8 - ‘And thou, to whom this Booke Shall Come’: Julian of Norwich and her Audience, Past, Present and Future

Summary

We have to discover a language which does not replace the bodily encounter, as paternal language attempts to do, but which can go along with it, words which do not bar the corporeal, but which speak corporeal.

READING the writing of the medieval English mystic, Julian of Norwich, is ioften problematised by the fact that very little biographical information is available to illuminate our knowledge and understanding of either the woman or her writing. Unlike the effervescent Margery Kempe, for example, or the well-documented figure of Saint Bridget of Sweden whose pseudo-histories and widely accessible bodily presence provide an easier inroad into their mystical writings for a student audience, Julian, as writer, as body, appears initially to remain tantalisingly beyond the margins of her own difficult texts and dense mystical theology. What we do know is largely derived from a series of local wills and some very scant information about her life, which surfaces periodically within her two accounts of a series of visions of the Passion experienced during the Spring of 1373.We learn, for example, that she had prayed for some kind of deeply affective experience as a young girl, becoming subject to it later at the age of thirty-and-a-half when suffering from a dangerous and paralysing illness. We also learn that she lies on the brink of death for several days whilst the visions unfold before her eyes. This would suggest a date of birth early in 1343. Other contemporary local wills suggest that Julian did not enter the anchorhold attached to the church of Saint Julian in Norwich until twenty years after her visions and illness, however. How she lived her life until that point is unknown. Modern scholarship, however, which had long considered her to be a Benedictine nun, is now tending towards a reading of Julian as probably a lay woman from the gentry class or the lower nobility who had been living in a domestic setting within the world prior to enclosure. Such a stance, of course, inevitably has an effect upon how we read Julian's texts, enabling us to examine them as products of a wholly embodied woman living within the world rather than a disembodied voice emerging from the more rarefied and symbolic location of enclosure.