A brief history of Revelations of Divine Love
This is Julian’s time. Her words are travelling around the world in the blink of an eye (or the click of a mouse) as interested people from every corner of the globe and every walk of life find solace in her fourteenth-century phrases. For nearly six centuries she had been sidelined, ignored and even vilified by the traditional, all-powerful, male-dominated Church. As male scribes in male universities or monasteries copied the works of the Church Fathers, transforming their medieval collections of religious texts via Protestant and Enlightenment literature, Julian’s text all but disappeared. But times have changed, and now the words of an intellectually and spiritually sophisticated woman, writing in English about her personal visions, can find a forum.
Fortunately for both us and Julian, her text has found a way through the centuries – surviving civil wars, bloody revolutions and the deliberate destruction of Catholic texts. It remained in just a handful of later manuscripts, until finally in the twentieth century when her work was copied, printed and disseminated to a wider audience. But how did her text survive when it was precisely the sort of Catholic mysticism that was targeted by centuries of Protestants, denounced as witchcraft by many? Somehow the text left Julian’s cell. This sounds like a basic point, but it is worth considering. While Revelations of Divine Love was not a clearly heretical text, some of its main themes sailed close to the wind. Julian’s insistence on mercy and an all-loving God who recognizes no sin could be seen as universalism, while her theology is not founded on years of scholarship but rather the ruminations of a ‘simple creature’. With the burning of heretics taking place virtually outside her cell, she would have been acutely conscious of the need to keep her ideas quietly to herself.
That she wrote them down at all may seem surprising. This was a time of suspicion, when communities were encouraged to look inwards and weed out the stain of heresy. She not only wrote her ideas down once, in the Short Text, but then appears to have returned to her work time and again over the course of many years, refining her thoughts and continually ruminating on her visions. Julian would not have seen her writing as an act of pride or self-aggrandizement. Instead, she seems to be leaving room in her text for others to take it further, and perhaps experience that seventeenth vision that might make sense of hers finally. She produced an unfinished work, where she knew there was more she could explore and expound. But she left the final revelation, number seventeen, to her readers.
It seems unlikely that Julian would have allowed her text out of her cell during her lifetime. Nothing in her Revelations suggests she was eager for recognition, so we must speculate on how it reached a wider audience. One possibility is that she gave a copy to a visitor to her cell, perhaps even Margery Kempe, who would have been a sympathetic recipient and would have influential friends in Norfolk who could copy and distribute it. In a time of religious confusion, handling mystical texts would have been a dangerous exercise, especially if they were not verified by a male priest or theologian. Whoever handled Julian’s manuscript, he or she managed to take it somewhere safe (possibly Carrow Abbey), where it was copied and preserved. Julian’s own reputation lived on long after her death, with new anchoresses taking her name and inhabiting her cell. She was clearly well respected during her life, so there is a likelihood that her text was also treated with respect after her death.
But the climate changed radically as the Protestant Reformation approached. In 1534, just a century after Julian’s death, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell passed the Act of Supremacy, which redesigned the English Church and fractured it from Roman Catholic Europe. Books were attacked alongside images and religious buildings, leaving a deep scar on the nation’s cultural heritage. The dissolution of the monasteries, far from a chaotic riotous attack on these establishments, was largely thought out and planned. Buildings were deconstructed carefully, and stone reused to fashion new stately homes. The collections of great establishments like Glastonbury, Walsingham and the Benedictine Library in Norwich were plundered for ‘useful’ texts, which would make their way into private collections, while anything seen as potentially heretical would be burned. Catholicism was by no means wiped out overnight, and many devout families created strongholds to protect relics, artworks and books. Certain families, such as the Earls of Arundel, managed to maintain their Catholic status throughout, despite the efforts of Protestant rulers like Edward VI and Elizabeth I. However, the preservation of mystical texts was potentially very dangerous, and those who owned a copy of Julian’s Revelations could easily have found themselves the subject of a heresy trial.
As Catholic families had priest holes and secret masses, so they preserved texts such as Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love. It may be thanks to the family of Thomas More, famous Catholic martyr and advisor to Henry VIII, that the text survives at all. His great-great-granddaughter, Gertrude More, was one of nine young, brave, adventurous women (she was 17 and the oldest in the group was 23) who established a Benedictine order of nuns, which has since become based at Stanbrook Abbey in Yorkshire. Along with the chosen abbess, Catherine Gascoigne, these young English girls chose to flee the oppression of Catholics in England, and founded a house in Cambrai, France. Gertrude was not an easy character, and she had many moments when she doubted what she and her fellow nuns were doing. She died very young, at just 27 years old, of smallpox, but her community lived on. The community was one of resistance and intellectual freedom, and in Cambrai it grew while it remained hidden from view.
What is interesting about Gertrude More and her fellow nuns is that when they went to France they clearly took a copy of Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love with them. It is impossible to know how they got this, but we can speculate that it was passed from hand to hand by Catholic sympathizers, finding itself eventually in those of Thomas More’s descendant. The nine young women who founded the order at Cambrai were in search of intellectual freedom; indeed, it was said that Gertrude was such a beauty that she would be married off as soon as she came of age. In an act she saw as divine intervention, she was struck with a hideous disease that disfigured her face, so no man wanted to marry her. But we should see these women as early intellectual pioneers. Restricted by a male-dominated establishment, their adventure to France would see them managing property, educating new English nuns and protecting, copying and distributing texts that resonated with them on a deep spiritual level. For a young woman hoping to study, read, engage with a sisterhood of like-minded women, the opportunity open to the Cambrai nuns was clear. And Julian’s text accompanied them on their travels.
A note on the manuscripts
We no longer have the original manuscript Julian wrote, or even a copy that is roughly contemporary. Three complete copies of the Long Text of Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love survive. Two are in the British Library, and one is in Paris, a reminder that Julian’s text travelled with English nuns to France. The two that form the basis of most modern translations are MS Sloane 2499 (S1), and Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds Anglais No. 40 (P). There is another early complete manuscript, MS Sloane 3705 (S2), but this is a late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century modernization and, although more beautifully copied, is not as accurate for translation.
Of the two most reliable copies of the Long Text, the Paris manuscript, is by far the more elegantly written and the easiest to decipher. It contains some passages not found in S1, in particular a revealing account of the soul that contains scatological imagery, describing the necessity of excretion.1 However, the Paris manuscript displays a greater amount of editorial tinkering, in that certain words are modernized and problematic passages are ‘tidied up’ and brought into line with more orthodox seventeenth-century approaches. MS Sloane 2499 is perhaps the closer to Julian’s original text, inasmuch as it is clearly written in an East Anglian dialect. It is copied in a rather rushed hand, and is difficult to decipher given that the ink has bitten through the paper. It is most likely a copy made by the English Benedictine nuns at their convent in Cambrai, from a now lost medieval manuscript. While it is still up to two hundred years later than Julian’s text, it appears to preserve aspects of her dialect and expression that are excised from the Paris manuscript.
MS Sloane 2499 seems most likely to be a close copy of an original or near-contemporary manuscript of Julian’s text, one that found itself under the protection of the English nuns in Cambrai. The Cambrai nuns continued to copy Julian’s Revelations, producing numerous manuscripts with extracts of her book copied out alongside other mystical texts. The nuns, now based at Stanbrook Abbey in Yorkshire, have recently had a number of handwritten manuscripts returned to them that include parts of Revelations, revealing that their sisters in France valued the text deeply and wanted to continue its transmission.
It is clear that the convent at Cambrai was protecting Julian’s text, because in 1670 the nun’s chaplain, Serenus de Crecy, published the first printed version of the text, based on the nuns’ handwritten copies of an earlier manuscript. He tinkers with the text, playing down some of the more controversial elements, and yet his version was still met with contempt by Protestant English readers. The book was vilified, receiving harsh reviews, and people were encouraged not to read the ‘poisonous’ outpourings of Julian’s ‘distempered brain’. Crecy had made a step forward, however, and the nuns of Cambrai remained fiercely protective of Julian’s text.
The reason the sisters of the English Benedictines in France eventually lost their precious copies of Julian lies in another cataclysmic historic event: the French Revolution. As religious tensions grew in France, the leaders of the Benedictine order demanded that the nuns of Cambrai hand over their books for inspection, to see whether there was any stain of heresy in their library. Remarkably, the nuns refused, claiming they would rather see the dissolution of their convent than hand over their books to their male monastic superiors. They must have known texts like Julian’s would have been destroyed, so they entered into a stalemate with the order’s superiors, refusing to hand over their books.
But the nuns could not resist the scrutiny of the Revolutionary forces, when finally in 1789 they entered their monastery and collected their holdings. Many think of the French Revolution as an attack on the wealthy members of society and the royal house of France. What few realize is that it also attacked monastic communities and the Church with vehemence and violence. From their small community in Cambrai, the English nuns and guardians of Julian’s texts were aware their security was under threat. A catalogue of the nuns’ holdings was compiled by revolutionary troops, and it still survives in the Municipal Library at Cambrai. It lists a fascinating, diverse and huge collection of over a thousand handwritten manuscripts, and even more printed books, and illustrates how learned the English nuns in Cambrai had become. There are fifteen printed copies of Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love mentioned, but sadly it seems that the manuscript originally brought from England by the nuns was not listed by the revolutionaries. Everything else was taken, the nuns were given just fifteen minutes to take the possessions they needed, and they were all imprisoned to await their execution at the guillotine.
The English Benedictine nuns from Cambrai shared a cell with sixteen Carmelite nuns. On 17 July 1794 the Carmelite nuns were led to the guillotine and executed, while the English nuns remained in their cell, awaiting the same fate. Fortunately the pioneer of the executions, Maximilien Robespierre, was killed shortly after the Carmelite nuns, so the English Benedictines never made it to the guillotine. Instead, they took the lay clothes of the dead Carmelite nuns, and escaped to England, where they went on to found the convent at Stanbrook. The Abbey still preserves the clothes of the Carmelite martyrs as a relic. With the English nuns and their convent in Cambrai went all possibility of tracing connections to the original manuscript of Julian’s Revelations.
Yet all is not lost, and miraculous discoveries continually come to light. Somewhere in a French municipal library, or in the collections of a stately home, there may be documents relating to enigmatic Julian. Perhaps, better still, there may be another manuscript, closer to Julian’s own words, that could bring us greater insights into this tantalizingly self-effacing woman. Her original manuscript ended up somewhere, and while the chaos of revolution may have scattered it, there may be an old vellum book hiding in a collection somewhere that can get us even closer to Julian’s original words, thoughts and ideas.
Modern translations
Based on Serenus de Crecy’s version of the text, in 1877 Henry Collins brought the manuscript to a modern audience, with his printed version. But it was Grace Warrack’s 1901 account, with its modernized English and sympathetic treatment of Julian’s text, that really made Revelations of Divine Love popular. Her text has been reprinted many times, and is an achievement akin to Julian’s own considering the circumstances in which it was produced. Out of the suffragette movement, and the increasing intellectual and social liberties women were securing by the turn of the twentieth century, Julian’s text could finally emerge.
Grace was brought up in a strict Scottish Presbyterian household, where Catholic mystical texts such as Julian’s were precisely the sort of works that were not permitted. It is difficult to know what first drew her to seek out this obscure work, listed in the Sloane Collection under ‘Witchcraft: Revelations to one who could not read a letter, 1373’. Why did she attempt translating it from Middle English, a language she displayed no previous knowledge of, into emotional and moving modern English? To translate Julian’s East Anglian fourteenth-century dialect well, and to create the sort of potent prose translation that Grace managed, is no mean feat. She must have been exposed to some medieval literature before she embarked on this project, perhaps reading Chaucer at school. She was certainly no medievalist, yet she created a clear and emotive version of Julian’s text that really captured the public imagination.
Something prompted Grace to leave Scotland for London (despite a woman’s travelling on her own being seen as socially questionable in the nineteenth century), to spend a month living in an unfamiliar city, tirelessly transcribing a rather tatty manuscript and translating a text that would have been attacked by her family. There is the suggestion that she may have experienced a period of grief with the death of a dear nephew, and perhaps she found solace in an earlier printed copy of Revelations. Yet she displays great spirit and ingenuity in locating MS Sloane 2499 among the British Library’s vast collections, and persuading Methuen to publish her translation. Grace shows how the fortunes of women were changing at the turn of the twentieth century, and what better symbol of this than to produce a printed version of a great fourteenth-century woman’s ideas?
Grace’s translation was hugely popular, and reprinted many times. Thanks to her, Julian’s work has remained in print for over a hundred years, with many new translations, articles and books written about Julian and her text. In an interesting twist, Grace left her handwritten notes to Stanbrook Abbey, the current home of the English Benedictine nuns who probably copied out MS Sloane 2499 in the seventeenth century. Grace was corresponding with the abbess of the convent, and her decision to leave her documents to Stanbrook means that Julian’s text has returned in some way to the nuns who kept her memory and text alive. The handwritten notes Grace made from MS Sloane 2499 were recently revealed to her descendant, John Warrack, a musicologist married to a historian. The rediscovery of these notes shows how much detective work there still is to be done on Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love. It really is a text that keeps on giving.
Conclusion
Why read Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love today? Hers was a voice nearly lost to time, and ‘amplifying subdued voices provides a more complete awareness of medieval history and theology’.2 But more than simply developing our understanding of Julian’s time, this book taps into deeper mystical ideas that have run as a steady current across the millennia. Written at the turn of this millennium, Umberto Eco’s work Baudolino features a female character called Hypatia, apparently descended from the fourth-century female philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria. The character describes how a group of female thinkers have developed an understanding of the divine, which she calls ‘the unique’. To reach the ultimate point of understanding, she explains what has to be done:
You have to create an absolute calm around you. You remain alone, remote from everything we have thought, imagined and felt; you find peace and serenity. Then we will no longer experience wrath or desire, sorrow or happiness. We will have moved out of ourselves, wrapped in absolute solitude and profound calm. We will no longer look at things beautiful and good; we will be beyond goodness itself, beyond the chorus of virtues, like someone entering the sanctum of a church and leaving behind the statues of the gods as his vision is no longer of images, but of God himself.3
This sounds distinctly similar to what Julian achieves. By being walled up in a single room for over twenty years she found serenity, a peaceful place to achieve ‘profound calm’ and go ‘beyond the chorus of virtues’. It is difficult to capture the magnificence of her work in a short introduction. Julian is unlike any other author I have encountered, and the reason her book is becoming increasingly popular now is that her ideas are finally finding a footing within modern scholarship and Western spirituality. Her time is now, and having waited in the wings for centuries, she is ready to be heard.
Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love can obsess readers, captivate them for a lifetime and offer support and solace during times of difficulty. I’ve interviewed people who have said that her book offered the only beacon of light through such dark times as the death of a child, dealing with cancer and fighting in wars. And it seems her work rewards more, the more you return to it. Thomas Merton, the twentieth-century Trappist monk and mystic, describes how his relationship with Julian’s text developed:
Julian is without doubt one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices. She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I grow older, and whereas in the old days I used to be crazy about St John of the Cross, I would not exchange him now for Julian if you gave me the world and the Indies and all the Spanish mystics rolled up in one bundle. I think that Julian of Norwich is with Newman the greatest English theologian.4
Professor Vincent Gillespie describes it as ‘one of the first great masterpieces of English prose … in terms of the sheer beauty of her prose there’s nobody else at that period who I think can really challenge her’,5 while Rowan Williams states, ‘she is blazing a trail, doing something unprecedented’.6 If Chaucer is the father of English poetry, then Julian is the mother of English prose. But what she produced was something beyond beautiful English literature. She crossed the boundaries between theology, philosophy, psychology, art, science, astrology and even metaphysics. Her relevance as a great fourteenth-century brain is staggering, but her role as a woman in this world of male intellectualism is something that also should be celebrated.
Julian had the ability to do something that very few of us possess: to see beyond our current miseries, the pains and problems that obsess us, the politics that surround us and the events that play out during our lifetimes. Her book is ahistorical, in that it passes beyond earthly things. She is quietly confident that, no matter what seemingly important events are playing out on earth, ‘our heavenly mother Jesus cannot allow us that are his children to perish.’
Revelations of Divine Love was written against its own politically, socially and economically unsettled backdrop; every generation struggles to put its own hopes, fears, obsessions and concerns on to a broader canvas. And that is why, like many others, I continually return to Julian’s deceptively simple words, which exist outside time and will always ring true whenever and wherever they are read:
All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.