Julian wrote a Short Text recounting her visionary experience some years before she completed the Long Text of the Showings. The textual history of the Showings suggests both the extraordinary care she took as a writer and the vulnerabilities to which manuscript culture was subject. In so doing, Julian at once drew upon a vigorous tradition of vernacular devotional prose and employed that tradition to reformulate the terms with which the divine nature and the human flesh it took as its clothing are understood. Like other late fourteenth-century writers such as William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer, she understood and exploited the inherent flexibilities of the vernacular as a medium of common and uncommon speech. She is a subtle theologian of quiet daring and one of the early masters of Middle English prose. With her description of God as both mother and father, her unwillingness to dwell upon sin and judgment, her carefully articulated discussion of divine love, and her refusal to claim for herself any special status, she speaks to the devotional needs of many who find themselves weary of the hegemonies of gender and power. Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century mystic and writer whose Showings recount a series of visions she had when she was “thirty and a half,” has gained in appeal throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |