Julian of Norwich

Almost nothing of Julian’s biography is securely known — not her birth name, her family, her education, or whether she had been a nun or a wife or both before becoming an anchoress. What is known is that on what she believed was her deathbed in May 1373, at age thirty, she received a series of visions of the crucified Christ and of the love behind the world; that she recovered; and that she spent the rest of her life as an anchoress in Norwich, walled into a cell attached to the parish church now bearing her name, accessible to [[san-francisco|the city]] through a small window for spiritual counsel. Margery Kempe visited her there in 1413 and recorded the visit. Bequests in Norwich wills name Julian as alive into the 1410s.

She wrote two versions of her Revelations. The Short Text, composed close to the visions themselves, recounts what she saw. The Long Text, revised across decades, is a sustained theological meditation on what the visions meant — written by a woman whose disclaimers about her unlearned state are themselves a careful negotiation of her position as a woman doing theology in 14th-century England.

The teaching

Three threads, deeply intertwined, run through the Long Text:

1. The unshakability of divine love. Julian’s visions were of the suffering Christ, but what she saw in the suffering was the depth of love willing to bear it. The recurring refrain: Love was his meaning. Who showed it to thee? Love. What showed he thee? Love. Wherefore showed it he? For love.

2. The motherhood of God. Julian works out, with theological care, the claim that God is mother as fully and as properly as God is father — not as metaphor but as substance. Christ is “our true Mother in nature by our first creation; and he is our true Mother in grace by his taking our created nature.” This is not 20th-century gender politics retrofitted onto a medieval text; it is in the manuscripts, developed at length, in the 14th century.

3. Sin, necessity, and the optimism of love. Confronted in vision with the question of why God permitted the Fall, Julian receives the answer that has rung across centuries: Sin is behovely [necessary], but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Not a denial of pain — Julian’s theology is fully clear-eyed about suffering — but a refusal to grant pain the last word.

She holds these together with a delicacy that her readers across centuries have found inexhaustible.

Why she matters now

Julian was an obscure figure for centuries; the Long Text was not printed until 1670 (by the English Catholic dom Serenus Cressy), and even then circulated narrowly. The 20th century recovered her: Grace Warrack’s 1901 modernization, Evelyn Underhill’s championing, T.S. Eliot’s quotation in the Four Quartets (All shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well) put her into general reading. Now she is studied across denominations, read by feminist theologians for the motherhood-of-God passages, taught in contemplative-renewal programs as a guide to the long patience contemplative life requires.

She remains, on the page, what she became in her cell: a witness that love can be trusted past the worst of what one has seen.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[christian-mysticism]]
• Shares approach with: [[spirituality]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Julian of Norwich. The [[revelations-of-divine-love|Showings]] of Julian of Norwich. Ed. Denise N. Baker. Norton Critical Editions, 2005. Source class: primary text / scholarly edition.
2. Julian of Norwich. [[revelations-of-divine-love|Revelations of Divine Love]]. Trans. Elizabeth [[atlantic-silverside|Spearing]]. Penguin Classics, 1998. Source class: primary text / accessible translation.
3. Grace M. Jantzen. Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian. SPCK, 1987 (rev. 2000). Source class: book / scholarly study.
4. Veronica Mary Rolf. Julian’s Gospel: Illuminating the Life and Revelations of Julian of Norwich. Orbis, 2013. Source class: book / contextual study.
5. Denys Turner. Julian of Norwich, Theologian. Yale, 2011. Source class: book / theological study.

Lenses still to grow

• The English mystical flourishing of the 14th century in its own right (Julian, [[the-cloud-of-unknowing|the Cloud]] author, Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle, Margery Kempe).
• Julian’s reception in 20th-century literary modernism (Eliot, Auden, contemporary poets) deserves its own treatment.
• The motherhood-of-God theology as developed by later feminist theologians (Sallie McFague, Elizabeth Johnson) reading back through Julian.
• Julian and disability theology / theology of suffering — her serious illness and her thirty in-cell years are read in different ways by different traditions.