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Essay on Julian of Norwich
Julian of Norwich was an English spiritualist and author of Revelations of Divine Love, an extraordinary record of medieval religious understanding. She was born in Norwich, England. When she was 30 years old, she suffered a grave illness. At the same time as recuperating, she claimed to experience a series of 16 ecstatic visions of Christ's passion and of the Virgin Mary, which she recorded first in a short version and, about 20 years later, in an expanded version. She was probably a Benedictine nun, living as a recluse in an anchorage of which traces still remain in the east part of the churchyard of St. Julian in Norwich, which belonged to Carrow Priory. According to her book, this revelation was "shewed" to her on 8 or 14 May (the readings differ), 1373, when she was thirty years and a half old.
This would refer her birth to the end of 1342. Her statement, that "for twenty years after the time of this shewing, save three months, I had teaching inwardly", proves that the book was not written before 1393. An early fifteenth-century manuscript, recently purchased for the British Museum from the Amherst library, states that she "yet is on life, Anno Domini 1413". It is probable that this is the manuscript cited by Francis Bloomfield, the eighteenth century historian of Norfolk, and that a misinterpretation of the date led to the statement that she was still living in 1442. Attempts have been made to identify her with Lady Julian Lampet, the anchoress of Carrow, references concerning legacies to whom occur in documents from 1426 to 1478; but this is manifestly impossible. The newly discovered manuscript differs considerably from the complete version hitherto known, of which it is a kind of condensation, lacking the beginning and the end. Only three, much later, manuscripts of the fuller text are known to exist....
