Julian of Norwich's Legacy: Medieval Mysticism and Post-Medieval Reception (The New Middle Ages)

THE N E W M I D D L E AGE S BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to pluridisciplinary studies of medieval cultures, with particular emphasis on recuperating women’s history and on feminist and gender analyses. This peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.

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Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture edited by Stewart Gordon Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the Middle Ages edited by Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: Ocular Desires by Suzannah Biernoff Listen, Daughter: The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages edited by Constant J. Mews Science, the Singular, and the Question of Theology by Richard A. Lee, Jr. Gender in Debate from the Early Middle Ages to the Renaissance edited by Thelma S. Fenster and Clare A. Lees Malory’s Morte D’Arthur: Remaking Arthurian Tradition by Catherine Batt The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval Religious Literature edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Duncan Robertson, and Nancy Warren Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 by Kathleen Kamerick Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Literary Structure in Late Medieval England by Elizabeth Scala Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul by Bonnie Eff ros

Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Image and Empire by Anne McClanan

Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity by John M. Ganim

Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects, Texts, Images edited by Désirée G. Koslin and Janet Snyder

Queer Love in the Middle Ages by Anna Klosowska

Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Carmi Parsons Isabel La Católica, Queen of Castile: Critical Essays edited by David A. Boruchoff Homoeroticism and Chivalry: Discourses of Male Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century by Richard E. Zeikowitz Portraits of Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and Politics in England 1225–1350 by Linda E. Mitchell Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan of Arc by Maud Burnett McInerney The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture by Angela Jane Weisl Capetian Women edited by Kathleen D. Nolan Joan of Arc and Spirituality edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie Wheeler The Texture of Society: Medieval Women in the Southern Low Countries edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Mary A. Suydam

Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric by Denise K. Filios Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England by David Gary Shaw Visual Culture and the German Middle Ages edited by Kathryn Starkey and Horst Wenzel Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor of Jeremy duQuesnay Adams, Volumes 1 and 2 edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature by Elizabeth Allen Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses of Alterity in the Middle Ages by Michael Uebel Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays edited by Lawrence Besserman Tolkien’s Modern Middle Ages edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England by Frank Grady

Charlemagne’s Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age by Paul Edward Dutton

Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in Eighth-to-Twelfth Century Painting by Jennifer L. Ball

Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Medieval Text and Image edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills

The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the “Work” of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350–1500 by Kellie Robertson

Queering Medieval Genres by Tison Pugh

The Dogaressa of Venice, 1250–1500: Wife and Icon by Holly S. Hurlburt

Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism by L. Michael Harrington The Middle Ages at Work edited by Kellie Robertson and Michael Uebel Chaucer’s Jobs by David R. Carlson

Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, Abelard, and Alan of Lille: Words in the Absence of Things by Eileen C. Sweeney The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the Medieval Religious Renewal Movement by Patricia Ranft

On the Purifi cation of Women: Churching in Northern France, 1100–1500 by Paula M. Rieder

Women and Medieval Epic: Gender, Genre, and the Limits of Epic Masculinity edited by Sara S. Poor and Jana K. Schulman

Writers of the Reign of Henry II: Twelve Essays edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones

Race, Class, and Gender in “Medieval” Cinema edited by Lynn T. Ramey and Tison Pugh

Lonesome Words: The Vocal Poetics of the Old English Lament and the African-American Blues Song by M.G. McGeachy Performing Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval English Nunneries by Anne Bagnell Yardley The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer by Robert R. Edwards Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk edited by Bonnie Wheeler Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork, and Other Cultural Imaginings edited by E. Jane Burns Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France?: The Case for St. Florent of Saumur by George Beech Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the Middle Ages by Erin L. Jordan Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Diffi cult Middles by Jeff rey Jerome Cohen Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer’s Pandarus by Gretchen Mieszkowski The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature by Jeremy J. Citrome Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the Canterbury Tales by Lee Patterson

Allegory and Sexual Ethics in the High Middle Ages by Noah D. Guynn England and Iberia in the Middle Ages, 12th–15th Century: Cultural, Literary, and Political Exchanges edited by María Bullón-Fernández The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process by Albrecht Classen Claustrophilia: The Erotics of Enclosure in Medieval Literature by Cary Howie Cannibalism in High Medieval English Literature by Heather Blurton The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture by Christina M. Fitzgerald Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood by Holly A. Crocker The Literary Subversions of Medieval Women by Jane Chance Manmade Marvels in Medieval Culture and Literature by Scott Lightsey American Chaucers by Candace Barrington Representing Others in Medieval Iberian Literature by Michelle M. Hamilton Paradigms and Methods in Early Medieval Studies edited by Celia Chazelle and Felice Lifshitz The King and the Whore: King Roderick and La Cava by Elizabeth Drayson

Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing by Lara Farina

Langland’s Early Modern Identities by Sarah A. Kelen

Odd Bodies and Visible Ends in Medieval Literature by Sachi Shimomura

Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages edited by Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberly K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey

On Farting: Language and Laughter in the Middle Ages by Valerie Allen

Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language: An Edition, Translation, and Discussion by Sarah L. Higley

Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality by Louise M. Sylvester

The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance by Seeta Chaganti

Communal Discord, Child Abduction, and Rape in the Later Middle Ages by Jeremy Goldberg

The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages: Power, Faith, and Crusade edited by Matthew Gabriele and Jace Stuckey

Lydgate Matters: Poetry and Material Culture in the Fifteenth Century edited by Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown

The Poems of Oswald von Wolkenstein: An English Translation of the Complete Works (1376/77–1445) by Albrecht Classen

Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature by Tison Pugh

Women and Experience in Later Medieval Writing: Reading the Book of Life edited by Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker and Liz Herbert McAvoy

Sex, Scandal, and Sermon in Fourteenth-Century Spain: Juan Ruiz’s Libro de Buen Amor by Louise M. Haywood

Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature: Singular Fortunes by J. Allan Mitchell

The Erotics of Consolation: Desire and Distance in the Late Middle Ages edited by Catherine E. Léglu and Stephen J. Milner

Maintenance, Meed, and Marriage in Medieval English Literature by Kathleen E. Kennedy

Battlefronts Real and Imagined: War, Border, and Identity in the Chinese Middle Period edited by Don J. Wyatt Wisdom and Her Lovers in Medieval and Early Modern Hispanic Literature by Emily C. Francomano Power, Piety, and Patronage in Late Medieval Queenship: Maria de Luna by Nuria Silleras-Fernandez In the Light of Medieval Spain: Islam, the West, and the Relevance of the Past edited by Simon R. Doubleday and David Coleman, foreword by Giles Tremlett Chaucerian Aesthetics by Peggy A. Knapp

The Post-Historical Middle Ages edited by Elizabeth Scala and Sylvia Federico Constructing Chaucer: Author and Autofi ction in the Critical Tradition by Geoff rey W. Gust Queens in Stone and Silver: The Creation of a Visual Imagery of Queenship in Capetian France by Kathleen Nolan Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art edited by Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney, and John K. Downey Strange Beauty: Ecocritical Approaches to Early Medieval Landscape by Alfred K. Siewers

Memory, Images, and the English Corpus Christi Drama by Theodore K. Lerud

Berenguela of Castile (1180–1246) and Political Women in the High Middle Ages by Miriam Shadis

Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England edited by Jeff rey Jerome Cohen

Julian of Norwich’s Legacy: Medieval Mysticism and Post-Medieval Reception edited by Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics by Susan Signe Morrison

The Letters of Heloise and Abelard: A Translation of Their Complete Correspondence and Related Writings ( forthcoming) translated and edited by Mary Martin McLaughlin with Bonnie Wheeler

Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones

Heloise and the Paraclete ( forthcoming) by Mary Martin McLaughlin

JULIAN OF NORWICH’S LEGACY MEDIEVAL MYSTICISM AND POST-MEDIEVAL RECEPTION

Edited by Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker

JULIAN OF NORWICH’S LEGACY

Copyright © Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–60667–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: November 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

List of illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Textual note Introduction Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker

xiii 1

1 Julian of Norwich and Her Children Today: Editions, Translations, and Versions of Her Revelations Alexandra Barratt

13

2 From Anchorhold to Closet: Julian of Norwich in 1670 and the Immanence of the Past Jennifer Summit

29

3 W.B. Yeats and a Certain Mystic of the Middle Ages Anthony Cuda

49

4 The Fire and the Rose: Theodicy in Eliot and Julian of Norwich Jewel Spears Brooker

69

5 Julie Norwich and Julian of Norwich: Annie Dillard’s Theodicy in Holy the Firm Denise N. Baker

87

6 Julian of Norwich in Popular Fiction Susannah Mary Chewning

101

7 Playing Julian: The Cell as Theater in Contemporary Culture Jacqueline Jenkins

113

8 “A Great Woman in Our Future”: Julian of Norwich’s Functions in Late Twentieth-Century Spirituality Christiania Whitehead 9 Julian in Norwich: Heritage and Iconography Sarah Salih

131 153

viii

CONTENTS

10 In the Centre: Spiritual and Cultural Representations of Julian of Norwich in the Julian Centre Sarah Law

173

Contributors

191

Bibliography

193

Index

211

ILLUSTRATIONS

9.1 9.2 9.3

9.4 9.5

9.6 10.1 10.2

St. Julian’s Church, Norwich. The Julian Cell, interior St. Julian’s Church, Norwich. “All Shall Be Well” window, by Dennis King and Sons, 1953 Selection of souvenirs from Julian Centre, Norwich: “All Shall Be Well” mug; “Our Faith Is Light in Darkness” candleholder; St. Saviour’s Chapel window fridge magnet. Karen Manton and Lynn Muir, The Gift of Julian of Norwich (Leominster: Gracewing, 2005), front cover Norwich Cathedral, Bauchon Chapel. Detail of Benedictine window, designed by Moira Forsyth, made by Dennis King and Sons, 1964 Norwich Cathedral, St. Saviour’s Chapel. Juliana of Norwich window, by A.K. Nicholson, 1930 The Julian Centre, Norwich, interior Merchandise at the Julian Centre

154 160

162 163

165 167 178 180

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This collection arose from the New Chaucer Society Congress, New York, July 2006, where the wide-ranging program of papers, the stimulating environment of the conference, the fi ne summer weather, and some excellent lunches all contributed toward producing an enthusiastic commitment to the project. The editors are grateful to Bonnie Wheeler and all at Palgrave Macmillan for their support for the collection; to the contributors, for their prompt and cheerful responses to prodding; and to one another, for collaboration and complementarity.

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TEXTUAL NOTE

Quotations from Julian of Norwich are identified by revelation (when appropriate), chapter, and page number. Glosses are based on Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Short Text and Long Text), trans. Elizabeth Spearing (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998).

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INTRODUCTION Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker

D

avid Holgate’s statue of Julian of Norwich, pictured on the front cover of this book, attests to the multiplicity of Julian’s audiences and the temporal complexity of her present-day persona. Erected to mark the millennium, the statue stands in a fifteenth-century niche in the west front of Norwich Cathedral, where the visible difference in age between statue and niche acknowledges the passage of time. That the niche was empty testifies to the post-Reformation attempts to reimagine the national religious past; that it has been refilled indicates a desire to reach past that rupture and recuperate the medieval. Julian, who stands framed by, but distinct from, the institution of the Church, has replaced a figure of a bishop, which occupied the niche until 1875: the desire to memorialize her in so prominent a position is very recent.1 Standing beside the main visitors’ entrance to the Cathedral, she is accessible to pilgrims, tourists, and passersby. “Everyone’s mystic,” as Ritamary Bradley calls her, Julian has several publics.2 She is well known to scholars of medieval literature as an outstanding vernacular theologian and as the fi rst woman to write a book in English. There is a substantial scholarly literature on her Revelation of Love by academics whose interests may be primarily literary, historical, theological, or feminist. Although academic scholarship is the mode of response to Julian that is probably most familiar to readers of this book, it does not have exclusive rights to her. Before Julian of Norwich became a canonical author of interest to scholars, influential writers, such as T.S. Eliot, Annie Dillard, and Iris Murdoch, had already deployed her in their poetry and prose.3 Her appearances in mainstream high cultural texts make her part of the mental furniture of readers of literature who may not have any particular interest in medieval literature or Christian mysticism. Versions of Julian’s text are also widely read by contemporary Christians, both ordained and lay. This is by no means a homogenous group, as Sarah Law and Christiania Whitehead demonstrate in this collection, for Julian is a valuable property in intra-Christian debates. Contemporary Christian responses to Julian have an extremely wide range of forms, including theological scholarship, devotional anthologies, didactic plays, liturgy, art, music, and artifacts. Julian’s Cell in Norwich is a minor heritage site that attracts both Christian visitors and secular

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SA R A H SA LIH A N D DENISE N. BA K ER

tourists. These publics do not constitute discrete categories: it is possible for an individual to access Julian through all kinds of combinations of these sources. The literary, devotional, and touristic versions of Julian are occasionally alluded to in academic studies and have been surveyed by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, but until now they have received no sustained academic analysis.4 Scholarship on Julian has, generally, been concerned with her as a medieval thinker and writer. Such scholarship typically relates her to aspects of medieval culture: mystical tradition, vernacular theology, the contestation of orthodoxy, and women’s writing. This collection is concerned with a different reading context for Julian. The cultural history of Julian of Norwich is overwhelmingly postmedieval, and the overwhelming majority of the postmedieval readership is in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From the same base materials of the Short and Long Texts of the Revelation and the few scraps of historical evidence, postmedieval readers have constructed numerous Julians to fit their various purposes. The essays in this collection explore these various readings from their inception at Julian’s first appearance in print and in the several formats and contexts in which she has appeared in recent and contemporary culture. The collection is an exercise in the study of medievalism and the study of reception. Critical analysis of topics such as fi lms set in the Middle Ages shows that scholarly and popular representations of the medieval may inform one another.5 Medievalism and medieval studies are intimately related modes of enquiry, and the study of popular medievalisms encourages self-reflective scholarship.6 The study of medievalism is a specialized form of the study of reception. Hans Robert Jauss argues that “[a] literary work is not an object that stands by itself and that offers the same view to each reader in each period. . . . [but] much more like an orchestration that strikes ever new resonances among its readers.” 7 A text, then, is a dynamic process: “Julian” is not the text alone, but the cumulative effect of many shifting readings of it. Julian’s Earliest Readers Julian of Norwich’s present-day popularity with such diverse audiences is especially remarkable because, unlike her fellow Middle English mystics, Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton, her texts did not circulate widely in the centuries prior to the twentieth. In fact, as this brief survey will show, her writings seem to have been known only to a small group, and many questions about the process of their transmission remain unanswered. The two versions of Julian’s book are known as the Short and the Long Texts, because the one we believe to be the later version is four times the length of the earlier one. Julian composed the Short Text, entitled A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman by its most recent editors, sometime between 1373 and 1388.8 It survives in a single manuscript now held in London by the British Library, MS Add. 37790. This manuscript is sometimes referred to as Amherst after its last owner before the British Library acquired it in 1910. It was compiled in the midfi fteenth century, but, as the introductory rubric indicates, Julian’s Short Text descends from an exemplar made while she was still alive. “Here es a vision,

I N T RO DU C T ION

3

shewed be the goodenes of God to a devoute woman. And hir name es Julian, that is recluse atte Norwiche and yit is on life [is still alive], anno domini 1413. In the whilke vision er fulle many comfortabille [comforting] wordes and gretly stirrande [very moving] to all thaye that desires to be Cristes loverse.”9 This scribal note is the only evidence we have that the author of the Short Text was for some time in her life an anchorite in Norwich or that she was known by the name Julian.10 Several wills from 1393 through 1416 attest that a recluse occupied the anchorhold of the church of St. Julian in Norwich.11 Her regional reputation is further evinced by Margery Kempe’s account of her visit to “Dame Jelyan” around 1413.12 However, neither the wills nor Kempe mention Julian’s revelations or either of her two texts. Their silence implies that she was not well known as a visionary or an author during her lifetime and that her texts did not circulate widely. MS Add. 37790 is an anthology of vernacular contemplative literature, including translations of works by Richard Rolle, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Marguerite Porète (although she is not identified as the author), and various fragments. Annotations by the scribe James Grenehalgh (d. 1530) as well as the emphasis of its texts on the solitary life indicate a Carthusian provenance.13 Founded in the Chartreuse Mountains of France at the end of the eleventh century and brought to England around 1178, the Carthusians are an order of hermits. Each charterhouse consists of about a dozen monks who live in separate cells where they engage in solitary contemplation. During the Middle Ages, the Carthusians were particularly active in the transmission of mystical texts. Recognizing the uniqueness of an anthology that focuses on authorial accounts of mystical experience, Marleen Cré concludes, “It is most likely that the anthology was produced within a Carthusian monastery to be read by the monks themselves, and that the anthology was designed with a view to guiding the readers in their own spiritual growth.”14 Thus, the earliest readers of the Short Text were probably a small group of professed male religious who were, like Julian herself, solitaries, a vocation regarded as the highest form of the contemplative life in the Middle Ages. Julian indicates that the revision of the Short Text into the Long occurred in at least two stages based on subsequent understandings she attained in 1388 and 1393. In the concluding chapter of the Long Text, she writes: “And fro [from] the time that it was shewde, I desyerde oftentimes to witte [know] what was oure lords mening [meaning]. And fi fteen yere after and mor, I was answered in gostly [spiritual] understonding, seyeng thus: ‘What, woldest thou wit thy lordes mening in this thing? Wit it wele [know it well], love was his mening.’ ”15 Watson argues that this 1388 revelation impelled Julian to revise her Short Text, which she may have just completed around this time. As he notes, the Long Text begins with an echo of her new insight: “This is a revelation of love.”16 The other important date for Julian’s revision of the Short Text is February 1393. In Chapter 51 of the Long Text, Julian says that it took “twenty yere after the time of the shewing, save thre monthes” for her to understand the “misty example” of the lord and servant.17 The editors who include both the Short and Long Texts in their editions disagree about how this statement should be interpreted. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, on one hand, argue that Julian’s revision of

4

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her fi rst version began soon after the 1388 revelation and ended not long after she achieved the understanding of the “misty example” of the lord and servant in 1393.18 Watson, on the other hand, contends that 1393 is the earliest possible date at which Julian began her revision and that the Long Text may, in fact, have been written in the early fi fteenth century and completed shortly before her death around 1416.19 Whether Julian spent two decades or nearly four writing the two versions of her book, articulating the experience of May 1373 became her life’s work. Although the earliest surviving copies of the entire Long Text were made about 250 years after its completion, passages from A Revelation of Love appeared in a manuscript from the fi rst half of the fi fteenth century, which was, in turn, copied in London, Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4 around 1500. This manuscript compiles excerpts from the commentaries on two psalms attributed to Walter Hilton, from the second book of his Scale of Perfection, and from Julian’s Revelation of Love.20 Since the Westminster Manuscript includes passages unique to the Long Text, such as selections from the fourteenth revelation that discuss Jesus as mother, it proves that the Revelation existed in the late Middle Ages even if no full copy survives from that period. However, as Hugh Kempster, the most recent editor of this manuscript, observes, “the editor of W[estminster] goes to considerable length to construct a purely didactic text which nestles unobtrusively at the end of a collection of texts usually ascribed to Hilton.”21 Thus, all mention of Julian’s visionary experience is omitted. Kempster argues that this pattern of omission suggests that lay people attempting to combine the active and contemplative lives as Hilton describes in his Mixed Life were the intended audience.22 However, Walsh and Eric Colledge, who translated the Westminster version in 1961, assert that “the editor had only one concern, one principle of selection: contemplative living.”23 They conclude that this editor was a professed contemplative or a student of mystical theology and that he compiled these selections for readers like himself, not for beginners.24 In their discussion of the Westminster Manuscript, Watson and Jenkins support Walsh and Colledge by pointing out that “the compilation assumes the distinction between ordinary Christians and ‘contemplatives’ Julian’s writings tend to avoid.”25 In either case, the circulation of this manuscript, like that of Additional 37790, was certainly limited. The earliest surviving manuscripts of the complete Long Text were produced in the mid-seventeenth century by English Catholic nuns exiled on the continent during the Reformation. We do not know how the Revelation of Love was transmitted to them, but the Benedictine nuns at Cambrai in Flanders had it in their possession before 1637.26 In 1623 the seventeen-year-old Helen More, the great-great-granddaughter of St. Thomas More, arrived at Cambrai with a party of eight English nuns, including two other descendents of the martyr, to found the convent of Our Lady of Consolation.27 She became its fi rst abbess, Dame Gertrude, and was joined in 1629 by another sister, Dame Bridget, the fi rst prioress of the daughter house established in Paris in 1651. In 1624 Fr. Augustine Baker arrived at Cambrai and for nine years provided spiritual direction in contemplative prayer to the nuns. Prior to his arrival, he had worked in the library

I N T RO DU C T ION

5

of Sir Robert Cotton in London compiling monastic records from the antiquarian’s medieval manuscripts. In 1629 Baker wrote to Cotton requesting for the nuns “such bookes as you please, either manuscript or printed being in English, conteining contemplation Saints lives or other devotions. Hampooles workes are proper for them. I wishe I had Hilltons Scala perfectionis in latein; it woulde helpe the vnderstanding of the English; and some of them vnderstande latein.”28 We do not know whether Julian’s Revelation of Love was among the manuscripts Cotton sent or whether it arrived at Cambrai by some other means. In the 1630s, though, Dame Margaret Gascoigne, professed at Cambrai in 1629, quotes two brief passages from Chapters 5 and 36 of Julian’s Long Text in the treatise Augustine Baker prepared from the loose papers found in her cell at the time of her death in 1637. In his biography of her, Baker also describes how she reiterated these words in her “imitatio Julianae” on her deathbed.29 Towards the said good preparation for death, and to hold her the more continuallie and efficaciouslie therin, she caused one that was most conuersant and familiar w th her, to place, (written at and vnderneath the Crucifixe, that remained there before her, and wch she regarded w th her eyes during her sicknes and till her death), thes holie wordes, that had sometimes ben spoken by God to the holie virgin Julian the clustresse of Norwich, as appeareth by the old manuscript booke of her Reuelations, and w th the wch wordes our Dame had euer formerlie ben much delighted: ‘Intende (or attende) to me; I am inough for thee; rejoice in me thy Sauiour, and in thy saluation.’ Those wordes (I saie) remained before her eyes beneath the Crucifixe, till her death.30

A second witness to Cambrai’s possession of the Long Text are the excerpts from the twelfth and thirteenth revelations in the Upholland Manuscript, owned until 1999 by St. Joseph’s College in Upholland, Lancashire, England, but now held anonymously by a private collector. Like Add. 37790 and Westminster, Upholland includes Julian in the company of other experts on the contemplative life, such as Walter Hilton, Henry Suso, and Teresa of Avila; it was copied between 1640 and 1684 by Cambrai nuns, with Bridget More possibly among them.31 The earliest surviving full copies of A Revelation of Love were probably made by these Benedictine nuns around 1650 either at Cambrai or its daughter house in Paris. Paris, MS Bibliothèque Nationale Fonds anglais 40, apparently the earlier of these manuscripts, may be a copy of the “old manuscript booke of her Reuelations” known by Gascoigne because the quotations from Julian she cites are in the same mid-fi fteenth century East Midlands Standard English as Paris. 32 The second manuscript, London, British Library MS Sloane 2499, was copied from a different exemplar from Paris because its language is closer to Julian’s own East Anglian dialect. It may be in the hand of Mother Clementine Cary (d. 1671), the daughter of Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, the fi rst English woman dramatist and a convert to Catholicism, whose biography was composed by one of her four daughters, all of whom were Benedictines of the Cambrai community. In addition to the difference in language, Paris is more ample than Sloane, which seems to have omitted lines either accidentally or

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deliberately. 33 Many editors believe that the Paris Manuscript better represents both Julian’s style and her ideas. Whatever the relative merits of the two earliest complete copies of A Revelation of Love, we owe an immense debt of gratitude to the exiled Benedictine nuns who preserved the Long Text for posterity. Without their labor, Julian of Norwich would not have had the legacy that the essays in this collection celebrate. Julian’s Post-Reformation Reception Examination of Julian’s post-Reformation reception brings into focus different modes of representing and consuming the past. As Jennifer Summit shows in this collection, the split between historicizing and contemporizing responses to Julian was inscribed in her reception from the moment her text moved into print. The most detailed historicizations of Julian have been in academic studies: Alexandra Barratt speaks for many scholars when she writes that “We do Julian a profound disservice if, with the laudable desire of making her accessible to our own time, we occlude the way in which she is fi rmly embedded in a specific historical era.”34 Devotional writers have produced the boldest contemporizing statements, but both movements can be identified in academic and in literary forms. Allusions to Julian in high cultural literary texts often present her as a disembodied, dehistoricized seer whose revelations address the most profound spiritual enigmas. T.S. Eliot and Annie Dillard use Julian to explore the problem of evil. Both detach her from her medieval context in order to assimilate her words and ideas into their own texts. She provides an insight that impels them to a poetic resolution of their conundrum. The invocation of Julian creates for their texts an aura of timeless Christian wisdom, of enduring mystical truth. Although W.B. Yeats refers to Julian only once in a letter, she represents for him, as for Eliot, the lost ideal of a unified sensibility, both for the individual and the community. Christian readings of Julian repeatedly claim her as timely, addressing the ecumenical, environmental, and feminist concerns of the present day. Her text has come to answer new questions; she thus validates present-day concerns by apparently anticipating them. Although most medievalists are accustomed to thinking of historicism as a politicized mode, in this instance it is dehistoricization that attributes political power to the text, and historicization that mutes it. Julian may be seen as ahead of, or in opposition to, her time, and her vision removed from its cultural context of late-medieval Passion piety. Dehistoricization also entails isolation. There is good reason to suppose that Julian was part of a network of lay and clerical enthusiasts for affective piety, and she would certainly have had clerical advisors, confessors, teachers, and scribes.35 Some strands of contemporary devotional writing on Julian suppress these, substituting the presentday Christian community for the late-medieval one. As Whitehead shows here, such substitution is based on narratives of rediscovery, such as “she has patiently waited 600 years for a generation receptive to her message.”36 This is, obviously, not a factual statement: although we know little about her earliest audience, this introduction and the essays by Barratt and Summit track a continuous history of

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readings of Julian, and it is only because it was read and valued in the seventeenth century that we have the Long Text now. Nevertheless, it is a telling fantasy, for it shows a desire for a Julian who has been unearthed, pristine, without having gone through the historical process of textual transmission and corruption. Replicating an idealization of mysticism as a direct access to extra-historical realities, it enables a Christian reading practice that constructs a Julian who does not belong to history or to historians, but to an extratemporal group of sympathizers. An alternative movement is to place Julian’s thought in historical and social context. The Revelation, though deeply concerned with the social, does not comment directly on the conditions and events of the late fourteenth century. Historical fiction fi lls the gap by imagining Julian in dialogue with her contemporaries or making her speak on current events. The example of Margery Kempe’s consultation with Julian has been the blueprint for numerous scenes in which Julian is placed in dialogue with Katherine Swynford, the Lollard Margery Baxter, John Ball, or John Ball’s mother.37 Fiction is a vehicle that allows exploration of what Julian’s thought might have meant in social terms, as she is interrogated by contemporaries seeking practical advice. Such historicizing fictions, however, are often driven by present-day concerns: Kenneth Leech, for example, uses the imagined meeting of Julian and John Ball to call for the reunion of “spirituality and social justice” in a Christian politics.38 Julian’s value to him depends on her temporal displacement. Historicizing academics are in a minority: most present-day readers of Julian require her to be, or to be reconstructed as, our contemporary. In this Volume Alexandra Barratt revises her 1995 overview of editions and versions of Julian’s texts, “How Many Children Had Julian of Norwich?” taking recent publications into account. Some form of Julian’s text has been continuously in print since the seventeenth century, but editors often struggled to fi nd a method that produced a text that was both accurate and accessible. Scholarly editions were a relatively late development. Despite the reverence in which Julian has been held, commentators have been curiously willing to read her in translations, some of them rather approximate. Good new editions and translations have been published, and some of the gaps identified in 1995 have been fi lled with editions of the Paris and Westminster manuscripts, but opportunities for would-be editors of Julian remain. Jennifer Summit uses the reading of Julian’s text to rethink literary historical chronology: is Julian a medieval writer or an early modern one? She concentrates on a key moment for the history of Julian reception, the publication in 1670 of Serenus Cressy’s edition of the Long Text, which was to be the base text of Julian until the twentieth century. Cressy recommends an empathetic, affective reading of Julian’s text. His use of Julian to defend the Englishness of the medieval Catholic past established themes that were to be key to Julian’s later reception, such as her Englishness, her special address to women readers, her medievality, but also her chronological transcendence.

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Anthony Cuda discusses the little-known topic of W.B. Yeats’s knowledge of Julian. Though Yeats did not broadcast his interest in Julian, Cuda fi nds evidence that he was fascinated by her both as a model of literary style and of a style of life. In medieval mysticism he found an example from which he developed his theory of Mask, or antiself. Yeats emerges as a remarkably perceptive reader of Julian, alert to the vigor and precision of her thought, but he nevertheless discarded her along with the rest of the Christian mystical tradition as his interests changed. Jewel Spears Brooker reveals the profound influence of Julian of Norwich on another high modernist poet, T.S. Eliot. She traces the confl ict between an awareness of evil and a longing for transcendence that troubled Eliot throughout his career, but especially in Four Quartets. In Julian he found a mystic who was also an artist and a philosopher, most importantly one who addressed the problem of evil. Through her pedagogical and teleological theodicy, Eliot discovered the good of evil. Thus, as Brooker argues, the complex image of the tongues of fl ame as petals of a rose that concludes Little Gidding is Eliot’s counterpart to Julian’s “Alle shalle be wele.” Denise N. Baker examines Julian displaced to contemporary North America. Annie Dillard’s reading of Julian reimagines an anchoritism mediated through American Transcendentalism. She comes to focus on theodicy through the sharply contemporary event of an air crash that injures a child whom she names “Julie Norwich.” The problem is not so much solved as rearticulated, through Dillard’s concept of “holy the fi rm,” a development of the medieval mystical concept of the ground of being, which enables her to reconcile matter and spirit. In the present day, however, it is the artist rather than the visionary who takes the responsibility of articulating and disseminating this message. Susannah Mary Chewning considers the use that twentieth- and twentyfi rst-century popular fictions make of the figure of Julian. Fiction and scholarship share interests in such topics as anchoritic life, the situation of the medieval female vernacular writer, and aspects of Julian’s thought, including her perception of the motherhood of God. Chewning fi nds in the fictions a systematic tendency to make Julian more familiar, modern, comfortable, and comforting and to look away from less comfortable topics, such as the asceticism of anchoritic life or the violence of Julian’s Passion visions. Four chapters follow on closely related aspects of the contemporary, and particularly the contemporary Christian, Julian. Jacqueline Jenkins examines the uses that contemporary devotional drama makes of Julian, and in particular of the powerfully theatrical space of the anchorhold. She finds that contemporary representations of Julian, and of medieval anchoritism in general, are split. Of the three plays Jenkins surveys, one brings Julian on stage only as a speaking text, while the other two settle for more conservative content and format. Jenkins highlights the process by which an apparently accessible figure of an author is constructed out of, and comes to substitute for, a difficult text. However, while these two plays are content with conventional biography, avant-garde performance art has a deeper engagement with the theater of enclosure. Christiania Whitehead supplies a detailed overview on Julian’s meanings for contemporary Christians. Within Christian discourse, Julian has been used to

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authorize numerous positions—the ordination of women, contemplative withdrawal from engagement with modernity, ecumenical contact with other denominations and faiths—and is sometimes therefore a site of contest. Whitehead examines the various groups and movements dedicated to Julian: the Julian Cell and Centre in Norwich; the contemplative Julian Meetings; the Anglo-Catholic Order of Julian of Norwich. She also discusses appropriations of her for Christian socialism and person-centered therapy. Responses to Julian may overcome the distance between medieval and modern by modernizing Julian or by rejecting modernity. Sarah Salih concentrates on visual and material manifestations of Julian in Norwich, where the reconstructed Cell is the center of the contemporary cult. The Cell is a memory-place that, for most visitors, succeeds in evoking a sense of Julian’s presence and of access to the past. Visual images of Julian in St. Julian’s and in Norwich Cathedral show as much variety as do textual appropriations of her: various images focus on Julian the visionary, Julian the Benedictine nun, and Julian the woman writer. Sarah Law adds a unique insider’s perspective on the Julian Centre and Julian Cell from their establishment to the present day. The Julian sought by visitors to the shrine, she argues, is, like the anchoress behind her window’s veil, a screen onto which hopes and fears are projected. The paucity of information about her life enables her to be reimagined. Law concludes by discussing the anchorhold as the “room of one’s own,” which Virginia Woolf argued was the basic requirement of a woman writer. Notes 1. Francis Woodman, “The Gothic Campaigns,” in Norwich Cathedral: Church, City and Diocese, 1096–1996, ed. Ian Atherton, Eric Fernie, Christopher Harper-Bill, and Hassell Smith (London: Hambledon, 1996), p. 184 [158–96]. 2. Ritamary Bradley, “Julian of Norwich: Everyone’s Mystic,” in Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England, ed. William F. Pollard and Robert Boenig (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 139–58. 3. The first scholarly editions of Julian’s texts were published in the late 1970s: A Revelation of Love, ed. Marion Glasscoe, Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1976); and A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and James Walsh, S.J., 2 vols., Studies and Texts 35 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978). Academic study of Julian has increased dramatically since the 1980s due to these editions and the efforts of feminist scholars to recover texts written by women. 4. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, introduction to The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 12–24 [1–59]. 5. For example, Medieval Film, ed. Anke Bernau and Bettina Bildhauer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 6. David Matthews, “What was Medievalism? Medieval Studies, Medievalism and Cultural Studies,” in Medieval Cultural Studies: Essays in Honour of Stephen Knight, ed. Ruth Evans, Helen Fulton, and David Matthews (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2006), pp. 9–22.

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7. Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 21. 8. Nicholas Watson, “The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” Speculum 68 (1993): 637–83. Watson surveys the different titles Julian’s texts have been given on p. 637 n. 1. The most recent edition of the Short and Long Texts is The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006). 9. “A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman,” rubric 1–4, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 63. 10. Many scholars assume that the name Julian derives from St. Julian’s Church in which this anchorite was enclosed. However, E.A. Jones contends that no evidence supports the assumption that anchorites changed their names at enclosure in “A Mystic by Any Other Name: Julian (?) of Norwich,” Mystics Quarterly 33.3–4 (2007): 1–17. 11. Three of these wills are translated in Appendix B of Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, pp. 431–35. 12. Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2000; reprint, Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004), Book 1, chap. 18. Watson and Jenkins include the excerpt from The Book of Margery Kempe in Appendix C, Writings of Julian of Norwich, pp. 436–37. 13. Marleen Cré, Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse: A Study of London, British Library, MS Additional 37790, The Medieval Translator/Traduire au Moyen Age 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 23–31. 14. Cré, Vernacular Mysticism, p. 23. 15. “A Revelation of Love,” 16.86, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 379. 16. Watson, “The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” 670. 17. “A Revelation of Love,” 14.51, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 277. 18. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and James Walsh, S.J., introduction to Showings, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), pp. 20, 23 [17–119]; and Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and James Walsh, S.J., introduction to A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, Part One: Introduction and the Short Text, Studies and Texts 35 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), 1:24–25 [1–198]. 19. Watson, “The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” 678. 20. Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, includes the selections from the Long Text that appear in the Westminster Manuscript in Appendix A, pp. 417–31, based on Hugh Kempster’s edition, “Julian of Norwich: The Westminster Text of A Revelation of Love,” Mystics Quarterly 23 (1997): 177–245. 21. Hugh Kempster, “A Question of Audience: The Westminster Text and FifteenthCentury Reception of Julian of Norwich,” in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), pp. 270–71 [257–89]. 22. Kempster, “A Question of Audience,” in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, pp. 257–89. 23. James Walsh and Eric Colledge, introduction to Of the Knowledge of Ourselves and of God: A Fifteenth-Century Spiritual Florilegium, Fleur de Lys Series (London: A.R. Mowbray, 1961), p. viii [v–xix].

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24. Walsh and Colledge, introduction to Of the Knowledge of Ourselves, p. xv. 25. Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, Appendix A, p. 418. Marleen Crè admits that the evidence is not conclusive, but she argues that the editorial choices made by the compiler tend to indicate an audience of contemplatives; see “ ‘This blessed beholdyng’: Reading the Fragments from Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation of Love in London, Westminster Cathedral Treasury, MS 4,” in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 116–26. 26. Colledge and Walsh, introduction to Book of Showings, 1:16–17; Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, Appendix D, pp. 438–39. 27. Information about the Cambrai foundation is from Placid Spearritt, O.S.B., “The Survival of Mediaeval Spirituality among the Exiled English Black Monks,” American Benedictine Review 25 (1974): 289–93 [287–316]. 28. Quoted by Spearritt, “Survival of Mediaeval Spirituality,” 291–92. 29. The phrase is from Appendix D in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 439, which includes excerpts from Gascoigne’s treatise on pp. 440–46. 30. Augustine Baker, O.S.B., Five Treatises; The Life and Death of Dame Magaret [sic] Gascoigne; Treatise of Confession, ed. James Hogg, Alain Girard, and Daniel Le Blévec, Analecta Cartusiana 119:23 (Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2006), p. 66. 31. Colledge and Walsh, introduction to Book of Showings, p. 9. 32. Watson and Jenkins, introduction to Writings of Julian of Norwich, pp. 14, 36. 33. For a thorough discussion of these differences, see Watson and Jenkins, introduction to Writings of Julian of Norwich, pp. 35–40. 34. Alexandra Barratt, “Lordship, Service and Worship in Julian of Norwich,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium VII, ed. E.A. Jones (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004), p. 177 [177–88]. 35. See Felicity Riddy, “Julian of Norwich and Self-Textualisation,” in Editing Women, ed. Ann Hutchinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 101–24. 36. Michael McLean, introduction to In Love Enclosed: More Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), p. x [vii–xvi]. 37. Anya Seton, Katherine (London: Hodder and Staughton, 1954), pp. 506–15; Ralph Milton, Julian’s Cell: The Earthly Story of Julian of Norwich (Kelowna: Northstone, 2002), p. 124; see Whitehead and Jenkins in this volume. 38. Kenneth Leech, “Contemplative and Radical: Julian Meets John Ball,” in Julian: Woman of our Day, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), p. 99 [89–101].

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CHAPTER 1 JULIAN OF NORWICH AND HER CHILDREN TODAY: EDITIONS, TRANSLATIONS, AND VERSIONS OF HER REVELATIONS Alexandra Barratt

This essay updates the study first published in 1995 of the transmission of Julian of Norwich’s texts from the earliest manuscripts to present-day printed editions.

T

he viability of such concepts as “authorial intention,” “the original text,” “critical edition,” and, above all, “scholarly editorial objectivity” is not what it was, and a study of the textual progeny of the revelations of Julian of Norwich—editions, versions, translations, and selections—does little to rehabilitate them. Rather it tends to support the view that a history of reading is indeed a history of misreading or, more positively, that texts can have an organic life of their own that allows them to reproduce and evolve quite independently of their author. Julian’s texts have had a more robustly continuous life than those of any other Middle English mystic. Their history—in manuscript and print, in editions more or less approximating Middle English, and in translations more or less approaching Modern English—is virtually unbroken since the fifteenth century. But on this perilous journey, many and strange are the clutches into which she and her textual progeny have fallen. The earliest version of the revelations is the unique copy of the Short Text in London, British Library MS Add. 37790. This copy was made sometime after 1435 from an exemplar dated 1413, as we know from its opening, which refers to Julian as still alive in that year.1 The Carthusian monks, who also preserved the unique manuscript copy of The Book of Margery Kempe, must be credited with its preservation.2 The only other pre-Reformation Julian manuscript, dated around 1500, is now London, Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4, in the Westminster Archdiocesan Archives; it contains selections from the Long Text combined with selections from Walter Hilton.3 But the only complete manuscripts of the

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Long Text are post-Reformation, and this fact poses particular problems for the establishment of the text. The seventeenth-century Paris Manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fonds anglais 40) is already to a certain extent a “modernization,” as it has substituted then-current words for those that were already obsolete. Opinions as to its exact date still vary, but there is no doubt that it is Benedictine and probably belonged to the monastery of exiled English Benedictine nuns in Paris.4 There is rather more consensus about the date of the Sloane Manuscript (London, British Library MS Sloane 2499), the only other independent witness to the Long Text, though not about its textual value. Dated as around 1650, it is written in a hand that resembles that of Anne Clementine Cary, a Paris Benedictine nun who died in 1671.5 Marion Glasscoe argues that this manuscript is early-seventeenth-century and was intended as “a faithful copy of an earlier version,” and she is not alone in holding that it largely preserves the distinctively Middle English features of the original language.6 It is, therefore, more of an “edition” and less of a “translation” than the Paris Manuscript. In 1670 the fi rst printed edition of either Julian text appeared, as XVI Revelations of Divine Love, Shewed to a Devout Servant of Our Lord, Called Mother Juliana, an Anchorete of Norwich: Who Lived in the Dayes of King Edward the Third. This was edited, probably from the Paris Manuscript, by Serenus Cressy, an English convert to Roman Catholicism who had become a Benedictine monk. In 1651 the Benedictine congregation had directed him “to accompany nuns from Cambrai to a new foundation in Paris, where he acted for a year as chaplain.” 7 In his address “To the Reader,” for the fi rst time someone responsible for transmitting a Julian text left a record of his “editorial” policy: “I conceived it would have been a prejudice to the agreeable simplicity of the Stile, to have changed the Dress of it into our Modern Language, as some advised. Yet certain more out of fashion, Words or Phrases, I thought meet to explain in the Margine.”8 Most of these marginal glosses are accurate enough, though some, for example, “mind” for feeling, “earnest” for wilful, “friendly” for homelie, “confessarius” for domesman, have an air of guesswork. Cressy had in fact hit upon the very method followed by so many subsequent “modernizers” of Julian’s texts: he glosses or (sometimes) replaces obviously obsolete individual words but otherwise simply modernizes the spelling of words that appear to be still current. Unfortunately, many Middle English words that survive into Modern English have changed their meanings radically and significantly. These “false friends,” to use C.S. Lewis’s phrase, include such common but structurally essential words as can, wold (i.e., “would”), shal, may, and other more technical words vital to Julian’s thought, such as (notoriously) substance and sensualite. Once there is a printed edition of a text as well as manuscript witnesses, the history of reading and misreading becomes more complex. The Upholland Manuscript, written by various English Benedictine Cambrai nuns in the mid to late seventeenth century, contains selections from the Long Text, but these were probably copied from Cressy’s printed edition rather than from an earlier manuscript.9 In the next century another manuscript version (now London, British Library MS Sloane 3705) was made. This was a modernized copy of Sloane 2499, which had been collated

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with either the Paris Manuscript or Cressy’s edition and included some of their readings. Until the nineteenth century, then, Julian’s Long Text circulated mainly among English Catholics, and her Short Text was not known at all. Only two copies of Cressy’s printed edition were listed in the original Short Title Catalogue, though the online ESTC now lists copies in eleven British libraries, plus one in Berlin, and three in the United States. Colledge and Walsh credit Julian’s survival to Fr. Augustine Baker, but perhaps the nuns of Paris and Cambrai, who provided the manual labor at least to copy the manuscripts, deserve some acknowledgment too. In the nineteenth century the Long Text began to reach a wider public. George Hargreave Parker, an Anglican priest, reissued Cressy’s edition in 1843, writing in his introduction: “The work is printed verbatim and literatim from the edition of 1670, except in one or two instances where a typographical error was obvious.”10 This is not quite true. Parker also modernized, or rather regularized to nineteenth-century usage, Cressy’s use of capital letters and removed Cressy’s glosses from the margins, gathering them together at the end of the text to form a “glossary of obsolete words and phrases,” as he describes it. But he mainly reproduced Cressy’s punctuation and paragraphing and tried to give a typographic equivalent of the original ornamentation. He also kept at least two glaring errors in the text itself. In Chapter 7, in the passage that describes the drops of blood flowing down Christ’s face, Cressy had printed, “And for the roundness, they were like to the Seal of her Ring.” He was followed uncritically by Parker. Both the Paris and Sloane Manuscripts, of course, have the correct though perhaps more unexpected phrase, “scale of heryng.” Similarly, in Chapter 10 Parker followed Cressy in printing, “One time my understanding was litle down into the sea-ground,” where the Paris Manuscript reads, “One tyme my vnderstandyng was lett down in to the sea-grounde,” and Sloane reads led for lett. Parker, unlike some later editors, had apparently no gift, or desire, for conjectural emendation. The main interest of Parker’s edition, however, is its motivation. Why should a Victorian Anglican clergyman go to the trouble of reprinting a rather rare recusant edition of an obscure medieval text? Apparently he saw Julian as an Anglican born before her time: in his introduction he writes that her text “confi rms our belief that even during the worst corruptions of the Romish Church there was a generation within its pale who . . . formed a part of that vital bond which connected the Apostolic Church with the revival of primitive Christianity at the time of the Reformation. It is very interesting to trace the strugglings of the writer’s mind against preconceived and erroneous opinions.” Otherwise, Julian gains only cautious and qualified approval: “The spiritually-minded reader will meet with some few statements in the course of the following pages, with which he will not be able to acquiesce; but in the main he will meet with much amply to repay a careful perusal.”11 In contrast to the enthusiasm lavished on Julian since the beginning of the twentieth century, Parker’s overall assessment of her is somewhat refreshing: “The matter is peculiar; the style quaint; and the language obscure.”12

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Not much information is available about Parker. He was vicar of a parish in Bethnal Green, in the slums of London. His other publications were an edition of a treatise by John Eaton (1575–1641), strongly Protestant in its theology, and a pamphlet, Letters on the Great Revolution of 1848, in which he argued that the liberal revolutions that occurred throughout Europe in that year were masterminded by the Pope as a plot to bring all of the continent under his sway. The only cohesive factor to all three publications, then, seems to be a strong antiRoman Catholicism. Some fi fty years later, in 1877, the fi rst printed edition based on the Sloane Manuscript, rather than (directly or indirectly) on the Paris Manuscript, appeared. Henry Collins, an Anglican convert to Roman Catholicism, edited it as Revelations of Divine Love. Twenty years earlier he had published Difficulties of a Convert from the Anglican to the Catholic Church, in which he had appealed to his newly acquired coreligionists to treat potential converts with slightly more tact: “kind and gentle dealings with Anglicans is the only prevailing way of softening their prejudices, explicating their difficulties, and otherwise preparing a road for complete reunion.”13 One can easily see the appeal of Julian’s text to someone with such anachronistically irenic ecumenical attitudes. Collins was a serious and reputable scholar. His edition of Julian was merely one of numerous spiritual classics that he edited and translated over the years. But his edition of the Sloane Manuscript is not all that he claimed. Although he called his publication an “edition,” it is really, as he explained, a “modernization”: “The antique spelling has been laid aside as unintelligible to all but the learned, and some few words have been translated to render the sense intelligible. A list of such words appears at the end of this preface. With all this the ordinary reader will fi nd sufficient difficulty in mastering the meaning of many passages.”14 Furthermore, although he did appreciate that “[t]he MS on which the present edition is formed, differs from that followed by Cressy, both in the division of chapters, and in various readings,” he judged none of these differences very important, and in fact he relied far more on Cressy’s printed edition than he was willing to admit.15 My own comparison of a sample of the text did not produce a single indisputable instance where he had followed the Sloane Manuscript reading rather than Cressy’s on occasions on which they diverged. Collins did, however, print the chapter headings found in the Sloane Manuscript and mainly followed the Sloane rather than Cressy chapter-divisions. Strangely, although he printed the opening of the fi nal passage (thought to be a scribal addition) peculiar to the Sloane Manuscript, “Thus endith the revelation of love,” his text stops with the sentence, “I pray almighty God that this book come not but to the hands of them that will be his faithful lovers, and to those that will submit them to the faith of Holy Church,” although the manuscript itself continues for another half page. Ironically, the passage omitted includes the sentence, “And beware that thou take not on thing after thy affection and liking and leve another, for that is the condition of an heretique,” but it is hard to account for this omission other than by sheer carelessness. Probably Collins genuinely believed that the differences between the Sloane Manuscript and the Cressy edition were insignificant. He spotted something as

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obvious as the chapter headings and incorporated them into his version, but he was no doubt working fast (by modern editorial standards) and, impatient with the relative illegibility of the Sloane Manuscript, relied heavily on Cressy. Nor should we criticize him too harshly for this. The study of English Literature was only just beginning to establish itself as a serious academic discipline and there was as yet no canon of Middle English prose texts that had to be treated with accuracy and respect. The interest in Julian came not from academics, but from devout Catholics (Anglican and Roman) who were intrigued or inspired by what Julian had to say—or rather, by what they were led to think she had said. In 1901 Grace Warrack’s version, Revelations of Divine Love, appeared. It went through many editions over the next fifty or sixty years, a reprint of the thirteenth appearing as recently as 1958. (It was here that I, like many other students in the 1960s, first encountered Julian.) Warrack knew of the Paris Manuscript as well as Cressy’s printed edition but preferred to base her version (her own word) on the Sloane Manuscript. She does not seem to have regarded this as more than a matter of convenience, however, for she wrote of Cressy’s edition, “It agrees with the Manuscript now in Paris, but the readings that differ from the Sloane Manuscript are very few and are quite unimportant.”16 Her statement of her editorial practice is comprehensive, honest, and informative: “For the following version, the editor having transcribed the Sloane MS., divided its continuous lines into paragraphs, supplied to many words capital letters, and while following as far as possible the significance of the commas and occasional full stops of the original, endeavoured to make the meaning clearer by a more varied punctuation. As the book is designed for general use, modern spelling has been adopted, and most words entirely obsolete in speech have been rendered in modern English, though a few that seemed of special significance or charm have been retained.”17 She is aware of the potential hazards this policy entails, however, and in Chapter 58, for instance, although she keeps “Substance” for ME substance, substitutes an invented term, “Sense-soul” or “Sense-part,” for sensualite and does not merely “modernize” it to “sensuality.” Her “rule of never omitting a word from the Manuscript, and of enclosing within square brackets the very few words added” sometimes makes for awkward reading, but it at least avoids the destruction of evidence.18 In practical terms her version was a great success and enjoyed a steady sale; unfortunately it still lives on in a way that Warrack herself would surely have deplored, being used by some recent popular versions as a substitute for the Sloane Manuscript itself. In 1902 a rather different version of Julian appeared. The Jesuit priest George Tyrrell reprinted—yet again—Cressy’s 1670 edition, stating in a final note: “That edition has been followed faithfully, except in a few cases where obvious misprints, or the spelling, seemed likely to lead to confusion for the reader.”19 (He also altered Cressy’s punctuation “wherever it seemed needful.”) Tyrrell, unlike Parker, did suggest some emendations, which he put in square brackets rather than incorporating into the text: in Chapter 7 he prints “the seal [scale] of herring,” and in Chapter 10 “my understanding was litle [?led] down into the sea-ground,” both changes that suggest he had consulted the Sloane Manuscript, the existence of which he knew.

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But the real interest of this edition is not textual. Tyrrell (1861–1909) was a leading figure in the Catholic Modernist movement. Anglo-Irish by birth, he was brought up as an evangelical Anglican but became a Roman Catholic at the age of eighteen.20 He joined the Society of Jesus and was ordained a priest in 1891. Intellectually brilliant, he became renowned as a spiritual director, retreat conductor, and writer, and was a friend of Baron von Hügel, author of The Mystical Element of Religion. But in 1899 he published an article, entitled “A Perverted Doctrine,” on the doctrine of eternal suffering, which incurred the displeasure of the Jesuit censors at Rome. According to his friend and biographer Maud Petre, this article was inspired by his reading of Julian. From 1900 he was effectively exiled to a remote parish in Yorkshire until dismissed by the Jesuits in 1906. In the following year he was excommunicated, and two years later he died and was buried in an Anglican cemetery. Tyrrell’s introduction to the Cressy reprint hints at his own position in 1902. He saw himself reflected in a Julian tormented by those very aspects of Catholic teaching on damnation that caused him distress. Of her treatment of the problem of predestination, he wrote: “It is curious and instructive to see how, in many ways, Mother Juliana’s spirit of Catholic-hearted love was cramped in its efforts at self-expression by certain current theological conceptions of the time, whose subsequent Calvinistic developments caused them, even in their more tolerable forms, to be eventually abandoned by the Church.”21 While Parker had seen Julian as a proto-Protestant and Collins as an early ecumenist, Tyrrell saw her as a fellow Catholic Modernist. This version was eventually reprinted, but not until 1920, by which time Warrack’s more successful version had reached its seventh edition. Meanwhile, back at the British Museum there had been an exciting new development: the Short Text, known to the historian Francis Blomefield in the eighteenth century, had been rediscovered when in 1910 the Museum purchased the Amherst Manuscript (now MS Add. 37790).22 Two years later a version was published by Dundas Harford, whose policy was described as follows: “The Editor has tried to give the original wording, wherever it would not be positively misleading to the modern reader. He has modernized the spelling. For the punctuation, and the division into paragraphs, he is alone responsible, as there are few stops, and no breaks, in the MS.”23 Harford also invented chapter headings and a title, Comfortable Words to Christ’s Lovers, which survived the first two editions but was eventually replaced by The Shewings of the Lady Julian. Harford (1858–1953) was an Anglican priest and Vicar of St. Stephen’s, Norwich, between 1901 and 1908. Possibly the Norwich connection was the reason he was chosen to edit the newly found text. He was the fi rst to argue that the Short Text was Julian’s original account of her experiences, which she expanded fi fteen years later into the Long Text. This hypothesis has been generally accepted, except by Julia Bolton Holloway, whose views on all the Julian manuscripts, their dates and their interrelationships, are often different from those of other scholars.24 It was in the early twentieth century, too, that the dismemberment of Julian, and her reconstitution in the more palatable form of extracts and selections,

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began—or rather, continued and gathered strength, as both the Westminster and Upholland Manuscripts had long ago ignored the stern warnings of the Sloane scribe against incomplete transmission. In 1908 an anonymous collection, All Shall Be Well (the fi rst of numerous books with this title), was issued. This claimed to extract from Warrack’s version “these few pearls of spiritual thought, hoping that some who are hindered by the lack of time or opportunity or by difficulty of style and language, from giving this wonderful book the study it deserves, may fi nd in them helpful subjects for meditation and prayer.”25 The compiler also carried a torch for the restoration of the solitary life in the Church of England, murmuring wistfully: “Have we no place in our twentieth century for such as Julian? Are there none whose souls are athirst for God, who are unsuited for a life in Community, unfitted for the ceaseless round of active life which seems unavoidable in our large English sisterhoods, who yet would gladly answer the call to a life of seclusion, devoted to prayer and meditation?”26 A few years later appeared The Shewing of a Vision, once again extracts from Warrack’s version, compiled by an Anglican sister with a preface by George Congreve, S.S.J.E. The tone may be adequately judged by this sample from the preface to the “priceless little book” by “this beautiful character”: “In every page one meets charming tokens of English education and character, traces of love of home, of religion that made her childhood and youth happy, traces of poetic insight, of humour, of happy laughter.”27 This marks the one and only appearance of Julian as the Georgian Country Gentlewoman. Julian was becoming a household (or at least parish and convent) name. Yet there was still no edition of any of the manuscript versions that adhered to modern standards of textual scholarship, even though the Early English Text Society had published its fi rst volume in 1864, the Oxford English Dictionary was appearing regularly in fascicle, and diligent Victorian scholars had already edited many Middle English treatises. At the same time there were no real translations either, just those strange hybrids, “modernized versions.” Perhaps because of the success of Warrack’s version, only one other version of a complete text, Long or Short, was published between 1902 and 1958: in 1927 the Benedictine Dom Roger Hudleston brought out in a Roman Catholic devotional series a version based on the Sloane Manuscript. This might seem superfluous, but Warrack’s publisher, Methuen, had no religious affi liation and perhaps it was felt that Roman Catholic ownership rights over Julian needed reasserting. Hudleston also claimed that his version was closer than his predecessors’ to the Sloane Manuscript itself: “While adopting modern spelling throughout, the actual wording of the text has been kept considerably closer to that of the MS than in the editions of Miss Warrack or Fr. Collins, although really obsolete words have been abandoned in favour of the nearest modern equivalent.”28 But his support for Sloane was not unqualified: his version is subtitled “edited from the MSS” (note the plural), possibly because he cites some passages from the Short Text in his notes, and he ventured the cautious opinion that Sloane was “perhaps nearer to the original text” than the Paris Manuscript. In 1958 Sr. Maria Reynolds, who had worked on the Short and Long Texts for University of Liverpool dissertations, published a “partially modernized” version

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of the Short Text.29 She stressed the rhetorical aspect of Julian’s prose, describing her as “the first English woman of letters,” a term that some might consider inappropriate to the early fi fteenth century as it suggests someone whose primary interest lies in professional writing. Possibly Christine de Pisan can be regarded as a “woman of letters,” but surely not the anchoress Julian, who made no attempt to circulate her writings as far as we know or to use them to seek patronage. In some ways this characterization of Julian has, in the event, had (quite unintended) consequences, possibly more harmful than some others that are merely ludicrous. In 1955 the Westminster Manuscript had been identified as containing extracts from the Long Text, but again, instead of a scholarly edition of the Middle English, a modernized version, entitled Of the Knowledge of Ourselves and of God, was published in 1961 by James Walsh (like Tyrrell, a Jesuit priest) and Eric, later Edmund, Colledge (like Cressy and Collins, an Anglican convert to Roman Catholicism); the Anglo-Catholic fi rm Mowbray published it complete with nihil obstat and imprimatur, to make assurance doubly sure. It was described as “completely modernized in punctuation and spelling, vocabulary and idiom” and emended with reference to earlier “editions” where the editors considered it necessary.30 It was therefore a long way from the original manuscript, the neglect of which until recently, given that it is the earliest witness to the Long Text, was extraordinary and may have been due to a distrust of medieval anthologies and compilations. It has now, however, been edited by Hugh Kempster, and his edition forms the basis of the text recently printed by Watson and Jenkins.31 It has also been transcribed and translated by Reynolds and Holloway.32 In the same year Walsh published a new version of the Long Text, in the same series (Orchard Books) as Hudleston’s. For this he used transcripts of the Sloane and Paris Manuscripts made by Sr. Reynolds. He outlined his editorial policy as follows: “I have adopted Paris as the basis of my version, though I have never scrupled to substitute a reading from Sloane whenever this seemed superior, either linguistically or textually. My choice of readings has been governed largely by what appear to me to be the principles of Julian’s spiritual theology. In point of fact, I began my version in the settled conviction that there is nothing unorthodox, nothing contrary to Catholic theology, in the Revelations.”33 No doubt, as a Jesuit, Walsh was reacting against the use to which Tyrrell had tried to put Julian. Nonetheless, this combination of textual eclecticism with theological rigidity is hardly in the best interests of the text, though one is at least grateful for the editorial candor that makes his policy so clear. In 1966, at a time when there was a strong countercultural interest in mysticism of all sorts, Penguin published in its Penguin Classics series the fi rst real translation of Julian into Modern English, as opposed to piecemeal modernizations. The translator, Clifton Wolters, was an Anglican priest who had spent most of his working life in Newcastle, in the (then) industrial northeast of England. This is perhaps reflected in the salutary remarks he makes in his introduction: “Very rarely do works improve by being translated. Julian is more obscure than is generally recognized. Perhaps this is due to the sort of gold-panning treatment

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she is subjected to by those on the look out for nuggets. Golden sentences there are in plenty, but in the process of isolating them a lot of very rich minerals are sieved away. It is more profitable to treat her as a coalmine and work the seams. The yield is greater and more rewarding.”34 The resulting translation is very free, more of a paraphrase, and not always successful, notoriously so in the case of one of Julian’s “nuggets.” It renders the famous line, that in the Sloane Manuscript reads “al shall be wele and al shall be wele and al maner of thyng shal be wele,” as “it is all going to be all right; it is all going to be all right; everything is going to be all right.” This is at least a genuine attempt to render Julian into Modern English: the “modernizers” who simply keep “all shall be well” misrepresent her, for Middle English shal is not accurately rendered by Modern English “shall.” But unfortunately Wolters has not gained accuracy by sacrificing elegance, for shal does not primarily indicate futurity but rather obligation or necessity. Nonetheless, Wolters’s version was immensely successful and was reprinted at least six times. (In 1998 Penguin replaced it with a translation of both the Short and the Long Texts by Elizabeth Spearing, who uses Glasscoe’s edition of the Sloane Manuscript for the latter.35) Wolters had also based his translation on the Sloane Manuscript, “generally accepted as the most reliable of the extant versions.”36 But it was not for another ten years that a scholarly edition of that manuscript appeared. The credit for that goes to Marion Glasscoe, who in 1976 published her edition with the title A Revelation of Love.37 In 1978 Frances Beer published an edition of the Short Text in the Middle English Texts series, while simultaneously Colledge and Walsh published their monumental edition of both the Short and Long Texts, claiming it as the “fi rst critical presentation of the texts of the Revelations” and using as their base manuscript for the Long Text not Sloane but Paris.38 At the same time the editors published a translation of their own edition, announcing, “Although numerous beginnings have been made on critical texts—that is, editions of the original language, displaying and evaluating all the evidence—the task was only successfully completed this year when the present writers issued their edition,” and asserting that all previous translations (including Walsh’s own) were now superseded.39 This confidence was premature. Their privileging of the Paris Manuscript over Sloane has certainly not met with general approval, nor has their reason: that is, its superior preservation of Julian’s (presumed) rhetorical skills—in some ways a legacy of the earlier emphasis on Julian as a “woman of letters.” Their edition, though respected and still widely read and cited, has not become the “received version.” Rather, it seems to have stimulated various reediting projects, most notably led by Anna Maria Reynolds and Julia Bolton Holloway, on one hand, and by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, on the other. This activity must stem from more than mere dissatisfaction with the choice of base manuscript by Colledge and Walsh. Rather, in the late twentieth century the whole idea of a “defi nitive” and “critical” edition had become problematic. Constructing a stemma and using it to reconstruct an archetype as close as possible to the author’s “original,” closer than any of the presumably flawed and corrupted surviving witnesses, were no longer (and had not been for some time)

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unchallenged editorial methods. And there were always texts for which they were inappropriate. In the case of Julian’s Long Text the only two independent witnesses to the complete text, the Sloane and Paris Manuscripts, were both written down at least two hundred years after the composition dates of A Revelation of Love.40 In addition, they sometimes disagree significantly. Some of these divergences may even be due to revision by the author herself, for all we know. Nor does the only copy of the Short Text consistently support either manuscript when comparison is possible. Some would claim that a defi nitive and convincing reconstruction of the “original version” of the Long Text is pretty much of an impossibility, and that any attempt to produce one would be permeated by subjective editorial judgment. And if ever a text has been at the mercy of editors, their prejudices, quirks, and hidden agendas, it is Julian’s.41 But neither Watson and Jenkins, nor Reynolds and Holloway, in their different ways, could resist the temptation to attempt the impossible. The results are strikingly different: Watson and his fellow-editor have produced a radically confl ated but meticulously documented text, and Holloway and her felloweditor, an edition that is textually conservative but in many other respects highly speculative. Both projects deserve our respect, although one is put in mind of Gerald Manley Hopkins’s comment on Milton: “The effect of studying masterpieces is to make me admire and do otherwise.”42 The more prudent (or boring) among us continue to believe that what would be far more useful than further attempts at critical editions would be proper editions of the various witnesses. We do have Beer’s currently out-of-print edition of the Short Text, though it perhaps pays too much attention to the Long Text. We also have Glasscoe’s edition of the Sloane Manuscript, whose unpretentious presentation belies its importance, but it still comes with an admittedly incomplete glossary and textual notes only. A later student edition of the Sloane Manuscript (with occasional emendations from Paris) by Georgia Ronan Crampton, who characterizes hers as “a conservative text,” has a fuller glossary and ample explanatory notes.43 Yet a third student edition, edited by Denise Baker, this time based on the Paris Manuscript “[b]ecause its language is closer to Modern English than that of the Sloane manuscripts,” came out in 2005: this partly satisfies the need for an edition of Paris itself, rather than of Paris sometimes conflated with Sloane, as offered by Colledge and Walsh.44 At the other extreme, the 2006 edition of Julian’s complete oeuvre produced by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins was not presumably designed with students in mind. Theirs is a complete departure from earlier editions: admittedly “more interventionist and more speculative,” it sets out to “establish a hybrid text that differs in many details from its predecessors.”45 Although their edition of the Long Text uses the Paris manuscript as its base text, it imports readings not only from Sloane but also, as it is self-confessedly “synthetic,” from the Amherst Manuscript.46 The even pricier edition of Reynolds and Holloway “replicate[s] the surviving manuscripts as closely as possible,” presenting diplomatic transcriptions of each witness.47 It even goes to the extent of reproducing the page rulings

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of the Westminster and Paris Manuscripts and it keeps long “s” as well as thorn and yogh. If over a decade ago I could associate Julian with a possibly childless Lady Macbeth, perhaps now she looks more like the old woman who lived in a shoe, who had so many children she (or we) did not know what to do. What more could be the objects of our textual desire? A wish list might include a reprint, preferably in facsimile, of Cressy’s rare edition of 1670 (available online through Chadwyck-Healey’s Early English Books Online service). Apart from its textual value it throws light on late-seventeenth-century English Catholicism and its attitude toward medieval texts.48 An edition of Sloane 3705, a witness that has no intrinsic textual value, might serve a similar purpose for the eighteenth century: bad manuscripts do have certain virtues for those interested in the “sociology of texts.” And what of the translations? They can only be translations, not of “Julian’s Revelations” but of a particular version. The existing translations, however, do preserve much valuable information about the reception of the Julian texts and the many ways in which they have been found useful by different readerships at different times. One would not wish to disparage what so many have found there over the last five hundred years, even if readers have mainly found what they wanted to fi nd. It is not possible to discuss in detail the problems of translating the Julian texts into Modem English, and in any case this would now be superfluous.49 Briefly, Modern English is not simply Middle English with different spelling and certain obsolete words replaced. Too much else is significantly different, though this is not always immediately obvious. Moreover, it is no longer possible to bank on the general awareness or passive knowledge of archaic forms of English that prevailed, at least among the devout, fi fty years ago when the Authorized and Douai versions of the Bible were still widely read, and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer was in use. One would think it obvious that “modernized” versions are no longer viable, but unfortunately they continue to appear. One attempt, which had best remain unidentified, is readable enough, but its editors are quite confused about the history of their text, wrongly claiming that the Paris Manuscript is the earliest, and that it contains the Short Text! The version is, unforgivably, based not on the Sloane Manuscript itself, but on Warrack’s version of Sloane. A recent selection also bases itself on “Grace Warwick” [sic].50 There will, however, always be a place for translations for readers who cannot read Middle English. For those willing to attempt Julian’s texts in their original forms, there is now a huge choice of editions with varying editorial philosophies and extensive glosses, annotations, and/or glossaries. We could still use affordable editions with facing-page prose translations into Modern English that are not afraid to diverge quite markedly from the Middle English in order to render the linguistic nuances of the original. (Reynolds and Holloway provide modernizations, rather than translations, on the same page as “quasi-facsimile” editions of Westminster, Paris, and Amherst.51 Watson and Jenkins consider, and

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reject, the provision of translations as such, instead preferring extensive notes and paraphrase.52) Such versions hardly sound like potential bestsellers, and indeed both Reynolds and Holloway’s monumental edition and Watson and Jenkins’s are expensive (190 Euros and $72 respectively), putting them beyond the reach of students or even of most general readers. But Julian is not really a “popular” author, for all her current popularity. She certainly was not in the past, as the social history of her texts makes clear. Far more stands between modern readers and Julian than just the obsolescence of her own, or her scribes’, language. She is often obscure and difficult and must be approached with all the resources of scholarship as well as with good intentions, for we still know too little about her and her texts. (It is chilling that some studies of her theology have been based on existing translations rather than the Middle English originals, a method that would be unthinkable in dealing with biblical or patristic texts.) Even the knowledge that is available, for instance about Middle English vocabulary and semantics, has not been fully exploited in the past to elucidate her meaning. Furthermore, textual scholars have a duty to emphasize that our concept of “Julian of Norwich” can be no more than that of a group of texts of obscure and uncertain history, a view that should modify her current near canonization. For instance, some Anglican dioceses now celebrate a Feast of Saint Julian on May 8, quite an achievement for a shadowy figure of whom we know practically nothing except that she wrote at least two accounts of a series of visions—accounts that may or may not be accurately preserved in the various manuscripts, almost all written long after her death, the exact meaning of which we often do not understand. Such veneration places “Julian” in a very select group of authors of canonized texts, of which only four others spring to mind: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We need to ask ourselves whether such an apotheosis really does “Julian,” and her readers, a service. Notes This is a revision of my article, “How Many Children Had Julian of Norwich? Editions, Translations, and Versions of Her Revelations,” in Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett with Thomas H. Bestul, Janet Goebel, and William F. Pollard (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 27–39. 1. See further Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love: The Shorter Version ed. from B.L. Add. MS 37790, ed. Frances Beer, Middle English Texts 8 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1978), pp. 9–10. 2. On the Amherst Manuscript as a whole, see now the excellent study by Marleen Cré, Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse: A Study of London, British Library, MS Additional 37790, The Medieval Translator / Traduire au Moyen Age 9 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006). 3. See further Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and James Walsh, S.J., introduction to A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich: Part One: Introduction and the Short Text, Studies and Texts 36 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), pp. 9–10 [1–198].

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4. Colledge and Walsh date it as mid-seventeenth century (introduction to A Book of Showings, p. 7), while Marion Glasscoe thinks it late sixteenth or early seventeenth century: see her “Visions and Revisions: A Further Look at the Manuscripts of Julian of Norwich,” Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989): 105 [103–20]. 5. Colledge and Walsh, introduction to A Book of Showings, p. 8. 6. Marion Glasscoe, introduction to Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1976), p. viii [vii–xviii]. 7. On Cressy, see now Patricia C. Brückmann, “Cressy, Hugh Paulinus (1605–1674),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6676, accessed January 3, 2008]. 8. XVI Revelations of Divine Love, published by R.F.S. Cressy (1670), sig. A3r. 9. So-called after its most recent known location, St John’s College, Upholland, Lancashire. Its current whereabouts are unknown. 10. George Hargreave Parker, preface to Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love, Made to a Devout Servant of Our Lord Called Mother Juliana (Leicester: Crossley, 1843), p. viii [iii–viii]. 11. Parker, preface to Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love, p. vii. 12. Parker, preface to Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love, pp. vii–viii. 13. Henry Collins, Difficulties of a Convert from the Anglican to the Catholic Church (London: Dolman, 1857), p. 14. 14. Henry Collins, preface to Revelations of Divine Love, Shewed to a Devout Anchoress, by Name, Mother Julian of Norwich (London: T. Richardson and Sons, 1877), p. xiv [xii–xxi]. 15. Collins, preface to Revelations of Divine Love, p. xiv. 16. Grace Warrack, “Notes on Manuscripts and Editions,” in Revelations of Divine Love Recorded by Julian, Anchoress at Norwich, Anno Domini 1373 (London: Methuen, 1901), p. xiii [xi–xiv]. 17. Warrack, “Notes on Manuscripts,” in Revelations of Divine Love, pp. xiii–xiv. 18. Warrack, “Notes on Manuscripts,” in Revelations of Divine Love, p. xiv. 19. XVI Revelations of Divine Love Shewed to Mother Juliana of Norwich 1373, with a preface by George Tyrrell, S.J. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1902). 20. See further Nicholas Sagovsky, “Tyrrell, George (1861–1909),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/36606, accessed January 4, 2008]. 21. Tyrrell, preface to XVI Revelations of Divine Love, pp. xiv–xv [v–xvii]. 22. Georgia Ronan Crampton, introduction to The Shewings of Julian of Norwich (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 1994), pp. 19–20 [1–23]. 23. Dundas Harford, introduction to Comfortable Words for Christ’s Lovers: Being the Visions and Voices Vouchsafed to Lady Julian, Recluse at Norwich in 1373 (London: H.R. Allinson, 1911) p. 13 [7–14]. 24. See Julian of Norwich, Showing of Love: Extant Texts and Translations, ed. Sr. Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., and Julia Bolton Holloway, Biblioteche e Archivi 8 (Florence: SISMEL–Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2001). 25. Preface to All Shall Be Well: Selections from the Writings of the Lady Julian of Norwich A.D. 1373 (London: A.R. Mowbray, 1908), pp. iii–iv [iii–v]. 26. “Of the Lady Julian, Anchoress,” in All Shall Be Well, p. ix [vii–x]. The first contemplative Anglican community for women, the Society of the Love of God, located at Fairacres in Oxford, was not founded until 1906 or 1907. 27. George Congreve, preface to The Shewing of a Vision, Being Extracts from “Revelations of Divine Love” Shewed to a Devout Anchoress by Name Mother Julian of Norwich (London: Elliot Stock, 1915), pp. viii–ix [v–x].

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28. Dom Roger Hudleston, O.S.B., introduction to Revelations of Divine Love, 2nd ed. (London: Burns and Oates, 1952), p. viii [v–xxix]. 29. A Shewing of God’s Love, ed. Anna Maria Reynolds (London: Sheed and Ward, 1974). 30. James Walsh, S.J., and Eric Colledge, introduction to Of the Knowledge of Ourselves and of God: A Fifteenth-Century Florilegium (London: A.R. Mowbray, 1961), p. xviii [v–xix]. 31. “Julian of Norwich: The Westminster Text of A Revelation of Love,” ed. Hugh Kempster, Mystics Quarterly 23 (1997): 177–245; Appendix A in The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 417–31. 32. Julian of Norwich, Showing of Love, ed. Reynolds and Holloway, pp. 37–117, based on Reynolds’s 1956 University of Liverpool thesis. 33. James Walsh, S.J., preface to The Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich (London: Burns and Oates, 1961), p. vi [v–vii]. 34. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, trans. Clifton Wolters (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1966), p. 20. 35. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Short Text and Long Text), trans. Elizabeth Spearing, intro. A.C. Spearing (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1998). 36. Wolters, introduction to Revelations of Divine Love, p. 14 [11–44]. 37. Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love, ed. Marion Glasscoe, Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1976). 38. Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, ed. Beer; Colledge and Walsh, introduction to A Book of Showings, p. 196. 39. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and James Walsh, S.J., introduction to Julian of Norwich, Showings (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 17 [17–119]. 40. The debate over the composition dates of the various Julian versions would furnish material for a separate article. See Nicholas Watson, “The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” Speculum 68 (1993): 637–83. 41. See further Glasscoe, “Visions and Revisions.” 42. The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 291. 43. The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Crampton. 44. The Showings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Denise Baker (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005). Although this is part of the Norton Critical Edition series, textual scholars would probably regard it as closer to a “variorum” than a “critical” edition. 45. Watson and Jenkins, preface to Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. x [ix–x]. 46. Watson and Jenkins, introduction to Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 39–40 [1–59]. 47. Sr. Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., and Julia Bolton Holloway, “Westminister Cathedral Manuscript, Text and Translation,” in Showing of Love, p. 5 [5–33]. 48. Watson and Jenkins, introduction to Writings of Julian of Norwich, p. 16, point out that Cressy’s edition “is the most important document in the history of the work’s reception and of perceptions of its author, fixing the image of Julian for centuries to come.”

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49. See the discussion in Watson and Jenkins, introduction to Writings of Julian of Norwich, pp. 25–27. 50. To be fair, the title page of the 13th edition gives the translator’s name as “Grace Warwick,” though the “Note to the Thirteenth Edition” by P. Franklin Chambers correctly calls her “Grace Warrack of Edinburgh.” 51. Julian of Norwich, Showing of Love, ed. Reynolds and Holloway: the term “quasifacsimile” occurs on p. 495, while the blurb claims that “[t]he volume presents the manuscript texts, diplomatically transcribed.” 52. Watson and Jenkins, introduction to Writings of Julian of Norwich, pp. 25–26.

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CHAPTER 2 FROM ANCHORHOLD TO CLOSET: JULIAN OF NORWICH IN 1670 AND THE IMMANENCE OF THE PAST Jennifer Summit

This essay situates the production of Julian of Norwich’s early texts within the seventeenth century, when historicism and contemplation became competing modes of consuming medieval works.

J

ulian of Norwich wrote in the late fourteenth century, but the only surviving manuscripts of A Revelation of Love, together with the first printed edition of her work, date from the second half of the seventeenth century: does this make her a medieval or an early modern author? Following our dominant paradigms of literary history, which fix works to the moment of their production, scholarship has focused on Julian’s immediate historical contexts to situate the meanings of her work. Yet the seventeenth-century edition and manuscripts can remind us that literary history does not follow a chronological order, because it is the nature of literary texts to circulate far outside the circumstances of their initial production.1 Ref lecting on precisely this point, Wai Chee Dimock has recently called instead for new conceptual models of literary history that might acknowledge the temporal elasticity and multiplicity of readers’ experiences. Instead of following a linear route from past to present, Dimock argues, the reading experience disrupts chronology: “Two thousand years and two thousand miles can sometimes register as near simultaneity: ten years and ten miles can sometimes pose an impassable gulf. Thanks to this elasticity, the now experienced by any reader is idiosyncratic, unlike anyone else’s. It has its particular radii, particular genealogies and coevals. Its relational fabric is separately cut, stretching and bulging in odd places. It is not synchronized with the numerical now on any standard calendar.”2 Taking up Dimock’s invitation to rethink literary-historical chronology, this essay reads Julian of Norwich as an important author of England’s early

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modernity.3 For despite the details of her immediate biography, Julian’s cultural inf luence and reputation were generated within—and, I will argue, came to ref lect historical and cultural conditions that were specific to—the religious controversies of the English seventeenth century, when nuns at the Benedictine convents at Cambrai and Paris transcribed the Long Text of A Revelation of Love, and when the nuns’ chaplain, Serenus Cressy, brought out his edition of 1670. If Julian now inhabits our canon as an English medieval writer, it is also possible to argue that she did not become “English”—in the sense of being assimilated into an English literary tradition—nor did she become “Medieval”—that is, fully situated in the pre-Reformation literary past—until the seventeenth century, when she was called on to ground English Catholicism in a native, insular past. Today, Julian of Norwich sustains a double reputation, appealing, on the one hand, to academic readers who situate her work in a historical context, and on the other, to nonacademic readers who adapt her theology to the spiritual needs of the present day.4 This division of Julian’s readership and reputation is a legacy, as I will argue, of the English seventeenth century, which produced historicism and contemplation as two dominant but competing modes of consuming medieval texts. By tracing these modes of reading to Julian’s early modern reception, I will further argue, we uncover the origin of the linear and chronological literary histories that Dimock critiques, along with the historicizing reading practices that they foster. As the early modern production of Julian of Norwich shows, historicist protocols of reading—marked by their fidelity to documentary evidence and a chronological model of literary time—emerged out of a particular historical moment and defi ned themselves against contemplative literacies that upheld contrastingly atemporal models of revelation. I make this argument at a moment when professional medievalists are challenging the historicist protocols of academic literacies. Recently James Simpson and Nicholas Watson have called on fellow medievalists to practice a “hermeneutics of empathy” that might explore our connections with, rather than distance from, the historical past.5 For Simpson, this approach does not undermine scholarly historicism so much as it broadens its analysis, replacing the strict divisions of literary-historical periodization with a deeper and more diachronic focus that can reveal patterns of continuity as well as change across the broad sweep of time.6 Yet the early modern publication and legacy of Julian of Norwich suggests that historicist literacy became legitimized precisely to counter a literacy of empathy, which it expelled outside its constitutive borders—suggesting, in other words, that historicist empathy was a contradiction in terms. Cressy’s “Mother Juliana” and the Conversations of the Closet The confrontation between historicist and contemplative literacies forms both pretext and aftermath of Cressy’s 1670 edition of Julian’s Long Text, XVI Revelations of Divine Love, Shewed to a Devout Servant of Our Lord, Called Mother Juliana, an Anchorete of Norwich: Who Lived in the Dayes of King Edward the Third.7 The work emerged from the exiled Benedictine community of nuns at Cambrai, founded in 1623, whose early spiritual director, Augustine Baker, actively sought

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to recuperate medieval devotional works for the nuns’ use.8 For this purpose, Baker famously wrote to Sir Robert Cotton, asking if he could spare from his extensive collection of medieval manuscripts (now preserved as the Cotton Collection in the British Library) any works of medieval devotion for the nuns, since “Thair lives being contemplative the comon bookes of the worlde are not for their purpose, and litle or nothing is in thes daies printed in English that is proper for them”; yet, he continues, “there were manie good English bookes in olde time,” including the works of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and The Cloud of Unknowing, which, Baker insists, remained relevant for contemporary contemplatives.9 Baker’s interest in reviving medieval religious texts helped to foster a distinct, contemplative literary culture in the Benedictine convent of Cambrai and its sister house in Paris, which generated the only surviving manuscripts of Julian’s Long Text.10 These are Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fonds anglais 40; London, British Library MS Sloane 2499, which appears to have been copied by Mother Clementine Cary (d. 1671), founder of the sister house in Paris; and the Upholland Manuscript, which includes a set of excerpts from Julian’s Revelation, copied by nuns Barbara Constable and Bridget More.11 Serenus Cressy’s 1670 edition of Julian’s Revelation participated in this medieval revival and appears to have derived from the same missing base text used to compile the Upholland Manuscript.12 Together, these works reveal that the contemplative nuns actively consulted Julian of Norwich as a spiritual guide and inspiration. Serenus Cressy was a high-profi le convert to Catholicism who left the Anglican intellectual community of the Great Tew Circle to become a Benedictine priest and confessor for the English nuns of Cambrai and, in 1651, the chaplain to the new house at Paris.13 In his account of his dramatic conversion, Exomologesis (1647 and 1653), Cressy describes his special admiration for “Mysticall Theology,” which he defi nes as “nothing else in generall, but certain Rules, by the practise whereof a vertuous Christian might attain to a neerer, a more familiar, and beyond all expression comfortable conversation with God.”14 In keeping with his mystical affi nities, Cressy published his edition of XVI Revelations of Divine Love along with other contemplative works from Cambrai and Paris, including Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection (which Cressy published in 1659) and a condensed edition of Augustine Baker’s writings, published in 1657 as Sancta Sophia, or, Directions for the Prayer of Contemplation, which includes directions for “Reading Spirituall Bookes” and “Mystick Authours.”15 Modern critics have charged Cressy with reducing Baker’s original writings to “pre-digested pabulum.”16 Yet Cressy’s mystical writings and editions took place within a polemical context, and the publications that resulted—particularly the 1670 Julian of Norwich— were aimed as salvos in a public controversy over the proper purpose and objects of religious literacy. By 1670 Cressy had returned to England, like many English Catholics after the Restoration, and published his edition of Julian of Norwich at a time when, as Thomas Clancy remarks, “Catholic publishing moved back home.”17 True to his own biographical circumstances, Cressy self-consciously frames his edition of Julian as an exile’s return. It is significant that Cressy dedicates his edition not to

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English nuns displaced to the continent, but to an English laywoman: Lady Mary Blount of Sodington, the recently widowed matriarch of an aristocratic Catholic family in Worcestershire.18 Lady Mary is the dedicatee of other works from this period, including Robert Knightley’s crypto-Catholic manuscript closet drama, Alfrede or Right Reinthron’d (1659), an English translation of William Drury’s Aluredus sive Alfredus (1619), and The Office of the Holy Week According to the Missall and Roman Breviary (1670) by Lady Mary’s own son, Walter Kirkham Blount, which he dedicated to “My most Honoured Dear Mother the Lady M. B.” as a work for “the special satisfaction and spiritual comfort of your ladyship and my Dear Sisters.”19 Both the works confirm Lady Mary Blount as not only a prominent Catholic woman but one who actively supported a domestic Catholic literary culture. In the paratext surrounding and presenting his XVI Revelations of Divine Love, Cressy calls attention to the historical and cultural distance that separates his subject and dedicatee, only to bridge it by appealing to Lady Mary to consider Julian of Norwich her contemporary. Writing in his dedication to Lady Mary, Cressy describes the work thus: “The author of it, is a Person of your own Sex, who lived about Three Hundred Yeares since, intended it for You, and for such Readers as your self who will not be induced to the perusing of it by Curiosity, or a desire to learn strange things, which afterward they will at best vainly admire, or perhaps out of incredulity contemn. But your Ladyship will, I assure my self, afford Her a place in your closet, where at your Devout Retirements, you will enjoy her saint-like conversation” (XVI, A2r-v). Contemplative literacy traverses historical difference: while Julian “lived about Three Hundred Yeares since,” Cressy assures Lady Mary, she “intended” her work “for You.” Just as Cressy and many fellow Catholics crossed the Channel to return to England after the Restoration, Cressy’s Julian projects herself across the channel of time, becoming a fourteenth-century emissary to the late seventeenth-century present. In this representation of Julian’s transhistorical mobility, Cressy follows the lead of Julian herself, whose revelations vehiculate a sacred “time travel” by means of a compassionate identification that crosses temporal distance.20 In her fi rst revelation, for instance, Julian perceives the Virgin Mary both externally, “ghostly in bodily likenes,” and internally, when “God shewed me in part the wisdom and the truth of [Mary’s] soule.” From the privileged vantage of Mary’s own mental space, Julian is made a fellow-beholder of God: “wherin I understode the reverent beholding that she beheld her God, that is her maker.”21 Julian’s revelation is not a vision of Mary, but an understanding of Mary’s perception; it is not an object to be beheld, but a shared experience of beholding. Just as the vehicle of compassion transports Julian backward in time to share Mary’s beholding of God, it carries her forward in time to share the same contemplative experience with Lady Mary Blount. If Julian and the Virgin Mary become identified as fellow-beholders, Julian and Lady Mary become similarly identified through the shared experience of beholding that is presented in Cressy’s edition of Julian’s Revelation of Love. In the prefatory letter “To the Reader,” Cressy outlines Julian’s biography, explaining that she “was one of the strictest sort of Solitary Livers; being Inclosed all her life (alone) within four

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Walls: whereby, though all Mortals were excluded from her dwelling, yet Saints and Angels, and the Supream King of both, could and did fi nd Admittance” (XVI, n.p.). But Julian’s solitary contemplative practice is less a mark of historical otherness than a point of cross-historical identification with the domestic devotional subject. Like Julian in her anchorhold, Lady Mary practices “devout retirements” in her “closet,” which Cressy frames as a seventeenth-century equivalent of a fourteenth-century anchoritic space. While Julian’s solitude in the anchorhold permits the visits of “saints and angels,” Lady Mary’s closeted “retirements” invite the “saint-like conversation” of Julian herself. Cressy’s model of conversational devotional literacy recalls his earlier defi nition of “Mystical theology” in Exomologesis as “the practise whereof a vertuous Christian might attain to a neerer, a more familiar, and beyond all expression comfortable conversation with God”; it also anticipates Simpson’s “hermeneutics of empathy,” which approaches medieval texts across time as “friends with whom we want to converse.”22 For Cressy, such cross-historical conversations characterize the experience of contemplative reading, which is defi ned against a literacy of “curiosity”; as Cressy writes, he hopes that readers of his edition will “not be induced to the perusing of it by Curiosity, or a desire to learn strange things, which afterward they will at best vainly admire, or perhaps out of incredulity contemn” (XIV, fol. A2r). By setting his reader of Julian against the reader driven by “curiosity,” Cressy recalls terms that he adapts from Augustine Baker in Sancta Sophia in order to direct readers’ uses of “spirituall bookes,” which include “Mystick Authours,” such as “Scala perfectionis written by F. Walter Hilton [and] The Clowd of vnknowing written by an vnknowne Authour”: As for Spirituall Bookes the Intention of an Internall liver ought not to be such as is that of those who live extroverted lives, who read them out of a vaine curiosity or to be thereby enabled to discourse of such sublime matters, without any particular choyce or consideration whether they be suitable to their spirit for practice, or no. A Contemplative soule in Reading such bookes must not say, This is a good booke or passage: But moreover, This is useful & proper for mee, & by Gods grace I will indeauour to put in execution in due time & place the good instructions conteined in it, as far as they are good for mee.23

Driven by “vaine curiosity,” the “extrovert” secular reader maintains a posture of detached critical appraisal (“this is a good booke or passage”) in place of the personal absorption and application that drive the “Internall” contemplative reader. In this, Baker (as edited by Cressy) establishes a taxonomy of reading practices that preserves the symbolic significance of the cloistered reader’s physical location while internalizing it as a distinctly inward mental space: Cressy’s English readers may not be literally cloistered, but they are oriented toward intimate, shared experience in a way that opposes the critical distance of the “extrovert” reader. The seventeenth-century “culture of curiosity” has been well documented; associated with the rise of collecting, exploration, and empiricism, “curiosity” won legitimacy as a spur to, as Barbara Benedict puts it, “the ambitious penetration of the unknown and the astute penetration of the untrue.”24 By setting

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his work against “curiosity,” Cressy purposefully distances himself from contemporary antiquarians, who approached the past with what William Camden calls “back-looking curiositie.”25 The subjects of Camden’s description, early modern antiquarians and collectors such as Robert Cotton, were largely responsible for preserving medieval religious texts that they transvalued as specimens of historical otherness.26 Prior to Cressy’s 1670 edition of Julian, anchoresses were familiar to some sixteenth and seventeenth-century readers through the Ancrene Wisse, which had become an antiquarian collector’s item: Cotton alone owned three copies.27 The early modern marginalia in surviving manuscripts reflects the historical curiosity with which its antiquarian collectors approached it, showing that they viewed it as the material emissary of a long-distant past whose alterity was apparent in its linguistic difference. Thus a copy belonging to Matthew Parker includes a sixteenth-century note that remarks, “In this may be notid howe the English tonge is altered in time both in wordes sentences and phrases” and lists “manie wordes” that appear in the text “wch nowe be forgotten.”28 Another copy, now at Magdalene College, Cambridge, was annotated by the great Reformation-era collector Stephen Batman, who cautions readers: “Let reason Rule the, [that] this booke shall reede,” and “Consider of the tyme, else thow art not wize.”29 Batman promotes “reason” and “wisdom” as marks of historical detachment that inoculate against the pernicious influence that medieval texts might otherwise exercise on their readers. Batman’s readerly deployment of “wisdom” as a cordon sanitaire runs in the opposite direction from the “wisdom” that Julian of Norwich describes when she joins Mary as fellow-beholder of God. For Julian, “wisdom” is the experience of compassionate, cross-temporal shared experience, while for Batman, the term disavows such identification; readers who are “not wize” will fail to “consider of the tyme” and thus mistakenly overstep the boundary between past and present. Conversely, by removing the texts of English Catholicism to a safely distant temporal moment, early modern antiquarians such as Batman anticipate modern historicism, which, explains Paul Hamilton, “refuse[s] to take the past on its own terms” and aspires to a “deregulation of original economies of meaning.”30 The very gestures by which historicism attempts to recuperate the past, in other words, also establish that past’s alterity from the present, while initiating its own practitioners in readerly protocols of detachment and estrangement. Where antiquarian and historicist literacies establish borders between past and present, Cressy’s contemplative literacy attempts not to distance the past but to domesticate it. Like the early modern annotator of the Parker Ancrene Wisse, Cressy acknowledges the apparent strangeness of Julian’s Middle English but defends it: “It is true, her language to the ears of this age, seems exotick; But it is such as was spoken in her time: therefore she may be excused: Her expressions touching Gods favours to her are homely, but that surely is no sin.”31 Rather than rendering Julian’s language archaic, Cressy insists that its apparent otherness is a sign of self-alienation affl icting “the ears of this age.” Julian’s language only “seems exotick,” he insists, but in fact it is “homely”; it is not foreign but domestic, not extrinsic but intrinsic. Cressy’s defense of Julian’s English recalls

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the earlier taxonomy of literacies that he developed in his edition of Baker’s writings, Sancta Sophia, which contrasted the literate practices of the “Internall liver” to “those who live extroverted lives.” Where the “extroverted” reader imposes critical and historical distance onto the object of literacy, the “internall liver” experiences the act of reading as one of cross-temporal sharing and identification. Likewise, Cressy urges readers of his Julian of Norwich to approach the text not as an “exotick” but a “homely” work that breaks down the alienation “of this age.” As many readers have noted, “homely” is a key term in Julian’s mystical lexicon.32 Julian marvels that Jesus “that is so reverent and so dredeful will be so homelie with a sinful creature living in this wretched flesh”; she is granted “a ghostly sight of his homely loving”; she observes that “he is full homely, and curteous”; and she explains that “the place that Jhesu taketh in our soule he shall never remove it withouten ende, as to my sight, for in us is his homeliest home and his endless dwelling” (my emphases).33 Julian uses the term to denote not only the intimacy of Jesus’ loving contact but the immanence of the divine within the human; Jesus is “homely” with us when he makes us his “homeliest home.”34 Cressy’s edition glosses Julian’s term “homely” with a range of translations offered as early modern equivalences. When Julian marvels that Jesus “will be so homelie with a sinfull creature living in this wretched flesh,” Cressy supplies the marginal gloss, familiar; when Julian beholds “a ghostly sight of his homely loving,” Cressy glosses the term to mean friendly; and when she observes that “as the Bodie is cladd in the cloath and the Flesh in the skin, and the Bones in the Flesh . . . so are we Soule and Bodie cladd and enclosed in the Goodnes of God; Yea, and more homelie,” Cressy glosses the term as truly.35 The late seventeenth century saw the rise of glossed editions of Middle English texts, which, as A.S.G. Edwards notes, reflect and reinforce editors’ growing awareness of “[the] problem of linguistic distance between text and audience.”36 But Cressy’s gloss moves in the opposite direction; rather than calling attention to historical and linguistic difference, Cressy works to render the Middle English “homely,” like Julian herself, “familiar,” “friendly,” and “true.” In so doing, Cressy adapts and transforms Julian’s own original sense, along with the sense of enclosedness with which Julian links it. Where Julian employs the term “homely” to suggest the immanence of the divine in the human, Cressy uses the term in his own defense of Julian’s “homely” language to suggest the immanence of the past in the present. As Cressy posits, the apparent strangeness of Julian’s language is actually a mark of its “homeliness”—what fi rst appears as a sign of distance in fact signals extreme intimacy and proximity. “Her expressions touching Gods favours to her are homely, but that surely is no sin,” he insists: if Julian’s language is “no sin” because it is “homely,” that is, springing from native ground, no more a sin is her equally “homely” Catholicism. Cressy’s insistence on Julian’s “homeliness” disguises the political implications of his project, which aims to restore Catholicism to its English home by reestablishing its native roots. Cressy’s “homely” Julian both domesticates the medieval source and brings Catholicism into the household; she is an author of

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domestic spaces, who conversationally visits women in their closets and other private places in which they practice their “devout retirements.” By 1670 the English house was contested territory, starting with the devotional space of the closet, in which Cressy projects his readers. Contemporary Protestant devotional works such as Edward Wettenhall’s Enter into Thy Closet (which went into multiple editions from 1663 through 1676) counseled readers to cultivate private spaces into which they could retire for private prayer and reflection. Such “closet transactions,” as another popular handbook would call them, were strictly regulated; Wettenhall’s title is careful to prescribe “a method and order for private devotion” that, as he insists in the text, follows “the same which the wisdom of the Church hath prescribed for publick use.”37 As Richard Rambuss and Ramie Targoff have argued and texts such as Wettenhall’s show, in the Protestant prayer closet private space was made to reproduce and internalize the disciplines of public practice. 38 Yet for Catholic women such as Lady Mary Blount, the closet is not an extension of Protestant public worship but a surrogate for it. Barred from public worship, English Catholics conducted their rites in hidden spaces secreted in their houses behind hidden panels, floorboards, and stairs, despite the fact that priest-harboring was made a capital crime in 1585. 39 Pursuivants charged with locating and punishing hidden priests focused their searches on “Clossettes and all other seacreate places of the house, perusing all the bookes, Lettres and writings in Chestes, Cupboordes and boxes there remaining.”40 Although persecutions relaxed somewhat in the period after 1660, as Patricia Crawford points out, anti-Catholic hysteria continued unabated in the popular press, which fuelled paranoia about Popish Plots and made the Catholic closet a symbol of covert danger; thus The Jesuites Intrigues (1669) proffers a self-condemning Catholic text “lately found in Manuscript in a Jesuites Closet.”41 Protestant polemic came to associate Catholics with private places, as does one contemporary polemic that refers to the “secrete caves, dennes, and holes” in which recusants hid their priests and conducted forbidden masses.42 Thus while Protestant works such as Wettenhall’s make the devotional closet a mirror of domestic order—“my closet would I have no unpleasant place, as sweetly situated as any part of my home,” Wettenhall writes—the Catholic closet was an unincorporated territory, menacing domestic security from within.43 By directing his edition of Julian of Norwich to Lady Mary in her “closet,” Cressy recalls the secret space of Catholic worship that lies both within the physical borders of Protestant England yet beyond the reach of Protestant control. Indeed, the surviving Elizabethan house of a related branch of the Blount family, Mapledurham House near Reading, still preserves two contemporary “hides,” one under a cupboard floor that was presumably meant for books and other illicit objects, and another in a garderobe closet, big enough for a priest.44 The Catholic closet does not internalize public discipline but rather provides safe haven for what Cressy calls in Sancta Sophia, “Secret operations of Gods Holy Spirit in the Hearts of Internal livers.”45 Where the “Internal liver” of Sancta Sophia inhabited the cloister or cell, the recusant readers to whom Cressy directs his XVI Revelations of Divine Love reproduce these “secret operations” both in

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their homes and their very “hearts.” Reproducing what Olga L. Valbuena calls an early modern “architecture of Catholic interiority,” Cressy makes the closet an architectural analogue for the recusant mind—which, like the secret spaces of recusant religious practice, represents an unincorporated territory.46 By casting Julian of Norwich, and the medieval Catholicism she represents, as intrinsic, not extrinsic, to the nation’s religious and cultural identity, Serenus Cressy, I am arguing, waged an appeal to English Catholics to restore Catholicism’s English place and heritage. Thus Cressy’s “homely” Julian deflects Protestant charges against Catholicism as a foreign imposition, which Cressy confronted in two earlier works, Roman-Catholick Doctrines No Novelties (1663) and The Church-History of Britanny from the Beginning of Christianity to the Norman Conquest . . . from all which is evidently demonstrated that the present Roman Catholick religion hath from the beginning, without interruption or change been professed in this our island (1668). Not stopping at the borders of the “island,” Cressy’s indwelling English Catholicism, built on his edition of Julian of Norwich, was anchored in both the domestic interior of the nation and the unpoliced interior of the recusant reading subject. The Stillingf leet Controversy The threat that Cressy’s Julian posed is registered in by the vehemence of the attack that the edition of her Long Text inspired by the “foremost theologian” of the Restoration, Edward Stillingfleet, Dean of St. Paul’s and then Bishop of Worcester.47 The year following Cressy’s publication of Julian of Norwich, Stillingfleet published A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry Practised in the Church of Rome (1671), a work that contrasts Protestant rationality with Catholic “fanaticism” and exemplifies the latter in Cressy’s edition of Julian, which Stillingfleet calls “the blasphemous and senseless tittle tattle of [a] Hysterical Gossip.”48 “Have we any mother Juliana’s among us? Or do we publish to the world the Fanatick Revelations of distempered brains as Mr. Cressy hath very lately done, to the great honour and service of the Roman Church, the sixteen Revelations of Divine Love shewed to a devout servant of our Lord (and Lady too) called Mother Juliana? We have, we thank God, other wayes of imploying our devout retirements, than by reading such fopperies as those are.”49 Cressy responded to Stillingfleet the year following with Fanaticism Fanatically Imputed to the Catholick Church by Doctour Stilling fl eet: And the Imputation Refuted and Retorted by S.C., a Catholick (1672), which defends “poor Mother Juliana” against the “spleen and choler” that Stillingfleet vents “against her litle Book.”50 Cressy’s response was joined by an anonymous defense, The Roman-Church’s Devotions Vindicated from Doctour Stilling fl eet’s Misrepresentation (1673), which insists “that [if Stillingfleet] can prove [ Julian’s] old English to be Fanaticism . . . then let Chaucer also look to himself.”51 A year later Stillingfleet responded with An Answer to Several Late Treatises, Occasioned by a Book Entituled A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry Practised in the Church of Rome (1673), which revives his earlier attack against “Mother Juliana,” “than which scarce any thing was ever Printed more ridiculous in the way of Revelations.”52 In the years that followed, Stillingfleet

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and Cressy continued to exchange salvos in a print war that grew to include Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, who entered the fray himself in 1673 with Animadversions Upon a Book Intituled Fanaticism Fanatically Imputed to the Catholick Church, by Dr. Stilling fleet, and the Imputation Refuted and Retorted by S.C., to which Cressy responded with An Epistle Apologetical of S.C. to a Person of Honour: Touching his Vindication of Dr. Stilling fleet (1674) and Stillingfleet himself responded with An Answer to Mr. Cressy’s Epistle Apologetical to a Person of Honour Touching his Vindication of Dr. Stillingfleet (1675). The polemical flurry was only halted with Cressy’s death in 1674.53 In these works, the attack and defense of Julian of Norwich focus an epistemological dispute concerning the “certainty of belief, compared with certainty of knowledge,” as Cressy’s Exomologesis names it.54 Stillingfleet, the author of Origines Sacrae, or a Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith (1662), championed a Christianity grounded in reason and the “fact” of Scripture, arguing “where the truth of a doctrine depends upon a matter of fact, the truth of the doctrine is sufficiently manifested, if the matter of fact is evidently proved in the highest way it is capable of.”55 His writings on church history and doctrine reflect the influence of contemporary antiquarians, particularly their use of material and textual evidence, which Stillingfleet emulates by vaunting his use of manuscripts and other critical source study.56 Thus his “rational account of the Christian Faith,” he insists, “depend[s] upon the comparing of ancient Histories, the credibility of Testimonies, and the sagacity in search, and skill concerning them.”57 This emphasis on critical source study identifies Stillingfleet with the “culture of fact,” whose rise Barbara Shapiro charts in the English seventeenth century.58 In his controversy with Cressy, Stillingfleet opposes his own rationalism with Cressy’s “fanaticism”—that is, Cressy’s downgrading of human reason in the pursuit of contemplative truth, such as when Cressy insists that the “Secret operations of Gods Holy Spirit in the Hearts of Internal livers” can only occur in the absence of “the voice and solicitation of Human Reason.”59 Thus Stillingfleet cites Cressy’s own insistence that “[the] actions of the brain and intellect hind[er] the heart and will” from apprehending the divine, only to retort: “The Christian Religion is a very plain and intelligible thing; and if it had not been so, I do not know, how men could be obliged to believe it?”60 For Stillingfleet, Cressy’s Julian manifests “the Fanatick Revelations of [a] distempered brain” and “the strange effects of the power of imagination, or a Religious Melancholy,” to which he insists that “any of us who have the use of reason” are less vulnerable than “unlearned persons and women.”61 By imagining a Catholicized imagination unleashed from the control of a Protestantized reason, Stillingfleet casts Cressy’s project as not only a religious threat but a cognitive one. As James Simpson has pointed out, one legacy of the Reformation was a widespread Protestant tendency to stigmatize the imagination by Catholicizing it.62 Stillingfleet’s treatment of Cressy’s Julian of Norwich shares this tendency, along with its concomitant enforcement of rupture between the new age of reason and the old age of irrational belief; but Stillingfleet’s opposition to “the strange effects of the power of imagination” embodied in “Mother Juliana” also

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allows him to appropriate the terms of Reformation anti-Catholicism to serve the ends of Restoration rationalism.63 Stillingfleet objects that Julian’s writings “deserve no other name at the best than the efforts of Religious madness”; yet his arguments reflect a careful engagement with her text and its mystical language.64 To illustrate Julian’s “madness,” Stillingfleet cites her signature image of “beclosedness”: “As when she speaks of our being beclosed in the mid-head of God, and in his meek-head, and in his benignity, and in his buxomness,” a direct quotation from XVI Revelations of Divine Love, Chapter 49. Likewise, Stillingfleet objects to Julian’s description of the mutual enclosure of the human and the divine, which he cites in another direct quotation, this time from Chapter 56: “it is our sensuality in which he is inclosed; and our kindly substance is beclosed in Jesu with the blessed soul of Christ, resting in the Godhead.”65 After an extended quotation of the passage, Stillingfleet breaks off abruptly, charging: “It were endless to repeat the Canting and Enthusiastick expressions, which signifie nothing in Mother Juliana’s Revelations.”66 Yet despite his insistence that they “signifie nothing,” Stillingfleet’s selection of these particular passages reflects his attentiveness to what Maud Burnett McInerney calls Julian’s “poetics of enclosure,” and specifically as it relates to the disposition of the soul.67 Julian’s image of the mutual enclosure of the human and the divine in Chapter 56 forms the climax of her fourteenth revelation on the nature of the soul, which follows from her desire “to know oure owne soule, wherby we be lerned to seke it ther it is, and that is into God.”68 As Julian learns, the soul is grounded in mercy and grace, which spring from God and complete the human faculties of memory and reason, which are incomplete without them; “For only by oure reson we may not profite, but if we have evenly therwith minde and love.”69 This map of the human faculties recalls but rewrites the Aristotelian division of the mind into the three faculties of imagination, reason, and memory; occupying a position analogous to the imagination, Julian’s category of “love,” arising from God, joins the faculties of “reson” and “minde” (memory) to make up a tripartite soul. In Julian’s distinct spiritual psychology, therefore, love is a specifically cognitive faculty that completes, but also reveals the limits of, human reason. This “created trinity of the human faculties,” as Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins call Julian’s model, develops from an image of enclosure because “oure soule is kindely roted in God in endlesse love,” as Julian explains: therefore, “if we wille have knowing of oure soule, . . . it behoveth to seke into oure lord God in whom it is enclosed.” 70 By insisting that love completes reason, Julian does not oppose the two or take a stand against the latter; indeed, as Nicholas Watson has meticulously established, Julian’s Revelation represents an intellectually rigorous engagement with the most challenging theological topics of her day, though her intellectual rigor has been consistently downplayed by her absorption into a modern canon of “medieval mystics” that equates femininity with simplicity and anti-intellectualism.71 Yet Stillingfleet consistently responds to Julian as a figure of irrationality, madness, and nonsense, a stance that responds less directly to Julian’s text itself than it does

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to Cressy’s own presentation of “mystick theology” as a departure from reason and will. If Cressy’s particular brand of neomedieval mysticism—of which he makes Julian the representative—emerges in opposition to a seventeenth- century antiquarianism fueled by detached “curiosity,” Stillingfleet’s attack on Julian bears the stamp of a late seventeenth-century paranoia about Catholic secrecy that Stillingfleet projects onto Julian’s own terminology of “beclosedness.” The resulting representation of Julian of Norwich, whose “mysticism” translates as obscurity and antirationality, is the product of a distinctly early modern confl ict over English Catholicism, literacy, and the uses of the medieval past. As an example of “the Fanaticism of the Roman Church” that he targets in A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry Practised in the Church of Rome, Stillingfleet cites a passage from Cressy’s preface to Sancta Sophia, which instructs contemplative readers to seek God in “that hidden fund of their souls.” 72 Stillingfleet himself held that the nature of the soul could be apprehended through natural reason, a position he develops in a later response to John Locke.73 In contrast, he attacks Cressy’s description of the “hidden fund” of the soul accessible through contemplation as “a way of knowing without thoughts, of seeing in darkness, of understanding without reason.” 74 Stillingfleet’s objections indicate that he found Cressy’s contemplative models not only intellectually but politically threatening, as he cites Cressy’s preface to Sancta Sophia and his edition of Julian to attack “fanatics” for “resisting authority under a pretence of Religion.” To the author of A Rational Account of the Grounds of Protestant Religion, such resistance to religious authority is also a resistance of reason.75 Thus Stillingfleet targets Cressy, “the worthy publisher of the sixteen Revelations of Mother Juliana:” Supposing they have new and strange revelations among them, yet Mr. Cressy saith, they are not seditious and troublesome to the World, no dissolving unity or crossing lawful authority by them; because these are enjoyed in solitude and retirement, and supposing they be mistaken, no harm would accrew to others by it. As though persons were ever the less mad for being chained, and having a keeper assigned them: such in effect do they make the office of a confessour to these contemplatives. The mischief to the world is not so great while they are kept up, but that to Religion is unsufferable, while they lead devout persons in such an unintelligible way, that the highest degree of their perfection is Madness.76

Again, Cressy’s threat is not only a religious but a cognitive one; he resists not only the “authority” of the Anglican Church but also that of reason itself, by leading his followers both to Catholicism and (by extension) to madness. Where seventeenth-century Protestant polemic cast Catholics as an enemy within, inhabiting “secrete caves, dennes, and holes” of recusant worship, Stillingfleet charges Cressy with invading and overturning his reader’s very mind. The “hidden fund of their souls” to which Cressy directs his readers is for Stillingfleet not only a space of irrational “understanding without reason” but a threateningly hidden space like those of recusant worship. Stillingfleet suggests as much when he asks his readers to picture it: “It being, it seems, like some very cunning drawer in a Cabinet where the main treasure lyes, which the owner

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himself cannot fi nd out, till it be broken to pieces.” 77 Recalling the “secreate places of the house” sacked by early modern pursuivants in their search for “bookes, Lettres and writings in Chestes, Cupboordes and boxes,” Stillingfleet’s characterization of Cressy’s “hidden fund of [the] soul” as a “cabinet” that eludes even the owner’s discovery recalls the Catholic “closet” to which Cressy directs his edition of Julian’s Revelations, but in terms that make it interior not only to the house but to the soul itself. Cressy, I have been arguing, attempts to bring Julian home—both from the exiles of time, as he brings the medieval into the early modern, as well as space, as he attempts to repatriate the medieval-influenced devotional practices of the continental nuns to the closets of English recusants such as Lady Mary Blount. By bringing Julian home, Cressy is not just erasing the difference between past and present. Rather, I believe that he recuperates the medieval text in order to unsettle the fi xities of the present. Cressy’s “homely” Julian anticipates Freud’s observation on the “homely,” or Heimlich, which bleeds over into the unheimlich, “unhomely,” or “uncanny.” As Freud insists in the essay of the same name, “the uncanny is something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it.” 78 By refusing to distance the medieval past but bringing it into the present, making the “exotic” “homely,” Cressy’s Julian produces “the immanence of the strange within the familiar,” as Julia Kristeva remarks on Freud’s uncanny.79 For Cressy, the medieval past challenges the security of the early modern present, making it a stranger to itself. Like the Catholic, the past is the enemy within. Notes I am grateful to Sarah Salih and Denise Baker for excellent editorial guidance; to Nicholas Watson, for suggesting this topic long ago; to David Wallace, for inspiring me to revisit it through discussions of his own work on post-Reformation Catholic English women; and to Simon Firth, for everything. 1. As Russell A. Berman points out, “the literary work, as literature, does not belong neatly to its moment of production.” See Berman, “Politics: Divide and Rule,” Modern Language Quarterly 62 (2001): 322 [317–30]. See also Joep Leerssen, “Literary Historicism: Romanticism, Philologists, and the Presence of the Past,” Modern Language Quarterly 65 (2004): 221–43, which asserts that there is “reason to rethink our a priori notion that the workings of literary history run smoothly in tandem with the chronological parameters of literary production” (240). 2. Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” PMLA 116 (2001): 174 [173–88]. 3. Julian’s impact on early modern literary culture has yet to be fully appreciated. For her inf luence on Margaret Cavendish, who I believe encountered Julian’s work through contact with the Paris nuns while in exile with Queen Henrietta Maria, see Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 207, an argument I am developing further in forthcoming work. 4. In the original call for papers (written by Sarah Salih) for the New Chaucer Society session in which this paper was presented, participants were invited to consider and historicize Julian’s divided readership: “Our understanding of Julian

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13.

is shaped by two different forces. The most inf luential current scholarship on Julian locates her in her historical moment, while her devotees tend to abstract her from it. This session invites consideration of Julian and the Revelations in, and out of, history: in the context of contemporary religious and political controversies and contemporary writers, including Chaucer; and as a presence in the modern world.” James Simpson, “Confessing Literature,” English Language Notes 44 (2006): 121–26; Nicholas Watson, “Desire for the Past,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 21 (1999): 59–97. My own support for this project and the expanded focus it advocates will become visible, I hope, in the analysis that follows. See James Simpson, “Diachronic History and the Shortcomings of Medieval Studies,” in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, ed. Gordon McMullan and David Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 17–30. XVI Revelations of Divine Love, Shewed to a Devout Servant of Our Lord, Called Mother Juliana, an Anchorete of Norwich: Who Lived in the Dayes of King Edward the Third, ed. R.F.S. Cressy (? London, 1670); subsequent references to this text will be made parenthetically. On this work, see Alexandra Barratt, “How Many Children Had Julian of Norwich? Editions, Translations and Versions of Her Revelations,” in Vox Mystica: Essays in Honor of Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett with Thomas H. Bestul, Janet Goebel, and William F. Pollard (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 28–29 [27–39]; an updated version is included as chapter one in this volume. The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), Appendix E, “Serenus Cressy’s Edition of A Revelation and the Stillingf leet Controversy,” includes essential extracts and context, pp. 448–55. J.T. Rhodes, “Dom Augustine Baker’s Reading Lists,” Downside Review 111 (1993): 157–73; Elisabeth Dutton, “Augustine Baker and Two Manuscripts of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” Notes and Queries 52 (2005): 329–37. On the contexts of the Cambrai and Paris nuns and Augustine Baker’s spiritual role, see Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 141–47. My understanding of the literary cultures and practices of post-Reformation English nuns has greatly benefited from Jenna Lay (Ph. D. diss., Stanford University, 2009), “ ‘They Will Not Be Penned Up in Any Cloister’: Catholic Englishwomen and Early Modern Book Culture.” London, British Library MS Cotton Julius C iii, fol. 187. Dutton, “Augustine Baker and Two Manuscripts.” See Hywel Wyn Owen and Luke Bell, “The Upholland Anthology: An Augustine Baker Manuscript,” Downside Review 107 (1989): 274–92; Owen, “Another Augustine Baker Manuscript,” in Dr. L. Reypens-Album, ed. A. Ampe (Antwerp: Uitgave van het Ruusbroec-Genootschap, 1964), pp. 269–80. On the relationship between Cressy’s edition and the surviving manuscripts, see Dutton, “Augustine Baker and Two Manuscripts,” 333. On Cressy’s biography, see Edmund College, O.S.A., and James Walsh, S.J., introduction to A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, Studies and Texts 35, 2 vols. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), 1:13; and Hugh Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays

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14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

43

(London: Secker and Warburg, 1987), pp. 182–86, especially pp. 182–84 on Cressy’s connections with the Cary family, first as the (Anglican) private chaplain to Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, and then as (Catholic) confessor to four of Falkland’s Cary sisters at Cambrai, a topic that deserves further research. Serenus Cressy, Exomologesis, or, A Faithfull Narration of the Occasion and Motives of the Conversion unto Catholick Unity of Hugh-Paulin de Cressy (1647; repr. Paris, 1653), p. 434. Walter Hilton, Scale (or Ladder) of Perfection, ed. Serenus Cressy (London, 1659); Augustine Baker, Sancta Sophia, or, Directions for the Prayer of Contemplation, ed. Serenus Cressy (London, 1657), pp. 85, 88. David Lunn, “Augustine Baker (1575–1641) and the English Mystical Tradition,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 26 (1975): 275 [267–77]. Thomas H. Clancy, English Catholic Books, 1641–1700: A Bibliography (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1974), p. ix. On Lady Mary Blount and her family, see Alexander Croke, The Genealogical History of the Croke Family, Originally Named Le Blount, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1823), 2:146. Albert H. Tricomi’s introduction to Robert Knightley, Alfrede or Right Reinthron’d, ed. Albert H. Tricomi, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, vol. 99 (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993), pp. 11–20 [1–49]; Walter Kirkham Blount, The Office of the Holy Week according to the Missall and Roman Breviary (London, 1670), epistle [n.p.]. This observation about Julian’s “time travel” comes from Nicholas Watson: “The origin of the visions on which the text is based [is] what Julian stresses was an unusual desire to engage in a version of time travel. Longing for a closer identification with the past, her desire was to occupy physically the same ground and moment as those who saw Christ die . . . , a mighty company gathered together to assist through suffering in the turning point of world history.” Watson, “Desire for the Past,” 89. “A Revelation of Love,” 1.4, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 137; compare also to this parallel moment in the seventh chapter: “And to lerne us this, as to my understanding, our good lorde shewed our lady, Sent Mary, in the same time: that is to meane, the highe wisdom and truth that she had in beholding of her maker. This wisdom and truth made her to beholde her God so gret, so high, so mighty, and so good” (p. 145). Simpson, “Diachronic History and the Shortcomings of Medieval Studies,” in Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England, p. 30. Baker, Sancta Sophia, p. 86. Compare the same passage in Baker’s original: “When you were in the world, or else in religion before you seriously determined to prosecute a spirituall life, you did likely read good bookes out of some curiosity or to drive away the time; but now you are to read them (I mean, such of them as are proper for you) w[i]th a serious resolution of putting in practise whatsoeuer you read that shall be good & proper for you, & so not content yourselfe w[i]th only bare delightfull readinge of those good bookes. Before you would say: ‘This or that is a very good booke,’ &, layeinge it aside, this was all that you did w[i]th it; but now you must say to yourself: ‘This or that thinge that I reade in this booke is a good instruction & proper for me, & I will put it in execution when it shall be time & place for it.’ ” Augustine Baker, Directions for Contemplation: Book H, ed. John Clark (Salzburg, Austria: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2000), pp. 37–38.

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24. Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 27, 29. 25. Britain, or A Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the ilands adjoyning, out of the depth of antiquitie beautified vvith mappes of the severall shires of England: vvritten first in Latine by William Camden Clarenceux K. of A. Translated newly into English by Philémon Holland Doctour in Physick: (London, 1637), Letter to the Reader (n.p.). 26. Anne Hudson points out that “antiquarian interest” was likewise responsible for “the first true scholarly edition of a Middle English text: Thomas Hearne’s edition of Robert of Gloucester’s Chronicle, published in 1724”; see “Middle English,” in Editing Medieval Texts: English, French, and Latin Written in England, ed. A.G. Rigg (New York: Garland Publishing, 1977), p. 35 [34–57]. For a consideration of early modern collectors’ transvaluations of medieval books, see Jennifer Summit, Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern Libraries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 27. I am grateful to A.S.G. Edwards for private discussions of post-Reformation collectors of the Ancrene Wisse. 28. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402, fol. 2v. 29. Cambridge, Magdalene College MS C 2498, fol. 44r. 30. Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 4. 31. Serenus Cressy, Fanaticism Fanatically Imputed to the Catholick Church by Doctour Stilling fleet (Douai, 1672), p. 64. 32. See Andrew Sprung, “ ‘We Nevyr Shall Come out of Hym’: Enclosure and Immanence in Julian of Norwich’s Book of Showings,” Mystics Quarterly 19 (1993): 47–61; Robert Mills, “Jesus as Monster,” in The Monstrous Middle Ages, ed. Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), pp. 31–32 [28–54]. 33. “Revelation of Love,” in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, pp. 137, 139, 163, 337; spelling for these passage has been modified to ref lect The XVI Revelations, ed. Cressy, pp. 10, 11, 29, 178. 34. Elizabeth Robertson develops a reading of what she calls a “materialist immanence” that she finds at work in anchoritic contemplative literacy in “ ‘This Living Hand’: Thirteenth-Century Female Literacy, Materialist Immanence, and the Reader of the Ancrene Wisse,” Speculum 78 (2003): 1–36. 35. The XVI Revelations, ed. Cressy, pp. 10, 11, 16, 29, 38. 36. A.S.G. Edwards, “Observations on the History of Middle English Editing,” in Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature, ed. Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1985), p. 35 [34–48]. See also Tim William Machan, Textual Criticism and Middle English Texts (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), pp. 41–43; and David Matthews, The Making of Middle English, 1765–1910 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 37. Edward Wettenhall, Enter into Thy Closet (London, 1676), pp. 46, 48. 38. See Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), which develops a persuasive critique of the “binary between Catholicism and publicness on the one hand, and Protestantism and privacy on the other” (p. 5). Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); as Rambuss observes, “Closet devotion . . . is the technology by which the soul becomes a subject” (p. 109). 39. Peter Davidson, “Recusant Catholic Spaces in Early Modern England,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,

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40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

45

2007), pp. 19–51. Olga Valbuena, Subjects to the King’s Divorce: Equivocation, Infidelity, and Resistance in Early Modern England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 31–36. From a report issued by Justices Thomas Parry, Reade Stafford, and Humphrey Foster in Berkshire, 1586, to Francis Walsingham, S.P, cited by Michael Hodgetts, “Elizabethan Priest-Holes: II—Ufton, Mapledurham, Compton Wynyates,” Recusant History 12 (1973): 101 [99–119]. Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 192–93. The Jesuites Intrigues: With the Private Instructions of That Society to Their Emissaries. The First, Translated out of a Book privately printed at Paris. The Second, lately found in Manuscript in a Jesuites Closet, after his Death (London, 1669). Thomas Bell, Hunting of the Romish Foxe (London, 1598), quoted by Julian Yates, “Parasitic Geographies: Manifesting Catholic Identity in Early Modern England,” in Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Arthur F. Marotti (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), p. 65 [63–84]; as Yates further observes, recusancy “testif[ied] to the fact that there were places, however circumscribed, that lay beyond the state’s control” (p. 65). Wettenhall, Enter into Thy Closet, p. 5. Frances Dolan finds that representations of recusant women in the late seventeenth century “reveal that the private is too important and dangerous an arena to leave to women”; see Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 219. Hodgetts, “Elizabethan Priest-Holes: II—Ufton, Mapledurham, Compton Wynyates,” 113–14. Baker, Sancta Sophia, p. iii. Valbuena, Subjects to the King’s Divorce, p. 31. Davidson explores Catholic productions of such interior, mental spaces in “Recusant Catholic Spaces,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, pp. 19–51. Robert Todd Carroll, The Common-Sense Philosophy of Religion of Bishop Edward Stilling fleet, 1635–1699 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), p. 3. Raymond D. Tumbleson calls Stillingf leet the author of “the predominant Anglican theological case against Catholicism”; see “ ‘Reason and Religion’: The Science of Anglicanism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (1996): 131 [131–56]. Edward Stillingf leet, A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry Practised in the Church of Rome and the Danger of Salvation in the Communion of It in an Answer to Some Papers of a Revolted Protestant: wherein a particular account is given of the fanaticism and divisions of that church (London, 1671), p. 261. Stillingf leet, A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry, p. 257. Cressy, Fanaticism Fanatically Imputed, p. 64. The Roman-Church’s Devotions Vindicated from Doctour Stilling fleet’s Misrepresentation (Douai, 1673), p. 112. Edward Stillingf leet, An Answer to Several Late Treatises, Occasioned by a Book Entituled A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry Practised in the Church of Rome (London, 1673), pp. 57–58. See Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), for the contexts of this (and other) print skirmishes over Catholicism. Cressy, Exomologesis, p. 254. Edward Stillingf leet, Origines Sacrae, or a Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith (London, 1662), p. 295.

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56. Thus in Origines Britannicae, or the Antiquities of the British Churches (London, 1685), Stillingf leet cites the precedent of John Jocelyn, Matthew Parker’s great associate and grandfather of English antiquarian bibliography, in calling for a rigorous study of manuscript sources meant “to reform [our] histories, and to purge away all fabulous Antiquities out of them.” Preface, pp. xix, lxii. 57. Stillingf leet, Origines Sacrae, pp. iii–iv. 58. Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 44, 170–71. 59. Baker, Sancta Sophia, p. iii. 60. Edward Stillingf leet, An Answer to Mr. Cressy’s Epistle Apologetical (London, 1675), pp. 25, 27. 61. Stillingf leet, A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry, pp. 261, 247, 332. 62. James Simpson, “The Rule of Medieval Imagination,” in Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image, ed. Jeremy Dimmick, James Simpson, and Nicolette Zeeman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 4–24. Michelle Karnes is rethinking the meanings of the imagination for the Middle Ages; I am grateful to her for sharing her unpublished book manuscript on this topic with me. 63. On Stillingf leet’s contribution to, and arguments on behalf of, “natural reason,” see Tumbleson, “ ‘Reason and Religion’: the Science of Anglicanism,” 131–56. 64. Stillingf leet, A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry, p. 258. 65. Stillingf leet, A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry, pp. 259–60. 66. Stillingf leet, A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry, p. 259. 67. Maud Burnett McInerney, “ ‘In the Maydens Womb’: Julian of Norwich and the Poetics of Enclosure,” in Medieval Mothering, ed. John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 157–82. 68. “Revelation of Love,”14.56, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 301. My understanding of the passage that follows was greatly aided by the insightful notes of Watson and Jenkins in their edition, p. 302. 69. “Revelation of Love,” 14.56, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 303. 70. See Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 302, n. 45–46, and “Revelation of Love,” 14.56, p. 301. 71. Nicholas Watson, “The Middle English Mystics,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 539–65. 72. Stillingf leet, A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry, p. 329. 73. Stillingf leet also denies that “the Soul” is “a Material Substance” but insists rather that it is “an Immaterial Substance.” Stillingf leet, An Answer to Mr. Locke’s Letter (London, 1697), pp. 536–39. This point recalls Julian’s discussion of “oure kindly substance” from 14.56, which insists that “oure substance . . . may rightly be called oure soule”; see “Revelation of Love,” in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 301. For a discussion of Stillingf leet’s response to Locke, see Carroll, The Common-Sense Philosophy of Religion of Bishop Edward Stilling fleet, pp. 135–50. 74. Stillingf leet, A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry, p. 330. 75. Edward Stillingf leet, A Rational Account of the Grounds of Protestant Religion: Being a Vindication of the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury’s Relation of a Conference (London, 1664).

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76. Stillingf leet, A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry, pp. 341–42. 77. Stillingf leet, A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry, p. 329. 78. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14, Art and Literature: Jensen’s “Gradiva,” Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), p. 368 [335–76]. 79. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. L.S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 182–83.

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CHAPTER 3 W.B. YEATS AND A CERTAIN MYSTIC OF THE MIDDLE AGES Anthony Cuda

This essay examines how Julian of Norwich’s work helped W.B. Yeats to reconceptualize his own early theories of emotion, aesthetics, and daimonic psychology.

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ew contemporary scholars would consider W.B. Yeats a poet of medieval sensibility. Ezra Pound immersed himself in translating Anglo-Saxon verse and the philosophical poetry of Guido Cavalcante; T.S. Eliot lectured on twelfth-century theology, Richard of St. Victor, and the medieval unity of sensibility that dissolved after Dante. Yeats, on the other hand, attended séances, advocated for the Golden Dawn Hermetic Society, and combed the epic mythologies of William Blake in search of hidden Neoplatonic cosmological doctrine. Yeats himself admitted once that his Middle Ages were shaped primarily by late nineteenth-century England; his youthful imagination was, he says, “full of the medievalism of William Morris,” the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet whose baroque Arthurian fantasies no doubt inf luenced Yeats’s early penchant for romance and narrative.1 Many scholars claim that even the poetry of Dante, for which Yeats always professed a great admiration, reached him only once it had refracted almost beyond recognition through the agonistic lens of Romanticism.2 In the eyes of most scholars of modernism, we can call Yeats the last of the Romantics, or a survivor of the Tragic Generation, or even the first modernist, but we cannot, in good faith, call him medieval. Given the relative silence about any medieval influences on Yeats except for Dante, it is all the more striking to fi nd a rarely quoted letter that he wrote to the American journalist, Cornelius Weygandt, on May 30, 1897, in which the thirtytwo-year-old poet and playwright reflects on the most significant and enduring influences of his early career. The “chief influences” on his work, he claims, were neither William Blake and Emmanuel Swedenborg nor William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites but instead “Irish folklore & mythology” and “certain mystics of

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the middle ages.”3 Over the preceding years, as his eclectic interests in mysticism and meditation gained in momentum, Yeats integrated a number of these medieval mystics into his early fiction and nonfiction prose. The young poet envisioned himself as a kind of enchanter, calling forth their peregrine shades from the deeps of the anima mundi, the vast Neoplatonic reservoir of images and memories that Yeats would later read about in Plotinus. There is one shade, however, whom he invoked by name only once, and only privately, and who seemed destined to remain an unacknowledged legislator of his verse, despite the fact that her Revelations of Divine Love apparently found its way not only to his bookshelf but to the inside pocket of his coat when he left the house one afternoon.4 His first and only explicit reference to Julian of Norwich in November 1901 gives us the unique and as yet entirely neglected opportunity to inquire into her influence on his intellectual and aesthetic development, both during his early, formative years and in the years of his mature verse and philosophical theories. This essay offers no sustained argument for a single, consistent way in which Julian influenced Yeats; his attention to her was neither sustained, singular, nor consistent. Although fragmentary, the evidence for her presence in his imaginative landscape is persuasive, and I intend to explore it in three ways. To allow us to discern more readily the extent of Julian’s influence on him, I shall fi rst clear the field by demonstrating Yeats’s underestimated and almost wholly overlooked intellectual allegiances to the Middle Ages and the ways that these allegiances shaped his early aesthetic philosophies. I shall then turn directly to Julian, who offered Yeats, during his transitional “middle period,” not only salient tropes and figures but a model for sustaining the two oppositional forces of passion and precision, emotion and logic. I will suggest why Julian’s work held an enduring appeal for Yeats by consulting several texts in which he would have reencountered her Revelations throughout his later career. And I will conclude by speculating more broadly about the role that Julian, along with other medieval thinkers in the tradition of affective spirituality, played in the formation of Yeats’s later mystical theories of Mask and antiself as he articulates them in the “creative mysticism” of his 1925 treatise, A Vision. Yeats’s Medieval Mind Yeats famously declared that when we want to know about a poet, we should consult the polished, completed portrait in his work and ignore “the bundle of accidence and incoherence that sits down to breakfast.”5 It might be worthwhile, however, to begin by lingering for a few moments at Yeats’s breakfast table, if only to survey the stacks of books by and about medieval writers that often ended up there. Certainly the preponderance of Yeats’s books were by authors of the nineteenth century and later, but evidence from the descriptive catalogue of his library and from the casual allusions in his nonfiction prose makes it clear that he studied the Middle Ages with much greater breadth, deliberateness, and intensity than we have yet recognized. Perhaps most conspicuous is Chaucer, to whom Yeats returned insistently throughout his career as a master of characterization, irony, and narrative. He

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owned not only the 1903 World Classics edition, Pollard’s 1908 Globe edition, and Skeat’s Chaucer Canon (1900) but most impressively, William Morris’s gorgeous and expensive 1896 Kelmscott edition—complete with illustrations by Burne-Jones—which was given to him on his fortieth birthday by more than twenty of his friends.6 When his mystical research demanded the historical detail of reference works, he turned to J.B. Bury’s massive, eight volume Cambridge Medieval History, Cardinal Mercier’s two volume manual of scholastic philosophy, Charles Seignobos’s History of Medieval Civilization, or an unlikely study titled The Gothick North: A Study of Medieval Life, Art, and Thought by the modern poet, Sacheverell Sitwell.7 He read about Dante in Benedetto Croce’s famous The Poetry of Dante (1922) and in a host of other critical sources, which have yet to be examined in this context.8 Thomas Malory and other Arthuriana, medieval drama, even thirteenth-century sculpture and architecture were all topics that found their place on Yeats’s shelves and in his capacious and ever-expanding historical imagination.9 While he was immersed in medieval theology and mysticism during the preparation of A Vision, Yeats explicitly told artist and illustrator J.S.R. Langdale in no uncertain or ambiguous terms: “my mind is late medieval.”10 It is a striking claim, and one that is further supported by the many allusions, in the lyrics and tales of Yeats’s early years, to the twelfth-century abbot Joachim of Fiore, the fourteenth-century Flemish mystic Jan van Ruysbroeck, and the “Subtle Doctor” of the Church, theologian John Duns Scotus.11 He often quotes from (and infamously misattributes phrases to) Thomas Aquinas, St. Bernard, and St. Francis of Assisi, and as I shall explore later in this essay, his daemonic theories propelled him toward the performative thinking of German ecclesiastic Thomas à Kempis’s fifteenth-century Imitatio Christi.12 Yeats gravitated most strongly toward those among his contemporaries who possessed “late medieval minds” as well. He was taken with Ezra Pound’s work on the dolce stil novo of thirteenth-century Italy and greatly admired the younger poet for being “full of the middle ages”; elsewhere, he applauds the “medieval” imagination of his close friend George Russell, whom he calls with admiration “not so much a Theosophist as . . . a mystic of medieval type.”13 Yeats carefully constructed a medieval world of the imagination, one that reigned long before the drab materialism of his father’s generation, which offered historical validation for his commitment to narrative and phantasmagoria, to myth and folklore, and to the idea of the supernatural. In addition, Yeats’s Middle Ages also helped him to reenvision ancient Ireland, to give its parochial charm a philosophical and historical depth—“Provincialism destroys the nobility of the Middle Ages,” he claims—and to put it on fi rm, common footing with the artistic and religious cultures of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe.14 Speaking in the context of Irish folklore, Yeats “remembered” the Middle Ages as a time “when the most beautiful of our stories were invented,” and in testimony to this belief, he himself drew inspiration from the narratives of the medieval German epic Parzival and the poems of Chrétien de Troyes and deliberately designed his own play, The Countess Kathleen (1892), to be “medieval in fealing [sic].”15 When he wrote on behalf of the nascent Irish dramatic movement, Yeats argued for an intellectual and historical continuity between the “poetic tradition descended

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from the Middle Ages” and the rich cultural heritage of the contemporary Irish audiences who would see his plays.16 Yeats’s imaginative reconstruction of the Middle Ages extended beyond history and aesthetics and into the reaches of his own eclectic spiritual beliefs and practices. Finding himself deeply dissatisfied with both organized Catholicism and the overwrought religious symbolism of his earlier Celtic Twilight style, Yeats yearned to rediscover a religious tradition that would unify the passion of the spirit and the precision of art. He believed to have found it, in part, in the Irish peasant villages where he went in search of folklore and myth: “in the cottages I found what seemed to me medieval Christianity . . . shot through as it were with perhaps the oldest faith of man. Could not a poet gladly believe in this country Christ?”17 A poet may believe, Yeats implies, as long as his belief is grounded in an idealized medieval spirituality, far from the contemporary church and its institutional and political strife. In a letter to the editor of the United Irishman written as early as May 1902, he explicitly declares the need to emphasize and cultivate this cultural, literary, and sacred connection to the Middle Ages for the good of the civilization: “I even think that Christianity itself will lose something of noble life if it cannot begin again to make the hills where men work and live mysterious and holy. I would restore the spirit of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.”18 Though it was as much a product of twentieth-century Ireland as medieval England, Yeats himself was fi lled with this composite “spirit” of the Middle Ages and certainly did his part to restore it. I believe that only when we have fully gauged the extent to which it permeated his imagination—in folklore, occultism, art, and spirituality—can we be in the position to understand why he was so intensely drawn to Julian’s Revelations, how her text affected his artistic maturation, and why he eventually felt forced to abandon it and his composite Middle Ages altogether. A Certain Mystic Yeats was always quick to refute the accusation that his interests in mysticism were merely by-products of the recent vogue for French symbolism and Arthur Symons’s widely read account of it in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), the text that introduced T.S. Eliot to the ironic classicism of Jules Laforgue and so profoundly influenced early literary modernism. In fact, he was equally quick to reveal the origins of his fascination with mysticism, which lay not in Renaissance Neoplatonism or fin de siècle decadence but in his familiar composite Middle Ages: “My interest in mystic symbolism does not come from Arthur Symons or any other contemporary writer,” Yeats declares proudly. “I have been a student of the medieval mystics since 1887.”19 Many contemporary critics still overlook this assertion because it disrupts the traditional narrative of Yeats’s early career.20 We do not know when Yeats fi rst read Julian of Norwich. We must assume that he could have encountered this “certain mystic” as early as 1887—when he claims to have begun his studies of medieval mysticism—shortly after his fi rst poems were published in the Dublin University Review. We know for certain,

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however, that he had already read and begun to assimilate Revelations of Divine Love into his imagination by November 19, 1901. On that day in London, Yeats attended a performance of Norwegian playwright Björnstjerne Björnson’s Beyond Human Power at the Royalty Theatre, where it ran for a series of nine matinees between November 7 and 21. He was mildly disappointed in the script, which explores the relationship between miracles and faith through the self-sacrificing actions of a country parson and alleged worker of miracles, Pastor Sang. But the performance itself stirred his medieval imagination. Just a few hours afterward, Yeats wrote to his close friend Lady Gregory to argue that Björnson did not take “the religious genius” seriously enough. What the playwright has forgotten, Yeats writes, is that religious genius must possess the same “perfect” precision that characterizes all genius and that distinguishes genius itself from “gushing” zealotry.21 Despite the script’s shortcomings, however, Yeats had nothing but praise for its producer and star, Beatrice Stella Campbell, a highly celebrated English actress of the time with whom he had already shared a yearlong correspondence. On the day of the play, he wrote to Campbell and applauded her masterful performance, which he says possessed the very thing that Björnson’s play itself lacked, “the perfect precision and delicacy and simplicity of every art at its best.”22 Precision was obviously on Yeats’s mind, and he wanted to convey more clearly to Campbell what he meant by the word. He did not have to search far in his memory for an analogous work, one that would exemplify the perfect precision that he extolled. In fact, he apparently did not even have to leave his seat: “I happened to have in my pocket ‘The Revelation of Divine Love,’ by the Lady Julian, an old mystical book; my hand strayed to it all unconsciously. There was no essential difference between that work and your acting; both were full of fi ne distinction, of delicate logic, of that life where passion and thought are one.”23 Especially among modern poets such as Yeats who read so widely and eclectically, it is a rare thing indeed to discover not merely that he was familiar with an author, not merely that he possibly alludes to that author, but that he actually had the book in his pocket when he left the house. In the interests of scholarship’s own precision and “fi ne distinction,” I am tempted to speculate about when Yeats’s restless fi ngers reached instinctively for Grace Warrack’s 1901 edition of the Revelations, the one that he most likely owned and that was published in July of the same year.24 Was it, as he claims, solely because of Campbell’s brilliant performance? Or could it have been during a particularly compelling scene in the play, like the one in which Pastor Sang’s wife—lamenting the unbearable consequences of her husband’s excessive selflessness for the family’s well-being—proclaims with a mixture of rage and disbelief: “He cannot see evil in anybody. That is, he sees it, but he doesn’t care. ‘I hold on to what is good in men,’ he says. And when he is talking to them, they become good—absolutely every one!”25 I think it quite possible that Yeats was immediately reminded of Revelations by this unique scene, which of course recalls Julian’s tendency to shift discussions of sin and evil toward grace and redemption.26 In the same letter, Yeats admits to Campbell that the perfect union of passion and precision that he remarked both in her performance and in Julian’s

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Revelations had recently become, in fact, an urgent creative ideal of his own, part of his midlife campaign for self-mastery and what he calls “unity of being”: “I said to myself, this is exactly what I am trying to do in writing, to express myself without waste, without emphasis. To be impassioned and yet to have a perfect self-possession.”27 In other words, Yeats fashioned a new ideal for his work after the kind of passionate precision that he found in Revelations; Julian, he admits obliquely, has been a stylistic guide and model. The period of Yeats’s career during which he was reading Julian avidly enough to carry the book in his pocket is widely considered to be the beginning of his middle years. “In 1900,” he would later write, “everybody got down off his stilts.”28 In the so-called middle period, Yeats’s descent from the stilts of baroque, Arnoldian rhetoric and fin de siècle decadence was driven by three related imaginative and personal changes: (1) his growing commitments to the practical business of writing plays and running a national theater (what he disparagingly calls elsewhere, “Theatre business, management of men”); (2) his equally growing devotion to organizing, scheduling, and creating a taste for public performances of poetic chanting; and (3) in his poetry, a concerted effort to abandon the mists and shadows, vagaries and excesses of his early Celtic Twilight style in favor of a clear, hard, precise language of natural speech.29 In short, the Romantic dreamer was learning to become a businessman, a manager, a minimalist: someone for whom detailed precision is essential. The momentum toward precision and practicality manifested itself in both his life and his verse. Years before the renowned literary surgeon Ezra Pound would help him further to cauterize his poetry, Yeats began to fashion a new style that he characterized with words such as “defi nite and precise,” “utter simplicity,” and “hard and clear.”30 Just two months after Campbell’s performance, he began to sense that his style had already undergone a significant and wholly salutary transformation. His verse now had more “salt” in it, he wrote to Gregory; it had become “far more masculine.”31 How appropriate that this new salty, “masculine” style was founded, at least in part, on a creative reading of and profound appreciation for one of the most original and compelling voices to arise out of the medieval tradition of women’s spirituality, on a text whose claim to relatively widespread popularity continues to be its use of nurturing, maternal appellations for the Divine.32 Learning from Julian Yeats nurtured a lifelong hatred for “logic-choppers,” by which he meant the kind of rigid thinkers who would pillage the forest of the imagination for intellectual timber. But his admiration for the “delicate logic” of Julian’s Revelations betrays a significant change in his attitude toward rationality during his middle period, a change that I believe Julian helped to speed along. Early in his career, Yeats declares himself a herald of “the revolt of the soul against the intellect.”33 True illumination comes not from the straight, cumulative path of logic, he contends, but from the sporadic, uncertain leaps of the imagination. Or as he puts it later in his career, when his anti-intellectual prejudice returns: “Wisdom is a

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butterfly / And not a gloomy bird of prey.”34 By the time he reads Julian, however, he has suspended his invective against the “logic-choppers” and is instead extolling logic, delicacy, and precision as marks of true creative genius. Shortly after Campbell’s performance he writes to persuade another correspondent of the value of the same attributes: “conviction” combined with “precision” and “delicacy.”35 Artistic and critical precision, he tells another correspondent, are the only counterweights to the characteristic tendency of Irish politics toward violence and zealotry.36 The delicacy and precision that he discovered in Julian’s patient and thorough interpretations of her visions also became for Yeats a steadfast model of interpretative practice. Take, for instance, her many-layered explication of the Lord in Chapter 51, whose “blueness of the clothing betokeneth His steadfastness; the brownness of his fair face . . . was most accordant to shew His holy soberness. The length and breadth of his garments, which were fair, fl aming about, betokeneth that He hath, beclosed in Him, all Heavens.”37 Perhaps such a minutely detailed, repetitive analysis of this vision’s symbolic register would have turned a lesser mind away, but for Yeats, it must have seemed strikingly familiar. In the 1900 essay “The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry,” Yeats takes a similarly precise, nearly exhaustive approach to decoding Shelley’s symbolism, such as the recurring image of the cave, which he says is also “the cave of man’s mind,” “the caves of his youth,” or “the cave of mysteries.” He continues: “It may mean any enclosed life, as when it is the dwelling-place of Asia and Prometheus, or when it is ‘the still cave of poetry,’ and it may have all meanings at once, or it may have as little meaning as some ancient religious symbol enwoven from the habit of centuries with the patterns of a carpet or a tapestry.”38 This sort of stylistic and interpretative precision of mind—whether political, literary, or religious—was becoming, for Yeats, an antidote to the affl icted will, a tonic to zealotry, and a way toward what he called “a new discovery of life” by means of “more precise thought, or a more perfect sincerity.”39 Years later, at work on his mystical treatise, A Vision, Yeats would again rely upon his mental connection between medieval mysticism such as Julian’s and the necessity for precise, controlled passions: “I am writing it all out in a series of dialogues about a supposed medieval book.” He writes emphatically: “I live with a strange sense of revelation.” And he concludes: “You will be astonished at the change in my work, at its intricate passion.”40 When Yeats created a fictional “medieval book” for the preface to A Vision, fi lled with his own sense of immanent revelation, he could not help but think of it in terms of the intricate precision he had admired in Julian’s Revelations. Other scattered evidence of Julian’s influence appears in Yeats’s work from around this period, including a strange mystical fellow who seems at times to be the size of Julian’s familiar hazel nut (“the quantity of an hazel-nut,” as she puts it in Chapter 5, “in the palm of my hand”) and at others to have “his head in the stars,” or perhaps as Julian says, to encompass “all that is made.”41 Like Julian, Yeats was a master at discerning the All in the One, at fi nding the Divine presence in hazelnuts, berries hooked to thread (“The Song of Wandering Aengus”), or an empty bird’s nest (“The Stare’s Nest by My Window”). He would also have recognized Julian’s repeated claims that the mysteries of her visions were always

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in excess of her interpretative capacities: “three properties of the Revelation be yet greatly hid; and not withstanding this [further forthleading], I saw and understood that every Shewing is full of secret things [left hid]” [sic].42 Yeats regards these persistent and intransigent blind spots with great respect, and he often relates encountering them himself in dream and vision. “All last night the darkness was full of writing,” he confides to Lady Gregory in 1917, “now on stone, now on paper, now on parchment but I could not read it. Were spirits trying to communicate?”43 And in another dream, he confronts a spirit with a striking resemblance to himself as a younger man: “I asked him questions which he answered by showing me flowers and precious stones, of whose meaning I had no knowledge.”44 For both Julian and Yeats, vision always leaves an excess, and that excess points toward divine inscrutability. Julian’s striking shift in emphasis from the soul’s desire for God to God’s persistent and consuming desire for the human soul—what she calls his “thirst and longing” or more formally, his “Spiritual Thirst”—seems also to have struck Yeats’s spiritual imagination uniquely. “For as verily as there is a property in God of ruth and pity,” Julian writes, “so verily there is a property in God of thirst and longing.”45 In 1902, Yeats relates his own revelatory moment, through which he gained a strikingly similar insight into God’s need and thirst: “That night I awoke lying upon my back and hearing a voice speaking above me and saying, ‘No human soul is like any other human soul, and therefore the love of God for any human soul is infi nite, for no other soul can satisfy the same need in God.’ ”46 Is this the same poet who, fi fteen years before, had dubbed himself “the churchless mystic”?47 It is clear that Julian’s influence helped him to contextualize his own visitation and freed him to formulate it in these uncharacteristically Christian terms. Two essays written around this time are particularly indebted to Yeats’s reading of Julian for their religious rhetoric and their emphasis on spiritual vision and revelation, and together they begin to hint toward the aesthetic theories that would dominate Yeats’s imagination for decades afterward. The 1901 essay “Magic” is his midlife, mystical manifesto of sorts, unabashedly articulating the basic tenets of his artistic and occult belief system, especially the idea that “our most elaborate thoughts” as well as our most “precise emotions” do not merely arise from individual, subjective phenomena but “have on a sudden come up, as it were, out of Hell or down out of Heaven.”48 In short, Yeats is arguing for the transcendent origins of vision—and of almost any mental state, including the passions—and he upbraids historians for failing to attend to “angels” and “devils” as closely as they do kings and queens. He takes great pains to convey the strange autonomy of his own revelations, the ways in which his imagination (as he says) “began to move of itself,” bringing before him images “that had yet a motion of their own, a life I could not change or shape.”49 Elsewhere around the same time, Yeats speculates about the “strange visitation[s] in the night” that bring such unruly visions.50 Admittedly, these sentiments could just as likely derive from Blake as from Julian. But where his foremost Romantic predecessor would have veered away into his personal, idiosyncratic mythology of Los and Urizen, Yeats chooses instead an uncharacteristically orthodox revelation that

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resonates with what he had recently been reading in Julian, a ghastly crucifi xion scene whose details seem to “flutter like a drift of leaves before our eyes.”51 It seems that Yeats’s respect for Julian’s stylistic precision also helped him to fi nd a new, perhaps unexpected freedom to experiment with and integrate more conventional Christian symbolism into his wild dreams and waking visions, which before then had stayed almost exclusively within the realm of Irish folklore and literary epic. In another brief essay that appeared in The Speaker on April 19, 1902, Yeats explicitly uses his recent reading in medieval mysticism to frame and contextualize an unlikely revelation that he himself claims to have experienced. As he was walking through the woods, he relates, he was consumed by “all of a sudden, and only for a second, an emotion which I said to myself was the root of Christian mysticism. There had swept over me a sense of weakness, of dependence on a great personal Being somewhere far off yet near at hand.”52 We have already remarked the variety of changes that Yeats’s ideas began to undergo in his middle period. This remark is demonstrative of another important one: the gradual substitution of the hero’s strident, bellicose posture by a more fragile awareness of weakness, vulnerability, and passivity. Though this Nietzschean defiance would return with even greater fierceness in his later work—when he celebrates the “lust and rage” that “spur me into song”—in these middle years, Yeats experiments openly with Julian’s way: weakness, vulnerability, and dependence on a wholly personal God.53 It is in the paragraph directly following his account of this personal revelation that he discusses the distinctly Julian-like “need in God” that I have remarked above. These two elements, I believe, combine to make “A Voice” a kind of subtle, implicit tribute to the ideas and forms that he was in the process of internalizing from Julian’s Revelations. In the years that followed, this internalization process would have been propelled by a number of scholars and commentators whose readings of Julian invariably shaped Yeats’s understanding of her and of the kind of medieval sensibility that she encapsulated for him. Learning about Julian: Yeats’s Sources Yeats was, at times, what we might call a vicarious reader. “No, I have not read him,” he once shouted at a friend after a heated, hour-long debate about the unforgivable faults of Thomas Carlyle; “my wife, George, has read him and she tells me he’s a dolt.”54 Fortunately, we know that Yeats read at least some of Julian for himself. But there are also a number of contemporaneous texts—which he either owned or had read—wherein Yeats would have refi ned his familiarity and appreciation for Julian’s mysticism. I would like to linger for a moment over three of his contemporaries in particular: Evelyn Underhill, Friedrich von Hügel, and William Ralph Inge, each of whom exerted a demonstrable pressure on Yeats’s thinking in other matters as well. We know that Yeats’s own Julian offered him a model of passion and precision and an artistic freedom to experiment with orthodox Christian symbols. But what did he gather from Underhill’s Julian, who was a consummate symbolic artist? Or from Inge’s Julian, a case study in psychological materialism?

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Yeats liked to think of himself as a “creative mystic”—a rapt, passionate seer with the precision and patience of a lyric poet—so he doubtless would have felt drawn to Evelyn Underhill’s widely influential characterizations of Julian as both a great mystical lyricist and “the most philosophic” of the early mystics.55 In Revelations, Underhill suggests, one fi nds “the most lyrical passages of mystical literature,” or as she says elsewhere, the true “poetic feeling.”56 Yeats would no less have appreciated her sensitive portrayal of Julian as a kind of precursor to the literary modernists, a proto-imagist “poet, mystic, and musician” who expresses her visions only “by the oblique methods of the artist, by the use of aesthetic suggestion and musical rhythm.”57 It was Yeats himself, of course, who vigorously championed “aesthetic suggestion” under the banner of symbolism and whose lifelong commitment to “musical rhythm” in lyric led him to develop, throughout his career, an intricate musical notation system for the chanting and performance of verse.58 In Underhill’s most well-known text, Mysticism (1911), Yeats would have found strong support for his admiration of Julian’s aesthetic virtues: not only her formal precision (“She is a great stylist,” Underhill concludes) but the vividness and fluidity of her “symbolic form.” Revelations demonstrates a “constant and not always conscious recourse to symbol and image,” and it makes use of “all the resources of artistic expression.”59 The Julian whom Yeats encountered in Mysticism (and perhaps in conversation with Underhill, who was herself a fellow member of the Golden Dawn Hermetic Society) was an artist after his own heart, one who was dedicated to the mysterious power of symbols and their ability to convey both supernatural realities and “psychological state[s],” or stages in what Underhill calls “the soul’s progressive apprehension of reality.”60 Though we are not certain when he fi rst read it, we do know that Yeats was deeply familiar with The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends by the Roman Catholic religious thinker, the Baron Friedrich von Hügel. Scholars claim that when Yeats was partially moved by the claims of Christianity later in his life, it was in large part due to “the work and personal example of von Hügel”; it is also probable that the two men met in London, where they both lived and frequented the same social circles for a time.61 The Mystic Element touches upon Julian’s mysticism only briefly, long enough to describe her as “the entirely orthodox optimist” of the Catholic Church.62 Yeats was no optimist, and I believe that his own fundamentally dialectical sensibility—fi rmly rooted in a Blakean model of confl ict and discord— would have been drawn, instead, to von Hügel’s brief discussion of Julian’s place in the Neoplatonic tradition, which increasingly consumed Yeats’s imagination throughout his later volumes.63 Julian’s theology, he would have read with interest, eliminates the ever-multiplying strata of Neoplatonic mediators, refocusing the soul’s struggles inwardly to a single, unified entity. For Julian, von Hügel claims, “the fight against Evil is simplified to a watch and war against Self.”64 Around the time that von Hügel published The Mystical Element, Yeats was beginning to explicitly formulate his own philosophy of the “war against Self,” one that emphasized the opacity of the mind to itself and the resistance of what he called “the other will that wrestles with our thought, shaping it to our despite.”65 “We meet always,” he reiterates elsewhere (in language that echoes

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Julian’s in describing a later showing), “in the deep of the mind, whatever our work, wherever our reverie carries us, that other Will.”66 The Julian to whom von Hügel introduced Yeats might have been an orthodox optimist, but she was also a theologian of our inner strife and discord, of the inward confl ict that Yeats held to be so integral to his own creativity. The last and most significant of Yeats’s sources that I want to address is the work of William Ralph Inge, professor of Divinity at Cambridge and Anglican priest, several of whose books the poet owned and whose mystical thought he valued and respected.67 Yeats turned to Inge’s work with particular urgency when he began the intense study of Plotinus and Neoplatonism in the mid- and late-1920s. The edition of Revelations that Yeats owned features an epigraph from Inge’s Bampton Lectures (1900), so he would likely have been prepared to read that Inge places Julian squarely within the Neoplatonist tradition in his The Philosophy of Plotinus, citing her work as a prime example of “the extreme optimism of the Neoplatonic creed.”68 But perhaps he would have been surprised to fi nd Inge asserting that Julian’s vision is more objectified, more believable, and more alive than that of Plotinus: “We do not feel quite clear what is the object which excites the ardor of the Soul or Spirit in Plotinus.”69 In his Studies of the English Mystics (1905), Inge proposes an argument that Yeats himself often espoused with regard to visions and extraordinary spiritual experiences: he urges his readers to take Julian’s visions seriously rather than dissolving them into metaphor or falsifying them into systematic theology. In his eyes, Julian’s text is a penetrating study of the psychology of religious vision. “Modern psychology must recognize the scientific accuracy,” he writes, “of her description of the conditions under which the visions occurred.” 70 Inge’s prolonged and rigorous attention to Julian’s version of negative theology and to her desire for purgation both would have interested Yeats immensely.71 But it is his insistent attention to the psychology of her visions and especially the material and mental “conditions under which the visions occurred” that doubtlessly caught Yeats’s attention during these middle years, when he himself was deeply interested in material conditions necessary to achieve trance and meditative states of enlightenment. After discussing Julian’s prayers for sickness and their purgative value, Inge writes that “what follows [in Revelations] is so important a document on the physical conditions which may precede trance that I will give it in her own words.” 72 He then quotes a lengthy passage from Chapter 3 of Warrack’s edition, which begins “Thus I dured till day, and by then my body was dead from the middle downwards, as to my feeling.” 73 It is a brief remark, but one that likely held great consequences for the poet’s appreciation of Julian’s psychological inquiries. Yeats never lost interest in trance-mediumship throughout his career, from his early attendance at séances to his late mediumistic transcriptions with his wife. He associated the gift of “passing into a slight trance” with the capacity for imaginative vision; he wrote repeatedly of his quest for “things discovered in the deep / Where only body’s laid asleep”; and his stories and poems repeatedly feature characters or narrators who, like Julian in the passage that Inge quotes, feel their bodies becoming stonelike and numb as fantastic visions come to life in the liberated mind.74 Like the Julian whom Yeats

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read about in Underhill and von Hügel, Inge’s Julian was a great stylist and was deeply influenced by the rich Neoplatonic tradition. But unlike the others, she was also an experimenter in trance-mediumship, a case study in the psychology of revelation and the material conditions of supernatural visions. In Inge’s Julian, Yeats found an accomplice in the practice of visionary trance. Mask and Antiself: Leaving Julian As he returned time and again to his enigmatic masters in the Middle Ages, Yeats began to assemble a philosophical and aesthetic doctrine based upon a willingness to sacrifice the expression of personal, individual emotion in favor of meditating upon a set of foreign emotions, assuming an Other personality, distant from the self and its idiosyncratic desires. Though he rarely describes it as such, Yeats gravitates during his later years toward the creative and ethical virtues of affective spirituality and the Imitatio Christi, both of which he would have looked upon as modes of mental activity that require the poet to don a “Mask,” to assume a set of emotional “features” unfamiliar to him and, at times, contrary to his own desires or fears. The Mask forces us to stretch the mind, he contends, beyond the circumference of the personal and parochial. Those who cannot do so, in Yeats’s eyes, are doomed to the futile repetition of their own past, trapped and impoverished by a single, restrictive personality. They are ignorant of the hidden psychological regions accessible only by the kind of imitative performance that medieval thinkers such as Thomas à Kempis and Julian of Norwich model for us.75 Yeats arrives at his clearest statement of this doctrine of the “Mask” (or as he calls it, the “antiself ”) in the prose treatise Per Amica Silentia Lunae (1917): “Some years ago, I began to believe that our culture, with its doctrine of sincerity and self-realisation, made us gentle and passive, and that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were right to found theirs upon the imitation of Christ or of some classic hero.” 76 Unlike Philip Sidney, Yeats believes that we cannot simply look into our own “hearts” to discover ourselves and fuel our creative energies; we gaze, instead, as Julian does, upon the unfamiliar face of an Other. A twentieth-century Julian of Norwich, Yeats implies, would likely cultivate self-realization by gazing into the mirror, reflecting upon her personal emotions, perhaps her thwarted desires, fears of death, feelings of alienation. The medieval and Renaissance authors who practiced a self- conscious dramatization of an Other’s personality, on the other hand, “made themselves overmastering, creative persons by turning from the mirror to meditation upon a mask.” Yeats concludes by describing the ethical and eudemonic implications of the Mask: I fi nd in an old diary: “I think all happiness depends upon the energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a re-birth as something not one’s self, something created in a moment and perpetually renewed” . . . And again at an earlier date: “If we cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are, and try to assume that second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves though we may accept one from others. Active virtue, as distinguished from passive acceptance of a code, is therefore theatrical, consciously dramatic, the wearing of a mask.” 77

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It is not difficult to imagine the ways that Julian’s intense, disciplined, and affective meditations upon the Passion helped Yeats to formulate this theory. There is, of course, her desire for “all manner of pains, bodily and ghostly” and her request for three “wounds,” along with the painful, tortuous visions that vividly reenact Christ’s sufferings.78 Particularly poignant in this regard, however, is the way that Julian so nimbly and fluidly alters her state to mirror Christ’s emotional changes, as after the fi fth bodily showing when she describes the transformation of his features from agony to joy: “suddenly (I beholding the same cross), He changed [the look of ] His blessed Countenance. The changing of His blessed Countenance changed mine, and I was as glad and merry as it was possible.” 79 Here Yeats would have found a striking affi rmation of his doctrines of Mask and antiself: Julian’s affective modulations are not the visible expressions of her invisible inwardness, nor do they necessarily reveal her own values and commitments. Instead, they faithfully and relentlessly imitate their object, changing only as Christ’s change. “In all this time of Christ’s pain,” Julian concludes, “I felt no pain but for Christ’s pains.”80 Julian and other medieval thinkers like her helped Yeats to discipline the emotions, to feel only that pain which an Other feels, and to be “consciously dramatic” by modeling the Self after an image of an Other. As one of Yeats’s poetic surrogates exclaims in the Dantesque poem, “Ego Dominus Tuus”: By the help of an image I call to my own opposite, summon all That I have handled least, least looked upon.81

As his aesthetic philosophy grew in scope and ambition, however, Yeats seems to have become impatient with the medieval paradigms that he once admired and upon which he originally based his theories of Mask and antiself. In the most elaborate (yet perhaps least successful) articulation of his later thought, A Vision, he still upholds the necessity to don the Mask, to assume a personality foreign to one’s own, as did Julian and his other medieval guides. But now Yeats begins to doubt the value of merely accepting a Mask sculpted for us by convention and tradition, like that of Christ. The “saint”—his shorthand for the medieval spiritual sensibility—is too passive in his acceptance of an alternate personality, too much like the mute wood from which the mask is carved. At times, Yeats uses the figures from the Commedia dell’Arte to describe this mode of being, which he labels “primary man” or the “primary phase”: “For [an example of the] primary man I go to the Commedia dell’Arte in its decline. The Will is weak and cannot create a role, and so, if it transform itself, does so after an accepted pattern, some traditional clown or pantaloon.”82 Yeats explains that the saint’s Mask is always derivative rather than creative; it makes no room for the fury of the shaping imagination. He concludes ironically by offering a familiar example: “The author of the Imitation of Christ was certainly a man of a late primary phase.”83 To balance the passive objectivity of “primary” man, Yeats proposes an “antithetical” or “subjective” man, the man of creative genius who actively forges his own Mask from the depths of his imaginative unconscious rather than

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passively accepting it from tradition or convention. The antithetical man aggressively and forcefully imagines an alternate personality, creates it with the help of the Daimon (“or ultimate self of that man”), and fi nally hammers it into unity through poetry, painting, and drama.84 Drawing on dizzying diagrams, cosmological tables, and outlines of lunar phases, Yeats argues that all of history alternates between these two poles of mental activity, the primary and the antithetical. He concludes by foretelling the advent of an Antithetical Age, an era in which poets and artists will forge a nation’s personality and ideals, supplanting the paradigms handed down to them by historical Christianity. The famous last lines of “The Second Coming”—“what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”—are actually an enigmatic announcement of an Antithetical Age, which will emblazon the actions of a rough beast rather than the passive mildness of the child.85 In effect, Yeats bids a fi nal farewell to the Christian mysticism that so profoundly influenced his earliest thought. The era of primary man—and with him the mysticism of Julian—was reaching its end. Get you gone, von Hügel Yeats’s close friend and sometimes lover Iseult Gonne was almost thirty years younger than he, so when she wrote to him in 1926 with her new literary “discovery,” she could not have known just how long ago he had discovered it for himself. “I have been reading ‘Revelations of Divine Love’ by Julian of Norwich,” Gonne writes: “It is obscure, but fi lled with the beauty of happiness—a rare thing. Although she does not deny evil nor explain it in any way, still she seems to do away with it. She was shown the depths of the sea and the crucifi xion and I feel she really saw them.”86 How strange it must have been for Yeats to be reminded of Julian at this particular time, when his philosophy of primary man and the coming antithetical epoch was first reaching the public in print. We do not have Yeats’s response to Iseult; as usual, we must turn instead to the poetry, where a response of sorts does eventually appear. When Yeats was composing The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), he conveyed his leave-taking of Julian and her deeply formative tradition in the aptly titled lyric “Vacillation.” There, his speaker bids a grand, rhetorical farewell to the passive saint and to the preformed Mask of the medieval Christian mystic, asking: Must we part, Von Hügel, though much alike, for we Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity? ... Homer is my example and his unchristened heart. The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said? So get you gone, Von Hügel, though with blessings on your head.87

As we have seen, von Hügel’s work was one of the places where Yeats encountered Julian of Norwich, and in a propitious context that would have resonated

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with his own taste for confl ict and discord. I believe it is safe to assume that his ambivalent address to the widely known theologian—simultaneously a dismissal and a benediction—is also a farewell to the “certain mystics of the Middle Ages” who helped to give his imagination one of its most permanent and enduring shapes, to Thomas à Kempis, Julian of Norwich, and all others who (unlike Homer and his “unchristened” mind) were willing to believe what Yeats ultimately could not, despite Julian’s tutelage: that the passions of imaginative freedom fi nd their fullest realization in discipline, fragility, and precision. Notes 1. W.B. Yeats, Autobiographies, ed. William H. O’Donnell and Douglas N. Archibald (New York: Scribner, 1999), p. 291. See also T. McAlindon, “The Idea of Byzantium in William Morris and W.B. Yeats,” Modern Philology 64 (1967): 307–19. 2. See George Bornstein, “Yeats’s Romantic Dante,” Colby Library Quarterly 15 (1979): 93–113; Giorgio Melchiori, “Yeats and Dante,” English Miscellany: A Symposium of History, Literature and the Arts 19 (1968): 153–79; Stephen Paul Ellis, “Yeats and Dante,” Comparative Literature 33 (1981): 1–17. 3. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume 2: 1896–1900, ed. John Kelly, Warwick Gould, and Deirdre Toomey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 106. 4. Because it was the copy that Yeats most likely owned and used, I have quoted from and referred to Grace Warrack’s edition of Revelations of Divine Love Recorded by Julian, Anchoress at Norwich, Anno Domini 1373 (London: Methuen, 1901) throughout this essay. 5. W.B. Yeats, “A General Introduction for My Work,” in Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 509. 6. Edward O’Shea, A Descriptive Catalog of W.B. Yeats’s Library (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985); Chaucer, The Poetical Works: From the Text of Professor Skeat, 3 vols., The World’s Classics (Vol. 1–2, London: Grant Richards, 1903; Vol. 3, London: Oxford University Press, 1906); Works of G. Chaucer, ed. Alfred W. Pollard, The Globe Edition (London: Macmillan, 1908); Walter Skeat, The Chaucer Canon: With a Discussion of the Works Associated with the Name of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900); and Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.S. Ellis (Hammersmith, UK: Kelmscott Press, 1896). 7. The Cambridge Medieval History, ed. J.B. Bury, H.M. Gwatkin, J.P. Whitney, J.R. Tanner, C.W. Previté -Orton, Z.N. Brooke, and J.M. Hussey, 8 vols. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1911–36); Cardinal Mercier, A Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy, trans. T.L. Parker and S.A. Parker, 2 vols. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1921); Charles Seignobos, History of Medieval Civilization and of Modern to the End of the Seventeenth Century (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1908); Sacheverell Sitwell, The Gothick North. A Study of Medieval Life, Art, and Thought, 3 vols. (London: Duckworth, 1929–30). 8. Benedetto Croce, The Poetry of Dante, trans. Douglas Ainslie (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1922); Franz Hettinger, Dante’s Divina Commedia: Its Scope and Value, ed. Henry Sebastian Bowden (London: Burns and Oates, 1894). 9. Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, with Designs by Aubrey Beardsley, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1893); Three Chester Whitsun Plays, ed. Joseph C. Bridge (Chester: Phillipson and Golder, 1906); Alfred Nutt, Celtic and Medieval Romance (London: David Nutt, 1899); Alfred Nutt, Legends of the Holy Grail (London: David Nutt, 1902);

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

French Sculpture of the Thirteenth Century, Seventy-eight Examples of Masterpieces of Medieval Art Illustrating the Works at Reims and Showing Their Place in the History of Sculpture, ed. Arthur Gardner (London: P.L. Warner, 1915). Yeats to J.S.R. Langdale, September 7, 1922, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Accession #4169 (Oxford University Press, InteLex Electronic Edition, 2002), hereafter cited by short title and accession number. Yeats integrates “Joachim of Flora” into his mystical narrative “The Tables of the Law,” first published in the Savoy in 1896: “I know little about Joachim of Flora,” the narrator admits before his interlocutor describes the twelfth-century monk at great length, “except that Dante set him in Paradise among the great doctors.” Mythologies (New York: Touchstone, 1998), p. 300. The young poet owned a copy of Maurice Maeterlinck’s well-known study, Ruysbroeck and the Mystics: With Selections from Ruysbroeck, trans. Jane T. Stoddart (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1894). Yeats refers to Duns Scotus in several early letters; see The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 2:106 n., 2:268 n., and 2:717. W.B. Yeats, Later Essays, ed. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeauz and William H. O’Donnell (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994), pp. 168–69. Yeats frequently refers to a passage that he believes to be from Thomas Aquinas, but which he actually found in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Axël (1890): “For eternity, as Saint Thomas well remarks, is merely the full and entire possession of oneself in one and the same instant.” Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axël, trans. H.P.R. Finberg (London: Jarrolds, 1925), p. 60. For Yeats’s comments on Thomas à Kempis, see the speech he delivered at a dinner honoring Rabindranath Tagore on July 10, 1912, recorded in “Dinner to Mr. Rabindra Nath Tagore,” London Times ( July 13, 1912): 5. “[Pound] is full of the middle ages & helps me to get back to the definite & the concrete away from modern abstractions.” W.B. Yeats to Lady Gregory, January 3, 1913, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Accession #2053; for George Russell, see The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume 1: 1865–1895, ed. John Kelly and Eric Domville (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 73. W.B. Yeats, Memoirs, ed. Denis Donoghue (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 187. Yeats, “A Letter to the Students of a Californian School [1923],” The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Accession #4243; Yeats, “Introduction to ‘Mandukya Upanishad,’ ” in Later Essays, p. 163. See also Yeats’s letter to Edward Gordon Craig, February 28, 1911: “Sooner or later I shall produce the Countess Cathleen but cannot see it without much colour for it is essentially medieval in feeling.” The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Accession #1556. See R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 2, The Arch Poet (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 252. Gale C. Schricker quotes from an unpublished version of Yeats’s “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” in her A New Species of Man: The Poetic Persona of W.B. Yeats (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1982), p. 69. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Volume 3: 1901–1904, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 188. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, 2:676, n. 18. Terence Brown, for instance, attributes the poet’s symbolic methods to the rise of occultism and French symbolism: “it was probably the clarification of Yeats’s thoughts in discussion with Symons . . . which allowed him slowly to systematize his beliefs about the role of Symbolism in poetry.” The Life of W.B. Yeats (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 71.

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21. Yeats to Lady Gregory, November 19, 1901, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 3:121. 22. Yeats to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, November 19, 1901, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 3:122. 23. Yeats to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, November 19, 1901, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 3:122. 24. For the rationale behind the assumption that Yeats owned this edition, see The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 3:122 n. 2, and also T.A. Birrell, “English Catholic Mystics in Non-Catholic Circles (the Taste for Middle English Mystical Literature and Its Derivatives from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries),” Downside Review: A Quarterly of Catholic Thought 94 (1976): 223 [60–81, 99–117, 213–31]. Birrell’s three-part essay is also the only one that I have found that makes any useful mention of Yeats’s explicit reference to Julian in 1901. 25. Three Plays by Björnstjerne Björnson, trans. Edwin Björkman (New York: Howard Fertig, 1989), p. 122. 26. See, for instance, Chapter 11 in Warrack’s edition, wherein Julian arrives at an answer to her question—”What is sin?”—in terms of negativity and then quickly continues onward toward God’s “rightfulness”: “And I saw verily that sin is no deed: for in all this [vision] was not sin shewed.” Revelations, ed. Warrack, pp. 26–27. Yeats owned and read with great interest The Mystical Element of Religion (1908) by the Italian-born Roman Catholic Baron Friedrich von Hügel, where he would have read that Julian was an “entirely orthodox optimist” and that she refused to dwell on evil and sin; instead, according to Von Hügel, “the whole dread secret as to the future of evil-doers is left in the hands of God.” Von Hügel, The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends, 2 vols. (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1908), 2:219. 27. Yeats to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, November 19, 1901, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 3:122. 28. Yeats, “Introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse,” in Later Essays, p. 185. 29. W.B. Yeats, “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats, ed. Peter Allt and Russell Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1977), p. 260. 30. The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 2:522, 3:124. See Richard Ellman’s discussion of Yeats’s stylistic changes in Yeats: The Man and the Masks (New York: Dutton, 1948), pp. 154–56. 31. Yeats to Lady Gregory, January 14, 1903, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 3:303. 32. For one scholar’s account of the category of women’s spirituality, see Caroline Walker Bynum’s Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), and Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body (New York: Zone Books, 1992). 33. Yeats to John O’Leary, [week ending] July 23, 1892, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 1:303. 34. Yeats, “Tom O’Roughley,” Variorum Poems, p. 338; Yeats to William Force Stead, September 26, [1934]: “The Butterf ly is the main symbol on my ring—the ring I always wear—the other symbol is the hawk. The hawk is the straight road of logic, the butterf ly the crooked road of intuition—the hawk pounces, the butterf ly f lutters. I do not know any book upon the subject. I got like you a vision if I remember rightly.” Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Accession# 6102.

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35. Yeats to Fiona Macleod, c. November 23, 1901, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 3:123. 36. Yeats to W.J. Stanton Pyper, January 24, 1901, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 3:23. 37. Revelations, ed. Warrack, p. 113. 38. Yeats, Essays & Introductions, p. 86. 39. Yeats to the Editor of the United Irishman, October 17, 1903, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 3: 448. 40. Yeats to Lady Gregory, January 4, [1918], The Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (New York: Macmillan, 1955), p. 644. 41. The mystical traveler appears in Yeats’s 1904 comedy, “A Pot of Broth”: “Well, as I was telling you, he was sitting up, and one time I thought he was as small as a nut, and the next minute I thought his head to be in the stars. Frightened I was.” Variorum Edition of the Plays of W.B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1966), p. 244. Warrack’s edition of Revelations, p. 10, translates the well-known hazelnut passage as follows: “Also in this he shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.” 42. Revelations, ed. Warrack, p. 110. 43. See Yeats’s letter to Lady Gregory, September 19, 1917, The Letters of W.B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade, p. 633. 44. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 151. 45. Revelations, ed. Warrack, p. 64; see also her suggestion, p. 183, that “the Thirst of God is to have the general Man unto Him” and that there are “three manners of longing in God, and all to one end.” 46. Yeats, “A Voice,” Mythologies, p. 68; for several of Yeats’s other accounts of this strange revelation, see also Memoirs, p. 126; Later Essays, p. 19; and Autobiographies, p. 284. 47. Yeats to Katharine Tynan, July 1891, The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, 1:255. 48. Yeats, Essays & Introductions, p. 40. 49. Yeats, Essays & Introductions, p. 29. 50. Richard Londraville, “Four Lectures by W.B. Yeats, 1902–4,” Yeats Annual 8 (1991): 105 [78–122]. 51. Yeats, Essays & Introductions, p. 35. 52. Yeats, “A Voice,” Mythologies, p. 68. 53. Yeats, “The Spur,” Variorum Poems, p. 591. 54. W.B. Yeats: Interviews and Recollections, ed. E.H. Mikhail, 2 vols. (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1977), 2:329. 55. Yeats to T. Werner Laurie, September 7, 1923, Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats, Accession# 4364; Evelyn Underhill, Mystics of the Church (1925; rpt. Cambridge, UK: James Clark and Co., 1988), p. 128. 56. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1974), p. 239; Mystics of the Church, p. 127. 57. Underhill, Mysticism, p. 239. 58. On the crucial importance of rhythm and chanting to Yeats’s aesthetic, see, for example, Ronald Schuchard, “ ‘As Regarding Rhythm’: Yeats and the Imagists,” Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 2 (1984): 209–26, and The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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59. Underhill, Mysticism, p. 239; The Mystics of the Church, p. 131 60. Underhill, Mysticism, p. 252. 61. David Rogers, “Yeats and Von Hügel: A Study of ‘Vacillation,’ ” Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 6 (1988): 94 [90–164]. 62. Von Hügel, Mystical Element of Religion, 2:218. 63. In the late version of A Vision, Yeats describes the formative time during the midtwenties when “he read all MacKenna’s incomparable translation of Plotinus, some of it several times, and went from Plotinus to his predecessors and successors.” A Vision (London: Macmillan, 1937; rpt. 1981), p. 20. 64. Von Hügel, Mystical Element of Religion, 2:307. 65. W.B. Yeats, Explorations (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 56. 66. In addition to echoing the language of Julian’s claim that “Adam fell . . . into the deep of this wretched world” and that Christ fell “with Adam, into the deep of the Maiden’s womb,” Yeats’s formulation of the “other Will” may also owe something to Julian’s discussion of the difference between the “Godly Will” (“that never assented to sin”) and the “beastly will” (“that may will no good”). Revelations, ed. Warrack, pp. 116, 76. 67. O’Shea, A Descriptive Catalog, p. 135, includes in the list of books in Yeats’s library Inge’s The Philosophy of Plotinus, The Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews, 1917–1918, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1918), marked throughout with the poet’s annotations, and The Platonic Tradition in English Religious Thought, The Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge, 1925–1926 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1926). 68. Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, 2:232. 69. Inge, The Philosophy of Plotinus, 2:162. Underhill, Mysticism, p. 101, agrees that the tender, direct address of a writer such as Julian or Catherine “rules out the formless and impersonal One of Plotinus, the ‘triple circle’ of Suso and Dante.” 70. William Ralph Inge, Studies of English Mystics, St. Margaret’s Lectures, 1905 (London: John Murray, 1906), p. 54. 71. “It is well known that most mystics lay great stress on what is called the negative road. . . . Julian is not a stranger to this method. ‘It needeth us,’ she says, ‘to know the littleness of creatures, and to noughten all thing that is made.’ ” Inge, Studies of the English Mystics, p. 69. 72. Inge, Studies of English Mystics, p. 55. 73. Revelations, ed. Warrack, p. 6; Inge, Studies of English Mystics, p. 55. 74. Yeats, Later Essays, p. 17; Variorum Poems, p. 138. 75. Denise Nowakowski Baker situates Julian in the “specific cultural matrix” associated with the practices of late medieval affective spirituality, one that embraces “a compassionate participation in the Savior’s pain” and “imitation in penitential suffering.” Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 21, 24. I do not agree with David Aers, who contends that the self-conscious rhetoric of Julian’s text “discourages any attempt to compose an ‘imitatio Christi,’ ” as if rhetoricity and affective identification could be mutually exclusive; see “The Humanity of Christ: Ref lections on Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” in David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval Culture (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), pp. 86–87 [77–104]. 76. Yeats, Later Essays, p. 10. 77. Yeats, Later Essays, p. 10. 78. Revelations, ed. Warrack, p. 4. 79. Revelations, ed. Warrack, p. 45.

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80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

Revelations, ed. Warrack, p. 39. Yeats, Later Essays, p. 1. Yeats, A Vision, p. 84. Yeats, A Vision, p. 84. Yeats, A Vision, p. 83. Yeats, Variorum Poems, p. 401. Iseult Gonne to W.B. Yeats, October 6, 1926, Letters to W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound from Iseult Gonne: A Girl That Knew All Dante Once, ed. A. Norman Jeffares, Anna MacBridge White, and Christina Bridgwater (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 128. 87. Yeats, Variorum Poems, p. 503.

CHAPTER 4 THE FIRE AND THE ROSE: THEODICY IN ELIOT AND JULIAN OF NORWICH Jewel Spears Brooker

In Four Quarters, culminating in Little Gidding, Eliot found Julian of Norwich to be a powerful ally in dealing with the problem of evil in the context of war.

T

he epigraph of T.S. Eliot’s first major poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the coda of his last, Little Gidding, contain the same image, enfolding tongues of f lame. His Collected Poems opens with the voice of a damned soul, Guido da Montefeltro, who is being tormented in the eighth circle of Dante’s hell for giving false counsel to others, a sin committed with his tongue.1 Guido’s punishment, in keeping with Dante’s representation of divine justice, is a visual counterpart of the sin itself, and thus in perfect contrapasso, Guido is forever wrapped in a quivering tongue of f lame. His voice merges with that of a modern deceiver, J. Alfred Prufrock, whose signature sin of endless rationalization also involves an abuse of language and whose punishment is to wander endlessly in the circular and smoky alleys of his own mind. Flames flicker throughout Eliot’s poetry, and in his last important poem, Little Gidding, they are present from beginning to end. In the final lines, they form a kaleidoscopic image that summarizes the poem, the sequence of which it is the capstone, and Eliot’s work over the previous three decades. The fi res of Little Gidding, far richer than those of “Prufrock,” gather into a single image flames of desire and suffering, destruction and redemption, as well as the tongues of the dead and those of the Holy Spirit. As the sin in “Prufrock” involves an abuse of language, so the redemptive process in Little Gidding impels a purification of “the dialect of the tribe” (CPP, 141). In “Prufrock,” Eliot prefi xes a quotation from a fourteenthcentury poet; in Little Gidding, he enfolds a quotation from a fourteenth-century mystic, Julian of Norwich. The embedded words are uttered by a comforting Jesus who assures Julian that, in spite of appearances to the contrary, everything is going

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to be all right. Eliot’s complex image—tongues of flame folded in on themselves and transfigured into the petals of a rose—is his counterpart of Julian’s “Alle shalle be wele.”2 The fi res of “Prufrock” and Little Gidding are suggestive of two continuing strands in Eliot’s moral imagination—the fi rst an awareness of evil, the second a longing for transcendence. The reality of evil is apparent in his attraction to figures such as Augustine, Dante, T.E. Hulme, and Charles Baudelaire; the longing for transcendence, in his identification with figures such as St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich. His awareness of horror and beatitude, displayed in such early poems as “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” played a role in his conversion in 1927. His baptism, however, was more than a commitment to the Church; it was also a commitment to England. In ensuing years, as Ronald Schuchard has shown, Eliot increasingly turned toward English models of spirituality. In poetry, this turn is evident in his new appreciation of George Herbert; in religion, it is shown in his renewal of interest in Julian of Norwich. 3 Julian, who refers to herself as a simple and unlettered Christian woman, is the author of a fourteenth-century classic in European spirituality, A Revelation of Love. The origin of this book, the fi rst to survive by an English woman, is described in the work itself. When Julian was thirty years old, she had a neardeath illness. Her family gathered and the parish priest administered the last rites. He then placed a crucifi x before her gazing eyes and instructed her to concentrate on it. Between the hours of four and nine in the morning of May 8, 1373, she experienced in rapid succession fi fteen visions, and the next night, she experienced one more. In the visions, which were not seen by others, Christ appeared, revealing his suffering, responding to her questions, assuring her of his love. Soon after her recovery, Julian described her visions in graphic detail. At some later time, she became an anchoress and was enclosed in a cell attached to a church in Norwich, where she remained for the rest of her life. In 1393, twenty years after her illness, she wrote a longer description of her experience, adding insights gleaned from thinking about the visions over time. This later version reveals that she was an informed theologian and an original thinker. Julian lived into her seventies, at least, for in 1416, she was named a beneficiary in a will. Eliot’s engagement with Julian was continuous from the early 1930s. His interest, which evolved and deepened, went through several stages. First, Julian was to him a symbol of continuity in the history of the English Church. In 1937, in an essay on Paul Elmer More, Eliot wrote: “In his introduction to Anglicanism . . . [More] fails . . . to emphasize the continuity of the Church: one might think it was the invention of Hooker. He does not give recognition to the probable influence of the mystics of the fourteenth century—Richard Rolle and Julian of Norwich—as late as the time of Lancelot Andrewes and George Herbert.”4 Eliot’s reason for including Julian’s work in Little Gidding was also related in part to church history. In 1942, he said that he put Julian in the poem to give it “greater historical depth” by balancing his allusions to the seventeenth century with allusions to the fourteenth, the “other great period” in church history.5

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Second, Julian was for Eliot a symbol of a vital connection between art and mysticism. He discovered her at Harvard in 1913–1914 when he read Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1911), a landmark in the twentieth-century revival of experience-based spirituality. As indicated by the following passage, copied into his notes, he was especially drawn to Underhill’s analogy between the artist and the mystic: “Visionary experience is . . . the outward sign of a real experience. . . . As the artist’s paint and canvas picture is the fruit, not merely of contact between brush and canvas, but also of a more vital contact between his creative genius and visible beauty or truth; so too we may see in visions . . . the fruit of a more mysterious contact between the visionary and a transcendental beauty or truth. . . . [T]he paint and canvas picture . . . tries to show . . . that ineffable sight, that ecstatic perception of good or evil . . . to which the deeper, more real soul has attained.”6 Eliot, like Yeats, felt that he had been deprived of access to the world of the spirit by post-Darwinian materialism and the decay of Protestantism.7 In this religious vacuum, he was drawn to Aestheticism, an early modernist movement that turned art into a religion with its own mysteries and rituals. Although he resisted the identification of art and religion, he accepted the idea that the mystical and the poetic imaginations have much in common.8 In Mystics of the Church (1925), Underhill praises Julian not only as the crown of English mysticism but as a powerful artist. She dwells on Julian’s ability to convey profound truths in “homely images,” quoting as an example: “A child, when it is a-hurt or adread, it runneth hastily to the mother for help, with all its might. So willeth He that we do, as a meek child.”9 Third, Julian was attractive to Eliot because of her philosophical imagination. In 1913–1914, while reading Mysticism, he was working on a Ph.D. in philosophy. Underhill connects philosophy, especially that of Henri Bergson, whose lectures Eliot had recently attended in Paris, with the mystical quest.10 In Mystics of the Church, she discusses Julian as a philosopher distinguished by a combination of utmost subjectivity and utmost objectivity: “Apparently the most subjective, Julian is really the most philosophic of our early mystics.” As an example, Underhill quotes her vision of God as a still point: “I saw God in a point . . . by which sight I saw that He is in all things. . . . He is the mid-point of all thing. . . . He is the ground, He is the substance.”11 In Murder in the Cathedral and Four Quartets, Eliot used this traditional mystical symbol a number of times, always associating it with the point of intersection between fi nite and infi nite, time and eternity, as in Burnt Norton: “Except for the point, the still point, / There would be no dance, and there is only the dance” (CPP, 119). Finally, Julian was for Eliot a powerful example of a Christian struggling with the problem of evil. In A Revelation of Love, she affi rms the goodness and omnipotence of God, but is unable to reconcile those attributes with the reality of suffering. She circles and worries, trying not to deny the authenticity of her revelation, trying not to undercut the authority of the Church or the Bible. She broods on the implications of original sin and the meaning of the biblical account of the fall, which are central in Augustine’s theodicy. In the process, as Denise N. Baker has shown, Julian “formulates her own original response to a theological dilemma at the center of Christian belief: the problem of evil.”12

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At the time Eliot returned to reading Julian, he was also circling and worrying. An awareness of evil had been at the center of his poetry, his politics, and his understanding of history from the beginning, but after his conversion in 1927, that awareness had to accommodate a newfound belief in the power and goodness of God. In the mid–1930s, in Burnt Norton, he imagines a rose garden that is also a “fi rst world,” suggesting that despite the fl aming swords barring the way, it might be possible to circle back to Eden. In Murder in the Cathedral, written in the shadow of the rise of Nazism, he dramatizes the murder of Thomas Becket as a parallel to the murder of Christ and thus projects an affi rmation based on the paradox of the fortunate fall. In the last three Quartets, written in 1940–1942 when England was in the midst of a catastrophic war, he made his most strenuous effort to come to terms with the problem of evil. In this effort, he looked to Julian of Norwich, making her “alle shalle be wele” his own, indicating thereby that she had become a significant spiritual mentor. Julian’s basic theology and her Trinitarian imagination descend from Augustine, but as Baker has demonstrated, her interpretation of her revelations calls into question fundamental premises of his thought, primarily his account of the fall and original sin.13 Given the fact that Eliot considered original sin as the foundation for understanding not only the human condition but also human history, his engagement with Julian inevitably would have involved a reexamination of his own moorings. Of the writers who contributed to Eliot’s understanding of original sin, the most important were T.E. Hulme and Charles Baudelaire. These figures first led Eliot to address the central question in theodicy: what is the good of evil. Influenced by Hulme, Eliot began by connecting original sin with literary politics—specifically, with antiromantic assumptions about human nature. In the 1920s, influenced by Baudelaire, he associated the doctrine primarily with the knowledge of good and evil, an emphasis that is explicit in his essays and The Waste Land (1922). By the 1930s, as shown in After Strange Gods and The Rock, he had begun to think of original sin in theological terms, as an inherited propensity to harm others and to ignore God. In the early years of the Second World War, in Little Gidding, he attempted to understand sin as part of a larger good. Eliot’s interest in original sin was piqued soon after his arrival in London in late 1914 through contact with Hulme’s ideas. A pioneer of Imagism and an antiromantic crusader, Hulme believed that original sin was the key to understanding history. As he used the term, it referred primarily to the idea that humans are inherently limited and prone to overreaching. In his introduction to Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence, reviewed by Eliot in early 1917, Hulme claims that “Romanticism . . . blurs the clear outlines of human relations . . . by introducing into them the Perfection that properly belongs only to the non-human.” In a passage marked in Eliot’s copy, Hulme praises Sorel as a “classical, pessimistic” thinker who understands “that man is by nature . . . limited. . . . In other words, [Sorel] believes in Original Sin.” Hulme goes on to defi ne Romantics “as all who do not believe in the Fall of Man. It is this opposition which . . . underlies most other divisions in social and political thought.”14 The stress on original sin can be

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found throughout Eliot’s work. In “Second Thoughts About Humanism” (1928), for example, Eliot quotes Hulme on the distinction between the “religious” and the “humanist” attitude. The fi rst, which Hulme associates with classicism, assumes that man is endowed with “Original Sin” and “in no sense perfect.” The second, which he associates with romanticism, assumes that “man is either perfectible, or capable of indefi nite improvement.” Hulme maintains that these two attitudes generate two different value systems. From a religious perspective, values are “absolute and objective”; from a humanist perspective, values are “relative to human desires.” Although Hulme’s espousal of original sin was in part political, it included a moral dimension. In a sentence quoted by Eliot, he maintained that for romantics, “the problem of evil disappears; the concept of sin loses all meaning.”15 This is a crucial element in Eliot’s antiromanticism and the point at which for him literature intersects with morality. By 1920, Eliot had begun to take note of good and evil in the work of Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du Mal he had discovered at Harvard in 1908–1909. Baudelaire epitomized romantic excess: in religion, he was a flamboyant Satanist; in private life, he was “perverse and insufferable.”16 Nevertheless, in Eliot’s view, this ultraromantic was “the first counter-romantic.”17 In support of this assessment, Eliot said Baudelaire was one to whom “the notion of Original Sin came spontaneously.”18 Sin for Baudelaire was a means of self-discovery, a way of descending into the abyss. The fi rst poem in Fleurs du Mal, “Au Lecteur,” links the poet and his readers in a fraternity of evil by cataloging their shared sins—avarice, murder, rape. The last line of this poem, “Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!,” quoted almost verbatim in The Waste Land, corroborates Eliot’s description of Baudelaire as a “deformed Dante.”19 In his 1930 essay on Baudelaire, Eliot defends his view that the French poet understood good and evil by quoting one of Baudelaire’s outrageous aphorisms: “the greatest and most singular joy in making love lies in the certainty of doing evil” [la volupté unique et suprême de l’amour gît dans la certitude de faire le mal]. Eliot interprets this aphorism as follows: “This means . . . that Baudelaire has perceived that what distinguishes the relations of man and woman from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of Good and Evil . . . [he understood] that the sexual act as evil is more dignified, less boring, than as the natural, ‘life-giving,’ cheery automatism of the modern world. . . . So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good . . . and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least, we exist.”20 In bringing Baudelaire to bear on the conditions of modern life, Eliot was led to reflect on one of the central issues in theodicy—namely, what is the purpose of sin or, put another way, what is the good of evil.21 His position is that, both logically and morally, the sense of good presupposes the sense of evil. In spite of Baudelaire’s addiction to romantic claptrap, he understood “that what really matters is Sin and Redemption. . . . [T]he recognition of the reality of Sin is a New Life; and the possibility of damnation is so immense a relief in a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform, that damnation itself is an immediate form of salvation—of salvation from the ennui of modern life, because it at last gives some significance to

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living.”22 Baudelaire’s position is a theological variant of the ancient structural idea formulated by Heraclitus: the way up and the way down are one and the same. This Heraclitean notion, used by Eliot as the epigraph to Burnt Norton, is the basic structural principle in Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Eliot’s Four Quartets. The attempt to see evil as part of a pattern that is in some way good is at the heart of Four Quartets. The fi rst, Burnt Norton (1935), was written as a standalone poem “l’entre deux guerres,” and the other three—East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942)—were written in quick succession under harrowing conditions during the fi rst two years of the Second World War. Of the four, Little Gidding is the most concerned with theodicy and most deeply indebted to Julian, who appears at the poem’s turning point. Its brilliant concluding image of tongues of fi re turned in on themselves to become rose petals was the fruit of decades of thinking about fi re and roses. When asked about the roses in Four Quartets, Eliot said “There are really three roses . . . the sensuous rose, the socio-political Rose . . . and the spiritual rose: and the three have got to be in some way identified as one.” 23 Eliot’s reference to “three” both limits and expands his meaning, for as indicated by his allusion to the Trinity, three is both three and infi nity. In the same sense, there are “three” fi res. First, there is “destructive fi re,” associated with fl ames shooting from German bombers in Little Gidding and with apocalyptic terror in East Coker. Second, there is the “purgatorial fi re” of East Coker, referred to in Little Gidding as the “refi ning fi re.” Third, there is spiritual fi re, including in Little Gidding Pentecostal tongues of fl ame and revivified tongues of the dead. As with the rose, so with the fi re: they are simultaneously three and one, simultaneously three and all. “Fire and ice” is also used three times in the Quartets. In the fi rst instance, fi re and ice are apocalyptic; in the second, purgatorial; and in the third, Pentecostal. Four Quartets begins and ends in a garden, and this return is essential to its theodicy. The rose of Little Gidding was gathered from the garden of Burnt Norton. The fi rst Quartet opens with a brief meditation on time and eternity, followed by an image of a bowl of rose leaves giving rise to “footfalls” echoing in the memory “Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden.” Entering this “might-have-been” garden involves fi nding “the fi rst gate / Into our fi rst world.” The reiteration of “fi rst” brings echoes of childhood, young love, and Eden; it hints of a return to innocence and whispers that “alle shalle be wele.” The garden is entered, at least for a moment, and it contains more inklings of Eden—“unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,” children “Hidden excitedly, containing laughter,” roses with the “look of flowers that are looked at.” The vision is undercut, however, by the presence of a deceiving thrush and by immediate banishment: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” (CPP, 118). The moment in the garden, nevertheless, turns out to be unforgettable, a pledge given in time of the reality of the transcendent, a pledge that sanctifies the temporal, for “only in time can the moment in the rose-garden . . . / Be remembered; . . . / Only through time time is conquered” (CPP, 119–20). Eliot returns in the last movement of Burnt Norton to the “hidden

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laughter / Of children in the foliage” (CPP, 122). These unsustainable moments, much like Julian’s visions, open windows to another world. Several instances of Eliot’s use of fi re and roses appear in the second Quartet, East Coker (1940). The opening lines describe large cycles of human history: Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored . . . Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires, Old fi res to ashes, and ashes to the earth. (CPP, 123)

These fi res, destructive but part of a self-renewing cycle, take Eliot back to East Coker, his ancestral home, where he observes his seventeenth-century forebears dancing around a bonfi re: “Round and round the fi re / Leaping through the flames” (CPP, 124). As he watches this dance of life, his ancestors disappear back into the earth. In the lyric that follows, Eliot moves to a world in which destructive fi re, now paired with unseasonable roses, takes on darker meanings. No longer part of the dance of life, it becomes the agent of an apocalypse that ushers in the end of history. East Coker II describes a world in which disorder on earth is mirrored by disorder in nature. Late November is disturbed by sensations of spring. “Late roses” are fi lled with “early snow”; the Sun and Moon drop from the sky; comets weep. With Hitler’s planes soaring over Europe, it is also late November in the history of civilization, which risks being Whirled in a vortex that shall bring The world to that destructive fire Which burns before the ice-cap reigns (CPP, 125).

The most striking instance of the combination of fi re and roses in East Coker comes in part IV, a meditation on the meaning of Good Friday and the most overtly theological passage in all of Four Quartets. In a tightly structured lyric about the paradoxical underpinnings of the atonement, Eliot writes: If to be warmed, then I must freeze And quake in frigid purgatorial fires Of which the fl ame is roses, and the smoke is briars. (CPP, 128)

These purgatorial fi res, like the apocalyptic fi res that usher in the end of history, are associated with ice. They are also associated with roses, making them forerunners of the paradisial fi re at the end of Little Gidding. In a general sense, Little Gidding clarifies what had been implicit in the previous three poems—that Four Quartets as a whole constitutes a demonstration of the struggle to reconcile good and evil by fi nding unity in warring elements, different seasons, and confl icting voices. Structurally, it supports the theodicy theme by completing the circular journey begun in the rose garden of Burnt Norton. Thematically, it collects and transfigures images such as the dance and the fi re/rose cluster that hint of ultimate goodness. In addition, it includes several figures whose work deals with theodicy—Augustine, Julian of Norwich, and

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Milton. Augustine provides the foundation that Julian and Milton use as reference points. Julian resists his interpretation of the fall, and both she and Milton (but not Eliot) reject the idea of original sin. In a more focused sense, Little Gidding should be seen as a war poem. From September 2 to November 7, 1940, the Germans bombed London every night. On May 10, 1941, there were over 3,000 casualties in a single raid. Eliot was in the city much of this time, and in 1942, as he was working on Little Gidding, he was aware that Hitler had conquered most of Europe and was expected to invade England. In the opening months of the war, Eliot had served as an air-raid warden, spending two nights each week on Kensington rooftops watching for fi res. At dawn, he would walk through the shattered streets to his flat, an eerie experience that became the basis for the “Compound Ghost” section of Little Gidding. He uses his situation in the midst of one war to reflect on other wars—the Great War, the English Civil War of the seventeenth century, “forgotten wars” of the fourteenth century—and on philosophical issues raised by war. As Little Gidding opens, the protagonist has retreated from the blackened streets of London to the shimmering lanes of a small settlement seventy-five miles to the north, Little Gidding, a place that in the English civil war had been a beacon of holiness. This movement in space is also a movement in time, from the twentieth century to the seventeenth, and a shift of focus from present to past antagonists, primarily to the “broken king” Charles I who had found sanctuary in Little Gidding, the leader of the opposition Oliver Cromwell, and the poet/statesman John Milton. The time is midwinter, the shortest day of the year. With London burning, it also appears to be midwinter in the history of England. But in this winter darkness, the sun fl ames the frozen ponds, and light, both natural and supernatural, breaks through the gloom. “When the short day is brightest, with frost and fi re, / The brief sun fl ames the ice, on pond and ditches” (CPP, 138). The blinding glare, “more intense than blaze of branch,” ushers in a timeless moment, “a spring time . . . not in time’s covenant.” This “midwinter spring” awakens the spirit with Pentecostal fi re, not with “a mighty rushing wind,” as at the fi rst Pentecost, but with tongues of flame flashing on ice.24 This is the third time that fi re and ice have appeared together in Four Quartets. In East Coker, they were associated with the destructive fi re that ushers in the reign of the ice-cap and with frigid purgatorial fi res that are part of the cure recommended by Christ, the wounded surgeon. Here, in Little Gidding, at a moment of great peril, fi re and ice are associated with beatitude, with the descent of the Holy Spirit and the rising of the human spirit. These icy flames also beckon the voices of the dead, not only Eliot’s poetic mentors, but his forebears in the faith, beginning with those present at the fi rst Pentecost. Despite being gifted to speak in tongues, these saints and poets, “when living,” “had no speech” for what “They can tell you, being dead: the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fi re beyond the language of the living” (CPP, 139). The descent of the Spirit is a pledge of presence in a time of woe. The Spirit, in the Bible called the Comforter ( John 15:26), uses voices of the dead, including Julian’s, to whisper that, despite the ostensible triumph of evil, “alle shalle be wele.”

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In part II of Little Gidding, the speaker is back in the stricken city, breathing the dust from collapsing buildings and burnt roses. Having spent the night watching for “the dark dove with the fl ickering tongue,” that is, the German bombers spewing fi re, he heads for home through devastated streets. In “the uncertain hour before the morning,” he meets a ghost compounded of several of his spiritual and poetic mentors, including Dante, Swift, and Yeats. The presence of Dante underscores an analogy between the speaker’s encounter with ghosts in the ravaged city and Dante’s similar encounters in the infernal city. The Compound Ghost chastises the homing fi re-watcher for his sins and then reveals that the alternative to hell is purgatory. From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a dancer. (CPP, 142)

For the frustrated pilgrim wandering in the scorched city, the choice of fi re or fi re is little comfort. Before reiterating the terrifying link between the dark dove breathing fi re on innocents and the bright dove descending on Christ at his baptism, Eliot summons another ghost, Julian of Norwich. Unlike the others, Julian turns her eyes from personal failings, preferring to imagine the good that can come of pain “Now, and in England” (CPP, 139). The problem of pain is at the heart of Julian’s theodicy. She defines sin as the physical and psychological pain endured by Christ and all mankind: “the shamful despite and the utter noughting [humiliation] that he bare for us in this life, and his dying, and alle the paines and passions [sufferings] of alle his creatures, gostly and bodely [spiritual and physical].”25 Although she feels uneasy about doing so, she wonders “why, by the grete forseeing wisdom of God, the beginning of sinne was not letted [prevented]. For then thought me that alle shulde have be wele.”26 As she grieves over this situation, Jesus appears, not as a formidable male, but as a tender mother. “Jhesu Crist, that doth good against evil, is oure very moder [mother]: we have oure being of him . . . with alle the swete keping of love that endlesly foloweth. . . . oure moders bere us to paine and to dying. . . . But oure very moder Jhesu, he alone bereth us to joye and to endlesse leving [eternal life]. . . . This fair, lovely worde, ‘moder,’ it is so swete and so kinde in itselfe that it may not verely be saide of none . . . but of him.”27 As a mother to a puzzled child, Jesus responds with the comforting words quoted by Eliot six centuries later at the end of his visit with ghosts in the streets of London: “Sinne is behovely [necessary, appropriate, beneficial], but alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thinge shalle be wel.”28 Julian can understand how the suffering of Christ was “behovely,” but she flounders in the face of human suffering. She refuses to believe that God could be vengeful, and she rejects the doctrine that suffering is punishment. She interprets “sin is behovely” to mean that evil will lead to good, and so instead of counting “things ill done and done to others’ harm,” as the Compound Ghost does, she counts possible goods: suffering leads to self-knowledge and to knowledge of God; pain provides the occasion for Christ’s compassion for us and our compassion for others. As Baker notes, sin

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is pedagogical.29 In spite of apprehending these goods, however, Julian cannot fathom the saying that “alle shalle be wele.” During her youth, the Black Death ravaged England; from 1348 to 1350, it killed between 30 and 40 percent of the population. As an adult, she had witnessed evil deeds. “Ther be many dedes evil done in oure sight and so gret harmes . . . that it semeth to us that it were unpossible that ever it shuld come to a good end.”30 She repeatedly objects to the saying that “alle shalle be wele,” and Jesus repeatedly responds, “It is soth [true] that sinne is cause of alle this paine, but alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thing shalle be wele.”31 Always courteous, always “shewing no maner of blame,” he simply says “alle shalle be wele.” He usually says it three times, signifying for Julian that he speaks for the Trinity. It is significant that Eliot’s quotation of Julian comes at the end of his stroll with Dante through the streets of hell. She was especially troubled by the doctrine that suffering in this life would be followed by suffering in the next. “[O]ne point of oure faith is that many creatures shall be dampned [damned] . . . man in erth that dyeth out of the faith of holy church . . . also man that hath received cristondom [Christianity] and liveth uncristen life, and so dyeth oute of cherite. All theyse shalle be dampned to helle without ende. . . . And stonding alle this [this being so], methought it was unpossible that alle maner of thing shuld be wele.”32 This was an urgent matter for fourteenth-century Christians, for many who perished in the Black Death died without having a chance to confess their sins and receive the last rites of the Church. Jesus again urges her not to worry, promising that everything will be all right. Julian decides that his saying must have two meanings. One part, which is clear, concerns salvation; the other, which is hidden, does not.33 If it is true that “alle shalle be wele,” then God must have “a secret,” which she imagines as a “deed the which the blisseful trinite shalle do in the last day. . . . This is the gret deed ordained of oure lorde God fro without beginning . . . only knowen to himselfe, by which deed he shalle make all thing wele.”34 In part, Julian is simply being humble, but she is also conveying her hope that all suffering will be redeemed, and all people will be saved. Eliot’s “Sin is Behovely, but / All shall be well, and / All manner of thing shall be well” modifies the Augustinian/Dantean perspective of the Compound Ghost by adding the perspective of Julian. After quoting her, Eliot ruminates on the meaning of the saying. His immediate reference point is “this place,” Little Gidding, and the civil war that darkened England in the seventeenth century. He ponders the situation of brothers killing brothers, all fighting for God and England. The antagonists, “touched by a common genius,” were not villains— Charles I, who fled to Little Gidding for sanctuary, but eventually died on the scaffold; Cromwell, who led the parliamentarians, but whose death was followed by the restoration of the monarchy; Milton, Cromwell’s Latin Secretary, “who died blind and quiet” after fi nishing Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. These men were even then “United in the strife which divided them” and now are reconciled among the stars. These men, and those who opposed them And those whom they opposed

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Accept the constitution of silence And are folded in a single party. (CPP, 143)

The phrase “folded in” anticipates Eliot’s image of reconciliation at the end of the poem, in which tongues of flames are folded in on themselves to make a rose. The reconciliation includes the combatants in the civil war, but it also includes the reconciliation of the living with the dead. For Eliot, this reconciliation would have included Milton. Eliot was not an unbiased reader of seventeenth-century history, and in his early essays, he had allowed political and religious partisanship to compromise his assessment of Milton. By the 1940s, he knew that history would fold them into the same party—that is, the party of poets whose greatest work deals with good and evil. Although Eliot’s attention is primarily on a seventeenth-century war, his language brings in other times and other confl icts. Eliot’s enfolding of Julian brings in the fourteenth century, with its “forgotten wars.” “The spectre of a Rose” brings in the fi fteenth-century Wars of the Roses. “Why should we celebrate / These dead men more than the dying?” is a reminder of the twentiethcentury war now raging, with soldiers dying “here and abroad.” The abandoned “king at night-fall” brings in the martyrdom of Christ, and “three men . . . on the scaffold” brings in the three crosses on Golgotha. For Eliot, as for Augustine, Julian, and Milton, that cruel history “Sings below inveterate scars / And reconciles forgotten wars” (CPP, 118). The meditation on history in part III ends with the reassuring voice of Julian’s Jesus: And all shall be well and All manner of things shall be well By the purification of the motive In the ground of our beseeching. (CPP, 143)

These lines combine two sayings of Julian’s Jesus: “alle shale be wele” and “I am grounde of thy beseking [beseeching]. . . . sithen [since] I make the to beseke it. . . . How shoulde it than be that thou shuldest not have thy beseking?”35 In Eliot’s reading of Julian, the benediction is not unconditional; it is contingent on grounding oneself in love and purifying one’s motives. In part IV, the heart of Eliot’s theodicy, he returns to the scene depicted in part II, the incinerated London streets on which he had been reprimanded by the Compound Ghost. The essential backdrop for part IV includes both Augustine and Julian. The lessons Eliot brings from Augustine have to do with the reality of sin and the inevitability of consequences; the lessons from Julian include her belief that suffering is not only a necessary part of human existence, but in some hidden way a beneficial part. The larger pattern of Little Gidding begins to emerge in this section of the poem. In part I, set in the hamlet of Little Gidding, the refugee from culture fi nds peace in the sun-sparked streaks of fi re on an icy pond in midwinter. These flames (both illusory and real) stir his spirit, ignite Pentecostal fi res, and loosen the tongues of ghosts. These beatific tongues are Julian’s fi res. In part II, set on the streets of a burning metropolis in wartime,

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an agitated fire warden fi nds a monstrous dove breathing flames on civilians and meets a Compound Ghost who reproves him for personal wrongs. These are Augustine’s fi res. In part III, the exasperated pilgrim beckons Julian to help him make sense of history. And now in part IV, Eliot merges the image of the descending dove of part I with that of the descending bombers of part II. The dove descending breaks the air With f lame of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only hope, or else despair Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre— To be redeemed from fire by fire. (CPP, 143–44)

The successful coalescence of the bomber, an image of war and devastation, and the dove, an image of radiance and peace, is due in part to the visual overlap. The bomber appears in the sky as a giant dark dove: gray, bird-shaped, hovering or in fl ight, red-tongued. The connection is supported by language, much of it associated with fi re (incandescent, discharge, pyre) that can be applied simultaneously to the bomber and the Holy Ghost. Both generate “incandescent terror”—the bomber by falling fi re, the dove by sudden epiphany. Both bring tongues that declare “the one discharge from sin and error,” the bomber by discharging its incendiary load and ending lives; the Holy Ghost by pointing to Christ whose suffering discharged the debts of mankind. The paradoxes ending the stanza play with three levels of fi re—destructive fi re, purgatorial fi re, and refi ning fire. They suggest that, in ways yet to be revealed, these three are interrelated and that both physical and spiritual suffering are behovely. The “pyre or pyre” alternative is terrifying, but it is also consoling because it includes on one side the redeeming fire of God’s love. “Who then devised the torment? Love.” This is the theodicy question, the same question posed by Augustine and Milton. The response, however, is Julian’s. At the end of A Revelation, she asks Jesus to explain the meaning of her visions. “What, woldest [wouldest] thou wit [know] thy lordes mening in this thing? Wit it wele, love was his mening. Who shewed it the? Love. What shewed he the? Love. Wherfore shewid he it the? For love.”36 Julian concludes by declaring, based on decades of meditation on the problem of evil, that God loved us before he made us, and that his love has never slackened and never will, in spite of appearances to the contrary. As rhetoric, her conclusion is glib; as the fruit of decades of enduring and observing suffering, her conclusion is profound. Her wisdom, however, is not for the casual reader. Only those who have observed and experienced evil and tried to reconcile it with the goodness of God can understand her meaning. As one who had lived through one world war and was caught in a second, as one who had experienced estrangement and unhappiness, Eliot considered Julian’s conclusions to be wise. He also shared her position that one cannot demand to know all the truth about everything. The opening line of one of his earliest poems is “Hidden under the heron’s wing,” and in the following passage, written in the 1930s, he joins the concept of hiddenness

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and the still point, both crucial in Julian’s understanding of theodicy.37 O hidden under the dove’s wing, hidden in the turtle’s breast, Under the palmtree at noon, under the running water At the still point of the turning world. O hidden. (CPP, 86)

It does no good to assault the heron and the dove to find out what they are hiding. As Julian says: “the more we besy [busy] us to know his prevites [privates, secrets] in that or in any other thing, the ferthermore shalle we be from the knowing.”38 The superimposition of the dark and the white doves is the obvious context for understanding the theodicy implicit in the second stanza, but the shadowy presence of Heracles hinted at in the “pyre or pyre” phrase, is also crucial. Who then devised the torment? Love. Love is the unfamiliar Name Behind the hands that wove The intolerable shirt of f lame Which human power cannot remove. We only live, only suspire Consumed by either fire or fire. (CPP, 144)

The central element in the myth of Heracles is the account of his “labors,” all of which involve a struggle with and triumph over death. All are a variant of his descent to the underworld, where he worsted Hades and brought Alcestis back alive to her husband. Eliot’s source is Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis, which tells the story of the hero’s homecoming. Contaminated by his sanguinary labors, he has to purify himself in order to avoid carrying violence into the domestic and civic spheres. Like Agamemnon, he arrives with a lovely captive. Like Clytemnestra, his wife Deianira is distressed, but instead of taking a lover and slaying her husband, she devises a trick to rekindle his love. Years earlier, she had been assaulted by a centaur engaged by Heracles to carry her across a river. Heracles shot the centaur with a poisoned arrow, but as he lay dying, the centaur told Deianira to save some of his blood, and if Heracles should prove unfaithful, she could use it to regain his love. When Heracles approached, she sent him a shirt dipped in the blood. He put it on and proceeded to light the altar fires. The fire activated the poison in the blood and thus made his shirt of flame irremovable. Horrified at having harmed her husband, Deianira killed herself. Realizing that death was the only way to end his torture, Heracles immolated himself on a pyre on Mount œta. His selfimmolation fulfi lls several cryptic prophecies and leads to the apotheosis of the hero. As the play ends, the Chorus laments that the gods have no pity for mortals. The myth of Heracles touches on several themes that are central to Eliot’s emerging theodicy: war, sacrifice, love, and most of all, atonement. Eliot weaves together three narratives. The fi rst is that of Everyman, including the speaker; the second, that of Heracles; and the third, that of Christ. On all three levels, there is a descent to hell. The speaker has just emerged from a conversation with

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ghosts in the streets of London; Heracles has descended into the underworld and overcome Hades; and Christ descended to Hades on Good Friday. “The intolerable shirt of flame / Which human power cannot remove” is suffering. For Everyman, it is inseparable from original sin; for Heracles, from his freely shot poison arrow; for Christ, from his fall, to use Julian’s image, into the Virgin’s womb. The name on the label of the shirt, paradoxically, is Love. In the last movement of Little Gidding, Eliot gathers the themes of all four poems and composes them into an elegant and profound poetic theodicy. He achieves perfect concord between the form—four parallel compositions inspired by his love of Beethoven’s late quartets—and the theme—the harmony that eventually will be seen to exist between discordant parts of human experience. The theodicy has several essential elements. The fi rst, which can be associated primarily with Augustine, is that it must acknowledge the reality of evil in human history. For Eliot, this meant accepting the doctrine of original sin, which for him had less to do with guilt than with making sense of history. From Cain’s murder of Abel to Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews, history had been defi ned by reciprocal malice, a situation he associated with human nature after the fall. In Little Gidding V, he insists that being human means living inside this history, where every action “Is a step to the block, to the fi re, down the sea’s throat” (CPP, 144). History is not simply the past; it is “now and England.” “Now” is midwinter 1942; England is the country in which he lives. The second and related element in Eliot’s theodicy is that one must acknowledge the good and the beautiful, especially those moments in the rose garden that enable one to imagine being redeemed from history. The material world points to the immaterial, the natural to the supernatural; in Eliot’s poignant phrase, nature bowers “echoed ecstasy.” To pick up these echoes, one must tune in to the “Whisper of running streams . . . The laughter in the garden” (CPP, 127). The third element in Eliot’s theodicy is that it must be forward-looking, teleological, as in Julian, rather than backward-looking, etiological, as in Augustine. Augustine’s basic questions about the existence of evil were related to its origins: when and where did it originate? who is to blame? His reference point was the beginning of history—that is, creation and subsequently the fall. Julian’s basic question, on the other hand, was related to the ends (effects) of history: given the human condition, what good can come of suffering? Her reference point was primarily the future in which God would perform a “secret” deed that would make everything right. Eliot is also forward-looking, drawn by an end that is both a purpose and a destination. We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. (CPP, 145)

Eliot’s fourth element, inseparable from the third, is that the way forward involves a loop in time. The exploration leads to the “first gate” that opens to the mighthave-been rose garden of Burnt Norton and from that imagined place to our

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“fi rst world.” To reach that world, one discovers at the end of Little Gidding, it is necessary to go “Through the unknown, remembered gate.” The fact that the “unknown” gate, once found, will be “remembered” suggests that the discovery is a metaphor for the return to Eden. The fi fth element in Eliot’s theodicy is that it must allow for mystery. As discussed earlier, Eliot believed that something precious is “hidden under the dove’s wing,” “under the heron’s wing.” In the last paragraph of Little Gidding, he mentions the “voice of the hidden waterfall,” a voice “heard, half-heard, in the stillness / Between two waves of the sea.” These hidden wonders are what Julian refers to as God’s secrets. God’s secrets are emphasized by another fourteenth-century mystic, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, whose words Eliot folds into this part of the Quartets. The line “With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling” was written by an English monk who, like Julian and Eliot, kept his face to the wind. His version of an ancient paradox is that in order to fi nd the way, it is necessary to enter a “cloud of unknowing”; in order to know, it is necessary to “know only that we know nought.”39 Such spiritual humility is integral to most mystical theodicy. In the coda of Little Gidding, as in the epigraph to “Prufrock,” the tongues of flame simultaneously conceal and reveal a someone, a voice, a Presence. The final point in Eliot’s theodicy, the one he has been moving toward from the beginning, is atonement, literally at-one-ment. This theme is caught in the coda of Little Gidding. And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of f lame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fi re and the rose are one. (CPP, 145)

By the end of Little Gidding, the fi re and the rose, which Eliot has been using as separate images for three decades, have accumulated incredible resonance. The fi re has been associated with physical suffering, with damnation and purgation, with psycho-religious states from sexual passion to spiritual elation to mystical union, with material properties such as destruction and creation, with natural cycles of winter and summer. In Four Quartets alone, fi re is associated with the intimate family hearth, ancestral fi re festivals, indiscriminate fi res falling on London, and apocalyptic fi res that could usher in a new ice age. In its connection with purgation and apocalypse, fi re has been paired with ice, both beautiful, both unifying, both catastrophic. Fire is associated with tongues of flame—those of the Holy Ghost, the saints at Pentecost, and the living dead from Heraclitus to Augustine and Dante to W.B. Yeats. All of these connections and more are hovering over the coda of Little Gidding. The rose, similarly, has been accumulating significance in Eliot’s poetry for decades. It has been associated with a carpe diem motif, with beauty, sexual passion, might-have-been love, and might-have-been innocence. “The single Rose / Is now the Garden / Where all loves end . . . the Garden / Where all love

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ends” (CPP, 62). In Burnt Norton, it is linked to both paradise lost and paradise regained, to lost and recovered love, to a gate into a “first world.” It also carries the resonance of Eliot’s other flower gardens, notably the hyacinth garden of The Waste Land, the site of an ecstatic experience leaving the protagonist looking into the “heart of light.” As the fi re brings a multitude of witnesses to its symbolic power, so does the rose. In Little Gidding, the witnesses include Yeats with his ideal Rose and Dante with his multifoliate rose, specifically folded into the coda of Little Gidding. By the end of Eliot’s poetic career, the fire and the rose as separate symbols have gathered significance too great for words, and in the last line of the poem, the two are joined in a single line that embodies good and evil, beauty and horror. “The fi re and the rose are one” is a consummate image of atonement. It not only reconciles Eliot’s awareness of evil and longing for transcendence, but in the context of this poem, historical characters such as Augustine and Julian, Charles I and Cromwell. It is a reminder that antagonists in wars great and small will be pacified, that the living and the dead, including Eliot and Milton, will be conciliated. The knotting of the fi re and the rose binds life and death, whispering that pain is part of birth and death part of life. The reconciliation touches personal animosities in the human community, including marital estrangement. It includes not only peace on earth, but peace with God arising from the pain endured by Christ. While epitomizing these rapprochements, the image maintains difference. The paragraph of which it is the end, moreover, emphasizes the connection of reconciliation with return. The prefi x “re” is an etymological reminder that these words, at the heart of Eliot’s theodicy, include the idea of conciliating again, of recovering something that has been lost, thus supporting the intuitions of prelapsarian unity and a loss of innocence. As Eliot writes in East Coker, “Home is where we start from” (CPP, 129). The incandescent beauty of the fire and the rose, however, should not detract from the crucial point that the closing image is adverbial. The main clause in the coda, the part that announces the yes indeed of Eliot’s theodicy, is the double “All shall be well.” This direct quotation gives Julian of Norwich pride of place, even above Dante, who is situated in the modifier. The enfolded and enfolding of the tongues of flame and the petals of the rose compose the picture and sound the notes that substantiate confidence in the harmony of the spheres. “Alle shalle be wele.” Notes 1. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is the first poem in T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), hereafter cited as CPP in the text. When lines are sufficiently identified, by title or section of poem, no citation appears. 2. “A Revelation of Love,” 13.27, in The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Version Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 209. The version used by Eliot: Revelations of Divine Love Shewed to Mother Juliana of Norwich, preface by George Tyrell (St. Louis: Herder Book Co., 1920).

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3. Ronald Schuchard, Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.175–97. 4. T.S. Eliot, “Paul Elmer More,” Princeton Alumni Weekly 37.17 (February 5, 1937): 374 [373–74]. 5. Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 70. 6. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911; rpt. New York: Dutton, 1961), p. 271. The quotation is an abridged version of a long passage Eliot copied on a note card, now in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. 7. The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (1916; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 77. 8. T.S. Eliot, “Arnold and Pater,” in Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), pp. 382–93. 9. Evelyn Underhill, Mystics of the Church (1925; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1964), pp. 130, 131. 10. Underhill, Mysticism, p. 30. 11. Underhill, Mystics of the Church, pp. 128, 130. 12. Denise Nowakowski Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 63. 13. Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, pp. 68–69. 14. T.E. Hulme, translator’s preface to Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1916), p. ix [v–xi]. T.S. Eliot, review of Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel, Monist 27 (1917): 478–79. Hulme, as Schuchard has shown, contributed substantially to Eliot’s growing interest in classicism, royalism, and Anglo-Catholicism. See Eliot’s Dark Angel, pp. 52–69. 15. The Collected Writings of T.E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 444. Eliot, “Second Thoughts about Humanism,” in Selected Essays, pp. 437–38 [429–38]. 16. Eliot, “Baudelaire,” in Selected Essays, p. 374 [371–81]. 17. Eliot, “Baudelaire,” in Selected Essays, p. 376. 18. T.S. Eliot, “Baudelaire in Our Time,” For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1928), p. 98 [86–99]. 19. T.S. Eliot, “The Lesson of Baudelaire,” Tyro 1 (Spring 1921): 4 [4]. 20. Eliot, “Baudelaire,” in Selected Essays, p. 380. 21. For further ref lections by Eliot on Original Sin and evil, see After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934), pp. 61–62. 22. Eliot, “Baudelaire,” in Selected Essays, pp. 378–79. 23. Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets, p. 137. 24. Acts of the Apostles, 2:2 25. “Revelation of Love,” 13.27, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 209. 26. “Revelation of Love,” 13.27, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 209. 27. “Revelation of Love,” 14.59, 14.60, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, pp. 309, 313. 28. “Revelation of Love,” 13.27, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 209. 29. Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings, p. 70.

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30. “Revelation of Love,” 13.27, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 221. 31. “Revelation of Love,” 13.27, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 211. 32. “Revelation of Love,” 13.32, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 223. 33. “Revelation of Love,” 13.30, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, pp. 216, 217. 34. “Revelation of Love,” 13.32, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 223. 35. “Revelation of Love,” 14.41, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 249. 36. “Revelation of Love,” 16.86, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 379. 37. T.S. Eliot, “Hidden under the heron’s wing,” Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), p. 82. 38. “Revelation of Love,” 13.33, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 227. 39. Quoted in Underhill, Mysticism, p. 337.

CHAPTER 5 JULIE NORWICH AND JULIAN OF NORWICH: ANNIE DILLARD’S THEODICY IN HOLY THE FIRM Denise N. Baker

Annie Dillard’s solution to the problem of evil in Holy the Firm reveals the profound influence of Julian of Norwich and the medieval mystical tradition.

A

nnie Dillard gained national prominence in 1975 when, at the age of twenty-nine, she won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for her second book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She has since remained a preeminent literary figure in the United States, publishing twelve books in a variety of genres: a memoir and a collection of essays, two books of poetry, two novels, and six works she describes as nonfiction narratives. The texts in this last category are difficult to classify due to their range of subjects. Particularly problematic are Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the book published shortly after it, Holy the Firm (1977), because in them Dillard grapples with issues of doubt and faith from a unique perspective informed by her wide reading and personal ref lection. Julian of Norwich and other medieval mystics are among the authors who have inf luenced her, but the exact nature of Dillard’s debt to them has not been examined in detail. Dillard’s debt to medieval mysticism in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm is, in turn, a factor in the debate about her place in the American literary canon. She is often regarded as a nature writer akin to the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists. Dillard herself describes Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the account of the year she lived on the banks of this creek in southwest Virginia, as “what Thoreau called ‘a meteorological journal of the mind,’ telling some tales and describing some of the sights of this rather tamed valley, and exploring, in fear and trembling, some of the unmapped reaches and unholy fastnesses to which those tales and sights so dizzyingly lead.”1 As a descendant of the Transcendentalists, Dillard investigates both the physical and metaphysical realms, but despite her careful observation of the natural world, her contemplative ruminations about

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life’s meaning make it difficult to place her work in the genre of American nature writing. Singling her out from the other contemporary nature writers, Edward Abbey praises Dillard as “the true heir of the Master” because “she alone has been able to compose, successfully, in Thoreau’s extravagant and transcendentalist manner.” Nonetheless, he objects to her “constant name dropping. Always of one name. People who go around muttering about God make me nervous. It seems to me that the word ‘mystery,’ not capitalized, should suffice.”2 Responding to Abbey’s criticism, James McClintock observes that Dillard is not unique among nature writers in being religious, but rather in being explicitly Judeo-Christian rather than pantheistic.3 Dillard’s religious preoccupation has led some critics to refer to her as a mystic. Margaret Loewen Reimer, for example, describes Dillard’s dual focus in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek as that of “an unusual empiricist and a still more unusual mystic.”4 Bruce Ronda considers her “contemplative writing a paradigm of the mystic life in our time.”5 Peter Hawkins is even more precise in his claim about Dillard’s mysticism: “Like a worldly Julian of Norwich set loose on Thoreau’s pond, she has looked through to nature’s bottom and managed, without sentimentality, to fi nd all manner of things to be well. If well, however, things are always cloaked in mystery and contradiction; the glory often hurts.”6 This comparison to Julian of Norwich is very apt, because Dillard alludes to this fourteenth-century English mystic both in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and, more significantly, in her third book, Holy the Firm, as she confronts the conundrums of time and eternity, good and evil, and an immanent and a transcendent God. Despite the influence of Julian and other medieval contemplatives, however, Dillard differs from them in that she struggles to achieve faith in, not union with, the deity.7 Her resolution of these tensions is eclectic rather than orthodox, poetic rather than theological. Although Dillard is not a mystic in the medieval sense of the term, an understanding of her debt to Julian of Norwich enables us better to appreciate her deep learning and impressive artistry in Holy the Firm. Throughout Holy the Firm, Dillard interrogates the mystery of evil in a universe created by an inscrutable deity. In the three chapters of this meditative narrative published in 1977, she reflects on her experiences at her home in Puget Sound over the course of three days, November 18, 19, and 20. Dillard claims that she had “decided to write about whatever happened in the next three days. . . . On the second day an airplane crashed nearby, and I was back where I had been in Pilgrim—grappling with the problem of pain and dying.”8 In that crash, recounted in the second of the three chapters, a young girl has her face burned off. This girl is Julie Norwich, an obvious allusion to the fourteenthcentury English mystic. Why did Dillard decide to call this severely burned girl Julie Norwich and what understanding of A Revelation of Love and medieval mysticism in general does Holy the Firm manifest? In an interview given in 1978, just after Holy the Firm was published, Dillard said, “The sixteenth-century [sic] British mystic named Juliana of Norwich wrote Revelations of Divine Love, which I’ve only had the courage to read once. Its main idea, God’s love, is the most threatening of all, because it demands such faith.”9 From this statement, it would seem that Dillard has not studied Julian’s text very thoroughly. As I hope

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to demonstrate, however, the argument of Holy the Firm indicates that she comprehends more of Julian’s ideas than she admits in this interview. For Holy the Firm is a theodicy that attempts to address the problem of evil just as Julian does in A Revelation of Love. One might argue, however, that Dillard is criticizing or even refuting Julian’s theodicy because she casts the problem of evil in a more intractable form than the English mystic does. Julian of Norwich is troubled by the problem of moral evil. She asks in the third revelation: “What is sinne?” She cannot understand why a God who is all powerful, all knowing, and all good would create a universe in which humans choose to do evil acts. As she answers this question, particularly in the thirteenth revelation, Julian focuses on the consequences of sin for the wrongdoer and receives the assurance that “Sinne is behovely [befitting], but alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thinge shalle be wel.”10 In Holy the Firm, Dillard poses the much more disturbing problem of natural evil and the suffering of an innocent child. As she writes at the beginning of her second chapter, “Into this world falls a plane . . . There was no reason: the plane’s engine simply stilled after takeoff, and the light plane failed to clear the fi rs. . . . the fuel exploded; and Julie Norwich seven years old burnt off her face. Little Julie mute in some room at St. Joe’s now, drugs dissolving into the sheets. Little Julie with her eyes naked and spherical, baffled. Can you scream without lips? Yes. But do children in long pain scream?”11 For Dillard’s contemporary readers, the horrific consequences of this freak accident for the innocent child are much more problematic than the sins that individuals commit and are punished for, even if such punishment is eternal. Furthermore, although Julian graphically describes the physical torments of Christ’s Passion, she believes they have a redemptive purpose. Dillard regards Julie’s excruciating pain as neither merited nor beneficial. Dillard may, therefore, be criticizing the anchorite’s restricted focus on moral evil by naming the young victim of this accident Julie Norwich. In order to ascertain the relation between Julian of Norwich’s theodicy and Annie Dillard’s, we must examine the solution to the problem of natural evil that Dillard proposes to see whether it conforms in any way to Julian’s Revelation. The pain Julie Norwich suffers precipitates a crisis of faith for Dillard and brings about a change in her perspective from the fi rst to the third chapters. At the beginning of Holy the Firm, Dillard depicts herself as a pantheist in the tradition of the American Transcendentalists. Her fi rst chapter begins, “Every day is a god, each day is a god, and holiness holds forth in time” (HF, 11). These words allude to a quotation from Emerson, “No one suspects the days to be gods,” the epigraph to this fi rst chapter in the revised version of Holy the Firm published in 1994 in The Annie Dillard Reader.12 Throughout the chapter, Dillard spells the name of this deity with a lowercase g to emphasize her pantheism. In the 1978 interview, she identifies these pagan gods with the natural world and time: “Every day has its own particular brand of holiness to discover and worship appropriately. . . . If you examine each day, with the events and objects it contains, as a god, you instantly have to conclude there are pagan gods. And if you believe in a holy God—how does he relate to these pagan gods that fi ll the world? That is exactly the same question as the relationship between time and eternity.”13

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Dillard has come to Puget Sound, a narrow strip of land west of the mountains and east of the ocean, to study “the fringey edge where elements meet and realms mingle, where time and eternity spatter each other with foam” (HF, 21). As William Scheick observes, “For Dillard, this frayed liminal edge raises as many doubts as it seems to provide affirmative answers about the meaning of life.”14 But even though she foreshadows the doubts that dominate the subsequent two chapters, Dillard’s fi rst chapter celebrates the natural world in time. She concludes this chapter with a panegyric of pantheism: “Time is enough, more than enough, and matter multiple and given. . . . The god of today is a boy, pagan and fernfoot. . . . He sockets into everything that is, and that right holy. . . . he is everything that is, wholly here and emptied—flung, and flowing, sowing, unseen, and flown” (HF, 29, 30–31). The plane crash that begins the second chapter, however, destroys Dillard’s confidence in this pantheistic god of nature and time. After describing the crash and Julie’s suffering at the beginning of Chapter 2, Dillard repudiates her optimistic pantheism and expresses profound skepticism: “No gods have power to save. There are only days. The one great god abandoned us to days, to time’s tumult of occasions, abandoned us to the gods of days each brute and amok in his hugeness and idiocy” (HF, 43). Dillard’s first reference to a monotheistic deity describes a deconstructive Deus Absconditus, a Derridean watchmaker who designs a meaningless universe and withdraws from it.15 “God despises everything, apparently,” she writes. “If he abandoned us, slashing creation loose at its base from any roots in the real; and if we in turn abandon everything— all these illusions of time and space and lives—in order to love only the real: then where are we? Thought itself is impossible, for subject can have no guaranteed connection with object, nor any object with God. Knowledge is impossible. We are precisely nowhere” (HF, 45–46). Dillard, in contrast to Derrida, values the logocentrism of Western onto-theology. Thus, in Holy the Firm the problem of evil has both theological and epistemological dimensions. What is the nature of God if natural evil exists in the universe he creates? What meaning does life and socalled objective reality have if it is created by a deity who allows such evil? In her initial pantheism and her subsequent skepticism, Dillard’s perspective bears little resemblance to Julian’s. While Julian’s visions exercise her faith, Dillard’s experience challenges hers. While Julian is troubled by moral evil, the transgressions against divine injunctions by human agents, Dillard explores the apparent evil consequences of natural or accidental processes. While Julian begins her inquiry about the problem of evil by assuming a deity who is all powerful, all knowing, and all good, Dillard questions whether this deity is engaged with the created universe. “Has God a hand in this? Then it is a good hand. But has he a hand at all? Or is he a holy fi re burning self-contained for power’s sake alone? Then he knows himself blissfully as flame unconsuming, as all brilliance and beauty and power, and the rest of us can go hang. Then the accidental universe spins mute, obedient only to its own gross terms, meaningless, out of mind, and alone” (HF, 48). In the despairing mood of Chapter 2, Dillard entertains the idea of an utterly transcendent and indifferent deity, closer to the incomprehensible God of negative theology than Julian’s courteous and familiar personal God who creates all that is made and sustains it with his love.

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In Chapter 3, however, Dillard’s resolution of the problem of evil bears some resemblance to Julian’s and reveals her profound understanding of the medieval mystical tradition. Reflecting on the problem of Julie’s unbearable pain, Dillard recalls the Gospel story of Christ healing the blind man. The disciples ask, “ ‘Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ . . . ‘Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him,’ ” Christ responds (HF, 60). At fi rst Dillard is incredulous: “The works of God made manifest? Do we really need more victims to remind us that we’re all victims? . . . Do we need blind men stumbling about, and little flamefaced children, to remind us what God can—and will—do?” (HF, 60–61). As she continues, however, Dillard’s exasperation gives way to recognition of the gap between herself as a creature and God as the creator. We do need reminding, she concedes, “that we are created, created, sojourners in a land we did not make, a land with no meaning of itself and no meaning we can make for it alone. Who are we to demand explanations of God?” (HF, 61–62). This question, of course, echoes God’s response to Job in the Hebrew Bible: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” ( Job 38:4). Human creatures should not inquire into the ways of their creator. Here Dillard seems to perpetuate the perception of an indifferent deity and an incomprehensible universe that she expresses in Chapter 2. However, as she continues, Dillard voices a more positive view of this transcendent God that marks the turning point in her argument. She acknowledges her dependent status as a creature and relinquishes her demand for understanding and control. “There is no such thing as a freak accident. ‘God is at home,’ says Meister Eckhart, ‘We are in the far country’ ” (HF, 62). The remark Dillard attributes to Meister Eckhart expresses the medieval notion that each individual’s creation is a fall into a land or region of unlikeness. Augustine refers to the regio dissimilitudinis in his Confessions. Addressing God, he writes: “I gazed on you with eyes too weak to resist the dazzle of your splendour. Your light shone upon me in its brilliance, and I thrilled with love and dread alike. I realized that I was far away from you. It was as though I were in a land where all is different from your own and I heard your voice calling from on high.”16 Dillard’s language bears a remarkable similarity to Augustine’s. “We are most deeply asleep at the switch when we fancy we control any switches at all. We sleep to time’s hurdy-gurdy; we wake, if we ever wake, to the silence of God. And then, when we wake to the deep shores of light uncreated, then when the dazzling dark breaks over the far slopes of time, then it’s time to toss things, like our reason and our will; then it’s time to break our necks for home” (HF, 62). Influenced by Augustine, Christian Neoplatonists refer to the material world as a region of unlikeness in their adaptation of the theory of emanation, which regards all creation as an overflow of the One. In the Christian version, a personal deity replaces the impersonal One and creation is ex nihilo. However, as in Neoplatonism, the human soul preexists from all eternity and falls into the material world or land of unlikeness when it is united with a body. Although Dillard does not refer to Julian of Norwich, this idea is central to her theodicy. In her parable of the lord and servant in Chapter 51 of Revelation of Love, she writes that Adam “fell fro life to deth: into

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the slade [dell] of this wreched worlde, and after that into hell.”17 Dillard’s allusion to the medieval idea that the earthly realm is a land of unlikeness reverses the trajectory of her argument. Rather than asking if God has abandoned his creatures, she now realizes that human creatures have fallen away from their creator. She looks forward to their reunion when the creatures will awake from the dream of time to the dazzling dawn of eternity. This concept of creation as emanation transforms Dillard’s initial pantheism into a sacramental view of the natural world that culminates in a visionary experience reminiscent of two of Julian of Norwich’s revelations. This experience occurs as Dillard walks up a hill carrying the bottle of wine she has purchased for a nondenominational communion service. “Here is a bottle of wine with a label, Christ with a cork. I bear holiness splintered into a vessel, very God of very God, the sempiternal silence personal and brooding, bright on the back of my ribs, I start up the hill” (HF, 64). As she moves through this familiar landscape, she suddenly recognizes its essential wholeness and holiness. “Everything, everything, is whole and a parcel of everything else” (HF, 66). She observes an adult baptism in the bay and identifies the two participants as Christ and John the Baptist. Watching the Christ-figure emerge from his immersion in the bay, she focuses her attention on the water beading on his shoulders: “I see water in balls as heavy as planets, a billion beads of water as weighty as worlds, and he lifts them up on his back as he rises. . . . Each one bead is transparent, and each has a world, or the same world, light and alive and apparent inside the drop: It is all that ever could be, moving at once, past and future, and all the people” (HF, 67). The round drops of this passage are reminiscent of Julian’s description of Christ’s blood falling profusely from his thorn-crowned head like drops of rain from the eaves of a roof in Chapter 7 and of the hazelnut, “rounde as any balle” that she sees in her palm in Chapter 5 of the Revelation of Love. When she asks, “What may this be?” she is answered in her understanding, “It is all that is made.”18 Like Julian, Dillard recognizes the unity of all creation. Everything in her purview fuses together: “It is the one glare of holiness; it is bare and unspeakable. There is no speech nor language; there is nothing, no one thing, nor motion, nor time. There is only this everything” (HF, 67–68). The man being baptized is at one and the same time a contemporary individual and Christ as eternity infuses time. Despite her skepticism about God’s engagement in the temporal world in Chapter 2, Dillard affirms the conjunction of the natural and the supernatural, of time and eternity in Chapter 3. The change in her opinion, she explains, results from her realization that the material world rests on Holy the Firm. “Esoteric Christianity,” she writes, “posits a substance. It is a created substance . . . occurring beneath salts and earths in the waxy deepness of planets, but never on the surface of planets where men could discern it; and it is in touch with the Absolute, at base. . . . The name of this substance is: Holy the Firm” (HF, 68–69). Dillard’s conception of Holy the Firm enables her to reconcile the oppositions with which she has been struggling. A point of contact between base matter and transcendent spirit, Holy the Firm unites the physical and the spiritual, the temporal and the eternal at creation’s primal beginning and at its ultimate end.

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Dillard’s Holy the Firm bears some resemblance to the concept of the ground of being in Julian of Norwich and other Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart even though, as we shall see, there is also a crucial difference. “Ground” is an English translation of the Latin fundus, meaning “bottom, base, foundation,” or profundum, “depth.” Derived from Augustine, these terms are used throughout the Middle Ages to express the doctrine of participation adapted from the Neoplatonic theory of emanation. “The centrality of this doctrine,” according to David Bell, “lies in the fact that if a thing is, then it is not by virtue of its own being, but simply because it participates in True Being, which is God.”19 Thus, to exist means to exist in God without being God. For the late German mystics such as Eckhart, grunt or “ground” is what Bernard McGinn identifies as a “Sprengmetapher (explosive metaphor)” because “it breaks through previous categories of mystical speech to create new ways of presenting a direct encounter with God.”20 Eckhart expresses a new kind of mystical union in which there is no distinction between the creator and the creature when he asserts that God is hidden “in the ground of the soul, where God’s ground and the soul’s ground are one ground.”21 Julian makes a similar claim about the higher part of the soul, what she calls the substance, in contrast to the sensuality, or lower part of the soul, directed toward the body and temporality. “God is more nerer to us than oure owne soule,” Julian writes. “For he is grounde in whome oure soule standeth, and he is mene [means] that kepeth the substance [spiritual essence] and the sensualite [physical embodiment] togeder, so that it shall never departe.”22 For Julian, then, the metaphor of the ground indicates that the substance or higher part of the soul subsists in God even after it is embodied in the land of unlikeness. However, in contrast to Eckhart, she is careful to insist on the distinction between the divine and human substance. Like Holy the Firm, then, Eckhart’s and Julian’s ground of being is “in touch with the Absolute at base” (HF, 70). As in Neoplatonic Christianity, Dillard’s Absolute is the ground and the source, the nadir and the zenith of creation; the deity sustains being from the bottom up as it emanates from the top down. There is, however, one crucial difference. The mystics’ ground of being is a spiritual substance, whereas Dillard’s Holy the Firm is material. “But if Holy the Firm is ‘underneath salts,’ if Holy the Firm is matter at its dullest, Aristotle’s materia prima, absolute zero,” she speculates, then “Holy the Firm is in short the philosopher’s stone” (HF, 70–71). This mention of the philosopher’s stone provides the clue to unpacking this dense passage, because it indicates that Dillard is drawing her ideas from an esoteric Christianity influenced by alchemy. Although we usually think of alchemy as a physical process, an effort to transform matter, Dillard is alluding to a second branch of this discourse, spiritual alchemy or theosophy, which articulates a process of self-transformation that results in illumination. Rudolf Bernoulli distinguishes between these two kinds of alchemy: “one strives to know the cosmos as a whole and to recreate it; it is in a sense the precursor of modern natural science. . . . The other alchemy strives higher; it strives for . . . the wonder of all wonders, the magic crystal, the philosophers’ stone. . . . It is something more than perfection, something through which perfection can be achieved. . . . This is alchemy in the mystical sense.”23 By alluding to

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the philosopher’s stone in the context of esoteric Christianity, including medieval mysticism, Dillard signals her recognition that spiritual alchemy or theosophy emerged in the seventeenth century when Jacob Boehme combined concepts from German mystics such as Eckhart with the Naturphilosophia of Paracelsus. The father of theosophy equated spiritual alchemy’s Great Work with Eckhart’s theme of the second birth of Christ in man.24 Antoine Faivre further elucidates this relationship between medieval mysticism and theosophy by revealing the similarities between the phases of the alchemical process and the three traditional stages of the mystical ascent: purgation, illumination, and union.25 Thus, as Mircea Eliade asserts, “The opus alchymicum had profound analogies with the mystic life.”26 Both physical and spiritual alchemy accept the premise of the Greek natural philosophers, including Aristotle, that the cosmos was formed from a single primal substance, a materia prima, which Dillard calls Holy the Firm.27 Alchemists saw themselves as perfecting the original creation by recovering and refi ning this prime matter. Theosophy places this process in the context of Christianity. “In reference to the divine work of creation and the plan of salvation within it, the alchemistic process was called the ‘Great Work.’ In it, a mysterious chaotic source material called materia prima, containing opposites still incompatible and in the most violent confl ict, is gradually guided towards a redeemed state of perfect harmony, the healing ‘Philosophers’ Stone’ or lapis philosophorum.”28 Spiritual alchemists often identified the philosopher’s stone, the ultimate goal of their self-transformation, as Christ.29 “In the mind of many alchemists,” Eliade observes, “the procuring of the Philosopher’s Stone is equated with the perfect knowledge of God.”30 Thus, in theosophy the process of recovering and refi ning the prime matter that creates the philosopher’s stone is a metaphor for the inner transmutation of initial chaos into ultimate harmony that culminates in a higher state of consciousness. Holy the Firm is Dillard’s philosopher’s stone because this concept enables her to reconcile the oppositions between time and eternity, matter and spirit, an immanent and a transcendent deity that have troubled her throughout the narrative. Although it is prima materia, Holy the Firm resembles the medieval mystics’ notion of God as the ground of being because it rests on the Absolute in which creation and time subsist: “and since Holy the Firm is in touch with the Absolute at base,” she asserts, “then the circle is unbroken. . . . Time and space are in touch with the Absolute at base. Eternity sockets twice into time and space curves, bound and bound by idea” (HF, 70–71). By using the verb sockets, Dillard implicitly compares the Absolute to an electric current that pulsates through creation in a circuit from above and below. Holy the Firm is the medium that conducts the current between matter and spirit. Dillard’s claim that Holy the Firm is the nexus between the physical and the metaphysical realms thus solves the epistemological doubts raised by the problem of evil and the utterly indifferent deity it entails: “Matter and spirit are of a piece but distinguishable,” she writes. “God has a stake guaranteed in all the world. And the universe is real and not a dream, not a manufacture of the senses; subject may know object, knowledge may proceed, and Holy the Firm is in short the philosopher’s stone”

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(HF, 71). By Chapter 3 Dillard has gained the faith she longs for in Chapter 2 when she writes: “Of faith I have nothing, only of truth: that this one God is a brute and traitor, abandoning us to time, to necessity and the engines of matter unhinged. . . . Faith would be, in short, that God has any willful connection with time whatsoever, and with us. . . . The question is, then, whether God touches anything. Is anything fi rm, or is time on the loose?” (HF, 46–47). Holy the Firm is Dillard’s affirmative answer to this question; this concept enables her to make the leap of faith. Dillard’s allusion to the philosopher’s stone also connects the climax of Holy the Firm to the conclusion of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Near the end of the fi nal paragraph of this earlier text, she observes: “A sixteenth-century alchemist wrote of the philosopher’s stone, ‘One fi nds it in the open country, in the village and in the town. It is in everything which God created. Maids throw it on the street. Children play with it.’ ”31 In The Forge and the Crucible, his study of alchemy and religion, Mircea Eliade cites a longer version of this same passage from the Gloria Mundi of 1526. Although Dillard’s translation is slightly different, suggesting that Eliade may not have been her source, his comment on the significance of this passage aptly describes Dillard’s own process of transmuting her experience into illumination through the alchemy of art. “The alchemist’s emergence on another spiritual plane, with the aid of the Philosopher’s Stone, may be compared with the experience of the homo religiosus who assists in the transmutation of the cosmos by the revelation of the sacred.” Eliade then refers to the statement Dillard cites about the ubiquity of the philosopher’s stone as an expression of the paradox of the religious experience: “it manifests the sacred and incarnates the transcendental in a ‘base thing’ . . . it is beyond the comprehension of the uninitiated, though children may play with it or servants throw it into the streets; although it is everywhere, it is also the most elusive of things.”32 Similarly, Dillard begins with her observations of the natural world and, through the crucible of reflection and the forge of language, she transforms these mundane, temporal experiences to provide a glimpse of the sacred and eternal. As a contemporary homo religiosus, she reveals through her art “the transcendental in a ‘base thing’ ” and thus she serves her “evencristen,” as Julian calls her fellow Christians, not through her visions but through her poetic language. Dillard’s idea of Holy the Firm provides the ground for her response to the problem of evil by allowing her to reconcile the apparent contradiction between an immanent and a transcendental deity that she develops in Chapters 1 and 2. Just after introducing the notion of Holy the Firm, Dillard summarizes the scholarly distinction between “two strains of thought” about God’s relationship to creation. “In one, the ascetic’s metaphysic, the world is far from God. Emanating from God, and linked to him by Christ, the world is yet infi nitely other than God . . . The more accessible and universal view, held by Eckhart and by many people in various forms, is scarcely different from pantheism: that the world is immanation, that God is in the thing, and eternally present here if nowhere else” (HF, 69–70). Dillard believes that each of these views is deficient and that, instead of being contradictory, they should be complementary. “For to immanence, to the heart, Christ is redundant and all things are one. To

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emanance, to the mind, Christ touches only the top, skims off only the top, as it were, the souls of men, the wheat grains whole and lets the chaff fall where? To the world flat and patently unredeemed; to the entire rest of the universe, which is irrelevant and nonparticipant; to time and matter unreal, and so unknowable, an illusory, absurd, accidental, and overelaborate stage” (HF, 70). In identifying the deficiencies of these two positions, Dillard describes her own spiritual development in Holy the Firm. Like those who celebrate immanence, she begins as a pantheist confi rming the holiness of the natural world in time. But then the inexplicable suffering of the innocent Julie causes her to question God’s engagement with the temporal realm. However, in the fi nal chapter, she is able to reconcile these two apparently contradictory views of God through the God-man Christ. Like Holy the Firm, Christ is another contact between time and eternity. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard reflects on the fact that Christ’s incarnation “occurred improbably, ridiculously, at such-and-such a time, in such-and-such a place . . . as ‘the scandal of particularity.’ ”33 But how else, she asks, could eternity be manifest in time? Likewise, how but through Christ can God’s immanence and transcendence be reconciled? As with the spiritual alchemists, Dillard’s philosopher’s stone is, in fact, Christ. Dillard’s description of these two different positions regarding God’s relationship to creation is similar to the two kinds of mysticism identified by scholars: the cataphatic or via positiva, which claims that God’s attributes are manifest through creation, and the apophatic or via negativa, which asserts that God is incomparable and incomprehensible. Dillard acknowledges her familiarity with these two mystical traditions. “In Pilgrim I wrote about the vita positiva [sic] and the vita negativa [sic]. The rich, full expression of God’s love bursts out in all the particulars of nature. Everything burgeons and blossoms—and then comes a devastating flood. There is spring, but also winter. There is intricacy in detail, but also oppressive fecundity as nature runs wild. It all starts collapsing; I see sacrifice and then prayer and everything empties and empties until I’m at the shores of the unknown where I started—except much more informed now.”34 Unlike most scholars, who regard these two ways as separate and distinct, Dillard see them as cyclical, alternating with each other in a dynamic and continuous process. Her recognition of the interdependence of cataphatic and apophatic mysticism reiterates the position of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the anonymous fi fthcentury Christian who fi rst articulated a systematic mystical theology. Bernard McGinn’s words about the complementarity of these two Dionysian mystical ways aptly describe Dillard’s exploration of the supernatural through the natural. “All things, then, both reveal and conceal God. The ‘dissimilar similarity’ that constitutes every created manifestation of God is both a similarity to be affirmed and a dissimilarity that denies anything is really like God. The universe is both necessary as an image and impossible as a representation of the God for whom there is no adequate representation. Nevertheless, it is only in and through immersion in the beauty of the universe that we can discover that God is always more than we can conceive.”35 For Dillard, as for pseudo-Dionysius, cataphatic and apophatic mysticisms are two sides of the same coin. Through observation of the natural world, one may perceive the deity immanent in creation, but one

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must also withdraw from the created world to approach the transcendental deity. Dillard, like the American nature writers, sees evidence of God in nature, but she resembles the medieval mystics in admitting as well the deity’s inscrutable transcendence. We can return now to our initial question about Dillard’s debt to Julian of Norwich in Holy the Firm. As this essay has demonstrated, this narrative attests to Dillard’s deep engagement with medieval mysticism, especially with the conception of God as the ground of being articulated by Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich. For Dillard, however, it is the contemporary artist, not the mystic, who understands best the unbroken circle that runs from eternity through time and back to eternity. The artist “is holy and he is fi rm, spanning all the long gap with the length of his love, in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross stretched both ways unbroken and thorned. So must the work be also, in touch with, in touch with, in touch with; spanning the gap, from here to eternity, home” (HF, 72). Although she is in dialogue with Julian of Norwich, Dillard regards herself as an artist fi rst and foremost, not a mystic. As she put it in a letter, “Art is my interest, mysticism my message, Christian mysticism.”36 While Julian meditates on the redemptive suffering of Christ, Dillard reflects on the apparently inexplicable suffering she observes around her. While Julian has unwavering confidence in the sustaining love of the Trinity, Dillard struggles to achieve faith in an inscrutable deity who seems detached from time. While Julian writes as a visionary to comfort her fellow Christians with the message of God’s love, Dillard hopes as an artist to provide illumination through poetic language. But what of Julie Norwich and Dillard’s solution to the problem of evil? By the end the girl’s suffering has been subsumed into the larger question of God’s engagement with the world that is resolved by the concept of Holy the Firm and the figure of Christ, both of which represent the deity’s involvement with creation. At the conclusion of Chapter 3, Dillard imagines two possible futures for Julie. One possibility, with her severely deformed face, she may become a nun, “God’s chaste bride” (HF, 74). But Dillard does not intend the literal vocation; rather she uses “nun” to refer to a life like her own as an artist in touch with the holiness of the universe. The other possibility, the one that seems most likely, is that surgery will fix Julie’s face and she will marry and only remember her suffering as a dream. In that case, Dillard concludes, “I’ll be the nun for you. I am now” (HF, 76). If these two possible scenarios provide any consolation for Julie of Norwich, it is only to trust that in the future, as Julian of Norwich assures us, “alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thinge shalle be wel.”37

Notes I wish to thank Jennifer Keith, Karen Kilcup, and Sarah Salih for suggestions that improved this essay. 1. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974), p. 11. 2. Edward Abbey, Abbey’s Road (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979), p. xx. For a discussion of Dillard’s relationship to various kinds of romanticism and nature writing,

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3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

see Sandra Humble Johnson, The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1992), pp. 25–61. James I. McClintock, “ ‘Pray Without Ceasing’: Annie Dillard among the Nature Writers,” in Earthly Words: Essays on Contemporary American Nature and Environmental Writers, ed. John Cooley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 69 [69–86]. Margaret Loewen Reimer, “The Dialectical Vision of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” Critique 24 (1983): 182 [182–91]. Bruce A. Ronda, “Annie Dillard and the Fire of God,” The Christian Century 100 (1983): 483 [483–86]. Peter S. Hawkins, “Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Midstream,” The Christian Century 106 (1989): 592 [592–95]. For other discussions of Dillard as a mystic, especially in Holy the Firm, see Joseph Keller, “The Function of Paradox in Mystical Discourse,” Studia Mystica 6.3 (Fall 1983): 3–18; Jacob Gaskins, “ ‘Julie Norwich’ and Julian of Norwich: Notes and a Query,” 14th Century English Mystics Newsletter 6 (1980): 153–63. Critics who complicate or call into question the claim that Dillard should be viewed primarily as a mystic include Robert Paul Dunn, “The Artist as Nun: Theme, Tone and Vision in the Writings of Annie Dillard,” Studia Mystica 1.4 (1978): 17–31; and Susan M. Felch, “Annie Dillard: Modern Physics in a Contemporary Mystic,” Mosaic 22.2 (spring 1989): 1–14. Any discussion of mysticism is complicated by the variety of definitions of this term. Scholars disagree about whether mysticism should be regarded as a crosscultural phenomenon or understood in relation to a particular historical and cultural context. Dana Wilde demonstrates the importance of clarifying the term “mysticism” in his analysis of three of Dillard’s later essays in “Annie Dillard’s ‘A Field of Silence’: The Contemplative Tradition in the Modern Age,” Mystics Quarterly 26 (2000): 31–45; and “Mystical Experience in Annie Dillard’s ‘Total Eclipse’ and ‘Lenses,’ ” Studies in the Humanities 28 (2001): 48–81. In recent discussions of medieval mysticism, scholars have argued that the focus must be on the language of a text rather than an experience. See Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, vol. 1, The Foundations of Mysticism (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1992), pp. xi–xx; and Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1–8. “A Face Af lame: An Interview with Annie Dillard,” Christianity Today 22.15 (May 5, 1978): 15–16 [14–19]. “A Face Af lame,” 19. “Revelation of Love,” 3.11 and 13.27, in Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 163, 209. Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 35–36. Hereafter cited in the text as HF. The Annie Dillard Reader (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 425. “A Face Af lame,” 17. William J. Scheick, “Annie Dillard: Narrative Fringe,” in Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, ed. Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheick (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), p. 53 [51–67]. Dillard introduces this conception of the deity in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 7: “Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s, once having called

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18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened?” Augustine, Confessions, 8.10, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961), p. 147. “Revelation of Love,” 14.51, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 283. For a discussion of the land of unlikeness in Julian of Norwich, see Denise N. Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 93–96. “Revelation of Love,” 1.5, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 139. David N. Bell, The Image and Likeness: The Augustinian Spirituality of William of St. Thierry, Cistercian Studies Series 78 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1984), p. 23. See also Denise N. Baker, “The Structure of the Soul and the ‘Godly Wylle’ in Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium VII, ed. E.A. Jones (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 41–45 [37–49]. Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, vol. 4, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (New York: Crossroads Publishing, 2005), p. 85. Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and Bernard McGinn, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), sermon 15, p. 192. “Revelation of Love,” 14.56, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 301. Rudolf Bernoulli, “Spiritual Development as Ref lected in Alchemy and Related Disciplines,” in Spiritual Disciplines: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series 30.4 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), p. 318 [305–40]. Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism, SUNY Series in Western Esoteric Traditions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 27. Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism, p. 13. Mircea Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, trans. Stephen Corrin (New York: Harper, 1962; reprint, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1971), p. 165. Bernoulli, “Spiritual Development,” in Spiritual Disciplines, pp. 313–14. Alexander Roob, The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy & Mysticism (Cologne: Taschen, 1997), p. 123. Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, pp. 162–63, stresses “the paradoxical character of the beginning and the end of the opus alchymicum. One starts with the materia prima in order ultimately to arrive at the Philosophic Stone, but both substances defy precise identification—a consequence not of the writers’ brevity but rather of their prolixity.” Bernoulli, “Spiritual Development,” in Spiritual Disciplines, p. 320. Eliade, Forge and the Crucible, p. 166. Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 271. Eliade, Forge and the Crucible, pp. 163–64, 165. Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p. 80. “A Face Af lame,” p. 18. Johnson, The Space Between, pp. 65–72, associates Dillard’s conception of the via positiva and via negativa with two different types of epiphany. See B. Jill Carroll, “An Invitation from Silence: Annie Dillard’s Use of the Mystical Concepts of Via Positiva and Via Negativa,” Mystics Quarterly 19 (1993): 26–33; and Kevin Radaker, “Caribou, Electrons, and the Angel: Stalking the

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Sacred in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” Christianity and Literature 46 (1997): 138–41 [123–43]. 35. Bernard McGinn and Patricia Ferris McGinn, Early Christian Mystics: The Divine Vision of the Spiritual Masters (New York: Crossroads Publishing, 2003), p. 183. 36. Eleanor Wymard, “A New Existential Voice,” Commonweal 102 (1975): 496 [495–96]; see also Dunn, “The Artist as Nun,” 17–31. Gaskins, in contrast, concludes that Dillard is a “true contemplative” in “ ‘Julie Norwich’ and Julian of Norwich,” 162–63. 37. “Revelation of Love,” 13.27, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 209.

CHAPTER 6 JULIAN OF NORWICH IN POPULAR FICTION Susannah Mary Chewning

This chapter compares fictive with scholarly representations of Julian, focusing on anchoritism, literacy, and themes from Julian’s writing.

A

lthough the physical presence of Julian of Norwich may now be felt, or experienced, secondhand through visiting the reconstructed Cell at St. Julian’s Church or the recently dedicated statue of Julian at Norwich Cathedral, there is little left of Julian herself except her text and the ideas it has generated since it was produced. Even without any physical artifacts, however, Julian of Norwich remains a unique figure both in Norwich and in larger academic and popular circles. Sarah Salih argues that “almost alone amongst such figures, she has a present-day public profile beyond the academy of professional medievalists and theologians. Julian, in fact, currently enjoys what medievalists will recognise as a cult. Like a medieval cult, it adapts and supplements its core materials, in this case A Revelation, in order to construct a figure who can address changing circumstances.”1 Her presence has spread beyond the confines of Julian of Norwich gift shop items (statues of Julian and her cat, for example, are available in a U.S. “art” catalogue) and devotional works into popular fiction and, by informing the larger concept of the medieval anchoress, onto the stage and screen.2 In this chapter I will discuss several novels written since the mid-twentieth century that include Julian of Norwich as a character. Although many aspects of Julian are addressed by the fictional accounts, I will discuss three main issues: the representation of Julian’s biography and anchoritic life; the representation of medieval female and vernacular authorship; and the transformation of her theological ideas, particularly her concepts of Jesus as mother, the hazelnut, and the images of the blood and the bleeding of Christ, into narrative fiction. These works represent modern efforts to popularize the idea of Julian of Norwich, of the recluse as wise woman, whose theological significance pales next to their romanticized notions of her life and her inf luence on the lives of those around her.

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Julian of Norwich’s inclusion in The Norton Anthology of English Literature and several anthologies of women’s writing has identified her to modern students of English literature as the “first English woman of letters.”3 Her identity, of course, is unknown, but whether we call her Julian of Norwich, simply Julian, or “Conisford Jill,” she is clearly a major figure in the teaching of medieval English literature, medieval women’s history, and fourteenth-century theology and spirituality.4 Much scholarship concentrates on the best-known passages of her texts: her references to herself and the source of her visions, the imagery of the bleeding Christ as her visions begin, her theology of the hazelnut, her recognition of Christ as mother, and her passage on God’s will: “Sinne is behovely [necessary], but alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thinge shalle be wel.”5 In addition to these popular themes, current scholarship on Julian is also concerned with her relationship to the liturgy, to apocalyptic writing, to other writers and genres of her era, and her participation in the anchoritic tradition.6 Non-scholarly treatments share many of these concerns, but regularly whittle down the significance of Julian’s thought to a few main points, most of which were outlined in the introductions to Edmund Colledge and James Walsh’s edition and translation of the Revelation. Colledge and Walsh emphasize Julian’s depiction of the Trinity, her metaphor of creation as a hazelnut, and her depiction of Christ as “mother, father, and nurse as symbolizing divine goodness; it is the fullness of what God has to give and longs to give which ‘the soul seeks and always will, until we truly know our God, who has enclosed us all in himself.’ ” 7 Their edition has been the standard until the recent publication of Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins’s edition, and no doubt served as the starting point for much of the work that has been done on Julian since the 1970s. Modern fictional accounts often emphasize the same passages as Colledge and Walsh, indicating that their edition has been the most common and influential scholarly source for these fictional interpretations. The most recent fictional representation of Julian appears in Brenda Rickman Vantrease’s The Illuminator, published in 2005, in which Julian is a fairly central figure, but other novels also include her as a character, most notably Julian’s Cell: The Earthly Story of Julian of Norwich by Ralph Milton (2002); the children’s book Julian’s Cat: An Imaginary History of a Cat of Destiny by Mary E. Little (1989); the best-selling Katherine by Anya Seton (1954); and the extremely unexpected self-published gothic lesbian work, Mother Julian and the Gentle Vampire by Jack Pantaleo (1999).8 These works represent Julian in a variety of ways, from the widowed Katherine who takes the name of Julian when she enters the anchorhold of Milton’s novel, to the forty-something woman with the “homely broad face beneath the graying hair and wimple” of Seton’s Katherine, to the vaguely queer teacher of Pantaleo’s work, author of the “feminists’ Holy Grail.”9 None of them is a scholarly history of Julian’s life and times, of course, but they all cite some authenticating details of her life and work, while also making various moves to place her in a more modern context according to their various agendas. Fiction variously adjusts and supplements the historical record to produce narratives of anchoritic life that appeal to modern readers. It is difficult, though not impossible, for narrative fiction to adopt the disinterest of Kim Phillips, who

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is “content to let the pre-reclusive Julian go, to admire the choices she evidently made to become a[n] anchoress, mystic, author and thinker, and ultimately to let the focus of scholarship rest on her work, not her life”: indeed, as Phillips shows, academics have also been tempted into biographical speculation.10 Milton imagines Julian’s pre-anchoritic life in most detail. In Julian’s Cell, Katherine is sixteen when she marries Walter, a tanner ten years her senior. Walter and their two children die in 1362 as a result of the plague, at which time Katherine moves to Carrow Abbey [sic: Carrow was a Priory] to live among the nuns, but does not take the veil herself. Milton describes the transition from Katherine to Julian with sensitivity: “The bishop sprinkled a handful of dust on Katherine’s head as she knelt before him. The abbess draped a plain grey cloak around her shoulders and kissed her gently. Then the abbess led her to the doorway of the anchorhold. ‘I cannot go inside with you, my child. But God will go with you. God will go with you.’ Katherine was left outside. Katherine was dead. Julian stepped into the anchorhold.”11 Milton’s depiction of Katherine the widow / Julian the anchoress uses evidence presented by several scholars, including Colledge and Walsh, Felicity Riddy, and Sr. Benedicta Ward. Ward, in her article “Julian the Solitary,” argues competently that Julian may well have been a wife and mother, and that there was a recurrence of the plague in Norwich in 1361 and 1369 that may have left her widowed and childless.12 Ward also emphasizes the importance of Carrow Priory as holding fi nancial responsibility for the church of St. Julian, and Carrow and its abbess are central features of Milton’s book. Milton thus makes use of historical scholarship, while subordinating it to the demands of his fiction. It has been accepted since Colledge and Walsh’s 1978 edition that Julian had access to or read Ancrene Wisse. Milton’s Julian reads Ancrene Wisse, but sees it as more of a professional manual than a devotional guide. Milton writes: “an anchorite, Katherine discovered, does not spend her whole life in prayer and contemplation . . . she is also to be a guide and counsellor for those who come by the window of her cell. She is to hear of their pain and offer them her wisdom and her prayers.”13 Ancrene Wisse, in fact, clearly states that the anchoress should keep to herself, not speaking or looking at anyone, and specifically should stay away from her curtained window. “Look that your parlor cloth is fastened on every side and well-attached, and guard your eyes there in case your heart fl ies out and goes awry as it did from David, and your souls sickens as soon as she is gone. . . . For it is against nature and an immoderately strange thing that the dead should dote on those living in the world, and go mad with them through sin.”14 Milton’s reversal of this instruction reimagines the anchoritic vocation in terms more palatable to an author who identifies himself as a “curmudgeonly Protestant liberal,” focusing on social responsibility rather than contemplative withdrawal.15 This interpretation may depart from the express ideal of medieval English anchoritism, but accords with the fi nding of historians that anchorites were socially functional.16 The archaeological evidence of anchorholds is surprisingly strong. For example, although there is no standard size for anchorholds in England, archaeology suggests that many were very small: “One excavated at Leatherhead church in Surrey was eight feet square and its window was twenty-one inches square. A

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cell at Compton, also in Surrey, had a cubicle 6’ 8” by 4’ 4”.”17 This is not how they are presented in the fictionalized accounts, wherein the anchorites are able to entertain visitors across two, even sometimes three, rooms, which are furnished like small fl ats rather than tiny stone cells. Several of the fictional accounts describe Julian’s cell as having a parlor, a window, and a small room in which visitors could sit and speak with her.18 While some scholars argue that Julian indeed did have a parlor, there is no evidence for what this structure would have looked like or how large it might have been.19 Novelists, however, who require Julian to interact easily with other characters, take it for granted that Julian had space for visitors and those in need. Seton originated a model that other writers have followed. Her Julian resides in a cell that is also open to visitors. “Katherine entered Julian’s cell nervously, puzzled, curious. It was but six paces long and wide, and curtained down the middle with fi ne blue wool. There were two windows, the parlor window to the churchyard, and above a wooden prie-dieu a narrow slitted window that opened into the church. Through this, Julian could see the altar and take part in the Mass. There was a small fi replace, a table and two wooden chairs on the warm brick floor. The bumpy fl int walls had been painted white.”20 The size of the room accords with the archaeological evidence, but painted walls in what would, at the time, have been viewed as a tomb, seem unrealistic, as do the table and in particular the chairs, rare and high status items in medieval households. Vantrease imagines Julian’s parlor as one of two rooms in “a tiny hut attached to the sidewall of the church, hardly more than a lean-to. . . ., the cell-like appurtenance of a hermit, attached to but not contained within the church.”21 The parlor faces into a second room, divided by a wall with a window whose sill serves as a table wide enough for Julian’s maid, Alice, to pass her “a milk pitcher and a . . . trencher.”22 Julian’s cell itself is large enough to accommodate a sick child, and she has a further anteroom, “which allowed her visitors to be out of the elements as they conversed through the window”; the curtain to this window is “pulled back as wide as it would go.”23 Pantaleo’s Julian has an anchorhold that is more like a small apartment, with “her bookcases and collection of sacred books” and a writing table, and she too receives frequent visitors to her cell.24 The cell in all these novels functions as a refuge for the characters, and a refuge too for the reader, for it is an enclave of modernity, surrounded by but separate from the imagined medieval world around it. The authors create images of Julian’s cell as they would like to see it—warm, inviting, comfortable—rather than the genuinely tomb-like cell it probably was. The same can be said as a generalization about the fictional accounts themselves; their departures from historical probability represent a Julian with whom they (and their readers) can identify, watering down the severe discipline of asceticism and humility that would have been expected of these figures in the Middle Ages into a more manageable kind of peaceful solitude. These authors clearly wish to detach her from the often brutal reality of her time, to preserve her as a more modern figure, welcoming visitors and distributing theological and personal advice. Female and vernacular authorship and literacy are central issues to many of the fictional accounts of Julian. Julian appears as proto-feminist and harbinger of the Reformation. Most fictions indicate that she read and wrote in

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English; one indicates that she is sufficiently literate in English and Latin to write her own works and to transcribe several important English and Latin texts. Only Katherine does not represent Julian as literate; in that version, she discusses salvation and spirituality with the title character and refers to her revelations, but not as a text.25 In Julian’s Cell, she is warned that women are not meant to read or write: “the monks at the cathedral have all the Bible, but they will not let women read them. . . . Though they would never admit it, they fear us greatly. We tempt them and lead them into sinful thoughts, they say, and sometimes sinful acts.”26 In spite of this warning, Katherine, already literate in English, takes it upon herself to read and transcribe a copy of the Psalms in Latin. Later, as Julian, she is only questioned about her choice of writing her Revelation once, by her brother. Arguing about the Lollard John Wycliffe, whom her brother describes as an “evil preacher,” Julian responds by saying, “I have written my visions in English, Thomas. You know that.”27 He responds angrily, “It would have been better if you had not done that, sister. Did I not tell you to destroy that writing? But it is no matter . . . nothing written in English, especially if it is written by a woman, is of any note.”28 The misogynist hostility of the clerical establishment is contrasted to the supportive female community of Julian’s mother, her maid Alice, and the Abbess of Carrow, all of whom encourage her writing. The Julian of The Illuminator consciously writes her Revelation in English, spurred on by her friend Finn, the illuminator of the story, himself a Lollard who is working on the manuscript of a vernacular Bible. Although Julian struggles with her own composition, commenting to Finn, for example, that “the language is unworthy of illumination. It should be in Latin,”29 she eventually fi nds herself encouraged and empowered to write in English, and becomes sympathetic to the cause of Wycliffe and the English Lollards. Almost accused by the Bishop of being a Lollard herself, Julian defends her writing in English: “Is the language of Rome the language of our Lord? Latin, Aramaic, English: what does it matter if the truth is told? . . . I am sorry if you do not fi nd my simple language to your liking, but I’m not writing for priests and bishops who I assume already know the depth and breadth of His love. I’m only trying to explain God’s love, His infi nite mercy in a way that was revealed to me so that the unlearned can understand.”30 Although Julian is never accused officially of heresy in the story (nor, of course, was she in fact), Vantrease’s Julian comes very close to Wycliffite beliefs. The Julian of Pantaleo’s gothic text is a writer, though not a copyist. But she is aided in her work by two female assistants, one a scribe and the other, more significantly, the protagonist of the novel, who is entrusted with transmitting Julian’s work after she is dead. Julian is an intellectual and a teacher in Mother Julian. She deliberately contradicts Ancrene Wisse by teaching young girls to read and write, and she has a chambermaid, Alice, who transcribes her visions. However, she does not trust Alice with her words, and instead asks the protagonist, whom she calls “Little Gift,” to keep them safe.31 The idea that Julian’s writing, and especially her writing in English, was somehow a dangerous or seditious act is common in these fictional accounts, indebted to a tradition of anti-Catholic historiography, but it was not simply the case for the historical Julian of Norwich. To assume that her writing in English is unique

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ignores the presence of a variety of English religious texts, including several, like the works associated with Ancrene Wisse, that were written for (and possibly by) women. As many scholars have pointed out, most recently Watson and Jenkins, there is also a tradition of female vernacular authorship on the Continent about which Julian would no doubt have been informed. Indeed, as Ward has argued, not even all English biblical works were considered heretical, so Julian would have found herself in good company among the writers and thinkers of her time and among those of the growing English tradition of literature and theology.32 Watson and Jenkins describe Julian as most likely having an excellent education for her time, irrespective of whether she came by it before or after her enclosure. They argue that her work, particularly A Revelation, shows “knowledge, besides intuitive understanding, of late medieval theology. Its intense awareness of the theological implications of certain words and grammatical structures can only be the result of formal study of language.”33 Thus the fictional accounts that make her out to be a secretive or heretical writer, and indeed they almost all seem to see her in that way, detract from the likely reality of Julian as a learned, articulate product of her time, perhaps unusual in how well educated she was, but not afraid to make use of her education and her knowledge of theological works. The fictional accounts assume that Julian wrote in spite of her position as a religious woman and flew in the face of orthodoxy and church law. Julian’s negotiation between her own insights and the Church’s authority was more delicate. In 1310, Marguerite Porète was condemned for heresy and burned at the stake in Paris, along with her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls (an English translation of which survives in the same manuscript as A Vision).34 Whether Julian knew this story or not, she would have been keenly aware of the dangers of female authorship, and yet she was able to remain within orthodoxy while still writing with passion and honesty about her faith and her understanding of the love of God. Julian’s theology is represented with varying degrees of accuracy and detail in the fictional accounts that describe her. She is always seen as a rebellious, alternative thinker, resisting convention and constructing a feminine, feminist theology that shocks and scandalizes the masculinist medieval Church. Although several issues and details of her theological writings are presented in the various fictional accounts, I will limit myself here to three common moments: the theology of the hazelnut, the femininity of God, and the images of Christ’s blood and Passion. Julian’s metaphor of the hazelnut is possibly her most frequently quoted passage. It takes up most of Chapter 5 of the Revelation: “[God] shewed a little thing the quantity [size] of an haselnot [hazelnut], lying in the palme of my hand as me semide [it seemed to me]. . . . I marvayled [wondered] how it might laste, for methought it might sodenly have fallen to nought [disappeared] for littlenes, And I was answered in my understanding: ‘It lasteth and ever shall, for God loveth it. And so hath all thing being [all things exist] by the love of God.’ ”35 In almost all of the fictional works, some reference is made to the hazelnut, either as a direct reference to Julian’s theology or in some other passing manner. In Julian’s Cell, Katherine reveals her visions for the fi rst time to her mother when she is recuperating from her illness. After paraphrasing what is written in the Revelation, she goes on to say: “Creation is such a small thing. . . . You and I are part of that creation,

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Mother. Just like this hazelnut. God is our maker, our lover, our keeper. But we can never really know what that means until we are united with God the way this hazelnut is part of God. . . . That is why we are created, Mother. To be one with God.”36 Fiction transforms Julian’s metaphor into literal hazelnuts. In The Illuminator Julian keeps a bowl of hazelnuts on the edge of her parlor window: “I give them away to my visitors. As a reminder of God’s love. How he loves the smallest thing He has made. Please, take one with you when you leave. It will cost you less than a holy relic. Like grace, it is free.”37 In Katherine, the protagonist is urged to consider her own faith by thinking about Julian’s words about the hazelnut: “She picked up a black fl int pebble that seemed to glow with light like a diamond . . . as she held the pebble, joy shimmered through its black fl int, there was joy in the grass, the yew tree, the gravestones, the moss.”38 The hazelnut is made concrete and social, and is made to assert the sanctity of the material world. This is not inconsistent with Julian’s use of it, but its emphasis is earthy rather than cosmic. The difference between “a little thing the quantity of an heselnot,” and a hazelnut is the difference between concept and material thing. The change reimagines Julian as a precursor of Romantic nature mysticism. Perhaps the most frequent allusion to Julian’s theology in popular fiction is her reference to the femininity of God. Julian did not originate the idea: it is biblical, and it was a common metaphor for Christ’s love in English theology long before Julian’s visions.39 Anselm of Canterbury, for example, in his Monologion alludes to the passage in Matthew when he writes: “But you, Jesus, good lord, are you not also a mother? . . . run under the wings of your mother Jesus and bewail your sorrows under his wings.”40 Without an understanding of the impact her sources and cultural influences had upon Julian, it is impossible fully to consider the meaning of her notion of a feminine, maternal God, particularly because of the slippery nature of gender and identity in A Revelation. As Denise Baker points out, in Julian, “humans, both male and female, can know themselves by knowing God because, as children of God the Father and Jesus the Mother, and siblings of Christ, all individuals, regardless of their sex, have the potential for participating in the divine nature.”41 Vantrease frequently merges the notion of “all shall be well” with images of a Mother God: Julian tells Finn the illuminator that she can only really explain God’s love as being like “a mother’s love. He is a perfect mother with a perfect love for an infi nite number of children . . . whatever happens in this world, our Mother God will see that all is well.”42 Her narration of one of Julian’s visions expands on this connection: “The Christ of her vision, the vision her Mother God had granted her as she lay dying—a Christ whose blood flowed so freely from the Crucifi xion wounds . . . until it rushed in a veritable fountain, gushing, pulsing not with death but life, enough life to nourish all the souls of hungry humanity that He would gather to his breast. . . . Her mind was bathed in peace—peace and warmth and light, her body transcended, until her soul was free to touch His. I shall make all things well. And she knew it to be true.”43 The consistent association of divine motherhood with “all shall be well” affirms a comforting, nurturing version of femininity. Julian, however, did not in fact see, simply, a mother Christ—her ideology of the father and mother God is not a sentimentalized femininity but rather a genderlessness, something that

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exists beyond human notions of gender, which these fictional accounts, especially Vantrease and Pantaleo, misrecognize as feminism. Perhaps nowhere else in the fictional accounts of Julian of Norwich, however, are the concepts of Jesus as mother and the bleeding body of Christ more fully emphasized, or more thoroughly reinterpreted, than in Mother Julian. Jesus is only ever referred to by the title of Mother in the novel, and his sexuality is definitely queer: “I laughed a child’s laugh and giggled the tone of the innocent. My high-pitched rises of laughter were those of a virgin. Mother Jesus had not yet planted Her seed within me.”44 In two of the songs credited to Julian in the story, Jesus’s sexuality is feminine, though still uncertain. The fi rst, “Gift’s Song,” goes: “Voice and heart and hands and toes, Be ye oned the Gift that grows / Fear be gone with-in Her Arms Mother Jesus works her charms.”45 Later, another song is quoted: “The centurion told / Jesus, ‘I’m not worthy to have you under my roof.’ But from his cross We’re all made worthy We / are his children The fruit of his womb.”46 The image of Christ feeding believers with his breasts and with his wounds is common in medieval theology. Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, writes, “draw life from the wounds of Christ. He will be your mother, and you will be his son.”47 Male medieval authors frequently used the image of Christ as nourishing the world with his blood, even from his breasts, which they base on passages from the Song of Songs.48 Julian, of course, makes use of the breast-feeding image of Christ, as well, in two powerful moments: “The moder [mother] may geve her childe sucke her milke. But oure precious moder Jhesu, he may fede us with himselfe, and doth full curtesly [courteously] and full tenderly. . . . he may homely [familiarly] lede us to his blessed brest by his swet, open side”; and “oure very [true] moder Jhesu . . . fedeth us and fordreth [fosters] us, right as the hye [high], sovereyne kindnesse [supreme nature] of moderhed [motherhood] wille, and as the kindly [natural] nede of childhed asketh.”49 As Liz Herbert McAvoy points out, these images are fraught with many layers of meaning. “[ Julian] asserts a recontextualised maternal body as central to an understanding of the redemptive process [and] . . . implicates both herself and the maternal female in the pattern of imagery she chooses to employ, overlaying it upon traditional representations of a bleeding Christ and thus modifying its impact. In effect, she validates the concept of female participation within theological discourse by means of an inscription of a female-identified body upon the suffering and bleeding Christ.”50 Mother Julian’s images of blood and maternity are rather different. “Little Gift,” who later in history is known as Lesbiana, the “gentle vampire,” is initiated by the other vampires in an erotic ritual. “Right before the darkness was about to overcome me, I took their breasts into my mouth and tasted the Liar’s Blood, and the more I drank, the more I wanted. And the more I wanted, the more I took, and drank, and sucked their nipples dry.”51 Soon thereafter Little Gift is confused and knows instinctively that she is different from the other vampires. “When I wasn’t drinking blood, I was fantasizing about it. I even saw the blood of Mother Jesus in my fantasies. I could see copious bleeding from her crown of thorns. . . . I thirsted for Mother Julian’s blood as I thirsted for Mother Christ’s. She who had given me the most, left me the most parched.”52 Besides the obvious paraphrase

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of Julian’s fi rst vision, this passage sets up an eroticized, almost incestuous state of desire between Little Gift and Julian, but it is not fully accomplished in the novel. The inevitable moment arrives when Little Gift visits Julian in order to drink her blood, but the demure, almost formal encounter is disappointing: “Her gown lay low on her left shoulder, almost as if she had been waiting for me to perform my deed. . . . ‘Gift . . . take whatever you need from me, but take it quickly.’ I was befuddled. She had taken all the fun out of the hunt.”53 Biting Julian and sucking the blood from her neck transforms Little Gift, and as she later explains to a priest, “I drank the blood of a saint, and her sacred blood mixed with mine. I’ve been a Christian vampire for over six centuries.”54 She then sets out to heal those in distress with Julian’s blood. The novel uses the metaphor of vampirism to literalize the spread of Julian’s influence, imagining it as a bodily and spiritual, but not intellectual, process. Julian, as the original source of the miraculous blood, has come to substitute for Christ: Little Gift initiates a Julianist network of people linked by shared blood. Julian’s most powerful image of blood in her works is her fi rst: the dripping blood of Christ as he appears to her in her fi rst vision: “And in this, sodaynlye [suddenly] I sawe the rede blode trekille [trickle] downe fro [from] under the garlande alle hate [hot], freshlye, plentifully, and livelye, right as methought that is was in that time that the garlonde of thornes was thyrstede [thrust] on his blessede hede.”55 In her treatment of this vision, Caroline Walker Bynum points out that the blood in this vision is “vivid and hideous, fearful and sweet,” and that “something deeper is at stake [in such a representation] . . . than simply blood as an image of merits or a locus of affective response . . . [for medieval writers] blood imaged and evoked a Christ left-behind. As such, it offered comfort or contact. Yet it was also a result of violence against Christ. It breached the body. Thus it was accusation and reproach. Washwater that cleansed the faithful, blood was also a stain that fell upon them, coloring or marking them as guilty.”56 None of the fictionalized accounts of Julian wants to get very close to the Passion, the suffering Christ, the sorrow and abjection of the Crucifi xion, and the redemption felt by medieval Christians, Julian among them, in their participation with him in his agony. Julian makes reference to Christ’s blood on several occasions. A particularly evocative representation occurs when she describes the Crucifi xion: “And the body satilde [sagged] for weight by long time hanging, and persing [piercing] and rasing [twisting] of the heed, and binding of the crowne, alle baken with drye blode, with the swet here [hair] clinging the drye flesh to the thornes and the thornes to the flesh, drying. And in the beginning, while the flesh was fresh and bleding, the continualle sitting [continuous grip] of the thornes made the woundes wide.”57 Recent scholars have discussed the meaning of Julian’s intense and powerful images of the abjected, dying Christ, bleeding and, in this passage, so violated that his flesh hangs in pieces on his body. The identification of the anchorite, who suffers in her enclosure and sensual deprivation, with the humiliated, dying Christ is a central feature of anchoritic writing, including all of the English anchoritic works from the twelfth through fi fteenth centuries. This brutality, however, and Julian’s participation in it through her text, is something the fictional accounts

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seem unwilling to consider, leaving them ultimately empty of the deeper theological significance of her life and works. Though these novels can be entertaining, and no doubt serve to stimulate interest in Julian and her Revelation, they are reluctant to engage with historical alterity, and in particular with the medieval Catholic that Julian was. Instead they construct a Julian whose thought and lifestyle estrange her from her historical moment, but enable her to mirror, comfort, and flatter the present day. In the end Julian of Norwich is ultimately unknowable, just barely out of reach, like the Christ of her narrative as her visions begin. Notes 1. Sarah Salih, “Julian’s Afterlives,” in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2008), p. 208 [208–18] 2. See Jacqueline Jenkins in this volume for discussion of plays that feature Julian. 3. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, ed. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. 14. Some scholars see Julian’s significance as more theological than literary, but she has been characterized by her qualities as a writer of literature by several recent editors of materials for students. 4. E.A. Jones, “A Mystic by Any Other Name: Julian(?) of Norwich,” Mystics Quarterly 33.3 (2007): 10 [1–16]. 5. “A Revelation of Love,” 13.27, in The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 209. 6. Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004); A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2008). 7. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and James Walsh, S.J., introduction to Julian of Norwich: Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), p. 30 [17–119]. 8. Brenda Rickman Vantrease, The Illuminator (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005); Ralph Milton, Julian’s Cell: The Earthly Story of Julian of Norwich (Kelowna, BC: Northstone, 2002); Mary E. Little, Julian’s Cat: An Imaginary History of a Cat of Destiny (Wilton, CT: Morehouse Publishing, 1989); Anya Seton, Katherine (Boston, MA: Houghton Miff lin, 1954); Jack Pantaleo, Mother Julian and the Gentle Vampire (Roseville, CA: Dry Bones Press, 1999). Milton and Pantaleo, though central to this discussion, are not very well-known outside of a small circle of readers. The best-known of the novels that include Julian as a character is Seton’s Katherine. 9. Seton, Katherine, p. 525; Pantaleo, Mother Julian, p. 106. 10. Kim M. Phillips, “Femininities and the Gentry in Late Medieval East Anglia: Ways of Being,” in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2008), p. 31, p. 20 [19–31]. 11. Milton, Julian’s Cell, p. 98. 12. Benedicta Ward, “Julian the Solitary,” in Kenneth Leech and Sr. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., Julian Reconsidered (Oxford: Sisters of the Love of God Press, 1988), pp. 23–25 [11–35]. See also Felicity Riddy, “Julian of Norwich and Self–Textualizaton,” in Editing Women, ed. Ann M. Hutchinson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 101–24; McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, pp. 68–69.

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13. Milton, Julian’s Cell, p. 81. 14. Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works, trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), p. 67. 15. Milton, Julian’s Cell, p. 8. 16. Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 7. 17. Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, p. 32. 18. Robert Hasenfratz includes a sketch of a three-room structure, including a servant’s room and a parlor in the introduction to his edition of Ancrene Wisse (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000). The image is available online at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/awintro.htm. Evidence of parlors and parlor windows is scarce since extant anchorholds typically have only one room, but the anchorhold at Saxthorpe, Norfolk does have a blocked-in doorway that may, at one time, have opened into such a structure. 19. The arrangement of Julian’s cell is unknown, but Salih in this volume suggests that Julian had a parlor. 20. Seton, Katherine, pp. 523–24. 21. Vantrease, Illuminator, p. 12. 22. Vantrease, Illuminator, p. 13. 23. Vantrease, Illuminator, p. 14. 24. Pantaleo, Mother Julian, p. 92, p. 103. 25. Seton, Katherine, pp. 524–29. 26. Milton, Julian’s Cell, pp. 74–75. 27. Milton, Julian’s Cell, p. 165. 28. Milton, Julian’s Cell, p. 165. 29. Vantrease, Illuminator, p. 114. 30. Vantrease, Illuminator, p. 241, p. 243. 31. Pantaleo, Mother Julian, p. 106. 32. Ward, “Julian the Solitary,” in Julian Reconsidered, p. 26. 33. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, introduction to Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 10 [1–59]. 34. Robert Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1972), pp. 71–72; London, British Library MS Add. 37790. 35. “Revelation of Love,” 1.5, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 139. 36. Milton, Julian’s Cell, p. 89. 37. Vantrease, Illuminator, p. 110. 38. Seton, Katherine, p. 526. 39. The medieval concept of Jesus as feminine and maternal has been discussed thoroughly in several important scholarly sources, the most significant being Caroline Walker Bynum’s book, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and Barbara Newman’s From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). 40. Quoted in Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 114. 41. Denise Nowakowski Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 113. 42. Vantrease, Illuminator, pp. 113–14.

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48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

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Vantrease, Illuminator, p. 239. Pantaleo, Mother Julian, p. 122. Pantaleo, Mother Julian, p. 89. Pantaleo, Mother Julian, p. 124. The Letters of Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. Bruno Scott James (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1998), Letter 378, p. 449. This passage has also been translated as “suck not so much the wounds as the breasts of the Crucified”; Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 117. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 129. “Revelation of Love,” 14.60, 14.63, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 313, p. 321. McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body, pp. 81–82. Pantaleo, Mother Julian, p. 80. Pantaleo, Mother Julian, pp. 90–91. Pantaleo, Mother Julian, p. 92. Pantaleo, Mother Julian, p. 46. “Vision Showed to a Devout Woman,” 3, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 67. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 176, p. 178. “Revelation of Love,” 8.17, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 180.

CHAPTER 7 PLAYING JULIAN: THE CELL AS THEATER IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE Jacqueline Jenkins

This essay considers three late twentieth-century plays based on the life and writings of Julian of Norwich, with particular reference to the dramatic representation of enclosure.

T

he medieval Julian’s life as an anchoress, her experiences as a visionary and mystic, and her authority as a woman writer continue to generate significant interest in the contemporary cultural imagination. Almost nothing is known for certain of her life, and yet, as a character, she has found a relatively frequent home on the stage, popular with a limited but diverse audience of churchgoers, academics, and feminists. There is much in the prolonged meditation on the series of visions she experienced—recorded in A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love—that could properly be called dramatic, and that could easily, even successfully, be transformed to theater; however, it is, paradoxically, her enclosure that most intrigues audiences and fascinates playwrights, challenging them in their attempts to represent Julian on the stage.1 In this chapter, I consider three published and produced plays based on the writings of Julian of Norwich and on popular beliefs about her life: James Janda’s Julian: A Play Based on the Life of Julian of Norwich, Dana Bagshaw’s Cell Talk: A Duologue between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, and Sheila Upjohn’s Mind out of Time: A Play on Julian of Norwich.2 As my title suggests, my focus is the relationship between the anchoritic cell and performance, both in the dramatic performance of enclosure—that is, the cell in theater—as well as in the way or ways the cell enables the performance of a particular kind of holy life—that is, the cell is theatre. This chapter will also consider the equally difficult relationship between the constructions of Julian the anchoress and the author of A Revelation of Love offered by the separate plays and the critical positions of the playwrights: priest and poet; feminist and popular theologian; and “friend of Julian.”

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The Plays In Julian, James Janda, a Jesuit priest, combines original poetry with brief excerpts, also arranged as poetry, from early twentieth-century translations of A Revelation of Love and Ancrene Wisse.3 The setting directions are simple: the stage represents one room of a two-room apartment occupied by Julian and her maid, though the maid has recently left in order to be married; the plain room imagined through the actor’s pantomimed performance has three windows— one into the church, one overlooking the garden, and one out into the city— and two doors, one into the now empty maid’s room and one out into the city. Similarly, the props for the play are minimal. The production notes indicate that “One rule has dictated directorial comments: the simpler the better, so that the words of Julian and Janda remain dominant.”4 The play is an extended dramatic monologue, approximately one hour long, with the actor who plays Julian shifting between two styles of delivery: presentational, in which she speaks directly to the audience about her daily life, and representational, in which she relives, and acts out, events from her past. The events, both present and past, of Julian’s life in this play are primarily Janda’s imaginative constructions, though elements of the characterization—that is, her sickness and her visions—are derived from Julian’s surviving work and from anchoritic sources such as Ancrene Wisse. For instance, Janda’s play refers several times to the affection Julian has for her cat, Isaiah, an imaginary descendent of the cat allowed anchoresses in Part VIII of Ancrene Wisse. The play opens with the actor speaking one half of a conversation with a visitor in the cell (unseen by the audience) identified only as “Margery” in the notes and by name through the actor’s speech, but obviously, from the references to her intention to make a vow of chastity with her husband and to the miracle of the falling roof beam, Margery Kempe. 5 The dramatic potential of Margery Kempe’s visit to the “ankres . . . Dame Jelyan” seems both obvious and essential to an attempt at representing Julian’s life after her enclosure; for, aside from the extant Norfolk and Suffolk wills recording bequests to Julian (1393–1416) and the rubric heading the sole manuscript copy of Julian’s shorter text (London, British Library MS Add. 37790), Kempe’s account of the “holy dalyawns that the ankres and this creatur haddyn be comownyng in the lofe of owyr Lord Jhesu Crist” [holy conversation that the anchoress and the creature had by sharing the love of our Lord Jesus Christ] and her memory of Julian’s words to her, provide the only reference to Julian’s physical presence in Norwich.6 More importantly, for the playwrights at any rate, Kempe’s description of Julian as an “expert in swech thyngys” [expert in such things] (i.e., “revelacyons”) and one who “good cownsel cowd yevyn” [could give good counsel] provides the sole historical basis for a construction of Julian the counselor.7 Janda’s use of Margery in the play is to demonstrate Julian’s good sense as opposed to Margery’s illogical reasoning. His Julian is a patient, if slightly exasperated, listener, while Margery—as deduced from the side of the dialogue the audience hears—is, at best, fl ighty, and, at worst, self-important, perhaps even self-deluded. On the topic of Margery’s intent to make her vow of chastity, Julian

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questions, “But what of your good husband?” He objected at first, but has since succumbed to the Holy Spirit? But Margery, married life with husband and children is not lechery. You say chastity is a more perfect way. I beg to disagree— Did not our Maker wish such? Seeing as he fashioned us thusly? Oh, you have a heaven-sent confirmation of it? A stone and piece of wood beam fell down from the ceiling of the church and struck your back while at prayer— And you are here to tell of it. Yes, but what has this to do with denying your husband by new vows? Oh, a sign from God. You ought to remain chaste? Now how does that follow? I am not tired— I quite follow you. Yes, I have seen several people today.8

Julian’s slightly puzzled responses to Margery’s arguments for her vow of chastity move from a defense of God’s creation of social and sexual relationships to a defense of her own ability to follow an argument to its logical end. In a strange reversal of the expected characterizations, Janda has Margery preach the traditional views on marriage and chastity, and Julian, the enclosed celibate, seem to resist those views in terms reminiscent of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s “Prologue.” Here, Janda, as elsewhere in the play, seems to be attempting to make Julian less strange, more familiar, and thus more appealing to a contemporary audience, showing her to be capable of compassionate empathy with her fellow Christians even while living a life so removed from their own experiences. Margery leaves Julian’s anchorhold, and the actor turns directly to the audience, acknowledging them and naming herself, and thus erasing any boundary between the audience and the stage (the anchorhold): Forgive me, I often talk to myself,

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but when I do that I am talking to you also—am I not? You know my name, but I am called by many names and many things. The names I favor: Julian, Dame Julian, the ankress at Norwich.9

Following a brief description of the anchoritic life for contemporary audiences, Janda’s Julian begins a series of spoken memories outlining the emotional and psychological cost to her of the three cycles of plague in Norwich, as well as the later anarchy and destruction of the Peasants’ Revolt. In Janda’s interpretation of these events, the devastation of the plague and, in particular, the inexplicable fact of her own survival, cause Julian to “hate [her] self,” to fall into a madness that only ends when God condescends to “stop the voices” (“the voices, the accusing / condemning voices”) by revealing “the suffering Christ, / the forgiving Christ.”10 Janda’s Julian prays for the sickness she receives at the age of thirty-and-a-half not motivated by sorrow for sin, as Julian of Norwich acknowledges in her own account.11 Rather, this desire in the play arises out of her experience of watching so many around her die: And so I prayed that after I was thirty (not before) that—that I might pass through a sickness unto death, yet be spared, yet live. I desired all the pain, all the fears, all the assaults of the demons which I had seen so many others pass through, that I might live more fully for him who had lived and died so fully for me, for I felt full surely that in our last agony, in our final suffering, in our dying— will be the last act of loving,

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of believing, of hoping.12

Janda’s Julian is also considerably affected by her experience of the Peasants’ Revolt. Most of the second half of the play addresses the terror of the revolt and the violence that accompanied it. In this version, Julian describes how she, fearing for her own safety and sheltering in the enclosure, opened her anchorhold to a mad woman, the mother of the executed John Ball. Describing in detail the woman’s ravings and grief, Julian shows as well how the peace of her enclosure fi nally brings the grieving mother to her own peace. Janda draws an explicit connection between this experience and Julian’s understanding of her own visions: And while she did sleep, it was given me to see that just as every mother is more minded of her dying child than of its survivors, so too would God our Mother embrace and cleave to that wretched woman and with a mother-love keep her full surely.13

An emphasis on the social good of Julian’s vision runs through Janda’s play. At the beginning of the section on the Peasants’ Revolt, Julian states: yet part of the understanding was that this vision was not given for me to keep, but to share with all who suffer.14

For Janda, Julian is both witness to and critic of the social injustice of her world; her visions, and her understanding of them, are rooted in her compassion for those around her and the inequalities and hardships experienced outside her windows. In large part, Janda’s emphasis on Julian’s concern for the disenfranchised of her society—that is, the poor peasants and the powerless, such as John Ball’s mother—and his reading of that social commentary back into A Revelation of Love is part of a deliberate attempt to demonstrate her relevance in today’s world. Janda paradoxically dehistoricizes Julian, freeing her from her own historical exigencies and offering her to the present day at precisely the point in the play that he most explicitly historicizes her: for, as the logic of the play goes, if Julian offered solace to the powerless (the victims of real historical events) in her own time and place, then she will undoubtedly offer solace to the powerless in this time and place.15

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Like Janda’s dramatization, Dana Bagshaw’s Cell Talk begins with the idea of the encounter between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe described in Kempe’s Book, building on it as a way to construct a personality and biography for the anchoress. Cell Talk is one of three plays by Bagshaw that feature the two medieval women; the others, Tried and Tested and Mad for God, expand the onehour “duologue” to include events, people, and settings from Margery’s life.16 Though the setting of Cell Talk is the site of the anchorhold, in the expanded versions Julian’s cell necessarily recedes, becoming simply another destination point in Margery’s travels; similarly, Julian as a character is significantly reduced in the longer versions of the play, relegated to the role of supporting character in a drama about the life of Margery Kempe. Cell Talk is the most commonly performed version of the play according to the playwright’s Web site: easier to produce and stage, and manageable in length—the whole set of plays would run more than four hours—and requiring only two cast members, Cell Talk lends itself to small scale productions, requiring little in the way of setting, costume, or props. In addition to dramatizing the encounter between Margery and Julian, Cell Talk shares other important conceptual similarities with Janda’s Julian: for instance, both plays suggest Julian’s observation of and compassion for the victims of the social unrest occurring outside her cell (though, in Cell Talk, the emphasis is more on the persecution of the Lollard heresy rather than the Peasants’ Revolt), and both invoke the plague as the catalyst for Julian’s visionary experiences. However, Bagshaw’s play differs in key ways from Janda’s: specifically, Cell Talk is primarily a female friendship story. In Cell Talk, the four scenes present imagined conversations between Julian and Margery at vital points in Margery’s life through the decade between 1410 and 1420. In these conversations, each of the characters benefits from the other’s specifically female experiences; each encourages the other in her understanding of her visions and her communication with God; each warns the other about the dangers that attach to women with untraditional, even though not necessarily unorthodox, spiritual practices. What makes these particularly interesting constructions of Julian and Margery is Bagshaw’s emphasis on their status as women, physical and embodied. The histories and experiences Bagshaw creates for the characters, and especially their responses to them, speak to audiences as at home with the gender politics of The Vagina Monologues as with the history of A Revelation of Love; given the global popularity of The Vagina Monologues (it has been performed in over 120 countries) and the ubiquity of the associated antiviolence movement, V-Day, it seems quite likely that an audience for Cell Talk might indeed have even more familiarity with Eve Ensler’s play than Julian’s work.17 Bagshaw’s Julian and Margery are universal women in many ways: they are linked in the fi rst instance by their shared suffering as women, a suffering specifically predicated on their sexuality and maternity. In the fi rst of their visits, Bagshaw’s Margery confides her concealed sin to Julian, a sin hinted at in the fi rst chapter of The Book of Margery Kempe but developed in great imaginative detail in Cell Talk: M[argery]: Well then, here it is: Before I was married, I was with child

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I was only fourteen And . . . I killed it . . . my very own baby.18

At Julian’s prompting (“Surely, there is more to it . . . ”), Margery describes a series of events involving an older man visiting her father, his rape of her, her subsequent pregnancy and confusion and fear, and her eventual recourse to “an old wife” who attempted to procure an abortion for her. Some weeks later, Margery’s pregnancy ends tragically: I waited for days, weeks And then one night as I lay in bed, terrible pains seized my stomach And there was blood f lowing out of me And out came this, this tiny creature Horrible and ugly and blue And writhing. I couldn’t bear to look at it, to touch it. So I took off my nightgown And I started wrapping it I wrapped it, and wrapped it Until it stopped squirming.19

The narrative continues, describing the young Margery’s attempt at burying the body, its later discovery, and her fear that she would be revealed as a murderer. Bagshaw’s Julian is able, based on her own experiences, to fi nally mitigate Margery’s grief and guilt; she confides: It is possible, Margery, That you did not kill the baby. That even the old wife did not harm the baby. God wills such losses sometimes When things go wrong. ... It happened once to me, you know When I, like you, was very young I too lost a baby.20

Shocked that Julian had a life before the anchorhold, Margery questions her further, and Julian reveals that both her husband and a second later child, born at full term, were lost to the plague. Just as Margery’s spirituality is generated directly from her physical, explicitly gendered, experiences, so too are Julian’s visions: J[ulian]: The Black Death took them. Like you I felt deep grief for many years. In truth, I think this experience is what led me to my showings For I do not believe that God punishes us or sends us trials But that things happen as they are bound to in God’s world Which work to make us stronger.21

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For Bagshaw, this sharing of experience and the giving of comfort are possible only because both, by virtue of their sex, have access to “women’s knowledge”; in this worldview, women share a language and ability to relate, denied to men, but especially men who represent patriarchal values. After Margery states (and before her “confession”)— Over and over I feel the pain of this sin So I keep going to my confessors, the priests and vicars. [stops] But then perhaps it would help to tell another woman instead.

Julian responds, “That is what I am here for.”22 Thus Bagshaw’s characters are fully female, and the trials and losses they experience are specifically gendered as well. In part, this is an attempt to interpret various aspects of the surviving texts, but especially Margery’s concealed sin and madness after the birth of her fi rst child and Julian’s understanding of the maternal qualities of God.23 In addition, though, these shared experiences work to make the two characters more alike, equal, in fact, by virtue of their female bodies, lessening any distinction between a devout married laywoman and an enclosed celibate anchoress. Though it is important to remember Sarah Salih’s assertion that Margery Kempe’s religious practices existed on a continuum with the religious practices of professed or even enclosed religious, and that therefore the distinction between Margery and nuns, or even anchoresses, “should not be seen as absolute,”24 nevertheless the belief in at least some level of distinction between the two states remained an essential component both in the self-construction of Margery in The Book and in later responses to her text.25 That Julian and Margery are true peers in Cell Talk is not a critical position as much as it is a marketing one; the play depends on the relationship between the two women, and that relationship must be one of mutual dependency, education, and affi rmation. Though seemingly opposite in key ways—Julian is enclosed, Margery experiences much mobility, for instance—Bagshaw rescripts this dichotomy into complementarity: in discussing the public scorn for Margery’s white clothes, Bagshaw’s Julian concludes I think this is your calling: Whilst I stay here to welcome the troubled You go out to stir the untroubled.26

In contrast to both Julian and Cell Talk, Sheila Upjohn’s Mind out of Time resists all speculation about Julian’s biographical details, her daily life in the anchorhold, or her personality. In fact, though a figure named Julian appears on stage, her speeches are drawn exclusively from translations of A Revelation of Love and, to a lesser extent, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman. The play centers not on Julian the woman, but on her writing, the history and discovery of her work, and ultimately its efficacy in the modern world. Mind out of Time begins just after the Dissolution in Norwich; in the fi rst scene, set in an interior of a wealthy merchant’s house, a household scribe who was until recently “Brother John,” a

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monk, wistfully educates a young houseboy about the past glories of his scriptorium and the monastic library of Norwich Cathedral Priory before the books were disposed of by the King’s orders. He reminisces about one manuscript in particular: “I remember one of the last manuscripts I ever copied. Our own manuscript was beginning to perish, so I made another. It was in English, not the Latin I was used to. Perhaps that’s why I remember it. No, that’s not the reason. It was so honest and homely. You felt the woman who wrote it was there, talking to you.”27 The boy’s surprise that the monk would have any interest in a book by a woman leads Brother John to identify it further by title and provenance—“It was called Revelations of Divine Love, and it was by a woman in this city. You could tell she was a Norwich woman. It was full of local words”—and explain to the boy what it meant to be an anchoress, as well as introduce key features of the text itself: Julian’s sickness, her visions, and her commitment to sharing the experience with like-minded readers.28 This introduction, of course, is intended for the audience as well, who, the playwright must assume, comes to the performance unfamiliar with either A Revelation of Love or medieval anchoresses. The scene concludes as Brother John attempts to answer the boy’s question about the location of the wondrous manuscript, now missing: “I haven’t seen it nor my copy of it, since the books in the library were taken away. Lost, I suppose, lost or destroyed. Perhaps no one will ever read Julian’s book again.”29 The second scene is set in the same location as the fi rst, but has moved forward to the beginning of the twentieth century. As the scene begins, an actor playing Grace Warrack, the fi rst modern editor of A Revelation of Love whose influential edition sparked the intense interest in Julian of Norwich over the last century, lectures the audience on the history of the manuscript from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, making reference both to the period in which the surviving copies of the Long Text were made and the important contribution to its preservation made by Sir Hans Sloane (who acquired the copy from which Warrack’s edition was made, London, British Library MS Sloane 2499) and the British Museum, which purchased Sloane’s library in 1753.30 The actor acknowledges that though there were earlier editions, “mine was the one that put Julian back on the map. In fact, so many people wanted to read Julian’s book that my edition was in print continuously from 1901 right up to 1970.”31 This speech, and the introduction of Grace Warrack as the one who made A Revelation available for modern consumption, bridges the earlier scribal activity, represented by the sixteenth-century monk, and the manuscript’s disappearance from general use, with the present day’s increasing interest in Julian’s text. At the end of the speech, the actor transforms (the directions indicate that she is to remove pieces of her costume and change her voice and style of delivery) from the Victorian editor to a modern, 1970s news reporter chairing a televised debate. The lighting changes as well to reveal three characters: the opposing speakers, “the archangel Michael” and “the archfiend Beelzebub,” and Julian of Norwich. The debate concerns Julian herself, and her book becomes evidence in an argument about the relevance of the devotional life in today’s world. The play is in large part a dramatic adaptation of Upjohn’s explicit and continuing interest in Why Julian Now?, as the title of her 1997 book demonstrates.32 As an

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antidote to “the perpetual motion of the twentieth century,” Michael insists, Julian’s reclusion, her life of meditation and prayer, are offered to a harassed and fractured world; similarly, the archangel predicts that in this time of excessive material desire and consumption, Julian will provide a necessary model of personal and fi nancial restraint: “Julian, in one room, possessing nothing possessed the whole world.”33 Thus, Upjohn attempts in the play to demonstrate the efficacy of the intense personal devotion Julian’s text represents to contemporary society, one characterized by social and political uncertainty, and by increasing dissatisfaction with organized religion. All three plays, in their own ways, stress the relevancy of Julian in the modern world, and though only Janda and Bagshaw insist on creating for the anchoress biographical details unsupported by either the text or the extant records, each play also works to dehistoricize her, wresting her from her historical moment by making her “one of us,” in their desire to confi rm her appeal for contemporary audiences. The Cell as Theater Besides resisting speculation about either Julian’s life before her enclosure or her physical experiences inside the anchorhold, Upjohn also resists any attempt to stage Julian’s cell. For the other playwrights, the site of Julian’s anchorhold is a fundamental part of the set—indeed, for Janda, it is the set. My interest in these plays derives from thinking about the appeal of the anchoritic cell as a device for the contemporary stage: I wondered how playwrights and actors might negotiate the paradoxical visible invisibility of the medieval anchorhold, and whether or not contemporary performances might offer innovative ways of understanding the performative potential inherent in the cell. That the anchoritic cell was a site simultaneously of reclusion and spectacle was widely understood in the Middle Ages. The anchoress, especially the urban one, was both removed from the world spiritually and fi rmly located within it spatially, as Julian would certainly have been given the prominent location of her cell at St. Julian’s, Conesford, surrounded by thriving medieval Norwich.34 The author of Ancrene Wisse clearly acknowledged the cell’s potential for exposure when, in Part II, he advised the anchoress to approach her windows cautiously and to keep a dark curtain between herself and the world: “Therefore my dear sisters, love your windows as little as you possibly can. Let them all be little, the parlor’s smallest and narrowest. Let the cloth in them be of two kinds: the cloth black, the cross white, both inside and outside. . . . The black cloth apart from its symbolism, does less harm to the eyes and is thicker against the wind and harder to see through, and keeps its color better against the wind and other things. Look that your parlor cloth is fastened on every side and well-attached, and guard your eyes there in case your heart fl ies out and goes away as it did from David, and your soul sickens as soon as she is gone.”35 But despite all precautions to remove an anchoress from public sight, despite even the walls that both enclosed and erased her, anchoresses remained an object of spectacle by virtue of the public visibility of the anchorhold and its constant evocation of the performance of holiness taking place within its walls.

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Ann K. Warren argues that “Enclosed and yet exposed, hidden and yet visible, shadows behind the curtains of their access windows, medieval English anchorites were daily reminders of the proper focus of Christian existence.”36 And, as Salih has more recently shown, “The windows can be looked through in both directions, meaning that the texts conceive the anchoritic life as a performance with spectators.” Further, in discussing the attention paid to the window dressings, Salih emphasizes that, far from being the hiding place of the anchoress, the anchorhold is more properly understood as the physical stage on which that performance occurs: “The curtains conceal, frame and label the anchoress.”37 An awareness of the cell as a performative site runs through the Ancrene Wisse, but is especially evident in the ways the author urged the anchoress to be ever conscious of the effect her actions might have on those who observed her reclusive life. In addition to the concerns about her visibility at her windows and the potential repercussions of being a “peeping anchoress,” in terms both of her own temptation and the temptation she might pose to others, she was to be cautious about her generosity, or lack of it, about the company she might keep, the animals she might own, about her willingness (or not) to store or protect others’ belongings in her cell, about the behavior of her maids or her visitors, and more.38 That enclosure was performative, and a highly visible invisibility, was well understood by Margery Kempe when, in 1413, she paid her visit to Julian’s cell seeking benefit no less from an observed association with the anchoress than from a private confi rmation of her experiences.39 In other words, on that visit (and, indeed, again later in her use of the event in her Book), Julian’s cell served as a stage for Kempe’s own performance of the devout and mystical life. Kempe’s memory of her conversation with Julian is so intriguing chiefly because her description of the event is the only extant record of Julian’s spoken words, and even though we might do well to question the accuracy of Kempe’s memory as regards the actual order or content of what Julian said, nevertheless she could very well have had that conversation, or one like it, in 1413.40 Except for Kempe’s remembered speech, Julian remains voiceless to us outside her text; the effect of her enclosure (and her presumed name change) has been to make any part of her life, other than her writing and the experiences it records, invisible to modern readers. This would not have been unwelcome to Julian, it seems, for her careful revision of the Long Text encourages us to “leve [ignore] the beholding of a wrech [wretch] that it was shewde to, and mightely, wisely, and mekely behold God, that of his curteyse [courteous] love and endlesse goodnesse wold shew [show] it generally in comfort of us alle.”41 Though A Vision has few moments that could accurately be described as personal, in A Revelation the erasure of the justification for her writing despite her sex, and the nearly systematic deletion of the personal through, for instance, removal of the pronoun “me” and the pronominal phrase “to me,” all work to make Julian less visible even as the text becomes more pronounced.42 Nevertheless, in a paradox strangely parallel to the paradoxical visible invisibility of the anchorhold and the present absence of the anchoress, some modern audiences are encouraged to believe they can know Julian the woman simply because they know (parts of ) her written work. And, in a further paradox, perhaps, the Julian these audiences are encouraged to claim is

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surprisingly simple, ordinary, and unremarkable—at odds, to say the least, with the remarkable sophistication of her surviving work. For this last reason, Upjohn’s dramatization may be the most thoughtful of the three plays considered in this chapter: though the anchorhold is not visible on Upjohn’s stage, it is evoked in the present absence of the character of the anchoress. When lit from above, Julian occupies center stage in the third scene, but speaks only words from the translations of her work. Julian the historical person is enfolded completely into the words from the texts, in a stunning example of the metonymy that often accompanies modern thinking about Julian of Norwich (i.e., “I work on Julian”). Upjohn’s play effectively silences the human anchoress by making her personal history disappear, turning her body into a cipher, a conduit for the words of her texts; she disappears in and out of sight (through the use of a spotlight on the darkened stage), emerging only to “quote” herself; visible yet hidden, standing in darkness but nevertheless constantly in the audience’s mental sightline, the actor’s body implies the anchoress’s enclosure in an abstract and metaphoric way even as her body and its utterances recall the body of her work, the missing manuscripts cited in the fi rst parts of the play. Both the silence of Upjohn’s Julian and the abstract recollection of enclosure the staging promotes fundamentally separate this performance from the other plays. Upjohn seems to admit the impossibility of both personalizing Julian for a modern audience and displaying the cell, which—in theory—strips the inhabitant of her personal identity. Pushing the performance beyond a simple narrative dramatization of the life of Julian of Norwich, Mind out of Time appears to admit the difficulty in representing that life in narrative form. And yet, narrative style is both comfortable and familiar, even though voluntary enclosure is neither. Contemporary performance art—rarely comfortable, it must be said—offers some interesting possibilities for representing the present absence of reclusion and the paradoxical visible invisibility of the anchorhold. Two very different contemporary performances have recently attempted to approximate the experiences of complete and voluntary reclusion (Tehching Hsieh, 1978) and the paradox of living death (Cornelia Parker and Tilda Swinton, 1995); they might usefully be considered here. In 1978, Tehching Hsieh began a series of five one-year performances, the fi rst of which was called “Cell Piece.”43 In this fi rst performance piece, Hsieh built a barred enclosure in a section of his Tribeca loft and spent one full year enclosed in it, not reading, talking, watching television, writing, nor in any way leaving it. An assistant (to whom he did not talk) brought him his meals, took away his waste (in a bucket), and generally sustained his life. On limited occasions, an audience was allowed to watch him, but not to talk to him. At the end of the year, Hsieh admits, he was quite altered: he notes, “Sometimes I fi nd I have no answers to questions about that experience.”44 Cornelia Parker’s performance installation, The Maybe, was exhibited at London’s Serpentine Gallery in 1995. The installation consisted of a series of glass cases displaying flowers and plants, along with celebrity artifacts. The main draw of the exhibition, and the event for which audiences queued to be admitted, was a large, elevated glass case in which Tilda Swinton lay asleep.45 Swinton

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would spend the eight hours or more of the performance each day asleep (or seeming to be asleep—it was not possible to distinguish real sleep from performed sleep), never leaving the glass case, visible to the audience but deliberately unengaged with them, present but absent, gazed at but unresponsive to the audience’s gaze. Swinton has acknowledged that, for her, this performance was a tribute to Derek Jarman, who had died of AIDS-related illness in 1994, and that she was attempting to invoke death, especially the living death that AIDS was perceived to be in the late 1980s and 1990s.46 Though it is, of course, only coincidental that Swinton’s performance recalls the association of living death with the anchorhold, a metaphor explicitly enacted by medieval rites of enclosure, the intentional evocation of “absent presence” and sense of uncomfortable voyeurism were widely acknowledged by audiences and reviewers, as well as by the artist.47 Both Hsieh’s and Swinton’s performances suggest imaginative ways of performing an act such as enclosure in the absence of a religious profession and without the permanent commitment required by the vow (though one could argue that a yearlong performance is hardly temporary). My reason for describing them is to show, by comparison with Janda’s and Bagshaw’s plays, and to a lesser extent, Upjohn’s, that a truly effective way of performing the anchorhold would require confronting enclosure honestly, not smoothing over the rough edges of contemporary discomfort with its realities. And these plays do smooth over those edges: besides suggesting that the anchorhold is really just a much smaller version of a modest but comfortable dwelling, where anchoresses had recourse to companionship and affection (in the form of human or feline friends), both Janda and Bagshaw have their Julian actually leave her cell at the end of the play. As Janda’s Julian concludes, the character exits the stage, which has been played as the anchorhold, for the offstage space described as the maid Beatrice’s now empty room. And, in the last scene of Bagshaw’s Cell Talk, Margery arrives to fi nd Julian outside enjoying the beauty of an early morning. Julian responds to Margery’s shocked “I have never seen you out here before!” by stating, You have never been here so early before. I often come out here in the morning to walk and see what our Lord is up to. Lately, it seems, I do more sitting.48

The desire to make Julian’s enclosure more familiar and less uncomfortable for the contemporary audience sadly coincides with the popular desire to make Julian’s work generally more accessible and less uncomfortable. Many audiences, and certainly most of the audiences for whom these plays would be produced, never fully engage with the theology of A Revelation of Love nor appreciate the complexity of Julian’s interpretation of her visions; nor do the plays encourage them to do so. In thinking about the popular versions of the work of Julian of Norwich, Alexandra Barratt has protested that “Julian has been the object of much ill-informed adulation and dubious interpretation. She was a profound thinker, a difficult writer and an original theologian, not at all the simple, homely and cheerful woman of popular perception.”49 Though it may be argued that

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these plays are effective in introducing Julian of Norwich to modern audiences, in the end, they each reduce her experience to easy and comforting—and often misleading, by virtue of their reduction—extracts. Unlike contemporary performance art, or thoughtful engagement with Julian’s writing, the plays require little from their audience and regrettably neither challenge nor reward them in their encounter with her work. Notes An early version of this argument was presented at the 2006 meeting of the New Chaucer Society (New York, July 27–31). I am grateful to the other members of the panel whose discussions have inf luenced my thinking about postmedieval appearances of Julian of Norwich—Sarah Salih, Christiania Whitehead, and Jennifer Summit— and to the members of the audience for their questions and responses to the session. I am also grateful to the editors of this volume for their generous responses to this chapter and for their suggestions for improving it. All errors, of course, remain my own. 1. For ease of reference in this discussion, I will refer to the collected works of Julian as A Revelation of Love rather than naming both versions of her text each time. 2. James Janda, Julian: A Play Based on the Life of Julian of Norwich (New York: The Seabury Press, 1984); Dana Bagshaw, Cell Talk: A Duologue between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (London: Radius, 2002); Sheila Upjohn, Mind out of Time: A Play on Julian of Norwich, 2nd ed. (Norwich: Julian Shrine Publications, 1992); the first edition of this play, Mind out of Time: A View of Julian of Norwich, was published by the Julian Shrine in 1979. The plays continue to be performed and viewed, though primarily by audiences drawn from church communities. Janda’s Julian has been performed in the United States by the Rev. Linda Loving more than seventyfive times in the past nineteen years. She has produced a DVD of a production filmed at the Julian Shrine in 2005; it is for sale on her Web site: http://www. julianofnorwich.com/t_aboutloving.php. Loving (in correspondence with the author, June 9, 2008) notes that her performances “have ranged from 12 to 650 in the audience.” In 1985, the Paulist Press issued a video recording of Janda’s play starring Roberta Nobleman, who had worked with Janda originally on the play. According to Dana Bagshaw (correspondence with the author, June 3, 2008), Cell Talk has already had six separate productions, playing in fifteen locations since 2002. Cell Talk has also been recorded and is available for sale through the author’s Web site. Mind out of Time has also had continued productions, though less frequent it seems, since its first performance in 1976 in Norwich, and was also recorded on video, though apparently not intended for public distribution (correspondence with the author, June 6, 2008). Sections of Mind out of Time were performed as recently as 2006 at the Julian Festival in Norwich. 3. Revelations of Divine Love Showed to a Devout Ankress, ed. and trans. Dom Roger Hudleston, O.S.B. (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1927); The Nun’s Rule, Being the Ancrene Riwle Modernised, ed. and trans. James Morton (St Louis: B. Herder, 1905). 4. Janda, Julian, p. 11. 5. Janda, Julian, pp. 19–23. See The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004), Book 1, chap. 15.9. 6. The extant wills (three Latin, one Anglo-Norman) have been translated and included in Appendix B to The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

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Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), pp. 431–35. The scribal rubric that begins “A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman,” states: “Here es a vision, shewed be the goodenes of God to a devoute woman. And hir name es Julian, that is recluse atte Norwiche and yit is on life, anno domini 1413”; in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 63. Margery Kempe, ed. Windeatt, Book 1, chap. 18. Janda, Julian, pp. 22–23. Janda, Julian, p. 25. Janda, Julian, p. 43. “Revelation of Love,” 2, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 127. Janda, Julian, pp. 51–52. Janda, Julian, p. 97. Janda, Julian, p. 91. This particular emphasis is made significantly more explicit in the framing commentary offered by Sr. Joan Chittister in the Paulist Press video performance of the play (1985). These two plays are available from the author directly through her Web site: http://www.cdbagshaw.btinternet.co.uk/dana.htm. Eve Ensler wrote The Vagina Monologues in 1996 (New York: Villard, 1998); 2008 marked the ten-year anniversary of Ensler’s V-Day movement, a campaign founded to end global violence against women. Bagshaw, Cell Talk, p. 12. Bagshaw, Cell Talk, p. 13. Bagshaw, Cell Talk, pp. 14–15. Bagshaw, Cell Talk, pp. 15–16. Bagshaw, Cell Talk, p. 12. In reading Julian’s emphasis on maternal imagery in her elaboration of “God oure moder” (“Revelation of Love,” 14.59, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 309) as evidence that Julian had, and presumably lost, a family before her enclosure, Bagshaw may simply be echoing the critical trend in recent years to read such imagery in A Revelation of Love as autobiographical. See, for instance, Benedicta Ward, “Julian the Solitary,” in Kenneth Leech and Sr. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., Julian Reconsidered (Oxford: Sisters of the Love of God Press, 1988), pp. 11–35. This opinion that Julian must have had children and a family is certainly popularly held, as any preliminary search on the Internet will show. Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2001), p. 167. Consider, for instance, the impetus behind Henry Pepwell’s addition of “a devoute ancres” to the rubric for the extracts he published in 1521; Margery Kempe, ed. Windeatt, p. 434. Bagshaw, Cell Talk, p. 34. Upjohn, Mind out of Time, p. 6. Upjohn, Mind out of Time, p. 6. Upjohn, Mind out of Time, p. 9. Revelations of Divine Love Recorded by Julian, Anchoress at Norwich, Anno Domini 1373, ed. Grace Warrack (London: Methuen, 1901). For evidence of the inf luence of Warrack’s edition, see Alexandra Barratt, “How Many Children Had Julian of

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31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

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Norwich? Editions, Translations and Versions of Her Revelations,” in Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett with Thomas H. Bestul, Janet Goebel, and William F. Pollard (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer 1995), pp. 27–39; an updated version is included as chapter one in this volume. Upjohn, Mind out of Time, p. 11. Sheila Upjohn, Why Julian Now? A Voyage of Discovery (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1997). Upjohn, Mind out of Time, p. 18, p. 20. Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 12–13. Anchoritic Spirituality: Ancrene Wisse and Associated Works, trans. Anne Savage and Nicholas Watson (New York: Paulist Press, 1991), pp. 66–67. Warren, Anchorites, p. 7. See also Salih’s discussion of the anchoritic readers of the Katherine Group texts in Versions of Virginity, especially the section “Sex, Violence and Spectacle,” pp. 74–98. Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 74, 75. Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 67. The author of AW emphasizes the responsibility of the anchoress in not leading any other person to temptation through her careless visibility: “For this reason, it was commanded in God’s law that a pit should always be covered, and if anyone uncovered a pit and a beast fell in, the one who had uncovered the pit had to pay for it (Exodus 21:33–34). This is a most fearsome saying for a woman who shows herself to the eyes of men. She is symbolized by the one who uncovers the pit. . . . You who uncover this pit, you who do anything by which a man is carnally tempted through you, even if you do not know it, fear this judgement greatly. . . . For opening the pit you must pay for the animal, unless you are absolved of it”; Anchoritic Spirituality, p. 69. Margery Kempe, ed. Windeatt, Book 1, chap. 18. Clearly, I am assuming that neither Vision Showed to a Devout Woman nor Revelation of Love were dictated to a scribe and thus do not provide extant examples of Julian’s spoken words. The rubric to Vision states that Julian was still anchoress in Norwich in 1413; the testamentary evidence suggests she was still alive when the will of Isabel Ufford, daughter of the earl of Warwick and widow of the earl of Suffolk, was proved in 1416. See Appendix B, Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 431. “Revelation of Love,” 1.8, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 153. “Botte [But] God [forbid] that ye shulde saye or take it so that I am a techere [teacher]. For I meene nought so, no I mente nevere so. For I am a woman, lewed [uneducated], febille [feeble], and freylle [frail]. . . . Botte for I am a woman shulde I therfore leve [believe] that I shulde nought telle yowe the goodenes of god, sine [since] that I sawe in that same time that it is his wille that it be knawen [known]?” “Vision Showed to a Devout Woman,” 6, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 75; cf. “Revelation of Love,”1.9, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, pp. 153–57. Also known as “Cage Piece” and “One Year Performance 1978–1979.” For an interview with Tehching Hsieh, see Delia Bajo and Brainard Carey, “In Conversation: Tehching Hsieh,” in The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Arts, Politics, and Culture (August/ September 2003). Available online at http://www. thebrooklynrail.org/arts/sept03/tehchinghsieh.html.

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44. Bajo and Carey, “In Conversation.” The second yearlong performance consisted of punching a card in a time clock, every hour exactly on the hour, every day, twenty-four hours a day for one year. In his third performance, he spent one whole year outside in New York City, never entering any building during the year. In the fourth yearlong performance, he was tied to a fellow artist (Linda Montano) for the whole year. And, for the fifth performance, he spent one year not making art, or looking at art of any kind. 45. Cornelia Parker and Tilda Swinton, The Maybe (London and Rome, 1995). For more information about this performance, see Cornelia Parker, Bruce Ferguson, and Jessica Morgan, Cornelia Parker (London: The Institute for Contemporary Art, 2000), pp. 30–35; Cornelia Parker, Avoided Object (Cardiff: Chapter Gallery, 1996), pp. 11–20. 46. See, among others, Mignon Nixon, “Dream Dust,” October 116 (Spring 2006): 63–86. 47. For medieval rites of enclosure, see Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 97–100. In an interview with Lisa Tickner, Cornelia Parker referred to the performing Swinton as “a non-performing performer, a sort of absent presence”; she noted further that although sleeping, “Tilda stood in for everyone,” she was nevertheless “curiously absent.” See Lisa Tickner, “A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker,” Art History 26.3 (Spring 2003): 384 [364–91]. 48. Bagshaw, Cell Talk, p. 35. 49. Alexandra Barratt, ed., Women’s Writing in Middle English (London: Longman, 1992), p. 108.

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CHAPTER 8 “A GREAT WOMAN IN OUR FUTURE”: JULIAN OF NORWICH’S FUNCTIONS IN LATE TWENTIETHCENTURY SPIRITUALITY Christiania Whitehead

This essay assesses the ways in which Julian has been constructed in Anglican, American Episcopalian, and Roman Catholic spirituality from the 1960s until the present.

I

n a letter to Sr. M. Madeleva, Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist contemplative, wrote: “Julian is without doubt one of the most wonderful of all Christian voices. She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I grow older and whereas in the old days I used to be crazy about St. John of the Cross, I would not exchange him now for Julian if you gave me the world and the Indies and all the Spanish mystics rolled up in one bundle.”1 Merton was not alone in his enthusiasm for Julian. Over the past forty years, a record number of books have anthologized her “sayings” and framed devotional responses to her. A religious order of Julian of Norwich has been founded in the United States. A church dedicated to her name is being built in Australia.2 Over 300 “Julian Meeting” groups gather regularly for contemplative prayer in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, and the United States. Extracts of her Revelation have been turned into sacred choral music.3 She has been depicted, several times over, by contemporary icon painters. This chapter will explore some of the ways in which Julian has been made to function in late twentieth-century spirituality, taking as nominal boundaries the period from the 1960s until the present. Its focus will be largely upon Anglican, American Episcopalian, and Roman Catholic readings of Julian, since it is within these denominational settings that she seems to have made most contemporary impact. Its approach will be guided by the broad perception that, as Gayle Margherita writes: “Our relation to history is always produced through

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the imaginary moment of transference, whereby we see the past in terms that actually have more to do with our investments in and anxieties about the present and future.”4 In relation to the subject under discussion, I will apply this precept to argue that, whether declared or not, valorizations of the religious past invariably occupy polemical positionings within the debate about the direction of the contemporary church. Despite protestations to the contrary, Julian is, in effect, many different things to many different interest groups. Uncluttered by medieval hagiographies or cults, or by a long continuous tradition of devotional response, she bursts upon the twentieth century with a kind of innocence, a kind of whiteness—ready to be written upon, and to provide underpinning for a whole variety of personal and institutional positions. Our story—a high Anglican one for the moment—begins in postwar Norwich. Following the extensive wartime bombing of Norwich, the Anglican church of St. Julian (Bishop of Le Mans) and the Julian Cell were rebuilt in 1952, and they have since become, effectively, a kind of pilgrimage destination, receiving visitors from around the world. The Cell is serviced by an adjacent Centre, offering a library of Julian publications, and by a retreat house belonging to the community of All Hallows. Services are regularly held in the Cell; in addition, it is much used as a venue for impromptu silent prayer. How do these Anglican custodians position Julian? First, no accident this, given the dates, she is positioned as a figure of healing after the Second World War. Robert Llewelyn, a former chaplain of the shrine who has written widely on Julian’s spirituality, links her feast day (May 8) with the end of hostilities in Europe and evokes her as “the apostle of reconciliation, her wisdom and sanity transcending all national . . . boundaries . . . the strong and enduring love she holds out . . . is the only balm which may heal our wounds.”5 In addition, he tells the story of how, during his time as chaplain, a blind war veteran experienced a vision of Julian within the Julian Cell. In this vision, Julian brought before the veteran the Japanese soldier responsible for his suffering and presided over their subsequent reconciliation.6 This story is clearly a potent one on a number of levels. For the Cell and its devotees, it validates the emphasis placed upon the specifics of sacred space—the Cell enables, or at any rate facilitates, the vision—and fulfi ls those expectations of sanctity so artlessly inherent in the inception and operation of the shrine. It is a potent story for the city of Norwich, formulating Julian as the answer to their need for an emblem of hope and regeneration in the wake of the traumas of the war years. And it is a potent story because it wonderfully gets around the unpromising separations of historical difference and distance, creating an ahistorical Julian, a Julian out of time, susceptible of direct access, who can be applied healingly to the mental and physical wounds of postwar Britain. In the decades immediately after the war, Julian was made to function politically as a symbol of reconciliation and unity between nations. However, by the 1970s, the requirement for postwar healing had been superseded by other, more specifically church-oriented, considerations. In the early 1970s, following Vatican II, ecumenism was gathering pace.7 Hence, during the extensive public celebrations of the 600th anniversary of Julian’s visions in Norwich in 1973 (celebrations that were themselves conceived as an ecumenical venture, with Anglican, Roman

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Catholic, and Free Church involvement on the committee), Julian’s perception of having seen “God in a pointe—that is to say . . . in al thing” was used to construct her as a figure of interdenominational unity, embodying contemporary dreams of a full communion between different church traditions.8 Frank Dale Sayer, general secretary of the 1973 Celebration Committee, evokes Julian as “the great apostle of Christian unity,” pointing to her belief that her hope of salvation derives from her “onehede [oneness] . . . with alle my evencristen [fellow Christians].”9 He writes: “In [ Julian’s] life and teaching we meet the evangelical’s joy in the knowledge of a personal Saviour, the Quaker’s faith in the indwelling light, the mystic’s awareness of ‘God in a point,’ and ‘Holy Church’—the repository of those dearworthy and visible memorials of the Divine Presence.”10 Similarly, A.M. Allchin, canon of Canterbury Cathedral and warden of Fairacres Anglican convent in Oxford, looking back at the anniversary celebrations in 1980, interprets them as the “beginning . . . [of ] a new kind of canonization process . . . brought about . . . by popular acclaim . . . transcend[ing] . . . the separated Christian communities.”11 It should be said that the discernment of Julian’s ecumenical potential at that time was, and remains still, a principally Anglican one, presumably fuelled by the Anglo-Catholic desire for a closer rapprochement with Rome.12 In addition, and perhaps more surprisingly, a number of Anglican professionals also seem to have read Julian with an eye to her utility for East/West Christian unity. Canon Allchin links Julian’s emphasis upon the maternal aspects of God with the writings of St. Gregory of Nyssa and writes that her method of contrasting judgement with the hidden promise that all shall be well betrays a theological emphasis much more typical of eastern Christianity; Julian “represent[s] the co-inherence . . . of the east and the west . . . with remarkable force.”13 Kenneth Leech, Anglican Race Relations Field Officer, fi nds Julian’s perception of a human “godly will,” raised above our sensuality, which remains in union with God, closer to eastern Orthodox teaching than to western Augustinianism with its emphasis on human fallenness.14 And Robert Llewelyn links her anchoritic regime of repetitive prayer and its efficacy for contemplation with the repetition of the ancient Orthodox Jesus prayer, and uses her visual fi xation on the crucifi x and its visionary outcome to recommend the eastern Orthodox practice of icon meditation.15 So, Julian is worked as a site for Christian unity—generally from an Anglican starting point and generally with a view toward strengthening ties with Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. However, all this is very moderate compared with what happens next. In 1973, in the wake of the 600th anniversary celebrations, Hilary Wakeman, subsequently an honorary canon of Norwich Cathedral, placed a letter in the church papers seeking like-minded people to help her found a religious order for lay men and women of all denominations for the practice of contemplative prayer. She was supported initially in this venture by Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, who viewed it as an outworking of his belief that, in God’s plan, contemplation was not simply a coterie activity for the specialist but an integral part of the Christian journey for all lay believers. Reaction to Wakeman’s letter was enthusiastic and immediate, and by March 1974 her new order had a magazine and a name: the “Julian Meetings.”16 “Order” is perhaps not the best word

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to describe this movement, and it is noteworthy that it has now largely ceased to be used. The Julian Meetings are a network of small, informal groups, open to people of all faith traditions or none, who meet regularly to share in silent contemplative prayer. Aside from an annual national meeting and a retreat, there is little attempt at centralization. Initially disseminated across the United Kingdom (with notable success—by 1994 there were almost 300 groups meeting regularly), the Meetings have also made their presence felt within the broader frame of the worldwide Anglican communion. In 1980, Julian Meetings were inaugurated in Australia and South Africa by Anglican clergymen; and in 1992, they were carried to the United States by an Episcopalian laywoman.17 Why Julian? The two volumes of published reflections to arise from these Meetings never systematically answer this question, and there is certainly no suggestion that her text is read or reflected upon within the Meetings.18 Indeed, one could probably consider oneself a full “Julian” without ever having read a word of her Revelation. Nonetheless, from passing comments scattered between the two volumes it soon becomes plain that she is invoked as an exemplary practitioner and teacher of contemplative prayer. She is invoked in familiar ecumenical terms—because she is pre-Reformation, we are told, we can all in a sense lay claim to her. And she is invoked as a site of occupational indeterminacy; Wakeman notes that since it was unclear whether she was a lay woman or professed religious, she “seemed right” for a movement where those distinctions were unbound, and where clergy and laity met on an equal footing.19 Alongside these explicit traits, the two volumes of reflections also imply that Julian is to be made to stand for a movement that takes repeatedly articulated pride in its freedom from institutionalization—no rules nor rule of life, no hierarchy, no structure, no central leadership or leadership trainee programs, no permanent headquarters or property, no difference between clergy and laity, no creed, no liturgy.20 These freedoms are linked to the idea of gender; they are perceived to defi ne a “feminine spirituality.” As such, they are contrasted with “guru-led,” “masculine” movements such as John Main, O.S.B.’s World Community for Christian Meditation, which retain a dependence on hierarchic structure and central authority and promulgate a specific contemplative “technique” taken from the teachings of their charismatic founders.21 The sense that such freedoms go hand in hand with the regime of a medieval anchoress is worth considering in more depth. Anyone who has studied the Ancrene Wisse or Aelred of Rievaulx’s De institutione inclusorum, with their exhaustive configurations of the structure of the anchoritic day, will struggle to see the parallel. However, more important than historical accuracy or its obverse is the sense generated by the parallel that the anchoritic regime has come to function as an unregulated site of unprecedented potential in contemporary religious culture. Offering, on the face of it, a front of inscrutable alterity, anchoritism shows itself supremely well-suited to receive the impress of an adventurous spirituality equivalently rendered “other” by its rejection of institutional or credal specificity. In addition to being assertively nondoctrinal, the other notable thing about the Julian Meetings is their enthusiasm for interfaith syncretism. In their volumes of reflections, the contemplative “techniques” of Julian and the Cloud author are

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repeatedly aligned with the techniques of Zen Buddhist meditation and yogic practice. John Richards explores the similarities between the western tradition of apophatic theology and eastern Buddhist practice.22 Gillean Russell relates Zen Buddhism to the writings of the Cloud author.23 Hebe Welbourn recalls her experience of praying using the five chukras on a Julian Meeting retreat.24 Robert Llewelyn unfolds a personal spiritual journey in which he increasingly comes to read both Julian’s and the Cloud author’s insights on prayer in the light of Zen meditational teaching.25 Now this enthusiasm feels very progressive, and it certainly corresponds to the development of interfaith movements worldwide over the past forty years.26 Nonetheless, despite the appearance of innovation, it is actually not much more than an expanded reworking of the distinctly conservative supposition that spirituality functions as an absolute type: a single, unitary phenomenon, overriding variables of time, faith, and culture. In recent years, contemporary historians of spirituality have tended to fight shy of thinking big in this way, preferring to speak of a plurality of context-specific spiritualities, and of their construction in relation to the religious establishments that promote or resist them.27 There is a further subtext to the alluring synthesis between eastern and western contemplative practice in “Julian” literature. Wakeman, founder of the Julian Meetings, notes frankly that in the early 1970s people were abandoning the church for eastern meditation techniques and philosophies because they were unable to fi nd a comparable paradigm within their own tradition at home. As a consequence, the Julian Meetings were initiated, at least in part, to “seek to attract those who would otherwise turn to Eastern religions or cults.”28 Rather than departing altogether, seekers after eastern techniques could now conduct their fl irtation with Zen from within a broadly Christian, Anglican, and “Julian” environment. Effectively, Julian and her visions became a bait with which to lure the straying faithful back to a homegrown contemplative practice. Or, to put it another way, her rapprochement with Vedanta and with Zen emerged as nothing more than a tactical liaison dictated by the pragmatic desire to maintain Anglican numbers. Before moving on from the interfaith dimension of Julian’s new persona, it is worth commenting on her relation to Thomas Merton, perhaps the most seminal contemplative writer and practitioner of the late twentieth century. At the beginning of this essay we noted Merton’s uninhibited enthusiasm for Julian: “She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I grow older.” Undoubtedly, this enthusiasm has contributed to her increased popularity over the past forty or so years. However, it is also worth recalling some telling phrases of Kenneth Leech in Circles of Silence. Leech writes, vis-à-vis the relation between contemplation and resistance, that Thomas Merton can be viewed as a point of intersection between “the renewed Latin church . . . Eastern Christendom . . . the non-violent movement . . . Zen and the eastern mystical traditions . . . and political revolt . . . [for he saw] the apparent atheism of Zen . . . [as] the rejection of the view of God as an object.”29 Even at this comparatively early stage in our essay, it is possible to see how closely modern Anglican constructions of Julian and contemporary perceptions of Merton conjoin. One might say, indeed, that many of the traits

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of the Julian of the 1970s and early 1980s—her ecumenical prowess, her links to eastern Christendom, her affi nity to Zen Buddhism, the politically revolutionary leanings that we shall shortly review—are constructions in the image of Merton. He was known for all these things. Thus the relationship that emerges is dizzyingly circuitous. Merton is sustained by Julian, yet for subsequent viewers she soon becomes a construction in his image. In addition to interpreting this conundrum by viewing both Julian and Merton as the parallel expressions of a broader zeitgeist, it may also be the case that later commentators reconstituted Julian in a Mertonian guise in order to sidestep the sheer alterity of this maverick form of influence. Following the experimental, even audacious, constructions of the Julian Meetings, there was something of a backlash, causing Julian to become a contested site within liberal Anglicanism. In the early 1980s, high-church Anglicanism reanimated its late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commitment to the social issues of poverty, injustice, and urban deprivation in the light of the liberation theology emerging from Latin America.30 One of the most authoritative voices of this revival, Kenneth Leech, Race Relations Field Officer on the Church of England Board of Social Responsibility, authored a series of books, articles, and lectures interrogating certain trends in contemporary spirituality from a standpoint of Christian socialist commitment, verging toward Marxism. Remarkably, as his comparison of her to Merton implies, Leech gives Julian a key role within this polemic. He criticizes the “Julian culture” that has grown up around contemplative prayer groups (a reference to the Julian Meetings), accusing such groups of promoting a tranquilizing spirituality that avoids engagement with the world: “Those who follow Julian in the way of silent prayer need to take great care that they are not seduced by a cult of silence which is not only élitist and only accessible to a certain section of the population (middle class people with leisure, space and income) but also which shuts out the cry and the noise of injustice and oppression . . . a spirituality which fears . . . the darkness within our . . . socio-political structures is a harmful spirituality.”31 Note that Leech is not criticizing Julian directly here (although one might well feel that her anchoritic lifestyle lays itself open to equivalent charges), rather, he is criticizing the uses to which she has been put. However, Leech inadvertantly works himself into rather an untenable corner. He fi nds many aspects of Julian’s theology inspirational for modernity—he names, in particular, her simplicity, optimism, and earthiness.32 Yet, as a result of his theories of Christian engagement, he also feels the need to exonerate her from the charges levelled at Julian Meeting devotees—that they have simply shut themselves off from the world. It is here that polemical fiction takes over. In one article, Leech replaces the recorded meeting between Julian and Margery Kempe with an imagined meeting between Julian and the priest, John Ball, one of the legendary figures of the Peasants’ Revolt, describing Ball as an early representative of liberation theology.33 He imagines the two finding a great deal to agree about theologically. Julian’s incarnational spirituality would have worked in sympathy with Ball’s perception of God’s presence in the poor and downtrodden. Julian’s confidence in human perfectibility through grace would have

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tallied with Ball’s insistence on human equality (“When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman”) and the potential of humans to render social change. Leech imagines John Ball drawing strength from Julian’s optimism that “all shall be well” in the months preceding his death. In effect, he places the contemplative and the activist in a symbiotic relationship with one another: “Prophecy and action are born from and . . . sustained by vision . . . Julian of Norwich and John Ball need each other badly.”34 So Julian is redeemed for Leech because, if a social revolutionary had come to the window of her cell, she would have encouraged him in that revolution on grounds derived from the content of her visions. She is also redeemed insofar as the imagery of her visions proves extremely susceptible to radicalizing interpretations. With regard to that famous phrase about being “shewed a little thing the quantity of an haselnot, lying in the palme of my hand,” Leech writes: “[hazelnut theology] will be a theology of and for the poor, the lowly, the inarticulate, not a theology of the high and mighty. As the hazelnut is small and ordinary, it will be a theology which does not despise that which is small and ordinary, a theology that sees small people, ordinary people, as being of great significance.”35 For Leech, rather than being “all that is made,” the hazelnut becomes primarily a symbol for the poor, the ordinary, and the overlooked within society. Reading Julian through the lenses of the liberational socialism of the early 1980s, he prioritizes these categories within a visionary setting that shows them loved and upheld by God. Elsewhere, the image is animated less politically to assuage wider anxieties peculiar to the modern age. Sheila Upjohn aligns the image of the hazelnut with the words of the astronaut, Russell Schweickart, viewing the earth from the moon: “a small thing out there. . . . It is so small and so fragile and such a precious little spot in the universe that you can block it out with your thumb, and you realise that on that small spot, that little blue-and-white thing, is everything that means anything to you”; she takes comfort from Julian’s revelation that this “little thing” resides in the love of God.36 Leech constructs a Julian whose sympathies and visions conform to the Christian socialism of the early 1980s. However, his doubts about the spiritual utility of complete contemplative withdrawal have remained a topic of concern. What to do with her anchorhold? Very few devotional respondents have felt able to endorse literal enclosure as a valid contemporary option. Several locate the anchorhold as part of a set of ascetic world-denying, pain-seeking practices we have thankfully “moved beyond” (the assumption here is of an evolutionary spirituality), differentiating them fi rmly from the more “universal” aspects of Julian’s message.37 In this reading, the “strange” is rejected outright rather than being reassembled as the familiar. Others, more mildly, suggest that the only realistic way to live up to Julian’s dedicated lifestyle in the present time is to render it on a group basis—to become, in effect, an anchorhold of part-timers, committing a little time regularly to prayer and stillness.38 Here, the thinking is inverted—we can no longer measure up to the spiritual feats of former times. Grace Jantzen, the feminist theologian, echoing Leech’s belief in the necessity of conjoining contemplation with engagement, asserts that the postmodern anchoress must turn toward the needs of the world. To attain this complex positioning she postulates

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an “anchoritism of the heart”: essentially the decision to maintain an attitude of dissidence toward the structures and values of modernity.39 Jantzen’s allegorized approach to the singularity of the anchoritic regime—a private scepticism about the modern age that we carry within ourselves—is perhaps the most representative contemporary response. Nonetheless, there are certain communities and individuals that have opted to enact this regime on a more literal level. In 1985, Rev. John-Julian Swanson founded the Order of Julian of Norwich (O.J.N.) in Norwich, Connecticut.40 This order, a semi-enclosed, contemplative, monastic community of Episcopalians, comprising both monks and nuns, perceives itself living in the spirit of Julian of Norwich through the regular daily practice of contemplative prayer. From a study of the Order’s publications, a few points stand out. First, it would appear that O.J.N. is using Julian’s name to give medieval auctoritas to a highly traditionalist, ritualistically rigorous form of Anglo-Catholicism, which is a world away from the free expression of the Julian Meetings. The festivals celebrated within their calendar, their promotion of Marian devotion, their compilation of a Little Office of Julian modelled on the medieval Little Office of Our Lady, the conservative fashion of their habit, and their advocacy of rosaries, prayer ropes, and icons all point in this direction. In common with her treatment by other religious orders, Julian’s anchoritism is assumed to stem from a preexisting conventual routine (generally the nunnery at Carrow) despite the dearth of evidence of any type to support this assumption.41 As a result, icons of Julian by Lu Bro, an Associate of the Order, repeatedly depict her in a monastic habit and wimple. Julian is made monastic to validate her inspirational force for a community that construes itself in monastic terms. Second, unlike the socially engaged Anglo-Catholicism of Kenneth Leech, it seems to me that this community is in active retreat from the modern world, and that it has selected a fourteenth-century anchoress as its involuntary founder in large part to justify this retreat. John-Julian writes: “When circumstances of the world are no longer sane, and when they have moved beyond one’s personal power to change . . . [ Julian passes beyond] the madness . . . to the planes of reality, sanity and order.”42 The sense of disaffection and powerlessness inherent in this comment extends back not decades but centuries. In an earlier essay, John-Julian writes in strong terms of “the curse of the sixteenth-century [Reformation]” and the misleading precepts of Puritanism, valorizing the Middle Ages as a period when church remained coextensive with community, and body was not artificially segregated from spirit.43 Of all the subject positions reviewed so far, the Order of Julian of Norwich achieves the lowest level of rapprochement with modernity. Third, O.J.N.’s hostility toward the modern world extends toward other contemporary configurations of Julian: “Although some critics have striven to ‘modernize’ Julian by dressing her in the garb of crypto-Protestantism or anticlericalism, they are dead wrong . . . we do a great injustice to Mother Julian if we assign to her even the faintest ‘feminist’ motivations or intentions in the declaration of Christ’s Motherhood.”44 John-Julian enters the arena with even greater zest than Kenneth Leech, slashing left and right at the politicized interpretations of the preceding decade, and by inference claiming his own exegesis of the Revelation and his own, liturgically conservative, monasticization of Julian

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as the only authentic response. Because this is what is at stake, isn’t it? The contest to identify and possess the “true” Julian. And, like others before them, O.J.N. shows no hesitation in adding divine revelation to its arsenal in order to achieve this end. The current guardian of the Order, Fr. Gregory Fruehwirth, writes of his sense that O.J.N. is “the living embodiment of a response to God’s desire for a contemplative, monastic, and Julian renewal in our day . . . [the] brothers and sisters have given their lives to fulfi lling this divine dream.”45 Perhaps this especially forceful emphasis upon divine authorization reflects the beleaguerment of the Order with respect to their opposition to modernity. Nonetheless, it is also worth noting how closely it evokes and inverts sentiments expressed in Julian’s own Revelation. Julian initiates her Revelation with an account of the three petitions she put to God in her youth and the ways in which God responded to them. The Order guardian inverts this to God’s three desires for the present age and their realization through O.J.N. Finally, returning back to our checklist of responses to Julian’s anchorhold, O.J.N. seems to be the only devotional community to have taken the enclosed life as an entirely literal occupational option. In one of the latest online newsletters of the Order, we read that Fr. John-Julian has passed on his guardianship of O.J.N. and is now living as a solitary Member Regular, supported by the community, at a location elsewhere in Wisconsin.46 In this instance, it would appear that “true Julianism” necessitates austerely high levels of literal imitation and identification. Not for O.J.N. the Protestant fallacy of a part-time or allegorized anchoritism! So far in this essay we have reviewed Anglican and American Episcopalian readings of Julian, and it is unquestionably within these denominations that she has attracted the greatest attention in the modern age. However, it is also possible to identify a number of Roman Catholic responses to her spirituality, albeit more muted ones. High on the agenda of Roman Catholic readings of Julian seems a wish to bracket her with other female monastic visionaries of the Roman Catholic Church and to assert a single genealogy of feminine mystic expression, unchanging through the ages. Sr. Elizabeth Ruth Obbard, novice mistress of the Walsingham Carmelites, stresses Julian’s compatibility with the mystical theologies of Teresa of Avila and Thérèse of Lisieux.47 The Roman Catholic writer John Nelson, introducing a devotional anthology of extracts from the Revelation, is equally keen to extol Julian’s similarities to Thérèse. Julian’s approach to God, he writes, is “absolutely compatible with, and complementary to, the insights of that other great teacher, and Doctor of the Church, Thérèse of Lisieux . . . [the] coincidence of teaching, publication, and popularity of Julian’s and Thérèse’s works is a most remarkable happening . . . two weak, unknown, hidden women, in lives separated by five hundred years, have spoken and have been heard because they speak truth and point the way to life and joy.”48 Where Anglican writers postulate parallels for Julian across boundaries of faith (Vedanta and Zen Buddhism) and discipline (Carl Jung and Carl Rogers), Roman Catholic writers reinsert her fi rmly back into the mainstream of the Catholic mystical tradition. Additionally, where Anglican respondents are often keen to emphasize Julian’s struggles with medieval Catholic doctrine and her discomfort with some of the

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more hard-line teachings of the faith, such as the wrath of God and the eternal damnation of sinners, Nelson’s anthology works to entirely the opposite end, framing each extract from her Revelation with relevant passages from scripture and the 1993 Catechism of the Catholic Church, and stressing her amenability to the authority of the church: “in any of her discussion of difficult points . . . she specifically submits her will and judgement to that of the Church.”49 Like John-Julian Swanson, and in keeping with his institutional agenda, Nelson is keen to discredit citations of Julian as a protofeminist. Yet elsewhere, “presentist” readings of Julian from a feminist standpoint proliferate. Theologians and literary scholars have generated a substantial body of feminist interpretations of Julian over the past thirty years, partly at least in response to the rise of feminist studies as an acknowledged mode of cultural criticism.50 Of greater relevance here, however, in the light of our interest in responses generated from within the mainstream Christian churches, is the enrollment of Julian to lend weight to the late twentieth-century movement for women’s ordained ministry. In 1992, the Movement for Whole Ministry in the Scottish Episcopal Church (MWMSEC) published Julian for Today, an expanded transcript of a talk given two years earlier by Susan Cole-King, an American Episcopalian priest. In this talk, Dr. Cole-King draws out those elements in Julian’s theology purportedly of relevance to the cause of women’s ministry. In addition to valorizing Julian’s stress on Christ’s humanity and suffering, she also cites her understanding of the Trinity—Julian’s references to Christ as our mother—and uses these to assert her as the forerunner of an “integrated,” “feminine” spirituality staging a challenge to hierarchical, patriarchal models of the Trinity, a challenge that is only now coming to full fruition with the advent of a new millennium. Julian’s mobilization to serve the cause of women’s ordained ministry exemplifies the continued strength of the church’s desire to discern historical sources of authority for unprecedented courses of action, even though it may not be articulated within the institution in quite those terms. More recently, following the success of the movement for women’s ordination in Anglican and Episcopalian circles, Julian’s use as a guarantor of authority and value has shifted to other, less obviously Christian, spheres of operation. Julian furtively offers her encouragement to Christian socialism. Julian underwrites the movement for women’s ordination. It was only to be expected that at some point the psychological side of her activities as an anchoress—her expertise as a counselor, her insights into our motivations for acting—would succeed in attracting some attention. Llewelyn, pioneer of so many strands within the modern religious reception of Julian, lays the foundation in his well-received 1982 book, With Pity Not with Blame. Here, he links Julian extensively with the insights of Jung (“I have often thought that if Julian were living today she would fi nd much in Jung to attract her”), interpreting her emphasis on attaining knowledge of God through the knowledge of the soul or self as a Christian foresaying of the Jungian precept of accepting and befriending our unconscious, and reading her meditation on the human tendency to erect barriers against God through self-accusation as an anticipation of the Jungian theory of personae or masks, whereby we create for ourselves an overrigid ego structure that inhibits spiritual

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growth.51 Later in his book Llewelyn moves to the topic of meditative prayer. He reads the meditative regimes of Julian and the Cloud author as a therapeutic encounter with the subconscious, unearthing memories and imaginations that contribute toward our psychic healing. Similarly, he analyzes the journey or process of meditation with reference to the journey of psychotherapeutic treatment: “It may help to see the Holy Spirit as an all wise psychotherapist who takes his patient now to one point, now to another in the movement towards integration and wholeness.”52 Llewelyn’s methods of reading and analogizing are continued by Brian Thorne, Emeritus Professor of Counselling at the University of East Anglia. Thorne relates Julian to his own practice of “person-centered” therapy, originated by the American psychologist, Carl Rogers, in which the client in pain is offered empathetic understanding, respect, and love. Thorne parallels the relation between the psychotherapist and client within this therapy with the relation that Julian reveals between God and mankind—God does not accuse us, he shows infi nite love for us from the cross—and uses the second relationship to validate the fi rst. Person-centered therapy replays and reactivates God’s unconditional love and respect for us. It works and is transformative, because there is a God who meets with us on identical terms.53 In postulating these parallels and in constructing this validation, Thorne closes a circle that is left incomplete by the therapy’s founding father. Rogers trained for the Christian ministry but abandoned it for psychology, fi nding institutional religion an impediment to his belief in the supremacy of personal experience as a road to wholeness and wisdom.54 Thorne effects a reconciliation between Christianity and psychology, and between the spiritual and professional components of his own daily practice (he is a committed liberal Anglican), by using Julian to bridge the divide. Julian’s revelations stand with, not against, the insights of Rogerian psychology—they are simply alternative languages for talking about the same thing. Finally, to cement this sympathy, Thorne turns to the fictional tactics of Kenneth Leech, imagining Julian and Carl Rogers revelling in heaven.55 Essentially, he offers himself therapy, reintegrating the fractured influences upon his life by placing his spiritual helpmate and professional mentor in harmony together and using the healing, self-affi rming resources of the imagination to position them in a cosmic setting that provides both them and him with sizeable levels of divine approbation.56 It seems to me that these and other recent instances in which Julian’s teachings have been analogized with schools of twentieth-century psychology represent a narrowing in the manner of her reception and function toward greater individualism and also a secularization. Earlier readings of Julian retain a sense of her utility for the church as a whole, or for specific movements or factions within the church—conservative Anglo-Catholicism, the lobby for Christian socialism, the Movement for Women’s Ordained Ministry. By contrast, psychotherapeutic applications of Julian from a Christian standpoint tend to lose sight of the individual’s relation to the larger Christian body and its orientation toward God, asking instead: how can my soul be healed; by what means can my personality become integrated; how can my suppressed instincts be released? The

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effect is one of self-absorption and excessive individualism. Self-giving to God ( Julian’s conclusion) comes a poor second to the front runner of the integrated personality. The Jesuit scholar, Philip Sheldrake, provides a useful critique of this effect when he writes of a present cultural tendency to overidentify holiness with wholeness: “Holiness is not identical with the perfectly psychologically balanced person. . . . Is therapy necessarily the road to holiness?”57 Similarly, while the invocation of Julian can be used to divinize the processes of psychology if we accept Thorne’s assumption that psychology simply offers a secularized account of the workings of God within the soul, the analogy should be treated with caution since it can be all too easily turned on its head. Once the equation has been made, how much more tempting to see Julian’s revelations as a “primitive” account of a journey toward self-knowledge and healing, peopled by deities and fiends that can now be rendered in modern psycho-medical terms of the ego and id, without any further need for recourse to a language of the supernatural. The equation with psychology may strive to retain the integrity of the mystic, but its overall effect is secularizing. God yields place to self; the objective reality of Julian’s visions is thrown open to question. Alongside the broader narrative of Julian’s varying uses within late twentiethcentury spirituality, it is also informative to give specific consideration to the fate of her text in the hands of devotional editors and anthologizers. Far more than any other writer within the English mystical tradition, Julian’s text has been reorganized and reframed to service an extraordinary variety of devotional ends, ironically often moving ever further from its manuscript origins (as selectors pass on modern language versions of the most popular and widely quoted extracts to one another) in the same breath as, in academic circles, the search continues for an ever more comprehensive and precise critical edition of the Revelation.58 Many of these selections abbreviate or shuffle passages from the Revelation to fit a private devotional program of daily readings. The widely sold selection Enfolded in Love: Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich, fi rst published on May 8, 1980, to celebrate Julian’s inclusion in the Church of England Alternative Service Book calendar, offers sixty daily readings that “can either be read straight through . . . or taken page by page as a basis for daily prayer and meditation over a period of two months.”59 Similarly, John Nelson’s Julian of Norwich: Journeys into Joy offers tri-part readings for personal reflection, each designed as a day’s portion of a longer spiritual journey. Other selections reorganize Julian to service more season-specific themes or write her into liturgies designed for congregational usage in church. Stations of the Cross: A Devotion Using the Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich incorporates twelve salient passages from the Revelation into a liturgy designed to be performed before each Station of the Cross. Sr. Ritamary Bradley’s Not for the Wise: The Prayer Texts from Julian of Norwich presents a series of Julian’s references to prayer, broken down into key phrases and bullet points, which may “profitably be read aloud . . . recited rhythmically like a chant . . . read in chorus, or by alternate voices.”60 Often, in the course of shaping these private or corporate devotional selections, Julian’s words are paired with other authoritative texts. Nelson frames his extracts from the Revelation with passages from scripture and the Catechism of the

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Catholic Church, in a bid to press home Julian’s Catholic orthodoxy. The Stations of the Cross aligns extracts from the Revelation with the official scriptures of each Station, supplementing the bare factualism of the biblical accounts with additional affective comments that generate an amplified, more emotionally engaged way of “seeing.” On occasion, these additional comments extend beyond amplification toward a radical recoloring of the overt meaning of the Gospel passage. Christ’s meeting with the women of Jerusalem, in which he calls on them to lament for themselves and for their children, is softened and mitigated by Julian’s corollary: “do not be too downcast by the sin that overcomes you against your will . . . our Lord looks on his servant with pity, not with blame.”61 Even more revisionist, Christ’s several falls beneath the weight of the cross are bracketed with Julian’s writings upon the fall of Adam and our own descent into sin. The reordering of Julian to suit theme or season may bring additional clarity to her thinking on prayer, or on creation, or on motherhood.62 In other respects it is detrimental, sidelining parts of the revelations seen as off-putting, “strange,” or overly Catholic in character. Many of the devotional selections retain very little sense of Julian’s prolonged “seeing” of Christ in agony on the cross, the springboard of the crucifi x, the fascination with Christ’s blood, her wish for a sickness that would bring her to the brink of death, and her worried analysis of the complex overlaying of “gostly” and bodily sights. The features of Julian’s visions that attach her to a particular late-medieval devotional moment, which historicize her, are, in effect, painstakingly discarded. Similarly, the reordering of Julian to suit theme or season acts to obfuscate the narrative chronology of her visions and the evolving process of her responses to them: the way in which she thinks and rethinks what they might mean and through which we are made party to the progress and refi nement of her visionary hermeneutics. All this disappears. What remains—a string of brief aphorisms or significantly shuffled extracts—is made to seem much more static, far less contingent, far less of a work in progress. With stasis comes incontestability. Several of the devotional anthologists treat Julian’s sayings as akin to “text relics”: “words . . . charged with the life and power and the healing of eternity.”63 Bradley’s suggestion that they be sung or chanted aloud in a group setting brings to mind the recitation of sacred scriptures in various religious traditions. Elsewhere, Upjohn identifies the Revelation as a site of confl ict between God and the devil, detailing the spiritual opposition she perceives to Julian’s message being released into the world.64 The idea inherent in all these approaches: that Julian’s text contains God in some way, that it is a product of divine inspiration, and a source of spiritual power gives it a very close affi nity to the Bible. It can therefore come as no surprise to fi nd several of these anthologists pondering the process of reading Julian and lighting on a method distinctly akin to the practice of lectio divina or meditative reading. The introduction to Enfolded in Love states that Julian’s words are intended to be “savoured slowly and . . . allowed to dissolve in the heart.”65 Bradley, quite independently, also employs the language of savouring the text and of allowing it to root and bear fruit.66 This language of reading as eating, and the nutritive and generative expectations that it engenders about the text, bears comparison

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with the monastic practice of ruminatio, in which scriptural verses are turned over thoughtfully within the mouth before being drawn into the “gostly” body, as well as replicating the sensory vocabulary of taste and mastication that marks late medieval devotional engagement with the Bible. In addition, the highlighting of keywords to facilitate meditative cross-referencing between different passages of the Revelation (Bradley’s practice in Not for the Wise) also models another expectation of lectio divina: that contemplation upon a scriptural verse should activate within the reader a set of intertextual memories of verses with similar themes or vocabularies drawn from the narrative of the Bible as a whole. Julian has been constructed in many ways within the contemporary church to meet many different agendas. She has been found a saint of postwar healing and a figurehead for ecumenism. She has been interpreted, strenuously, to fit within a Christian revolutionary mold. She has inspired two different kinds of communal response—both initially envisaged as “religious orders”—the fi rst, a mushrooming network of informal meditation groups, disavowing any doctrinal or structural specificity; the second, a disciplined monastic regime, using Julian’s name to lend auctoritas to a trenchantly conservative variant of highchurch Anglo-Catholicism. More recently, she has been utilized to lend support to movements for women’s ordination, and her counsel and consolations have been paralleled with the methods of various twentieth-century schools of psychotherapy. Alongside these constructions, devotional editors and anthologists have reworked her visions in ways that imply their comparability to scripture. Despite the seesawing in institutional agendas—liberal versus conservative figurations of Julian, feminist versus Catholic—many of these constructions share certain key traits in common. She is repeatedly set against the ethos of her age, the embodiment of an optimistic spirit at odds with the severity and pessimism of late-medieval Christianity.67 There is a Protestant agenda at work here and the wish to dehistoricize: it is of no value to place her within her historical moment because she is so intrinsically different from that moment. She is identified with the body. Devotional respondents of all stripes repeatedly single out Julian’s insight into God’s love and acceptance of the excreting body for admiring comment. Her very real emphasis upon God’s redemption of “oure sensualite”68 is heightened to form one of her trademarks in an Anglican and Catholic milieu bent on countering contemporary tendencies toward gnosticism by robust counter-declamations of an incarnational spirituality.69 She is aligned with the experiential. That is, the experiential basis of her insight into God is played up and other textual and institutional bases played down in order to vindicate the primarily experiential thrust of many modern spiritualities and psychotherapies.70 She speaks to us down the centuries; she is transparent. Bradley describes her “sharing with us what she learned about prayer . . . invit[ing] us to enter . . . [a] dynamic universe of prayer.” 71 The comforting assumption that visionary spirituality speaks with one voice and expresses one eternal truth, regardless of place or time, is staged ever more fervently, even desperately, in a postmodern era in which, as Grace Jantzen says, after Heidegger and Derrida, we can no longer presume that it is possible to have direct access to Julian or to the real.72

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She is evaluated as simple (this is one of the most widespread assessments in modern devotional thinking on Julian), very possibly as a consequence of the lines in T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, which fi rst brought Julian to the attention of a twentieth-century audience: “Quick now, here, now, always—/ A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything) / And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well.” 73 Thus, Kenneth Leech makes simplicity one of the three key features of Julian’s relevance to the present day.74 O.J.N. literature eulogizes Julian as simple and direct, humble and light-fi lled. John Nelson credits Julian with “reveal[ing] a way for us of loving simplicity . . . the way of a child of God in the peace and joy which Jesus promised us and which a worldly, adult sophistication can never understand.” 75 The dangers of this assessment come across most clearly from the last quotation: the accolade of simplicity is a licence to infantilize. In common with the reception of many other female visionaries, both in their own time and now, the challenge of Julian’s writing is managed by keeping her safely childlike and artless. Against this, a small minority of modern exegetes have reinstated her intellectual capacity by writing farreachingly of her powers as a theologian. Rowan Williams names her one of the greatest theological prophets of the church’s history; Thomas Merton brackets her with Newman as “the greatest English theologian.” 76 Finally, she is constructed in what I can only describe as “providentialist” terms. She is spoken of as “saved up for our generation” and as “naturally” belonging to our time (a convenient erasure here of seventeenth-century Benedictine traffic with Julian’s text). Her message, we are told, has been under wraps for 600 years, because it would not have been understood. We are the fi rst generation who could receive her message.77 There are fascinating inferences to be drawn here: the perception that Julian’s wisdom in some way corresponds to hoarded riches, stored out of harm’s way until a worthy generation with unprecedented hermeneutic skills emerges; and the way that this, in turn, instates us as a spiritually elect generation—it might even be said, as inheritors of a promise—whose election relies upon our ability adequately to decode and revivify the past. Twenty-five years ago, the Canadian Anglican priest, Herbert O’Driscoll, wrote: “Julian is not only a great lady of the past; she is also a great woman in our future. What Thomas Merton was to spirituality in the 1960s and 1970s, Julian of Norwich will be to the 1980s and 1990s.”78 As well as being saved up for the present, Julian is also projected into the future—into some spiritually golden future time when her ideas on the multigendering of Christ, or the wrathlessness of God, or the universality of salvation, or the validity of female ordination will fi nally gain general acceptance, depending upon what liberalizing agenda lies uppermost. I began this essay by citing Julian’s increasing importance to Thomas Merton: “She gets greater and greater in my eyes as I grow older.” Note with what sleight of hand O’Driscoll inverts the chronology. Rather than Julian simply influencing Merton, she is now his successor. Rather than feeding Merton’s spiritual profundity, she now lies ahead of him. For O’Driscoll and other churchmen of similar tendencies, the past is something we are still aiming for. And Julian is constructed as something we have not yet managed to attain—a point of aspiration within the spiritual landscape of the future toward which we are invited to draw.

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Notes 1. Thomas Merton, Seeds of Destruction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), pp. 274–75. 2. The Church of St. Julian of Norwich at Ballajura in Western Australia, cited in Circles of Stillness: Thoughts on Contemplative Prayer from the Julian Meetings, ed. Hilary Wakeman (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002), p. 11. 3. See Betty Roe, Make All Things Well: SSAA Unaccompanied (London: Thames, 1992). 4. Gayle Margherita, The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), p. 6. 5. VE Day took place on May 7 and 8, 1945. Robert Llewelyn, “Woman of Consolation and Strength,” in Julian: Woman of Our Day, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), p. 130 [121–39]. It should be noted that in the Roman Catholic Benedictine calendars that include Julian, her feast day is celebrated on May 13. The two different dates for the feast day are due to a discrepancy between the manuscripts of the Long Text. The Paris Manuscript states that the revelation occurred on the xiii day of May, but the Sloane Manuscript cites the viii day. 6. Robert Llewelyn, With Pity Not with Blame: Reflections on the Writings of Julian of Norwich and on the Cloud of Unknowing (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982), p. 1. 7. ARCIC I, the Anglican-Catholic International Commission, set up to investigate paths toward unity, was established in 1970. It was commissioned by Archbishop Michael Ramsey at the 1968 Lambeth Conference and by Pope Paul VI through the Vatican Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. 8. The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 163. The anniversary was commemorated by exhibitions, celebration liturgies, and various publications, including Julian and Her Norwich: Commemorative Essays and Handbook to the Exhibition “Revelations of divine love,” ed. Frank Dale Sayer (Norwich: Julian of Norwich Celebration Committee, 1973). 9. “Revelation of Love,” 1.9, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 155. 10. Frank Dale Sayer, “Who Was Mother Julian?” in Julian and Her Norwich: Commemorative Essays and Handbook to the Exhibition “Revelations of divine love,” ed. Frank Dale Sayer (Norwich: Julian of Norwich Celebration Committee, 1973), p. 9 [5–9]. 11. A.M. Allchin, “Julian of Norwich and the Continuity of Tradition,” in Julian: Woman of Our Day, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), p. 28 [27–40]. 12. The Anglo-Catholic leanings of the Julian Cell are clearly apparent. The Cell’s former chaplain, Robert Llewelyn, recommends a revised rosary, based upon devotions to Jesus rather than the traditional Marian focus, in With Pity Not with Blame: The Spirituality of Julian of Norwich and The Cloud of Unknowing for Today, 3rd rev. ed. (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994), pp. 136–37. 13. Allchin, “Julian of Norwich,” in Julian: Woman of Our Day, p. 32. 14. Kenneth Leech, “Contemplative and Radical: Julian Meets John Ball,” in Julian: Woman of Our Day, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), pp. 92–96 [89–101]. 15. Llewelyn, With Pity Not with Blame (1982), pp. 117–23. Additionally, several essays in the two volumes of ref lections published by the Julian Meetings, Circles of

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16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

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Stillness, ed. Wakeman and Circles of Silence: Explorations in Prayer with Julian Meetings, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994), advocate the Jesus Prayer as a useful contemplative technique. Hilary Wakeman, “Beginnings . . . ,” in Circles of Silence: Explorations in Prayer with Julian Meetings, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994), pp. 4–6 [4–11]. Wakeman, “Beginnings . . . ,” in Circles of Silence, pp. 7–8. Circles of Silence, ed. Llewelyn and Circles of Stillness, ed. Wakeman. Wakeman, “Beginnings . . . ,” in Circles of Silence, p. 6. Hebe Welbourn writes at some length on this in “The Spirituality of Julian Meetings and Other Contemplative Networks,” in Circles of Stillness: Thoughts on Contemplative Prayer from the Julian Meetings, ed. Hilary Wakeman (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002), pp. 136–41. Liz Tyndall, “JM Spirituality,” in Circles of Stillness: Thoughts on Contemplative Prayer from the Julian Meetings, ed. Hilary Wakeman (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002), pp. 131–32 [131–36]. John Richards, “Christian and Buddhist,” in Circles of Silence: Explorations in Prayer with Julian Meetings, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994), pp. 136–38. Gillean Russell, “Christian Zen,” in Circles of Stillness: Thoughts on Contemplative Prayer from the Julian Meetings, ed. Hilary Wakeman (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002), pp. 30–31. Hebe Welbourn, “Prayer in the Body,” in Circles of Stillness: Thoughts on Contemplative Prayer from the Julian Meetings, ed. Hilary Wakeman (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2002), pp. 34–35. Llewelyn, With Pity Not with Blame (1982), pp. 106–16, 123–26. There are also some essays within the academic tradition that pursue this alignment: for example, Katharine Watson, “The Cloud of Unknowing and Vedanta,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1982), pp. 76–101. The international interfaith movement goes back to the 1890s, when the World Parliament of Religions was held for the first time in Chicago in 1893. Significant early twentieth-century initiatives include the establishment of the World Congress of Faiths in 1936. Interest in interfaith ideas grew in momentum through the 1960s, causing Pope Paul VI to instate a new Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue in 1964. Marcus Braybrooke provides a useful history of the movement in Pilgrimage of Hope: One Hundred Years of Global Interfaith Dialogue (London: SCM Press, 1992). Philip Sheldrake, S.J., Spirituality and History (London: SPCK, 1991), pp. 90–93, offers a useful analysis of the way in which older histories of spirituality, for example, the writings of Louis Bouyer and Jean Leclercq, assume a single masternarrrative of spiritual experience and expression, transcending distinctions of time and culture. Wakeman, “Beginnings . . . ,” in Circles of Silence, p. 5. Kenneth Leech, “Contemplation and Resistance,” in Circles of Silence: Explorations in Prayer with Julian Meetings, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994), pp. 100, 103 [99–104]. The landmark report, Faith in the City: A Call for Action by Church and Nation (London: Church House, 1985), was published by the Church of England Commission on Urban Priority Areas.

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31. Kenneth Leech, “Hazelnut Theology: Its Potential and Perils,” in Kenneth Leech and Sr. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., Julian Reconsidered (Oxford: Sisters of the Love of God Press, 1988), pp. 6–7 [1–9]. 32. These category headings are used to organize Leech’s essay, “Hazelnut Theology,” in Julian Reconsidered, pp. 1–9. 33. Leech, “Contemplative and Radical,” in Julian: Woman of Our Day, pp. 89–101. 34. Leech, “Contemplative and Radical,” in Julian: Woman of Our Day, p. 99. Because it is stretching the bounds of credibility even to imagine that this meeting could have taken place, Leech closes by lifting the encounter to a purely tropological register: we must unite Julian and John Ball, the contemplative and the radical prophet, within our own souls to attain a Christian standpoint appropriate to the modern age. Rowan Williams makes not dissimilar comments, albeit without the helpmates of fiction and allegory, in “Action and Contemplation: A False Antithesis,” in Circles of Silence: Explorations in Prayer with Julian Meetings, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994), pp. 156–59. 35. Leech, “Hazelnut Theology,” in Julian Reconsidered, p. 5; “Revelation of Love,” 1.5, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 139. 36. Sheila Upjohn, Why Julian Now? A Voyage of Discovery (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997), p. 132. 37. Shawn Madison Kahmer, “Redemptive Suffering: The Life of Alice of Schaerbeek,” in Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, ed. Louise D’Arcens and Juanita Feros Ruys (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp. 267–94, finds the value placed in medieval spiritual guidance writing on obedience and passive suffering a poor role model for contemporary women encountering domestic abuse within marriage. Kirsi Stjerna writes of her wish to shield her daughter from the extreme ascetic practices and anorectic behaviors of medieval female visionaries: “Medieval Women’s Stories: Stories for Women Today,” in Women Christian Mystics Speak to Our Times, ed. David B. Perrin, O.M.I. (Franklin, WI: Sheed & Ward, 2001), pp. 37–52. 38. Rev. Jack Robert Burton, “After the Festival,” in Julian and Her Norwich: Commemorative Essays and Handbook to the Exhibition “Revelations of divine love,” ed. Frank Dale Sayer (Norwich: Julian of Norwich Celebration Committee, 1973), pp. 36–38. 39. Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, Mystic and Theologian, 2nd ed. (London: SPCK, 2000), pp. xxii–xxiii. 40. It was subsequently relocated in two houses in Wisconsin. In 1997 it was accorded formal canonical recognition by the Committee on Religious Orders of the House of Bishops of the American Episcopal Church. 41. Benedicta Ward describes how, from Julian’s seventeenth-century Benedictine copyist to Colledge and Walsh, her Augustinian and Jesuit editors of the midtwentieth century, “every effort has been made to place her in the tradition of . . . [the] monastic orders.” “Julian the Solitary,” in Kenneth Leech and Sr. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., Julian Reconsidered (Oxford: Sisters of the Love of God Press, 1988), p. 13 [11–29]. 42. A Lesson of Love: The Revelations of Julian of Norwich, ed. and trans. Fr. John-Julian, O.J.N. (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1988), p. x, my italics. 43. John Swanson, O.J.N., “Guide for the Inexpert Mystic,” in Julian: Woman of Our Day, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), pp. 77–78 [75–88]. Swanson idealizes the Middle Ages in terms that ref lect the neo-Scholastic Catholic revival of the first half of the twentieth century. For an

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44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

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important analysis of this revival, see Philip Gleason, Keeping the Faith: American Catholicism Past and Present (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987), pp. 11–34. Lesson of Love, ed. John-Julian, pp. ix, xi. Nevertheless, the Order includes ordained women amongst its members. JuliaNews 21.1 (Lent 2005). JuliaNews 21.1 (Lent 2005). Elizabeth Ruth Obbard, O.D.C., “God Alone Suffices,” in Julian: Woman of Our Day, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), pp. 102–20. See also Circles of Silence, ed. Llewelyn, pp. 126–29. Julian of Norwich: Journeys into Joy, ed. John Nelson (New York: New City Press, 2001), pp. 16–18. Journeys into Joy, ed. Nelson, p. 19. Grace Jantzen has written extensively on Julian from the standpoint of feminist theology in Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian and Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion 8 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Liz Herbert McAvoy brings feminist theory to bear on her interpretation of Julian in Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2004). Llewelyn, With Pity Not with Blame (1982), pp. 48, 36–50. Llewelyn, With Pity Not with Blame (1982), p. 110. Brian Thorne, Infinitely Beloved: The Challenge of Divine Intimacy (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2003), pp. 7–21. Thorne, Infinitely Beloved, p. 14. Thorne, Infinitely Beloved, p. 14. Similar psychotherapeutic readings include Jane F. Maynard, “The Contribution of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations to Finding Religious and Spiritual Meaning in AIDS-related Multiple Loss,” in Women Christian Mystics Speak to Our Times, ed. David B. Perrin, O.M.I. (Franklin, WI: Sheed & Ward, 2001), pp. 89–107. Maynard configures Julian as a survivor of plague-related loss and describes her visions as “a creative act of the religious imagination enabl[ing] her to heal from traumatic loss” (p. 90). She then attempts to use Julian’s strategies of self-healing to help amend the grief of AIDS survivors. Daniel J. Rogers, “Psychotechnical Approaches to the Teaching of the Cloud Author and to the Showings of Julian of Norwich,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1982, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1982), pp. 143–60, reads Julian’s visions as autohypnosis in which she manages to rid herself of her intense illness by intuitively discovering a synthetic use of both hemispheres of the brain (pp. 150–51). Martin Israel, The Revelations of Julian of Norwich: A Meditation (Louth, UK: The Churches’ Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies, 2000), reads Julian’s visions as products of her psychic sensitivity and glosses her perception of salvation as “a . . . progressive process in which the whole personality is integrated, and the person begins to partake of the Divine nature” (p. 14). Philip Sheldrake, Images of Holiness (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1987), pp. 28–29, my italics. For example, the liturgical compilation, Stations of the Cross: A Devotion Using the Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich (Norwich: Friends of Julian of Norwich, 2001), acquires all its Julian extracts from All Shall be Well: Revelations

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59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

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of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich, abridged and arranged by Sheila Upjohn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1992). Enfolded in Love: Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich, trans. Members of the Julian Shrine (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1980), back cover. This book has subsequently been reissued in three editions in 1994, 1999, and 2004, edited by Robert Llewelyn with the assistance of Michael McLean and with Julian’s text translated by Sheila Upjohn. The book has since been translated into six languages and has sold over 120,000 copies worldwide. Not for the Wise: The Prayer Texts from Julian of Norwich, ed. Ritamary Bradley (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994), p. ix. Stations of the Cross, p. 19. Ritamary Bradley’s Julian’s Way: A Practical Commentary on Julian of Norwich (London: Harper Collins, 1992) compiles extracts from the Revelation beneath such headings as “Julian on Women,” “Julian at Prayer,” “Julian Beholds Creation: i) the Hazelnut Image ii) Mary, Fullness of Creation” (p. vii). The Gift of Julian of Norwich, ed. Karen Manton, illustrated by Lynne Muir (Leominster, UK: Gracewing, 2005), groups brief aphorisms from the Revelation into chapters entitled “I it am that is All,” “Three Persons, One Truth,” “Mind of the Passion,” and so on. Enfolded in Love, p. 62. Upjohn, Why Julian Now? pp. 82, 86. Enfolded in Love, p. vi. Not for the Wise, ed. Bradley, p. x. See Llewelyn, With Pity Not with Blame (1982), p. 21: “into [the medieval church’s] climate of theological cheerlessness and doom Julian’s message burst like a joyous song”; Lesson of Love, ed. John-Julian, p. vi: “[ Julian] stand[s] over against the pessimism and sin-absorption of the popular theology of much of the Middle Ages”; Susan M. Cole-King, Julian for Today (Musselburgh, UK: Movement for Whole Ministry in the Scottish Episcopal Church, 1992), p. 8. “Revelation of Love,” 14.55, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 299. Sheldrake, Images of Holiness, p. 38; Leech, “Hazelnut Theology,” in Julian Reconsidered, pp. 4–5. Thorne, Infinitely Beloved, pp. 15–16, 20; Swanson, “Guide for the Inexpert Mystic,” in Julian: Woman of Our Day, pp. 86–87. Julian’s association with the experiential underpins her use by the Julian Meetings, themselves based on an entirely experiential encounter; Sheldrake identifies an emphasis upon the experiential in contemporary Christian spirituality, Spirituality and History, pp. 51–52. Not for the Wise, ed. Bradley, pp. x, xvi. See also Gift of Julian, ed. Manton and Muir, p. 6: “her wisdom crosses many human-made boundaries of her day and ours.” Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, pp. xv–xvi. T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in Collected Poems 1909–1935 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), p. 145. Leech, “Hazelnut Theology,” in Julian Reconsidered, p. 2. Journeys into Joy, ed. Nelson, p. 17. Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1990), pp. 142–43; Merton, Seeds of Destruction, p. 275. See also Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (London: Burns and Oates, 1968), pp. 191–92.

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77. Cole-King, Julian for Today, p. 7; Michael McLean, introduction to Julian: Woman of Our Day, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), p. 2 [1–10]; Allchin, “Julian of Norwich,” in Julian: Woman of Our Day, pp. 27–28; Lesson of Love, ed. John-Julian, p. xvii: “She has lain quiet and still for 600 years, contemplatively awaiting the moment when the world’s needs would call her again from the Avalon of her anchorhold cell.” 78. Quoted in Lesson of Love, ed. John-Julian, p. v.

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CHAPTER 9 JULIAN IN NORWICH: HERITAGE AND ICONOGRAPHY Sarah Salih

This chapter examines the variations in representations of Julian in visual and material culture in Norwich.

T

he text, or multitext, attributed to a “devoute woman . . . Julian, that is recluse atte Norwiche,” is full of vividly described “shewinges”—the servant’s white tunic stained with sweat, the devil’s tile-red face—and draws extensively on the visual arts of late-medieval England.1 Its extant manuscript witnesses, however, are visually restrained, with decoration confined to elaborated capitals.2 It is unlikely that the lost early manuscripts had any more visual detail: no other Middle English mystical text survives in an illuminated manuscript, a generic characteristic that helps to distinguish them from texts of affective devotion such as Nicholas Love’s version of pseudo-Bonaventure, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, of which several luxuriously illuminated copies survive.3 There are no contemporary or near-contemporary visual depictions of Julian or of the site of her enclosure. Nevertheless, the composite phenomenon that we call “Julian of Norwich” has required, and developed, a visual identity. This chapter examines how “Julian” is encoded in twentieth-century and present-day visual and material culture in Norwich, the city where she lived: how her presence is evoked in the reconstruction of her anchorhold; how she is represented in pictures, sculptures, and artifacts in the Cell and in Norwich Cathedral; and how these representations incorporate interpretations of the text. Julian’s Cell, the chapel in the reconstructed St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, together with the neighboring Julian Centre, is the primary site of such representations (figure 9.1).4 Norwich in Julian’s day was “more than a provincial capital . . . a city of European standing,” a cultural, commercial, and ecclesiastical center with links to northern continental Europe.5 Present-day Norwich, like

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St. Julian’s Church, Norwich. The Julian Cell, interior.

Source: Photo by Sarah Salih.

many of Britain’s regional cities, has looked to tourism to replace its shrunken industrial base and become a “tourist-historic city,” which “sells itself to visitors as a medieval urban experience.”6 Its medieval past is valuable heritage capital. Michael Loveday, chief executive of the city’s Heritage Economic and Regeneration Trust, specifically identified Julian as one of the tokens of cultural value that helped Norwich’s successful application to join the World League of Historical Cities: “We say that Norwich is the best heritage city outside London, there is no other heritage city that has the same range of history—not just buildings but things like the archive centre with major collections and the museums, the fact that the fi rst woman to write a book in English came from Norwich—all this impressed them.” 7 Norwich is full of material traces of the past and makes a concerted effort to identify and market them. In the everyday experience of inhabiting or visiting the city, sites such as the Norman castle, Victorian railway station, and 1990s shopping mall—all of which are shown on a map of the city on the Julian Centre’s publicity leaflet—are effectively coeval. Whatever their age, all are functioning parts of the contemporary city. Heritage discourse introduces a chronology that makes this temporal multiplicity visible, identifying a medieval building as such, rather than as, say, a church, museum, or pub. Heritage thus makes the past manifest in the present. It continually negotiates the tension between “salvaging the past, and staging it as a visitable experience.”8 This past must be foreign enough to intrigue and familiar enough to access; constructing and consuming heritage are intrinsically interpretative and dialogic activities.

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Sites are, necessarily, reconstructed as they are viewed through this interpretative framework of heritage discourse. The process of the establishment and bridging of historical difference is particularly evident in the case of Julian’s Cell, a modern reconstruction that erases evidence of the historical ruptures of the Reformation and Second World War. Representations of Julian often emphasize temporal dislocation: the text of the Julian Centre’s leaflet, on the obverse of the map that locates the Cell in modern day Norwich, identifies Julian as being “centuries ahead of her time” in her theology. The Cell is a concrete exemplar of this persona’s ambivalent relation to history: it is what Pierre Nora terms a “memory-place,” constructed in order to generate and channel thoughts about the past.9 St. Julian’s Church was bombed in 1942, and the medieval cell itself had disappeared centuries earlier, presumably during the Reformation. The church and Cell were rebuilt in 1953, in the vanguard of Norwich’s re/construction as a historic city, a process dated by G.J. Ashworth and J.E. Tunbridge from the proposal of area conservation measures in 1958.10 St. Julian’s was not needed as a parish church in a city already amply supplied with churches, but it was reconstructed, as the Bishop of Norwich announced at its dedication, “in thanksgiving for the life and work of Dame Julian of Norwich.”11 The new Cell was thus from its inception a memory-place, constructed in denial, or defiance, of history’s best efforts to destroy the site. The rebuilt Cell is attached to the south wall of the church. Intermittently, this location is queried with reference to the evidence of Francis Blomefield, who reported in 1768 that “In the east part of this churchyard stood an anchorage, in which an ankeress or recluse dwelt till the Dissolution, when the house was demolished, though the foundations may still be seen.”12 In 1973 F.I. Dunn referred to the question as a long-standing dispute and opined that Blomefield was right to identify the anchorhold as a detached building; in 1984 Ronald Fiske, a local amateur historian (and persistent skeptic on matters Julian, who was later to argue that as female authorship of such a complex English text was unprecedented, it was probably the work of the Carmelite Thomas Scrope), again raised the question in correspondence with Michael McLean, then the rector of St. Julian’s.13 There was certainly a structure against the southeastern wall of the church, of which fragments can be seen in the current Cell. These fragments have been identified by numerous witnesses—Grace Warrack in 1901, Robert Flood in 1936, and the architect responsible for the rebuilding of the church in 1951—as remnants of the cell.14 Unfortunately, none of them recorded their reasons for identifying the remains as of an anchorhold rather than of, say, a chapel. In 1921 Norfolk Archaeology accepted the “two small fragments . . . rediscovered at the last restoration of the Church” as remnants of the anchorhold, but also noted the presence of “many foundations of old walls” in the churchyard.15 These were probably the same as those that Blomefield identified as remains of the anchorhold, so evidently there was also at least one structure in the churchyard. The current site is more likely: the few detached cells that are known to have existed are associated with priest-anchors, who could say their own masses and thus would not require visual access to the altar.16 However, the evidence does not allow for absolute certainty.

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Continuity of site, however, is important to the Cell, even though, or because, the structure itself is, and is generally known to be, a reconstruction: as the Centre’s leaflet states, “Her hermitage was pulled down at the Reformation, but it was rebuilt after wartime bombing.” The two fragments of medieval wall incorporated into the Cell testify both to the continuity and the difference of the two structures. It is obvious that these fragments are other than the current walls, that the Cell is not the cell; but the fragments also encapsulate the presumed continuous history of the location, its medieval origins, destruction during the Reformation, and postwar rebuilding. However, visitors almost always treat the reconstructed space as a real site. The Cell is hyper-real, fitter for present purpose than the historical cell would have been: most visitors fi nd it affectively engaging, a temporally thick location that permits prayer and contemplation. Typical comments in the visitors’ book include “power of silence,” “calming and restorative,” and “a peaceful oasis.”17 As a historical site, it is what David Brown calls a “genuine fake,” a reconstruction that nevertheless “arouses deep and genuine feelings.”18 However, it is also, indeed primarily, a contemporary place of Christian worship. The visitor leaflet of St. Julian’s Church describes it as “not a replica hermitage, but a chapel known as the cell,” and a regular program of services is held there.19 Thus Julian’s Cell spans medieval and modern in its dual function as both a heritage and a pilgrimage site. Pilgrimage and tourism are more similar than different: as Victor and Edith Turner put it, “a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist.”20 Tourism and pilgrimage share external forms. Time is taken out of daily life to travel to a location that is marked as significant; associated activities may include the formation of temporary communities of fellow travelers, the acquisition of souvenirs, and recounting narratives of the journey. Heritage tourism is particularly close in form to pilgrimage: both focus on sites that stage encounters between past and present. There is a tendency for heritage sites to frame the past in such a way as to set it apart from the present day, and for pilgrimage sites to emphasize the continued presence of the past, but this is a difference of emphasis rather than kind. Most religious heritage sites attract secular as well as devotional visitors, and Julian’s Cell is no exception.21 An individual, indeed, may combine the roles of pilgrim and tourist, finding that a site stimulates both pious and aesthetic responses. Information within the Cell itself is limited to a poster on the wall. Leaflets and literature are available in the church and the Centre, but their absence from the Cell implies that it is a space for contemplation rather than historical study. The Cell is furnished as a chapel, and so, perhaps mindful of Ancrene Wisse’s rebuke to those who are inquisitive about the anchoress’s sleeping quarters, has no heritage-style reproductions of domestic furnishings.22 Some aspects of its décor, however, appear to be informed by medieval anchoritic literature. In the case of an anchorhold, historical accuracy, paradoxically, requires it to be devoid of the kind of decorative scheme that might visually identify it as medieval: Aelred of Rievaulx instructed that a cell should not be furnished with “paintings or carvings . . . hangings decorated with birds or animals or flowers.”23 The furnishing of the altar, covered with a white cloth to “betoken chastity and display simplicity” and with a “representation of our Savior hanging on the Cross”

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conforms to Aelred’s recommendations.24 There are two of the three windows detailed in Ancrene Wisse, one that connects to the church and one to the outside, corresponding to the recluse’s roles as participant in religious ritual and to her interaction with the wider community, a role attested in Julian’s case in the Book of Margery Kempe.25 Julian literature typically imagines this window as the sole point of contact: the information sheet in the Cell explains that “From the window of her cell, too, she gave counsel and comfort to the burdened and the perplexed”; and the Order of Julian of Norwich names its electronic interface with the wider community “Julian’s Window” and visually identifies it with a photograph of the exterior window of the current building.26 The third, interior, window—which would have no function in a modern chapel—is omitted and with it is lost any detailed sense of the anchorhold in its social and domestic aspects, and of the recluse as “head of a small household.”27 The likely interior division of the anchorhold into private and semipublic zones, where visitors, or Julian’s servant, attested in wills of 1404 and 1415, might have been placed, is obscured.28 Julian probably did allow selected visitors into parts of the cell through a door. Ancrene Wisse envisaged an anchorhold with gates, “ʒeten,” beyond which the servants should go only on the anchoress’s instructions.29 Margery Kempe reported in detail “þe holy dalyawns þat þe ankres & þis creatur haddyn be comownyng in þe lofe of owyr Lord Ihesu Crist many days þat þei were to-gedyr” [the holy conversation that the anchoress and the creature had by sharing the love of our Lord Jesus Christ for the many days that they were together], which would be difficult to manage through a window.30 However, in the current building, it is easy to discount the modern doorway, as the guidebook urges, “of course there would not have been a door here when the cell was used as an anchorage,” and imagine a sealed space.31 This layout probably exerts an influence on the construction of historical scenarios and reinforces the prevailing assumption that contact occurred only through the exterior window. The Cell thus continues and concretizes the medieval rhetoric of anchoritism as enclosure and isolation rather than attempting to display the historical practice of an anchoritic cell that might on occasion be accessible to outsiders. The visual emphasis of the Cell thus falls on continuity of worship at the site rather than on Julian in her specific late-medieval moment. Such continuity of worship is itself, of course, a construction based, in this instance, on historical foreshortening. The Cell’s visual style, described by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins as “High Anglican medievalism, all cool lines and tranquility,” constructs its fourteenth century in accordance with a present-day religious aesthetic.32 The preference for contemporary over replica-medieval décor visually implies a Julian who was always already an Anglican in waiting. Its minimalist aesthetic distinguishes it from Catholic pilgrimage sites. In an unpublished poem Tony Lucas celebrates the absence of precisely the kind of Catholic sacred objects that made up Julian’s own material environment: Here is no gilded clutter, fusty relics, Clouding the straight plainness of her shrine; No painting of her life in stilted tableaux.33

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Any representation, it seems, would be inadequate: Julian must be approached through negation. Lucas’s poem feels the loss of the original cell to be fortuitous, or providential, because it ensures that connection with Julian cannot be made in the Catholic style, through bodily adoration of contact relics, nor in a historicist encounter with the material traces of the past, but must operate in a disembodied, Protestant mode. No one can kiss the ground she knelt on, lift a f lake of plaster where she might have pressed her head It would be fine to think that it was some good providence obliges us to use our imagination and her words instead. 34

For Lucas the Cell’s very emptiness produces a more powerful affect of connection with Julian than a historical reconstruction could. The ahistoricist tenor of the reconstruction accords with the ahistoricist reading of Julian often favored by the Centre’s associates, evident in titles such as Why Julian Now?, Mind out of Time, and Julian: Woman of our Day.35 The personcentered therapist Brian Thorne, for example, argued in his Julian Lecture that “it is only in our era that the full significance of her experiences is gradually emerging.”36 Fr. John-Julian, the founder of the Order of Julian of Norwich, regards Julian as having transcended history by abstracting herself from her own historical circumstances.37 It is thus in keeping that some present-day devotees should likewise abstract her from a late-medieval moment luridly depicted as a “mad crumbling world” of schism, rebellion, repression, and heresy.38 The Julian Cell transcends space as well as time, by being the focal point of a virtual community. On a recent visit, in April 2008, I had the Cell to myself, but eight votive candles, ranging from just lit to almost extinguished, mutely testified to the presence of previous visitors. A lamp near the internal window is dedicated to the Order of Julian of Norwich in the United States. Prayer requests, some E-mailed from afar, are pinned to a board in the church, inviting the visitor to take action to join the community by saying a prayer or adding their own request. Although the Cell is visibly not a heritage-style restaging of the past “within separate and hermetically sealed enclosures,” it nevertheless produces a similar effect of removal from normal temporality.39 The idea that the anchoritic space is outside of time can be traced to the late-medieval anchoritic literature itself, to, for example, Ancrene Wisse’s description of the cell as womb and tomb.40 The Cell is like an airlock between medieval and modern, enabling the visitor to feel coeval with a Julian imagined as having a special address to the present day. Its information poster encourages visitors to treat it as a time-capsule: “In this holy place one can almost hear her.” Visitors testify to the power of the Cell’s affect. As Jean Dale puts it, “The bare stones in their strength and simplicity breathe the very spirit of prayer. . . . This is one of those ‘thin’ places, a sacramental space where Heaven and Earth meet.”41 Everything in the location and material environment of the Cell serves to enhance this effect. St. Julian’s is in a narrow alleyway; the church is not

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visible or signposted from the main roads at either end of the alley, so fi nding it at all has something of the thrill of discovering a secret place. Descriptions often observe its incongruity in the unglamorous modernity of its surroundings. A visitor then passes through the church to a door marked “Mother Julian’s Cell.” The threshold between church and Cell is emphasized by the elaborate Romanesque doorway that frames the entrance to the Cell. The Cell is marked off from the main body of the church by a lower, literally older, floor level, so that to step into the Cell feels like stepping out of the present. One steps down into a space that is extratemporal, or multitemporal—a space like that which Julian occupies as she contemplates all of creation “lying in the palme of my hand.”42 This effect was exploited by a production of Dana Bagshaw’s play, Cell Talk, in September 2005, in which the nave was the main acting area and the Cell, so to speak, played itself: the actor playing Julian emerged from the Cell as if from the past. There is very little to look at or to do in Julian’s Cell. Its furnishings are minimal: there is an altar with candlesticks and a wooden crucifi x; a Virgin and Child sculpture; a sculpted Crucifi xion relief above a shelf for votive candles; the information poster; the interior and exterior windows; and the masonry fragments. All this can be taken in at a glance; even if a visitor lights a candle, reads the poster, and examines each object individually, it does not take above ten minutes. The masonry fragments are mute lumps of medievalness that offer little reward to a historicist gaze, and the devotional artifacts are unremarkable. Anyone who has made the effort to visit the Cell (and the visitors’ book for March 2008 showed visitors from the United States, Australia, and New Zealand as well as several European nations) will want to spend more than ten minutes on the spot to make the effort worthwhile. What most people seem to do at this point is sit on the benches against the west and south walls, and just be in the space. It is quiet; there are usually no other visitors. The door to the church is shut, to conserve heat. The church is on one side and a garden on the other, but both windows are placed too high for a person seated on the bench to see anything clearly through them. So there is nothing to see, except the shifting light through the window, and nothing to hear except the weather. The very lack of outside stimulus means that there is now nothing to do but think, and the cues in the building prompt thoughts on enclosure, on the sequence of recluses who occupied the site, on Julian’s visionary access to God. The material conditions thus induce imitation of anchoritic enclosure and contemplation even in visitors motivated by historical or secular curiosity. The Cell turns tourists into pilgrims: this is what accounts for its success as what Foucault terms a “heterotopia,” a site “outside of all places” in which normal time is suspended.43 The site produces a sense of Julian’s presence by inducing performative imitation of her. Awareness of Julian thus feels like a direct, visionary contact, unmediated through representations. The window between Cell and church depicts Julian kneeling before a lily crucifi x, her hands extended in a gesture that conveys both worship and astonishment, while “All Shall Be Well” unfolds on the scroll above her (figure 9.2). The window is an inventive and site-specific image, which represents not the exterior circumstances of Julian’s vision, but its internal content, in a place outside

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Figure 9.2 St. Julian’s Church, Norwich. “All Shall Be Well” window, by Dennis King and Sons. 1953. Source: Used by permission of the Julian Shrine, Norwich.

of normal time and space. The viewer looks both at and through the window, which has a substantial area of clear glass. Looking through its lower lights one sees the chalice and host motif of the window in the north wall of the church. The Eucharistic body of Christ in the church window is thus visibly aligned with the crucified body in the Cell’s interior window. In looking through from the Cell into the church, the viewer doubly imitates Julian’s looking. One imitates

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the gaze of Julian figured in the window itself as she stares at Christ; one imitates the imagined historical Julian, looking through the interior window at the Mass in the church. That defi ning act of tourism, site-seeing, is thus made imitative of Julian’s visionary sightseeing. Theorists of heritage agree that authenticity “has little absolute meaning” but is a myth, or effect.44 It always was. As a reconstruction, the Cell is, paradoxically, in the authentic historical tradition of the East Anglian cult centers of Julian’s day, in particular the region’s most popular shrine, the divinely inspired reconstruction of the Virgin’s house at Walsingham.45 Its authenticity is an effect, produced performatively and communally by an unspoken group agreement to treat the place as real and to make it so by enacting the rituals of devotion. The Cell matters. A visitor who is already a committed Christian, who has already read Julian’s text, may nevertheless fi nd that the experience of being in the Cell produces a sense of engagement with Julian more direct and powerful than is available elsewhere. One such was Ralph Milton, a Canadian Protestant who went on to write a historical novel about Julian: “I was blindsided. I didn’t see her coming or I might have ducked. But there I was, sitting in a small, dreary little chapel off the church of St. Julian’s in the heart of the Norwich red-light district. . . . Time seemed to compress. . . . Can most of an hour simply disappear?”46 The Cell has, as Walter Benjamin puts it, the aura of authenticity, of “unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”47 It has been the site of at least one experience perceived by witnesses as miraculous, as Christiania Whitehead discusses in this volume. Associates of the Julian Centre are currently making plans to form a community of Companions of Julian of Norwich, whose commitment to visit the Cell on at least one occasion in their lives would further consolidate the unique status of the location.48 This aura can be appropriated in the souvenirs sold at the Julian Centre (figure 9.3). Descendents of the medieval pilgrim badge, these allow a trace of the virtu of the site to be retained on return to daily life. These objects can be packed with meaning and made into foci for memories of the visit. Domestic items feature heavily in the Julian-specific souvenirs. There are fridge magnets, wooden spoons with “Julian’s hazelnut” designs, tea-towels, mugs, and candleholders. To buy one of these is to juxtapose a trace of the Cell with the mundane modernity of fridges, electric kettles, and fitted kitchens. The domestic, daily, bodily life eschewed in the reconstruction of the Cell is displaced to the womanly artifacts in the shop. These are decorated with images of Julian and/or snippets of text from the Revelation. The mugs, for example, have a picture based on Norwich Cathedral’s Benedictine window and the text: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” A souvenir such as the mug carries multiple triggers to memory and reflection. It is likely to have been bought at the Julian Centre (for which it is exclusively produced) and thus recall a visit there; the image of the Benedictine window may prompt recollection of that very different site; and it refers to the experience of reading the text. Some Julian commentators disapprove of such objects: the Christian socialist Kenneth Leech, for example, refers to the “danger of wrenching ‘All shall be well . . . ’ from its context . . . and putting it onto little devotional cards,” and I have previously argued

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Figure 9.3 Selection of souvenirs from Julian Centre, Norwich: “All Shall Be Well” mug; “Our Faith Is Light in Darkness” candleholder; St. Saviour’s Chapel window fridge magnet. Source: Photo by Sarah Salih.

that such quotation of isolated fragments obscures the questioning dynamic of the text.49 But these objects could also be considered as the far end of a continuum of packages of Julian’s text that runs through scholarly editions, translations, selections of extracts, to mugs, candleholders, and key-rings. Texts and souvenirs are not entirely distinct categories of object, and even academic editions of the text use images to position themselves in the market. The previous Penguin translation, by Clifton Wolters, had a cover image of Christ with Evangelist symbols from the Amesbury Psalter, while the current version by Elizabeth Spearing has a Rogier van der Weyden portrait of an anonymous woman. The difference reflects a shift between 1966 and 1998 in the contexts in which Julian is most likely to be taught in universities, from Middle English mystics to medieval women writers. The illustrated anthology of extracts entitled The Gift of Julian of Norwich knowingly puns on Julian’s visions as a gift to her, her text as a gift to her fellow Christians, and this edition as a suitable gift-object (figure 9.4).50 It mimics an illuminated manuscript, looking much more like a luxury Book of Hours than a visionary treatise. To readers with some knowledge of such conventions, it implies that the selection of Julian within is suitable for devotional rather than theological reading. To those without such specialist knowledge, it assimilates Julian to a general sense of decorative medievalness, the aesthetic of Past Times and National Trust gift shops. The Gift and the mugs are

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Figure 9.4 Karen Manton and Lynn Muir, The Gift of Julian of Norwich (Leominster: Gracewing, 2005), front cover. Source: Photo by Sarah Salih.

not intended for scholarly reading: Julian’s phrase instead, as Sarah Law argues in this volume, becomes a mantra. If, as devotional selections such as Enfolded in Love recommend, it is a rewarding spiritual exercise to read a daily paragraph of the Revelation, abstracted from its textual and historical contexts, why not reinforce it with a daily encounter with “All shall be well” on crockery?51 If these objects reify Julian’s text, they also sacralize mundane domestic activities. The mug’s text is actually inseparable from its image of Julian in visionary mode; image and text are on opposite sides of the item and cannot be seen simultaneously, so a viewer navigates between them, setting up a dynamic between the visionary experience and its (provisional) outcome, “All shall be well.” Turning the mug around, one moves from question to answer, answer to question. Thus the visionary and questioning context of “All shall be well” is not necessarily lost: it may be packed into the image. Julian is also memorialized in Norwich Cathedral, itself a heritage site of national significance, in a style that shifts her into a more public domain. If the Cell conjures a sense of her presence, the cathedral, a site to which she has no documented connection, deals in representation only. Such representations need to develop a legible code of what Julian looks like. The documentary evidence for Julian is slight, though no more so than for several other writers of the period: she is attested in four wills between 1394 and 1415 and in The Book of Margery Kempe.52 Nevertheless, a book requires an author, so a persona of Julian

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is constructed from the scant biographical details of the texts. Julian biography is an exercise in inference: its major division is over the question of whether the anchoress was or was not a nun, presumably of Carrow Priory to the south of Norwich, prior to her enclosure at St. Julian’s. All discussions acknowledge the evidence to be inconclusive; at different periods one or the other theory has been in the ascendant, but at no point has there been complete agreement. Early biographical accounts of Julian often reasoned that so learned and pious a woman was likely to have been a nun.53 In 1988 Benedicta Ward argued that the scene of the visions shows a secular household, and that Julian might have been a young widow and bereaved mother.54 Her argument was influential, though more recently Watson and Jenkins have argued that there is a “strong possibility” in favor of the view that Julian was a nun.55 Which biography is preferred may only nuance readings of the text, but has a more fundamental effect on the persona of the author and the style in which she is visualized. Norwich Cathedral, in Julian’s day home to a Benedictine priory, repeatedly places her in the context of Benedictine monasticism. This is most explicit in the 1964 window designed by Moira Forsyth in the Bauchon chapel showing the history of the Benedictines in England (figure 9.5).56 Julian appears in the right hand light, devoted to the Church in Norwich and the building of the Cathedral. This company produces a Julian contained within ecclesiastical structures and in ecclesiastical and national history; the visual equivalent, perhaps, of the theologically sited Julian of Colledge and Walsh’s edition of the Revelation. The image economically combines symbols of Julian’s presumed Benedictinism, her vision, and her anchoritism. Its iconography, probably influenced by the Cell window, again shows Julian kneeling before a crucifi x. (There is a local preference for this iconography, which also appears in a window of St. Thomas’s Church, Heigham.) Like the Cell window, the Benedictine window does not represent the material circumstances of the visionary scene described in the Revelation, with Julian in a bed in a chamber attended by her mother, the priest, and others. Again, Julian’s mental activity during the visions is represented in her alert yet worshipful bodily pose. While the Cell window places Julian against a clear— and often light-fi lled—background, the Benedictine window sites her in social and material space. She kneels at a prie-dieu, looking at a sculptured crucifi x in an architectural setting. These material furnishings militate against reading the image as a depiction of Julian’s subjective visionary experience, and it is possible to interpret it as an image of her experiencing her vision whilst performing her devotions according to monastic rule. The presence of St. Julian’s Church, complete with southeasterly cell, in the background thus suggests the presumed narrative that Julian, already a nun at Carrow, was enclosed following her vision. This is the most biographically specific image of Julian, and the only one of the widely disseminated images that locates her in a concrete space. The bold lines of the Benedictine window image of Julian reproduce effectively and appear on the Julian Centre’s leaflet, mugs, and tea-towels. Reproduced in monochrome, the image is remarkable for its temporal ambiguity, looking as if it might have been copied from a woodcut from an early printing. Isolated from the rest of the window, it abstracts her from the Benedictine context, and the

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Figure 9.5 Norwich Cathedral, Bauchon Chapel. Detail of Benedictine window, designed by Moira Forsyth, made by Dennis King and Sons, 1964. Source: By permission of Norwich Cathedral.

monochrome reproduction obscures Julian’s monastic clothing. Julianists connected with the Centre often favor the biographical hypothesis that Julian was not a nun, but a secular woman, perhaps a widow. Robert Llewelyn, then the chaplain of the Cell, notes that when Ward presented her hypothesis in the 1988 Julian Lecture: “To several the opinion was a delight, coming as a confirmation of what they had long believed but had hardly dared to proclaim.”57 The adapted version is primarily an image of prayer, in a vaguely realized architectural setting: it thus

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denotes the anchorhold and private devotional practice whilst stopping short of specific claims about the details of Julian’s biography. The 1930 window in St. Saviour’s Chapel in Norwich Cathedral represents an earlier, alternative iconography (figure 9.6). This is a single figure, icon rather than narrative, identified by a legend as “Juliana of Norwich.” It shows Julian in the traditional pose of a saint: standing, haloed, wearing a rich red mantle over a Benedictine habit, with a book of the Revelation in her hand and a tabby cat sitting at her feet. The window conveys much the same information as the Benedictine window, that Julian was a Benedictine and a recluse, but its emphasis falls on the text of the Revelation rather than on its visionary origin. If the Benedictine window and the Cell window illustrate the content of the Revelation, the St. Saviour’s window is more like an author-portrait. This window has had a widespread influence: for example, a window of Julian in St. Hilary’s Episcopal Church, Prospect Heights, Illinois, is based on it.58 The book and cat combination was to prove a popular solution to a lacuna in Julian’s persona. As various commentators point out, none of the documentary evidence identifies the recluse of St. Julian’s with the visionary writer of the Revelation; nor does Kempe, though she reports Julian speaking in terms that are consistent with the text.59 Julian’s contemporaries left no record that they thought of her as a writer. Iconography, however, can convey that union of person and text, anchoress and mystic, by combining symbols. The window’s designers presumably used the cat to symbolize anchoritism by reference to Ancrene Wisse’s permission for anchoresses to keep a cat.60 St. Saviour’s window is, as far as I know, the earliest image of Julian’s cat. Though in context it is symbolic, its presence in such an authoritative site has brought it historical credibility. The window is the starting point, for example, for Mary E. Little’s novel, Julian’s Cat: “In St. Saviour’s Chapel in Norwich Cathedral there is a stained glass window which honors one of the greatest of all mystics, Julian of Norwich. She holds in her hands her book Revelations of Divine Love. And at her feet, staring boldly out at the human race, sits, possessively, a cat.”61 The book and cat combination is an effective code, enabling Julian to be identified in a diagrammatic image, and though it originates in an ecclesiastical context, it is also suitable for secular appropriation. Originally a sign of anchoritism, the cat comes to represent domesticity in images that show Julian interacting with it, such as the cover of The Gift of Julian. The cat is now probably the most easily identified attribute of Julian, having also been widely disseminated in Robert Lentz’s icon-type image of a wimpled Julian stroking a cat.62 In a further compression, the cat alone may now symbolize Julian: an “Ecumenical Prayer Chaplet” is advertised with the explanation: “A pewter cat, symbolizing St. Julian is suspended from a dark blue glass heart that is attached to the cross.”63 The most recent image of Julian in the Cathedral is the one that a visitor encounters fi rst. This is a statue by David Holgate, commissioned to commemorate the millennium, placed beside the west door of the Cathedral, the main visitor entrance (cover image). Julian holds a book and quill pen. In comparison to the windows, this represents a partial retreat from the Benedictine

Figure 9.6 Norwich Cathedral, St. Saviour’s Chapel. Juliana of Norwich window, by A.K. Nicholson, 1930. Source: By permission of Norwich Cathedral.

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biography of Julian. She is paired with a statue of St. Benedict, but the details of her clothing are not specifically monastic. She is dehistoricized, modeled, as the Cathedral’s publicity explains, on a present-day Norwich resident, and lacking any specific signifiers of the medieval. The other single figure, the St. Saviour’s window, gives Julian distinctly 1930s facial features, but ties her to the medieval with her habit and cat. Holgate’s statue is a literally freestanding figure of the liberal-humanist author. The Cathedral’s description of the statue, which identifies Julian as “a medieval mystic who was the fi rst woman ever to write a book in English,” indicates that she is considered to be of feminist, literary, historical, and local as well as religious significance.64 As it lacks doctrinal specificity, this representation can be detached from its context to show Julian as a woman of letters: this is the image that appears on the Famous People section of Norwich City Council’s tourist information Web site, which places Julian in the context of local literary history.65 The image’s neutrality makes it widely adaptable. The various iconographies of Julian allow different aspects of her persona or text to be emphasized. The images of Julian kneeling before a crucifi x refer to the Revelation’s account of the crucifi x’s stimulation of the visions and place her in the historical context of late-medieval image devotion. The Cell window’s use of the lily crucifi x and the Benedictine window’s depiction of an artifactual crucifi x both use medieval art history to visualize the scene. Nevertheless, both soften the ugliness and violence of Julian’s text, which stares unfl inchingly while “the swete body waxid browne and blacke, alle changed and turned oute of the fair, fresh, and lively coloure of himselfe into drye dying.”66 As Chewning, Law, and Whitehead also fi nd in this volume, contemporary repackagings of Julian often obscure the violence of her vision. Christ’s body is fair and unblemished in the Cell window, and in the Benedictine window the crucifi x emits rays of light, a much more decorous and less specific scene than that which Julian describes. These representations thus downplay the historical, geographical, and, arguably, the gendered specificity of the language of bodily suffering in the affective piety of late-medieval cities, while at the same time recognizing, as David Aers argues, that Julian’s contemplation of the crucifi xion is intellectual and symbolic as well as affective.67 St. Saviour’s window and the Holgate statue emphasize the fact of Julian’s authorship without touching in any detail on her visionary experience. All the main varieties of contemporary Julians—medieval or protomodern, Catholic or nonspecifically “mystic,” traditional Christian visionary or pioneering woman writer, local or universal—can be found in visual as well as textual sources. Some excerpt the text, others complement it, but they may also circulate independently of it. Norwich is the cult center and point of origin of much of the iconography, but in this least pious (according to the 2001 census) of British cities, Julian is only one amongst many claims to literary and cultural heritage.68 The Julian Cell offers access to a sense of a trace of her real presence, while the visual images can travel and adapt to local requirements: both factors contribute to Julian’s position as the most widely recognized of the Middle English mystics, and indeed of any medieval English woman.

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Notes Versions of this material have been presented at Uses of the Past, Norwich, July 2006; New Chaucer Society Congress, New York, July 2006; Gender and Medieval Studies Conference, Norwich, January 2007; International Medieval Congress, Leeds, July 2008: I am grateful to all who organized, attended, and commented. I am particularly grateful to all at the Julian Centre, especially Sandy Williams, for allowing access to their library and archive and for their willingness to answer questions and enter into discussions. Thanks too to Denise Baker, Josh Davies, and Sarah Law for information, comment, and insight. 1. “A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman,” scribe’s introductory rubric, and “A Revelation of Love,” 14.51, 16.67, in The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 63, p. 281, p. 333; Kathleen Kamerick, Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350–1500 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 132–38. 2. See Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, plates 1–4 for images of British Library Additional MS 37790 and Bibliothèque Nationale MS Fonds anglais 40. 3. For example, Edinburgh, National Museum of Scotland Adv. MS 18.1.7. 4. I lived in Norwich from 1993 to 2007, and visited the Cell regularly, using it as an educational resource when I took students there, a tourist attraction when I visited with friends and family, and a research topic when I went alone. The account of the Cell in this chapter is drawn from this experience of visiting and discussing it. 5. Norman Tanner, “Religious Practice,” in Medieval Norwich, ed. Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), p. 137 [137–55]. 6. G.J. Ashworth and J.E. Tunbridge, The Tourist-Historic City (London: Belhaven, 1990), p. 27. 7. The Advertiser: Norwich Edition, July 20, 2007, p. 1. 8. Bella Dicks, Culture on Display: The Production of Contemporary Visitability (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003), p. 119. 9. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions, ed. Pierre Nora, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 7 [1–20]. 10. Ashworth and Tunbridge, Tourist-Historic City, p. 203. 11. Juliana of Norwich: An Introductory Appreciation and an Interpretative Anthology, ed. Franklin Chambers (London: Gollancz, 1955), p. 16; and see also Sarah Law in this volume. 12. Francis Blomefield, An Essay toward a Topographical History of Norfolk, etc, 11 vols. (London: William Miller, 1805–1810), 4:81. 13. F.I. Dunn, “Hermits, Anchorites and Recluses: A Study with Reference to Medieval Norwich,” in Julian and Her Norwich: Commemorative Essays and Handbook to the Exhibition “Revelations of divine love,” ed. Frank Dale Sayer (Norwich: Julian of Norwich Celebration Committee, 1973), p. 19 [18–27]; Julian Centre archive, boxes D and E; Letters to Eastern Daily Press, April 15, 1998, and May 9, 1998. 14. Grace Warrack, introduction to Revelations of Divine Love Recorded by Julian, Anchoress at Norwich, Anno Domini 1373 (London: Methuen, 1901), p. xviii [xvii–lxxviii]; Robert Flood, A Description of St. Julian’s Church, Norwich, and Dame Julian’s

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15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

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Connection with It (Norwich: Wherry Press, 1936), pp. 40–41; plan by T.P. Chaplin (1951) in the Julian Centre archive. “The Proceedings of the Society during the Year 1917,” Norfolk Archaeology 20 (1921): iii [i–xiii]. Michelle Sauer, ongoing research. All recorded in March 2008. David Brown, “Genuine Fakes,” in The Tourist Image: Myths and Myth-Making in Tourism, ed. Tom Selwyn (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1996), p. 33 [33–47]. P.J., “The Church of St. Julian, Norwich” (2005), n. p. Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), p. 20. Daniel H. Olsen, “Management Issues for Religious Heritage Attractions,” in Tourism, Religion and Spiritual Journeys, ed. Dallen J. Timothy and Daniel H. Olsen (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 106 [104–18]. Ancrene Wisse: Guide for Anchoresses, trans. Hugh White (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 34. Aelred of Rievaulx, “Rule of Life for a Recluse,” trans. Mary Paul McPherson, in Treatises and Pastoral Prayer (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1971), p. 71 [43–102]. Aelred, “Rule of Life for a Recluse,” pp. 72, 73. Ancrene Wisse, trans. White, p. 37. http://www.orderofjulian.org/julians_window/julians_window.html E.A. Jones, “Anchoritic Aspects of Julian of Norwich,” in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2008), p. 78 [75–87]. Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, pp. 432–33. Ancrene Wisse: A Corrected Edition of the Text in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, ms 402, ed. Bella Millett, EETS o.s. 325 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 162. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS o.s. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), Book 1, chap. 18. Michael McLean, “St. Julian’s Church and Lady Julian’s Cell: A Guidebook” (1979, rev. 2006), n. p. Watson and Jenkins, introduction to Writings of Julian of Norwich, p. 19, n. 54 [1–59]. Tony Lucas, “At the Cell of Mother Julian,” (1982) unpublished poem, Julian Centre Archive Box D, lines 13–15. Lucas, “At the Cell of Mother Julian,” lines 1–6. Sheila Upjohn, Why Julian Now? A Voyage of Discovery (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997); Sheila Upjohn, Mind out of Time: A Play on Julian of Norwich, 2nd ed. (Norwich: Julian Shrine, 1992); Julian: Woman of our Day, ed. Robert Llewellyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985). Brian Thorne, “Mother Julian, Radical Psychotherapist” (Norwich: Friends of Julian of Norwich, 1993), p. 9. Fr. John-Julian, O.J.N., introduction to A Lesson in Love: The Revelations of Julian of Norwich Edited and Translated for Devotional Use (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1988), p. viii [v–xviii]. John-Julian, introduction to A Lesson in Love, p. vii.

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39. Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985), p. 73. 40. Ancrene Wisse, trans. White, p. 173. 41. Jean Dale, “At the Shrine of Julian of Norwich,” in Circles of Silence: Explorations in Prayer with Julian Meetings, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994), p. 51 [50–51]. 42. “A Revelation of Love,” 1.5, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 139. 43. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” (1967), trans. Jay Miskoweic; http://foucault. info/documents/heteroTopia/foucault.heteroTopia.en.html. 44. Ashworth and Tunbridge, Tourist-Historical City, p. 24. 45. Gail McMurray Gibson, Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 139–43. 46. Ralph Milton, Julian’s Cell: The Earthly Story of Julian of Norwich (Kelowna, BC: Northstone, 2002), p. 8. 47. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin. htm, p. 3. 48. Thanks to Sarah Law for this information. 49. Kenneth Leech, “Hazelnut Theology: Its Potential and Perils,” in Kenneth Leech and Sr. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., Julian Reconsidered (Oxford: Sisters of the Love of God Press, 1988), p. 7 [1–9]; Sarah Salih, “Julian’s Afterlives,” in A Companion to Julian of Norwich, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), p. 212 [208–18]. 50. The Gift of Julian of Norwich, ed. Karen Manton, illustrated by Lynn Muir (Leominster: Gracewing, 2005). 51. Enfolded in Love: Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich, trans. Members of the Julian Shrine (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1980), p. 8. 52. Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, pp. 431–37. 53. Warrack, introduction to Revelations of Divine Love, p. xxii; Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and James Walsh, S.J., introduction to A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, Studies and Texts 36, 2 vols. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), 1:43 [1:1–198]. 54. Benedicta Ward, “Julian the Solitary,” in Kenneth Leech and Sr. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., Julian Reconsidered (Oxford: Sisters of the Love of God Press, 1988), p. 23 [11–35]. 55. Watson and Jenkins, introduction to Writings of Julian of Norwich, p. 4. 56. Moira Forsyth, “The Benedictines in England Window in Norwich Cathedral,” Journal of the British Society of Master Glass-Painters 14.2 (1965): 126. 57. Robert Llewelyn, foreword to Kenneth Leech and Sr. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., Julian Reconsidered (Oxford: Sisters of the Love of God Press, 1988), p. iii [iii–iv]. 58. http://sthilaryecusa.org/tour.htm#st_ julian. 59. Carole Hill, “Julian and her Sisters: Female Piety in Late Medieval Norwich,” in The Fifteenth Century VI: Identity and Insurgency in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Linda Clark (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2006), pp. 165–87; Margery Kempe, ed. Meech and Allen, Book 1, chap. 18. 60. Ancrene Wisse, trans. White, p. 192. 61. Mary E. Little, Julian’s Cat: The Imaginary History of a Cat of Destiny (Wilton, CT: Morehouse Publishers, 1989), p. ix. 62. http://www.americanchurch.org/juliannorwich.jpg.

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63. http://www.gigibeads.net/prayerbeads/saints/juliannorwich.html. 64. http://www.cathedral.org.uk/historyheritage/new-work-of-art---architecturenew-statues.aspx. 65. http://www.visitnorwich.co.uk/famous.aspx. 66. “Revelation of Love,” 8.16, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 179. 67. David Aers, “The Humanity of Christ: Ref lections on Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love,” in David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), pp. 87–94 [77–104]. 68. Carole Rawcliffe, introduction to Medieval Norwich, ed. Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), p. xxxiii [xix–xxxvii].

CHAPTER 10 IN THE CENTRE: SPIRITUAL AND CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF JULIAN OF NORWICH IN THE JULIAN CENTRE Sarah Law

This essay is a theoretical and experiential exploration of contemporary interest in Julian, represented by the work of, and visitors to, the Julian Centre, Norwich, UK.

J

ulian of Norwich has never been more popular than she is in the twenty-first century. She has various titles of address: “Dame Julian” makes reference to a putative link with the Benedictine community at Carrow Priory; “The Lady Julian” is the preferred title amongst the Anglo-Catholic community. Never Saint Julian, of course, unless in error: Julian of Norwich remains uncanonized by the Roman Catholic Church. Her most popular title is Mother Julian, perhaps in deference to her extensive use of maternal imagery: motherhood and Julian are firmly allied. Motherhood also implies descendents. If not literally, then Julian certainly has those who regard her as a mother in the sense of being a primary inspiration. “How Many Children Had Julian of Norwich?” is the title of Alexandra Barratt’s comprehensive discussion of versions of her Revelation.1 Here, I am also interested in acknowledging some of the “children” of Julian of Norwich: not from a textual perspective, but from that of a onetime (2000–2002) administrator of the Julian Centre at Rouen Road, Norwich, adjacent to St. Julian’s Church and its present-day Cell. In this chapter, I shall discuss the setting up and functions of the present-day Centre, and comment on the diversity of those who contact or frequent the Centre itself. I would also like to consider how the figure of Julian lends herself so well to projection and appropriation, offering some significant examples, and conclude with my own interest in Julian the woman writer as a creative inspiration and resource. I conclude in this way not

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because I think I have discovered the “real” meaning of Julian’s life and work, but rather to develop the pattern of Julian appropriation in good creative faith, while freely admitting that this Julian too is discovered at least in part through the passions of her beholder. What is it that is so compelling about Julian? Leaving aside questions of her text, there remain few extant details about Julian’s “professional” life: that of a veiled fourteenth-century anchoress who lived out her hidden vocation in the center of her community. If Julian followed the instructions of the Ancrene Riwle, she would have been concealed behind a window covered by a black cloth with a white cross: “be as little fond of your windows as possible. Let them all be small, those of the parlour smallest and narrowest. Have curtains made of two kinds of cloth, a black ground with a white cross showing both inside and outside. The black cloth shows that you yourselves are black and of no value in the eyes of the outside world. . . . The white cross properly belongs to . . . clean maidenhood and to purity, which it is hard to keep unspotted.”2 The Ancrene Riwle is more concerned with the inability of an anchoress to control her passions and lusts should she divest her windows of their gaze-obscuring veils: “It is against nature, and monstrous, that the dead should dote on those who are alive and act foolishly with them, in sin. . . . Now see what evil came about through looking.”3 But the veil has other practical and symbolic functions: allowing the woman who is veiled to withdraw from exchange of visual judgment, but also providing a blank canvas upon which those gazing may project their own fantasies and seek their own reflection. Is this a viable paradigm for our ongoing fascination with Julian? And does her gender (femininity being so consistently associated with veils and veiling) reinforce this cultural speculation? I would like to refer to the feminist psychoanalytical theorist Luce Irigaray whose thoughts on gender and specularity have been well documented in “The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry” and elsewhere.4 Irigaray revisits Freud’s developmental account of the little boy discovering the “castration” of the girl, her having “nothing to be seen” in terms of visible sexual identity. This “nothing to be seen” (Irigaray’s reiterated phrase) is reinforced through the images and symbolism of veiling: a woman, who is something and nothing, in the sense of lacking “phallic” visibility, must establish and yet shield herself through veiling: “How can one trade on something so empty? To sell herself, woman has to veil as best she can how price-less she is in the sexual economy. Whence the importance she vests in fabric and cloths to cover herself with . . . woman weaves in order to veil herself, mask the faults of nature, and restore her in her wholeness.”5 Irigaray sees self-adornment as a further act of veiling and self-erasure. She depicts woman as taking part in the sexual economy from which a vowed celibate such as an anchoress has on one level removed herself. But the metaphor of veiling is paradoxically all the more marked. Literally veiled, an anchoress has marked out for herself an authorized position of withdrawal and lack, a blind spot onto which the “phallic” authority can project and see reflected back an image / reverse image and validation of himself. But at the same time, she is in a position to adopt the subversive power of what Irigaray identifies as “La Mysterique,” a place of no authorized language where subject

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and object are blurred and barriers buckle. Only in this impossible space is it possible for a subject to experience “the light that forms and other speculative veils had shrouded from his gaze in an effort to weaken its white heat.”6 Language is inherently inadequate here; the unveiled space of the mysterique contains, as Irigaray intended, similarities with mystical apophasis, which has been described as a way of “showing by means of language that which lies beyond language.” 7 In Irigaray’s writing, veils and veiling are a recurrent trope, and the position of the (veiled) woman is one of unstable centrality in the prevailing “masculine order”: she cannot be seen and she cannot easily speak, but she is central to the construction of reality, which requires her to remain in place as an elusive and reflective blind spot. Her only language, in this position, is one of subversion, repetition, and mimicry, which opens up the indefi nable space of the mysterique. Here I am not questioning textual strategies in Julian’s Revelation (appropriately named, as the title etymologically “raises the veil” on her visions) so much as looking at Julian’s presence in the thought and praxis of her present-day advocates. As a cultural icon she occupies something of the position of the Irigarayan woman depicted at the conclusion of Speculum of the Other Woman: the elusive nourishing ground for a multiplicity of images that will sometimes contradict themselves. “In the relation to the working of theory, the / a woman fulfi ls a twofold function—as the mute outside all that sustains systematicity; as a maternal and still silent ground that nourishes all foundations—she does not have to conform to the codes theory has set up for itself.”8 What emerges, I shall show here, is a variety of Julians, a cultural, and spiritual, deployment of repetition and mimicry, reflecting contemporary concerns at least as much as historical fact, but also opening up a space for creative reinterpretation of her life and writing. This space is symbolized, I suggest, by the site-specific Julian Centre adjacent to her reconstructed Cell. According to the Friends of Julian of Norwich, Julian’s significance still constitutes something of a blind spot in her “home town” of Norwich, despite the growing number of people who make the journey to East Anglia specifically in order to visit St. Julian’s Church and the reconstructed Cell it contains: “Often we are told by visitors who have travelled from the other side of the world to visit Julian’s shrine that local citizens stare blankly at them and are utterly at a loss to offer information or guidance. Nonetheless the visitors and the pilgrims continue to arrive at the Shrine and the Centre in increasing numbers.”9 The physical site of Julian’s anchorhold is surprisingly modestly marked. The current Cell is to the right of the main body of St. Julian’s Church. A stone archway, wooden door, and some stone steps lead downward to a small side chapel containing benches against back and side walls; there is an altar, crucifi x, alcove for candles, and a fl int block purporting to date back to the original anchorhold. The present-day Cell offers an atmosphere of quiet enclosure. But this authentically prayerful space is a reconstruction, and it has a relatively recent history, dating from 1952. Substantially damaged by the war in 1942, St. Julian’s had at that time no physical marker for its medieval anchorhold. Plans to rebuild the church were boosted by the support of the Anglican religious Community of All Hallows, whose Reverend Mother Flora, together with parish priest Fr. Raybould, felt that the

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significance of Julian should be represented by a shrine within the church and perhaps something more. An appeal was launched. The current Cell is generally assumed to be on the site of the medieval anchorhold.10 However, no architecturally authentic reconstruction was intended. The supposed original floor level is now marked by the wall shrine within the Cell, and by the Norman archway to the Cell taken from the nearby St. Michael’s Church at Thorn, which was also destroyed during wartime bombing. The current carpeted Cell floor is lower than that of the modern main church floor. The appeal leaflet from around 1950 states: “There will be no attempt to ‘reconstruct’ either the cell or the Church, as the fi rst purpose of the building is to provide a place for devotion and worship, and the second a means of spreading Julian’s ‘Comfortable Words’ as a place of pilgrimage.”11 Historical replication from the outset of the appeal is of less importance than functionality as a spiritual focus and means of education. The vision of the appeal committee was, however, a considerable one. The appeal leaflet continues: The ante-room will contain information about Julian and possibly a library of books. Considerable information has been collected about her times and pictures, models and books will recreate the spirit of the age in which she lived. The events of the City will be shewn—the Black Death, pestilence, famine, storms, earthquakes, fires, the visits of Richard II, and Archbishop Arundel, Litester’s [sic] rebellion, and the warlike Bishop Dispenser. Books on the religious life of her world will be available . . . and of her famous contemporaries—Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton, Suso, Tauler, Rusbroeck, St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Bridget of Sweden, John Wycliffe, Chaucer, Joan of Arc and the strange Margery Kempe of King’s Lynn . . . It is hoped to represent all these people in a series of coloured statuettes which will be provided as funds are available.

Ambitious indeed. And while this vision of considerable spiritual adornment did not come to pass, it perhaps provided the model for the genesis of the Centre. Although no colored statuettes were ever produced, an original willingness to make known other spiritual figures is echoed today by both the lending library at the Centre and the Julian Lectures, which do frequently refer to other religious thinkers and how they connect to or compare with Julian herself. Spiritual resource, however, was the primary aim of the reconstruction and the Cell was envisaged as a sanctuary from worldly distraction: “The thought within the cell [will be] shielded from everything exciting and engrossing.” A prayerful atmosphere will be promoted by “the chapel meditation or prayer and the presence of the Sisters, available to give help if wanted, will take the place of the advice to her fellows which we know Julian gave.” The appeal leaflet suggests a direct connection between Julian’s supposed role as spiritual advisor and the pastoral duties of the contemporary All Hallows Sisters: “The resident Sisters will thus renew the work which Julian commenced when she vowed constancy of abode.” There is indeed still a resident sister at All Hallows House, the Community property next to the church. But practical help and information were also provided from the outset. At fi rst, information on Julian was available at the back of the church only, but in 1990, C.A.H. sisters at All Hallows House donated their

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Ecumenical Centre for use by the Friends of Julian of Norwich: it became the Julian Centre. Direction and running of the Julian Centre (not the church) is in the remit of the Friends of Julian of Norwich, a registered charity that was founded in 1975, two years after an ecumenical pilgrimage celebrated the six-hundredth anniversary of Julian’s revelations. The Friends of Julian of Norwich include, at the time of writing, over one thousand members who pay a small annual fee.12 A yearly newsletter is produced. The charity is steered by a committee whose membership has included Anglicans, Quakers, Roman Catholics, and other Christian denominations. The Friends publish selected books on Julian, such as a reissue of Sheila Upjohn’s edited translation of the Long Text, All Shall Be Well, and organize and publish in pamphlet form an annual lecture.13 The chief purpose of the Friends is to promote Julian as a spiritual figure and resource, but the charity remains supportive of academic research and artistic endeavor. Committee members are also responsible for appointing the Julian Centre administrator, who sees to its day-to-day running, and for advising on the Centre’s purchasing and display of commercial and library items. Distinction should be made between the church and Cell and the Julian Centre itself. Upkeep and running of St. Julian’s Church and its Cell are the responsibility of the Anglican (Anglo-Catholic) parish of Timberhill. The parish is a conservative one theologically: in particular, women priests are not permitted to celebrate the Eucharist in the nearby parish church of St. John’s Timberhill, nor in the regular Masses held under the auspices of the parish at St. Julian’s and in the Cell. Accommodation has, however, been made to allow visiting Christian groups to celebrate in St. Julian’s Church and Cell regardless of the denomination or gender of the celebrant: “S. John’s and S. Julian’s churches have always been strong in supporting the Catholic movement in the Church of England. For the parish, the appropriate resolutions have been passed to preclude the ministry of women priests for the parish. But considering the world-wide importance of The Lady Julian, any minister of any denomination, with his or her group, is welcome to celebrate their own Christian services for their people in S. Julian’s church.”14 The welcoming of visiting groups with their potentially female celebrants is laudable, but also serves to highlight tensions that remain apparent in religious readings of Julian: her image is still situated across something of a fracture regarding theological positions on ordination and gender. Julian seems to offer a spirituality that, while profoundly Christian in its iconology, gives great weight to motherhood and, by inference, the feminine in its metaphorical language of divinity. However, the alterity of Julian, the pre-Reformation fourteenth-century anchoress, clearly prevents referral to her life or text for a defi nitive “answer” (“what did she really think?”) about women’s roles in the church. Differences remain, although suspended, at the location of the present church and Cell. To move on to the Centre itself, we need to take a few steps along St. Julian’s Alley toward Rouen Road (figure 10.1). Open Monday to Saturday, 10.30 am to 3.30 pm, the Centre has a number of facilities and functions that reflect directly the spectrum of contemporary interest in Julian. It is primarily a visitor center

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Figure 10.1

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The Julian Centre, Norwich, interior.

Source: Photo by Sarah Law.

stocking information leaflets, books, and items for purchase, and a library that contains books on general spirituality, and which also aspires to own every published title on Julian of Norwich as well as archives of Julian-related letters, manuscripts, and journals. It provides opportunities for conversation and a cup of tea. A striking modern painting inspired by the Revelation by artist Alan Oldfield is prominently displayed, as are icons of Julian and a portrait of Fr. Robert Llewelyn (1909–2008), writer on Julian and much loved former (and only) shrine chaplain, who continued to visit Centre and Cell almost until the end of his life. For security reasons, the Centre is linked via video camera and TV monitor to the church. It is possible to see who is in St. Julian’s, who goes into the Cell, and to hear muffled sound, but not speech. There is no video intrusion into the Cell itself. When the church is empty, the Centre monitor portrays a view of the altar, with the reserved sacrament held upon it as Catholic tradition dictates. In stillness, the scene is as though static through time, perhaps little changed in purpose and layout from that six hundred years ago: in effect a contemporary “window” onto the church, an echo of Julian’s own arrangement as an anchoress. But if Julian had visitors seeking counsel at her street-facing window, the Julian Centre has a much broader remit of welcome. Visitors might include a church or school group (encouraged to book in advance); a solitary individual pilgrim or casual tourist; or a professional religious (monastic or clerical), who may be progressive or conservative theologically. A visitor may also be an academic, therapist, writer, or artist, or a local, sometimes vulnerable, person. It is

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not the job of the administrator to offer counseling or spiritual advice, yet the role requires qualities of diplomacy and hospitality as well as practical retail skills and some knowledge of Julian’s text and times. There is no typical day at the Centre. Visitors frequently arrive from Europe, Australia, Asia, and the United States, some journeying to Norwich specifically to visit the Cell and Centre. A fruitful encounter between visitors is always a possibility. There can be conversation between faiths: a Buddhist nun and a Greek Orthodox priest once encountered each other on individual pilgrimage. Infrequently, there is interdenominational confl ict: a recently ordained woman Episcopalian and a staunchly conservative Anglican priest met by chance, one afternoon, to converse at the edge of civility. If, however, a visitor declines to speak at all, it may be less a sign of incivility than of prayerfulness—guests at the neighboring All Hallows House are, sometimes, on silent retreat. And the Centre and Cell offer, without negating the silence and study each generally promotes, a space for occasional creative eccentricity: one uncommon visitor sat in the Cell, singing loudly, whilst drawing with pastels and sketchpad. Later he explained to me that he felt both Cell and Centre offered a special combination of healing and creative permission— perhaps not a viable long-term location for what was clearly a personal therapeutic experience, but illustrating nonetheless the attraction of the venue as a nonjudgemental sanctuary. The role of the Centre is thus something of a hybrid: neither dedicated drop-in centre nor retail outlet, neither pure research venue nor group facility, though elements of all are to be found there. To misapply a Julian quotation, the Centre is in a sense “at the mid point of all things.” Multiple interpretations of the Centre’s role reflect the multiple ways in which Julian herself is both represented and sought. This chapter must include some consideration of the Julian “economy,” the consumability of her representations. Commercialism has long been interwoven with sites of religious pilgrimage. The Julian Centre is no different from a successful Cathedral gift shop in its range of retail products, from guidebooks and devotional titles to cards and souvenirs. The Centre’s Julian-based inventory promotes and is illustrative of the quotable nature of the Revelation: “All Shall Be Well” is by far the most popular inscription for cards and other items; also popular are “You Shall not be Overcome” and “Love was His Meaning.” Each of these phrases are, according to the Long Text, locutions given to Julian; their lifting out of context is symptomatic of the ease of offering a “soundbite Julian,” arguably at the expense of the more complex nuances of the text itself. In contrast, Julian’s graphic descriptions of the beaten and bleeding Christ are not within any obvious commercial comfort zone, although the Stations of the Cross, a booklet produced by the Friends and comprising Julian readings and abstract art by Irene Ogden, is a notable exception. Conforming to the traditional Lenten devotional practice, the Stations, which commemorate Christ’s journey to crucifi xion, are a popular purchase by church groups. However, a solitary visitor will often seek something more akin to a nugget of comfort, and will typically purchase some “little thing, no bigger than a hazelnut,” a small item, palm- or pocket-sized, which acts as a memento and spiritual mnemonic: a

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Figure 10.2

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Merchandise at the Julian Centre.

Source: Photo by Sarah Salih.

medal, a keyring, a bookmark, a pen (figure 10.2). The products make good gifts. Some—mugs, tea towels—are of practical domestic use too. A range of jewelry, featuring the Cell door, has recently been added to the stock. But the quotable nature of Julian also works on other levels. Rosaries are a popular purchase at the Centre. The rosary, in its traditional guise as a circular linking of prayer beads, is a Catholic devotional item. It would have been in use

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in fourteenth-century England, and as an anchoress, Julian would at least have engaged in regular repetitions of prayers such as the Our Father and Hail Mary, which comprise the basic rosary prayers. Rosary sales at the Centre reflect the Anglo-Catholic affi liation of the parish and the high level of interest amongst Roman Catholic groups, who frequently visit St. Julian’s whilst on pilgrimage at the large north Norfolk shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham: to some extent, these pilgrimage groups to Norfolk regard St. Julian’s as a lesser satellite of the major Marian attraction. The presence of rosaries also reflects the interests and writing of former shrine chaplain, Fr. Llewelyn, whose exploration of Julian’s spirituality connects her anchoritic praxis explicitly with rosary prayer: “The rosary principle is important because it offers a structured form of prayer . . . that . . . makes a bridge between discursive meditation and silent contemplative prayer.”15 Llewelyn likens the rosary prayers to a mantra. The association between Julian and the rosary is not explicit within her own text. But various contemporary Anglican forms of the rosary do make this connection in their choice of refrain-based prayer. Phrases from the Revelation are used as mantras instead of the traditional Hail Mary.16 Julian’s words are replicated in a prayer-cycle that is deliberately intended to transport its users into silence, as the words themselves cease to have a primarily semantic purpose. This is spiritual quotability of a high order: a space for the “mysterique,” perhaps, in the “sense-less” repetition of quotable Julian fragments. The saying of the specifically Anglican rosary is a practice that is more popular in the American Episcopalian Church than the Church of England, however. It is the traditional (Dominican) Catholic Rosary that is said weekly in Julian’s Cell. Those unable to attend the Centre in person can purchase and have mailed to them a rosary blessed for them by a priest, a rather unusual practice (most rosaries are sold unblessed) perhaps emphasizing the export power of this mystic. Julian’s most quoted phrase, “All Shall Be Well,” is arguably her most misquoted in that it omits the complicating preface “sin is behovely.” In itself it offers a sense of uncomplicated reassurance. Grace Jantzen has argued that this quotable Julian risks inculcating a sense of privatized pacifism. She warns against “appropriating personal consolation, whether from Julian’s words or from other spiritual writers from whom words can be culled for the fostering of personal peace and tranquillity . . . Christendom has an unfortunate history of colluding with injustice by trying to give people the strength to bear it rather than the energy to change it . . . Such privatised spirituality, used to tranquillise against that which should not be tolerated, has become one of the primary functions of religion in modernity.”17 To some extent my Centre experience corresponds to this observation: I even had one memorable dream in which “rose-tinted spectacles” had been added to the gift inventory. There is certainly an edited “version” of Julian whose apparently “rose-tinted” acceptance of suffering might be misinterpreted as spiritual passivity. Jantzen offers as alternative a more complex reading of the Revelation, based on the thematic refrains of seeking and desiring: “Julian’s confidence does not come because desire has been quenched, but rather is delight in desire itself, and its fulfi lment in reduplication.”18 Containing both devotional books and less generally accessible research documents and titles, the Centre

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offers the option of seeking out this more challenging Julian: an ideal enquirer may therefore come in for an “All Shall Be Well” card, but leave with library membership and a copy of the unabridged Long Text. Whether this availability of books is sufficient for visitors interested but unversed in discourses of literary research is another question. But it is also addressed, albeit inadvertently, in the diversity of the Julian Lectures, annual addresses delivered in St. Julian’s Church and published in pamphlet form. The Julian Festival, which is generally held on the Saturday of, or immediately following, May 8, Julian’s day (the date of her revelations and of her commemoration in the Church of England calendar), comprises High Anglican Mass, the Annual General Meeting of the Friends, and a lecture from an invited speaker. One set of lectures has been collated and published and another one is planned.19 Motives for attendance are mixed, some regarding the Festival as a day of pilgrimage and others as an opportunity for study. Lecture themes and delivery are equally diverse, ranging from extended sermon to academic paper. Credit is due to the Friends’ Committee, who give their speakers a wide remit; though an inherent possibility of mismatch between audience expectation and lecturer theme and register remains. Yet explorations of Julian’s “comfortable words” frequently challenge: 2007’s lecture by Ursula King addressed the responsibilities of “spiritual rights” in the light of gendered oppression.20 The 2008 lecture, by Canon Melvyn Matthews, exemplified what may well be a growing trend of comparing Julian with a twentieth- or twenty-fi rstcentury spiritual figure: Matthews, who has written extensively on spirituality and mysticism, explores Julian’s mysticism in relationship to that of Holocaust victim and secular Jew Etty Hillesum, whose diary indicates a personal discovery of spirituality in the fi nal years of her life. The 2009 lecture was delivered by feminist theologian Mary Gray. Lectures are generally theologically based, but not exclusively so: my own addressed Julian as woman writer.21 Hybridity of discourse is something that Julian’s text itself contains.22 The annual Julian Lecture contributes to the ongoing hybridity of contemporary Julian readership: it allows for creative interpretations of Julian, and the Centre continues to make the lectures available. Lectures and library notwithstanding, the “quotable” Julian is by far the most popular image of Julian and one that the Centre cannot help but promote in terms of popular purchases. It does, however, raise the question: is there an “unquotable” Julian waiting to be recovered from resistant or unpalatable strata of the Revelation? And to what extent have our imagined ideas of Julian’s “former life” favored an easy image of sanctity over uncomfortable possibility? On a textual level, this question engages two issues, both somewhat outside the scope of this essay. The fi rst is the rhetoric of “apophasis,” the linguistic attempts to articulate the “unsayable” or “unutterable,” and the ways in which Julian’s Revelation employs these techniques.23 On the level of subject matter, Julian is considered less “erotic” than her female continental contemporaries; however, her engagement with the functions of the body have been glossed over in the “quotable” representation of Julian, whilst being intelligently explored in essays such as Barratt’s discussion of Julian and medieval gynecological writing.24

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Speculation about Julian’s early life also arguably reflects a desire for a “contemporary” Julian. Religious life is not now considered the only possible prequel to her anchoritic vocation: broken family life (albeit through bereavement rather than separation) is just as frequently imagined. The likelihood of pre-anchoritic Julian the (bereaved) wife and mother, rather than nun, is argued in some detail in Sr. Benedicta Ward’s lecture, “Julian the Solitary.” Ward draws her conclusion from the following evidence: (1) the absence of monastic references anywhere in Julian’s text coupled with the absence of any memorial or preservation of Julian’s life and book at Carrow Priory or any other monastery; (2) the tender exploration of maternity in the Revelation where the only reference to Julian’s own mother (at Julian’s sickbed during her sequence of visions) is cursory and indicates misunderstanding rather than empathy (her mother wanted to close Julian’s eyes); and (3) the historical situation in which the younger Julian must have lived: “she would have been six when there occurred the fi rst onslaught of the plague known as the Black Death which eventually destroyed one third of the population of England. The instinctive reaction after great disasters is towards marriage and childbearing. It was in just such a situation that Julian grew up and no one was to know if the plague would return. At marriageable age it is most unlikely that Julian would have remained unmarried and there is no reason to suppose that she herself wished for anything else.”25 Sophisticated though it is, Ward’s argument is based upon educated assumption and the absence of contrary evidence just as much as theories of Julian-the-nun. Again we are reliant, to a certain extent, on theories that are fitted over an ellipsis, an evidential “veil.” But in either case, the assumption persists that Julian was an intrinsically “good” woman. We have no historical evidence to suggest that Julian as wife and mother was “strange,” “hysterical,” or “a menace,” labels that continue to be ascribed to Margery Kempe (who, prior to the discovery of the full text of her life in 1934, was also considered of saintly anchoritic provenance). But neither do we have testimony or assertion that Julian was saintly, barring Margery Kempe’s own autobiographical testimony that she was famed for discernment of spirits, and the inferences drawn from bequests to the anchorhold.26 Is the general consensus regarding Julian’s steadfast nature refusing to acknowledge a potentially less palatable character? For example, how far could a “questioning” Julian (as depicted in the Revelation, where she queries certain locutions and asks questions on her own initiative) indicate a “difficult” Julian?27 The question itself discomforts: and I do not seriously wish to suggest a thesis that Julian was an unstable character, merely to highlight the popular and spiritual investment in Julian as a good woman as well as a good writer (and visionary). One of the obstacles to Julian achieving canonization by the Roman Catholic Church is, in fact, absence of information about her life (and therefore, absence of evidence of heroic virtue): she is thus, for this denomination, confi ned to a kind of reputation-limbo, lacking the full “accreditation” of sanctity, while sometimes popularly assumed to have achieved it. The “nothing to be seen” aspect of Julian’s background makes her a powerful site of biographical projection. Questions of Julian’s quotability or unquotability aside, there remains an attractive contemporary construction of Julian in which her capacity as listener,

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rather than speaker and writer, is prominent: Julian the counselor. Living as an anchoress in late fourteenth-century Norwich, Julian was following a valued religious calling. Her chief vocation was one of prayer. But it was also the function of the anchoress to listen to the spiritual concerns of people who would seek counsel outside the street-facing window of her cell (though separated by veil and cloth). Today we assume that Julian’s counsel was frequently sought.28 This function echoes that of the Catholic confessional, but lacks its sacramental and hierarchical structure; Julian as anchoress could not dispense absolution. Her listening and counsel arguably anticipated the contemporary model of humanistic, person-centered psychotherapy, manifesting the core conditions of empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard.29 Canon Professor Brian Thorne, current chairman of the Friends, is chief advocate of this model of Julian as “Radical Psychotherapist,” the title of Thorne’s 1993 Julian Lecture. Thorne sees himself, as a person-centered counselor, linked back to Julian through locality as much as profession: “After all, she was doing therapeutic work in my beloved city six hundred years ago and in a sense I am in some powerfully symbolic way a member of the house and lineage of Julian.”30 In his volume Infinitely Beloved, Thorne consolidates this sense of Norwich imbued with the spiritual heritage of Julian, as well as the therapeutic perspective of Carl Rogers, which is practiced and taught in the Norwich Centre, of which Thorne is a founder member.31 His introduction, “Journeys in Relationship: Julian of Norwich and Carl Rogers,” documents a typical Friday morning journey for Thorne from early Mass in the Cell, through the city, to his practice in the Norwich Centre. The two locations are linked by his footsteps, and their abiding genii loci ( Julian and Rogers, respectively) meet in his imagination to converse cheerfully, to “mardle” as local dialect has it: “it amuses me to imagine that she and Carl sometimes meet up to ‘mardle’ in Norfolk Style in the ‘Right Merry’ atmosphere of the heaven that Julian in her earthly life was privileged to glimpse.”32 In his lecture, Thorne crucially makes reference to Margery Kempe’s 1413 visit to Julian, as documented in the Lynn visionary’s own autobiography. In doing so he contributes to the considerable body of literature that compares the two women mystics, generally to the detriment of Margery, who is positioned as the unstable “foil” to Julian’s steadfastness. Thorne does not, however, mock Margery’s perceived inadequacies, but depicts her as a medieval “client,” and Julian as empathic therapist who “made it safe for Margery to express herself fully in all her confusion and ecstasy.”33 Thorne does not in his lecture draw distinction between the contemporary therapeutic space and the specific enquiry Margery Kempe was making about the discernment of spirits: it is not the purpose of his paper to offer historical accuracy so much as make general connections. The paradigm of Julian as a wise counselor is persuasive, though again the conceptual alterity of the fourteenth century is worth considering when positioning Julian too literally as humanistic therapist. On a symbolic level, Julian continues to serve as focus of spiritual enquiry within contemporary therapeutic practice, not least in the Julian Centre itself, where a university counseling diploma group meets weekly, in semester time, to explore spirituality, and in the Norwich

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Centre, a place of humanistic practice and spiritual exploration, where a small statue of Julian resides by the stairs. Adopting an image of Julian as model for a contemporary listening profession is an interesting development of her “role” in twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury society. But there is still a great appreciation of Julian as model of the religious life. No discussion of contemporary Julian would be complete without reference to the Order of Julian of Norwich, an Episcopalian religious community founded in 1985 by Fr. John-Julian, O.J.N.34 Clearly, there is no direct lineage back to Julian in the sense of being historically or primarily located in Norwich. Living as contemplative monks and nuns in a mixed-gender monastery in Waukesha, Wisconsin, the “Julians” (as they are informally called) maintain a scholarly / theological publications record and a web presence that includes “Julian’s Window,” the community blog. 35 The Order offers another paradigm of the contemporary Julian phenomenon in that each “version” of Julian, each “Julian,” retains individuality while living in community with others. It is possible to be an Associate or Oblate of the Order, undertaking a connection to the Julians and a commitment to prayer whilst remaining in the world.36 Links between O.J.N. and the Norwich Julian Centre are strong and likely to increase. A couple of members visit Norwich each year; the present Guardian of the Order, Fr. Gregory, has given a Julian Lecture (1998) and in 2008 jointly presented with Brian Thorne a weekend seminar on Julian and twenty-fi rst-century spiritual writer Eckhart Tolle. Julian House, the main O.J.N. Community house in Wisconsin, has its own Julian “Center” in terms of offering a focal point of information and running a small book and gift shop. JulianFest in America is an extremely well attended residential weekend (parallel to, but lengthier than, the Norwich Julian Festival) nearest to the Episcopalian Calendar’s Julian Day May 8. I can attest to the generous hospitality of the Community, having given a paper in 2005.37 In location as well as calendar then, Julian and her Centre are a transferable feast. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Julian and the Centre have lent themselves to fruitful replication, and that among the differences to be found in multiple vocations and celebrations, there remains ongoing and mutually enriching communication. One further example of Julian as a model for contemporary contemplative spiritual practice is in the ecumenical Julian Meetings.38 These are small groups who meet nationwide for contemplative prayer; one of these groups meets monthly in the Cell itself, moving to the Centre for subsequent hospitality. The purpose of the meetings is to foster silent prayer rather than Julian’s teachings per se: they use Julian as their nominative model. The procedure of the meetings, as of all contemplative prayer, is wordless, the opposite of textual or verbal production. And for the Irigarayan “mysterique” also, the best recourse is one of silence: “No being, no places are designated. So the best plan is to abstain from all discourse, to keep quiet, or else utter only a sound so inarticulate that it barely forms a song.”39 This chapter is, however, undeniably engaged in the production of text, and, in conclusion, I would like briefly to offer my own appropriation of Julian, the fi rst woman known to have written a book in English, as a model woman writer.

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The primary parallel I draw in my 2003 Julian Lecture is with Virginia Woolf: in 1928, Woolf gave the address to the two women’s colleges at Cambridge, which was subsequently published as A Room of One’s Own. It explored the difficulties facing women writers. Woolf ’s famous conclusion is that “a woman must have money and a room of her own”; she also addresses writing style: a woman who writes will fi nd “some new vehicle, not necessarily in verse, for the poetry in her” and that “the book has somehow to be adapted to the body.”40 Woolf, drawing on her own practice, imagined a woman novelist who resists conventional structure to embrace “a sensibility that was very wide, eager and free. It responded to an almost imperceptible touch on it. . . . It brought buried things to light and made one wonder what need there had been to bury them.”41 In my lecture I draw parallels between the space afforded by Julian’s anchorhold and the “room of one’s own” explored by Woolf. Julian found herself in possession of the basic requirements outlined by Woolf: space, solitude, and fi nancial stability. In addition, the three windows of her anchorhold (onto church, servant’s quarter, and street) symbolize potentially our needs for spiritual, practical, and social perspectives, whether or not there is an intention to write. I am interested in a Julian who empowers other writers to explore their personal vision, particularly, though not exclusively, if that writing is innovative: Julian’s writing employs fluidity of structure, shifts and mixtures of gender pronouns, and metaphors of maternity and the inner spaces of the body. For me, Julian is also a paradigm and I wish to view her as part of a lineage of (particularly twentieth-century) women writers who developed ways of writing about gendered spiritual experience, which Julian arguably anticipated. This image of Julian as a woman writer and a touchstone for the writer’s profession is, of course, just as constructed as that of Julian as feminist / antifeminist, therapist, community patron, and quotable commodity. I fi nd it resonant, but I would never offer it as defi nitive. Perhaps this is an aspect of contemporary Julian appropriation that should be cherished, however. It is a consciously creative representation of a veiled original; it is serious in intent but subversive in strategy: it is not intended as a fi nal word. What of the future of the Julian and the Julian Centre? To indulge in some lexical ambiguity, Julian’s appeal is ongoing. This is quite literally the case: a second specific fi nancial appeal has been set up and recently fulfi lled, fi fty years after the original appeal for reconstruction of the shrine. Launched at the nearby medieval merchant’s house, Dragon Hall, in September 2006, the Friends set a target of £100,000, half of which has been met by a Heritage Lottery Fund grant. This grant will provide for the appointment of an education officer. But upkeep and relevance of the Centre itself is also of primary concern. The Centre has recently reopened following substantial refurbishment; there is the distinct sense of a new stage in its project of information and outreach. General appeals for donations continue and are vital for continuation of the activities of the Friends and the Centre. Novelist Susan Howatch, a patron of the Friends, concludes the Friends’ recent appeal with a paragraph that nicely illustrates that it is still easier to describe the known facts of Julian’s life by what she did not do: Howatch depicts Julian as “an ordinary medieval Englishwoman who never went to college, never did a

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gap year, never drafted a CV, never had a mortgage, never shopped for designer clothes, never became a symbol for marriage or motherhood and yet became one of the greatest spiritual geniuses England has ever produced, a source of strength and inspiration and comfort to thousands—millions—all over the world.”42 It is as though we have come full circle. Julian is like us, but she is also, as Howatch rhetorically emphasizes here, fundamentally unlike us in her “ordinary medieval” alterity. Tempting though it is to suggest we live in “similar times” to Julian and that she speaks specifically “to us,” the truth is more complex and more elusive.43 Our appreciations and appropriations of her are prompted by a fruitful mixture of cultural and spiritual projection, alongside our (however prayerful) readings of the written text(s). The Julian Centre is a symbolic as well as sitespecific “mid point” for the different representations of Julian in contemporary usage. Julian is a woman who has “veiled herself as best she can” (Irigaray’s phrase) whilst providing, through her written Revelation, a creative matrix for contemporary concerns. Notes I wish to thank Nicole McDonald, the current Julian Centre Administrator, for her help with this essay. 1. Alexandra Barratt, “How Many Children Had Julian of Norwich? Editions, Translations, and Versions of Her Revelations,” in Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie Lagorio, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett with Thomas H. Bestul, Janet Goebel, and William F. Pollard (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1995), pp. 27–39; an updated version is included as chapter one in this volume. 2. The Ancrene Riwle, trans. M.B. Salu (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1990), pp. 21–22. 3. Ancrene Riwle, trans. Salu, p. 22. 4. I am indebted to Anne-Emmanuelle Berger’s analysis of contemporary Islamic veiling in “The Newly Veiled Woman: Irigaray, Specularity, and the Islamic Veil,” Diacritics 28 (1998): 93–113. 5. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 115. 6. Irigaray, Speculum, p. 192 7. Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 34. 8. Irigaray, Speculum, p. 365. 9. From a previous edition of text at http://www.friendsofjulian.org.uk. For ease of identification, I shall subsequently refer to the reconstructed cell/shrine as “the Cell,” and the Julian Centre as “the Centre.” 10. Further information in Michael McLean, “St. Julian’s Church and Lady Julian’s Cell: A Guidebook” (1979, rev. 2006). For pictures, see the Web site of St. Julian’s Church and Shrine: www.julianofnorwich.org. 11. I am indebted to Sr. Pamela of the Community of All Hallows for information and access to the Community scrapbook containing a copy of the appeal leaf let: “Rebuilding the Ancient Norwich Church of St. Julian: Site of the Anchorage of the 14th century mystic The Lady Julian where she experienced and wrote of her revelations of Divine Love.”

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12. http://www.friendsofjulian.org.uk/. 13. All Shall Be Well, Revelation of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich: Daily Readings from the Revelations, ed. Sheila Upjohn (Norwich: Friends of Julian of Norwich, 2002). 14. http://www.norwichanglocatholic.org/index.shtml. 15. Robert Llewelyn, With Pity Not with Blame: The Spirituality of Julian of Norwich and The Cloud of Unknowing for Today, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1989), p. 59. 16. John-Julian, O.J.N., comment posted at http://haligweorc.wordpress. com/2007/07/02/the-anglican-rosary/. 17. Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian, 2nd ed. (London: SPCK, 2000), p. xxii. 18 Jantzen, Julian of Norwich, p. x. 19. Julian: Woman of Our Day, ed. Robert Llewelyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985). 20. Ursula King, “Inspired by Julian—Seeking a Feminine Mystical Way for the 21st Century” (Norwich: Friends of Julian of Norwich, 2007). 21. Sarah Law, “A Room of her Own: Julian, Prayer and Creativity” (Norwich: Friends of Julian of Norwich, 2003). 22. 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: Garland, 1998), pp. 115–52. 23. See, for example, Turner, Darkness of God. 24. Alexandra Barratt, “ ‘In the Lowest Part of Our Need’: Julian and Medieval Gynecological Writing,” in Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 239–56. 25. Benedicta Ward, “Julian the Solitary,” in Kenneth Leech and Sr. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., Julian Reconsidered (Oxford: Sisters of the Love of God Press, 1988), p. 22 [11–35]. 26. The Book of Margery Kempe, trans. Barry Windeatt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), Book 1, chap. 18, p. 77: “And then she was commanded by our Lord to go to an anchoress in [Norwich] who was called Dame Julian. And so she did, and told her about the grace that God had put into her soul . . . and also many wonderful revelations, which she described to the anchoress to find out if there were any deception in them, for the anchoress was expert in such things and could give good advice.” 27. See Christopher Abbot, Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1999), which shows Julian situating herself as a questioning rather than authoritative figure. 28. The Ancrene Riwle discourages anchoresses from giving spiritual counsel, implying that such practice did occur; see, for example, Ancrene Riwle, trans. Salu, pp. 28–29 29. See, for example, Dave Mearns and Brian Thorne on the core conditions in Person-Centred Counselling in Action (London: Sage, 1999), pp. 62–63. 30. Brian Thorne, Julian of Norwich, Radical Psychotherapist (London: Guild of Pastoral Psychology, 1993), p. 10. 31. http://www.norwichcentre.org/Index.htm. 32. Brian Thorne, Infinitely Beloved: The Challenge of Divine Intimacy (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2003), p. 14. 33. Thorne, Radical Psychotherapist, p. 7.

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34. See Christiania Whitehead in this volume for further discussion of the Order. 35. http://www.orderofjulian.org/julians_window/julians_window.html. 36. At the time of writing, a similar association for those interested in contemplative prayer and Julian is planned by the Friends: the Companions of Julian of Norwich. 37. Sarah Law, “Patience, Prayer and Poetry: Reading Julian of Norwich” (Waukesha, WI: Order of Julian of Norwich, 2005). 38. http://www.julianmeetings.org/. 39. Irigaray, Speculum, p. 193. 40. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 101. 41. Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 121. 42. Previous edition of text at http://www.friendsofjulian.org.uk. 43. Examples of this sort of “like us” comparison abound: for example, Frodo Okulum, The Julian Mystique (New London: Twenty-third Publications, 1998), p. 60: “Julian lived in times much like our own, and her theology speaks clearly to our needs today.”

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CONTRIBUTORS

Denise N. Baker is the author of Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton University Press, 1994) and the editor of The Showings of Julian of Norwich: A Norton Critical Edition (W.W. Norton, 2005). She also edited the essays collected in Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures (SUNY Press, 2000). She is Professor of English and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Former editor of Mystics Quarterly, Alexandra Barratt is Professor of English at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She has published a number of books, including several editions of Middle English texts and the anthology Women’s Writing in Middle English (Longman, 1992), of which a revised edition is about to appear. Her most recent publication is Anne Bulkeley and Her Book: Fashioning Female Piety in Early Tudor England (Brepols, 2009). Professor of English at Eckerd College, Jewel Spears Brooker has written or edited eight books and published scores of essays on modern writers. Her most recent book, T.S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2004. She has received major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Knight Foundation, and Pew Charitable Trust and has served as a member of the National Humanities Council (NEH). Dr. Brooker is the coeditor of two volumes of the forthcoming Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot. Susannah Mary Chewning, an Assistant Professor at Union County College, has edited two collections of essays: Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in the Middle Ages: The Word Made Flesh (Ashgate, 2005) and The Milieu and Context of the Wooing Group (University of Wales Press, 2009). Her current research focuses on gender and difference in Ancrene Wisse. Anthony Cuda is an Assistant Professor of modern American literature at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He has published essays on T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats and has written The Passions of Modernism:Eliot, Yeats, Woolf, and Mann, forthcoming from University of South Carolina Press. He is coediting volume two of the forthcoming Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot. Jacqueline Jenkins is Associate Professor of English at the University of Calgary. She coedited St Katherine of Alexandria: Texts and Contexts in Western Medieval Europe (Brepols, 2003) and The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).

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Sarah Law was born in Norwich and studied English at Cambridge and London universities. For two years, she was the administrator of the Julian Centre in Norwich, where she still maintains links. After teaching literature and creative writing at the University of East Anglia, she is now a senior lecturer in creative writing at London Metropolitan University and also teaches for the Open University. She is a published poet and has also lectured and published on Julian of Norwich. Sarah Salih is a Senior Lecturer in English at King’s College London. She is the author of Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Brewer, 2001), coeditor of Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe (Routledge, 2002), and Medieval Virginities (University of Wales Press, 2003), and editor of A Companion to Middle English Hagiography (Brewer, 2006). She is currently working on a study of medieval representations of paganity. Jennifer Summit, Professor of English at Stanford University, is the author of Lost Property: The Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 (University of Chicago Press, 2000), and Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (University of Chicago Press, 2008). She is coeditor (with Caroline Bicks) of The History of British Women’s Writing: 1500–1610, Volume 2 of the Palgrave History of British Women’s Writing. She is currently at work on a new project focusing on the transformation of the debate over the Active Life versus Contemplative Life across the late-medieval and early-modern periods. Christiania Whitehead is Associate Professor of Medieval Literature in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick. Her publications include Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory (University of Wales Press, 2003). She is currently engaged in coediting the Middle English spiritual treatise, The Doctrine of the Hert, together with a companion volume of essays on the Doctrine in its Latin and vernacular contexts (both forthcoming from the University of Exeter Press).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Editions of and Selections from Julian of Norwich’s Texts Julian of Norwich. All Shall Be Well, Revelations of Divine Love of Julian of Norwich: Daily Readings from the Revelations. Ed. Sheila Upjohn. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1992. Reprint, Norwich: Friends of Julian of Norwich, 2002. ———. All Shall be Well: Selections from the Writings of the Lady Julian of Norwich A.D. 1373. London: A.R. Mowbray, 1908. ———. A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich. Ed. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., and James Walsh, S.J. 2 vols. Studies and Texts 36. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978. ———. Comfortable Words for Christ’s Lovers: Being the Visions and Voices Vouchsafed to Lady Julian, Recluse at Norwich in 1373. Trans. and ed. Dundas Harford. London: H.R. Allinson, 1911. ———. Enfolded in Love: Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich. Trans. Members of the Julian Shrine. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1980. ———. Enfolded in Love: Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich. 2nd ed. Ed. Robert Llewelyn and Michael McLean, trans. Sheila Upjohn. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1994. ———. Enfolded in Love: Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert Llewelyn and Michael McLean, trans. Sheila Upjohn. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1999. ———. Enfolded in Love: Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich. 4th ed. Ed. Robert Llewelyn and Michael McLean, trans. Sheila Upjohn. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2004. ———. “Extracts from ‘The Revelations of Divine Love’ of Julian of Norwich.” In Of the Knowledge of Ourselves and of God: A Fifteenth-Century Florilegium. Ed. James Walsh and Eric Colledge, pp. 45–68. Fleur de Lys Seris. London: A.R. Mowbray, 1961. ———. The Gift of Julian of Norwich. Ed. Karen Manton, illustrated by Lynn Muir. Leominster, UK: Gracewing, 2005. ———. In Love Enclosed: More Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich. Ed. Robert Llewelyn. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985. ———. Juliana of Norwich: An Introductory Appreciation and an Interpretative Anthology. Ed. Franklin Chambers. London: Gollancz, 1955. ———. Julian of Norwich: Journeys into Joy. Ed. John Nelson. New York: New City Press, 2001. ———. Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love: The Shorter Version ed. from B.L. Add. MS 37790. Ed. Frances Beer. Middle English Texts 8. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1978. ———. “Julian of Norwich: The Westminster Text of A Revelation of Love.” Ed. Hugh Kempster. Mystics Quarterly 23 (1997): 177–245.

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Manuscripts Cited Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402. Cambridge, Magdalene College MS C 2498. Edinburgh, National Museum of Scotland Adv. MS 18.1.7.

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INDEX

Abbey, Edward, 88 Aelred of Rievaulx, 134, 156–7 Aers, David, 67, 168 AIDS, 125, 149 alchemy, see theosophy Allchin, A.M., 133, 151 All Hallows Community, Norfolk, UK, 132, 175–7, 179 Amesbury Psalter, 162 anchoritism, 34, 39, 102–4, 109, 113–25, 134, 137–9, 155–7, 159, 174–5 see also Julian of Norwich: as anchoress Ancrene Wisse [Ancrene Riwle], 34, 103–6, 114, 122–3, 134, 156–8, 166, 174 Andrewes, Lancelot, 70 Anglicanism, 1, 15–20, 24, 31, 36–41, 59–60, 70, 131–42, 144–5, 157, 175–7, 179, 181 Anselm of Canterbury, 107 anti-Catholicism, 16, 36–40, 106 antiquarianism, 34, 38, 46 apophasis, 59, 90, 96–7, 175, 182 Aristotle, 93–4 Arundel, Thomas, 176 asceticism, 8, 95, 103–4, 109, 137 Ashworth, G.J., 155, 161 Augustine of Hippo, 70–2, 74, 75–6, 78–80, 82–4, 91, 93 Bagshaw, Dana, 113, 118–20, 122, 125, 159 Baker, Augustine, 4–5, 15, 30–1, 33, 35 Baker, Denise N., 22, 67, 71–2, 77–8, 107 Ball, John, 7, 117, 136–7 baptism, 70, 77, 92 Barratt, Alexandra, 6, 125, 173, 182 Batman, Stephen, 34 Baudelaire, Charles, 70, 72–4 Baxter, Margery, 7

Becket, Thomas, 72 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 82 Bell, David, 93 Benedict, Barbara, 33 Benedict, St., 168 Benjamin, Walter, 161 Bergson, Henri, 71 Berman, Russell A., 41 Bernard of Clairvaux, 51, 108 Bernoulli, Rudolf, 93 Bible, 23, 24, 71, 76, 91, 105, 108, 128, 140, 143, 144 Björnson, Björnstjerne, 53 Black Death, 78, 103, 116, 118–19, 149, 176, 183 Blake, William, 49, 56 Blomefield, Francis, 18, 155 Blount, Mary, 32–3, 36, 41 Blount, Walter Kirkham, 32 Boehme, Jacob, 94 Book of Hours, 162 Bradley, Ritamary, 1, 142–4 Bridget of Sweden, 176 Brown, David, 156 Brown, Terence, 64 Buddhism, 135–6, 139, 179 Burne-Jones, Edward, 51 Bury, J.B., 51 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 109 Camden, William, 34 Campbell, Beatrice Stella, 53 canonization, 24, 133, 173, 183 Canterbury Cathedral, 133 Carlyle, Thomas, 57 Cary, Clementine, 5, 14, 31 Cary, Elizabeth, 5 catechism, 140, 142–3

212

IN DEX

Catherine of Siena, 176 Catholicism, 3–6, 7, 9, 14–20, 23, 30–41, 52, 58, 105, 110, 131–3, 139–40, 142–3, 144, 157–8, 168, 173, 178, 180–1, 183, 184 Cavalcante, Guido, 49 Cavendish, Margaret, 41 Charles I, 76, 78–9, 84 chastity, 114–15 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 37, 50–1, 115, 176 Chrétien de Troyes, 51 Christian socialism, 9, 136–7, 140, 141, 161 Christine de Pisan, 20 Clancy, Thomas, 31 closet, 32–3, 36–7, 41 Cloud of Unknowing, 31, 33, 83, 134–5, 141 Cole-King, Susan, 140, 150 Colledge, Eric/Edmund, 3–4, 15, 20, 21–2, 25, 102, 103, 164 Collins, Henry, 16 Companions of Julian of Norwich, 161 confession, 78, 120, 184 Congreve, George, 19 Constable, Barbara, 31 contemplation, 3–5, 9, 29, 30–7, 40–1, 87–8, 103, 131, 133–9, 143–4, 156, 159, 181, 185 see also mysticism Cotton, Robert, 5, 31, 34 Crampton, Georgia Ronan, 22 Crawford, Patricia, 36 Cré, Marleen, 3, 11 Cressy, Serenus, 7, 14–18, 20, 23, 26, 30–41 Croce, Benedetto, 51 Cromwell, Oliver, 76, 78, 84 crucifix, 70, 133, 156, 159–61, 160, 164, 165, 168, 175 crucifixion, 57 see also Julian of Norwich: themes in: Passion vision Dale, Jean, 158 damnation, 18, 73, 83, 140 Dante, 49, 51, 69–70, 73–4, 77–8, 83, 84 Derrida, Jacques, 90, 144 Deus Absconditus, 90 Dillard, Annie, 1, 6, 8, 87–97 Dimock, Wai Chee, 29–30 Dionysius the Areopagite, pseudo-, 96 Dolan, Frances, 45

drama, 8, 113–26, 159 Drury, William, 32 Dunn, F.I., 155 Early English Books Online, 23 Early English Text Society, 19 Eastern Churches, 133, 135–6, 179 Eaton, John, 16 Eckhart, Meister, 91, 93–5, 97 ecumenism, 132–4, 144 Edwards, A.S.G., 35 Eliade, Mircea, 94–5, 98 Eliot, T.S., 1, 6, 8, 49, 52, 69–84, 145 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 89 English Civil War, 76, 78–9 Ensler, Eve, 118 Episcopalianism, 131, 134, 138–9, 140, 179, 181, 185 Eucharist, 92, 160, 177, 178 Faivre, Antoine, 94 feminism, 174–5, 108 see also Julian of Norwich: feminist analysis of Fiske, Ronald, 155 Flood, Robert, 155 Flora, Reverend Mother, 175 folklore, 49, 51–2, 57 Forsyth, Moira, 164–5 Foucault, Michel, 159 Francis of Assisi, 51 Free Church, 133 Freud, Sigmund, 41, 174 Friends of Julian of Norwich, 175, 177, 179, 182, 184, 186 Fruehwirth, Gregory, 139, 185 Gascoigne, Margaret, 5 Gaskins, Jacob, 100 Glasscoe, Marion, 14, 21, 25, 196 Golden Dawn Hermetic Society, 49, 58 Gonne, Iseult, 62 Gray, Mary, 182 Great War, 76 Gregory, Augusta, 53, 54, 56 Gregory of Nyssa, 133 Grenehalgh, James, 3 Hamilton, Paul, 34 Harford, Dundas, 18 Hasenfratz, Robert, 111

IN DEX

Hawkins, Peter, 88 Heidegger, Martin, 144 Heracles, 81–2 Heraclitus, 74, 83 Herbert, George, 70 heresy, 16, 105–6, 118, 158 heritage, 1, 37, 52, 153–68, 184 Hillesum, Etty, 182 Hilton, Walter, 2, 4, 5, 13, 31, 33, 176 historicism, 6–7, 29–30, 34 Holgate, David, 1, 166–8 Holloway, Julia Bolton, 18, 20, 21–4 Holocaust, 82, 182 Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 22 Howatch, Susan, 186–7 Hsieh, Tehching, 124–5 Hudleston, Roger, 19 Hudson, Anne, 44 Hügel, Friedrich von, 18, 57, 58, 62 Hulme, T.E., 70, 72 Hyde, Edward, 38 icons, 131, 133, 138, 166, 178 incarnation, 96, 136, 144 Inge, William Ralph, 57, 59–60 interfaith syncretism, 134–5 Irigaray, Luce, 174–5, 185, 187 Israel, Martin, 149 Janda, James, 113–18, 122, 125 Jantzen, Grace, 137–8, 144, 149, 181 Jarman, Derek, 125 Jauss, Hans Robert, 2 Jenkins, Jacqueline, 2, 4, 20–2, 23–4, 26, 39, 102, 106, 157, 164 Joachim of Fiore, 51 Joan of Arc, 176 Jocelyn, John, 46 John of the Cross, 70, 131 Jones, E.A., 10 Julian Cell, Norwich, UK, 1–2, 9, 101, 132, 153–61, 154, 160, 163–6, 168, 173, 175–81, 184, 185 Julian Centre, Norwich, UK, 9, 132, 153–6, 161–2, 164–5, 173–82, 178, 180, 184, 185, 186–7 JulianFest, 185 Julian Festival, 182, 185 Julian House, Wisconsin, 185 Julian Lectures, 158, 165, 176, 182, 184–6

213

Julian Meetings, 9, 131, 133–6, 138, 144, 150, 185 Julian of Norwich academic studies of, 1–2, 6, 9, 29–30, 102 as anchoress, 3, 8, 9, 32–3, 101–4, 109, 113–24, 125, 133–4, 137–8, 153, 155–7, 164–6, 176, 183, 184, 186 anniversary celebrations of in 1973, 133, 177 as author, 1, 3, 8, 9, 22, 24, 29–30, 32, 101–2, 104–6, 113, 155, 163–4, 166–8 biography, conjectural, 8, 9, 32, 101–6, 116–19, 125, 163–8, 183 with cat, 101, 114, 163, 166–8, 167 as counselor, 103–4, 114–15, 117–120, 140–2, 144, 184–6 dehistoricization of, 6–9, 30–7, 103, 108–10, 117, 121–2, 124, 132, 140–4, 155–9, 168, 175–6, 183–5 designations of, 173 editions, selections and translations of, 7, 13–24, 30–7, 41, 142–4, 162–3 All Shall be Well (anon, 1908), 19 All Shall Be Well (Upjohn, 1992), 149–50, 177 A Book of Showings (Colledge and Walsh, 1978), 21–2, 102 Comfortable Words for Christ’s Lovers (Harford, 1911), 18 Enfolded in Love (Llewelyn, 1980), 142–3, 163 Gift of Julian of Norwich (Manton, 2005), 150, 162–3, 166 Julian of Norwich: Journeys into Joy (Nelson, 2001), 142–3 Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love (Beer, 1978), 21–2 “Julian of Norwich: The Westminster Text” (ed. Kempster, 1997), 20 Julian’s Way (Bradley, 1992), 150 Not for the Wise (Bradley, 1994), 142–4 Of the Knowledge of Ourselves and of God (Walsh and Colledge, 1961), 20 Revelation of Love (Glasscoe, 1976), 21 Revelations of Divine Love (Wolters, 1966), 20–1, 162

214

IN DEX

Revelations of Divine Love of Julian (Walsh, 1961), 20 Revelations of Divine Love Recorded by Julian (Warrack, 1901), 17, 19, 27, 63, 120 Revelations of Divine Love, Shewed to a Devout Anchoress (Collins, 1877), 16–17 Revelations of Divine Love (Short Text and Long Text) (Spearing, 1998), 21, 162 Revelations of Divine Love Showed to a Devout Ankress (Hudleston, 1927), 19 Shewing of God’s Love (Reynolds, 1974), 19–20 Shewings of Julian of Norwich (Crampton, 1994), 22 Shewing of a Vision (anon, 1915), 19 Showing of Love (Reynolds and Holloway, 2001), 20–4 Showings of Julian of Norwich (Baker, 2005), 22 XVI Revelations of Divine Love (Cressey, 1670), 14–18, 23, 30–7, 41 Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (Parker, 1843), 15 XVI Revelations of Divine Love (Tyrrell, 1902), 17–18, 84 Stations of the Cross (Friends of Julian of Norwich, 2001), 142–3, 149–50, 179 Writings of Julian of Norwich (Watson and Jenkins, 2006), 20–4, 102 feast days, 24, 132, 142, 146, 182, 185 see also Julian Festival feminist analysis of, 6, 9, 102, 104–8, 113, 118–20, 137–8, 140, 144, 149, 168, 182, 185–6 in fiction, 7, 8, 101–10 in historical records, 3, 114, 128, 157, 163–6, 183 historicizations of, 2, 6–7, 29–30, 102–3, 116–18, 168 manuscripts London, British Library MS Add. 37790 [Amherst MS], 2–3, 5, 13, 18, 22, 23, 106, 114

London, British Library MS Sloane 2499, 14, 16–17, 19–23, 31, 121, 146 London, British Library MS Sloane 3705, 14, 23 London, Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4, 4–5, 7, 13, 19, 20, 23 Paris, MS Bibliothèque Nationale Fonds anglais 40, 4–6, 7, 14–23, 31, 146 Upholland MS, 5, 14, 19, 31 medieval readership of, 3–5, 19, 20, 166 servants of, 104, 105, 114, 125, 157 ‘simplicity’ of, 14, 39, 125, 136, 145 souvenirs of, 101, 156, 161–4, 163, 179–81, 180 texts A Revelation of Love [Long Text], 1–6, 7, 8, 13–24, 29–32, 34–5, 37–41, 52–63, 69–72, 76–84, 88–93, 97, 101–2, 105–10, 113–14, 117, 120–5, 133, 137, 139–40, 142–4, 153, 162–4, 166, 168, 175, 177, 179–82, 187 A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman [Short Text], 2–4, 7, 13, 15, 18–23, 70, 106, 113, 120, 123, 153 themes in “All shall be well, “ 21, 72, 74, 76–9, 84, 89, 97, 102, 133, 159, 160, 161–3, 162, 179, 181–2 Fall, 67, 71–2, 76, 91, 143 hazelnut, 55, 92, 101, 102, 106–7, 137, 159, 161, 179 motherhood of God, 4, 77, 101–2, 106–8, 117, 133, 138, 140, 173 Passion vision, 6, 8, 15, 57, 61, 89, 92, 101, 102, 106, 107–9, 143, 168, 179 sickness, 59, 70, 114, 116, 121, 143 visual images of, 131, 138, 159–68, 160, 162, 163, 165, 167, 178 Julian, St., 132 Jung, Carl, 139, 140 Kahmer, Shawn Madison, 148 Karnes, Michelle, 46

IN DEX

Kempe, Margery, 3, 7, 13, 113–15, 118–20, 123, 125, 136, 157, 163, 166, 176, 183, 184 Kempis, Thomas à, 51, 60, 63 Kempster, Hugh, 4, 20 King, Ursula, 182 Knightley, Robert, 32 Kristeva, Julia, 41 Laforgue, Jules, 52 Langdale, J.S.R, 51 Lay, Jenna, 42 lectio divina, 143–4 Leech, Kenneth, 7, 133, 135–8, 141, 145, 161 Leerssen, Joop, 41 Lentz, Robert, 166 Lewis, C.S., 14 liberation theology, 136–7 literacy, 101, 104–5 Little, Mary E., 102, 166 liturgy, 1, 102, 138, 142 Llewelyn, Robert, 132–3, 135, 140–1, 146, 150, 158, 165, 178, 181 Lollardy, 7, 105, 118 London, 5, 16, 53, 58, 72, 76–7, 79–80, 82, 83, 124, 154 Love, Nicholas, 153 Loveday, Michael, 154 Loving, Linda, 126 Lu Bro, 138 Lucas, Tony, 157–8 Main, John, 134 Malory, Thomas, 51 mantra, 142–3, 163, 181 Mapledurham House, Berkshire, 36 Margherita, Gayle, 131 Mary, Virgin, 32, 34, 43, 82, 138, 159, 161, 181 Mass, 104, 161, 177, 182, 184 materia prima, 93–4 Matthews, Melvyn, 182 Maynard, Jane F., 149 McAvoy, Liz Herbert, 108, 149 McGinn, Bernard, 93, 96 McInerney, Maud Burnett, 39 McLean, Michael, 155 medievalism, 2, 49, 157

215

meditation, 19, 50, 60–1, 80, 122, 133–6, 141–4, 176, 181 mediumship, 59–60 memory-place, 9, 155 Mercier, Désiré-Joseph, 51 Merton, Thomas, 131, 135–6, 145 Milton, John, 22, 76, 78–80, 84 Milton, Ralph, 7, 102–3, 105, 106–7, 161 monasticism, 3, 4–6, 9, 30–2, 41, 103, 105, 120–1, 138–9, 144, 164–5, 183, 185 More, Bridget, 4–5, 31 More, Helen, 4 More, Paul Elmer, 70 More, Thomas, 4 Morris, William, 49, 51 Movement for Whole Ministry in the Scottish Episcopal Church, 140 Movement for Women’s Ordained Ministry, 141 Murdoch, Iris, 1 music, 131 mysticism, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 20, 31–5, 39–40, 50, 51–3, 55–60, 62–3, 71, 83, 87–8, 91–7, 107, 133, 139, 142, 144, 153, 164, 175, 182 see also contemplation Nelson, John, 139, 142, 145 Neoplatonism, 49–50, 52, 58–60, 91, 93 Newman, John Henry, 145 New York, 124 Nicholson, A.K., 167 Nora, Pierre, 155 Norton Anthology of English Literature, 102 Norwich, Connecticut, 138 Norwich, UK, 1, 3, 9, 18, 70, 101, 103, 114, 116, 120–1, 122, 132–3, 153–68, 173, 175–82, 184–5, 186–7 Bishops of Despenser, Henry, 105, 176 Herbert, Percy, 155 Carrow Priory, 103, 105, 138, 164, 173, 183 Cathedral, 1, 9, 101, 121, 133, 153, 161, 163–8, 165, 167 Centre, 185 churches St. John, Timberhill, 177

216

IN DEX

Norwich, UK—Continued St. Julian, 9, 101, 122, 153–61, 154, 160, 164, 166, 173, 175–7, 178, 181, 182 see also Julian Cell, Julian Centre St. Michael at Thorn, 176 St. Stephen, 18 St. Thomas, Heigham, 164 City Council, 168 Dragon Hall, 186 Heritage Economic and Regeneration Trust, 154 Obbard, Elizabeth Ruth, 139 O’Driscoll, Herbert, 145 Ogden, Irene, 179 Okulam, Frodo, 189 Oldfield, Alan, 178 Orders of religion Benedictine, 4–6, 9, 14–15, 19, 30–2, 41, 134, 145, 146, 161, 164–8, 173 Carmelite, 139 Carthusian, 3, 13 Jesuit, 17–18, 20, 114, 142 of Julian of Norwich, 9, 131, 138–9, 144, 145, 157, 158, 185 ordination of women, 140–1, 144, 177, 179 Our Lady of Consolation convents, 4–6, 14–15, 30–1, 41 Oxford English Dictionary, 19 Pantaleo, Jack, 102, 104, 105, 108–9 pantheism, 89–90, 92, 95 Paracelsus, 94 Parker, Cornelia, 124 Parker, George Hargreave, 15–18 Parker, Matthew, 34, 46 Peasants’ Revolt, 116–18, 136, 176 Pentecost, 76, 83 Petre, Maud, 18 Phillips, Kim, 102–3 philosopher’s stone, 93–6 pilgrimage, 132, 156–7, 176–82 plague, see Black Death Plotinus, 50, 59 Porète, Marguerite, 3, 106 Pound, Ezra, 49, 51, 54 prayer, 4, 19, 36, 96, 103, 122, 131–8, 141, 142–4, 156, 158, 165, 176, 180–1, 184, 185

prayer ropes, 138 predestination, 18 Protestantism, 15–16, 18, 36–41, 103, 144, 158, 161 psychology, 39, 49, 59–62, 141–2 psychotherapy, 141–2, 144, 184 Quakers, 133, 177 Rambuss, Richard, 36 Ramsey, Michael, 133 Raybould, Paul, 175 reconciliation, 79, 84, 132, 144 redemption, 53, 69, 78, 109, 144 Reformation, 1, 4, 15, 38–9, 104, 120, 138, 155–6 Reimer, Margaret Loewen, 88 relics, 107, 157–8 Reynolds, Maria, 19–20, 21–4 Richard II, 176 Richards, John, 135 Riddy, Felicity, 103 Robertson, Elizabeth, 44 Rogers, Carl, 139, 141, 184 Rogers, Daniel J., 148 Rolle, Richard, 2, 3, 5, 31, 70, 176 Romanticism, 49, 56, 72–3, 107 rosary, 138, 146, 180–1 ruminatio, 144 Russell, George, 51 Russell, Gillean, 135 Ruysbroeck, Jan van, 3, 51, 176 Salih, Sarah, 41–2, 101, 120, 123 Sayer, Frank Dale, 133 Scheick, William, 90 Schuchard, Ronald, 70 Schweickart, Russell, 137 Scotus, John Duns, 51 Scrope, Thomas, 155 Second World War, 72, 74–7, 79–82, 132, 155, 175–6 Seignobos, Charles, 51 Seton, Anya, 7, 102, 104, 105, 107 sexuality, 73, 83, 108–9, 115, 118, 174, 182 Shapiro, Barbara, 38 Sheldrake, Philip, 142, 147, 150 Shelley, Percy, 55 Simpson, James, 30, 33, 38

IN DEX

sin, 53, 69–74, 76–80, 82, 89, 116, 118, 120, 181 Sitwell, Sacheverell, 51 Sloane, Hans, 121 Society of the Love of God, Fairacres, Oxford, 25, 133 Sophocles, 81 Sorel, Georges, 72 Spearing, Elizabeth, 21, 162 spirituality, 7, 50, 52, 60, 70–1, 119, 131–45, 177, 179, 181, 182, 184–5 St. Hilary’s Episcopal Church, Prospect Heights, Illinois,166 Stillingf leet, Edward, 37–41 Stjerna, Kirsi, 148 Suso, Henry, 5, 176 Swanson, John-Julian, 138–40, 151, 158, 185 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 49 Swift, Jonathan, 77 Swinton, Tilda, 124–5 Swynford, Katherine, 7, 104, 107 Symons, Arthur, 52 Tagore, Rabindranath, 64 Targoff, Ramie, 36 Tauler, John, 176 Teresa of Avila, 5, 139 theatre, 8, 53, 54, 113–26 theodicy, 8, 71–84, 89–97 theosophy, 93–4 Thérèse of Lisieux, 139 Thomas Aquinas, 51 Thoreau, Henry David, 87, 88 Thorne, Brian, 141–2, 158, 184–5 Tolle, Eckhart, 185 tourism, 154, 156, 161 Transcendentalism, 8, 87, 89, 97 Trinity, 74, 78, 97, 102, 140 Tumbleson, Raymond D., 45 Tunbridge, J.E., 155, 161 Turner, Victor and Edith, 156 Tyrrell, George, 17–18, 20

217

Underhill, Evelyn, 57–8, 71 Upjohn, Sheila, 113, 120–2, 124, 125, 137, 143, 158, 177 Valbuena, Olga L., 37 vampires, 108–9 Vantrease, Brenda Rickman, 102, 104–8 Vatican II, 132 Vedanta, 135, 139 veiling, 9, 103, 174–5, 184 vernacularity, 3, 8, 101, 104–6 Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Auguste, 64 Wakeman, Hilary, 133–5 Walsh, James, 3–4, 15, 20, 21–2, 25, 102, 103, 164 Walsingham, 139, 161, 181 Ward, Benedicta, 103, 106, 127, 148, 164–5, 183 Warrack, Grace, 17–19, 23, 53, 121, 155 Warren, Ann K., 123 Wars of the Roses, 76, 79 Watson, Nicholas, 2, 3, 4, 20–4, 26, 30, 39, 43, 102, 106, 157, 164 Welbourn, Hebe, 135 Wettenhall, Edward, 36 Weyden, Rogier van der, 162 Weygandt, Cornelius, 49 Williams, Rowan, 145, 148 Wolff, Mary Madeleva, 131 Wolfram von Eschenbach, 51 Wolters, Clifton, 20, 162 Woolf, Virginia, 9, 186 World Community for Christian Meditation, 134 Wycliffe, John, 105, 176 Yates, Julian, 45 Yeats, William Butler, 6, 8, 49–63, 71, 77, 83–4