Julian of Norwich, Revelations

Question 1

Julian of Norwich: Nature

Answer 1

• Nature fairly brutal—squalor and disease and the elements trying to intrude on the home; these punishments can also bring us close to God

Question 2

Julian of Norwich: ideology, old/new, attitudes

Answer 2

• The change from a warrior God (dream of the rood) to a more feminine God of suffering; christocentric.
• Identifying God (and through him, oneself) in the general rather than the particular [See identity below ]
  o The personal exists to fulfill the macrocosmic or universal, rather than the Romantic, post-Kantian conception that the universal is-for the personal.

Question 3

Julian of Norwich: identity, community

Answer 3

• The body & the home
• Identifying God (and through him, oneself) in the general rather than the particular
• Anchorite lifestyle
• Union with God through reverence and rapture (mysticism)

Question 4

Julian of Norwich: morality, mysticism, truth, revelation

Answer 4

Mysticism: understanding higher truths through revelation, involving an often ecstatic communion with God—so closely tied to the early Christian Eucharist. (Also probably the condescension of Christ; the Trinity.)
o “Mysticism” comes from the Greek word “to conceal.”
o Union with God through reverence and rapture

Question 5

Julian of Norwich: emotion, affect, sensation, bodies, pathos

Answer 5

• “Showings” can be sensory, esp visual (though not always)
• Desires to suffer Christ’s pain on the cross, a bodily sickness in youth unto death, and “wounds” of contrition, compassion, and longing for God
• God’s “familiar love”

Question 6

Julian of Norwich: art, artifice, allegory, innovation, commentary

Answer 6

• Small orb = representation of all of creation; God is over it (in some ways this vision invites her outside the created cosmos with its spheres and to where God is (Cf. the epic trope about the cosmos
• The epic trope of looking down on the cosmos–it’s in the Boccaccio tale the Knight’s Tale is based on, the Teseida tale, but it’s all over the place. Camoes later uses a version that features the cosmos as an artificial engine, orblike (NEED to know if this is modeled on something). Julian is being invited outside–to share glimpses of the cosmic view where God is. It’s quite empowering to her to be able to have this view–that’s how that trope works in the epic.

Question 7

Julian of Norwich: genre

Answer 7

• Spiritual autobio/memoir–an increasingly popular genre at the time
• To uplift any devout reader–devotional prose
• Fragmentary, incomplete
• An oral delivery—talking around the point rather than in the syllogistic style of the university trained theologian or debater.

Question 8

Julian of Norwich: textual history

Answer 8

• Short version, and a longer version prepared later; most scholars believe ST was composed shortly after the showings of 1373, and the LT around 1393.
• *Nicholas Watson has pointed out that ST may have been some years after 73 (Julian’s repeated insistence on her submission to the Church’s stance about the painting of crucifixes and scenes of Christ’s passion would be more appropriate to the 1380’s or later, when Wyclif’s Lollard followers had gained notoriety and condemnation for criticizing the Church’s use of these images)

Question 9

Julian of Norwich: key dates

Answer 9

Born: 1342
Dies: 1420’s?
ST: maybe 1373
LT: maybe 1393

Question 10

Julian of Norwich: gender, emotion

Answer 10

• The Revelations are the first known instance of a book in English being written by someone who is verifiable as female
• The shift toward a more feminine Christianity—intimacy, personal contact, domesticity, as opposed to the warlike god of early medieval Christianity up through the crusades (see A.C. Spearing’s intro, among other sources).
  o Christocentric—pity for the suffering Christ. Cf. “Knight’s Tale” and the way this kind of change might be indicative of irony in the work
• Jesus as a mother – Cf the hermaphrodite at this time: the philosopher’s stone

Question 11

Julian of Norwich: which version did you use?

Answer 11

Gulp. [NEED better one to cite]

Question 12

Julian of Norwich: audience?

Answer 12

Those of the contemplative lifestyle, or just the devout who could read

Question 13

Julian of Norwich: other writers? overlaps, traditions, precedent, etc.

Answer 13

• Like LANGLAND she devotes her life to thinking and rethinking her visionary experience
• Meets and gives advice to Margery Kempe, who acknowledges her in her own work
• Spiritual autobio is common at the time
• Anchrene Weiss extols virtues of the anchorite lifestyle, explains it

Question 14

Julian of Norwich: anchorite, female thought / writing, lifestyle, biographical circumstances of her writing

Answer 14

• Anchorite lifestyle increasingly common in late middle ages: this was someone who had entered into an enclosed solitary life in a fixed place, in order to achieve greater spiritual perfection (late 12-th century Ancrene Wisse offers guidance for this way of life). Allows for individual forms of devotion. More anchorites and hermits recorded in Norwich than in any other medieval English town.
  o Offers women some privacy, autonomy, and a chance for intellectual development that would have been unavailable even in a convent. Many lived in cells attached to churches, and Julian lived in such a cell at the St Julian’s church in Norwich (likely where she got her name). Julian appears as an anchorite in The Book of Margery Kempe, where she gives Margery some advice.
• For a variety of reasons mostly amounting to “incomplete sexism,” female monasticism is big throughout this period, and female and mixed gender monasteries (often headed by an abbess) are powerful political and cultural centers. It is, comparatively, a good time to be a female author.

Question 15

Julian of Norwich: fate, ideology, “all shall be well,” her attitude toward the church, what she’s trying to do

Answer 15

• God says to Julian: “I will make all things well; I shall make all things well, I may make all things well, and I can make all things well.” There’s not only unlimited potential for God to make things well; His omniscient foresight involves every possible iteration of the future for Julian—including one in which God only “may” or “can” make all things well. In other words, perhaps, the “wellness” is the only guarantee—not that it will come in a way mortals recognize.
• In my mind there’s a potential for irony here that might have made some uncomfortable–it seems hard to imagine she isn’t being completely sincere–in fact, it’s the sincerity that brings the potential for an embarrassing reading to the fore. Part of the ideological brilliance of an institution like Catholicism or many other Christian sects is an ingenuity of interpretation that allows events in the past, present, or future to be interpreted in such a way that the religion is never wrong; e.g. invasions or disasters that could threaten to subvert the status quo are shown to actually reinforce the status quo. But people are perceptive and smart and credulity can only be stretched so far–and for this reason, this kind of rewriting of reality is is usually shrouded a bit in euphemism, or it isn’t pulled out too frequently–because you don’t want to call attention to this trick too often. But Julian is pretty clearly defining all the ways events can and will be appropriated to bolster the Church. She can do this because she is clearly uncommonly devout. But less devout readers might be disturbed to ponder how blatantly events will be appropriated by the Catholic worldview.

Question 16

Julian of Norwich: what’s radical or important or new about this work? What does it do? Why is it significant?

Answer 16

• There’s every reason to believe Julian is completely sincere in her purpose of edification or expressions of devotion–but in the process she grabs quite a lot of power for a female–she assumes an outspoken interpretive role as recipient to revelation. You could say it’s perfectly managed, perfectly balanced–the in its tone and arguments, the work is centered on adherence to the Church and devout, unyielding loyalty to various precedents–in my opinion, almost to the point of “protesting too much.” The effusive devotion is directed at Biblical or doctrinal points that contain the the device for their own undoing. For instance, we all know the Madonna/whore binary and the way religion, particularly in the Catholic tradition, instantiates and reflects and amplifies this binary in a way that leaves women two totally powerless options–submissiveness or rejection from society. Julian, of course, is in all appearances deeply aligned with the Madonna–a Madonna paragon. But the way she uses this status is subversive even if its doctrinally sound–Mary was the recipient of an honor far greater than any man. So there’s the highest precedent for Julian being given such a witness. Christ on the cross is still concerned with the wellbeing of his mother and in a very tender way (John)–so there’s no ground for skepticism about the tenderness with which God speaks to Julian in her visions. But in all of these cases (there are more) important new tidbits are being added to the historical record. We’re getting a woman with access to a kind of reading and interpretive power the Church took pains to restrict to males; we’re getting a powerful account (profitable to the Church in many ways) which nevertheless features a Christ who is much less harsh in His attitude toward sin than many in the leadership may have wanted.

Question 17

Anglo-Saxon: oral culture, textuality in Germanic tradition v. Christian

Answer 17

The first period we’re concerned with is the Anglo Saxon era. The Anglo-Saxons are Germanic, and we generally assume that they showed up with some kind of oral culture. Literary culture, however, in the sense of written, comes mostly with Christianity, and is mostly Latin. Note that for medievalists, that does not make it foreign. Latin, tbh, has as much resemblance to modern English as OE does (Elaine is big on multilingual Britain).

Question 18

Anglo-Saxon: interaction of vernacular and latin cultures–they seem to figure out a way to get along pretty quickly; Caedmon’s Hymn

Answer 18

The story of Caedmon and his hymn (worth knowing, if you don’t), which we typically take as the earliest OE poem, suggests that the vernacular and latin cultures pretty quickly figured out some way to get along, and we see syncretic literature in other Germanic cultures, too (note that the person in charge in this story is an abbess).