Wikipedia Deep Dive

Julian of Norwich

12 min read

In May 1373, a thirty-year-old woman lay dying in Norwich, England. A priest held a crucifix above her bed, administering last rites. She was losing her sight. Her body was going numb. And then, staring at that crucifix, she watched the figure of Jesus begin to bleed.

Over the next several hours, she experienced fifteen visions. A sixteenth came the following night. Five days later, she recovered completely.

We don't even know her real name.

The woman we call Julian of Norwich—probably named after the church where she lived, though Julian was also used as a girl's name in medieval England—went on to write about those visions. Her book, now known as Revelations of Divine Love, is the earliest surviving work in English attributed to a woman. It's also one of the most profound theological explorations of divine love ever written. Yet for nearly five hundred years after her death, almost nobody read it.

A City of Death and Devotion

To understand Julian, you have to understand medieval Norwich. In the fourteenth century, it was England's second most important city after London—a thriving commercial center surrounded by the country's richest agricultural land.

It was also a city stalked by catastrophe.

The Black Death reached Norwich when Julian was about six years old. The plague killed perhaps half the city's population between 1348 and 1350. It returned again and again, with further outbreaks recurring until 1387. Imagine growing up in a world where half the people you knew had died before you reached adulthood, and where the specter of mass death might return at any moment.

When Julian was in her late thirties, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 swept through England. Rebel forces under Geoffrey Litster overwhelmed Norwich. The Bishop of Norwich, Henry le Despenser, eventually crushed the rebellion at the Battle of North Walsham and personally executed Litster. This same bishop zealously persecuted the Lollards—religious reformers who advocated changes to the Church—burning some of them at the stake at a place just outside the city called Lollards Pit.

Yet Norwich was simultaneously one of the most devoutly religious cities in Europe. Its skyline bristled with sacred architecture: the cathedral priory, founded in 1096; Benedictine hospitals; Carmelite and Franciscan monasteries; and numerous parish churches. Many of these churches had cells attached to them where recluses lived in permanent seclusion, devoting their lives to prayer.

This was the world Julian inhabited: plague, political violence, religious persecution—and an intense, pervasive spirituality seeking meaning amid the chaos.

The Anchoress

At some point after her visions, Julian became an anchoress. This was a specific and extreme form of religious life that has no real parallel today.

An anchoress—the female form; men were called anchorites—was a person who chose to be permanently enclosed in a small cell attached to a church. The word comes from the Greek anachorein, meaning "to withdraw." But unlike a hermit, who might wander in the wilderness, an anchoress stayed in one place. Forever.

The commitment was total and irreversible. When Julian entered her cell at Saint Julian's Church in Norwich, a formal ceremony took place. Psalms from the Office of the Dead were sung—as though it were her funeral, because in a very real sense, she was dying to the world. She was led to her cell door and through it. The door was then sealed behind her.

She would never leave that room again as long as she lived.

Life in the Cell

This sounds like solitary confinement, and in some ways it was. But an anchoress's cell wasn't a dungeon. Julian's would have had three windows: one into the church, so she could observe Mass and receive communion; one to the outside world, through which she could speak with visitors and receive food; and one for her servants.

Yes, servants. Julian had at least one maid living with her, and possibly a former maid as well—we know this from wills that mention bequests to "Sarah, living with her" and to "her maid and her former maid Alice."

The rules governing an anchoress's life were strict. Two important guides had been written: one in Latin by Aelred of Rievaulx around 1162, and another in Middle English around 1200 called the Ancrene Riwle, or "Rule for Anchoresses." The Ancrene Riwle was originally written for three sisters but became a standard manual for all female recluses. It stipulated lives of poverty, chastity, and confined isolation.

The popular image of Julian living with a cat for company? That comes from the Ancrene Riwle, which permitted anchoresses to keep a cat as their only animal companion.

But isolation didn't mean irrelevance. An anchoress played a vital role in her community. People sought her out for spiritual counsel. The wealthy left her money in their wills. She prayed constantly for the souls of others, complementing the work of parish priests. In an age that believed deeply in the power of prayer to affect outcomes in this world and the next, an anchoress was performing essential spiritual labor.

A Visitor Seeking Counsel

Around 1414, when Julian was in her seventies, she received a remarkable visitor: Margery Kempe, another English mystic whose autobiography—possibly the first in the English language—has also survived.

Kempe recorded that she traveled to Norwich specifically to seek Julian's advice. She had been "bidden by Our Lord" to visit "Dame Jelyan," because "the anchoress was expert in" divine revelations "and good counsel could give."

This tells us something important. By her seventies, Julian had a reputation that extended well beyond Norwich. She was known as an authority on mystical experience, someone whose judgment on spiritual matters could be trusted. People traveled to consult with her.

Curiously, Kempe never mentioned that Julian was also a writer, even though Kempe was familiar with the works of other spiritual authors and cited them. Either Julian kept her writings private even from visitors, or Kempe simply didn't think to mention them.

The Visions

What did Julian actually see during those hours of vision on her deathbed in 1373?

Her sixteen "shewings," as she called them—using a Middle English word that simply means "showings" or "revelations"—centered on the Passion of Christ. She saw Christ's suffering, his blood, his wounds. But more than that, she received insights into the nature of divine love that she would spend the rest of her life trying to understand and articulate.

Shortly after her recovery, Julian wrote down her visions in what scholars now call the Short Text. But she wasn't satisfied with this account. Something about those experiences continued to work on her. Decades later—perhaps in the early 1390s—she began writing a much longer theological exploration of what her visions meant.

This Long Text is about six times longer than the Short Text, running to eighty-six chapters and some 63,500 words. It may have gone through many revisions before being finished, perhaps as late as the 1410s or 1420s. Where the Short Text is a relatively straightforward account of her visions, the Long Text is a sustained work of mystical theology, wrestling with profound questions about sin, suffering, and divine love.

The Most Famous Line

Julian is best known today for a phrase that has become almost a proverb: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

Taken out of context, this can sound like naive optimism—the medieval equivalent of a motivational poster. In context, it's something far more radical.

Julian was writing in a world ravaged by plague, torn by social upheaval, threatened by religious persecution. She was fully aware of human suffering and sin. Yet through her visions, she became convinced that God's love was so vast, so encompassing, so fundamentally creative that somehow—in ways human beings cannot fully comprehend—everything would ultimately be made well.

This wasn't denial. It was mystical hope of the most audacious kind.

God as Mother

One of Julian's most striking theological contributions was her exploration of the maternal nature of God. While Christian tradition had occasionally used feminine imagery for the divine, Julian developed this theme more fully than any previous English theologian.

She wrote of Jesus as Mother—nurturing, feeding, caring for humanity with the tender love of a parent for a child. Some scholars have speculated that Julian herself had been a mother, that she might have lost her husband and children to the plague, and that this personal experience of motherhood informed her theology.

We simply don't know. Julian was remarkably reticent about her personal life. In fact, when she wrote the Long Text later in life, she actually removed some autobiographical details that had appeared in the Short Text, including references to her gender. She wanted her work to stand on its own, without being dismissed or diminished because a woman had written it.

The Long Silence

Julian's writings were carefully preserved by other religious women, passed down through communities of nuns. But the Reformation changed everything.

When England broke from Rome under Henry the Eighth, Catholic religious life was suppressed. Monasteries and convents were dissolved. Religious manuscripts became dangerous possessions. Works like Julian's, with their Catholic mysticism and their preservation by religious orders, could not be safely published.

For nearly two hundred years after her death, Julian's writings existed only in manuscript copies, known to a tiny circle of Catholic recusants—those who maintained their faith despite legal penalties—and to English nuns living in exile on the continent.

The Long Text was finally published in 1670 by Serenus de Cressy, a Benedictine monk who served as confessor to English nuns at Cambrai in what is now Belgium. The book bore a typically elaborate seventeenth-century title: XVI Revelations of Divine Love, shewed to a devout servant of Our Lord, called Mother Juliana, an Anchorete of Norwich: Who lived in the Dayes of King Edward the Third.

It attracted little attention. Cressy's edition was reprinted in 1843 and 1864, still with minimal impact.

Rediscovery

The breakthrough came in 1901, when Grace Warrack published a new edition with modernized language and what one scholar called "a sympathetic informed introduction." This book introduced Julian to a wide readership for the first time in over five centuries.

The Short Text had an even more dramatic history of rediscovery. It had been in the possession of an English Catholic family at some point. An antiquarian named Francis Blomefield saw and described it in 1745. Then it vanished for a century and a half. In 1910, it turned up in a collection of contemplative medieval texts purchased by the British Museum. It was published the following year.

Since then, Julian's reputation has grown steadily. Theologians and poets alike have found in her work a profound and accessible mysticism. T.S. Eliot famously quoted her "all shall be well" passage in his poem Little Gidding. She has been embraced by Christians of many denominations—Catholic, Anglican, Protestant—as a spiritual guide whose insights transcend sectarian boundaries.

What We Don't Know

Despite her modern fame, Julian remains mysterious. We don't know her real name. We don't know her family. We don't know if she was educated at Carrow Abbey, a Benedictine convent near Norwich that ran a school for girls, though some scholars have speculated she was. We don't know if she was ever a nun there, though if she had been, the abbey would probably have honored her memory and buried her in their grounds—and there's no evidence of this.

Some scholars believe she was a widow who had lost her family to plague before becoming an anchoress. Others suggest she was a laywoman who received her visions while sick at home before later taking up the anchoritic life. The rules of enclosure would normally have prevented the kind of access that her mother and others had to her during her illness—yet she mentions them being present.

Even the four wills that mention her—our only documentary evidence of her existence—raise questions. They span from 1394 to 1416. A bequest to an unnamed anchorite at Saint Julian's appears in a will from 1429. Could Julian still have been alive at such an advanced age? We simply cannot say.

The First and Only

Julian of Norwich holds a unique place in English literary history. Her Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest surviving work in English known to have been written by a woman. It is also the only surviving work by an English anchoress—though there were many anchoresses in medieval England, Julian is the only one whose writings have come down to us.

This makes her a figure of immense importance not just for theology but for literary history, for women's history, for the history of the English language itself. When she chose to write in English rather than Latin—the standard language of scholarship and theology—she was making a choice that other medieval writers were also making, breaking from tradition to express profound ideas in the vernacular. As the historian Janina Ramirez has suggested, by writing in her own language, Julian was "attempting to express the inexpressible" in the most direct way possible.

A Voice Across Centuries

There's something poignant about Julian's story. She sought anonymity. She literally walled herself off from the world. She suppressed autobiographical details from her later writings. She wanted her message to speak for itself, not to be judged by who delivered it.

Yet her voice has survived across more than six centuries. Her cell is gone—Saint Julian's Church was heavily damaged by bombing in World War Two and later rebuilt—but her words endure. The woman who chose permanent enclosure has, paradoxically, reached more people than almost any other English medieval writer.

Perhaps that's fitting. Julian's theology was always about the paradoxical nature of divine love—how suffering and hope could coexist, how sin and redemption were intertwined, how a God of infinite power could also be as tender as a mother with her child. A woman who sought obscurity becoming one of the most beloved mystics in Christian history is just another paradox she might have appreciated.

All shall be well.