Introducing Julian of Norwich

One of the surprising and encouraging turns in English-language theology of recent years is the amount of attention and respect given to the short fourteenth-century book, Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich. It is often said that Revelations was the first book-length text we have written by a woman in English. It is, in fact, two books, consisting of a relatively “short text” written when Julian was in her early thirties and the so-called “long text” written twenty years later. Her writing was occasioned by a short period of acute illness when she was thirty years old in which she, and those around her, were convinced that she was going to die. It was in this state that she experienced a series of what she called “shewings” which are often thought of as visions because some of them are so visually vivid, but the better word is “revelations” because not all of what is “shown” to Julian is visual. Indeed, one feature of her writing style is that she often uses the word “see” to mean “understand.” So to a considerable extent, it is possible to say that when we describe Julian as a visionary or mystic, we mean that she was a thinker; and when we talk about her “revelations,” we are talking about her “reflections.”

In Julian's day, Norwich was the second largest city in England and while she was a child, it was half destroyed by the plague.