Although the Revelation does not display a wealth of citation from attributed sources, yet it does imitate some of the gestures by which the compiler may be identified and the voices of his sources discerned. Julian's text will here be considered alongside three compilation texts which, like the Revelation, may be dated to the cusp of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: the Speculum Christiani, which draws together material from the Bible, the Fathers, and other auctoritates in Latin and English, with various popular sayings and verses, to form eight tabulae; The Chastising of God's Children, which draws on both early- and late-medieval sources including Gregory, Augustine, Ruusbroec and Suso; and Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God in which passages from Augustine, Cassian, Bernard, Peter Lombard and Gregory are interlaced with biblical citations, and Rolle, Hilton and Bridget also appear to have been adapted in a compilation which has been described as ‘really little more than a tissue of borrowings’.

To dismiss Contemplations with such a judgement is to ignore the great skill of the text's sophisticated organization: its material is carefully selected and arranged around an orderly series of topics, divided into brief sections alphabetically marked, and supplied with a kalendar. Nevertheless, it is true that, in terms of material, the Speculum, Contemplations and The Chastising in places exemplify compilatio in one of its most extreme forms, the catena – fundamentally a succession of different passages quoted from various auctoritates.