The Visit of Margery Kempe
The Visit of Margery Kempe
punishment explains a great deal about why people left bequests to people like Julian. It was seen as vitally important to have spiritual people to pray for benefactors and especially for their speedy release from purgatory and for their eternal well‐being. In that sense, an anchoress such as Julian of Norwich became a kind of servant or employee of the benefactor but one who looked after the spiritual rather than material needs of the employer.
Apart from offering a sense of Julian's own life, the tradition of bequests to men and women anchorites in Norwich raises some further questions.
Bequests in the mid‐thirteenth century suggest that there were anchorites in the city at that point. However, there seems to be a gap between 1312 and the presence of Julian towards the end of the fourteenth century. Apart from the instability of the times there is no obvious explanation for this. However, what it does suggest is that Julian does not seem to have been the product of a continuous stream of recluses in the city.
This makes her stand out even more. However, during her life as an anchoress the numbers of recluses in the city increased to around ten.
This does not prove that Julian gathered a circle or school of solitaries around her but it seems likely that she was responsible for the increase by way of inspiration.
The Visit of Margery Kempe The only other external evidence for the life and work of Julian lies in the text of another late medieval English woman visionary, Margery Kempe
(c.1373 to later than 1438), daughter of John Brunham, a wealthy merchant, Mayor of Bishop's Lynn (now King's Lynn) in Norfolk, and Member of Parliament. Married at the age of 20 to John Kempe and mother of some fourteen children over 20 years, Margery had visionary experiences and eventually went through a profound spiritual conversion. This led her to reach an agreement with her husband to lead a life of celibacy and then to go on an extensive series of pilgrimages before returning to Lynn.
It seems she first began to dictate her spiritual autobiography in the early 1430s and it was eventually completed in 1438. The complete manuscript of her work was only rediscovered in 1934.7
The relevance of Margery Kempe to the study of Julian of Norwich lies in her description of a visit and extensive conversation with Julian
(c.1413) at a relatively early stage in her spiritual journey. In Book 1, chapter 18 of her autobiography (the second of two chapters about a visit to Norwich), she notes that after a visit to a Carmelite friar in Norwich,
William Southfield, she was "commanded by our Lord" to "go to an anchoress in the same city who was called Dame Julian." The main focus
Julian in Context
of their conversation seems to have been Margery Kempe's desire to test out whether her visions and revelations and resulting spiritual sentiments were authentic or whether she was being deceived. She notes that Julian "was expert in such things and could give good advice." After listening to Margery Kempe, Julian's response was to thank God and to advise her to be obedient to God's will and to fulfil whatever God "put into her soul" if it was not obviously contrary to "worship of God" and was to the "profit of her fellow Christians." Once again, Julian seems to have a strong sense of the pastoral purpose of all authentic spiritual experiences. Kempe cites Julian as saying:
The Holy Ghost never urges a thing against charity, and if he did he would be contrary to his own self, for he is all charity. Also he moves a soul to all chasteness, for chaste livers are called the temple of the Holy Ghost and the Holy Ghost makes a soul stable and steadfast in the right faith and the right belief.
The conversation between them "for many days that they were together" was essentially a lesson in "testing the spirits," or discernment, to see whether one's spiritual experiences or desires are of God or not. Special revelations, once tested, must be trusted. It would seem from this evidence that Julian was seen as an authority on the Christian tradition of discernment. More broadly, Margery Kempe's account also provides evidence that Julian received visitors who came to talk about their spiritual journeys. Interestingly, although Margery Kempe had a liking for devotional texts in English, she makes no mention of Julian's writings as opposed to her spiritual reputation. Yet by 1413 Julian would have long since completed her Short Text and very likely also the Long Text. There do seem to be a few interesting similarities between Margery Kempe and Julian's texts. For example the image of the soul as the seat of God echoes the Long Text, chapter 68. The concern for the faith of Holy Church echoes the Long Text, chapter 9. There is also the use of such terms as "fellow Christians" or "evenchristen."
Margery Kempe's account of her meeting with Julian also has Julian refer to a number of biblical texts as well as to St Jerome and St Bernard on the gift of tears. This brings us briefly to the debates about Julian's previous background and education. As already noted, the first evidence we have for Julian as an anchoress is in a will dated 1393 or 1394. This is roughly the same time when contemporary scholars suggest that Julian began to write the Long Text. Without suggesting that Julian's motive for entering the anchorhold was to become a theological‐spiritual writer, it is nevertheless the case that the solitary life would have offered her the space to think about and to meditate upon her experiences and then to