History's Youngest Heroes: The Visionary Julian of Norwich

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You couldn't blame this woman in her 30s for feeling apprehensive about what lay ahead.

It was the most important day of her life.

She was making a commitment motivated by love.

She arrived at a church beside the River Yare in Norwich, England.

And she would lie down, prostrate.

Then two clerks would stand before the altar and they would sing a full litany for everybody to hear, with the choir responding, and people in the congregation would be asked to pray.

Julian, as she was known, underwent a sacred ritual.

The bishop, dressed in his priestly vestments, would walk around Julian three times, sprinkling her with holy water.

And then the priests would raise Julian up and put two burning candles in her hands.

She tried not to fear what was coming.

Julian would then stand up, holding the candles, and listen to one of the priests read a biblical lesson, which begins, Go, my people, enter into thy chamber, shut thy doors upon thee.

Julian knelt on one leg three times, saying, Receive me, Lord, according to thy word, and I shall live, and let me not be confounded by my expectation.

The past few years have been devastating for Julian, marred by poor health and loss.

Now she was ready to end them.

She was led to a tiny stone cell on the outside of the church.

When they reach the door of the cell, Julian would speak a short phrase responding to the psalms and the choir would sing the psalm as the heart panteth.

They then would enter the cell in which the priest would sprinkle the cell completely with holy water all around.

The priest then recites the commendations of the soul up to the point where the deceased would normally be placed on the funeral buyer ready for burial.

These were the rituals of a funeral.

The cell was to be Julian's tomb.

But Julian was not being buried alive.

Well,

not exactly.

From that day, she retreated from the world.

She was an anchress,

devoted to God.

Julian was sealed into her new home.

And the anchoress then sort of lies down in the middle of her cell in her grave, saying, here shall be my repose forever and ever.

Here shall I dwell, for I have chosen it.

Still a young woman, Julian promised to live out the rest of her days alone in this single tiny space.

Julian would be asked to rise up from her gravel-like area and live her life in obedience.

And then finally, the cell door is closed and blocked up, and Julian is then left in her enclosed silence.

Why would somebody choose to have themselves blocked up into a tiny little cell with sort of limited contact with the outside world, out of choice.

Why would anybody choose that kind of life for themselves?

I'm Nicola Cochlin, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Youngest Heroes: Rebellion, Risk, and the Radical Power of Youth.

The visionary Julian of Norwich.

Do you know what?

I actually would love to go chat with her and I feel like she'd be really lovely to have a cup of tea with.

And she'd, you know, you'd tell her all your problems and she'd be really great about them.

Hetta Howes is a senior lecturer in medieval and early modern literature at City University in London and the author of Poet, Mystic, Woman, Wife.

So life for medieval women was not amazing.

We don't know where Julian was born.

We don't even know if Julian was her real name.

But we do know that growing up in medieval England was tough for many women.

So even just on a very biological level, women are considered a sort of deficient version of man.

Medieval medicine spoke of the four complementary humours of the body: yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood.

Physical ailments were thought to be caused by an imbalance in these humours, making you hot, cold, dry, or wet.

Women were already on the back foot because they were a bit too

much towards the wet side.

So things like ideas about menstruation,

it was recognised that menstruation was necessary, but it revolted people.

Some claimed the crops would wither and die if a menstruating woman approached them.

There were sort of old wives' tales about how the blood would come up out of your eyes and you'd curse people.

And because of this sort of humoral imbalance, women were also seen as being incapable of being faithful to any particular partner.

They could be quite sex-mad, they were very quick to succumb to temptation.

You've got this sort of sin of Eve hanging over everybody all the time.

Women's sexuality was threatening to the religious society of the day, so women had to control it within strict boundaries.

Some had the opportunity to vow a life of chastity and live as a nun, but there were few places available at convents.

Most women who became nuns were from wealthy families who could donate a generous annuity for their upkeep.

The great majority of women married and had children, yet this was fraught with danger.

Childbirth, very, very risky for women, very dangerous.

But the idea was they kind of asked for it because Eve had eaten the apple in the Garden of Eden and had talked Adam into it, so it was a punishment from God for that that they should suffer in childbirth.

In January of 1349, when Julian was a child, the city of Norwich was struck by a pandemic that raged across the whole of Europe.

Bubonic plague began with flu-like symptoms, fever, headaches, vomiting.

Then patches on the skin darkened.

Lymph nodes swelled into what were called bubos.

This plague became known as the Black Death.

And this first bout of plague was so deadly that people were dying very, very quickly.

So much so that there weren't enough priests to go around, that priests that were going to give the last rites were also dying very quickly themselves.

Laura Callis is a senior lecturer in medieval literature at the University of Swansea.

Julian will certainly have remembered that period in her life.

But more than that,

the plague has a series of recurrences.

The plague resurged 12 years later when Julian was 19, and again when she was 27.

We think about a third of the population succumbed to the plague at the time.

And I don't think we can overstate how traumatic that period must have been for people that were living through it.

People kind of having to bury their loved ones in the street because no one will come near them because they're contagious.

Whole families being wiped out or just one person surviving.

And who knows who Julian may have lost during those years?

Close family members, possibly even

a young husband, possibly young children.

No No one knew where this illness came from, nor how to stop it.

Some fell back on superstition.

It brought out everybody's worst possible traits.

People are blaming each other, blaming themselves, people going out on the streets and sort of self-flagellating, trying to make God forgive them for the sin they're being punished for.

When the plague first struck, Julian was still a child.

She prayed to God for three things.

The first wish is to relive or to know Christ's passion in her mind.

The second was to undergo a great bodily sickness herself.

And this should be a sickness that was so grave that she would fear that she was going to die.

And the third wish is that she wishes for three wounds.

The wounds of contrition, compassion and purposeful longing for God.

These macabre wishes may have been a child's attempt to make sense of the suffering she saw around her.

Later, though, when she was 30 years old, they came true.

Julian fell seriously ill.

So she's losing her sight, she's becoming paralyzed, she's feverish, she's literally feeling her breath going out of her body.

And so, what the nature of the sickness was, we don't know, but certainly it was something that was absolutely

catastrophic.

And everybody in the room is believing that she is to die.

The room went dark.

Julian's vision tunnelled.

She has a series of 16 visions over the ensuing days of her terrible sickness.

Many of those visions are about the crucifixion, which are almost filmic in nature.

So she asks for a crucifix because she is convinced she's going to die.

Her mother is there.

She thinks she's going to die as well.

The priest has read the last rites over her.

A crucifix was held before her eyes.

Sort of waiting for the end to come.

And she's looking at this crucifix and she says that everything around it went dark.

And this kind of crucifix becomes really foregrounded for her and sort of has a beautiful light around it.

Julian instantly felt better.

The crucifix had on it a figure of Jesus of Nazareth wearing a crown of thorns with a wound from a spear in his side.

Contemplating it, Julian said she saw it come to life.

She describes how all of a sudden this crucifix begins to bleed and she watches the blood pour down from the crown of thorns and from the wound in the side.

She describes Christ's faith.

She describes the colour of his skin changing, the shape of his nose kind of

sort of almost shrinking in.

She describes the bowing of his head, the dripping of the blood from underneath the crown of thorns.

He's pierced with a lance in his side, and there's a wound

that he has there, even after he's died.

She then zooms in at other moments to Christ's side wound

and sort of imagines herself actually going into the wound and sort of residing inside Christ's kind of punctured body.

And in the vision, he stretches it open to show her that there's space for all mankind in there.

She talks a lot about how dehydrated his body was,

and she talks about kind of the changing colours of Christ's skin

and how the sinews are kind of bursting out.

This was not the only vision that came to her.

Julian recounted others.

God coming to her and showing her a hazelnut in his palm, or the Virgin Mary, or Christ's little boy, or Jesus as a mother, kind of

looking after children, the idea being that God is essentially a mother to devoted Christians.

After days of these intense sensory experiences, Julian made a miraculous recovery.

The visions she witnessed were so revelatory, she wanted to document them.

And Julian then goes on to write up the story of her visions.

A short manuscript will be titled, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman.

It is better known as the Short Text.

In writing down what she saw, Julian took an enormous risk.

So I think there's a real tight rope she's walking between

having these visions from God, which are a real gift and sort of mark her out as sort of a special holy person.

But were anyone to be able to prove or to suggest that those visions were fraudulent or that they were actually even worse from devils, she could very easily tip over into being thought of as a heretic.

And she has to be very careful to not

make any claims to teaching and certainly not to preaching because that's absolutely ruled against

by the medieval church and set down by St.

Paul in the Bible that a woman must not teach.

Other women have been punished for doing so.

Julian will also have been aware of the French mystic Marguerite Perrette, who also wrote about her visions and her beliefs in her text in France.

And in 1310, Marguerite Perrette was burned alongside her book, What Was Referred To As the Heresy of the Free Spirit.

Julian

doesn't do anything in her book that could be counted as heretical.

However, she's clearly worried about that because of the way she frames her text.

So there's a number of caveats that she gives that suggest that she's thinking about heresy.

So one is that she's a woman.

You know,

she repeatedly says, I'm just a woman, lewd, feeble, and frail, her exact words.

You know, I'm just ignorant, I'm illiterous, I'm just passing something on, you know, that, you know, and she says at one point, why shouldn't I communicate this even though I am a woman?

Writing her short text seemed to shift something in Julian.

She felt driven to communicate her experiences.

She approached her local bishop and asked to become an anchoress.

Anchoritism was a rare and hallowed vocation among women in the Middle Ages.

There are records of at least 200 anchoresses in England between the 13th and 15th centuries.

Around one woman a year chose to retreat from society like this.

Not just anyone can become an anchoress, you have to petition for it, you have to be able to provide essentially a dowry that you give to the church so they can pay for you for the rest of your life, your meals, and you probably have a servant kind of adjoined to you, things like that.

So she was probably a wealthy noblewoman or similar.

She probably had some education.

Her book certainly suggests that she was educated.

And some people have suggested that Julian's short text may have actually been implicated in the process of her probation as an anchoress.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

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Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score.

We the man to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaysF.com.

After her enclosure ceremony, Julian lived exclusively in her stone cell.

She spent her time praying and reading.

She had three windows.

One looked into the church so she could observe the Mass.

One was used by her servants to give her food and water.

One looked outwards so she could engage with visitors.

People in the parish would have known who the local anchoress was.

People would have gone to visit the local anchoress to ask for her counsel.

And some of them would come just for a prayer or to see her because they'd heard about her, but others would come with real genuine problems

or someone to talk to.

So she's kind of doing a lot of that sort of active listening anyway in her vocation.

And then probably some of that is making its way into her writing too.

In 1413, a woman in the English town of Kingslyn had a vision.

Her name was Marjorie Kemp.

Marjorie believed God told her to travel 50 miles to Narwich to meet the anchoress, Julian.

Word had spread about Julian and her own visions of God.

Marjorie had 14 children and her relationship with her husband John was fraught.

After the 14th child, she had refused to have sex with him.

Now they lived in separate houses.

Marjorie had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Rome.

Marjorie hoped Julian could tell her if she was blessed, possessed, or perhaps even mad.

Marjorie

was known for being a very weepy woman and had lots of bouts of crying and writhing around on the church floor.

She wanted to know why she was having these visions.

And Julian was very reassuring to Marjorie.

She told her that her visions were from God and that she was incredibly privileged and fortunate to have received them.

She tells her that her tears are,

you know, drink for angels.

She basically verifies Marjorie's crying and says that this is holy and that you are a good woman and you should go back to your community in King's Lynn or Bishop's Lynn as it it was known in the Middle Ages

and be confident in the fact that this is true.

Julian told Marjorie,

Set all your trust in God and do not fear the talk of the world.

The more contempt, shame and reproof you have in this world, the more is your merit in the sight of God.

Julian is known for being a wise woman, somebody who has

wise counsel and is a sort of a sagacious sort of

female figure for the community.

Julian received visitors every day through the window in her cell.

She also continued to write.

She hadn't quite understood what the visions meant when she first wrote them down, so she's trying to kind of extend her interpretation.

Julian worked on another manuscript, The Revelations of Divine Love, known as the Long Text.

She explained.

that she felt stirred to say more.

Her reflection as an anchoress allowed her to expand on her visions.

She included a new episode.

And that's the parable of the Lord and the servant about

a servant who falls quite literally into a ditch.

And

ultimately, this is a story about how falling,

both metaphorically and literally, falling is a good thing.

People need to fall and to fail and to make mistakes in order to be able to get up and to sort of

learn something and to grow as a person.

And Julian doesn't bother including that at all in the short text because she doesn't understand it.

She doesn't know what is going on in that vision.

And so it takes her many, many, many years to even arrive at the point where she's able to write about it.

Julian expanded the positive message of her visions.

Her most quoted line is,

All shall be well, and all shall shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

And that to me, I mean, who wouldn't be comforted by that phrase?

So there is

a sort of persistent tone of reassurance throughout the text.

She always brings everything back to something more gentle, and ultimately, everything boils down to love.

There's always this sense of positivity that comes out of the things that she describes.

She sees humanity as being fundamentally good, but she also says in her text that the bodily nature of the human, or our substance, as she calls it, is actually nothing to regret.

Our sins are necessary, she says in the text.

They're necessary.

They will bear fruit.

Because it's through sinning that we have kind of redemption, it's through sinning that we understand

better when we repent of that sin and when we do better as people.

Julian was on a personal quest for insight about the human experience and used this to counsel her visitors.

At the same time, she produced a powerful and groundbreaking literary work.

On the surface, her writing seems quite sort of simplistic.

It's actually predicated on something incredibly sophisticated and something incredibly intellectual.

And it's a great skill, of course, to be able to convey profound ideas in a very calm and simple way.

Often, beginning with the very tiny, she often will begin with a small image and then she will often work outwards and to sort of carefully construct and explicate her understanding of

whatever it is that she's seen.

Details of Julian's death have been lost.

It's believed she died in her 70s, around 1416.

Her body may lie below her cell, in the church now named after her, St.

Julian's Church, Norwich.

But Julian's legacy would follow an unexpected path.

Julian lived and wrote before the printing press existed.

But her writings were copied out in convents and religious houses throughout Europe.

They were handed down through the generations.

In 1590, the long text was written out in Antwerp and sold to the Brigitte monastic community.

It ended up in the French royal collection.

Other copies sprang up over the course of the 17th century.

As a result, Julian was spoken about as the first woman writer in the English language.

The short text was all but lost until the beginning of the 20th century.

Around 500 years after her death, the words Julian had written as a young woman suddenly reached a much wider audience.

And so there's this sort of hiatus of several centuries where Julian is virtually unknown.

But interestingly, it's not really until the 20th century that people really start to read Julian.

Today, Revelations of Divine Love has provided comfort to readers across the world.

What have people turned to her during COVID because here was a woman who'd chosen to be confined and she's kind of talked about it.

In modern times, Julian's works continue to inspire many people of faith, as well as poets, songwriters and playwrights.

She is celebrated worldwide.

and perhaps especially in Norwich.

In 2013, the University of East Anglia named its new study centre after her.

Laura Callas sees Julian as a woman ahead of her time, writing with power and authority about her own experience.

In that sense, I sort of see Julian as being a sort of a trailblazer in that she's a sort of a proto-feminist character for me,

who is standing for women

who have things to say and who know things.

Feminist theologians in particular are drawn to Julian's descriptions of Jesus' suffering on the cross, a contrast with medieval ideas about women's bodies as dangerous and cursed.

A feminist reading from lots of feminist historians of this kind of imagery is that they are feminizing the body of Christ even more so that they can feel a connection with him and that they can celebrate for the first time their own bodies rather than seeing them as something deficient and wrong.

Because if God's body was like this and their body is like this, then that must be something positive.

And if good can come from suffering, which Julian of Norwich is really interested in, good coming out of suffering, then maybe good can come out of the suffering of their own bodies.

Even Julian's quest for a private physical space to write from has resonated with many women.

Yeah, I've thought about Julian of Norwich and Virginia Woolf together often

because Virginia Woolf famously says, you know, a room of one's own is what is required for women and it's such a popular quotation now um and julian of norwich seems like the medieval version of that that she found a room of her own albeit a really extreme version of that and then was able to find the time for reflection for meditation to kind of really expand her thinking and interpretation of the visions that she had

julian's devotional life began before her teens and she made the decision to commit to a life of contemplation when she was still a young woman.

From her isolated space in 14th century Norwich, she quietly shaped modern literature.

There is an irony in Julian's minuscule, sort of day-to-day

life in terms of her enclosure and the sort of magnitude of her influence in terms of the 21st century.

Julian's vision of the hazelnut shows how even a very small thing can contain multitudes.

She sees

a tiny object in the palm of her hand which is the size of a hazelnut.

So she doesn't envision a literal hazelnut, she visions this tiny, tiny little thing.

And as she's seeing this tiny little thing, she is also understanding from God that this is everything that has been made, that the whole of creation

the entire universe is within this minuscule hazelnut-like thing.

That's exactly what her anchoritic cell is doing.

It's providing this kind of microcosmic world

through which she accesses, through her visions, through her writing, a much more macrocosmic existence.

And so in a sense, she transcends time and space.

Next time, on history's youngest heroes.

When her kingdom is threatened, a 22-year-old Indian woman takes on the British Empire on horseback, with a sword in each hand.

She was such a young woman, no one expected her to come out fighting the way she did.

Rani Lakshmi Bai, the warrior queen.

Hi, I'm Izzy Judd, and I'm quickly dropping in to let you know of an incredibly calming podcast which I think you'll love.

The Music and Meditation podcast is a place where we press pause and give ourselves some brain space to step back from life a bit.

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Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to stop engine problems before they start?

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