VINCENT GILLESPIE
‘Catholicism was language itself, a complete set of images, and such a rich one, with which to live and name the world.’
Michèle Roberts in Walking on the Water:
Women Talk About Spirituality, ed. Jo Garcia
and Sara Maitland (London, 1983), p. 59.
Many scholars and readers of Julian have puzzled over the strangeness of her text’s structure and the curiously recursive and apparently involuted way that she expounds her showings. Right from the outset, she challenges standard interpretative strategies with her claim in the first chapter of the Long Text that the showing of the Crown of Thorns both ‘comprehended and specified the blessed Trinity’ in which ‘all the shewinges that foloweth be groundide and oned’.2 This is typical of her dizzying changes of visual and intellectual perspective: both comprehensive and specific; effortlessly moving from image (crown) to abstraction (Trinity); grounding and unifying all that follows in a single metaphor. The linear analytical approach – schematizing, programming, spotting theological sources and rhetorical conventions – struggles to respond to this kind of discourse. Her text seems actively to resist this kind of scholastic reading. Instead Julian’s dominant imagery speaks of enfolding, embracing and enclosing, invoking an all-encompassing three-dimensional aesthetic: ‘He is oure clothing that for love wrappeth us, and windeth us, halseth us and all becloseth us, hangeth about us for tender love’ (Revelation, 5.3–4).
This does not mean that the linearity of the standard critical method is totally excluded, but the range of textual voices she uses, and her subtle and strategically shifting nuances of style and register, demand a different way of listening. More profitable is a version of an ancient monastic form of dialogue with the text derived from lectio divina (divine reading) of Scripture, traditionally described as rumination or meditation.3 Just as monastic reading generates what Jean Leclercq calls the ‘literature of reminiscence’, so we must become sensitized to the nuances and verbal play of Julian’s text, so that key ideas and concepts (such as ‘enclosing’ or ‘beholding’) begin to resonate together.4
The showings seem to have required from Julian an acutely attentive stillness (she calls this paradoxical state ‘willful abiding’) and the suspension of her hermeneutic preconceptions. Julian’s text demands from its readers these same qualities. Her re-enactment in the opening of the first revelation (Chapter 4) of Mary’s yielding of control and self-will in the Annunciation is the key to her own openness to the showings, and her willingness to ‘conceive’ of their truth (the gynaecological pun is Julian’s).5 Readers of her text need to aspire to the same condition, which Julian calls ‘meekness’ or ‘reverent dread’: ‘Lo me, Gods handmayd’ (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 6). This necessary and radical openness to the theological and rhetorical strategies of the text rests on a profound participation in a kenotic process.6 In modern terms, this translates into a willingness to listen to the text without a pre-formed interpretative agenda. Julian is repeatedly told in her showings to stop seeking for easy answers to hard questions. Similarly, modern readers have to be attentive to the complexity and sophistication not only of Julian’s ideas but also of the strategies that she uses to explore and communicate them. Indeed, readers may at times become aware that they are no longer the agent of reading but are themselves textual constructs which are being read and challenged, just as Julian has the sense at the end of the third showing that the soul has been closely ‘examined’ by God in the course of the revelation. Julian’s closing gesture here typically encodes what she sees as the appropriate response to this testing examination: ‘Thus mightily, wisely, and lovingly was the soule examined in this vision. Than saw I sothly that me behoved nedes to assent with great reverence, enjoying in God’ (Revelation, 11.46–8). The text requires us to give up the illusion of our activity and initiative, our only activity being that of intensely attentive receptivity which Julian calls ‘beholding’.
‘Beholding’ emerges as a transactional state in which God constantly beholds and comprehends us and we struggle fitfully to behold him, but fail to comprehend him in this life:
The continual seking of the soule pleseth God ful mekille. For it may do no more than seke, suffer and trust. And this is wrought in every soule that hath it by the holy gost […] The seking with faith, hope, and charity pleseth oure lord, and the finding pleseth the soule, and fulfilleth it with joy. (Revelation, 10.57–63)
Julian states that the skills necessary for seeking into this ‘beholding’ will be taught by God: that is, they go beyond normal human modes of inquiry and analysis: ‘It is God wille that we seke him [the Paris manuscript reads: in] to the beholdyng of him […] And how a soule shall have him in his beholdyng he shal teche himselfe’ (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 16). This process does not demand the ‘sacrifice’ of reason in the sense of its denial. Rather, in accordance with medieval models of contemplation, reason has first to be exercized to the utmost, and then we are asked to pass beyond it to be open to a higher reason.7 It is incorporated and transfigured into a new way of knowing, understanding, ‘wurking, thanking, trusting, enjoyeng’ (Revelation, 86.3), all of which, Julian would say, are ‘Goddes wurking’ (my emphasis), not man’s. Seeking into ‘beholding’ is the core work of Julian’s response to her showings. It is also a viable critical methodology for reading Julian’s account of that work. As always, Julian shows us how to do it: ‘I beheld the shewing with all my diligence. For in this blessed shewing I behelde it as one in Gods mening’ (Revelation, 9.22–3). Her beholding allows her to see the totality of the showings from God’s perspective (as one who shared God’s meaning); her beholding allows her to see the irreducible unity of the showing (I beheld it all in one, by means of God’s showing); and she beholds it as one who has herself become a means of showing, a signifier for those who, she expects, will follow her as performers of her text: ‘And that I say of me, I mene in the person of alle my evencristen, for I am lerned in the gostely shewing of our lord God that he meneth so’ (Revelation, 8.31–2). This classic word-knot or semantic cluster on ‘menen’ is how God ‘meneth’ or speaks, and how Julian and the readers of her text become the word spoken by God.8
But that speech is usually not straightforward or clear. There are problems in transcribing the ineffable Word into the fallen language of men and expressing its totality in the one-dimensional linearity of its written manifestation.9 Julian works hard to address these problems, but knows they can never be overcome. In her text, language is always viewed as slippery, imperfect and provisional. It is only a means to the end of beholding God. Julian’s Long Text always requires us to attend deeply and suspiciously to the texture of the writing, and in doing so the reader soon becomes aware of Julian’s skilful command of different linguistic moods and registers, narrative voices and rhetorical levels of style.
Julian is the mistress of multiple vernacular discourses, capable of alluding to and pastiching various contemporary styles of religious and philosophical writing, without ever allowing any of them to become dominant or specifying. Her text is a vast echo chamber of allusion and imitation, but there are relatively few occasions when it is possible to identify her source unequivocally once it has been through the crucible of her imagination. This is one of the key ways in which her text subverts normal critical (and perhaps theological) reading. It is essential to her strategy of truth-telling that she is able to float above the discourses that predominated in her contemporary textual environment, promiscuously bathing herself in them as and when her argument requires them, but never being possessed or controlled by them. Annie Sutherland has shown how in the Long Text most of her biblical allusions are woven into and subsumed within the warp and weft of her argument rather than being consciously and deliberately deployed as auctoritates or proof texts.10 Likewise, in Julian’s relations to other religious discourses she stands aloof, preferring to reforge her own discourse, to write her own performative utterance using dominant religious discourses tactically and often parodically. Julian is aware that her text ‘functions in the heart of a cluster of social determinations’, as Paul Zumthor puts it.11 Her deference to the historically determined magisterium of Holy Church shows this vividly. But, aware as she is of devotional conventions and interpretative norms, especially in relation to prayer, and other ‘means’ of worship developed by the Church in time, she is also aware of the need to be true to her own distinctive vision of Love. For Julian, the necessary narrative honesty required of her as the intermediary of that vision of Love prevents her from allowing her understanding to be articulated exclusively or even mainly in the worn and threadbare discourses prevalent in her lifetime. To do so would risk making God in the image and likeness of man’s fallen language. There is here an important general issue about self-textualisation and cultural coding. If visionary experience is written down in the popular registers and codes of theology and devotional writing, it runs the risk of losing its specificity and uniqueness.12 Julian is not only aware of this, but within her text she actually dramatizes and deconstructs her own instinctive tendency to process her showings in this way.
This is not just an issue of ineffability (though that is always part of her own horizon of expectation as a ‘reader’ of her own showings and a writer of her texts). It is rather an issue of communicability: how can Julian ensure that, however the reader or hearer ‘takes’ her text, they do so in a way that preserves the freshness of her showings and immediacy of her understanding of them (even when that immediacy has taken twenty years to achieve). In the Short Text, Julian asks for three gifts that are traditional and almost predictable in their devotional and affective reach: mind of Christ’s Passion; bodily sickness to share in the suffering of Christ; and three metaphorical wounds of contrition, compassion and wilful longing to God (Vision, 1.40–1). But their delivery in her showings blasts through the banality of the requests and transports them onto an altogether more abstract and theologically ambitious plane. The Short Text is stylistically much more austere and affective than the Long Text, is notably more schematic with its lists and numberings of observations and implications, and generally has the feel of a theologically cautious, perhaps even defensive, stocktaking exercise.13 If, as I believe, the Short Text is a probatio text, produced in connection with the enquiries surrounding her entry into the enclosed life of an anchoress, then it may date from much later than 1373, but rather from her eventual decision to enter religion (a decision perhaps even triggered or otherwise marked by the second vision of 1388).14 The Short Text already shows signs of rewriting, with the false peroration after the long and gloomy meditation on sin (Vision, 23.29–31) being modified and somewhat diluted by the more positive and upbeat theology of its final pages. A decision to abandon the Short Text in favour of a wholesale and much more radical rewrite is perhaps reflected by the headnote to Chapter 86 of the Long Text in Sloane, in a passage that suggests that the Short and Long versions were to perform different functions and needed very different textual and rhetorical strategies: ‘The good lord shewid this booke shuld be otherwise performid than at the first writing’ (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 134).
In discussions of Julian’s sources and influences she can sometimes emerge as the grateful beneficiary of antecedent (largely male and largely clerical) Latin writers who provide her with the interpretative matrix and visionary vocabulary to process her own experiences.15 Her compositional process, and her quizzical relationship with other religious texts, is messier, more radical and ultimately far more artistically controlled. Zumthor argues that ‘the historical development of cultures … rarely proceeds by linear sequences, formalizable in a closed discourse, but generally by a multidimensional expansion’.16 Julian strives for just such a multidimensional expansion in her Long Text, in response to the authority of a God of paradoxically complex simplicity, whose revelations never go in straight lines. Again and again, she demonstrates the ability to deploy contemporary religious and philosophical discourses in tightly controlled tactical ways without ever putting her faith or reliance on any of them to describe or account for the essence of her showings. Instead, she uses the local velocity of those discourses and registers to project her own text into new and surprising directions. These provisional discourses, codes and registers are only ‘means’ to be discarded on the journey to the promised end revealed by Christ who is the ‘soverayne techare’ (Vision, 6.38). Julian rejects the shell/kernel model of hermeneutics beloved of medieval (and many modern) commentators. Her interpretative strategies rest on a complex and subtle manipulation of the local textual experience of her audience.
Part of that experience is the constant sense of having our textual competencies challenged, manipulated, denied and overpassed. The texture of her discourse is always unsettled, provisional and protean. Her writing has many of the dialogic characteristics of Bakhtinian ‘heteroglossia’, eager to exploit ‘whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the artificial constraints of that system’ and using ‘parodic stylisations of canonized genres and styles’.17 Warily resistant to the reductive, the schematic and the programmatic, her text is full of surprises, textual aporias that suddenly (such an important word in Julian’s textual universe) open up beneath our feet. Just as we make ends meet, Julian moves the ends. This happens in big and small ways. In Revelation 3, for example, Julian embarks on a conventional simile to describe the strange beauty of Christ’s bleeding head: ‘the fairehede and the livelyhede is like …’. As if recognizing that the simile creates a centrifugal force in the text, drawing attention away from the core image and setting off a chain reaction of linked signifiers, in effect subordinating her showing to the very linguistic means from which Christ has liberated it and her, the analogy is overthrown in the Sloane text with an enigmatic assertion of ineffable irreduceability: ‘the fairehede and the livelyhede is like nothing but the same’ (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 10).18 Similarly, in Revelation 8, when watching the dying Christ, her expectations of the imminent death of Christ are overthrown:
And I loked after the departing with al my mightes and wende to have seen the body alle dead. But I saw him not so. And right in the same time that methought by seming that the life might no lenger last, and the shewing of the ende behoved nedes to be nye – sodenly, I beholding in the same crosse, he changed in his blisseful chere (Revelation, 21.5–9).
Physiological necessity and narrative expectation (and probably the conventions of numerous contemporary Passion narratives) have led her to attempt to extrapolate the ‘shewing of the ende’. But the divine logic proves to be unpredictable and unreadable. The script is torn up. The programmatic affective response of grief is rendered inappropriate. The sudden change of cheer changes hers: ‘and I was as glad and mery as it was possible’ (Revelation, 21. 9–10).
Already in the Short Text (and in some ways more explicitly there, as her ventriloquial artistry has yet to fully develop), we can see her pointing to the provisionality of her borrowed discourse, in a passage that prefigures (or may be an early response to) the great 1388 showing of Trinitarian Love:
And of this knawinge er we moste blinde. For many men and women leves that God is allemighty and may do alle, and that he is alle wisdome and can do alle. Botte that he is alle love and wille do alle, thar thay stinte. (Vision, 24.16–19)
This serves to signal her familiarity with the common discourse and lexis describing the powers of the Trinity, and her awareness that, like her, many Christians find the final leap of faith and trust hard to take.19 Compare, for example, this passage from William Flete’s popular and influential Remedies against tribulation:
And therefore thenk weel that his myght may do alle thinge and his wisdom kan and his goodnesse wole, and trusteth fully therto he wole saue ʒou and brynge ʒou to his euere lastynge joye, quan he seeth beste tyme for ʒou.20
The teaching is the same in both, as is the play on tenses. But Julian folds into her version an awareness of its limitations and of the human difficulties in accepting it. Indeed this same passage from Flete’s text, which overall has many resonances with Julian’s Trinitarian teachings, contains another parallel with Julian. Flete encourages his readers (who, like the inscribed (and later excized) audience of Julian’s Short Text, are aspiring to contemplative life) to:
Beleve, seyd oure lord Jesu, that god the fader is al myghtful, as who seyth, ther is no thing impossible to god, but alle is possible to hym that alle synnes may for ʒeue and alle wronges redresse and brynge soules to his blisse.
Julian, in querying God’s assertion that all shall be well, receives (in the Long Text only) the response: ‘ “That that is unpossible to the is not unpossible to me. I shalle save my worde in alle thing and I shalle make althing wele” ‘ (Revelation, 32.41–3). Although both these passages may derive independently from Scripture, Flete’s introduction of his gloss on God’s words (‘as who seyth’) is reminiscent of Julian’s most common markers of ventriloquial intervention into her text (‘as if he had said’/’as thus’).21 Both writers are groping towards expressing the apophatic and ineffable, just as Plotinus typically marked his textual approach to the apophatic by ‘hoion’ (‘as it were’).22
Julian’s dialogue, with the conventions and techniques of affective piety, extends to a virtuosic manipulation of linguistic register. Shifts between registers and moods often signal themselves with verbal punctuation (‘as if’; ‘as thus’; ‘as if he had said’).23 The opening of the Fourth Revelation (Chapter 12) returns to the linear narrative of the Passion meditations, subjecting another episode to her intense and unwavering attention: ‘And after this I saw, beholding, the body plentuously bleding in seming of the scorging’ (Revelation, 12.1–2).24 Still in the non-discursive mode of ‘beholding’, she sees the bleeding body not in the context of the historical or temporal narrative of the Passion. ‘In seming’ alludes to the context of the scourging, but its referentiality gestures elsewhere. Julian recognizes this in the way she grounds her description in the discourse of affective meditation, but she signals that this grounding is tactical rather than definitive by drawing attention to the consciously heightened language and the provisionality of the register, in a passage added in to the Long Text: ‘as thus: the fair skinne was broken full depe into the tender flesh with sharpe smitinges all about the sweete body’ (Revelation, 12.2–3).
There is something artfully contrived here: the onomatopoeic rhythm; the alliteration on f and s; the mechanically regular alternation of adjectives and adverbs; the conventionalized epithets. Most significant is the way the introductory ‘as thus’ keeps the language at arm’s length and marks it as pastiche. Julian is employing this emotionally coded discourse as a tactical springboard, an affective trigger.25
She moves on from this to play with another affective phrase: ‘the dereworthy blode’, which is repeated anaphorically three times as part of her exploration of the theological force of its ‘precious plenty’. It is ‘the precious plenty of his dereworthy blode’ that acts out the Harrowing of Hell and the triumphant Ascension into heaven in this schematized version of the salvific act. This episode, where the key player in the drama of salvation is metonymically replaced by his own saving blood, is surprisingly introduced by ‘Beholde and see’, a phrase Julian elsewhere uses to signal expository locutions spun out from Christ’s gnomic utterances (cf. Chapters 24 and 42).26 Julian is setting up a tension between the narrative and visual elements of the Harrowing and Ascension as they are usually portrayed in words or in pictures, and the abstract but empowering placement of the key concept of the precious plenty of Christ’s ‘dereworthy blode’. The scene is thus rendered, in an almost Langlandian fashion, as both familiar and deeply strange.27 Julian contrives the passage to gather imaginative and narrative velocity from the language she deploys while at the same time typically stretching it to the limits of its referentiality. To ‘behold and see’ the story she tells here requires real effort and a dizzying sense of dislocation. For, having played with the affective lexis of Passion meditations, Julian moves almost immediately to begin the process of effacing the familiar linearity and materiality of the description of the suffering Christ and of our response to it. Returning to the key concept of plenitude, she now uses the blood to create an apophatic surface that effaces its own physicality and the linear narrative expectations of the Passion story: ‘so plentuously the hote blode ran oute that there was neither sene skynne ne wound, but as it were al blode’ (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 19; Paris changes the word order).
Denying us the affective means of a conventional response, she provides us with a gathering image on which to still the imagination. Only the surface of hot blood is allowed to remain, emphasizing the immediacy of the encounter and the eternal present tense in which her beholding unfolds. In other respects the blood denies its materiality:
And whan it come wher it should a fallen downe, than [Paris: ther] it vanyshid […] And this was so plenteous to my sigt that methowte, if it had be so in kind and in substance for that tyme, it should have made the bed al on blode and a passid over aboute. (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 19)
This effacement of the material and frustration of the linear and the temporal draws us deeper into the showing by creating an appetite for the apophatic from her (and our) curiosity about what happens to the blood. The bleeding continues until, seeing non-naturalistically but ‘with avisement’ (a deeply abstract mode of perception already explored in Chapter 11), she is able to penetrate the surface ‘seemings’ of the image. Instead of the blood passing over the bed, Julian’s perception passes over into a meditation on the precious plenty of God’s love, transforming the image of physical excess into a metaphor for overpassing generosity and self-emptying:
it is oure kinde and alblissfully beflowyth us be the vertue of his pretious love […]. The pretious plenty of his dereworthy blode overflowith al erth and is redye to wash al creaturs of synne. (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, pp. 19–20)
‘As thus’ is also used by Julian to introduce Christ’s words that form a ‘special understanding and teching’ of miracles:
‘It is knowen that I have done miracles here before, many and fele, high and mervelous, wurshipfulle and gret. And so as I have done I do now continually and shall do in coming of time.’ (Revelation, 36.50–2)
Putting words into Christ’s mouth is one of Julian’s most audacious innovations in her text, and her textual construction of his linguistic register is interesting. Julian contrives a series of high style doublets (‘many and fele … worshipfulle and gret’), reflecting the dignity of her speaker. At the same time, she characteristically makes Christ inhabit past, present and future tenses in his ‘working’. This enacts and invokes a divine perspective that is simultaneously out of time and manifested in all times.
The marker phrase ‘as if he had said’ is regularly used by Julian to signal her ventriloquial expositions of the enigmatic locutions revealed to her in her showings. Increasingly as the Long Text progresses, her showings deal with the exposition of words rather than images. Christ speaks to her in cryptic, laconic utterances which Julian, as the intermediary or ‘mean’, provisionally translates into contemporary discourse:
And with this our gode lord seyd ful blisfully ‘Lo how that I lovid the’, as if he had seid: ‘My derling, behold and se thy lord, thy God, that is thy maker and thyn endles ioy. Se what likyng and bliss I have in thy salvation, and for my love enioy now with me.’ (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe p. 35)
She places herself at the meeting place of the ineffable and the discursive. She then tentatively transcribes into language – ‘as it may be seid, that is to mene’ – her own developing understanding of these liminal sayings: ‘This is the understondyng simply as I can sey of this blissid word: “Lo how I lovid the”. This shewid our gode lord for to make us glad and mery’ (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 35). In fact, her understanding of the enigmatic ‘Lo how that I lovid the’ has changed between the Short Text and the Long Text. Whereas in Sloane’s Long Text Christ speaks to Julian in the tender language of bridal mysticism (darling, joy, liking, bliss, enjoy), in the Short Text her early attempt to put words into Christ’s mouth produces a much more predictable and affective speech:
‘Lo how I loved the’, as if he hadde saide: ‘My childe, if thow kan nought loke in my godhede, see here howe I lette open my side and my herte be clovene in twa, and lette oute blude and watere all that was tharein. And this likes me, and so wille I that it do the.’ (Vision, 13.2–5)
The infantilising address of clerical Passion meditations in the Short Text has been replaced by the more abstract bridal imagery of the Long Text.28 Moreover, the explanation that Julian extrapolates from the utterance in the Short Text there risks being pulled back into the linear narrative of the Crucifixion or being focused on the affective stereotype of the wounded sacred heart of Jesus. That motif is central to the Long Text but only in a much more apophatically abstract version than a facile devotion to the humanity of Christ (the kind of ‘dalliance of the manhood’ which Margery Kempe was encouraged to transcend). Julian’s ventriloquism of Christ becomes more subtle and more challenging in the transition from Short to Long Text, where Julian is keen to empower her reader to obey Christ’s invitation to ‘loke in my Godhede’.
The phrase ‘as if he said’ is sometimes used to signal her transposition into words of a more abstract understanding of an event. So the ‘great deed’ that will be performed by God is glossed: ‘Than meneth our good lorde thus, as if he saide: “Beholde and se. Here hast thou matter of mekenesse, here hast thou matter of love” ‘ (Revelation, 36.33–4). Here Julian gives no fewer than three lexical signals that she is appropriating and expounding the ‘meaning’ of the words of God. The ‘thus’ formula, linked to ‘as if he saide’, leads into a locution that begins with ‘Behold and se’ to mark the need for special attentiveness on the part of the listener or reader. This showing is then further explained as something that God delivers deep into man’s understanding at a level that affects all the spiritual senses in a profound synthesis of comprehension that transcends human affections:
tenderly our lord God toucht us and blissfully clepyth us, seyand in our soule: ‘Lete by al thi love my dereworthy child. Entend to me, I am enow to the, and enioye in thi saviour and in thi salvation.’ (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 50; Paris reads ‘Let me alone’ which makes much less sense in context)
Such strategies aspire to the very multi-modality that Julian seems to have felt as fundamental to her own visionary experience.
This is not to say that Julian escapes the textual constructedness of her discourses that is an inescapable function of reading and hearing, writing and living in a particular time and space.29 But it is to say that she manipulates that constructedness with unusual deftness and tactical skill. And that deftness and skill is not only manifested at the micro-textual level of almost subliminal lexical signals. At the macro-textual level of chapters, or indeed whole revelations, Julian displays equal skill at ‘borrowing’ textual velocity and narrative texture from familiar genres of religious writing. Julian may have conceived of the Short Text and Long Text as inhabiting different genres and displaying different generic and linguistic markers. The many expansions in the Long Text certainly broaden the generic range of Julian’s writing to encompass iconographical, theological and philosophical discourses not represented in the Short Text. Julian is an hospitable but highly controlled writer, allowing these discourses to discharge their narrative potential in carefully constructed tactical deployments, without ever letting any one of those guest discourses or genres swamp the ordinatio or modus agendi of her own metanarrative.
Julian displays unusual sensitivity to her own textual construction by being alert to the way that her conscious mind naturally slides into the registers and narrative conventions of dominant contemporary genres. In Chapter 6 of the Long Text, for example, Julian introduces a long excursus on prayer. Arguing that good prayer is a naked cleaving to the goodness of God in its most abstract form, Julian ruminates on the ways that mechanical and liturgical prayer can occlude this abstract goodness with its emphasis on ‘means’. She then transcribes her own immediate thoughts on the subject, which ‘came to my minde in the same time’, and the texture of the writing immediately shifts to reflect the devotional clichés of her time (and perhaps of her own earlier life):
For this, as I shall say, came to my minde in the same time: we pray to God for his holy flesh and for his pretious blode, his holy Passion, his deareworthy death and wounds […] and we pray him for his sweete moder love that him bare […] and we pray by his holy cross that he dyed on. (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 8)
‘This’ discrete semantic unit is being presented as Julian’s subconscious, conditioned and therefore almost instinctive linguistic response to the subject of prayer. The results are not impressive: the usual suspects of contemporary prayers and meditations are lined up for inspection in this sentence, each noun clinging pathetically onto its clichéd adjective.30 Against this array of predictable and rather jaded religious language, Julian simply reiterates her understanding of the true nature of prayer with the mantra-like repetition of the bare clause ‘it is of his godeness’. More matter and less art.31
In Revelation 14, Chapter 46, of the Long Text, Julian plays with the register and lexis of contemporary philosophical writings (and perhaps particularly of penitential and homiletic texts) to discuss the moral blindness and lack of self-knowledge that mortals display. There is a low-grade Boethianism in much of this, but nothing that could not have been acquired by osmosis from many proverbial, penitential or homiletic writings. Indeed, the whole chapter follows the moral trajectory of a good many penitential lyrics.32 She starts from a stress on the need for self knowledge in a transient world: ‘But our passand lif that we have here in our sensualite knowith not what ourself is’ (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 64). The striving for self knowledge, however, will never be fully realised until after death: ‘But we may never fulle know oureselfe into the last point, in which pointe this passing life and alle manner of wo and paine shall have ane ende’ (Revelation, 46.8–9). We should not, therefore, strive or dispute, but as obedient children of the church, should suffer patiently and abide: ‘And therwith I am wele apaide, abiding our lords wille in this hye marveyle. And now I yelde me to my moder holy church, as a simpil childe oweth’ (Revelation, 46.40–1). So far, so conventional.33 But Julian is content to inhabit this conventional narrative form only because by this stage in her showings she has already devized ways of complicating and finessing it. The teaching on the deferral of full self knowledge until death, for example, is conventional enough. But many of the conventional terms (‘pointe’, ‘passing’, ‘paine’, ‘wo’) have already been charged with resonance and accumulated meaning by her exploration of them in her earlier ruminations on the Passion of Christ. Moreover, she makes it clear that this conventional register is being used to a double purpose:
And yet in al this tyme, from the begynnyng to the end, I had ii manner of beholdyng: that one was endless continuant love with sekirnes of kepyng and blisful salvation, for of this was al the shewing; the other was the common techyng of holy church in which I was aforn enformyd and growndid, and wilfully haveing in use and understondyng. (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, pp. 64–5)
Julian contrasts the enfolding and overarching salvific shape of her own showings with the historically contextualized teachings of the Church and her own devotional practices. But she does not merely assert her obedience to those teachings. She also enacts that obedience by demonstrating in her choice of vocabulary how deeply she is ‘enformyd and growndid’ in it. The whole chapter becomes a display of her ‘wilfully haveing in use’ the penitential teachings of the Church on self-knowledge, transience, obedience and the need for mercy and grace. The chapter is both radical and orthodox at the same time, and her skill lies in showing both facets simultaneously.
But she may have had mixed feelings about the language in which these teachings were usually couched. Later on, in Revelation 16, Chapter 76, Julian redeploys this same self-castigating penitential register, but this time puts it in the mouth of the devil as part of his temptation to the soul to wallow in self hatred and despair:
for the chongeabilitie that we arn in in ourselfe we fallen often into synne. Than we have this be the stering of our enemy, be our owne foly and blyndhede; for they seien thus: ‘Thou wittest wele thou art a wretch, a synner, and also ontrew; for thou kepist not the command [Paris: covenant]; thou behotist oftentymes our lord that thou shalt don better, and anon after, thou fallist agen in the same, namely in slauth, in lesyng of tyme’; for that is the begynning of synne, as to my syghte. (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 123)
In Julian’s eyes, such words lead to sin, because they deny the mercy and love of her ‘curteyse Lorde’.34
Similarly in Revelation 13, Chapter 28 (a chapter which Sloane heads with the generic subheading ‘a remedye agayn tribulation’, significantly recalling William Flete’s popular treatise) she confronts the Church’s dominant discourse of tribulation, sin and punishment and weaves into it her own by now well-established emphasis on Christ’s compassion and love:
Ya, so ferforth I saw that our lord ioyth of the tribulations of his servants with reuth and compassion, to ech person that he lovyth to his bliss for to bringen, he levyth upon them something that is no lak in hys syte, wherby thei are lakid and dispisyd in thys world, scorned, rapyd and outcasten; and this he doith for to lettyn the harme that thei shuld take of the pompe and the veyn glory of this wrechid lif, and mak ther way redy to come to hevyn, and heynen them in his bliss without end lestyng; for he seith: ‘I shal al tobreke you for your veyn affections and your vicious pryde; and after that I shal togeder gader you and make you mylde and meke, clene and holy, by onyng to me.’ And than I saw that ech kynde compassion that man hath on his even cristen with charite, it is Criste in him. (Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, pp. 39–40)
The register and lexis here are immediately recognizable from contemporary penitential texts, and in particular from exhortations on the uses of tribulation (scorn, pomp, vainglory, wretched life).35 Moreover, she daringly places the awesome and terrifying teachings of the Church in the mouth of Christ: ‘I shal al tobreke you for your veyn affections and your vicious pryde; and after that I shal togeder gader you and make you mylde and meke, clene and holy, by onyng to me’. But this does not sound like Julian’s loving Christ: the clichés are too abrupt and blunt (vain affections, vicious pride) and the results are too cloyingly predictable (mild and meek, clean and holy). Only the final reference to ‘onyng’ and to the displayed love to ‘even cristen’ as a manifestation of Christ’s saving love for mankind suggest that Julian is once again seeking to explore and understand how the paternalistic magisterium of the Church relates to the milder context of her faith in the tirelessly enfolding (and maternalistic) love of Christ.36 In her dialogue with the teachings of the Church, Julian emerges as both intelligently forthright in her questioning and thoughtfully obedient (but by no means cowed) in her responses to ecclesiastical authority. Julian responds to the fears that are commonly brought to religion, and the fears that institutional religion often engenders in order to control its members. But she ultimately sidesteps them, as she sidesteps much of the paraphernalia of institutional religion, as ‘means’ that may become a hindrance to the end of knowing, loving and, above all, beholding God.
Julian is not merely being polite when she says her text is for her fellow Christians. Indeed, it was considered to be a particular responsibility of an anchoress to ‘schew takynyngs [tokenings] of luf’ to ‘thi eeuencristene’.37 But her showings require a particular set of interpretative skills from their readers. Reflecting on her own struggles to understand and articulate the meaning of her showings, Julian is careful to inscribe into her work clear guidance for her readers, and to leave for them clear signs of the provisionality of her own understandings and of the language in which they are expressed. In Chapter 51, emerging from the interpretative maelstrom of the Lord and the Servant, she sums up her own experience of working with her showings:
For twenty yere after the time of the shewing, save thre monthes, I had teching inwardly, as I shall sey: ‘It longeth to the to take hede to all the propertes and the condetions that were shewed in the example, though the thinke that it ben misty and indefferent to thy sight’. (Revelation, 51.73–6)
Extrapolating from her own practice of tactically using but never resting on a range of dominant religious discourses, the coda to Chapter 86, found only in the Sloane manuscript, and possibly a scribal addition, is generous and permissive in the invitation it extends to other readers to perform Julian’s text in their own voices and from their own conditions and experiences of life:
But take everything with other and trewly vndertsonden all is according to holy scripture and growndid in the same, and that Ihesus our very love, light and truth shall shew to all clen soules that with mekenes aske perseverantly this wisdom of hym. (Chapter 86, coda: Sloane, ed. Glasscoe, p. 135)
Julian’s ideal reader must be ‘meke’ (in the kenotic sense of being in a state of ‘wilful abiding’, open to ‘beholding’ what God shows) but above all ‘perseverant’. They must learn to take heed of all the ‘propertes and condetions’ of her writing, and in particular to be carefully attentive to the ventriloquial voices that play tactically throughout her text. Her stylistic originality lies in her construction of a challenging new textual synthesis that works as much by juxtaposition and contrast as by exposition and exemplification. Her book is ‘begunne […] but it is not yet performid’, precisely because it refuses to allow itself to be safely inscribed into the canons of conventional religious discourse. That is her challenge, but it is also the source of her shocking and surprising stylistic and theological richness.
1 This paper is deeply indebted to work undertaken collaboratively with Maggie Ross, especially our joint articles ‘The Apophatic Image: The Poetics of Effacement in Julian of Norwich’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium V, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 53–77, and ‘ “With mekeness aske perseverantly …“: On Reading Julian of Norwich’, Mystics Quarterly 30 (2004), pp. 125–40. See also Vincent Gillespie, ‘Strange Images of Death: The Passion in Later Medieval English Devotional and Mystical Writing’, Analecta Cartusiana 117 (1987), pp. 110–59; Vincent Gillespie, ‘Postcards from the Edge: Interpreting the Ineffable in the Middle English Mystics’, in Interpretation Medieval and Modern: The J. A. W. Bennett Memorial Lectures: Perugia 1992, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 137–65.
2 All citations of Julian’s text will normally be from The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Shewed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (Turnhout, 2006), this quotation on p. 123. This edition, like that of Colledge and Walsh, is based on Paris, Bibl. Nat. MS fonds Anglais 40, written by an English hand in the third quarter of the sixteenth century. Citations from the slightly later London, British Library MS Sloane 2499 will be from Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter, 1993). In some of the detailed discussions that follow, I prefer Sloane to Paris. For an assessment of the textual problems, see Marion Glasscoe, ‘Visions and Revisions: A Further Look at the Manuscripts of Julian of Norwich’, Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989), pp. 103–20.
3 For the suggestion that Julian was engaged in a process of lectio divina on her showings, see A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Toronto, 1978), pp. 131–2.
4 J. Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. C. Misrahi (2nd edn, New York, 1974), pp. 90–1. See also the interesting discussion in Brad Peters, ‘A Genre Approach to Julian of Norwich’s Epistemology’, in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York, 1998), pp. 115–52.
5 Gillespie and Ross, ‘The Apophatic Image’, p. 62; Tarjei Park, ‘Reflecting Christ: The Role of the Flesh in Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium V, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 17–37, esp. pp. 33–4.
6 For analysis of kenosis in Julian’s text, see Gillespie and Ross, ‘The Apophatic Image’, pp. 59–60, and bibliography cited there; ‘Postcards from the Edge’, passim; and, more broadly, Nicholas Watson, ‘Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God’, in New Medieval Literatures 1, ed. Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland and David Lawton (Oxford, 1997), pp. 85–124. For recent general discussion of the theological concept, see Letting Go: Rethinking Kenosis, ed. Onno Zijlstra (Bern, 2002); Exploring Kenotic Christology: The Self-Emptying of God, ed. C. Stephen Evans (Oxford, 2006).
7 See, for example, A. J. Minnis, ‘The Sources of The Cloud of Unknowing: A Reconsideration’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium I, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter, 1982), pp. 63–75; A. J. Minnis, ‘Affection and Imagination in “The Cloud of Unknowing” and Hilton’s “Scale of Perfection” ‘, Traditio 39 (1983), pp. 323–66. For the theological background, see M. D. Chenu, La Théologie comme Science au XIIIe Siècle, 3rd edn, Bibliothèque Thomiste 33 (Paris, 1957), pp. 33–57, 93–100; Ulrich Köpf, Die Anfänge der theologischer Wissenschaftstheorie im 13. Jahrundert, Beitrage zur historischen Theologie 49 (Tübingen, 1974), pp. 107–12 and 266–7; Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition (Oxford, 1981), pp. 132–58, esp. pp. 153–4.
8 For more on this word, see Gillespie and Ross, ‘The Apophatic Image’, p. 69.
9 On ineffability in the Middle English tradition, see my ‘Postcards from the Edge’, passim. More generally, see Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1992); Mysticism and Language, ed. Steven Katz (Oxford, 1992); Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago, 1994); Mystics: Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard (Chicago, 2003).
10 Annie Sutherland, ‘ “Our feyth is groundyd in goddes worde”: Julian of Norwich and the Bible’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium VII, ed. E. A. Jones (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 1–20. See also her chapter in this volume.
11 Paul Zumthor, Speaking of the Middle Ages, trans. Sarah White (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1986), p. 58.
12 For useful discussion of this important and contentious issue, see Anna Maria Reynolds, ‘Some Literary Influences in the Revelations of Julian of Norwich’, Leeds University Studies in Language and Literature 7–8 (1952), pp. 18–28; 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), pp. 820–38; Denise Nowakowski Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton, 1994); 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, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 104–27; Felicity Riddy, ‘Julian of Norwich and Self-Textualization’, in Editing Women, ed. Ann M. Hutchison (Cardiff, 1998), pp. 101–24; Christopher Abbott, Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 47–60.
13 On this difference, see Simon Tugwell, Ways of Imperfection: An Exploration of Christian Spirituality (London, 1984), pp. 187–207; B. A. Windeatt, ‘Julian of Norwich and Her Audience’, Review of English Studies, n.s. 28 (1977), pp. 1–17.
14 Nicholas Watson, ‘The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Love’, Speculum 68 (1993), pp. 637–83, pp. 670–2. On the probatio vitae necessary before a bishop would sanction enclosure, see Ann K Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 53–91, esp. pp. 71: ‘In all known instances probation was ordered for women who were proceeding to the anchorite life without having been nuns’; E. A. Jones, ‘A New Look into the Speculum Inclusorum’, in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Ireland and Wales: Exeter Symposium VI, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 123–45. My hypothesis about the genesis of the Short Text may be significant for the question of Julian’s life before enclosure and whether she was already a nun when she received her showings. My view is that she was not. See Benedicta Ward, ‘Julian the Solitary’, in Julian Reconsidered, ed. Kenneth Leech and Benedicta Ward (Oxford, 1988), pp. 11–35. For revelations to an anchoress subsequently (and very rapidly) submitted in letter form to a spiritual ‘fadyr’ and other clerical authorities, see A Revelation of Purgatory, ed. Marta Powell Harley, Studies in Women and Religion 18 (Lewiston NY, 1985). Mary C. Erler, ‘ “A Revelation of Purgatory” (1422); Reform and the Politics of Female Visions’, Viator 38 (2007), pp. 321–47, notes (p. 325) that at the onset of her revelations Birgitta of Sweden was instructed that she ‘suld obei to one master of diuinite, and shewe hime hir reuelacions þat were shewed vnto hir’: Bridget of Sweden, The Liber Celestis of St Bridget of Sweden, vol. 1, ed. Roger Ellis, EETS o.s. 291 (1987), p. 3.
15 On the issue of Julian’s probable knowledge of some Latin grammatical constructions at the time of the composition of the Short Text, see the thoughtful analysis of Colledge and Walsh’s claims that she was literata by Michael J. Wright: ‘Julian of Norwich’s Early Knowledge of Latin’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 94 (1993), pp. 37–45.
16 Zumthor, Speaking of the Middle Ages, p. 72.
17 M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1973), pp. 153–65; Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, Texas, 1992), pp. xxxi, 6.
18 The apophatic force of this manoeuvre is entirely suppressed in the Paris Manuscript, which reads ‘Nevertheles the fairhede and the livelyhede continued in the same bewty and livelines’ (Revelation, 7.15–16). This looks like a particularly cloth-eared (‘livelyhede … livelines’) and literal-minded attempt to make sense of something like Sloane’s reading. There is nothing comparable in the Short Text at this point.
19 In the comparable passage in the Long Text (Revelation, 73.24), the reference to ‘many men and women’ has been replaced by the courteously inclusive ‘some of us’.
20 William Flete, ‘Remedies against Temptations’: The Third English Version of William Flete, ed. E. Colledge and N. Chadwick, Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pieta V (Rome, 1967), p. 227. The Latin De remediis contra temptationes was written by William Flete probably between 1352 and 1358. The text had considerable circulation in Latin and English, undergoing at least three recensions and elaborations of the vernacular text along the way. For discussion, see M. B. Hackett, ‘William Flete and the De Remediis contra Temptaciones’, in Medieval Studies presented to Aubrey Gwynn S. J., ed. J. A. Watt, J. B. Morrall and F. X. Martin (Dublin, 1961), pp. 330–48; Benedict Hackett, Edmund Colledge, and N. Chadwick, ‘William Flete’s ‘De Remediis contra Temptaciones’ in its Latin and English Recensions: The Growth of a Text’, Mediaeval Studies 26 (1964), pp. 210–30.
21 Colledge and Walsh (p. 426) suggest Luke 18.26–7 and 1.37.
22 On this apophatic topos in Plotinus, see Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, pp. 16–17.
23 Introductory verbal punctuation of this sort occurs throughout the text but is most densely found in the showings before the ‘misty’ example of the Lord and the Servant. See, for example, Chapters 12, 15, 19, 24, 25, 36, 40, 42, 43, 70.
24 Colledge and Walsh (p. 342) point out that the Short Text reading ‘in the semes’ (Section 8) might refer to long incised wounds, such as might be caused at the scourging. The Long Text’s more ambiguous ‘in seming’, therefore, puns on both the physicality of the suffering and its analogical function as a figure or likeness of something else.
25 Colledge and Walsh (p. 342) and Watson and Jenkins (p. 166) note the parallel with the language of The Privity of the Passion, edited in Yorkshire Writers: Richard Rolle of Hampole and his Followers, ed. C. Horstman (London, 1895), 1, pp. 198–218, esp. pp. 200–9. But the same lexical set is also found in other Passion meditations, lyrics, and popular prayers such as The Fifteen Oes.
26 The phrase ‘Beholde and see’ is also used in The Privity of the Passion, ed. Horstman, Yorkshire Writers, 1, p. 201. It is also common in addresses direct to the audience in medieval drama, and in hymns and religious lyrics. But the centrality of ‘beholding’ in Julian’s contemplative praxis gives particular force to her use of the imperative.
27 Christ’s wounds and his blood perform similar functions in The Prickynge of Love, ed. Harold Kane, Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 92:10 (Salzburg, 1983), 1, pp. 16–17. The Pricking may well be one of the vernacular texts that Julian is tactically pastiching.
28 At the opening of the second sentence here, Paris retains the conventional address to ‘My childe’ found in the Short Text, so it may be that the Sloane scribe is guilty of eyeskip in this passage. But the tenor of the passage is generally more sophisticated and abstract in the move from Short to Long Text.
29 On the ‘orality’ of Julian’s textual construction, see Felicity Riddy, ‘ “Women Talking about the things of God” ‘, pp. 113–14. For women as readers of religious texts, see the extensive bibliography in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Analytical Survey 5: “Reading is Good Prayer”: Recent Research on Female Reading Communities’, in New Medieval Literatures 5, ed. Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland and David Lawton (Oxford, 2002), pp. 229–97; Rebecca Krug, Reading Families: Women’s Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca, 2002); Mary C. Erler, Women, Reading and Piety in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2002).
30 Compare the lexis of these phrases with the commonplace vernacular prayers such as The Fifteen Oes, or those collected by R. H. Robbins: ‘Private Prayers in Middle English Verse’, Studies in Philology 36 (1939), pp. 466–75; ‘Popular Prayers in Middle English verse’, Modern Philology 36 (1939), pp. 337–50; ‘Five Middle English Verse Prayers from Lambeth MS. 541’, Neophilologus 38 (1954), pp. 36–41. I am indebted to Alex da Costa for this suggestion, and for her perceptive comments on Julian’s attitudes to private prayer.
31 Her more developed teachings on prayer, drawing on the abstract language of contemplative prayer treatises, are found in Revelation 14, Chapters 41–43.
32 See, for instance, some of the lyrics in the Vernon manuscript, e.g. nos 95, 100, 102, 105, 106, 107, 114 in Religious Lyrics of the XIVth Century, ed. C. Brown, 2nd edn rev. by G. V. Smithers (Oxford, 1952); Twenty-Six Political and Other Poems, ed. J. Kail, EETS o.s. 124 (1904), nos 1, 7, 22. Also worth comparison are the Middle English versions of the Penitential Psalms.
33 For an homiletic comparison, Fasciculus Morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook, ed. and trans. Siegfried Wenzel (London, 1989) offers a compendium of contemporary preaching clichés on penance, tribulation and the need for grace and obedience to Mother Church.
34 Colledge and Walsh’s suggested analogue from Book II Chapter 12 of Hilton’s Scale of Perfection (p. 687) is unpersuasive. But see the description of the death of an evil man, accompanied by the ‘voyce of creatures clamerynge and criynge’ in the Speculum Christiani, ed. Gustaf Holmstedt, EETS o.s. 182 (London, 1933 for 1929), pp. 50–2. Similar play of voices is found in the Middle English version of the pseudo-Augustine (Paulinus of Aquilea) Epistola ad Julianum vel Henricum Comitem (Liber exhortationis), in The Wycliffe Bible, II: The Origin of the First Revision as presented in De Salutaribus Documentis, ed. S. L. Fristedt, Stockholm Studies in English 21 (Stockholm, 1969).
35 Watson and Jenkins (p. 212) and Colledge and Walsh (p. 37) suggest as an analogue The Chastising of God’s Children and the Treatise of Perfection of the Sons of God, ed. Joyce Bazire and Eric Colledge (Oxford, 1957). The s.xv copy in Cambridge, Trinity College MS B. 14. 19 survives as part of a compilation, perhaps of Norfolk provenance, which also contains The Pricking of Love, Richard Lavenham’s Litel tretys on the deadly sins, an expanded copy of the so-called Lay Folk’s Catechism, and an interestingly pertinent treatise on discerning the voices of the world, the flesh and the devil from that of God. The range of texts in this compilation is suggestive of the kinds of vernacular materials that Julian is ventriloquising and pastiching.
36 For a similar, but more schematic and formulaic, linkage between penitential and tribulation themes, see Memoriale Credencium: A Late Middle English Manual of Theology for Lay People, ed. J. H. L. Kengen (Nijmegen, 1979).
37 See How ane ankares sal haf hir to þaim þat comes to hir, in Yorkshire Writers, ed. Horstman, 1, pp. 106–7. The passage derives from Book I, Chapter 83 of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection.