Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich was born about 1342 or 1343 and almost certainly spent her whole life in Norwich, then England's second city, a place of trade, churches, friaries, and recluses' cells. In her childhood the Black Death swept the city; later she lived through further plague, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and the harsh suppression of the Lollards. Almost nothing is known of her family or schooling. Some have thought she may have been taught by the Benedictine nuns of Carrow Abbey or that she knew motherhood and widowhood before enclosure; her own writings do not settle these questions, and it is even uncertain whether "Julian" was her baptismal name or taken from the church to which her cell was joined.

In May 1373, at the age of thirty, she fell so gravely ill that she and those around her expected her death. On 8 May a curate gave her the last rites and held a crucifix before her. As sight failed and her body grew numb, she fixed her gaze on the cross and saw the figure of Jesus begin to bleed. Over the following hours she received fifteen visions, or "shewings," of the Passion and of divine love; a sixteenth came the next night. She recovered completely on 13 May. Soon afterward she set down a shorter account of what she had seen. Decades later, perhaps from the early 1390s into the 1410s or beyond, she returned to the same revelations in a far longer theological meditation—the Long Text of what later ages call Revelations of Divine Love—probing sin, wrath, mercy, and the motherhood of God in Christ.

By at least the 1390s she lived as an anchoress in a cell attached to St Julian's Church in Conisford, Norwich. After the solemn rite that sealed her into enclosure, she kept the austere rule of poverty, chastity, and prayer proper to recluses, supported by the alms of the faithful and sought out for counsel. Four Norwich wills (1394–1416) leave money to the anchoress Julian; one mentions a companion Sarah and a maid. About 1414 the mystic Margery Kempe came to her, sent, she said, by Our Lord, because Dame Julian was expert in revelations and could give good counsel. Julian preferred anonymity and silence, yet she became a spiritual mother to her city. She was still living after 1416; a later bequest to an unnamed anchorite at the same church leaves open the possibility that she lived still longer. She died sometime after that date, her exact day unrecorded.

Her manuscripts were carefully kept through the Reformation though long unpublished. The Long Text appeared in print in 1670 through the Benedictine Serenus de Cressy; the Short Text resurfaced and was published in the early twentieth century. Modern readers have recognized in her an outstanding English mystic and theologian: she teaches that sin is "behovely," that wrath is on man's side alone, that God is both father and mother, and that divine love will make all things well.

May Blessed Julian of Norwich obtain for us a share in her trust, that we may rest in God's mercy and practice today the virtue of hope.