her to produce the more theologically complex and rhetorically smooth longer version of her showing.12 Given the closeness of most anchoresses to their spiritual advisors, it is entirely possible that Julian’s written texts may have been collaborative productions produced primarily through oral communication. Julian does not directly mention the name of an advisor but does refer once to a ‘religiouse person’ who, after initial skepticism, came to believe in her revelation (Vision, 21.6). Given Julian’s probable experience of oral intellectual communication, she may have had both a listening and a reading audience in mind. Indeed, the written accounts may well have been secondary to her oral performance of their content through the window of her anchorhold. Moreover, the dearth of extant medieval manuscripts could suggest that Julian was not especially interested in producing a written account and that her oral interactions, such as the exchange she had with Margery Kempe, were of equal importance to her.
The Sloane manuscript includes an endnote that may suggest that Julian’s audience eventually became limited because of the radical theology it contained. The note says:
I pray almyty God that this booke com not but to the hands of them that will be his faithfull lovers, and to those that will submitt them to the feith of holy church, and obey the holsom vnderstondyng and teching of the men that be of vertuous life, sadde age and profound lernyng; for this revelation is hey divinitye and hey wisdam, wherfore it may not dwelle with him that is thrall to synne and to the devill. 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 everything with other. And trewly vnderstonden all is according to holy scripture and growndid in the same, and that Ihesus, our very love, light, and truth shall shew to all clen soules that with mekenes aske perseverantly this wisdom of hym.13
This rubric implies that Julian’s work could lead to heresy if read partially or without intellectual rigor. Such a rubric seems particularly apt to the climate of fear of vernacular theology produced by Arundel’s constitutions of 1409, and it is tempting to think that Julian’s work failed to reach the broad audience she intended specifically because of a radical potential that may have prevented her manuscripts from being circulated in her lifetime. After the Reformation, dissemination of the written text would be further compromised by the Protestant desire to repress Catholic works, especially those that celebrated the Marian or the miraculous and mystical.
While it may be that Julian’s primary, early, actual audiences were aural ones, a treatise written in the 1630s by Margaret Gascoigne, a nun at Cambrai (and already discussed by Watt) tells us how one early reader of her text understood Julian. According to Watson, Margaret takes sentences from the Long Text as springboards for her own meditation.14 In addition, on her own deathbed, she imitates Julian’s near-death experience and asks that a crucifix be brought before her with Christ’s promise to Julian written underneath. Margaret ruminates on Julian’s sentences as if they were passages from the Bible. More particularly, however, her reading practice suggests that Margaret identifies so strongly with Julian that there is little difference between herself and the author. Christ’s words are spoken as much to her as to Julian. Although her training as a nun would encourage such rumination of a text, what is striking about Margaret’s meditation is that she feels at ease in entering Julian’s narrative as if it were her own. I argue that such a response emerges less from her training in monastic rumination than from the fact that Julian’s style, to which I now turn, encourages just such an interaction with her work.
Julian’s ‘Modernist’ Style
Although the avowed audience of Julian’s writing is made up of her ‘evencristen’, the meaning of this term remains uncertain. By ‘even’, does she mean those, like her, who are devoted to a rigorous form of the contemplative life, or does she intend ‘even’ to mean ‘equal’, in the sense of sharing with her the status of being human? While her specific addresses in the Short Text to those interested in contemplation suggest that Julian may have had a narrow audience in mind when she embarked upon her writing, her text – certainly as it develops – ultimately concerns a much broader one. That wider audience is as much inside the text as outside it, however, since Julian’s stylistic strategies pull readers into her work as her ‘evencristen’. Julian positions herself in relationship to her audience as one who does not claim authority over the materials she wishes us to experience, but rather one whose compositional style allows us to become co-participants with her in that experience. I will briefly touch upon a variety of stylistic elements that contribute to Julian’s dissolution of her own authority and her ability to empower her readers and listeners to join with her as witnesses of her showing. First, she presents her visions from multiple perspectives in a way that induces the reader to join in the production of one or more meanings of the experiences described. Second, she disrupts temporal linearity in order to create an immanence of meaning available to all. Third, she creates a narrative voice both assured and reassuring while at the same time claiming no authority over her readers or listeners or her vision itself. Fourth, she obscures the relationship between exterior events and inner meditation so that the inner world and the outer world merge, thus reinforcing her attempts to create an all-inclusive vision without boundaries. Fifth, she uses inclusive diction and quotidian imagery that create a sense of a community of which she is a part and an account of her vision that is accessible to everyone in that community. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, she uses visual techniques through which she invites the reader to witness with her ‘moving images’.15 These stylistic elements, I suggest, shatter the distance between Julian as writer and her audience whether that audience is a listener or a reader, of the past or of the present.
Erich Auerbach’s characterization of modernist literary style, through an analysis of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, helps bring into focus those elements of Julian’s style that concern audience. These stylistic features include what Auerbach calls a ‘multipersonal representation of consciousness’, the disintegration of the continuity of exterior events, and the use of layered time strata.16 Unlike in stream-of-consciousness narrative, however, the narrator of a multipersonal representation of consciousness does not claim authority over her subject matter:
[T]he writer as narrator of objective facts has almost completely vanished … the author at times achieves the intended effect by representing herself to be someone who doubts, wonders, hesitates, as though the truth about her characters (or subject) were not better known to her than it is to them or to the reader.17
Auerbach distinguishes Woolf from other modernists such as Flaubert, who ‘with his knowledge of an objective truth never abdicated his position as the final and governing authority’.18 Auerbach’s modernist writer further abandons a sense of teleology, preferring to
render the continuous rumination of consciousness in its natural and purposeless freedom … he submits much more than was done in earlier realistic works to the random contingency of real phenomena; and even though he winnows and stylizes the material of the real world …, he does not proceed rationalistically, nor with a view of bringing a continuity of exterior events to a planned conclusion.19
Auerbach demonstrates how Woolf, while telling a narrative in one time, interweaves three excurses from different times and places. Finally, he describes how the relationship between inner and outer is obscure in Woolf, where ‘the exterior events have actually lost their hegemony’ and, instead, ‘serve to release and interpret inner events’; this is in contrast to writers of an earlier period for whom, in his view, ‘inner movements preponderantly function to prepare and motivate significant exterior happenings’.20 In Woolf, ‘The stress is placed entirely on what the occasion releases, things which are not seen directly but by reflection’; the reader is immersed in a ‘layered structure of a consciousness engaged in recollection’.21
Whilst Auerbach notes that many male writers differ from Woolf, in that they tend to display ‘unipersonal subjectivism’ and almost always control their narrative, bringing it to a clearly sighted end,22 what he fails to recognize is that the doubtful, wondering, non-teleological, non-hegemonic style he describes is not particularly the province of male writers; nor is it exclusively modern, but rather one that occurs in numerous women writers – and even long before Woolf’s time, in the writing of Julian of Norwich. Auerbach also fails to discuss how such a style is intimately connected to a radical understanding of audience.
While there are, of course, significant differences between Woolf and Julian, not least the fact that Woolf wrote novels and Julian an autobiographical account of a mystical encounter, the two authors have in common a number of stylistic attributes that have particular implications for an understanding of the author’s relationship to her audience. In both cases, the author grants the reader as much agency, control or understanding as she herself has, while at the same time sharing with us the depth and intricacy of her own thought. Using Auerbach’s discussion as a guide, I shall briefly delineate further specific aspects of Julian’s style that have particular implications for her shaping of her audience.
Firstly, Julian, like Woolf, manipulates time in such a way that she focuses upon what Auerbach calls the ‘symbolic omnitemporality of an event fixed in a remembering consciousness’.23 Where Woolf creates a multipersonal consciousness through the presentation of characters whose mental worlds merge with one another, Julian does so by offering us multiple viewpoints on her vision. Julian’s work is usually understood as progressing over time from a short, naïve account of a vision that was written down fairly close to the events to a long, measured, more theologically complex ‘revelation’ formulated and written down after long years of meditation, study and reflection. The later version should not, however, be considered a replacement of the earlier version; rather it is an amplification of it, as Barry Windeatt demonstrates clearly in his essay included here. The two accounts together produce multiple perspectives that ultimately dislodge the authority of the narrating ‘I’, transferring the task of producing the meaning of the events into the hands of the audience.
Julian’s style in both versions, when the two are considered both as a whole and individually, is fundamentally dilatory – a stylistic attribute often associated specifically with the feminine.24 When Julian returns to an aspect of her vision in the long version, she does so only to dilate it, that is, to add additional perspectives to it, or more precisely, to broaden the vision of it so as to be more inclusive. Neither account takes primacy over the other; rather the Long Text simply fills out one moment of consciousness. For example, in the Short Text she describes how ‘I sawe the rede blode trekille downe fro under the garlande alle hate, freshlye, plentefully, and livelye, and methought that it was in that time that the garlonde of thornes was thyrstede in his blessede hede’ (Vision, 3.10–12). It is not until the seventh chapter of the long version that she expands upon the bleeding:
And in alle that time that he shewd this that I have now saide in gostely sight, I saw the bodely sight lasting of the plentuous bleding of the hede. The gret droppes of blode felle downe fro under the garlonde like pelottes […] The plentuoushede is like to the droppes of water that falle of the evesing of an house after a grete shower of raine, that falle so thicke that no man may number them with no bodely wit. And for the roundhede, they were like to the scale of hering.
(Revelation, 7. 9–17)
The vision itself has not changed; she has simply attempted to capture again its intensity by amplifying her rhetorical range. Even within the Long Text alone, her methods are dilatory. Her meditation in Chapter 51 on the lord/servant image returns to the image again and again to look at it from different angles, considering placement of the figures, then the colours, then the clothing. Dilation creates the sense that Julian’s visions can never fully be recounted. Her style enacts the openness she wishes to create as she invites the audience to join with her in deepening meditations on the multiple possible interpretations generated by the vision before us. Indeed, all the aspects of Julian’s style I wish to discuss here might be gathered under the general term of dilation, for Julian’s fundamental impulse is to open her visions wide.
The seemingly repetitious spiral-like structure of Julian’s argument furthers her desire to dilate her account so that the audience is drawn into her visions as if they were happening before them. Windeatt describes the frustrations of seeking a clear narrative structure in her work:
The text apparently maintains a relatively straightforward narrative for roughly its first half, although already in the thirteenth showing, Julian is moving into digressive reflection and losing the thread of her narrative of a single experience … Julian’s insertion of this later reflective vision within the continuum of her original account represents … an exploration of problems as they suggest themselves regardless of self-conscious artistic constraints of form, symmetry and narrative continuity … A sense of its own narrative continuity no longer controls the book, the first text has been turned inside out by those pressures … Instead, the narrative of the original one day’s visionary experience is held in fractured form within what is now the real continuum of the meditations on the visions. This continuum is itself unconnected with specific time or space since is it the product of Julian’s whole intervening period of contemplation.25
Julian seems simply to be losing the thread and lapsing into repetition.26 But repetition is not accidental to her style; rather repetition enhances the immanence of Christ’s meaning that she strives to recreate for her audience.
Julian not only violates temporal order, but also linear order. She often tells us, for example, that there are six things, or three parts, or five aspects, but she rarely completes the enumeration and the lists merge, blend and replicate themselves with subtle alterations. Julian’s shattering of linear logic reinforces her refusal to claim authority over her readers and further reflects her assumption that understanding is reached by a continual process of analysis of each moment that will always be in flux. Julian furthermore does not exhibit a clear sense of boundary between herself and her readers.27 Indeed, it is Julian’s aim to dissolve boundaries altogether to create a community which, although made up of discrete individuals, is a unified whole.
By maintaining multiple chronological perspectives at once, Julian aims to integrate the past, present and future into a single immanent moment ever-present before her and her audience. As Windeatt writes, ‘The showings are recorded in the past tense, but the meditations are expressed in a present tense that is timeless and that opens out into infinity to reflect in syntactical patterns the purposes of God’.28 Teaching, understanding and revelation also occur simultaneously; as she writes of her contemplation of the Lord/Servant parable: ‘The furst is the beginning of teching that I understode therin in the same time. The secunde is the inwarde lerning that I have understonde therein sithen. The third is alle the hole revelation, fro the beginning to the ende […] And theyse thre be so oned, as to my understanding, that I can not nor may deperte them’ (Revelation, 51.64–68). Watson aptly calls this technique her ‘trinitarian hermeneutic’,29 and what this stylistic technique does for the audience is to place it with Julian at the centre of the immanence she wishes to recreate. She famously ends her work by proclaiming that her work ‘is begonne by Goddes gift and his grace, but it is not yet performed’ (Revelation, 86.1–2), and surely it is to be performed not just by Julian, but also continually by her audience.
Just as Woolf inhabits a narrative voice that doubts and wonders, Julian’s narrative voice both wonders and hesitates to claim final or complete knowledge of the events she presents. For example, after her discussion of the Lord/Servant parable, Julian stresses the partial nature of her understanding of her vision: ‘In this that I have now saide was my desyer in perty answered, and my grete fere somdele esed’ (Revelation, 53.7–8).30 Her understanding is limited and her quest for understanding never-ending. Despite her optimistic assurance of a community where she, her audience and Christ are all one, her knowledge is only partial, as she indicates in her repeated use of the word ‘pertye’. Like Woolf, Julian provides partial glimpses of the truth – never the whole, never the definitive. Her stress on the incompleteness of her vision reveals her humility at the same time that it indicates her belief that truth is found only from the perspective of the collective. In her claim that ‘alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thinge shalle be wele’ (Vision, 13.61), Julian reiterates the importance of creating a whole, both by acknowledging the variety of the particular (all manner of things) and by embracing it in an inclusive whole (all).
Most importantly, she repeatedly subordinates her judgment of the revelations to that of the reader while at the same time granting final interpretive authority to God: ‘But I trust in our Lord God almighty that he shall, of his goodnes and for your love, make you to take it more ghostely and more sweetly than I can or may tell it’ (Revelation, 9.26–8). In contrast, in keeping with Auerbach’s description of a male author in control of his narrative who is ever-present as a guiding teleological force, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing sprinkles his narrative with hortatory commands and inserts his own authoritative voice in phrases such as ‘I think I know that’, ‘I deem it better that you think’.31 In a privileged relationship to his subject matter, he has more knowledge than his readers despite the fact that he acknowledges the incompleteness of his knowledge in the face of God. Julian, however, deliberately subordinates herself to her readers:
Alle that I saye of myselfe, I meene in the persone of alle mine evencristene […] And therefore I preye yow alle […] that ye leve the behaldinge of the wrechid sinfulle creature that it was shewed unto, and that ye mightelye, wiselye, lovandlye, and mekelye behalde God, that of his curtays love and of his endles goodnes walde shew generalye this vision in comforthe of us alle’. (Vision, 6.1–7)
Julian is present only as one who facilitates, but does not mediate, a direct connection between the reader and her subject matter, God. She herself dissolves in the face of what she presents.
Julian’s recurrent diction referring to human unity serves her desire to dissolve the boundary between herself and her readers in the creation of a universal ‘we’. The most frequently used words are ‘all’, ‘love’, ‘oneing’, ‘general’ and ‘common’, implying that Julian’s work is not for any one individual, but for everyone, for the general, and her concept of the general is of a community joined by love, a community ‘oned’. In a discussion of the ‘publication’ of Julian’s work, Riddy argues in this context: ‘This private-public divide – special versus general, singular versus common – is not spatial: it does not have to do with accessibility versus inaccessibility, or with hidden versus disclosed; it has to do with “what is individual or pertains only to an individual, versus what is collective.”‘32 Julian stresses her intention to recount her visions for the profit of the general of which she is a part: ‘And so is my desire that it shulde be to everilke manne the same profitte that I desirede to myselfe, and therto was stirred of God in the firste time whan I saw itte, for it is common and generale, as we are all ane. And I am sekere I sawe it for the profitte of many oder’ (Vision, 6.13–16).
Julian’s repetitive use of the self-negating term ‘nought’ might suggest her desire to enter into an apophatic form of mystical union with Christ, as Vincent Gillespie and Maggie Ross have argued.33 But if we look closely at her particular use of this word, she seems to wish to emphasize her desire for the dissolution of mediation between herself, her audience and God rather than desire for dissolution of herself alone. As she says:
I say not this to them that be wise, for they wit it wele. But I sey it to you that be simple, for ease and comfort; for we be alle one in love […] For if I looke singulery to myselfe I am right nought; but in general I am, I hope, in onehede of cherite wth alle my evencristen. (Revelation, 9.2–8)
‘Noughting’ herself leads her to merge not just with God, but also with everyone who together make up God. Furthermore, that dissolution of self takes place not by denying the world but by embracing it. Julian’s meditations are thus quite different from the negative theology advocated in The Cloud of Unknowing, in which all earthly things are to be forgotten in the quest for union with God, for, in her vision, things of the earth are always before her. As Gillespie and Ross point out: ‘Julian here emphasizes once again that the way (but not the means) to apophatic union is through our bodies and created things, not by rejecting or destroying them.’34 She does not leave this world behind but rather seeks to show how the world is always already infused with God’s meaning. Her noughting, therefore, is paradoxical for she wishes first to dissolve the distance between herself and her audience and then the distance between that larger whole and God. Ultimately her dissolution of her singularity into the general is what allows her to join with Christ.
The familiarity, simplicity and accessibility of Julian’s quotidian imagery further attempts to bring her audience closer to her visions. She compares Christ’s blood to the scales of a herring and the flowing of the blood to plenteous rain from the eaves. As other contributors also pointed out, the hazelnut is her most famous image:
And in this, he shewed me a litille thinge the quantite of a haselle nutte, lygande in the palme of my hande, and to my understandinge, that it was as rounde as any balle. I lokede theropon, and thought: ‘What maye this be?’ And I was answerde generaly thus: ‘It is alle that is made.’ I merveylede howe that it might laste, for methought it might falle sodaynlye to nought for litille. And I was answerde in mine understandinge: ‘It lastes and ever shalle, for God loves it. And so hath alle thinge the beinge thorowe the love of God’. (Vision, 4.7–13)
Julian develops this image by comparing the hazelnut to the Virgin Mary who, despite her ‘created littleness’, was chosen as God’s handmaiden. Through this comparison, Julian invites anyone, even those who consider themselves too humble or too sinful to participate in God’s love. She particularly grants the woman writer and the woman reader legitimacy by showing how even those considered little and inferior, like Mary, might be especially chosen by God. At the same time, by casting herself as ceaselessly restless in her desire for God, she acknowledges those who have not yet found grace and stresses that everyone must actively strive to participate in God’s love.
In the development of this image, as so often throughout her work, Julian blurs the distinction between outer and inner events. She begins by contemplating an external object and then moves inward into her spirit. She asks a question ‘in her mind’, but we do not know whether she receives an answer externally or internally. She then tells us her next question is answered in her understanding. This movement from the external to an inner space of the soul, from a bodily sight to a ‘gastely’ reinforces her dissolution of boundaries in her creation of a whole infused with God; God is always already inside and outside and both within and without her and us.
It is not only the content of Julian’s images that is significant for defining her relationship to her audience, but it is also the very notion of the image itself, for to Julian, imagery takes precedence over analysis or interpretation in what Roland Maissoneuve calls her ‘symbolic vision’.35 Although critics have observed that the use of concrete, sensual imagery is common in the work of late medieval mystics such as Richard Rolle, and especially in that of female mystics, Julian’s interest in the image is distinctive in that it is predominantly visual, and more precisely cinematic.36 Discussing the difficulties Julian faced in ‘turning shewing into writing’, Windeatt concludes that her ‘cinematically vivid, montage-like series of images and impressions, sensations and heard words, is so singular and deconstructive of traditional expectation as to pose real challenges to interpretation.’37 Julian wishes us to observe and experience with her exactly what she observes without mediation.
Julian’s account of her experiences begins with the contemplation of an image, the cross, and what emerges from that sight is her ‘showings’, events that have both physical and spiritual meaning, but which are repeatedly based on visual perception. Julian asks for only one showing, a ‘bodilye sight, wharein I might have more knawinge of bodelye paines of oure lorde oure savioure, and of the compassion of oure ladye, and of alle his trewe loverse that were belevande his paines’ (Vision, 1.13–15). Julian wishes to be present at Christ’s Passion. Such a desire is in keeping with literature written for female contemplatives, such as Ancrene Wisse or Aelred of Rievaulx’s ‘Letter to his sister on the Reclusive Life’, which urge the female contemplative to place herself within the Passion, to observe Christ’s suffering first-hand with Mary. Whether we name her work ‘showings’, ‘visions’ or ‘revelations’, the importance of the word Julian uses repeatedly herself, ‘showing’, should not be underestimated. It is not until the Long Text that we learn that she had sixteen showings specifically; in the earlier text one showing blurs into another and the divisions between them are unclear, a confusion which contributes to her habit of dilation for, in the end, it is a single but all-inclusive vision that matters, one that embraces potentially infinite numbers of particular visions.
Julian’s visual imagination begins with a description of a static image in what Windeatt calls ‘quasi-photographic detail’, and then the image moves:38
The persone sette the crosse before my face, and saide […], ‘Loke thereupon, and comforthe the therewith in reverence of him that diede for the and me.’ […] I assended to sette mine eyen in the face of the crucifixe […] After this my sight begane to faile, and it was alle dyrke aboute me in the chaumber, and mirke as it hadde ben night, save in the image of the crosse that helde a comon light, and I wiste nevere howe […] But in this I desirede never ne bodely sight ne no manere shewinge of God, botte compassion […] With him I desirede to suffere […] And in this, sodaynlye I sawe the rede blode trekille downe fro under the garlande alle hate. (Vision, 2.22–31; 3.6–10)
Julian’s vision’s close focus on the cross is so intense that it instigates an all-inclusive dilation of the eye such that the object itself becomes infused with light and all around it goes black. The object then takes on life and movement as it bleeds. It becomes a ‘moving’ image as Christ bleeds, dries out and becomes discoloured. Julian then shifts from ‘bodily sight’ to ‘gastelye sight’ through which she understands God’s love.
While Julian’s meditations lead her to engage with a living Christ, they begin by her consideration of images common and available to any Christian: Christ on a simple wooden crucifix, Christ discoloured, Christ bleeding, Mary mourning Christ, a lord and a servant. This differs from the visions of other female mystics where Christ appears from nowhere, engages in conversation, offers gifts (such as the ring of his foreskin), and appears in different ages and forms. Her initial vision is not paranormal. That the cross becomes infused with light and the space around it becomes completely dark might be attributed to a physiological visual disturbance. The movement of her images might themselves be slowed down into single frozen frames of familiar images of Christ in different stages of his Passion. Julian’s visions are grounded in an initial observation of something in this world and emerge from her contemplation of familiar devotional objects that become defamiliarized only when they move.
Julian asserts her belief in the spiritual efficacy of devotional objects such as the cross when she states:
Methought I wolde have bene that time with Mary Maudeleyne and with othere that were Cristes loverse, that I might have sene bodilye the passion of our lorde that he sufferede for me, that I might have sufferede with him as othere did that loved him. Notwithstandinge that I leeved sadlye alle the peynes of Criste as halye kyrke shewes and teches, and also the paintings of crucifexes that er made be the grace of God aftere the teching of haly kryke to the liknes of Cristes passion […] noughtwihstondinge alle this trewe beleve, I desirede a bodilye sight.
(Vision, 1.6–13)
As Watson has suggested, in this passage Julian may well be engaging with contemporary discussion about the role of images in orthodoxy, perhaps to defend herself against those who might associate her with those Lollards who both valorize women as preachers and deplore the veneration of images.39 By placing the cross at the centre of her meditations, Julian joins with others in the 1380s who celebrate the veneration of devotional objects, especially the cross.40 In addition, the passage also suggests that devotional images were an important part of Julian’s experience. As well as the simple cross she makes use of other images too, a number of which bear resemblance to paintings, as Barratt and Gunn persuasively argue in their own contributions to this present volume. Sarah Stanbury, too, reminds us of the ubiquity of devotional images in this period: ‘the parishes and cathedrals of Chaucer’s world (late fourteenth-century England) were saturated with images, their walls painted with life-sized sequences from the lives of the saints, choir screens and pulpits decorated with images of saints and apostles, and windows glazed with scenes from both Old and New Testaments.’41 While Stanbury here describes Chaucer’s London, given Norwich’s reputation in this period as an especially religiously active town, Julian’s life whether in or outside the convent would have included the sight of many images. Indeed, whilst Barratt links Julian’s vision of the Lord and Servant, to the Dominus Dixit image found in the Ormesby Psalter, I suggest that it could just as easily have emerged from her observation of a wall painting:
I sawe two persons in bodely likenesse, that is to say, a lorde and a servant […] The lord sitteth solempnely in rest and in pees. The servant stondeth before his lorde reverently, redy to do his lordes wille. The lorde loketh upon his servant full lovely and sweetly, and meekly he sendeth him into a certaine place to do his will. The sevant not onely he goeth, but sodenly he sterteth and runneth in gret hast for love to his lordes wille. (Revelation, 51.6–9)
After describing the position of two figures in a static tableau, Julian finds they begin to move – as if an actual pictorial image imprinted in her mind then began to take on a life of its own. Later, Julian fills out the painting by describing the landscape the two inhabit, the clothing of both and the colour – the lord’s a wide blue cape, the servant’s a ‘whit kirtel, singel, olde, and alle defauted’ (Revelation, 51.142). Although, as Lynn Staley has shown, this parable draws on Julian’s absorption of a host of scriptural references, almost all the details of the lord/servant parable in Julian’s rendering of it are visual and could have been taken from a painting.42 Indeed, the ante-reliquary chapel of Norwich Cathedral has a fourteenth-century wall painting with a figure of Christ in a blue mantle.43
Throughout her account, Julian repeatedly asserts that, as with her desire to reduce the distance between herself and her audience, she wishes to be with Christ without anything between herself and the object of her sight: ‘For to I am substantiallye aned to him I may nevere have full reste ne varray blisse: that is to say, I be so festenede to him that thare be right nought that is made betwyxe my God and me’ (Vision, 4.16–19). Just as she wishes to diminish her own mediatory role between herself and her audience, she emphasizes that her vision was directly from God without mediation: ‘it was himselfe that shewed it me, withouten any meen’ (Vision, 3.14). This desire is in keeping with her comment about devotional objects – it is not that she wishes to do away with images, but rather that she wishes to go through the image to the thing itself – Christ – without the mediation of an object or a painting, without even the mediation of the eye.44
Of the many features of Julian’s style that shape her relationship to her audience, it is finally her visual imagination that most significantly determines the kind of audience she engages. Reinforced by her repetitive use of the words ‘shew’ and ‘behold’, Julian asks the reader to join her as a witness of an event – to be shown something rather than to be told about it; and her ‘modernist’ stylistic strategies, including her self-effacement, her presentation of herself as doubting, hesitating or wondering, her violation of linear teleology, her layering of time strata, are all designed to produce that witnessing. On the one hand, she acts like a film director, deliberately ‘splicing, pacing, shaping what has been seen, and creating continuity in her edited later version’.45 On the other hand, in her commitment to the apophatic, to ‘noughting’, Julian works to dissolve her directorial role and the distance it implies between self and other. Julian, finally, is not just modernist in her style but post-modern in her cinematic imagination, an imagination that both creates and embraces an audience which is one and the same with herself.46 In this regard, she makes a strenuous spiritual demand upon her audience – to respond, interpret and act directly and without assistance, upon the vivid showings before them.
1 All references to Julian’s texts, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman (Short Text) and A Revelation of Love (Long Text), will be to 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), unless otherwise stated.
2 For a brief discussion of the manuscripts, see McAvoy’s introduction to this volume and the essays by Cré and Dutton, in particular. For a fuller treatment see Barry Windeatt, ‘Julian of Norwich’, in A Companion to Middle English Prose, ed. A. S. G. Edwards (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 67–81.
3 Both Benedicta Ward and Felicity Riddy have considered it possible that Julian was a layperson before she entered the anchorhold. See Benedicta Ward, ‘Julian the Solitary’, in Kenneth Leech and Benedicta Ward, Julian Reconsidered (Oxford, 1988), pp. 11–35; and Felicity Riddy, ‘ “Women Talking about the Things of God”: A Late Medieval Sub-Culture’, in Women and Literature in Britain: 1150–1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 104–27, especially p. 111. Watson and Jenkins disagree, as do Edmund Colledge and James Walsh in the introduction to their edition, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich (Toronto, 1978). Like other contributors to this present volume, although the evidence is inconclusive, I am inclined to agree with Ward and Riddy.
4 For a discussion of the association of Julian’s manuscripts with nuns, see Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, Introduction, pp. 10–17; and Windeatt in ‘Julian of Norwich’, p. 69. See again Dutton’s essay.
5 Julian addresses contemplatives in Vision, 4.38–40, and 13.23–4. Lynn Staley views the Short Text as addressed to female contemplatives. See her ‘Julian of Norwich and the Crisis of Authority’, in David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (Pennsylvania, 1996), pp. 107–78, especially pp. 107–32. Felicity Riddy, on the other hand, argues the text is addressed to a broader audience: ‘ “Publicaiton”, before Print: The Case of Julian of Norwich’, in The Uses of Script and Print: 1300 –1700, ed. Julia Crick and Alexander Walsham (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 29–49, esp. p. 44.
6 On Julian as an anchoress, see the essay by E. A. Jones in this present volume.
7 Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS o.s. 212 (Oxford, 1948; repr. 1997), ch. 18, pp. 42–3.
8 For a discussion of the importance of Julian’s placement within an oral community, again see Riddy, ‘“Women Talking about the Things of God”‘, pp. 104–27.
9 J. P. H. Clark discusses Julian’s acquaintance with a number of philosophical issues in a series of essays: ‘Fiducia in Julian of Norwich’, Downside Review 100 (1982a), pp. 79–91; ‘Predestination in Christ according to Julian of Norwich’, Downside Review 100 (1982b), pp. 203–20 and ‘Time and Eternity in Julian of Norwich’, Downside Review 109 (1991), pp. 259–76.
10 For a discussion of the vibrancy of Norwich as an intellectual religious community, see Norman P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich 1370–1532 (Toronto, 1984), especially pp. 18–57.
11 See Revelation, 51.228–31.
12 Windeatt, ‘Julian of Norwich’, pp. 78–9; and Felicity Riddy, ‘Julian of Norwich and Self-Textualization’, in Editing Women, ed. Ann Hutchinson (Toronto, 1998), pp. 101–24.
13 The Sloane manuscripts have been edited by Marion Glasscoe in Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love (Exeter, 1970; various repr.). This quotation is on p. 103. It is also cited in Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 11 and in the textual notes, p. 415.
14 See Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 15.
15 I adopt the term James Simpson uses in his discussion of late medieval saints’ lives in his book, The Oxford English Literary History Volume 2: 1350–1547: Reform and Cultural Revolution (Oxford, 2002), pp. 383–457. I shall focus more specifically on the cinematic animation and movement of Julian’s images.
16 Eric Auerbach, ‘The Brown Stocking’, in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton, 1953), pp. 536 and 545.
17 Ibid., pp. 534–5.
18 Ibid., pp. 535–6.
19 Ibid., p. 538.
20 Ibid., p. 538.
21 Ibid., pp. 541 and 542. Auerbach uses this phrase to describe Proust, but it seems especially applicable to Julian.
22 Ibid., p. 536.
23 Ibid., p. 544.
24 See, for example, Patricia Parker’s paradigmatic discussion of this attribute in her Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York, 1987), especially pp. 8–36.
25 Barry Windeatt, ‘The Art of Mystical Loving: Julian of Norwich’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium I, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter, 1980), pp. 55–71 (58–60). My interest in Julian’s style was inspired long ago by this wonderfully perceptive early essay by Windeatt.
26 Windeatt discusses Julian’s repetitiousness: ibid., p. 62.
27 Windeatt discusses Julian’s relationship to her readers: ibid., p. 65.
28 Ibid., p. 68.
29 Nicholas Watson, ‘The Trinitarian Hermeneutic in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Love’, in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra McEntire (New York, 1998), pp. 61–90.
30 Windeatt points to this passage as a sign of Julian’s lack of confidence and uncertainty in ‘Art of Mystical Loving’, p. 63.
31 See The Cloud of Unknowing and Related Treatises on Contemplative Prayer, ed. Phyllis Hodgson, Analecta Cartusiana 3 (Exeter, 1982).
32 Riddy, ‘ “Publication” before Print’, pp. 44–5.
33 Vincent Gillespie and Maggie Ross, ‘The Apophatic Image: The Poetics of Self-Effacement in Julian of Norwich’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium V, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 53–77.
34 Ibid., p. 75 n. 49.
35 Roland Maissoneuve, ‘The Visionary Universe of Julian of Norwich: Problems and Methods’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium I, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter, 1980), pp. 86–98 (87).
36 See Wolfgang Riehle’s discussion of these features in his The Middle English Mystics (London, 1981).
37 Windeatt, ‘Julian of Norwich’, p. 73.
38 Ibid., p. 73.
39 Watson argues that Julian’s defence of her orthodox views of imagery implies that Julian must have written that passage during a time of intense attacks on the Lollards and therefore quite later than her initial vision of 1373. See Nicholas Watson, ‘The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Love’, Speculum 68 (1993), pp. 637–83.
40 Sarah Stanbury summarizes the debate in ‘Visualizing’, in A Companion to Chaucer, ed. Peter Brown, (Malden, 2000), pp. 459–79 and refers to Tomas Brinton and Walter Hilton in this context on p. 463.
41 Stanbury, ‘Visualizing’, p. 465.
42 See Staley, ‘Crisis of Authority’, p. 164.
43 See The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Georgia Ronan Crampton (Kalamazoo, 1994), footnote to l. 1896. I am grateful to C. David Benson for alerting me to this wall painting.
44 Here, consciously or otherwise, Julian appears to engage with late medieval discussions regarding vision, which argued that objects themselves emitted rays (‘species’) which interacted with rays emitted from the eye (extramission and intramission). Ockham, however, rejected the doctrine of the multiplication of ‘species’, because ‘for him the species in the medium would constitute an obstacle to vision of the object from which the species radiated’. See Alexander Broadie’s review of Katherine H. Tachau’s Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundations of Semantics, 1250–1345 in Speculum 65, 4 (1990), pp. 1061–3 (1062). For a superb discussion of the debates about nature of optics in the period see Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (New York, 2002). Whether or not she knew of these optical theories, Julian nonetheless rhetorically strives to recreate such directness of vision.
45 Windeatt, ‘Julian of Norwich’, p. 73.
46 I would like to thank Nicholas Watson for answering questions about Julian I had at the beginning of this project, Alexander Stewart for discerning comments about the manuscript contexts, Karen Jacobs and Stephen Shepherd for stimulating discussions about contemporary visual theory, Sarah Stanbury and Holly Crocker for helpful advice about medieval vision theory and Jennifer Jahner, Karen Jacobs, Gerda Norvig, Karen Robertson and Jeffrey Robinson for discussions about the essay as a whole.