Julian of Norwich Biography and Books

We do not know her name. She is called Julian because she lived for many years in a cell built against the wall of St Julian’s church in Conisford, a parish of the busy river city of Norwich, and in her own book she calls herself only “a simple creature unlettered.” Yet that book, written in English by a woman who had been shut away from the world, is the first book in the English language known to have been written by a woman — and six centuries later it is still read and prayed over because it insists, against everything its age had seen, that the deepest truth about God is love.

A city of plague

Julian tells us that she was thirty and a half years old in May 1373, so she was born late in 1342 or early in 1343. Norwich was then one of the great towns of England, a city of wool and trade, of cathedral, priories and crowded parish churches. When she was about six the Black Death reached it. The pestilence of 1349 carried off a great part of the city, and it came back again and again through her childhood and youth. A woman of her generation grew up among funerals.

In 1381 the Peasants’ Revolt swept through Norfolk; in her later years the burning of heretics began in England. Julian’s serenity was won in a hard century.

Of her family we know nothing. Some have guessed that she was a widow who had lost a husband and children to the plague, and so learned the mother’s love she later wrote about; others that she was a nun of the Benedictine priory of Carrow, which held the church of St Julian. Neither guess can be proved. She tells us almost nothing of herself, because she wanted her readers to look past her: “Because of the Shewing I am not good but if I love God the better.”

Three gifts

What she does tell us is how she prayed. As a young woman she asked God for three gifts. She wanted to have been with Mary Magdalene and the others at the cross, to see with her own eyes what the Lord suffered; she asked for an illness when she was thirty, so severe that she and everyone around her would believe she was dying; and she asked for three wounds.

May 1373

When she was thirty and a half, she fell ill. For three days and nights she lay sick; on the fourth night she received the last rites, and no one expected her to live till morning. She lingered two more days. By then her body was dead from the waist down, and those who were with her thought she was passing. Her parish priest was sent for. He set a crucifix before her face and said, “I have brought thee the Image of thy Maker and Saviour: look thereupon and comfort thee therewith.” Everything in the room grew dark except the cross, on which she saw “a common light.” Then, suddenly, all her pain was taken away.

Over the next hours she received what she called “shewings.” The first began about four in the morning, and they followed one after another until past nine. She saw the face of the crucified Christ change colour as he died. And in one of the best loved passages in all Christian writing, she saw the whole of creation held in the hand of God.

It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God.

— Julian of Norwich, on the little thing, “the quantity of an hazel-nut,” in the palm of her hand

God made it, God loves it, God keeps it — and no soul is at rest till it rests in him. Later that day, when the pain came back, she told a visiting religious that she had been raving — and then was ashamed, because he took her shewings more seriously than she had. That night she dreamed that the Fiend had her by the throat, and woke to a smell of smoke that no one else could smell; she fled to what she had been shown and to the faith of the Church, and peace came. Then came the sixteenth shewing, in which she saw Christ dwelling in the soul as in a city, and heard the words that close the revelations.

He said not: Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be afflicted; but He said: Thou shalt not be overcome.

— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

Twenty years of pondering

Julian wrote down what she had seen; that first account, the Short Text, survives in a single fifteenth-century copy. But she did not stop there. For two decades she turned the visions over, prayed through them, and asked what they meant. She tells us that she desired “oftentimes” to know what the Lord meant, and that the answer came more than fifteen years after the shewings, in her understanding:

Learn it well: Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love.

— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

One vision had baffled her most: a lord who sends his servant on an errand, and the servant who runs off in his eagerness, falls into a ditch, and lies there hurt and unable to rise, unable even to turn his face to his master. The lord does not blame him at all, and means to reward him beyond anything he lost. Twenty years after the shewings, “save three months,” she was taught to see in the servant both Adam and Christ — fallen humanity, and the Son who came down into its fall to lift it. Out of these years of reflection came the much fuller book now called the Long Text, eighty-six chapters in which the visions open out into a theology of God’s love.

The anchoress of St Julian’s

At some point Julian became an anchoress. An anchoress was enclosed for life in a cell joined to a church, with one window onto the altar and another for those who came for counsel. Her days were given to prayer, to the services of the church and to the people who sought her out. The four wills that mention her show that she was known and valued: in 1394 a Norwich rector left twelve shillings to “Julian anakorite”; in 1404 a priest left money to Julian, anchoress at St Julian’s, Conisford, and to Sarah who lived with her; in 1415 a Norwich man remembered the anchoress there with her maid and her former maid Alice; and in 1416 Isabel, Countess of Suffolk, left twenty shillings to “Julian reclus a Norwich.”

The most vivid glimpse of her comes from another woman. In about 1413 Margery Kempe of Lynn, whose tears and visions had made her many enemies, came to Norwich to ask the anchoress whether her experiences were from God. Julian encouraged her to be obedient to God’s will, and told her that the Holy Spirit never moves anyone to anything against charity, for then he would be contrary to himself. Margery remembered “holy dalliance” between them over many days, and wrote it down in her own book.

All shall be well

What Julian saw, and what she spent her life understanding, is that God is love — not as a sentiment, but as the ground of everything. She saw no wrath in God; the wrath, she said, is on our side, and God’s mercy works to bring us peace. She saw the cross as the highest proof of that love: Christ told her that if he could suffer more for her, he would. She wrote boldly of Jesus as our Mother, who bears us to joy and endless life as an earthly mother bears her children to pain and death, and feeds us with himself in the Sacrament. The image was not new — Anselm and Bernard had used it, and Christ himself spoke of gathering Jerusalem as a hen gathers her chickens — but no one has drawn it more tenderly.

And she faced the hardest question of her century head on. If God is love, why was sin not prevented? Why so much sorrow? The answer she was given has become her most famous sentence:

It behoved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

She did not take this as a cheap comfort. She saw that there is a great deed the Trinity will do at the last day, hidden now in God, by which he will make well all that is not well. Some modern readers have pressed these words into universalism, the belief that in the end every soul will be saved. Julian herself would not go there. She set beside the promise the teaching of the Church that many shall be condemned, and confessed honestly that she could not see how both could stand. The answer she received was this: “That which is impossible to thee is not impossible to me: I shall save my word in all things and I shall make all things well.” So she held to the faith of the Church in every point, trusted God with what she could not see, and left the tension in his hands.

After her

We do not know when Julian died. She was alive in 1416, and probably did not live many years beyond it. Her Long Text survived because English Benedictine nuns, living in exile at Cambrai and Paris in the seventeenth century, copied the old contemplative writers for their own prayer; one of their chaplains, Serenus Cressy, printed it in 1670. In 1901 Grace Warrack brought out the version from the manuscript in the British Museum that is printed here; with it Julian found a new audience. In 1942 T. S. Eliot gave her words to the closing lines of Little Gidding, and in the same year a German bomb destroyed St Julian’s church. It was rebuilt and reopened in 1953, with a chapel on the site of her cell. She is remembered on 8 May in the calendars of the Church of England and other churches.

She wrote for all her “even-Christians,” her fellow believers, and wanted them to look past her to the Lord who had shown her his love. In her last chapter she says that the book is begun but “not yet performed” — a fitting word from a woman whose whole message was that the love of God is greater than anything we have yet understood of it.