Very Brief Histories

A very brief history

Janina Ramirez

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780281076857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Over six hundred years ago a woman known as Julian of Norwich wrote what is now regarded as one of the greatest works of literature in English. Based on a sequence of mystical visions she received in 1373, her book is called Revelations of Divine Love. Julian lived through an age of political and religious turmoil, as well as through the misery of the Black Death, and her writing engages with timeless questions about life, love and the meaning of suffering. But who was Julian of Norwich? And what can she teach us today?Medievalist and TV historian Janina Ramirez invites you to join her in exploring Julian's remarkable life and times, offering insights into how and why her writing has survived, and what we can learn from this fourteenth-century mystic whose work lay hidden in the shadows of her male contemporaries for far too long.

Part 1

THE HISTORY

1

Introducing Julian

Revelations of Divine Love is not an autobiography, in that it contains virtually no details about the life and times of its author. Julian is remarkably absent from her text. We learn nothing about her childhood, whether she had a family, where she lived, what occupied her outside prayer and contemplation. However, it is a spiritual autobiography, charting the inner journey of Julian’s mind and soul following a set of sixteen revelations that she received at the age of thirty. It charts her constant struggle to engage with the big questions of life: Who is God? How should we know him? Does sin exist? How can we survive in a life full of pain and suffering? What is the purpose of my life on earth? In this respect her text exists outside its time, and can be as relevant, comforting and thought-provoking now as it was in the fourteenth century.

‘Julian of Norwich’s day was a long time coming.’1 All commentators on Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love agree that her work has stayed in the shadows for too long. When it first appeared in print some three hundred years after it was written, it received the harshest of reviews. Bishop Stillingfleet declared it the ‘fantastic revelations of a distempered brain’. Written in Middle English, containing mystical visions gleaned through meditation upon a gory gothic image of Christ, and steeped in Catholic medieval ideas, Julian’s text fared poorly in post-Reformation England. As monasteries were dismantled and images attacked, so texts such as the Revelations of Divine Love were destroyed, scorned and driven underground. Yet it found a way to survive down the centuries, largely through the dedication of a sequence of intellectual, strong and determined women. That we even have Julian’s text today is little short of a miracle, and despite being a long time coming, her day is now.

One issue readers of Julian’s text can encounter, whether they read the original or a sensitive translation, is that she wrote in Middle English. Her dialect, East Anglian, is not as complicated to read as some other fourteenth-century texts, but it can still be startling for a modern reader. Some words appear recognizable, for example ‘behovely’, and yet their meaning can be complex and rooted specifically in the time and place in which they were written. Reading Julian out loud in the original can be a good way to hear the meaning of her phrases. It also allows the beauty of her prose to be truly effective. The pronunciation of her vowels is slightly longer and higher than our modern equivalents, and closer to a broad northern accent than a modern Norwich one.

Her text survives in two versions, known as the ‘Short Text’ and the ‘Long Text’. The first may have been written as early as 1388, shortly after Julian had her revelations, while the longer version, which contains an expanded and more sophisticated set of ruminations on her visions, could have been recorded late in her life. The Short Text survives in a single copy, made in the fifteenth century, and it has an immediacy and spontaneity to it that may indicate it was recorded from recent memory. The Long Text shows a greater degree of authorial consciousness, and the theology is far more developed, which may indicate that it has been worked and reworked over a number of years. It is remarkable that we have both versions surviving. Whatever the timings of the Short and Long Texts, to have two different accounts of Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love suggests that the little historical information we have about Julian’s life is borne out by the manuscripts; she had her visions, became an anchoress, lived for a long time afterwards, and continually returned to her revelations as she ruminated on them day after day, year after year.

All Julian wants us to know about her she includes in her text. She was born around 1343, received her visions at the age of 30 in 1373, and was still alive in 1416. She had many years to develop her understanding of what was shown to her over a period of three days and nights as she lay dying. To understand fully what she believed were ‘divine shewings’, she took the seemingly drastic step of being enclosed as an anchoress inside a cell, which was probably to the north side of the Church of St Julian, on King Street in Norwich. Becoming an anchoress around the age of 43, she lived on for up to thirty years in one room, her only door to the world walled up, and her enclosure confirmed by the last rites. This saw her as effectively dead to this world. In watching her own last rites she was a witness at her own funeral, and her existence within the cell was akin to living within a tomb.

Medieval mysticism

The text that she produced while locked within her cell is best described as ‘medieval mysticism’. All major world religions have a mystical element, and it can be understood as ‘a personal, unmediated approach to, and attainment of, a direct apprehension of God’ (Oxford English Dictionary). By the fourteenth century, when Julian wrote Revelations of Divine Love, the mystical tradition was gathering momentum across Europe and becoming extremely popular. Hildegard of Bingen was one of the first female mystics to establish the tradition. She was a remarkable woman, who in the twelfth century experienced visions but who was also renowned for her work in medicine, music, poetry, natural history, philosophy, mathematics and linguistics. She was a nun and abbess, but as the centuries progressed, women outside convents began to experience, publicize and record visions, and priests became fascinated with them.

Mystical texts became very popular and circulated widely. Marie of Oignies was heralded as a visionary, despite being a laywoman, and she was afflicted with uncontrollable tears and ecstasies. She wore only white, ate no meat and mortified her flesh, traits that English mystics such as Margery Kempe would later assume in emulation of a medieval celebrity. One of the most famous mystics of the fourteenth century was St Bridget of Sweden, now one of the six patron saints of Europe. Like Julian, she received revelations, though hers started at the age of ten. She too saw an image of the crucifix and interacted with Christ. Extremely popular in her lifetime, her writings were later widely condemned, Martin Luther declaring her die tolle Brigit (‘the crazy Bridget’),2 and William Marshall, the sixteenth-century English Protestant Reformer, encouraging people to ‘forget such prayers as those of Saint Bridget’.3

Mystical texts have often been scorned, since they rarely follow the tone and approach of traditional religious works, encouraging instead an immediate and intimate understanding of the divine. As a result, the online Oxford English Dictionary also includes this definition of ‘mysticism’:

Freq. derogatory. Religious belief that is characterized by vague, obscure, or confused spirituality; a belief system based on the assumption of occult forces, mysterious supernatural agencies, etc.

Despite the scepticism with which mystical texts could be viewed, they were incredibly popular in the medieval period. They present, often in beautiful and expressive language, an experience or set of experiences that have allowed an author to move beyond the limits of normal human thought, into an area that is inexplicable and based on feelings or sensations. For mystical writers, knowledge – the preserve of the few – was not academic, but experiential. Because Julian of Norwich and her fellow English mystics were writing within a fourteenth-century Christian framework, they call the divine ‘God’ and understand their experiences through Christian theology. Yet moving beyond the problems of human existence to a greater understanding of how these problems can be transformed is not limited to Christian readers. Revelations of Divine Love is a book in which people of all religions and backgrounds can find solace and inspiration. Blake tapped into the universal feeling of transcendence that the mystic experiences when he wrote:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.4

There are five well-known English mystics, who all lived roughly contemporaneously: Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle, the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Margery Kempe and Julian. All chose to write not in Latin, the language of the Church, but in English. This may be because the sensory, visceral experiences they recount depend on the spoken vernacular for potency.5 The inexplicable is best described in one’s mother tongue, rather than in a learned language. Two of the five English mystics are women, a staggering thought considering that neither would have received an education approaching that of their male counterparts. But it does make sense when considering what they were writing about. By using the vernacular, they could couch their theological ruminations more as personal encounters with the divine, rather than present them as treatises on the nature of the divine.

That a woman could have an individual experience and relate this to her relationship with Christ was preferable to trying to take on the monasteries and universities with academic treatises. Mystics directly experienced God in three ways: first, bodily visions, meaning to be aware with one’s senses – sight, sound or others; second, ghostly visions, such as spiritual visions and sayings directly imparted to the soul; and lastly, intellectual enlightenment, where their mind came into a new understanding of God.6 Julian says she has all three, but wants to explore the spiritual sight more fully:

All this was shown in three ways: that is to say, by bodily sight, and by words formed in my understanding, and by spiritual vision. But I neither can nor know how to disclose the spiritual vision as openly or as fully as I would wish.

(Chapter 9)

Had she tried to do this via the traditional routes reserved for theologians – namely within a university or monastery – she would have been prohibited because she was a woman. But within her cell she could read, ruminate and write, and because she wrote a mystical text in English, she could avoid coming into direct conflict with the male intellectuals of her time.

Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love is as unique for what it is not as for what it is. It is classed as a mystical text, since it focuses on a set of individual visions and explores a personal understanding of divine matters. Yet it is unlike other mystical texts of the time in many ways because it speaks to ‘all fellow Christians’ rather than one reader. Julian’s femininity brings a new twist to the themes handled by Hilton, Rolle and the Cloud-author, in particular with regard to God’s unconditional love as mother. Unlike other fourteenth-century religious texts, Julian’s is not founded on scholasticism or theological texts, it is not biblical in focus, and there is no mention of the multitude of biblical characters, from Adam and Eve to the Apostles. It is not instructional, and gives no direct guidance on how Christians should live their lives. It is not like other vernacular literature, such as Chaucer or Langland, in that it has no cast apart from Julian herself, God, Mary and Christ. It is not poetry, yet it is poetic. It is from the fourteenth century, and yet it seems timeless.

It is the work of one remarkable woman who has contemplated a set of personal visions within a single room for decades. The idea of being walled up in one room for the rest of our lives – more than two decades in Julian’s case – may sound like a living hell. That men and women throughout the medieval period chose this life chimes with our modern notions of the time as backwards, superstitious and ignorant. However, the life of an anchoress was something middle-aged women like Julian could embrace. If she were a widow or unmarried, there were four options she could choose from: marry again, become a celibate laywoman, enter a convent or become an anchorite. Julian chose the latter.

Julian as anchoress

The word ‘anchorite’ comes from the Greek verb ‘to retire’. An anchorite had to retire from the world, in emulation of the fourth-century Desert Fathers who sought to retreat from the world in order to be less distracted and more focused on spiritual matters. The desire for a hermit’s life away from cities and people was countered by the monastic ideals of communal living and adherence to a strict rule. But by the eleventh century a new interest in eremitical removal from worldly concerns became increasingly popular. Some chose the life of a solitary, rather than a hermit, so Richard Rolle, for example, was able to move about and was not tied to one place.7 In the fourteenth century there were options for those who wanted to follow the example of the original desert hermits. Yet there was a major difference: while the Desert Fathers had left behind the city in search of peace, medieval solitaries, anchorites and their female equivalents, anchoresses, were often walled up in the heart of towns. They were ‘in the world, but not of it’.8

A text survives from the thirteenth century, called Ancrene Wisse, which details the role of an anchoress and what was expected of her: ‘True anchoresses are indeed birds of heaven,’ says the author, ‘which fly up high and sit singing merrily on the green boughs – that is, direct their thoughts upwards at the bliss of heaven.’9 An anchoress should be seen as a potent member of a medieval society that valued continual prayer and care for the spiritual needs of its citizens. In a reductive version of medieval society – the three estates – the clergy protected the people’s souls, the nobility protected the people’s rights and the peasantry provided for daily needs. But certainly those members of society actively involved in religion, such as monks, priests and hermits, were fulfilling a function. As an anchorite, Julian would have imbued the very fabric of her church with her prayers and meditations, something the Christians of Norwich would have prized. She was working for her community, fighting for the souls of the people with her prayers.

Yet the Ancrene Wisse hints at some of the challenges she would have faced. Her contact with the world was strictly limited to conversation behind a black curtain and restricted interaction with her servant. She would have a window to the world, but it was to be seen as a distraction: ‘My dear sisters, love your windows as little as ever you can … all the misery that there now is and ever yet was and ever shall be – it all comes of sight.’10 Julian was in the world, but her text reveals she sought to withdraw from it, into a complex and mentally challenging inner life.

There were many restrictions on Julian as an anchoress. Not only had she to adhere to the three regulations of poverty, chastity and stability of place, she...

Table of contents

• CoverImage
• Title Page
• Imprint
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Chronology
• Part 1: The history
• Part 2: The legacy
• Notes
• Further reading
• Search terms
• Figures