LIZ HERBERT McAVOY
The curtain against which Wanton Kate’s face was pressing suddenly ceased to yield. There was a face on the other side and the anchoress was kissing her through the white linen cross.1
The above quotation, taken from a 1934 novel by Enid Dinnis, the main character of which is based loosely on the figure of Julian of Norwich, speaks volumes for the ‘industry’ of imaginative projection which Julian has become during the course of the last century or so. The very fact that this now obscure novel reached its sixth imprint in 1934 attests to its contemporary popularity and to a burgeoning fascination with Julian and the anchoritic life which she embraced. Since that time, Julian has become an increasingly familiar figure within both literary and non-literary circles, and both religious and non-religious milieux. Interpreted famously as ‘a woman of our day’,2 and as being of particular comfort to the more worldly woman (such as ‘Wanton Kate’ in Dinnis’ novel), Julian’s spirituality has spanned the centuries since her revelatory experiences of May 1373, which she proceeded to document and rework into two texts over the course of her long life.3 Moreover, these texts appear to speak just as cogently, relevantly and urgently to a modern (and, indeed, postmodern) audience as they must have done to those of her late-medieval contemporaries who had access to them. Julian’s importance as a religious figure, if not a writer, seems to have been constant since the time of her own enclosure as an anchoress in 1393, surviving into the Reformation among the recusant nuns of northern France, enduring well into the Victorian era and reaching its present crescendo during the course of the twentieth century and beyond.
But what is it about the figure of Julian which has brought about such an extraordinary longevity of attraction and interest – even amongst readers who otherwise have little familiarity with the writers of the later Middle Ages? Is it, perhaps, that her writing embodies an almost unique female voice emerging from the conglomeration of male-authored texts which proliferated during the period and continued to dominate into modern times? Or is it that her writing intersected with a particular moment within English literary history which saw an inexorable spread of theological vernacularity and the haemorrhaging of widespread literacy into the laity? Does it merely reflect on the part of increasingly frenetic societies a perennial fascination with the solitary, reclusive vocation upon which Julian embarked mid-way through her life? Or is it the result of a deeply embedded desire on the part of humanity for a comforting universal mother-figure, a perennial archetype who has been defined more recently by Julia Kristeva as ‘the reassuring wrapping … the proverbial mirage … the more or less discreet cult of the Mother’,4 and within which fetishistic desire-cycle the female martyrs, saints and the Virgin herself also play a major part? Conversely, perhaps Julian’s current popularity is merely evidence of a ‘quick-fix’ confessional culture which demands the type of instant pleasure and constant gratification so widely analysed by contemporary cultural theorists. The answer in each case is probably ‘yes – and no’, since Julian of Norwich, as much in her own day as now, seems to evade both definitive categorization and knowing. The more widespread her renown, the more we try to pin her down, the more of an enigma she seems to remain.
The concrete ‘facts’ of Julian’s life are scant: evidence internal to the texts she produced point towards her having been born in 1342–3 but we are unsure as to where that event took place, although her most recent editors, Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, hazard that she grew up in or around Norwich and that she was from a privileged and affluent background.5 Both texts corroborate that she was in her thirty-first year when a dangerous illness overcame her – one that she appears to have longed for in her youth – precipitating a series of sixteen ‘showings’ or visions which gave her a range of mystical insights into God’s love for humankind and the reciprocity of that bond. Internal evidence also corroborates that these visions precipitated an initial written text, which Watson and Jenkins entitle A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman (based on the incipit to the only surviving version of this text in London, British Library MS Additional 37790),6 in which Julian records her remarkable experiences and her initial responses to them. Moreover, these initial responses reveal a tentativeness and anxiety about her sex and gender, the purpose and meaning of her showings and, in particular, what she was supposed to do with them – and how:
Botte God forbede that ye shulde saye or take it so that I am a techere. For I meene nought so, no I mente nevere so. For I am a woman, lewed febille, and freylle. Botte I wate wele, this that I saye I hafe it of the shewinge of him that es soverayne techare. Botte sotherlye charite stirres me to tell yowe it. For I wolde God ware knawen and min evencristene spede, as I wolde be myselfe, to the mare hatinge of sinne and lovinge of God. Botte for I am a woman shulde I therefore leve that I shulde nought telle yowe the goodenes of God, sine that I sawe in that same time that it is his wille that it be knawen? (Vision, 6.35–42)
This defensive apologia, however, with its overly assertive tone and protective rhetorical questioning, was wholly excised by Julian from the later version of her experiences, pointing towards various stages, perhaps even perpetual stages, of revision and reworking as the writer, her confidence and her exegetical abilities matured. In any case, towards the end of A Vision, following what seems to be a false peroration of ‘Amen par charite’ (Vision, 23.31),7 Julian appears to have returned to her conclusion to add a series of questions to be addressed in the redraft which was to become the Long Text, A Revelation of Love: ‘Whate er we’, she demands, ‘Whate is alle in erthe that twines us?’ (Vision, 23.36, 39). More explicitly, perhaps, this added-on section states:
For the bodely sight, I haffe saide as I sawe, als trewlye as I can. And for the wordes fourmed, I hafe saide tham right as oure lorde shewed me thame. And for the gastely sight, I hafe saide somdele, bot I maye never fully telle it. And therefore of this gastely sight I am stirred to say more, as God wille gife me grace.
(Vision, 23.51–5)
Thus, on completion of the first text, Julian seems to have immediately embarked upon a new version (‘I am stirred to say more’) based on new insights and understanding which were clearly advanced by two further visionary insights, one in 1388 and the other in 1393, which she recalls in Chapters 51 and 86 of this new version.8 Both of these secondary visions seem also to have illuminated for her the meaning of the entire series of original visions and the mystical knowledge to which they had rendered her privy; ultimately, Julian was led to conclude that ‘love was [God’s] mening’ (Revelation, 86.14). For Julian, this becomes a universal truism which clarifies the extraordinary complexity of God’s assurance to her during her initial experiences that ‘alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thing shalle be wele’ (Revelation, 27.28–9), especially in the face of the ubiquitous evidence to the contrary which she finds within human sinfulness. This edict, of course, forms the core of the reassuring theology for which, perhaps, Julian is still best known and radiates out to form the primary exegetical structure of both texts.
The setting in which Julian experienced all her visionary encounters, both primary and subsidiary, is, again, indeterminate and the facts tantalizingly few. According to her first account, her mystical experiences began whilst she lay desperately ill and suffering in some kind of room – a ‘chamber’ – which was also populated by a number of other people, including a priest, a child and Julian’s own mother. Whether this priest was Julian’s confessor or another ecclesiastic, whether this child was an acolyte or a family member, whether Julian’s mother was her natural mother or a mother superior, all remain unclear and open to surmise. This indeterminacy has led to intense speculation by both scholars and readers as to whether Julian was a nun or a laywoman at the time of her illness, whether she was unmarried, a widow, or a wife and mother – and the arguments for and against her status as professed religious are cyclical. In the 1970s, for example, her editors, Edmund Colledge and James Walsh presumed upon her having been a nun, stating ‘the most probable [conjecture] (at which she seems herself in several places to hint) is that when young – that is, in her teens – she entered a religious house, and that she was still there after February 1393, when she was in her fiftieth year’.9 Marion Glasscoe, however, editing Julian’s Long Text in 1976, remained unconvinced on this issue, stating ‘there are no grounds for supposing that she was herself a Benedictine nun’.10 Subsequent to Glasscoe’s edition, a pivotal essay by Benedicta Ward added considerably to the growing debate, precipitating a protracted re-appraisal of Julian’s background, her writing and her theology.11 Ward’s ‘Julian the Solitary’ drew seductively upon overt and covert evidence, both internal and external (and, perhaps on occasion, circumstantial), to postulate that Julian had been both wife and mother at the time of her visionary experiences, possibly even widowed and deprived of a child during the Black Death of the mid century.12 Whilst Glasscoe’s response to this suggestion was that it was ‘not very fruitful’,13 the possibilities of this alternative environment as prompt for re-examination of Julian’s writing inspired a number of commentators, myself included, to read her texts from a variety of new perspectives, not least in an attempt to demythologize Julian and reinstate her both as writer and as highly gendered subject.14 Such a reappraisal was also fuelled by Nicholas Watson’s 1993 revision of the accepted dates of composition of both texts.15 Prior to Watson’s reassessment, it had been assumed that Julian’s Short Text, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, was an early and relatively unformed response to her experiences; the Long Text, A Revelation of Love, was understood as the result of a reworking of this text twenty or so years later. Watson, however, argued for a much later date for the Short Text, and for the Long Text as being a work which occupied Julian for much of the rest of her life up until her death sometime after 1416, a text which was begun as soon as the Short Text was completed. As a result of Watson’s reassessment, then, Julian’s writing took on a new impetus within late twentieth-century scholarship as the likely life-work of a lay-woman-turned-anchoress spanning the end of the fourteenth century and the first decade (at least) of the fifteenth.16 A more recently articulated innovation on this position has been made by Vincent Gillespie (and is reiterated in his essay included in this present volume): that Julian’s first account – the Short Text – constitutes a likely probatio text of the type required of some aspirant anchorites, particularly female applicants, in order to justify to the bishop their vocational drive and the orthodoxy of their spirituality.17 It may well be that increased activity within the field of contemporary anchoritic studies will uncover more evidence in support of this supposition but there is no doubt that there are elements of this type of justification or apologia in Julian’s Short Text which are missing from the Long, as we have seen.
Additional contributions to this debate have also been made by the aforementioned editors of the 2006 synoptic edition of Julian’s writing (which has been utilized by the contributors to this present volume). Nicholas Watson’s and Jacqueline Jenkins’ intimate knowledge of both texts and the manuscripts which house them has led them to conclude that ‘there is a strong possibility that [Julian] was a nun at the Benedictine convent at Carrow, a mile from the church of St Julian’s, Conesford [sic] in Norwich where she was later enclosed as anchoress’.18 Foremost amongst the evidence cited by Watson and Jenkins in support of this stance is the fact that Julian’s anchorhold, attached to the church of St Julian’s, was in the gift of the nuns at Carrow nunnery, a mile from her abode. This cloistered environment would not only have provided her with the educational background which is everywhere displayed in her writing but would also account, so they argue, for Julian’s somewhat garbled version in the Short Text of the monastic greeting Benedicite and the traditional response, Dominus te benedicat. On recounting the onset of her visionary experiences, Julian recalls that her own words were ‘Benedicite dominus!’ (Vision, 3.15), leading one to wonder why a nun familiar with this interchange on a daily basis would make such a basic grammatical error, even if she were not entirely Latinate. Similarly, Watson and Jenkins also cite Christ’s words to Julian thanking her for ‘thy service and […] thy travaile and namly in thy youth’ (Vision, 8.53–4), as possible evidence of her service to God as a young novice, but it is equally likely, of course, that here Christ is referring to the exceptional piety which, as Julian has already self-confessedly informed her readers, she possessed as a young woman (‘This sekenes desirede I in my youth’: Vision, 1.34). Whilst acknowledging that ‘the religiosity of nuns and devout laywomen may not have differed a great deal’, nevertheless, Watson and Jenkins firmly conclude that ‘a straightforward reading of this passage in light of other fragments of evidence makes it likely she was a nun’.19 So, what we have, of course, is fragmentary and contradictory evidence on both sides of the argument and, moreover, evidence which can be read in a number of different ways – a debate and a dilemma which is probably best summed up by the shrewdly formulated words of Kim M. Phillips at the start of this volume: ‘I am content to let the pre-reclusive Julian go, to admire the choices she evidently made to become a anchoress, mystic, author and thinker, and ultimately to let the focus of scholarship rest on her work, not her life.’20
Of Julian’s choice to embrace the anchoritic life there is, however, considerably more consistent and solid evidence than is attached to her way of life prior to enclosure. Not only, as stated, does the scribal incipit to the only extant version of her Short Text inform us ‘Here es a vision, shewed be the goodenes of God to a devoute woman. And hir name es Julian, that is recluse atte Norwiche and yit is on life, anno domini 1413’,21 but the writing of contemporary holy woman Margery Kempe in the autohagiographical account of her own life, The Book of Margery Kempe, corroborates Julian’s status as respected anchoress of Norwich whose particular skill seems to have been in discretio spirituum – the discernment of spirits.22 As both Rosalynn Voaden and Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa have demonstrated,23 the doctrine of discretio spirituum was a highly important one at this point in the Middle Ages, more so for women, who were much more likely to be relegated to the grey area between orthodox thinking and heterodox subversion and who, therefore, were particularly in need of authoritative endorsement of any prophetic or visionary activity. Margery’s written account of a protracted meeting with Julian, datable also to 1413, certainly corroborates the fact that Julian, now in her seventies, was ‘yit […] on life’ in the spring of 1413 and still offering advice to passing visitors from her anchorhold. In addition to this, the evidence of local wills points towards Julian’s enclosure as having been enacted in 1393–4: a series of bequests made between 1393 and 1414 – all helpfully reproduced by Watson and Jenkins in Appendix B to their new edition – confirm for us that Julian spent more than twenty years as a recluse, during which time she was evidently held in high esteem locally by a wide and influential network of people. Julian’s posthumous benefactors for whom evidence remains include, for example, a local rector, Roger Reed; a Norfolk chantry priest, Thomas Emund; a local merchant, John Plumpton, who also left money to Julian’s current servant and a former maid; and Isabel Ufford, daughter of the Earl of Warwick, at that time a nun at the famous house at Campsea Ashe in Suffolk. Far from constructing a solitary Julian, then, in the same spatial vacuum frequently implied by the paradigmatic anchoritic guidance text, Ancrene Wisse (‘[I]n the same way as all the openings of all your windows have been kept closed from the view of everyone, so let them remain closed from now on – and the more tightly they can be closed, the more tightly they should be’),24 all these long-distance glimpses at Julian point towards a woman who, whilst spanning the ideological solitude of the desert upon which the anchoritic vocation was firmly built, nevertheless also occupied a position at the heart of the Christian community within late-medieval East Anglia. Indeed, as Watson and Jenkins also point out, such an ambiguous positionality is also constitutive of Julian’s writing: both A Vision and A Revelation ‘traverse a conceptual version of the ground Julian occupied herself in her years as an anchorite: between self and community, God, church, and world’.25
Further problems arise, however, in any attempt to discuss ‘Julian’s texts’ as a concept. We do not, for example, have any autograph version of her writing, nor do we even have a single medieval copy of the longer version, A Revelation of Love. The only truly medieval witness to her writing is that of the Short Text, A Vision Shown to a Devout Woman, extant in the aforementioned London, British Library MS Additional 37790, a mid fifteenth-century manuscript which is, in Watson’s and Jenkins’ assessment, ‘a copy of a copy’ of Julian’s autograph Short Text,26 a text which, of course, may never have been released for circulation amongst the general populace at all during its author’s lifetime. Its appearance in this manuscript forms part of a compilation which also includes Richard Misyn’s Middle English translations of Richard Rolle’s Emendatio vitae and Incendium amoris, the Middle English translation of Ruusbroec’s Vanden blinkenden steen and M. N.’s Middle English translation of Marguerite Porète’s Mirouer des Simples Âmes, thus forming part of an anthology of mystical works compiled for devotional purposes. The fact that it is included in such an anthology, and the means by which the longer A Revelation of Love makes use of it as a source text, lead Watson and Jenkins to conclude that ‘Julian and her scribes shared a common respect for A Vision, as in some sense an unsuperseded account of an act of divine revelation’.27
The so-called Long Text, A Revelation of Love, however, survives in its entirety in three versions, each containing some readings which are at variance with the others: Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fonds Anglais 40, produced somewhere in northern France in the seventeenth century (and the version upon which both the Colledge and Walsh and Watson and Jenkins editions are based);28 London, British Library MS Sloane 2499 and London, British Library MS Sloane 3705, both probably produced in the same house from the same copy in or around 1650 in northern France and, like the Paris manuscript, a product of the recusant nuns who had settled there following the Reformation; and London, Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4, a manuscript of unknown provenance which is datable to around 1500 and contains a single text made up of fragments from existing texts: Qui habitat and Bonum est, probably by Walter Hilton; Books I and II of Hilton’s Scale of Perfection; and, of course, extracts from Julian’s A Revelation of Love. In addition to these significantly different versions of Julian’s Long Text, there also exists a series of fragments from A Revelation appearing alongside others taken from other medieval and post-Reformation spiritual writings in MS St Joseph’s College, Upholland. Until recently, this seventeenth-century witness to the Long Text was thought to be part of the ‘Englishings’ of Augustine Baker, and produced for the benefit of the nuns at Cambrai in northern France to whom he was at one time spiritual director, although that view has been brought into some doubt by recent scholarship.29 What is clear, therefore, is that we do not have any definitive version of what Julian wrote, either in the short or the long version, and that it becomes very problematic to talk definitively about her ‘texts’, and how – or even if – they were circulated or disseminated during the medieval period. Thus, as many of the contributors to this volume will also suggest, it may be more helpful to consider Julian and her writing in less teleological terms: as plural, as multiple, as variable, as unstable, metamorphosing between the centuries and becoming different things for different audiences, and, yet, containing at the core the stability and consistency of God’s message to humankind, common to all manuscript versions, that ‘love was his mening’ (Revelation, 86.14). Such a remarkable mouvance has been, perhaps, effectively articulated in more modern times by T. S. Eliot’s kaleidescopic conception that ‘[e]very phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning … / for history is a pattern / Of timeless moments.’30
So, which and how many ‘Julians’, conceived of and produced over the countless ‘timeless moments’ since she came to writing, does this present volume aim to uncover? Firstly, its approach to Julian is self-evidently – and self-consciously – literary and historical. It is her status as a writer and historical recluse with which most of the essays concern themselves, since these are the aspects of Julian’s work which are most widely scrutinized within the academic context. However, this is not in any way to downplay the importance of Julian’s exceptional contribution to theological exegesis, which is of concern to a large proportion of her readership today: indeed, this aspect of her work would seem to call for a separate volume in order to build upon those highly insightful theological examinations already undertaken by scholars such as Denise Nowakowski Baker, Christopher Abbott, Barbara Newman,31 and the contributors to a special issue of the journal Spiritus in 2005, which focused specifically on Julian’s theology.32 In this present volume, however, except for the essays of Denise N. Baker and Diane Watt, which are more directly concerned with aspects of Julian’s theology, Julian’s exceptional contribution to medieval theological exegesis is regarded as a given, implicit rather than explicit to the arguments presented by the contributors, who prefer instead to concentrate on Julian’s place within the traditions of women’s writing and its reception, and medieval anchoritism.
Certainly all of the original essays included here, which are gathered into two sections, will dispel the myth of Julian as an introverted and isolated solitary, a mystic-theologian separated off from the world by the stone walls which surrounded her and left alone in singular communion with God. Instead, they locate her deep within the heart of a range of communities, of which the present-day reader is no less a part.
To this end, Part I, ‘Julian in Context’, aims primarily to place the writer firmly within a variety of her own contemporary contexts: social, religious, artistic, cultural and mystical, to name but a few. Opening with Kim M. Phillips’ astute and sensitive appraisal of the probable social background from which Julian emerged, this essay rises to the challenge laid down by an earlier suggestion made by Alexandra Barratt that Julian’s preoccupation with issues of service, worship and lordship in her writing allows us to locate her within a gentry or lower aristocratic milieu.33 Whilst avoiding unhelpful speculative assertion regarding Julian, however, Phillips’ essay presents evidence for forms of femininity experienced by women of gentry status in late-medieval East Anglia and suggests ways in which such experiences may be contextualized within Julian’s vocation and writing as belonging to a specific historical era. Similarly, Cate Gunn, in her contribution here, focuses on the artistic and cultural specificities of late-medieval Norwich: its architecture, images, noise, its social hustle-and-bustle. Such visual, auditory and olfactory immersion in the day-to-day life of the busy city would, she argues, have fed into an allegorical pattern of articulation within Julian’s writings which helped transcend the mundane and offered expression for the mystical. In short, for Gunn the richly sensual culture of the world surrounding Julian in medieval Norwich gave her access to a tradition of allegory which surpassed the limitations of language.
The visual culture of medieval Norwich is also of interest to Alexandra Barratt, whose essay concentrates on visual images of the Trinity which, she argues, may well have had an influence upon how Julian filters out and reinvents prevalent Trinitarian theology in her writing. Of particular concern to Barratt’s analysis are the physical and visual experiences Julian may have undergone and their likely influences on Julian’s verbal imagery in her texts. Most arrestingly, Barratt posits an acquaintance by Julian with the Dixit Dominus image of the Father and Son which appears in the Ormesby Psalter (see Illustration 1), which lay open in the choir of Norwich Cathedral during the latter part of the fourteenth century. She argues that it is not out of the question that Julian had access to this displayed psalter during her early life and that it may have had a long-lasting effect upon her. A particularly vibrant example of the Dixit Dominus image, which depicts both Father and Son sitting alongside each other in parity rather than hierarchically as in other images of the Trinity, appears at the opening to Psalm 109 in this psalter and, as Barratt points out, its figures appear of relatively indeterminate gender. Could this, she queries, have inspired Julian, perhaps even subconsciously, for her reconfiguration of an intensely masculine and patriarchal God in familial terms as both mother and father, male and female, two equal parts of the same equation?
In contrast – and moving away from the specific location of medieval Norwich – Denise N. Baker’s essay examines Julian as a mystical writer within the context of the wider community of the English mystical tradition of which she has long been considered an integral part. Such a tradition includes, of course, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing and Margery Kempe, all of whom have long been read alongside each other as constituting some type of homogeneous ‘group’. Following Nicholas Watson’s 1999 appeal for caution in considering the English mystics as forming any type of ‘group’,34 Baker argues for Julian’s occupation of a position wholly outside this ‘community’ of English mystics. As she points out, on no occasion is Julian ever alluded to by either Hilton or the Cloud author, both of whom were her contemporaries; and even though Margery Kempe documents a protracted meeting with the anchoress, as we have seen, at no point does she mention or even allude to Julian’s having produced any writing. And given Margery’s own preoccupation with the question of whether to write or not to write her own experiences, we can safely presume that she was unaware of Julian’s textuality when she came to write her own Book in the mid 1430s. Baker comes to the conclusion, therefore, that any similarities detected by scholars between Julian’s mystical theology and those of the other English mystics must have arisen because of their common participation within a much wider framework of mystical activity, rather than through Julian’s having been familiar with their writing – or they hers.
If not part of the ‘community’ of English mystics as such, Julian certainly appears to have had some affinity with the writings of other female mystics of the fourteenth century – Bridget of Sweden, for example, and Elizabeth of Hungary, both of whom could well have been known either to Julian herself or, at least, to members of her intellectual community.35 Bridget, of course, had been recently canonized amidst some controversy and, if Margery Kempe’s own affinity with this visionary precursor is anything to go by, she was certainly known and admired by at least one East Anglian holy woman in the first decades of the fifteenth century prior to the founding of the Brigittine Syon Abbey in 1413. Whilst, however, there is again a strand within contemporary scholarship which places Julian outside such a specifically feminine mystical and prophetic tradition,36 and which therefore claims Julian’s theology and writing for a transcension of sex and gender, Diane Watt takes up a somewhat different stance on Julian’s mysticism in her essay, which follows on from Baker’s. Watt reads Julian firmly within the context of the twelfth-century English recluse, nun and prioress Christina of Markyate and Julian’s younger contemporary Margery Kempe. Building on the exhortations of Felicity Riddy to read Julian as ‘relational’ rather than solitary,37 Watt asserts that, in her role as holy woman and intercessory, Julian was always part of a larger spiritual – and visionary – female community which both pre-dates and succeeds her. For Watt, however, in the visionary Julian’s attempts at self-effacement she necessarily distances herself from the expectations presented by such a community, developing instead her own far more theologically daring and innovative brand of universalist apocalypticism.
Julian’s relational and communal positions are further argued for by Annie Sutherland in her painstaking examination of the ways in which contemporary liturgical and quasi-liturgical practices have a bearing upon Julian’s writing. In the same way that she places herself both firmly within and simultaneously extraneous to traditional mystical and prophetic discourse (as demonstrated by Baker and Watt), so Julian makes full use of communal liturgical practices and conventions to articulate her insights. As Sutherland demonstrates, whilst Julian is keen to assert the appropriateness of liturgical tradition as meditative device and methodological practice for the faithful, she is also aware of its limitations. Within the context of her own mystical understanding of the fundamental, yet overarching, ‘goodnes’ of God, such insights clearly surpass the ‘comene course of prayers’ (Vision, 1, 30–1) inherent to the Christian communion. The liturgy, therefore, and Julian’s argued-for familiarity with aspects of it, is incorporated into Julian’s texts as reiterative mainstay of orthodox performativity, whilst at the same time forming a spring-board for more radical and heterodox investigation on the part of the author.
The final essay in Part I focuses on Julian’s position within the English anchoritic tradition. E. A. Jones’s appraisal of Julian as an anchorite draws upon and anatomizes a wealth of extant information available to us about the lives and activities of late-medieval anchorites. Not only does he make use of the more obvious sources – anchoritic guidance texts such as the fifteenth-century Speculum Inclusorum, for example, but he also painstakingly sifts through evidence from sources such as wills and legacies which help to illuminate the lived experience of other female anchorites of the same period. In this context, Jones identifies the female anchorite as frequently occupying a conglomeration of subject positions in the late fourteenth and the early fifteenth century, some or all of which were almost certainly relevant to Julian’s own experiences of reclusion. An anchorite, for example, was frequently a legatee of the local community, often of the wider community, sometimes even of the king. She might also be a householder, organizing servants, perhaps even maintaining a garden. Some anchorites appeared to be dynasts too. In this capacity Jones examines how, as in many cases, there were continued bequests to an unnamed female recluse at St Julian’s throughout the 1420s, long after Julian is thought to have died, with a final bequest being made as late as the 1440s, pointing towards a practice whereby an anchorite could inherit the cell of a known predecessor who may also have been his/her acquaintance or employer. Thus, it is quite feasible that one of Julian’s servants, who is named by two of her benefactors in their wills, went on to inhabit the anchorhold at St Julian’s after Julian’s death.38
Part II, ‘Manuscript Tradition and Interpretation’, seeks to build upon such contextual approaches, focusing on manuscript traditions, dissemination and new methodological approaches in order to prise open further the treasure-house of Julian’s writing. It begins with an essay by Barry Windeatt, a contribution which is intensely textual in its focus, concentrating as it does on a close comparison between the initial Short Text and the highly wrought and complex Long Text into which it metamorphoses. Such a close and tightly wrought comparison allows for the tracing of Julian’s development, both as a mystic and as a writer, and for the charting of the multiplicity of ways in which she learns to interpret the meanings of her original visionary experiences. For Windeatt, even A Revelation retains an aura of the original commentary it was established to be and in it he recognizes ‘something of the layered, interleaved structure of a private working draft, perhaps never widely circulated’. This, of course, is in line with the claims of other contributors to this volume, many of whom surmise on the evidence suggesting lack of circulation in Julian’s own lifetime.
In contrast to Windeatt’s approach, the essays contributed by Marleen Cré and Elisabeth Dutton which follow Windeatt’s are more concerned with mechanistic analyses of manuscript traditions and culture, choosing to scrutinize individual manuscripts containing Julian’s work and the concomitant traditions. Placing the works firmly within their manuscript contexts, both contributors examine the complex issues of audience and dissemination – in the case of Cré in the context of London, Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4 which, as I have pointed out earlier, contains a single text consisting of extracts from a number of contemporary works of contemplation, Julian’s A Revelation amongst them. By examining the Julian extracts wholly in manuscript context and assessing the ways in which they are aligned with the other textual fragments, Cré is able to offer valuable insights into the intentions of the anthologist, the medieval reception of Julian’s writing and the positioning of her likely audience. Arguing for a strong cohesive unity to this text, with each textual fragment harking backwards or pointing forwards to other textual extracts, Cré’s essay insists upon a determined and deliberate intentionality within the Westminster manuscript, claiming Julian’s A Revelation as an important component of its rich, experiential impact.
Elisabeth Dutton’s essay comprises an intricate examination of the variances between the surviving seventeenth-century Long Text manuscripts – Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fonds Anglais 40, British Library Sloane MS 2499 (Sloane 1) and British Library Sloane MS 3705 (Sloane 2) – in order to extrapolate valuable clues as to the ways in which the text has been read and interpreted since its origins in the first decade of the fifteenth century. Similarly, she turns her attention to the less frequently examined MS St Joseph’s College, Upholland, which again contains short fragments of Julian’s Long Text copied by recusant nuns at Cambrai in northern France at some stage during the latter half of the seventeenth century. Dutton concludes by focusing her attention on what she considers to be the extensive influence exercised by Augustine Baker, spiritual advisor to the Cambrai nuns, upon the preservation of Julian’s works, adding to what is becoming a contentious contemporary debate on this particular issue, as I suggested earlier.
Reception and audience is an aspect of Julian’s writing which is taken up by Elizabeth Robertson in a more discursively investigative approach which concerns itself in part with Julian’s own construction of an audience, both internal and external to her texts. Here, Robertson traverses between the audiences Julian herself envisages within her texts and those who most probably constituted them in practice (and these two positions are by no means synonymous). She examines what Julian’s likely audience became, from the inception of her work to its later dissemination, and the movement between ‘audience’ in the auditory sense, and ‘audience’ in the sense of ‘readership’. Such multiple audiences are, so Robertson argues, both inscribed stylistically within Julian’s texts and directed verbally as to how they should engage with her visions. These visions, moreover, as some of the remaining essays included in Part II will demonstrate, are presented from a plethora of dizzying perspectives and platforms, coming into focus and fading out again in ways which, for Robertson, ‘shatter the distance between Julian as writer and her reader, whether the reader is of the past or the present’. And it is such a shattering of the distance between authorial and readerly perspectives that causes Robertson to make her most interesting claim: that Julian’s style constitutes a forerunner to the modernist enterprise, specifically that of Virginia Woolf. Like Woolf, Julian’s preoccupation is with an ‘omnitemporality’ and ‘multipersonal consciousness’, giving rise to a style which is ‘fundamentally dilatory’. Repetition, contradiction and verbal spiralling disrupt readerly expectation at every turn, shattering any type of linear logic which can lay claim to finality, completion or closure and effacing the distance between author and audience. For both herself and her multiple audiences, Julian collapses all mediation – which, in innumerable ways, includes the mediational presumptiveness of her texts themselves.
Julian’s use of space and imagery based on her own surroundings both before and after her anchoritic enclosure forms the focus of the next essay in this collection by Laura Saetveit Miles, who also alerts the reader to resonances between the styles of writing of Julian and Virginia Woolf. Miles’ main concern, however, is the ways in which Julian experienced both the physical and conceptual spaces of the medieval anchorhold and how these were translated into her writing. Her particular interest is the relationship between physical space, mystical space and authorship as a methodology for opening up a window on a writer about whom, on the surface of things, we know so very little. For Miles, Julian’s Long Text negotiates ‘a tripartite system of enclosures’: that of her anchorhold, that of her revelations and that of her text. By offering a Foucaultian, heterotopic reading of Julian’s configuration of such spaces within the Long Text alongside an analysis of the treatment of space by two other visionary women of the period – Bridget of Sweden and Margery Kempe – Miles convincingly argues for the centrality of the anchorhold to Julian’s expression of a mystical theology of communitas and the individual Christian’s union with the Godhead.
Such issues regarding Julian’s use and (re)configuration of gender binaries and space are also central to my own essay, which follows on from Miles’. Concentrating primarily on A Vision Shown to a Devout Woman, this essay offers a Kristevan reading of Julian’s writing in order to illuminate her protracted search for an appropriate idiom with which to express her mystical insights into the ‘oning’ of ‘kinde […] to the maker, which is substantial kinde unmade’ (Revelation, 53.38–9), a linguistic search which, I argue, characterizes both texts but which is never fully realized. Faced with the ontological and teleological inadequacy of a phallogocentric language (that is, the privileging of the masculine in the construction of meaning) to express the inexpressibility of the mystical, it is to the poetic semiotics or sign-system of primary unity with the mother to which Julian increasingly resorts as her text takes shape and moves inexorably towards the explosive outbursting of its God-as-Mother, God-as Father conclusion. Beginning with and then moving beyond the corporeal body, Julian unearths its semiotic traces to produce an anti-phallic language and poetics constructed specifically to approximate upon a vision of ultimately ungendered wholeness.
And it is with Julian’s language and its poeticity which the two essays which follow my own, those by Ena Jenkins and Vincent Gillespie, also concern themselves. Both commentators here offer close, sensitive, intensely aware and insightful readings of Julian not only as mystical theologian but also as a poet who uses a wide range of textual voices and who, in the words of Gillespie, employs ‘subtle and strategically shifting nuances of style and register [which] demand a different way of listening’. Ena Jenkins’ essay concurs with such a reading of Julian’s poetics but prefers to focus specifically on the poeticity of her texts and, in particular, the role that metaphor plays within that framework. For Jenkins, there is an inherent simplicity within Julian’s use of imagery which, she argues, develops into imagistic clusters which move on to form patterns and grow into the complex metaphorical system which pervades the Long Text in particular. Particularly useful, too, is Jenkins’ insightful analysis of the parable of the Lord and Servant in this context (and she is one of the few contributors to concentrate significantly on this episode), a visionary encounter which Julian avoided discussing in her initial response to her experiences simply because of a complete failure to understand its import (‘full understanding of this mervelouse example was not geven me in that time’: Revelation, 51.59–60). The parable, then, is ideally placed to demonstrate the development of Julian’s poetic sensibilities and modes of expression, which Jenkins reads as ‘both functional and elegant and … the way in which seeing and seeking proceed’. Here, as elsewhere in Julian’s text, Jenkins identifies iconic imagery which distills out into metaphoric complexity and the production of what can only be described as ‘lyric fragments’ of closely wrought poetic sensibility. Moreover, for Jenkins, such lyric fragments embody the essence of Julian’s theological insight, expressing ‘both intellectual grasp and emotional response’, and uncovering, in a term adapted from William Wordsworth, the author’s own ‘feeling intellect’.39
For Gillespie, meanwhile, Julian’s visions demand of her a new form of interpretation which suspends all preconceived hermeneutic formulations, resulting in her writing necessarily demanding from its readers similar qualities. Gillespie proceeds to demonstrate the extent to which Julian adopts and adapts both multiple discourses and textual voices to create a type of pastiche of contemporary styles of writing. He alerts the reader to the complex multivalence of Julian’s intertextuality, its Bakhtinian heteroglossic resonances or multiple ‘voices’, claiming her text as ‘a vast echo chamber’ within which allusion, imitation, ventriloquism and parody endlessly resound but without its ever relinquishing its own originality and specificity.
In the final essay of this collection Sarah Salih takes the reader on a breathless helter-skelter tour of the myriad of ‘contemporary Julians’ who have surfaced during the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in poetry, novels, film and other media, including a strong ‘virtual’ presence online. As Salih argues, such a proliferation of ‘Julians’ has contributed in no small measure to what can only be termed a ‘Julian cult’ which now centres on her reconstructed cell in present-day Norwich. Such a mélange of contemporary Julians makes its appearance on items of memorabilia: cards, pens, pencils – even fridge magnets. She is consulted by her followers, from evangelical Christians to new-age goddess-seekers, for what is recognized as her ‘feminine’ wisdom and comforting aphorisms in the face of a ‘degenerating’ world.
In appraising this extraordinary appropriation and reappropriation of Julian – the solitary, the writer, the mystic – Salih, perhaps, posits an answer to the question raised at the beginning of this Introduction: what is it about the figure of Julian which has brought about such extraordinary longevity of attraction and interest even amongst readers who otherwise have little familiarity with the writers of the later Middle Ages? In Salih’s estimation (and quoting Carolyn Dinshaw), for those coming to Julian from a non-academic perspective, ‘Julian offers a life possibility for the present’,40 perhaps, even, in her multiplicity of aspects, belonging more to the fragmented postmodern view of the present than to the historical telos of the medieval past. Which leads me to return to the question which heads this Introduction: can we ever aim to ‘know’ who or what Julian ‘really’ was? The answer is probably ‘no’, but it is hoped that the multiple scholarly perspectives gathered together in this collection of essays, and the new ways of unpicking the Julian tapestry which they facilitate, will allow the twenty-first-century reader of Julian’s texts to get as close to answering this question as can ever be possible, given Julian’s own concerted resistance to ever being ‘known’ by anybody other than God.
1 Enid Dinnis, The Anchorhold: A Divine Comedy (London, 1934). I am most grateful to Ena Jenkins for alerting me to this novel, and to the nuns of the Anglican convent of Ty Mawr in Monmouthshire for their generous loan of the book.
2 Michael McLean, ‘Introduction’, in Julian: Woman of our Day, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London, 1985), pp. 1–10 (2).
3 Although, as several of the contributors point out in this present volume, there could have been various interim versions of Julian’s texts which simply have not survived.
4 Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York, 1986, various repr.), pp. 160–86 (76–7).
5 The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (Turnhout, 2006), p. 4. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations will be from this edition, both in this introduction and elsewhere.
6 ‘Here es a vision, shewed be the goodenes of God to a devoute woman. And hir name es Julian, that is recluse atte Norwich and yit is on life, anno domini 1413’. See Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 63.
7 This is a commonly used peroration appearing at the end of many medieval texts and suggests that Julian had initially intended to end A Vision at this point.
8 ‘[F]ifteen yere after [the first experience] and mor’ (Revelation, 86.12); ‘twenty yere after the time of the shewing, save thre monthes’ (Revelation, 51.73).
9 A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, 2 vols (Toronto, 1978), vol. 1, p. 43. For a fuller appraisal by these editors of Julian’s likely status as a nun see Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, ‘Editing Julian of Norwich’s Revelations: A Progress Report’, Medieval Studies 39 (1976), pp. 404–27.
10 Marion Glasscoe, ‘Introduction’, in Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter, 1976; various repr.), pp. vii–xvii (vii).
11 Benedicta Ward, ‘Julian the Solitary’, in Ken Leech and Benedicta Ward, Julian the Solitary (Oxford, 1988), pp. 11–35.
12 Ibid., pp. 24–5.
13 Marion Glasscoe, English Medieval Mystics: Games of Faith (London, 1993), p. 24.
14 See, in particular, Elizabeth Robertson, ‘Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings’, in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 142–67; Alexandra Barratt, ‘ “In the Lowest Part of Our Need”: Julian and Medieval Gynecological Writing’, in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York and London, 1998), pp. 239–56; Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writing of Julian of Norwich and The Book of Margery Kempe (Cambridge, 2004). And, more recently, Diane Watt, ‘Julian of Norwich’, in Diane Watt, Medieval Women’s Writing: Works By and For Women in England, 1100–1500 (Cambridge, 2007). Here, Watt posits the possibility that Julian may have been in service in another family.
15 Nicholas Watson, ‘The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, Speculum 68 (1993), pp. 637–83.
16 Watson himself has always remained equivocal on this issue but takes up a contrary stance in the introduction to his co-edited edition, considering it most likely that Julian was a nun: for a discussion of this, see p. 6 below.
17 I am grateful to Vincent Gillespie for sharing his thoughts on this in his private correspondence of 2 July 2007.
18 Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 4.
19 Ibid., p. 4.
20 See p. 31 below.
21 Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 63.
22 Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS o.s. 212 (Oxford, 1940; repr. 1997), pp. 42–3.
23 Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Later-Medieval Women Visionaries (York, 1999); Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, Margery Kempe’s Meditations: The Context of Medieval Devotional Literatures, Liturgy and Iconography (Cardiff, 2007).
24 Ancrene Wisse, in Anchoritic Spirituality: ‘Ancrene Wisse’ and Associated Works, ed. and trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (New York, l991), pp. 41–207 (71). The original, which is extant only in the Anglo-French version, reads: ‘toutes les ouertures de toutes voz fenestres, ausi come ci-deuant a la vewe de touz hommes vnt esté closes, ausi soient ça enaprés’. See Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402 with Variants from Other Manuscripts, ed. Bella Millett, EETS o.s. 325 (Oxford, 2005), Part Two, lines 208–10.
25 Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 6.
26 Ibid., p. 33. For a full-length study of this manuscript, see Marleen Cré, Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse: A Study of London, British Library, MS Additional 37790, The Medieval Translator 9 (Turnhout, 2006).
27 Ibid., p. 35.
28 A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, 2 vols (Toronto, 1978). For the Watson and Jenkins edition, see n. 5 above.
29 Elisabeth Dutton considers this point in her essay, p. 135. Siobhan Condron also debates this issue in her recently completed Ph.D. thesis from University College, Dublin. I am grateful to her for allowing me access to some of her unpublished work.
30 T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, part 5, ll. 11–12, 20–1.
31 Denise Nowakowski Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton, 1994); Christopher Abbott, Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology (Cambridge, 1999); Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2003).
32 See Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 5, 1 (2005). In addition, Denys Turner is currently working on a monograph for SCM Press focusing on Julian’s doctrines of sin and providence.
33 Alexandra Barratt, ‘Julian of Norwich and the Holy Spirit, “Our Good Lord” ‘, Mystics Quarterly 28 (2002), pp. 78–84; and ‘Lordship, Service and Worship in Julian of Norwich’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium VII, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 177–88.
34 Nicholas Watson, ‘The Middle English Mystics’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 539–65.
35 See Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 3.
36 Watson and Jenkins, for example, assert that ‘the references to mothering and pregnancy in A Revelation are theological, not autobiographical’, Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 4. Christopher Abbott shows equal caution in his appraisal of Julian’s depiction of the motherhood of God, reading it as a concerted metaphor. See Christopher Abbott, Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology (Cambridge, 1999), especially p. 2.
37 See 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 (115).
38 One of Julian’s former servants, named as Alice in the 1415 will of John Plumpton (for which see Writings, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 433), could well be the ‘Alicie hermyte’ who later donated a chalice to the church of St Giles in Norwich and who quite feasibly could have taken up occupancy of Julian’s cell after her death. This is a point first mooted by Aelred Watkin in his edition of the Inventory of Church Goods, temp. Edward III (Archdeaconry of Norwich), 2 vols (Norfolk Record Society, 1947), I, 18; II, 161, as cited in A Book of Showings, ed. Colledge and Walsh, p. 34 n. 70.
39 William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), Book XIII, 1. 205. Cited by Jenkins, p. 181.
40 See p. 218 below.