Differencesbetween Manuscripts
The Fate of Julian's Texts
held by the English convent at Cambrai. The Sloane 1 manuscript (BL Sloane Ms 2499) is much plainer and there are some differences in content from P. This manuscript may have been produced by the Benedictine nun Clementina Carey of Cambrai who was responsible for founding a daughter house in Paris. The third full manuscript, known as Sloane 2 (BL Sloane Ms 3705), is probably a copy of Sloane 1 and dates from later in the seventeenth century. The first printed edition of the Long Text was published in 1670 by an English Benedictine monk at Douai, Serenus Cressy (or de Cressy). He had fled England as an Anglican priest during the Civil War and subsequently converted to Roman
Catholicism. Cressy based his edition on the Paris manuscript and this was reprinted several times during the nineteenth century and again in 1902, with a fascinating Preface by the famous Anglo‐Irish Jesuit George
Tyrell who was shortly afterwards condemned for the supposed heresy of Modernism.
Differences between Manuscripts There are debates about how and why the Paris and Sloane versions of the Long Text came to differ. It could be that the differences simply reflect
Julian's various re‐workings of the text. However, this is not the consensus among scholars, not least because the differences involve language as well as content. A more likely reason for the differences is the impact of different scribes and textual compilers between the time of Julian's own version of the Long Text and its reappearance in seventeenth‐century
France.
There are a range of hypotheses. The scholar Marion Glasscoe argues that the Paris manuscript (P) is a modernization. For this reason she chooses Sloane 1 as the basis for her edition of the Long Text.2 However,
Sloane 2 also sometimes modernizes Sloane 1 although overall they are the same and Sloane 2 is basically a copy. There are also some possible dialect variations. It has been suggested that Sloane 1 derives from Norfolk while Paris sporadically employs Northern words. However, other commentators note the same sporadic use of Northern words in Sloane! In their scholarly edition, Colledge and Walsh point out that there were Northern women among the Benedictine nuns at Cambrai where Sloane was copied and they therefore suggest that the Northern elements do not reflect Julian but were introduced by the manuscript scribes.
Another suggestion is that Sloane 1 imitates an earlier exemplar (now lost) in Northern dialect which, if true, suggests that either Julian herself or an anonymous amanuensis was originally from Northern England.
The Fate of Julian's Texts
Without forming a judgment about this hypothesis, it is worth noting that the use of an amanuensis was not unusual even among the educated, literate upper classes. This text may have remained standard until English adopted a more Southern form as the norm. For example, Watson and Jenkins in their recent scholarly edition of Julian's texts argue (page 11) that the Paris manuscript was not in the original dialect of the Long Text.
Rather it represents a version of the text in the East Midlands dialect that had become standard English by around 1420 for any works being copied for wider circulation. This standardization of English in the fifteenth century offers an alternative explanation of the Paris manuscript against the notion that it was simply a later seventeenth‐century modernization of the earlier and "purer" language used by the Sloane manuscript.
It is important to remember that the mid‐fifteenth‐century Westminster Cathedral extracts from the Long Text is also post‐standardization.
Therefore its failure to mimic the Northernisms of Sloane does not automatically undermine the notion that Sloane's Northernisms either preserve Julian's own dialect or preserve the dialect of an anonymous amanuensis. The fact that the single surviving Amherst manuscript of the Short Text also employs numerous Northern dialect words may reinforce the idea that Julian was a Northerner who moved to Norwich but equally it may reinforce the possibility that Julian employed a Northern amanuensis who wrote down both the Short Text and the Long Text in her or his native dialect.
My own view is that, on balance, there is no convincing reason to depart from the long‐standing perception that Julian was a woman of Norwich rather than a woman from the North.
A final question concerns content. Which of the Sloane or Paris manuscripts is more authentically Julian in its content? The point is that Paris contains both phrases and whole passages that are not present in either
Sloane 1 or Sloane 2. Some of these simply gloss certain words but others actually clarify important ideas. So, the question is whether material was left out of the Sloane manuscript or was added to the Paris manuscript?
Any response to this is necessarily inconclusive. However, a growing consensus is that Sloane carelessly omits material rather than that Paris adds material.
As a result of this growing consensus, it seems probable that Paris is the earliest surviving manuscript of the Long Text, possibly dating from the late sixteenth century. Nowadays it is also widely agreed by scholars to be the most complete version of what Julian actually wrote. However, while Paris mimics medieval script it also modernizes the language in relation to the Middle English of Julian's own time. As already noted, it has been "translated" into the standard English that derived from the dialect of the East Midlands.