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This chapter focuses on Julian of Norwich, the most attractive and most original figure in medieval English mysticism. Many people consider Julian of Norwich to be a spiritual authority through her unique revelations of the human love of a maternal God. Her work not only moves readers more deeply than any other English mystical text; it has also been described as the most significant theological achievement of late-medieval England. This chapter first considers the textual transmission of Julian's A Revelation of Love before turning to her theological self-assurance. It then discusses Julian's Cistercian concept of God as mother and her awareness of God's impassibilitas (his inability to die). It also examines the role of prayer in Julian's mystical theology as well as her views on Trinity, Incarnation, and the human being. Finally, it looks at the Pseudo-Dionysian tradition's influence on Julian's theology, Julian's reception of St. Paul, and unsolved problems in her biography.

In late medieval mystical writings, the narrative subject self-consciously fashions him- or herself, notably in the writings of Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Richard Rolle. The authority in which the mystics’ experience is grounded is intimately connected with sanctity: the narrative personae employs individual experience to establish his or her sanctity through the employment of a range of strategies, which are meant to provide a model for the readers and enable affective responses. The three authors fashion their ‘I’ in different ways, from Rolle’s powerful visual images that reflect an open first-person speaker to Margery’s highly particularised persona that invites the audience’s participation to a limited degree only.

This chapter examines the poetic properties of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love to show how they are central to her partial performance of divine contemplation. For Julian, as for Cloud, the specific properties of Middle English enable Julian to stage contemplation: she relies on modal verbs and English grammar and syntax to make available a series of meditations on the nature of the divine Trinity—meditations that are crucial to her overall message of comfort. Julian’s staging of contemplation not only relies on Middle English grammar, but also on her careful and deliberate poetic creation of three different de facto time signatures in her work: one encapsulates the feeling of time that human beings have, another encapsulates the feeling of time that Jesus has during his crucifixion, while a third encapsulates the feeling of divine eternity itself. By drawing her readers into these three interlocking experiences of time, Julian helps them feel anew their own participation in the divine Trinity. This staging of the participation in the divine Trinity becomes one of Julian’s most sustained modes of providing comfort—or consolation, in a revisionist Boethian sense—to her readers.

This chapter examines two key texts, Augustine's De Triniate and Julian of Norwich's The Revelation of Divine Love, or Shewings, as it's sometimes called. The De Triniate is abstract and speculative, while the Shewings is a narrative that begins at what Julian believed to be her hour of death. The similarities between Julian and Augustine include the wedding of the doctrine of Trinity with that of imago Dei, and the recursive style. In the matter of content, both deal with the Trinity and with the peoples' union with the God of love. The chapter concludes that the main difference in their texts is partly a matter of tone. Augustine accepts that one can't dismiss his embodied life, while Julian suggests that one should rejoice in it. But both do so by similar means: by finding Christ, one can travel a path that leads to God.

Two of the ablest medieval theologians who set to work on the meaning of the cross for the Christian life were Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) and Dame Julian of Norwich (b. 1342). St. Thomas's treatise on the passion, found in part III of the Summa Theologiae, not only synthesizes the various images commonly applied to Christ's work on the cross, but also balances teachings on love and righteousness (1965). Mother Julian, a 14th-century English theologian, had a bolder and more independent voice. She took a clear and uncompromising stand on the love of God, daring the church to unreservedly embrace the transforming power of love.

This chapter addresses the life and thoughts of the English mystic Julian of Norwich. Julian’s unique life of suffering shaped her understanding of theology, in which salvation is part of the journey of the individual, in which salvation occurs not as a result of humanity running from God, but as a great oneing between Divinity and humanity.

This chapter suggests that the unsatisfactoriness of the natural for Chaucer and Gower was inevitable because they were much concerned with nature as promoter of sexual love; and in late medieval culture sexual love and reason were inevitably at odds. Nevertheless, they are greatly interested in the natural precisely as it offers the prospect of concord between love and reason, the body and the spirit, the self-oriented and the altruistic, earth and heaven. Dante certainly moved towards it and in England, the Gawain-poet was emphatically affirmative about the goodness of the natural in sex. However, It is also noticeable that Chaucer's great contemporaries Langland, the Gawain-poet, and Julian of Norwich all strongly affirm the mercy of God and celebrate the natural.

Rabbinical texts kept preexistence alive in the Jewish tradition (largely through the concept of the guf, or soul-treasury. Authorities like Peter Lombard and Aquinas declared against it. Neoplatonism and the cosmology of Timaeus persisted in works by Bernard Silvester, Hildegard von Bingen, and Julian of Norwich. Kabbalah serves as a conduit for the idea to later Christians. Menasseh ben Israel and Jacob Boehme are important in this regard.

This chapter analyzes the rich visionary traditions in medieval Christianity. It first analyzes the visions of Julian of Norwich, the first known female author in England. These visions are recorded in two texts, both of which begin with Julian's wish for three things: a vivid perception of Christ's Passion; bodily sickness; and for God to give her three wounds. It then attempts to understand the symbolic meanings of dryness by interrogating a study on the parallelism between the “holy anorexia” of Christian female religious virtuosos and anorexia nervosa, the neurotic condition afflicting modern-day females. Next, it examines the notion of fasting females and the spiritual nourishment that sustained them through St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582). The remainder of the chapter discusses Margery Kempe, born around 1373, and her unique relation to Jesus, that is, her continual weeping and crying whenever she recollects his Passion.

This chapter considers the representation of figures such as Noah's wife, Eve and the Virgin in relation to the typology that is established through their paradigm stories. Religious and literary texts, like the writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, and the poems Piers Plowman and The Romance of the Rose, demonstrate the complexity and reflexivity of motherhood in a range of genres that in turn influence such dramas as the later court plays Wisdom and Nature. Focusing upon the mother figure in terms of function rather than subject, the chapter traces the utility of motherhood as a dramatic trope. This richness of meaning ensures that the mother figure is integral to a reformulation of ideology during the process of Reformation. Her importance as an emblem is demonstrated by reference to two polemical plays written during the Reformation and its aftermath, the Protestant Kyng Johan and its Catholic rejoinder, Respublica.

This chapter examines the mysticism of Margery Kempe, a second late-medieval Englishwoman who sought to open her life entirely to Christian spirituality. Kempe's well-known only work, The Book of Margery Kempe, is both remarkable and controversial; until the 1930s it was known only from contemplative excerpts printed by Wynkyn de Worde. This chapter first considers the theological underpinning of Kempe's spirituality before turning to a discussion of her ideal of imitatio Christi and her life of poverty. It then explores Kempe's marital ambiguity, along with the theological significance of her excessive tears, and especially how her tears of compassio with the suffering Christ take on a “histrionic element.” It also analyzes Kempe's connection with the spirituality of the beguines, including Elizabeth of Hungary and St. Birgitta of Sweden, as well as whether The Book of Margery Kempe is a result of collaboration. Finally, it looks at Kempe's meeting with Julian of Norwich and what she learned from her.

Mary is the pure virgin at her conception and at the birth of Jesus as well as the exalted queen of heaven. But she is also the sorrowful mother. She understands and is with us in our suffering. More fundamentally, she shared fully in her son' suffering, having foreknowledge of his crucifixion from his birth. Feminine symbolism is central to the work of several key medieval mystical writers, including Hildegard of Bingen. This chapter explores the development of Mariology through the medieval world. It looks at five medieval women mystics who laid hold of these female symbols—Wisdom, Mother Church, and bridal soul—to affirm their own spiritual journeys as women empowered to speak, write, teach, and guide other women. It also discusses feminine symbols in Cistercian and beguine love mysticism, as well as the views of fourteenth-century recluse Julian of Norwich.

This overview chapter for the second part of the book covers the Middle Ages and includes chapters on Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and Julian of Norwich. This chapter recounts the development of the theology of salvation through this period, where the life of Christ as the payment to the Devil for the souls under his authority became an increasingly popular notion. Over the course of the Middle Ages, this doctrine became known as the harrowing of Hell, due to the belief that when Jesus rose from the grave, the righteous were let out of Hell itself.

Self-knowledge is a persistent—and paradoxical—theme in medieval mysticism; union with God is often taken to involve a loss of self as distinct from the divine. Yet an examination of Christian contemplatives in the Latin West between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries who work not just within the apophatic tradition (which emphasizes the need to move past self-knowledge to self-abnegation) but also within the affective tradition (which portrays union with the divine as involving self-fulfillment) demonstrates that self-knowledge in medieval mysticism was not seen merely as something to be overcome or transcended. Instead, self-knowledge is viewed (particularly in the works of medieval women contemplatives) as an important means of overcoming alienation from embodied human existence.