Introduction
Introduction
Julian of Norwich and her Book
Julian of Norwich is the first writer in English who can be identified with certainty as a woman. Before her, a few works survive written by women in other languages used in England – notable among them are the short romances and fables in French by the great twelfth-century poet Marie de France – and, since a large proportion of writing in medieval English is anonymous, some of it may have been by women of whom nothing is now known. But most medieval Englishwomen were not educated or even literate, and those who were would not generally have been encouraged to write works intended to outlive some immediate purpose. Julian’s period, the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, is now recognized as one of the great ages of English literature – the age of William Langland, John Gower, the Gawain-poet, Geoffrey Chaucer and his first major disciple Thomas Hoccleve in verse, and of Walter Hilton, Nicholas Love, the Wycliffite translators of the Bible and the anonymous writer of The Cloud of Unknowing in prose. These were all men, and it took some very unusual stimulus to impel a woman to write, and especially to write a work designed to teach others. What this stimulus was for Julian is revealed by the texts translated here – the two versions of her Revelations of Divine Love,1 her only known writings, an earlier short version (ST) and a later long version (LT).
Julian states in LT that ‘These revelations were shown to a simple, uneducated creature in the year of our Lord 1373, on the eighth day of May’ ().2 She adds that she was then ‘thirty and a half years old’ () – about the age of Chaucer. Apparently at the point of death from a severe illness, for which she had earlier prayed as a means to be ‘purged by the mercy of God and afterwards to live more to God’s glory’ (), she received a series of ‘showings’ (we retain the word she normally uses for each separate religious experience). These were extraordinary experiences conveyed in three modes: in sensory and especially visual imagery, in words perceived directly by the mind, and in the form of insight so far transcending the sensory and the verbal that ‘I neither can nor may show the spiritual vision as openly or as fully as I would like to’ (). On 8 May she experienced fifteen showings: the first ‘began early in the morning, at about four o’clock’ and the series continued ‘until it was well past the middle of the day’ (). A sixteenth came ‘on the following night’, sandwiched between two dreamlike experiences of diabolic temptation, and was ‘conclusion and confirmation’ to the entire sequence (). The showings were so compelling and so rich in meaning that Julian understood them to come directly from God and to be messages not just to herself but to all Christians. This led her to put them in writing and to convey her sense of their significance, as it was revealed in the course of many years of meditation, renewed by ‘flashes of illumination and touches, I hope, of the same spirit which was shown in them all’ (). One supplementary showing came ‘fifteen years and more later’ – that is, about 1388 – and this she recounts in the final chapter of LT: it was that God’s meaning in the whole series of experiences from 1373 was no more nor less than love. Julian wrote for private readers; they rather than listeners would have needed the list of contents in of LT and the summaries heading the other chapters (if these are authorial). Her target audience was initially ‘all men and women who wish to lead the contemplative life’ (ST ), but in LT she drops this limitation and seems to envisage a broader public of devout laypeople – a public that was on the increase in her lifetime. Since her work was adapted into modern English in 1901, her readership has expanded to far greater numbers than could have known it in earlier times.3
What Julian meant by describing herself as uneducated (that cowde no letter) has been much discussed. Some have argued that it indicates that she was illiterate, so that her writings must have been penned on her behalf by someone else, presumably a man. The concept of literacy is not a simple one: in late medieval England the language of learning was Latin, known only to a few, nearly all of them men and those mostly clerics, but the ability to read and write in English was becoming more widespread. Many who knew no Latin had access to Latin culture with the assistance of clerics, and many who could not write or even read English could similarly enjoy some of the fruits of literacy with the help of those who could. (An example of the latter is Julian’s younger contemporary, Margery Kempe, of whom more below.) English culture was strongly patriarchal, and the ability to write even in the mother tongue was thought unsuited to women; on the other hand, by Julian’s time women were becoming increasingly interested in personal forms of religious devotion, and this encouraged ‘a textuality of the spoken as well as the written word’, originating in books, perhaps read aloud, but then ‘transmitted among the women by word of mouth’.4 Julian is manifestly a woman of exceptional intelligence, and she shows not just an understanding of theology, the province of learned male clerics, but a capacity for powerful new theological thought; moreover, her prose, while owing much to speech, is distinctive and distinguished. If she emphasizes her ignorance, describing herself as ‘a woman, ignorant, weak and frail’ (ST ), this is likely to have been both out of genuine humility and so as to avoid her contemporaries’ unease with female learning, especially in theological matters. She may have had little or no Latin (to know ‘no letter’ could well mean that) and nothing is known for certain of her reading, but there seems no reason to deny her authorship, in the fullest sense, of the work attributed to her.
Julian reveals little of her life, beyond certain details that authenticate her religious experiences. This reticence was evidently a matter of principle, and in LT she omits even some of the few personal items mentioned in ST. She urges her readers to concentrate on the revelation itself and ‘stop paying attention to the poor being to whom [it] was shown’ (), and later explains that, when she desired to know whether a certain friend would ‘continue to lead a good life’, she learned that it was not to God’s glory to be concerned about ‘any particular thing’ (; cf. ST ) – hence the omission of nearly all such particulars from her writing. External documents place her in Norwich in her later years; we cannot be sure that she was there in May 1373 (what can be discerned of her dialect in the scribal copies of her work suggests that she came from further north), but there is no reason to think otherwise. Norwich was among the largest and most prosperous English cities in the later Middle Ages, and East Anglia, the region where it is situated, was ‘one of the great centres of artistic creation in late medieval England’.5 Commercial wealth and religion were closely connected in the later Middle Ages, and, though Julian’s way of life indicates her wish to separate herself from the city’s bustling commerce, even the religious language she adopted was shaped by ideas of buying and selling, profit and loss. Religion was the focus of most cultural activity, and in East Anglia generous patronage supported enterprises ranging from the composition of elaborate poems, often by members of religious orders such as the Benedictine monk John Lydgate and the Augustinian canon Osbern Bokenham, to the building and decoration of magnificent churches. Norwich had over fifty churches, most of which still survive. East Anglia’s many ports (including Norwich itself, linked to the coast by the rivers Wensum and Yare) enabled close connections across the North Sea with continental Europe; the chief exports were wool and cloth, and imports included works of art and the latest forms of religious devotion. Julian’s account of the gifts she desired from God in early life () implies an exceptionally devout young woman with the leisure to devote herself to religious experience, thus presumably one from a background of material comfort. Some have thought she may have been a nun,6 but the details in ST of her circumstances in 1373 indicate a secular domestic setting: when she seemed about to die, her parish priest was sent for, he was accompanied by a boy, and later ‘My mother, who was standing with others watching me, lifted her hand up to my face to close my eyes, for she thought I was already dead’ (ST ). Probably then Julian was at this time either an unmarried daughter living at home or a widow. The centrality of motherhood in her religious thought might suggest that she had been a mother herself. Later, presumably influenced by the showings, she adopted a fully religious mode of life, becoming not a nun but an anchorite.
An anchorite was a person who had entered into an enclosed solitary life in a fixed place, in order to achieve greater spiritual perfection. (The thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse is an important English text offering guidance for such a way of life.7) Options of this kind, allowing for individual forms of devotion, became increasingly popular in late medieval England, and more anchorites and hermits are recorded in Norwich than in any other medieval English town.8 It has been suggested that such options, offering a ‘medieval version of Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own” ’, might have been especially appealing to women, ‘because there a woman could find privacy, autonomy, and a chance for intellectual development unavailable even in a convent’.9 Many anchorites lived in cells attached to churches, and Julian can be identified as the anchoress who occupied a cell at St Julian’s church in Norwich, within earshot of the busy quayside; her name was presumably adopted from the church. The cell, with an opening into the church from which to see the tabernacle containing the sacrament, did not survive the Reformation; the church was largely destroyed by German bombing in 1942, but has been rebuilt.
The manuscript of ST has a rubric describing Julian as ‘recluse at Norwyche’ and as still alive in 1413. She is similarly mentioned in wills dating from 1394 to 1416, but the most striking reference to her as an anchorite occurs in The Book of Margery Kempe. This, the first autobiography in English, dictated by a woman of passionate and eccentric religious devotion from the nearby port of Lynn, describes how in 1415 she visited ‘an anchoress … who was called Dame Julian’ and received what sounds like wise and tactful advice.10 (Though they lived in solitude, anchorites were expected to give spiritual counsel to others.11) The date of Julian’s death is unknown; she may have lived into the 1420s.
ST and LT form two distinct versions of Julian’s work.12 ST consists mainly of an account of the 1373 showings and Julian’s initial interpretation of their meaning, but it omits the parable of the lord and the servant recounted in of LT. Though this was part of the 1373 experience, Julian initially found it too baffling to set down alongside the other showings, ‘for a full understanding of this marvellous parable was not given to me at that time’ (). As mentioned above, ST also omits the further experience of about 1388 recounted in LT . All scholars agree that ST was composed earlier than LT, which incorporates most of ST’s material but with more about some of the showings and far fuller interpretation of what Julian originally saw (especially in the thirteenth and fourteenth showings): she ‘reads’ her memories of these showings over and over again, as if they formed a treasured book. Introducing the parable of the lord and the servant, she explains that the initial showing, the ‘inner learning’ she has subsequently gained, and the light thrown on it by the entire sequence of revelations ‘which our Lord God in his goodness often shows freely to the eyes of my mind’, are by now ‘so united in my mind that I neither can nor may separate them’ (). Experience, memory and meaning could never be fully separable. Like her contemporary William Langland, author of at least three successive versions of his great religious poem Piers Plowman, Julian seems to have devoted her life to thinking and rethinking the meaning of her visionary insights. She was never satisfied that she had plumbed their depths, for the final chapter of LT opens, ‘This book was begun by God’s gift and his grace, but it seems to me that it is not yet completed.’ Like Piers Plowman, Julian’s work owes much of its difficult fascination to its status as a text of repeated new beginnings, lacking the final conclusion that for both writers would be possible only at the end of the world.
Most scholars have assumed that ST dates from shortly after the 1373 experiences and LT from 1393, in accordance with Julian’s explanation that understanding of the lord and servant showing was granted to her ‘twenty years after the time of the showing, all but three months’ (). These assumptions have been questioned, however, in an important study by Nicholas Watson.13 Considering the likely historical context for Julian’s work, he suggests that ST would most naturally belong not to 1373–4 but to some years later, when the visionary writings of continental female mystics such as Catherine of Siena and Bridget of Sweden had begun to circulate in East Anglia, and that Julian’s repeated insistence on her submission to ‘the teaching of Holy Church’ (ST ), especially in regard to ‘paintings of crucifixes … in the likeness of Christ’s Passion’ (ST ), seems appropriate to the 1380s or later, when the critique of images by Wyclif’s followers, the Lollards, had gained notoriety and been condemned. It could then have been the 1388 experience that stimulated the writing of ST, and Watson further proposes that LT may date from the early fifteenth century, perhaps after 1413 (the date mentioned in the ST manuscript) – for why would the ST copyist have disregarded the later, fuller version if it existed then? The question of dating cannot be regarded as settled, but Watson’s hypothesis is persuasive.
Medieval Religious Devotion
In both texts, Julian begins by telling of her desire for three gifts from God: imaginative identification with Christ’s sufferings on the cross, bodily sickness in youth to the verge of death and three ‘wounds’ of contrition, compassion and longing for God. Six centuries later, in an age when Christianity has come to be centred in moral conduct and social concern, many readers, believers or not, may find an almost perverse egocentricity and masochism in such desires. Although current interest in Julian’s writing shows that she can speak directly to many modern readers, it may be helpful to sketch the tradition of religious devotion in which her desires could seem normal and praiseworthy.
Through most of the first thousand years of western Christianity, Christ was widely seen as a remote, awesome judge and hero, who had fought and conquered the devil to gain the possibility of salvation for the human souls seized as a consequence of Adam’s sin. In this struggle, human beings were little more than spectators. A famous English expression of this view occurs in the eighth-century Dream of the Rood, where the cross appears to the poet in a vision and tells how ‘the young warrior who was God almighty stripped himself, stalwart and resolute; he stepped on to the high gallows, bold in the sight of many, when he determined to liberate mankind’.14 That conception of Christ as divine warrior did not disappear in later centuries (it is present in Piers Plowman), but alongside it there grew up a different emphasis on Christ as suffering man, arousing compassion in his fellow human beings. In this new theology, developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries by learned Latin writers such as Saint Anselm, Peter Abelard and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, God’s Incarnation as man was seen not primarily as a device for defeating the Devil but as a means of drawing human love towards God as an object for identification and imitation. Bernard remarked:
I think this is the principal reason why the invisible God willed to be seen in the flesh, and to converse with men as a man. He wanted to recapture the affections of carnal men who were unable to love in any other way, by first drawing them to the salutary love of his own humanity, and then gradually to raise them to a spiritual love.15
Bernard was preaching to Cistercian monks, but this focus on Christ’s fleshly existence and its appeal to fleshly love became the central feature of the less communal, more personal kinds of religious devotion that flourished from the twelfth century onwards. As the Church became more centralized and its teachings pervaded western society more effectively, this devotion attracted the laity as well as those committed to a religious life; the kind of meditations originally recommended for monks began to be practised by devout laypeople. The new devotion was more Christocentric and more affective than that of earlier Christianity: that is, it centred in God’s human nature and in the powerful feelings of love and pity aroused in men and women by his bodily sufferings. There was a longing to share imaginatively in the life of the Holy Family but above all in the experience of Jesus in his Passion. For the desired feelings to be continually renewed, Christ’s torments had to be evoked in ever-intensifying detail, to an extent that modern readers of Julian and other devotional writers may find repellent and even nauseating. Meditation on the Passion, often imagined with a gruesome hallucinatory realism, with the aid of details borrowed from apocryphal sources such as the Gospel of Nicodemus, was the central theme of later medieval devotion. This was where Julian’s showings began, with blood seeming to trickle down Christ’s face as she gazed at the crucifix.
From one point of view, the process just described might be called a feminization of devotion. The predominant ideology of the Middle Ages connected men with rationality and the spirit, women with emotion and the flesh. The change began with men like Saint Bernard, eliciting in themselves and their fellows the tender and passionate feelings traditionally attributed to women; but it went on to appeal to women also, and was subsequently associated with an increasing part played by women as readers and patrons, and ultimately as writers, of devotional works. From the thirteenth century on an increasing proportion of saints are female; and in Julian’s time the rood-screens of East Anglian churches displayed images of holy women old and new. In the late fourteenth century the writings of passionately devout continental women began to be read in England and were greatly admired. Whether or not Julian knew them, her milieu must have been dominated by this emotional and bodily piety of the later Middle Ages. For this piety, as Caroline Bynum puts it, ‘bodiliness provides access to the sacred’,16 and bodily sensations such as pain, heat and sweetness, and bodily fluxes such as blood and tears, were seen as signs of God’s presence and means to union with him. In this context, the three gifts that Julian desired would not seem abnormal; indeed what is striking is the way that her religious aspirations, without ever abandoning the bodily and the emotional,17 go beyond the gifts she initially desired to achieve penetrating and difficult intellectual insights – a process that has been described as ‘Julian’s transformation … from a visionary into a theologian’.18
A brief introduction cannot offer a comprehensive analysis of these insights and the means by which she expresses them. What follows concentrates chiefly on LT and considers two aspects of Julian’s work that have particularly interested modern readers: the ways in which her writing was affected by the fact that she was a woman, and the ideas about salvation that are focused in the longest chapter of LT, containing the parable of the lord and the servant. As will be seen, these two aspects are closely connected.
Julian as Woman Writer
Julian must have continued working on her Revelations over many years (especially if the later dates for the two versions are correct), choosing the exact words to record her showings and to convey their meaning as it gradually emerged. Her determination to represent and understand her experiences with scrupulous accuracy, indicated by repeated use of phrases such as ‘as I see it’ and ‘as I understand it’, makes for an exploratory style, in which even the most definite statement remains provisional. English, much used for devotional writing, was an unaccustomed medium for theology, and in her quiet struggles with her mother tongue Julian persuades it to release richnesses of meaning that careless readers might dismiss as imprecision or ambiguity. In LT especially, her prose can be memorably figured and patterned; but that may also be true of speech, and her writing resembles speech more closely than it resembles medieval Latin prose or even the learned English prose into which Chaucer had translated Boethius’ Latin. As Felicity Riddy puts it, ‘Julian’s text has the fluidity of talk, now brief, now expansive, moving in and out of autobiography.’19 This ‘fluid’ style is often seen as distinctively feminine, and with some justification: not because it constitutes an écriture féminine, a form of writing that expresses some transhistorical essence of femaleness, but for specific historical reasons. Some of these are expounded by Bynum in a general discussion of religious writing by medieval women:
… part of the reason for the more open, experiential style of women’s writings is the fact that women usually wrote not in the formal scholastic Latin taught in universities, but in the vernaculars – that is, in the languages they grew up speaking. The major literary genres available in these languages were various kinds of love poetry and romantic stories: the vocabulary provided by such genres was therefore a vocabulary of feelings … Furthermore, women’s works, especially their accounts of visions, were often dictated (that is, spoken) rather than penned – a fact that is clearly one of the explanations for women’s more discursive, conversational, aggregative, tentative, empathetic and self-reflective style. As Elizabeth Petroff has recently pointed out, the prose of a female writer such as Julian of Norwich, which tends to circle around its point, evoking a state of being, displays exactly those traits Walter Ong has seen as characteristic of oral thought and expression.20
Not just the style of Julian’s prose is at issue here but the style of her thought. The formal education received by male writers, based in Latin and practised in disputation, emphasized opposition, combativeness, triumph or defeat in argument, and tended to shape men’s thought accordingly; it was an intellectual counterpart to the martial training that produced medieval knights. In a disputation, you can uphold one view only by opposing its contrary, unhorsing your opponent as if in a joust. Far from being carried away by emotion, Julian is always careful to analyse what she sees, feels and understands as exactly as she can, often in the form of numbered lists; but this disputative, adversarial quality is quite lacking in her writing. In that sense, while doubtless more learned than most women, she does write as a woman, and gains a real advantage by doing so.
Medieval culture offered strong resistance to writing and teaching by women, a resistance justified by statements of Saint Paul such as ‘Let women keep silence in the churches; for it is not permitted them to speak, but to be subject’ (1 Corinthians 14:34) and ‘Nor I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to use authority over the man; but to be in silence’ (1 Timothy 2:12).21 In Julian’s time Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, wrote as follows, possibly with Catherine of Siena in mind:
… the female sex is forbidden on apostolic authority to teach in public … All women’s teaching, particularly formal teaching by word and by writing, is to be held suspect unless it has been diligently examined, and much more fully than men’s. The reason is clear: common law – and not any kind of common law, but that which comes from on high – forbids them. And why? Because they are easily seduced, and determined seducers; and because it is not proved that they are witnesses to divine grace.22
This attitude was probably even more unquestioned in England than on the continent, where there was already a tradition of female visionaries claiming an authority alternative to that of male clerics. In England there was no such tradition; religious devotion was generally moderate and cautious, and there is little evidence of female visionaries before Julian herself. From the 1380s on, the anticlericalism of Wyclif’s followers gave some encouragement to female teaching, but that meant that any woman who seemed to be offering to teach was likely to be suspected of heresy – which was what happened to Margery Kempe. Any work discussing theological issues in the vernacular was suspect, for ‘at the same time that literacy and the tendency toward private devotion were beginning to increase, an official distrust of both was also on the rise’,23 but this was especially so when any connection was found between women and books. Hence Julian’s need for the careful, modest self-presentation found in ST :
But God forbid that you should say or assume that I am a teacher, for that is not what I mean, nor did I ever mean it; for I am a woman, ignorant, weak and frail. But I know well that I have received what I say from him who is the supreme teacher … Just because I am a woman, must I therefore believe that I must not tell you about the goodness of God, when I saw at the same time both his goodness and his wish that it should be known?
This passage is lacking from LT, perhaps because Julian later came to feel more confidence in herself as female visionary writer and in her ability to balance her revelations against the Church’s teaching. Yet even here in ST Julian’s very modesty casts her as a spokeswoman for God himself; and more generally the role she adopts, of the mere woman who accepts and proclaims her incapacity to teach, is not necessarily disadvantageous to her. She seems to have thoroughly internalized her culture’s downgrading of her sex,24 but from it, consciously or unconsciously, she fashions a textual self that serves her purpose admirably. She avoids the outward trappings of learning – the use of Latin, of technical terminology, of citations of authority – in order to share her own meekness with her readers and with a God whose power is exercised through womanly meekness and motherly forgiveness. Within this shared space, Julian’s acknowledged womanliness, far from separating her from the male God of Christianity, could have the effect of identifying her more closely with Christ in his humanity. To quote Bynum again,
Medieval men and women did not take the equation of woman with body merely as the basis for misogyny. They also extrapolated from it to an association of woman with the body or the humanity of Christ. Indeed, they often went so far as to treat Christ’s flesh as female, at least in certain of its salvific functions, especially its bleeding and nurturing.25
In another way too, Julian turns to the advantage of her writing a disadvantage culturally imposed on her sex. In the Middle Ages most women had no public role; their sphere was private rather than public, and their religious self-expression was likely to be in private devotion. The female realm was the home – the place of direct and intimate relations among human beings, the place where children were born, fed and taught the mother tongue, the place of nourishment and sleep, where bodies met bodies for comfort, affection, procreation. Medieval laypeople were accustomed to think of their favourite saints as sharing this intimate space; thus Julian writes of Saint John of Beverley, ‘our Lord showed him very clearly to encourage us by his familiarity [homlyhed], and he reminded me that he is a very near neighbour and we know him well’ (). But Julian goes further; as she sees it, even God accommodates himself to the domestic sphere, the home in which he visited her in 1373. In the earlier chapters of LT she repeatedly stresses God’s ‘homeliness’ with us, homely retaining the full emotional resonance of home itself, including friendliness, familiarity, intimacy, without the pejorative associations it has in American English. God is a great lord, ‘holy and awe-inspiring’ (), infinitely superior to his creatures, but he possesses the lordly quality of courtesy, and shows his courtesy to human beings precisely in his homelyhede towards them (see especially LT ). As Julian perceives him, he is ‘everything that we find good and comforting’ (), so familiar and accessible that we must be reminded not to forget the respect that medieval courtesy demanded from inferior to superior: ‘But be careful not to take this friendliness [homelyhede] too casually, so that we neglect courtesy; for our Lord himself is supreme friendliness, and he is as courteous as he is friendly; for he is truly courteous’ ().
The images Julian uses to describe the supernatural phenomena of her showings often belong to the same sphere of the domestic and familiar, appropriate to her as a woman and to the God who accommodates himself to that sphere. When she sees Christ’s blood dripping from beneath his crown of thorns, she compares the drops to pills, to herring scales and to raindrops falling from the eaves of a house (). (Herring from the North Sea would have been available in Norwich market-place, and any housewife would have found their scales clinging to her kitchen.) As Christ dies on the cross, his skin resembles ‘a sagging cloth’, and then in the cold wind that she imagines accompanying the crucifixion (a familiar feature, this, of the dry, chilly East Anglian climate) she sees it as ‘hung in the air, as a cloth is hung to dry’, until eventually it is ‘like a dry board when it has been scorched’ (). Similarly, the ‘little thing’ that she is told ‘is all that is made’ is described as ‘the size of a hazel-nut in the palm of my hand’ (). The Devil too is perceived in domestic similes; when Julian first sees his face, ‘The colour was red like newly fired tiles, with black spots on it like black freckles, fouler than the tiles themselves’ and ‘His hair was as red as rust’ (). But the homeliness of Julian’s revelations is not a matter of cosiness, reducing the divine and the diabolic to what can be easily understood and controlled. The medieval home was the place of birth and death, and the scene of an unending struggle against squalor and confusion;26 women’s tasks of feeding, cleansing and comforting demanded incessant labour and courage, demands from which men were shielded by the supposedly larger responsibilities of the public world. If God relinquished his transcendence to take on human flesh, it was not to step boldly on to the cross as a liberating warrior but to become a cloth hung up to dry, to undergo the ‘feminine’ squalor of blood and water, herring scales and rain; and one effect of Julian’s writing is to confront the hidden but inescapable horrors of the body and the home. They are epitomized in her vision – a housewife’s nightmare – of an immovable ugliness stinking and swelling uncontrollably: ‘I saw a body lying on the earth, a body which looked dismal and ugly, without shape or form as if it were a swollen and heaving mass of stinking mire’ ().
Christ as Mother
The element in Julian’s work that now seems most strikingly feminine is her insistence that God is not only our father but our mother. In family roles as conceived in medieval culture, the father is associated with authority, punishment and fear, the mother with kindness, gentleness, mercy, protectiveness, and with nourishing and clothing.27 ‘It is fitting that God’s lordship and fatherhood should be feared’, Julian writes, and from that fear we take refuge ‘like a child upon its mother’s bosom’ (). Medieval people felt less difficulty than we may in associating God with stern punishment; but in the later Middle Ages an increasing wish to find an element of motherly love in a religion dominated by maleness was one factor responsible for the rise of devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Julian places Mary in this role in a way entirely normal in her time – ‘our Lady is our mother in whom we are all enclosed and we are born from her in Christ; for she who is mother of our Saviour is mother of all who will be saved in our Saviour’ – but she adds, more unusually, ‘And our Saviour is our true mother in whom we are eternally born and by whom we shall always be enclosed’ ().
The idea that God is our mother, absent from ST, is first mentioned briefly at the beginning of LT . It returns in in the words just quoted, seeming to come as a resolution to theological complexities in which Julian has become hopelessly entangled. It is developed most fully in the following six chapters. Julian begins by associating God’s motherhood especially with Christ, the second person of the Trinity, identified with divine wisdom, which was traditionally personified as female (Sapientia): ‘God all wisdom is our mother by nature’ and ‘the great power of the Trinity is our father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our lord’ (). She then focuses on two less abstract aspects of motherhood, creation and nourishment. God gave birth to humanity, but he also became human himself, ‘And so Jesus is our true mother by nature, at our first creation, and he is our true mother in grace by taking on our created nature’ (). But the agony of the crucifixion was also an act of giving birth, by which human beings, born of their human mothers to pain and death, were reborn through Christ’s ‘pangs and … sufferings’ () to the possibility of heavenly bliss. And the body that died in its birth-pangs on the cross remains a source of generous maternal nourishment for humanity: ‘So next he had to feed us, for a mother’s dear love has made him our debtor. The mother can give her child her milk to suck, but our dear mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and he does so most generously and most tenderly with the holy sacrament which is the precious food of life itself.’ The consecrated host, truly God’s body in Catholic doctrine, is imagined as life-giving food; and the parallel between mother’s milk and Christ’s blood is no literary conceit but a reflection of medieval scientific understanding that milk is reprocessed blood.28 The embodiment that associates God-become-man with femaleness makes Christ homely and motherly in the most literal way, transforming violation into nourishment, the wound into a breast: ‘The mother can lay the child tenderly to her breast, but our tender mother Jesus, he can familiarly [homley] lead us into his blessed breast through his sweet open side’ (). And God’s dealings with humanity in its daily sinfulness are no less motherly, calling up intensely homely images of a child frightened, dirty and ashamed, turning to mother for comfort:
But often when our falling and our wretched sin is shown to us, we are so terrified and so very ashamed that we hardly know where to put ourselves. But then our kind Mother does not want us to run from him, there is nothing he wants less. But he wants us to behave like a child; for when it is hurt or frightened it runs to its mother for help as fast as it can; and he wants us to do the same, like a humble child, saying, ‘My kind Mother, my gracious Mother, my dearest Mother, take pity on me. I have made myself dirty and unlike you and I neither may nor can remedy this without your special help and grace.’ ()
Julian’s teachings on the motherhood of God reflect the experience of a woman for whom ‘mother’ was a ‘fair, lovely word’ (). Her own mother was present at her sick-bed in ST; omitted from LT, she is replaced by Christ as mother. But these teachings, strongly felt and intricately developed, to an extent unexpected in a medieval writer, were not original with Julian; they have precedents in writings by men. As early as Isaiah, God was presented as mother of his chosen people, asking, ‘Can a woman forget her infant, so as not to have pity on the son of her womb? And if she should forget, yet will not I forget thee’ (49:15). And in the New Testament Jesus rebukes Jerusalem for its callousness by contrast with his own motherly concern: ‘How often would I have gathered together thy children, as the hen doth gather her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldest not?’ (Matthew 23:37). In these texts that Julian would have known, God is mother only by analogy; there are also medieval writers who wrote directly of God’s motherhood, and whose work she might or might not have encountered. One of the originators of the theology underpinning the affective, Christocentric devotion of the later Middle Ages was Saint Anselm of Canterbury. He wrote prayers as well as theology, and in a Prayer to Saint Paul, sent to Countess Mathilda of Tuscany in the late eleventh century, he begins from the image in Matthew of Jesus as a hen protecting her young:
And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother?
Are you not the mother who, like a hen,
gathers her chickens under her wings?
Truly, Lord, you are a mother;
for both they who are in labour
and they who are brought forth are accepted by you.
You have died more than they, that they may labour to bear.
It is by your death that they have been born,
for if you had not been in labour,
you could not have borne death;
and if you had not died, you would not have brought forth.29
This is only one instance among various medieval treatments of God as mother noted by modern scholars.
Julian then was not eccentric or unorthodox in exploring this theme; what is remarkable is the intensity of her treatment, and the theological implications developed from it. It must be stressed that, though she did not write in Latin or employ the logical and analytic methods of scholasticism, Julian was a theologian; her work has been described as ‘the most remarkable theological achievement of the English late Middle Ages’.30 Vernacular devotional writers were rarely original theologians – the works of the most widely read of all such writers in English, Richard Rolle, have little doctrinal content of their own31 – and that a medieval woman should mature ‘from a visionary into a theologian’ is truly extraordinary. What specially drove Julian towards theology seems to have been her difficulty in seeing the ‘fatherly’ side of God, in the medieval sense of anger and punishment. Belief in hell and purgatory, the manifestations of divine punitiveness, was required by Catholicism, and she insists that she ‘firmly believed that hell and purgatory have the purpose taught by Holy Church’. She wished for ‘a complete vision of hell and purgatory’, yet found that what her showings revealed was ‘of goodness, and there was little mention of evil’. Her vision of the Passion itself was affected by this absence of evil, for she saw Christ’s pain and his friends’ sorrow, but nothing of those who caused his pain. The ‘Jews who did him to death’ (), usually prominent in medieval pictures and plays of the Passion, are conspicuously absent from Julian’s showing. If Christ is our mother and his pains those of a woman in childbed, they are in a sense natural and even healthy, and emphasis on the cruelty and wickedness of those who caused them is unnecessary and even misleading. Similarly, if the Passion involves a spiritual feeding of humanity from Christ’s own body, we need think only of ‘his sweet open side’ and not of any human malice that tore it open.
In God’s showings to Julian of his own nature, fatherly anger played no part; this she repeatedly stresses. According to the Church’s teaching she must acknowledge herself a sinner and must recognize ‘that sinners deserve blame and anger one day; and I could see no blame and anger in God’ (). Not only is she unable to see blame and anger in God, she sees that ‘God is the goodness that cannot be angry, for he is nothing but goodness’ (). Moreover, our very existence proves that God cannot be angry: ‘it seems to me that if God could be even slightly angry we could never have any life or place or being’. Anger exists, but only on man’s part; God forgives us, but in regard to himself he cannot forgive, for he cannot be angry – ‘it would be an impossibility’ (). The implications of this impossibility are far-reaching, leading Julian to an apparent impasse: ‘My good Lord, I see that you are truth itself and I know for certain that we sin grievously every day and deserve to be bitterly blamed; and I can neither give up the knowledge of this truth, nor can I see that you show us any kind of blame. How can this be?’ (). The path is blocked, and Julian can only trust to God’s assurance that ‘you shall see for yourself that all manner of things shall be well’ (). She interprets this promise as entailing that, at the Day of Judgement, beyond present human understanding, God will perform a ‘great deed’ to reconcile his motherly love with the unquestionable fact of human sin:
… there is a deed which the Holy Trinity shall do on the last day, and when that deed shall be done and how it shall be done is unknown to all creatures under Christ, and shall be until it has been done … This is the great deed ordained by our Lord God from eternity, treasured up and hidden in his blessed breast, only known to himself, and by this deed he shall make all things well; for just as the Holy Trinity made all things from nothing, so the Holy Trinity shall make all well that is not well. ()
Just as God made everything at the beginning of the world, like a mother giving birth to a child, so that deed will be matched by another equally motherly deed at the end of the world: we do not know what it will be, but it will ‘make all well that is not well’. It is for that comfort, that making well or making better, that children have historically turned to their mothers rather than their fathers.
Julian repeatedly affirms her acceptance of the Church’s teachings, and by leaving the nature of the great deed mysterious she avoids head-on conflict with orthodoxy. Nevertheless, a God who cannot be angry without self-contradiction, and who will ultimately make all well, surely leaves no place for damnation; Julian is troubled by this, yet remains unshaken in her conviction of what God has directly revealed to her. She acknowledges the Church’s teaching that ‘many shall be damned’, including the fallen angels, the heathen and Christians who die as unrepentant sinners.
Holy Church teaches me to believe that all these shall be condemned everlastingly to hell. And given all this, I thought it impossible that all manner of things should be well, as our Lord revealed at this time. And I received no other answer in showing from our Lord God but this: ‘What is impossible to you is not impossible to me. I shall keep my word in all things and I shall make all things well.’ ()
Despite the statement in 1 Timothy 2:4 that God ‘will have all men to be saved’, belief that all would be saved at the Last Judgement was a heresy, known as universalism; but Julian clearly entertains it as a possibility. In this she was not alone in her time. Earlier, it had been held that most Christians and certainly all non-Christians would be damned, but by the fourteenth century opinion was shifting. There was discussion of the possibility that virtuous pagans might be saved, and many felt, with the fourteenth-century devotional writer Walter Hilton, that the salvific power of Christ’s sacrifice must match its greatness: ‘It had been a little purchase to Him to have come from so far to so near, and from so high to so low, for so few souls. Nay, His mercy is spread larger than so.’32 In Piers Plowman, too, when Langland sees Jesus harrowing Hell, he hears him promise mercy to his human brothers despite the orthodox teaching that ‘no evil shall go unpunished’, and he identifies that promise with Saint Paul’s ‘secret words which it is not given to man to utter’.33 Langland’s vision throughout his poem is strongly and often harshly masculine, with no suggestion of God’s motherhood, but he and Julian are at one in their vision of a divine mercy that will encompass all humanity.
It has been said of writing by medieval women that ‘There is, more often than in men’s writing, a lack of apriorism, of predetermined postures: again and again we encounter attempts to cope with human problems in their singularity – not imposing rules or categories from without, but seeking solutions that are apt and true existentially.’34 To return to our earlier point: if such a generalization holds good, it is less as a consequence of unchanging truths about the sexes than because it reflects the roles and powers allotted them in actual historical societies. Men on the whole have been in a position to impose ‘rules or categories from without’, and women have not; but women’s powerlessness could enable them to recognize what was omitted or obscured by the systematic official teachings of their time. Even a woman’s silence can be eloquent; and, as final aspects of Julian as a woman writer, we note her complete silence about Eve’s alleged responsibility for Adam’s sin (there is no figure corresponding to Eve in the parable of the lord and servant in LT ), and her equally complete silence about chastity and celibacy,35 the distorting obsessions of so many of the Church’s male teachers from Saint Paul and Saint Augustine onwards.
The Parable of the Lord and the Servant
Julian’s vision of a God whose mercy is universal is supported by her conception of the human soul as having two aspects, which she calls substance and sensualyté, here generally translated as ‘essential being’ and ‘sensory being’ or as higher nature and lower nature. As she explains in , ‘… in every soul that shall be saved there is a godly will which never consented to sin and never shall; just as there is an animal will in our lower nature which can have no good impulses, there is a godly will in our higher nature which is so good that it can never will evil but only good …’ She begins by distinguishing between two kinds of judgement corresponding to these aspects of the soul: human beings judge in terms of the sensualyté, and thus judge severely, but ‘God judges us in terms of our natural essence, which is always preserved unchanged in him, whole and safe for ever’ (). God’s judgement expresses justice, but (contrary to normal medieval assumptions) is not harsher but less harsh than men’s judgements, because human beings see only the ‘animal will’ corrupted by the Fall, while God sees the ‘godly will’ that reflects his own purity and remains uncorrupt. True, that ‘godly will’ exists only ‘in every soul that shall be saved’; but Julian cannot help suspecting that this may mean all souls.
Her most penetrating insight into this mystery of salvation comes in the parable of the lord and the servant, expounded in LT , by far the longest chapter she wrote and ‘the heart of the entire work’.36 Just as the idea of God’s motherhood emerges in as the solution to theological difficulties that seemed insoluble through logical argument, so earlier this parable had emerged to resolve the fundamental discrepancy between human judgement as conveyed by the Church’s teachings and divine judgement as revealed in her showings: ‘So this was what I longed for: that through him I might see how what is taught in this matter by the judgement of Holy Church is true in the sight of God, and how it befits me to know it truly; so that both judgements might be preserved to the glory of God and in the right way for me. And the only answer I had to this was a wonderful parable of a lord and a servant …’ (). This parable (example, or exemplary story) is a showing of a different kind from the others. First Julian recounts it as it was originally shown her, ‘spiritually in bodily likeness’ (), but already accompanied by some degree of understanding beyond what could be represented in bodily form. A lord is sitting peacefully and a servant stands by, ready to do his commands. The lord, whose looks convey his love for the servant, sends him on an errand, and the servant sets off in haste to do the lord’s will; but in his very eagerness he falls into a slough, is injured and laments that he cannot help himself or look towards the lord, even though still near him. Absorbed though the servant is in his misery, the lord does not blame him, ‘for his good will and his great longing were the only cause of his fall’; indeed he promises to reward him for his sufferings, beyond what he would have received if he had not fallen. There ‘the showing of the parable vanished’, and Julian is left to ponder its meaning.
At first she does not see the story’s point, but God encourages her to ‘read’ it closely as an allegory about sin, redemption and salvation. It resembles a New Testament parable, but one originally delivered in pictures rather than words; and Julian comes to see that it deserves and rewards minute decoding of the kind applied to Scriptural parables by medieval scholars. Like Jesus’ parables of the Kingdom, it offers a glimpse of God’s view of reality, translated into human terms, but terms that initially seem utterly strange to human readers, and that challenge all their interpretative powers. It then turns out to convey a mysterious truth, compatible perhaps with theological orthodoxy, but lying beyond the scope of normal theological discourse.
Reflection on the story leads to problems. Accustomed like most medieval people to symbolic narratives of the kind found in sermons and fables, Julian recognizes that the servant who falls is likely to stand for Adam; yet in him she sees ‘many different properties which could in no way be attributed just to Adam’. The only solution is to interpret more closely, ‘to pay attention’, as God later instructed her, ‘to all the properties and conditions of what you were shown in the parable, though they may seem mysterious and insignificant in your eyes’. The pictorial detail exists not just to provide verisimilitude or incite emotional response, but to carry meaning that will yield itself up only to persistent rumination. So the interpretation begins, as Julian retells the story bit by bit, now summoning up every detail to see what she can make of it. The lord must be God, and the servant Adam, yet Adam not as an individual but as a representative human being, ‘for in the sight of God, all men are one’. The fuller realization of the lord’s and servant’s appearance and clothing, and of the setting in which she sees them, is often reminiscent of late-medieval manuscript illumination, or of panel painting of the kind that decorated many East Anglian churches. Yet some details go beyond the bounds of pictorial representation, as when Julian sees within the lord ‘a great refuge, long and wide and all full of endless heavens’.
As in other late-medieval religious art,37 elements contributing to realism are also rich in symbolic meaning, and this Julian proceeds to expound as it has come to her over the years. She explains that, though God the Father is not really a man, ‘he shows himself in a familiar way [homley], like a man’, and is so represented in her vision. God might be expected to appear in heavenly bliss or in the human soul that he created as his dwelling, so the setting on barren earth also has further meaning:
… he made man’s soul to be his own city and his dwelling-place, the most pleasing to him of all his works; and once man had fallen into sorrow and pain he was not fit to serve that noble purpose, and therefore our kind Father would prepare no other place for himself but sit upon the earth waiting for mankind, who is mixed with earth, until the time when, through his grace, his beloved Son had bought back his city and restored its noble beauty with his hard labour.
Now the servant is more exactly described. Outwardly he resembles a labourer prepared for work, wearing a garment which is white but scanty, sweat-stained and ragged. As often, a parallel from Piers Plowman suggests itself: the figure of Haukyn in B XIII–XIV, the representative of the active life of work in the world, with his coat soiled with all the sins. (Haukyn is a kind of degraded version of Piers, and Piers, the ideal labourer, is ultimately identified with Christ’s Humanity.) But here too Julian finds contradiction, for outwardly the servant seems to have been ‘a labourer continuously for a long time’, yet her ‘inward sight’ tells her that he is ‘newly beginning to labour, a servant who had never been sent out before’. More narrative detail emerges: the servant has been sent to find a treasure in the earth. Perhaps we should recall Matthew 13:44 – ‘The kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hidden in a field’ – but this treasure is food, ‘sweet and pleasing to the lord’. The servant labours as a gardener (and Julian conveys a keen sense of the hard bodily labour involved in gardening), so as to get food for his lord, which he alone can provide. Meanings flicker into life and accumulate in bewildering profusion, not hierarchically layered as in orthodox Scriptural exegesis but coexisting regardless of logic: if the servant is a gardener, we cannot help thinking of Adam both in the garden before the Fall and in the life of labour to which he was condemned afterwards. And now, in the most startling insight of the whole vision, Julian grasps that the servant is Christ as well as Adam, and that this double identity underlies the narrative contradictions. The idea that Christ was the second Adam, sent to make good the sin inherited from the first, was familiar in medieval thought, but this vision of complete identity goes beyond such parallelism. A further, crucial stage of interpretation follows: in a passage of exceptional beauty, Julian sees that the Fall of Adam and the Incarnation of Christ are the same event.
When Adam fell, God’s son fell; because of the true union made in heaven, God’s son could not leave Adam, for by Adam I understand all men. Adam fell from life to death into the valley of this wretched world, and after that into Hell. God’s son fell with Adam into the valley of the Virgin’s womb (and she was the fairest daughter of Adam), in order to free Adam from guilt in heaven and in earth; and with his great power he fetched him out of hell.
This insight abolishes temporal extension and historical difference, and in doing so offers a glimpse of what Julian has desired – to see reality as God sees it. The orthodox solution to the problem of predestination and free will was that for God, who exists in eternity, past and future coexist in an eternal present to which the ‘present of this brief and fleeting moment’ is the nearest human equivalent.38 In the parable Julian apprehends this divine vision of reality not as theory but as experience. It ends with the lord and the servant reigning together in heaven as Father and Son, the Son crowned with mankind; God’s triumph is also, through Jesus, the triumph of humanity. At the very centre of Julian’s vision is a God inseparable from man and woman: transcendent in some sense, yes, but unable to set aside the bodily kinship he has chosen with his creatures.
NOTES
1 Julian’s work, like many medieval English writings, lacks a title; this title has been given to it by modern editors and translators, and we retain it for its familiarity.
2 Unless prefaced by ‘ST’, references in the Introduction are to LT.
3 The adaptation was that of Grace Warrack. Julian’s most famous reader has perhaps been T. S. Eliot, who quotes her in ‘Little Gidding’ (1942); he had read her in a seventeenth-century adaptation by Serenus de Cressy. (See Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets, London, 1978, p. 71, n. 84.)
4 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; quotations from p. 111.
5 Medieval Art in East Anglia 1300–1520, ed. P. Lasko and N. J. Morgan (Norwich, 1973), p. 6.
6 E.g. Denise N. Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton, 1994), p. 34; the opposing case is persuasively made by Sr Benedicta (Ward), ‘Julian the Solitary’, in Julian Reconsidered, ed. Kenneth Leech and Sr Benedicta (Oxford, 1988), pp. 10–31.
7 See Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses, trans. Hugh White (London, 1993).
8 Norman P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich 1370–1532 (Toronto, 1984), p. 58.
9 Elizabeth Robertson, Early English Devotional Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville, 1990), p. 23.
10 The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. B. A. Windeatt (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 77. For the complete passage, see .
11 As one scholar puts it, ‘The ministry of an anchoress could be compared in some respects with that of a modern psychotherapist or professional counsellor’ (Grace M. Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian, London, 1987, p. 47).
12 For further details see the ‘Translator’s Note’.
13 Nicholas Watson, ‘The composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, Speculum, 68 (1993), 637–83.
14 Lines 39–41 (my translation).
15 Sermons on the Song of Songs 20, in The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, vol. 2, trans. Kilian Walsh (Spencer, Mass., 1971), p. 152.
16 Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1992), p. 186.
17 Thus when she is gazing at Christ’s suffering body and her reason urges her, ‘Look up to his Father in heaven’, she rejects the temptation of transcendence and tells Christ, ‘No, I cannot, for you are my heaven’ (LT ; cf. ST ).
18 Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, p. 12.
19 Riddy, ‘ “Women talking” ’, p. 114.
20 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 196, referring to Elizabeth Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (Oxford, 1986), pp. 28–32, and Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982).
21 Throughout this volume, the Bible is quoted in the Douai version, translated from the Latin Vulgate read in the Middle Ages. The titles of some books and the numbering of the Psalms differ from those in Protestant Bibles.
22 Quoted in Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, eds., A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich (Toronto, 1978), 2 vols., p. 151.
23 Lynn Staley Johnson, ‘The trope of the scribe and the question of literary authority in the works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe’, Speculum, 66 (1991), 820–38; quotation from p. 828.
24 Cf. Nicholas Watson, ‘ “Yf wommen be double naturelly”: remaking “woman” in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, Exemplaria, 8 (1996), 1–34.
25 Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 204.
26 Emphasized in earlier devotional writings such as the anonymous Holy Maidenhood, which describes how a wife ‘hears her child screaming, sees the cat at the flitch and the dog at the hide, her loaf burning on the hearth and her calf sucking, the pot boiling over into the fire – and her husband is complaining’ (in Medieval English Prose for Women, ed. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Oxford, 1990, p. 35).
27 Cf. Julian’s statement that God is ‘our clothing, wrapping us for love, embracing and enclosing us for tender love’ ().
28 See Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982), p. 132.
29 Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm, trans. Benedicta Ward (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 153.
30 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven, 1992), p. 314.
31 See Nicholas Watson, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 54–5.
32 The Scale of Perfection, ed. Evelyn Underhill (London, 1923), II:10, p. 256. In the next sentence, however, Hilton goes on to warn against the view that ‘there shall no soul be damned’.
33 The Vision of Piers Plowman, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London, 1978), B-text, XVIII 390–6, quoting 2 Corinthians 12:4.
34 Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1984), p. x.
35 Cf. Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, p. 157.
36 Watson, ‘The composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, p. 638.
37 See Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), vol. 1, ch. 5.
38 So put by Boethius, in Book V, prose 6, of his Consolation of Philosophy, trans. S. J. Tester, Loeb Classical Library (London, 1918), p. 425. See also Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus II, qu. 2, n. 2.