Gone Medieval - Julian of Norwich: England's First Woman Writer?

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

The writings of Julian of Norwich are the earliest surviving English language works by a woman and the only surviving English language works by an anchoress. But her life - particularly prior to taking on her role at Saint Julian's Church in Norwich - is shrouded in mystery and it has been widely debated.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to author Claire Gilbert. Her new book I,Julian is a powerful fictional autobiography of Julian - as mother, mystic and radical.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Julian of Norwich lived through the second half of the 14th century and into the 15th. She's most famous for being associated with her writings, the earliest English language texts attributed to a woman, and the only writings by an anchoress that we have.

Julian's life, particularly prior to taking on her role at St. Julian's Church in Norwich is shrouded in mystery and it's been widely debated. So to learn more about this fascinating figure, I'm joined today by Claire Gilbert, whose new book, I Julian, is a fictional autobiography of Julian's life that deftly weaves together the known facts. Thank you very much for joining us, Claire. Hello, it's lovely to be here. It's great to have the chance to talk about someone like Julian. And I think you're going to start us off with a little reading from your book just to set the scene, which is fantastic, so thank you very much. So this is the passage which follows Julian losing her husband. and daughter to the second wave of the pestilence, as they called it in the 14th century,

which particularly took children and young men. And she feels guilty because it happened while she'd escaped to the forest for a bit of time for herself. In the time that follows, I move as one who is walking through thick slime. The air is heavy, my body is heavy, every task is a burden to me, and every person I meet is a stranger. I have nothing to live for, and I do not wish to live. Some servants return. The household revives a little.

The merchanting begins again under John's direction, but I eat only because the maid brings me food, and I direct the household only because John stands in front of me and waits patiently for my orders. Kind-hearted and understanding and attentive, he does what he can to relieve me, remaining strong, so I can be weak. I do not know what to do or how to be. After a time, I lift myself from my torpor, and I wander outside through silent streets, still empty of citizens, grateful for the

quiet, while hating its cause. My steps take me to the cathedral where I am alone and anonymous, hidden in the shadows, and there I return again and again, standing for long hours, dry eyes. murmuring dry prayers, gazing upon a wall painting of St. Thomas wrapped in his green cloak, kneeling with his hand in Christ's wounded sigh, his face upturned and penitent. I gaze and my fingers tell my prayer beads, repeating, Ave Maria, Hail Mary, Patinoster, Our Father, and my prayer is barren, but it directs my angry, guilty, painful thoughts to other words,

words, words of repentance, words that pray for mercy, for forgiveness though I do not deserve it. I do not know the God to whom I supplicate. I do not know who God is. This latest, pitiless wave of pestilence took our young men and our children from us, our children, and robbed us of hope. But the priests do not spare us, saying again that it is punishment for our guilt, and what have we done and who is to blame? I am to blame. I am. Bereaved and lost as I am, I feel my guilt in my heart and I do not spare myself.

But nor do I know how to atone. I cannot bear any more pain, and I do not know what else to offer, if not that. For the God who has shown himself to me seemed only to demand pain, and he has been given what he asked for. and now he is silent. Well, that was a very evocative passage from the time, I guess, before Julian becomes an anchoress. And before her visions.

Yeah, yeah. Thank you for sharing that with us. To start us off with then, what do we know about Julian's earlier life, about this period that you were just reading about then? How much do we know? It's all guesswork. She is marvelously hidden, like so many women of her time.

And all we have is the text. There are certain things we can surmise from the text. So, for example, the text which describes her visions has her in a bedroom with her mother and a curate. There's no abbess or infirmarian. So she's clearly not a nun. So we don't think she was a nun in her earlier life. And we can imagine if there was that sort of household set up that she grew up in perhaps a family that wasn't lacking in wealth. I have imagined her living just outside the city on a small holding.

with her father and mother. She loses her father in the first wave of the pestilence, which, as a matter of fact, happened when Julian would have been seven. And we guessed Julian's age because she says she has her visions when she was 30 and a half in May 1373, this month, 650 years ago. So we surmise when the first wave of the pestilence came, she was seven years old. So I imagine her losing her father then, but we know her mother survived because she mentions her mother in the text. And then the other thing that I have imagined for her, which seems to me to be plausible, is that she was taught to read. Because she, although in her text, she says, I am unlettered. She can only mean that she doesn't have Latin by that, because the book, the English of the book, is exquisite poetry. Lyrical, full of words, it's not a simple, simplistic text in any way at all. So she must have learnt her letters and gained some sort of facility with reading. and I imagine later writing too. It must be frustrating to try and find these people

because you're always pulling on those tiny little threads and thinking, you know, how far can I reasonably tease this backwards to create this person who, before we get to her writings and her visions as an anchoress, we know so little about her. But I do think it's fascinating that sometimes you can just pick that thing.

As you say, she talks about her mother being there so we can surmise probably not a nun and her mum is still alive. It's all of those kind of, little pieces of a jigsaw that you can try and put together. That's right. The other thing I did was to take each of the legator. So one of the reasons we know there was an anchoress called Julian in Norwich at this time is that there are four legacies. So I thought, well, they wouldn't have just left that money out of the blue. So how did they come to know Julian? And so I turned them

into characters, one of them being the interlocutor to whom Julian speaks in the story, who becomes her confessor. So this is a really delicious thing. Okay. end of the book, Revelations of Divine Love, Julian, having described all the revelations, all 16 of them, it's a long book. She says, and then I fell into a deep sleep. So the crisis of her fever, one imagines has passed, because she has the visions in the middle of a fever. And then she wakes up, and she says that a religious person was sitting by my bed, and he asked me how I fared. And I said, I raved. She said, I thought, I saw the crucifix that was held before my eyes when I was ill, thinking I was dying. I thought it bled. And she laughs at herself, but he doesn't laugh. And because he doesn't

laugh, she takes her vision seriously. So if he hadn't been there, if they hadn't had that encounter, we might not have had revelations of divine love. And she says, I'm telling you this, readers, so you know what kind of a person I am. I'm rubbish. It was this person. So I imagine this person to be Thomas Eamond, who's one of her legators, so that he features throughout her life from the moment she has the revelations and thereafter. And then there's the Countess of Suffolk, Isabel, who becomes a canoness at the prioress in Camps. These are all matters of historical fact, one of her legateurs. She comes to Julian for counsel. Julian helps her with her loss through miscarriage. And she becomes a firm friend and supports Julian in her entry into the anchor hold. And there's a delightful light character.

They go on a horse ride together. And Julian's full of this speed. And it's all of great contrast between entering the anchor hold. And John Plumptum, another legateau is the steward who wants to marry her after her husband, Martin, dies, and she won't. And so the decision not to become a householder again is again part of why she decides to go into the anchor hold. And so I've woven these historical characters into the story. And it was great fun to do it. Also, that in Norwich, still, their stands are building on Elm Hill. It's 15th century, so it's later than Julian, but not much later. And we know four lay women lived there together in community. Their proto beguines, you know, lay women who live together in community. And so it's a fascinating example of where

women had chosen a different form of life for themselves that wasn't being a nun or being a wife. And I have Julian encountering them and being soothed by them and being introduced to text by them, texts whose theology we can see in revelations of divine love. She doesn't quote anybody, but you can see these influences. So the question was, how did she get those influences? So I brought these laywomen into the 14th century for that reason. Also, another problem to solve or question was, where did she get the paper from? If she was an anchoress.

And so one of the trades that was open to women in the 14th century was parchmenting. So I have these laywomen as parchmenters, and that's how they make their living. And then they spend time caring for the poor and praying together and reading. It was fascinating how you can weave those threads together to create a much clear a picture from the individual pieces. You mentioned there about Julian's experience of illness, so she has this vision while she's unwell. What do we know about that period of her illness and the visions that came with it? So this is all in the text, which is helpful. But we don't think it was the plague, even though that was returning again and again and again to the people.

There's no mention of buboes or any of the symptoms of the plague. She simply says, I fell into a fever, which lasted several days, and then I thought I was dying. My body became numb all the way up as far as my waist. And she says, and she was lying propped up for ease of breathing. So we know whatever it was that she had, it had those symptoms. And she was looking up towards heaven because she thought she was about to die. And then the curate arrives, she says, and he holds a crucifix up before her and counsels her to fasten her eyes on the crucifix.

And there's another very sweet, very homely moment when she says, well, actually my eyes were beginning to ache, looking upwards. So this is much easier to look at this which is before my eyes. And it's at that point that the vision starts. The location of the visions is on this crucifix, which the Curate is holding before her eyes. And there are 16 of them. Some of them directly, this figure on the cross, bleeding.

It's very visceral, very physical. Some of them more, she says ghostly, so in her imagination, in her mind and heart. And we know from the text and from what we know about Julian's life that this sort of experience leads her to become an anchoress. So I guess to begin with, what is an anchoress? Okay, I've got to say, because the manuscripts of Revelations of Divine Love are all so late

and the authorship is added as a rubric. We simply cannot say, if you're a good historian, if you're a rigorous historian, you cannot say 100%, that the woman, and she calls herself a woman, so we know she's a woman, who wrote Revelations of Divine Love is the Julian of Norwich we know existed at the end of the 14th and beginning of the 15th centuries. We're 95% sure it is she, because she says, I had these visions in May 1373, so it does tie in. And also there's an account by Marjorie Kemp, who's a contemporary of meeting Dame Julian,

and the nature of that conversation is quite similar to what's in Revelations of Divine Love. So let's say we're 95% certain it is the same woman. So back to your question, why would Julian then go into an? an anchor hold and what is an anchoress. So the tradition of the hermit in which the anchorite life stands, in the Christian tradition, begins with St. Anthony in the fourth century, escaping the city to the desert to be alone so he could pray, become closer to God and get away from the bustle of daily life. What happened as a matter of fact was that people found him and sought his counsel because they thought he must be a wise person. And this has been the tradition of hermits ever since. They find a way

to separate themselves from the world, but then they also seem to have this role of offering counsel. You can't shut out the world, as we know. Yeah, the harder you try to get away from the world, the more the world wants to come and find you and find out why you want to get away. That's right. And also, you need the world because you need to be fed and watered.

So by the time you get to Julian, there are a couple of texts which are guides for anchoress. There are anchorites, male and anchoress, female. These are guides for anchoresses written by men. You may make of that what you will, but it's not a rule, it's a guide. And this is 11th century. So they were around for a while before Julian. But in Norwich, we think there are only two or three of which Julian was one. And then in the 15th century, it became really popular. There were maybe 50 of them in Norwich, which is not a big town. So nearly every church had its own hermit.

The anchoress has called that, or the anchorite has called that because their cell is attached to a church. So they are anchored to a church, like an anchor. And I suppose the idea is they also anchored. of the church in some way by their holiness and practice of prayer. And broadly, the anchorite will make their vows to the bishop. We know that. They're not under any rule except the vows they make to the bishop, but these include obedience. They vow to pray. I imagine her in her cell praying the hours, so as if she were a nun. And then between times, contemplative prayer, in her case, reflecting on her visions and intercessory prayer. So there are people that she prays for specifically and time for counselling others. So her cell, although she is bricked in, she can't get out, there are no doors. She has

an altar facing east. She has a window into the church, which means she can see the high altar in the church and participate in mass. She has a window for her maid. So her maid will live in a cell next to her and the maid will bring food and necessaries and Julian will hand out the detritus of life. The maid ensures that her need to met and then the other window is to the world onto the street and that's where people will come for their counselling. You slightly imagine surgery hours, because they can't come all the time at any time because she has to do these other things and in Julian's case really needs to do these other things. And we have her relieved. So part of the reason she goes in is she needs time to think and write because the visions are quite

dangerous, they're quite radical. And this is a time not only of pestilence, but also the church is looking for heretics because we've got a proto-protistent thing happening here. They become known as the Lollards. And a lot of what Julian saw in her visions smacks of Lollardy. It's direct with God, there's no priest. And that she wants to write in English. She can only write in English. So it's a good idea for her actually to go into a cell where she can't be got that, but she does have people coming to her window. The other thing to say is that, of course, you need to be fed and mortared. So you would need to be supported. So hence, the legacy. So people would leave money to anchoresses and anchorites. And you would be supported. So I have Isabelle

supporting her financially, for example, and a pension from John, the steward who takes over the business because she doesn't want to marry him. So she gives him the business in return for pension. So I find these ways of her being able to support herself as an anchoress. She has to do that because the bishops wouldn't let her be in Ankara so he couldn't support itself. From biblical fame to its fabled great walls, Babylon was home to kings, conquerors and wonders of the ancient world. But what do we actually know about this legendary city? And how much is still shrouded in mystery? Join me, Tristan Hughes, every Sunday throughout May on the ancients, as we delve into the story of Babylon. We'll be covering topics very.

bearing from the King Nebuchadnezzar the 2nd and how he forged a massive Babylonian empire, will be exploring the mystery of the hanging gardens of Babylon, looking at world-renowned objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder, and also looking at Babylon in the aftermath of one of the most well-known conquerors in the whole of history. Babylon, after Alexander the Great. That's all to come this May on the ancients every Sunday. Such an odd thing. It's such an odd combination of kind of voluntary, solitary confinement, but also being the community agony, aren't, but having all of these religious requirements too,

and as much as you are deprived of so much, you still do have a maid who is there to bring your food and take away your slot bucket and whatever else. It's such a weird combination of juxtaposed ideas in an anchoress, I think. It is. The word I use for it is porous. So, The cell is porous. She's inside it voluntarily, but it's open to everything. Church, basic human needs. Quite a few people actually have said this. Didn't she get bored? Wouldn't you get bored? Well, you know, I just don't think that's possible because there's so much going on. And also, of course, if this is the life that you seek, you have a rich interior life. And this is really what Julian wanted to pursue.

So a room of her own in which she could look deeply into herself. The interior life is every bit as dramatic as the exterior life, you know, if you're serious about it. And I wanted to show that. I wanted to show a 21st century audience that this is strange as it sounds. This is actually quite a lively choice to make. It makes sense in its time. And that brings us on nicely to Julian's writing. So Revelations of Divine Love is the text that is associated with Julian.

you've put, there is a caveat that we're not 100% sure. You mentioned that she writes in English, possibly because she had no Latin, but was there also a positive driver to write in English in the vernacular so that it could be shared more widely? And I guess that's getting dangerously close to Lollardee again, isn't it? Yes. Well, we don't know. I imagine her, as it were, going through those thought processes. So lots of spiritual things are written in Latin and she has the thought she won't be taken seriously if she doesn't write in Latin. But then she says, well, I always, All I have is the liturgical Latin, the Ave Maria, the Pat and Noster the Credo. That's not very much Latin.

And also, she has been reading The Cloud of Unknowing, for example, Richard Roll, Walter Hilton, probably. These are other English mystics who wrote in English, not in Latin. Oh, and Chaucer's translation of Boethius's consolation of philosophy. Because you can see influences in her text of those thoughts. And so he translated that in the 80s. So I have her reading that as well. So there's a rich genre, actually, that she's joining. She knows she has the words in English to say these extraordinary things that had happened to her that are really quite difficult to explain.

And she fears that if she tried to do it in Latin, it would turn the visions into something else which they're not in the way that translations often can do that. She said, I don't know what language Jesus spoke to me in, but I understood it, and I still do. So English became her choice. Now the question of whether she did it in order for more people to read it, I think probably the answer is yes, because she often talks about even Christians and how we are not to look at her, we're to look at the visions that she sees directly.

So she wants her readers to experience them in the very direct way that she did through her text, and if I may say so, I think she succeeds. It's a very powerful, very immediate text. But it's also true that the manuscript disappears. And it's only really in the 20th. century that we've started reading it seriously. It emerges from time to time. And you can see some convents had it and took it seriously, exiled nuns at the Reformation in Combray in France. And then the text came back at the French Revolution to England when it was safe again for it to be

published there. So Catholics claim her, but Protestants do as well because it's written in English and it's a little bit lullardish. All those things fed into why she wrote in English, I think. And I guess not having any Latin, you know, I think we can fall into a trap of assuming all religious people had Latin and visions would only come to someone who had already learnt Latin. But this is about a normal woman, having an experience that she puts down to religious visions, which then drives the rest of her life. And she kind of wants to share that with everybody because, as you say, it's not just for her. She believes it's for everybody. So I think it is for everybody. And that was what she intended.

but she was also aware that it might not be seen for a long time because it's not safe. In the text, she does say again and again and again, don't turn away from Holy Church. And whether that's because she means it or because she doesn't want to be taken for a heretic. I think it's both, actually. I think there's a determination in her to not abandon Holy Church. And that reflection in her, which I think is reflected in the text, I think again is very contemporary, where we pretty much all say, don't like organised religion and spiritual,

our sense that institutions are really needing to reform and not knowing how to reform. And yet there's this strong uprising in people of a sense of a new world which we have to transform ourselves to meet and the huge challenges we have of today. Julian's challenges must have seemed just as enormous as climate change and refugees and so forth.

In her days, it was the pestilence and war and the peasants revolt, social unrest, that you've got this institution that can't cope with that, it seems. And it's frustrating. But institutions are the way we can be together. So you're not just an individual. I have her thing.

The church does matter, actually, without saying that means it's always right in every case because it really, really isn't. And her vision to show her that. And it's interesting that there's a sense from Julian's writing that she didn't expect people to read it anytime soon, because that in itself is an enormous act of faith that I'm going to put this down.

We all tweet today, and we expect people to have read what we've tweeted within 10 seconds, otherwise we don't matter in the world anymore. But this is the idea that you could write something because it's important and time will come to it. You don't have to throw it out into the world. Time will come to your work. That's a beautiful way to put it. Oh, thank you. And I guess your book is a fictional sort of autobiography based on all of the evidence that we do have about Julian. What were the key aspects of Julian's messages that you were keen to get across, perhaps in the way that you explored her early life. The way you describe what she talks about, isn't a million miles away from things like mindfulness today, seeing, it's quite

relevant to the way we want to live our lives today. Yes, there is a lot in Julian that can speak to us today and the fact that more and more people are reading her and falling in love with her, which is kind of what happens to Julian, is indicative of that. So yes, the interior life, the patience for the interior life, the consolation, this famous phrase, all shall be well, all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well, which T.S. Eliot brought to our attention because he quotes it in Little Gidding. That's when we started noticing Julian again. It's because of him, really. Of course, it was woven on to one of the anointing screens,

the west-facing anointing screen around the king at the coronation. Can you imagine what Julie would make of the idea that her words from more than 600 years ago were on TV in 2023 at a coronation? I think a part of her would be astonished, but a part of her would be very calm about it. I sense her as being spiritually very mature. In contrast to Marjorie Kemp, for example, this account of their meeting,

who's kind of looking for visions and wanting all of this to happen. And Julian, it happens to her. You know, she's not looking for visions. She thinks they're ravings at first and then makes this choice to plant herself in one place in order to go deeper and deeper and deeper. It's a call to us to put down the things

that we think are absolutely necessary that are external to us. that to keep us simulated and to look inside and not to be afraid to look inside. Because the other thing about Julian that's so powerful and why all shall be well is no trite statement is that she has so much pain and suffering in her life, loss, bereavement, her own illness. And then in her visions themselves, she experiences the pain of Christ on the cross, the pain of the pain of losing the child to which she gave birth. And I should say she taught me how to meet my cancer treatment.

That's one of the reason she's so important to me. She taught me to walk towards the pain, not to fight it. I never used metaphors of fighting or battle. It was receive, receive the suffering. Move towards it, move through it, and allow it to transform you. That's what she allowed her visions to do, to transform her, and the things that had happened to her before to transform her. So she moved from this sense of an angry God,

would never be satisfied who wanted pain to a God who is a flood of love. I don't even know the word for it, an outpouring of love that just dismisses all the good and bad. It's just love and it melts everything. She has this vision, and this is very contemporary to us, she has this vision, one of the 16 visions, is of seeing everything that is made in the palm of her hand, a little sphere, the size of a hazelnut, everything that's made. Doesn't that sound like the first? Doesn't that sound like the fragile earth. And she wonders how it could exist because it's so fragile. And she says it exists because God loves it. And if for one moment God ceased to love it, it would cease to exist. So God cannot be wroth. I think that's beautiful for us to hear today, don't you? It is. It's wonderful.

And I kind of feel like Julian might be far happier that she helped you meet your cancer treatment than that her words were at the King's coronation. She seems like that kind of person to me. And I would also add, you know, as someone with experiences this kind of thing, that terming engagements with cancer and things like that is in any way a battle is nonsense. It's wrong. It's never a fight because that implies that if you lose it, you didn't try hard enough. And that's absolutely not the way to look at anything like that. I heartily agree.

We need to stop talking about people fighting cancer. And I guess Julian, we're talking a little bit about how relevant she is today, but she lived through pandemics and social upheaval and lots of. of change. We've just lived through a pandemic that probably gave us a little bit of a taste of the kind of isolation and disconnection that Julian experienced, albeit we still all had our phones in our pockets and we weren't entirely disconnected as she wasn't entirely disconnected from the world. So I guess there's lots of parallels that we can see there. Do you think we ought to revisit Julian's text now and all pick up a copy and read it? I do. And I think you don't need to know lots.

you can read my book as a way into feeling Julian as a person. It is plausible. The story is plausible, but you have to remember it's fiction. I explain at the end, there's a timeline explaining exactly what did happen and who were real characters and put in italics where I've done something creative with it. But the text itself, you can open it pretty much on any page, and there'll be something there. And there are some really excellent translations and more and more of them. Although the middle English in which she writes is not difficult. If you read it out loud, you would find that it makes sense.

And of course, some of the words are beautiful, like making the soul supple and buxom to God. That gorgeous. Yeah, fantastic. I would thoroughly recommend your book as a way in. It opens the door into Julian's cell a little bit for us. Thank you very much for joining us and talking through the life and times of Julian of Norwich,

albeit from a slightly fictional point of view, but built around the facts that we know. It's been wonderful to talk about her life a little bit. more. Thank you very much. Thank you, Matt. Claire's book, I Julian, is out now, wherever you get your books from, if you like to get a little bit closer to the real Julian of Norwich. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest period in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval.

If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It does help new listeners to find us. And if you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter by following the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.