Who was Julian?
Chapter 1 Julian in Context The contemporary rediscovery of the fourteenth‐century anchoress,
Julian of Norwich, as an important mystical writer, theological thinker, and spiritual teacher has inevitably led to a great deal of speculation about her origins and life. Whatever the long‐term value of Julian's teachings, no mystical or theological writing exists on some ideal plane removed from the historical circumstances in which it arose.1
Julian's possible background and her historical context affect our contemporary interpretation of what she wrote. Without some awareness of her context, it is all too easy to make Julian an honorary member of our own times or to pick and choose the aspects of her writings that appeal to us or to make overall judgments about her without seeking to honor what she herself intended to communicate in her writings.
Who was Julian?
Who Julian was, her social background, her education, her life experience prior to becoming an anchoress, when she became an anchoress – even where she was born – are all matters of speculation. The name "Julian" by which she is known is also likely to have been an adopted one. It was quite common for medieval anchorites and anchoresses to assume the name of the church to which their anchorhold (or cell) was physically attached. In the case of Julian of Norwich, her anchorhold was next to the parish church of St Julian Timberhill in Norwich which survives in reconstructed form to this day. The church has been known by that name since the tenth century but it is not absolutely clear to which St Julian it is dedicated. There are several saints of that name. One suggestion is
St Julian the Hospitaller because he was the patron saint of ferrymen and the local ferry ran across the River Wensum very close to the church.
However, another suggestion is that the title of St Julian's Church somehow touched Julian of Norwich's own personal and painful
Julian of Norwich: "In God's Sight" – Her Theology in Context, First Edition. Philip Sheldrake.
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2019 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Who was Julian?
experience. A growing consensus, not least in Julian's own city of Norwich and in the parish of St Julian, is that the underlying echoes in the Long
Text may point to a woman who was a widow and had lost a child at a young age. The text has the flavor of someone who suffered the darkness of such a loss. For example, chapter 61 briefly and poignantly notes that an "earthly mother may suffer her child to perish." If so, it is speculated that a likely date was the plague of 1362 because that particular outbreak did not simply lead to the death of twenty per cent of the city's population but, unusually, the majority of deaths were of children. In this environment, devotion to St Julian of Le Mans would have attracted people, perhaps Julian of Norwich among them, because the saint was famous for miracles of curing children and even of raising them from the dead.
St Julian's Church was the responsibility of the nuns of Carrow Priory (popularly referred to as Carrow Abbey). Interestingly, the manuscript of the Carrow Abbey Psalter still survives in the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, MD. In it the usual liturgical calendar is supplemented by a special feast day dedicated to St Julian of Le Mans. Whether the parish church was technically dedicated to this St Julian or not, it would seem that St Julian of Le Mans was well known to the people of Norwich.2
Having said this, all attempts at reconstructing Julian of Norwich's life must be treated with caution. The only evidence we have about her identity consists of what is present in her two texts, a mention of bequests made to her in several surviving wills, and the record of a visit to her
(probably around 1413) by another of the late medieval English mystics, Margery Kempe. This is described in Margery's dictated autobiographical work, The Book of Margery Kempe.
Julian says very little about her own life and circumstances in the texts that she herself wrote, apart from the bare details of her original visionary experiences and references to further interior enlightenment some years later. In the second chapter of what is typically known as her Long Text, or A Revelation of Love, Julian writes of a "revelation" made to her in "the year of our Lord one thousand, three hundred and seventy‐three [1373] on the thirteenth day of May."3 As the third chapter makes clear, this occurred when she was "thirty and a half years old" during a "bodily sickness in which I lay for three days and three nights." On that basis we can presume she was born around 1342 or 1343. The only other biographical details offered in Julian's texts occur in a short, probably scribal, preface to her so‐called Short Text, or "A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman," in its one surviving manuscript. This records that "her name is Julian, who is a recluse at Norwich and still alive, anno domini 1413." There are oblique hints about two other dates within the Long Text and these will be referred to in my discussion of the relationship between this text and the Short Text.