Julian of Norwich

Everything is terrible, I know, but it’s still Women’s History Month and I still have things to share with you. Today I’m going to tell you about Julian of Norwich, a 14th century mystic and anchoress who was pretty cool.

-Julian of Norwich was born. Yay! That’s it, that’s all we know. Most of what we know about her comes from her own writing, and she didn’t record the names of her mother or her father, nor anything about her personal background. We know she was born in 1342 based on math, because she mentions she was 30.5 in May 1373, when she experienced her first visions.

-She didn’t write about it, but Julian lived through multiple waves of the Black Death, which devastated her hometown of Norwich and the larger country of England. The first occurred when she was four, so the majority of her life was spent knowing that people could die in great numbers at any time, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. There is some speculation, based on her writing, that she once had children, and may have lost them in what’s known as the Children’s Plague of 1361. She saw some shit, is the point.

-Julian was, by her own admission, illiterate at the time of her visions, but she did eventually write them down, a short version that was produced not long after she first had them, and a much longer version produced later in life. This means that she set out as an adult to learn how to read and write, specifically so she could record what she’d learned about God and religion. Her work remains the ONLY work we have that was written by an English anchoress, as well as the earliest surviving book we have written by a woman in the English language. Badass.

-Julian was an anchoress, which was NOT an abbess. I cannot stress this enough – there is a HUGE difference. Anchoresses were independent entities, answering to no one other than the bishop under which they served. To become an anchoress, women underwent death rites, removing themselves from the outside world, and then were literally WALLED INTO CELLS that were attached to their chosen churches. These cells had windows – the number varied – that allowed the person living inside to speak to people outside, sharing spiritual wisdom and comfort, as well as to observe mass. Julian’s cell appears to have been pretty comfortable, she had servants who handled clean-up and catered to her needs (all of which would have been negotiated through a window) but some anchoress cells have been shown to have just one little window, for the churchy stuff, big enough to get food delivered through but not big enough to pass out a chamber pot. Just….think on that. And there’s no evidence that Julian was ever a nun, before or after she became an anchorite, so she just signed up for that shit because she thought it was what God wanted. Talk about dedication.

-Margery Kempe, a 14th/15th century woman who left her secular life behind to cry all the time and fight bishops and wrote the first autobiography in English (like, period, not just by a woman), explained in her own writing that she visited Julian and received advice and spiritual support from her. Which is pretty cool.

-Julian’s revelations about God and his relationship with humans can be a little esoteric and weird (I love her but damn). But she did write something, this woman who saw some truly horrible things and apparently thought life bricked into a cell was preferable to living on the outside, that I bet you would recognize.

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing [sic] shall be well.”