Julian, he says, was a profoundly original and radical thinker who wrote at length about the motherhood of God. His translations of both the long and short texts are preceded by an excellent forty-page introduction. There have now been many editions of Revelations of Divine Love, but this one by Barry Windeatt is likely the best one in English. How she and her manuscript ever survived is both mystery and miracle.
Today we remember Julian for having written the first book composed by a woman in English, Revelations of Divine Love. Remarkably, this obscure text by an unknown woman received little attention until it was first published in 1670. Twenty years later, as she continued to reflect on her visions, she wrote a fuller description called the Long Text (125 pages). Soon after she recovered, Julian wrote a short summary of her revelations, which we now know as her Short Text (35 pages). "I never asked for any bodily vision," writes Julian, "or any kind of revelation from God." And yet she had the audacity to believe that God had in fact spoken to her in order to benefit all humanity: "I had a true and powerful perception that it was he himself who showed this to me without any intermediary." She then had a sixteenth revelation on the following night that confirmed to her the authenticity of her experiences, which she was otherwise tempted to attribute to delirium. What happened next, as they say, is history.īeginning at four in the morning, and lasting well past the middle of the day, Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) had a series of fifteen visions, showings, or revelations as she gazed at the crucifix. He set a crucifix before the woman at the foot of her bed. By this time her eyes were fixed, her lower body was numb, she could not speak, and a priest had come to preside over her death. On the night of May 8, she asked to be propped up in her bed.
In the first few days of May of 1373, an obscure woman who called herself "a simple, uneducated creature" lay on her death bed for "three days and three nights." She was "thirty and a half years old." On the fourth night she received the last rites of the Catholic Church "and did not expect to live until morning." Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, translated with an Introduction and Notes by Barry Windeatt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 214pp.
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