of Norwich Julian - A Companion to Julian of Norwich

A COMPANION TO JULIAN OF NORWICH

Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth/early fifteenth-century anchoress and mystic, is one of the most important and best-known figures of the Middle Ages. Her Revelations , intense visions of the divine, have been widely studied and read; the first known writings of an English woman, their influence extends over theology and literature. However, many aspects of both her life and thought remain enigmatic.

This exciting new collection offers a comprehensive, accessible coverage of the key aspects of debate surrounding Julian. It places the author within a wide range of contemporary literary, social, historical and religious contexts, and also provides a wealth of new insights into manuscript traditions, perspectives on her writing and ways of interpreting it, building on the work of many of the most active and influential researchers within Julian studies, and including the fruits of the most recent, ground-breaking findings. It will therefore be a vital companion for all of Julian's readers in the twenty-first century.

This collection provides accessible coverage of a range of debates about this popular late medieval figure. Containing important new work and tracing well-known debates about Julian, it will be a useful companion for both teachers and researchers. JOURNAL OF ENGLISH AND GERMANIC PHILOLOGY.

St Julians Church, Norwich, showing the reconstructed anchorhold on the south side of the church.

Copyright Contributors 2008

All Rights Reserved . Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2008

D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

Paperback edition published 2015

This edition published 2015

ISBN9781843841722 hardback

ISBN 978-1-84384-404-4 paperback

ISBN 978-1-78204-467-3 eBook

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd

PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK

and of Boydell & Brewer Inc.

668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA

website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library

LIZ HERBERT MCAVOY

KIM M. PHILLIPS

CATE GUNN

ALEXANDRA BARRATT

DENISE N. BAKER

DIANE WATT

E. A. JONES

ANNIE SUTHERLAND

BARRY WINDEATT

MARLEEN CR

ELISABETH DUTTON

ELIZABETH ROBERTSON

LAURA SAETVEIT MILES

LIZ HERBERT MCAVOY

ENA JENKINS

VINCENT GILLESPIE

SARAH SALIH

Frontispiece: St Julians Church, Norwich. The Churches of East Anglia: Norfolk Churches Site. http://www.norfolkchurches.co.uk/

a Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is author of Julian of Norwichs Showings : From Vision to Book and editor of Inscribing the Hundred Years War in French and English Cultures and The Showings of Julian of Norwich: A Norton Critical Edition. She has published widely on the Middle English mystics, Gower, Langland and Chaucer.

is Professor in the Department of Humanities, University of Waikato, New Zealand. She has published widely on Middle English women writers, in particular Julian of Norwich and Dame Eleanor Hull, and on anchoritic writing. She is currently working on a study of MS Harley 494, to be published by Brepols as Anne Bulkeley and Her Book: Fashioning Female Piety in Early Tudor England.

is an associated researcher at the Ruusbroechenootschap, University of Antwerpen. She has published on the two fifteenth-century manuscripts containing Julian of Norwich material: Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4 and London, British Library, MS Additional 37790 (Amherst). Her monograph on the latter, Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse , was published by Brepols in 2006. She is currently researching a study of Benet of Canfield, Augustine Baker and Gertrude More.

is Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. She has published on the medieval mystical writers Hadewijch and Julian of Norwich, and on the late-medieval compilation Book to a Mother . She has also published an edition of Julians Revelation of Love (Plymouth, 2008) and her monograph on Julian, The Influence of Late-Medieval Devotional Compilations is forthcoming (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008).

is J. R. R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall. He publishes on medieval mystical writing (especially Julian of Norwich), the circulation and transmission of religious, devotional and para-mystical texts, and the history of the Carthusians and Birgittines in England. His annotated edition of the registrum of the library of the brethren at Syon Abbey was published in 2002, and a selection of his papers will soon be published by the University of Wales Press as Looking in Holy Books: Essays on Late Medieval Religious Texts .

s Ph.D. thesis on the rhetoric of Ancrene Wisse has recently been revised as a book entitled Vernacular Spirituality in the Thirteenth Century: The Pastoral Context of Ancrene Wisse (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). She has published several articles and essays on vernacular spirituality and has taught medieval literature and religion for the Continuing Education departments of Essex and Cambridge Universities and for the WEA.

has recently been awarded an M.Phil. for her thesis on the poetics of Julian of Norwich from the University of Wales, Lampeter. A retired schoolteacher, she has been an active researcher in the area of Julian Studies for many years and has also written and lectured extensively on female mystics, both medieval and modern. She has presented on the links between Julian and Annie Dillard and also has a teaching and research interest in the area of Evelyn Underhill.

is Senior Lecturer in Medieval English Literature and Culture at the University of Exeter. He works on the devotional and contemplative literature of the late Middle Ages, and the history and literature of the solitary vocations in medieval England. He is, in succession to Marion Glasscoe, the organiser and editor of the Exeter Symposium on the Medieval Mystical Tradition; volume VII was published in 2004. He has also assumed responsibility for completing the revision of Rotha Clays Hermits and Anchorites of England .

is Senior Lecturer in Gender in English Studies and Medieval literature at Swansea University. She has published widely in the area of medieval womens literature and anchoritism, including Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004). She has also edited a number of volumes, including (with Mari Hughes-Edwards) Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs: Intersections of Gender and Enclosure in the Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2005) and Rhetoric of the Anchorhold (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008) and is currently working on a book focusing on issues of gender, space and enclosure in texts by, for and about anchorites.

is a doctoral candidate in English at Yale University, with an M.Phil in Medieval Studies from Yale and an M.Phil in Medieval English Literature from Cambridge University. She is working on a study of the Annunciation scene in Middle English literature. Her research interests include the Bridgettine Order, texts and scribes at Syon Abbey, mystical texts and translation, and Carthusian spirituality.