Title: Revelations of Divine Love Author: Julian of Norwich Creation Date: c. 1395 Location: Norwich, England Collection: Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To
Brief
We do not know her birth name. "Julian" comes from the church to which her cell was attached — St Julian's in Norwich — and that borrowed name is the only one she carried into history. Born around 1342, she lived through the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, the Western Schism, and the Lollard persecutions. In May 1373, aged about thirty, she fell desperately ill and received the last rites. As a priest held a crucifix before her failing eyes, she experienced sixteen "showings" — visionary revelations in which Christ spoke to her about suffering, sin, love, and the architecture of God's relationship to the world. She recovered. She spent the rest of her life trying to understand what she had seen.
She wrote two versions: a short text completed within a few years of the visions, and a long text composed after "fifteen years and more" of sustained meditation, adding the parable of the lord and the servant, the theology of Christ's motherhood, and chapters of extraordinary intellectual ambition. Both were written in Middle English at a time when the church's authorised language of theology was Latin. To write of God in English was a political act. John Wycliffe had died in 1384; the first English Lollard martyr was burned in 1401, within Julian's lifetime.
What makes the Revelations canonical is the scale of its achievement against the conditions of its making. From an anchoress's cell the size of a small kitchen, walled in for decades under a rite that formally declared her dead to the world, Julian produced the earliest surviving book in English by a woman — and one of the most original theological works of the English Middle Ages.
The Prohibition
The prohibition on women's theological writing in fourteenth-century England was absolute in principle. No woman held ecclesiastical office, preached publicly, or was admitted to Oxford or Cambridge where theology was taught and examined. The authorised language of theology was Latin, which women were almost never trained to write with scholastic competence. Canon law, following 1 Corinthians 14 and 1 Timothy 2, held that women were to "learn in silence with all subjection" and were not to "teach, nor usurp authority over the man." A woman claiming direct theological insight risked classification as either a saint or a heretic — and the second category was expanding throughout the fourteenth century.
Julian wrote in a specifically dangerous moment. Wycliffe's campaign for vernacular scripture and lay access to theology had provoked a backlash that by the 1390s was hardening into formal heresy-hunting apparatus. In 1401 Parliament passed De heretico comburendo, the first English statute authorising the burning of heretics. In 1409 Archbishop Arundel's Oxford Constitutions criminalised English-language religious writing without episcopal licence and forbade possession of vernacular religious books. Julian's long text circulated under their shadow.
A woman writing vernacular theology was suspect on two counts simultaneously: as a woman presuming to teach and as a vernacular writer bypassing Latin authority. Margery Kempe, a generation younger and living nearby in King's Lynn, was repeatedly arrested and threatened with burning for speaking publicly about God in English. Margery records visiting Julian's cell for counsel — our only contemporary witness to Julian as a living figure, placing her squarely in the territory where women's religious speech was being policed. Julian survived the policing. Margery barely did.
The Strategy
Julian's strategy was to make her cell the frame that authorised everything she wrote. The anchoritic life was, paradoxically, a recognised form of religious authority. An anchoress underwent a funeral rite — the bishop said the mass of the dead, sprinkled the cell with dust, sealed the door. After that rite she was legally dead to the world, but she acquired spiritual standing ordinary women could not claim. Her words carried the weight of a life given entirely to contemplation, and that weight was legible to ecclesiastical power in a way that a laywoman's speech was not.
She used this standing with precision. She did not call her book a theological treatise but a record of showings — visions received passively, which she was merely reporting. Throughout the text she insists she is "a simple creature unlettered," deferring in everything to Holy Church. The framing is strategic: a visionary reports; a theologian teaches. Vision was a category the church had protocols for. Theology was reserved to men. By placing her work under the rubric of vision, Julian could write what is in fact sustained theological argument while maintaining she was only repeating what Christ had shown her.
The second element was absolute orthodox framing wherever her insights might contradict church teaching. When she says she saw no wrath in God, she adds immediately that the church teaches punishment for sin and that she trusts the church's authority. The effect is to make her text doctrinally unattackable while leaving her actual insights intact for careful readers. The third was patience: the long text was developed through two decades of contemplation. She is not a visionary producing enthusiastic outpourings but a thinker working out what she has been given. The cell is a workshop.
The Price and the Legacy
The price was the cell itself: decades inside a stone room, the funeral rite, the closed door, the withdrawal from marriage, children, travel, and ordinary companionship. Whether this was a price or a chosen freedom the text does not answer, and the distinction may not hold for a woman whose alternatives were so constrained. The cell was the condition of her work, and within it she built a life of thought denied to most medieval women.
The price paid by the book was more dangerous. After the Oxford Constitutions of 1409, English-language religious writing became legally suspect. After the Reformation dissolved the monasteries in the 1530s, the libraries preserving such texts were scattered and destroyed. Julian's long text survived by an extremely thin margin: three complete manuscript witnesses, all post-Reformation copies preserved by English Benedictine nuns in exile at Cambrai and Paris. Without their labour — other enclosed women, centuries later, hand-copying the text — the book would have been lost.
The first printed edition appeared in 1670. Julian's wider circulation came in the twentieth century, through T.S. Eliot's quotation of "all shall be well" in Little Gidding and through scholarly editions that made the Middle English accessible. Since the 1980s she has become the most widely read female theologian of the English Middle Ages, invoked in feminist theology for her image of Christ as mother, cited in philosophical theology for her handling of sin and divine love. The church of St Julian in Norwich, bombed in the Second World War, has been rebuilt with a reconstructed cell as a place of pilgrimage. Six hundred years after her death, she is read more widely than in any earlier century — a book kept alive by enclosed women passing it from hand to hand, century to century, holding the text in their care as Julian held the hazelnut in her palm.
The Reading
The Illness and the First Showing
She had asked, as a young woman, for three gifts: an experiential understanding of the passion, a bodily sickness so severe she should think herself at the point of death, and three spiritual wounds — contrition, compassion, and longing for God. The first and third she had asked conditionally. The second she had forgotten entirely. Now, in May of the year of our Lord 1373, at the age of thirty or thirty-one, the second gift arrived without announcement. She fell so ill that the priest was called to administer the last rites. Her body went cold from the feet upward. Her sight began to fail. She could no longer speak. The priest held a crucifix before her face and said, "I have brought you the image of your saviour. Look on it, and take comfort from it."
She fixed her eyes on the cross. The pain left her. And the first showing began.
Blood running down from the crown of thorns in great drops, like pellets, as it had come out of the veins — hot, fresh, plenteous. The image was not symbolic but sensory: blood as blood, falling with the particular weight and roundness of actual pellets, each one carrying the reality of a body opened by sharp things. The colour was brownish red, as it came from the veins, and the drops were round as they fell from the head, but when they spread they became bright red. The bleeding was so plenteous it seemed to her that had it been real blood in nature, the whole bed and everything around would have been drenched.
The Hazelnut
Between the sensory visions — the blood, the drying flesh, the wind across the body — came interior communications. In one of these she was shown a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of her hand, and it was as round as a ball. She looked upon it with the eye of her understanding and thought, What may this be? And the answer came generally thus: It is all that is made. She marvelled how it could last, for she thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing, it was so small. And she was answered in her understanding: It lasts, and ever shall last, because God loves it. And so hath all thing being by the love of God.
In this little thing she saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second is that God loves it. The third is that God keeps it. But what is that to her? It is that God is the maker, the keeper, and the lover. Until she is substantially united to God she can never have full rest nor true bliss; that is to say, until she is so fastened to God that there is nothing at all that is made between her God and her.
The smallness of the world against the infinity of the maker became one of her governing images — all that exists held in the palm like a nut, persisting not by its own strength but by the attention of love.
The Passion
The showings moved between the cross and the interior voice. The physical detail was unsparing: the drying of the body as a process observed in time, the blood congealing and darkening, the skin tightening and cracking in the wind, the face changing colour as suffering worked through it. She watched the flesh dry as a board when it is aged, and the face turn from fair and lifelike to blue-brown, then to drier death, then darker still, as the wind and the cold from without met the inward dying.
She saw the great drops of blood fall down from under the garland of thorns, hot and fresh, and the sweet body turn dry in her sight, and the fair skin and tender flesh, with the hair and the blood, all raised and loosened from the bone by the thorns. She saw the scourging that tore the tender flesh of the sweet body deep into the skin, and the hot blood running out so plentifully. And at a point the flesh hung loose, heavy with moisture and weight, ready to fall, as she watched.
Christ spoke to her in the vision, in the first person, and what he said sat oddly with fourteenth-century orthodoxy. He did not speak of obedience or sacrifice in the Anselmian manner. He said he was satisfied with her, said she was precious to him, said that the suffering of the cross was a joy to him because it was done for love. If he could suffer more, he would, because his love was greater than any suffering that could satisfy it. The willingness was not mere endurance but delight — the joy that love takes in giving itself completely. The joy of the crucifixion was not a conventional theological position; the mainstream medieval view emphasised suffering as sacrifice, and Christ's willingness was normally framed in terms of obedience and satisfaction for sin. Here instead was love — his love for humanity — and the joy that love takes in the totality of its own gift.
Sin Is Behovable
She spent fifteen years and more expanding each showing into sustained meditation, and the theology that emerged was distinctive and, in places, startling. She was told that sin is behovable — meaning necessary, inevitable, fitting — but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
She struggled with this. The triple repetition was not ornament. It was the way the showing came, and she recorded it as she received it, with the fidelity that distinguishes testimony from composition. It could not be literally true, she argued with her vision, because sin is the cause of damnation and the damned are not well. The church teaches, and she accepts, that some souls are lost forever. Her vision replied that the reconciliation of sin's reality with God's final victory is a great deed that God will accomplish at the end of time, a deed whose nature is hidden from the church and from human understanding but whose effect will be total.
She was given no further explanation. She was told only to trust the promise and that everything she could not reconcile would be reconciled then. She was careful never to contradict the church's teaching explicitly — but the vision pressed closer to universal salvation than any orthodox theologian of her century dared go. The theological boldness was masked by the visionary framing: she was not teaching universal salvation; she was reporting that Christ told her all shall be well. The distinction is the hinge on which her survival turned.
No Wrath in God
She said, quite plainly, that in all her visions she saw no wrath in God. God is not angry, cannot be angry, is not the kind of being in whom anger could arise. The wrath that exists between God and humanity is entirely on the human side — the human experience of estrangement projected back onto the divine. Christ's action in the passion is not the appeasement of a wrathful Father but the expression of a love that was never withheld and never needed appeasing.
This was a significant departure from the dominant Anselmian satisfaction theory of atonement that had shaped medieval theology since the eleventh century. She knew it. She conceded, carefully, that the church teaches God's wrath against sin, and that she accepts the church's teaching as the teaching of Holy Church, and that she does not know how to reconcile what she has been shown with what the church teaches. The gap she left open.
The Lord and the Servant
Among all the showings, one deepened over years of prayer into a parable: she saw a lord sitting in state and a servant standing before him, eager to do the lord's will. The servant ran off to perform his task, fell into a ditch, and was so injured and disoriented by the fall that he could not see his lord or understand what had happened to him. The lord looked on the fallen servant with tender compassion, understanding that the fall was the consequence of his eagerness to serve and therefore not his fault.
She worked at this image for years before she understood what it meant. The servant, she eventually saw, was at once Adam — humanity fallen through its own attempt at good — and Christ, who fell into the womb of Mary and into the ditch of the crucifixion in order to rescue the fallen humanity he embodied. The doctrine of the fall and the incarnation were fused into a single movement of divine love that saw no fault in the one who fell. The conventional distinction between human sin and divine rescue was dissolved: Adam and Christ were one servant, and the lord's compassion for the fallen servant was directed at both simultaneously.
The Motherhood of Christ
From this parable she developed the vocabulary for which she is best known. Jesus is our true Mother, she wrote, who feeds us with himself in the sacrament as a mother feeds her child with her own body, and who bears us for joy and endless life in the labour of the crucifixion. Our mother Jesus carries us in the womb of his love, gives birth to us in pain on the cross, nurses us at the breast of the sacraments, and comforts us in our childish needs.
When the child falls and hurts itself, the mother does not punish the child for falling. She picks it up, cleans the wound, and holds it close. So when the soul sins and falls, Christ the mother does not abandon it in wrath but reaches down with tenderness, because a mother's love is not conditional on the child's performance. The child may be angry with the mother, may push the mother away, may run and hide its face in shame — but the mother does not therefore cease to be the mother, and the mother's love does not depend on the child understanding that it is loved.
The maternal imagery for Christ had antecedents — Anselm used it occasionally, Bernard and the Cistercians more systematically — but she developed it with a sustained theological seriousness without precedent in English. God is both father and mother; Christ is both brother and mother; the soul is the child whose weakness is met with maternal tenderness rather than paternal judgement. The medieval God had been almost exclusively judge; here he was nurse, midwife, and mother, and no severity in the reckoning — only the tenderness of one who had borne the child in labour and would not now let it go.
The Wound as Room
In one showing, Christ revealed his side — the wound from the lance — and invited her to look inside it. She did. Inside the wound she saw a space large enough for all humanity to rest in, a refuge within the body of Christ, a place of peace. The wound was not a mark of violence but a door, and inside it was a room — a room that was also a body, a body that was also a home — and the image collapsed the distinction between suffering and shelter in a way no abstract theology could achieve.
The vision was simultaneously literal and symbolic, and she refused to collapse one reading into the other. Both were true. Both were shown. In another showing, she saw the whole creation hung on the cross with Christ, and understood that the suffering of the cross was not something that happened at one moment in history but something ongoing in the life of every creature, and that Christ's presence in every suffering is the condition on which the suffering can be borne. The cell in which she wrote — a small enclosed space within a larger structure, a place of refuge that was also a place of confinement — was itself an echo of the wound — small enclosure within, refuge and confinement the same thing, held inside the body of suffering.
Love Was His Meaning
She wrote that it was shown to her in her own soul, by a movement of understanding some fifteen years after the showings themselves, what the meaning of the whole sequence had been. "What, would you know your Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well: love was his meaning. Who showed it thee? Love. What showed he thee? Love. Wherefore showed it he? For love. Hold thee therein, thou shalt know more in the same. But thou shalt never know nor learn therein other thing without end."
The visions were not primarily about sin or judgement or the theological questions that had consumed the scholastic minds of her century. They were about love. She was explicit about her own limits as a teacher — a woman, she said, and unlearned — but she added: "God forbid that you should say or take it so, that I am a teacher, for I mean not so, no I meant never so; for I am a woman, lewd, feeble, and frail. But I know well, this that I say, I have it of the showing of him that is sovereign teacher." She disavowed the category of teacher and then proceeded to teach, in the name of the one who had shown her what she was teaching. What made it more than strategy was the genuine uncertainty underneath — she was genuinely unable to reconcile all of it with the church's teaching, and genuinely willing to say so. The uncertainty was itself a form of theological honesty that distinguished her from the confident scholastic systems of her male contemporaries.
The Chain of Hands
That her words survived — her reputation, her anchoritic cell — depends on a combination of institutional protection, theological caution in her self-presentation, and the willingness of a few women copyists across several centuries to keep the manuscript alive. The Benedictine nuns at Cambrai and Paris, hand-copying her manuscript in exile after the English Reformation, were themselves enclosed women doing for her words what no male institution had done: keeping them alive because they recognised them as true.
It is one of the more exact ironies of literary history that the first book in English written by a woman was preserved, across the centuries in which it could easily have been lost, by other enclosed women working in silence. The chain of transmission is itself a kind of showing: women passing words from hand to hand, century to century, through the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the dissolution of the monasteries, the exile of English Catholic religious orders, holding the text in their care as the hazelnut was held in the palm — a small thing, but it lasted, because someone loved it enough not to let it go.
The anchoritic silence in which the work was composed turned out to be, historically speaking, the loudest form of speech available to an English woman theologian of the fourteenth century. From a cell the size of a pantry, walled in for decades, she spoke to a world not yet ready to hear her and that has spent the past hundred years catching up. The hazelnut is still in the palm. It has not stopped lasting.
This post is part of Women Who Wrote When They Weren't Supposed To, a series on women writing against the constraints of their time. See the full collection →
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