Julian of Norwich 1343 – 1416

Julian of Norwich was an English anchoress and the author of the Revelations of Divine Love, the first surviving book in English written by a woman. At thirty she received a series of sixteen visions during a near-fatal illness, and she devoted the rest of her life, enclosed in a cell attached to St Julian's Church in Norwich, to meditating on their meaning. Her two texts, the short and long versions of her Revelations, develop a theology of God's all-encompassing love, the inseparability of joy and sorrow, and the motherhood of Christ. She has become one of the most read of medieval mystics.

Julian of Norwich was born around 1343 in or near the city of Norwich. Almost nothing is known of her life before May 1373, when at the age of thirty she suffered a near-fatal illness and, while she was being prepared for death, received a series of sixteen 'showings' or visions of the suffering Christ and the love of God. She lived afterward as an anchoress in a cell attached to the church of St Julian in Norwich, from which she takes her conventional name.

Her Revelations of Divine Love survive in two versions: a Short Text composed not long after the visions, and a much longer and more theologically elaborated Long Text written after some twenty years of meditation on their meaning. The Long Text in particular is the first known book in English by a woman, and one of the great works of medieval mystical theology. The visionary Margery Kempe is recorded as having consulted her in 1413.

Julian's theology of divine love, her treatment of Christ as mother, her insistence that sin is 'behovely' yet 'all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well', and her contemplative practice of seeking the inmost ground of the soul in God have made her a central figure in the recovery of medieval women's writing and in modern Christian spirituality. The exact date of her death is unknown; she is last attested in a will of 1416.