I'm a post-doctoral researcher in medieval literature and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Oxford (the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, to be exact) with a two-year project titled "Women Making Memories: Liturgy and the Remembering Female Body in Medieval Holy Women’s Texts". I'm also a Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College. My dissertation focused on Middle English visionary Julian of Norwich, (1342 to circa 1416) and her two texts. My current research considers the intersection of women’s writings, medieval literary theory, popular religion, visual and material culture, focusing in particular on the role of the remembering body and the liturgy. Address: Oxford, United Kingdom
In medieval England, devout individuals-women in particular-self-isolated professionally, living ... more In medieval England, devout individuals-women in particular-self-isolated professionally, living confined to little rooms attached to parish churches. Although discomfort constituted the heart of this vocation, guides written for these anchorites also envisage enclosure as bringing risks to physical and mental health. These risks map onto acedia and sloth, two overlapping sins against which these texts caution. I argue that the anchoritic cell as metaphor and matter mediates the anchoritic endeavour of generating acedia and sloth and overcoming them. Twinning a literary approach with a feedback model from cognitive behavioural therapy, my discussion juxtaposes two texts addressing female anchorites, the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse, and The Form of Living by Richard Rolle (1300-1349) with two texts by female anchorites, A Revelation of Purgatory by an anonymous fifteenth-century anchorite and A Revelation of Love by Julian of Norwich (ca. 1343-ca. 1416). It probes whether, in these texts, the cell shifts the dynamics of the feedback loop from self-reinforcing to selfstabilizing or maintains these self-reinforcing dynamics. This discussion concludes by examining the stakes involved in the texts' commitment to the cell's ascetic materiality. Charting parallels to the home during COVID-19 lockdowns and historicizing the gendered physical and mental effects of (self-)isolation in narrow spaces, this analysis of medieval enclosure resonates with modern concerns about how confined spaces materialize power.
This article results from ‘Women Making Memories: Liturgy and the Remembering Female Body in Medieval Holy Women’s Texts’, my MSCA-IF project at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 842443.
Summarizes the impact of my MSCA-IF project Women Making Memories, which ran from September 2019 ... more Summarizes the impact of my MSCA-IF project Women Making Memories, which ran from September 2019 to December 2022. This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 842443.
Reflection on four round tables held at Pusey House (Oxford) on 15 July, as part of the "New Visi... more Reflection on four round tables held at Pusey House (Oxford) on 15 July, as part of the "New Visions of Julian of Norwich" conference (15-16 July 2022, Oxford)
Collective blog post on our vIMC 2020 session “Boundless Devotion: Female Spirituality across Bor... more Collective blog post on our vIMC 2020 session “Boundless Devotion: Female Spirituality across Borders Organizers”. we reflect more broadly on common themes in our papers: what role does adaptation play in medieval women’s religious literature? What constraints did the adaptation process entail for these readers and writers, and what opportunities did it offer them?
This blogpost examines how a story from the medieval Sister-books of Deventer can teach us about ... more This blogpost examines how a story from the medieval Sister-books of Deventer can teach us about the tensions between self and community in both Alijt’s era and our own.
The pandemic of COVID-19 is often called “unprecedented” – and for many people cooped up in their... more The pandemic of COVID-19 is often called “unprecedented” – and for many people cooped up in their homes in different countries, the experience is both unparalleled and challenging. But in late-medieval Europe, individuals self-isolated professionally. Some people – women particularly – permanently withdrew from society to live walled in, alone in a room attached to a church.
Guides for, and texts written by, these female “anchorites” – as the women were known – from Britain and continental Europe give us descriptions of their way of living and recount their reflections. So what can these medieval women teach us about how to cope with self-isolation?
Godelinde Perk, Marly Terwisscha and Lieke Smits brought medieval sisters to life at the Internat... more Godelinde Perk, Marly Terwisscha and Lieke Smits brought medieval sisters to life at the International Medieval Conference in Leeds, 2018. How can research by performance lead to new insights?
On a winter’s day, in the Dutch city of Deventer, a group of semi-religious women, all Sisters of... more On a winter’s day, in the Dutch city of Deventer, a group of semi-religious women, all Sisters of the Common Life, start telling each other devotional tales, but their storytelling soon reveals that being a Sister does not make you a saint . . .
Retelling biographies from two collections from Modern Devout Sisters’ Houses, this theatrical reading in English reconstructs a medieval reading experience, including the modern audience in the community of holy women. We would like to welcome you to Master Geert’s House: join the Sisters as they wish to hear ‘edifying points of our elder Sisters’, but cannot agree on the most spiritually exemplary and enjoyable tale. At the same time, each Sister strives to tell the story of her own life, trying to fit into the community by adapting and adopting Modern Devout narrative conventions. Whose story will be heard and whose forgotten?
This performance brings to life the Sister-Books of Deventer and Diepenveen, two female-authored Middle Dutch texts. Originating from the bookish Devotio Moderna, a late-medieval religious movement encompassing both monastic and semi-monastic communities, these vitae are brimming with unforgettable scenes and local colour. Written and read in the very same Sisters’ House in which the narratives are set, these 15th-century texts not only recount Sisters’ lives; they also prompt the Sisters to overlay their lives with those of their predecessors and stage the departed Sisters’ devotional feats in the spaces inhabited by the living Sisters.
This theatrical reading explores how the Sister-Books construct the very community they describe, investigating how the Sister-Books surround the living Sisters with the presence of those gone before them. According to the Deventer Sister-Book, hearing these lives makes the departed Sisters ‘seem alive after death’; this research-by-performance event therefore also examines how the text includes and engages its audience. Ultimately, this performance illuminates medieval reading practices, the effect of aurality on text and reception, and medieval women’s literary activity. After the 45 minute performance, there will be time for discussion.
Conference paper presented at Leeds 2020, as part of "Boundless Devotion: Female Spirituality Acr... more Conference paper presented at Leeds 2020, as part of "Boundless Devotion: Female Spirituality Across Borders.” Virtual Leeds International Medieval Congress. 7 July 2020, Leeds.
UGPS Working Paper Series, Umeå Group of Premodern Studies, Jan 2014
“Exegesis in the Works of Julian of Norwich”
Fourteenth-century recluse Julian of Norwich per... more “Exegesis in the Works of Julian of Norwich”
Fourteenth-century recluse Julian of Norwich perhaps spent her entire life meditating upon a series of visions, which she experienced at the age of thirty. She first described these in A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and later in A Revelation of Love, more than four times longer than the earlier text and containing more exposition and a more accomplished theological argument. Many of these meditations on the “shewings” are highly reminiscent of Biblical exegesis: Julian skillfully brings techniques for interpreting the Word of God to her interpretation of her own words from God.
Having been a nun at the Benedictine convent at Carrow, Julian must have been closely familiar with medieval biblical exegesis, including the Quadriga, the four senses of Scripture. Exegesis was common in medieval preaching; Julian’s exegetic analyses of her revelations therefore allowed her to communicate her theology to her “evenchristen” or fellow Christian in a manner immediately recognisable to them. In A Revelation, exegesis often consists of glosses on words from Christ’s statements or paraphrases such as attributed speech. However, at several moments in the text, the visions and their exegesis –for instance, Christ’s words and Julian’s paraphrase– overlap or even become indistinguishable.
This paper will explore Julian’s exegesis of A Vision in A Revelation, its relation to its fourteenth-century theological environment, and its significance for her individual theology, focusing in particular on those complex, meaningful instances in both works where revelation and exposition – God’s words and Julian’s words– merge.
Both critical and popular descriptions are quick to compare medieval romances and religious writ... more Both critical and popular descriptions are quick to compare medieval romances and religious writing to modern romance fiction, hinting at an underlying association of women readers with romantic fiction, an assumption often found in modern literary discussions. This paper examines how medieval and modern preconceptions about women readers have shaped the reception of medieval texts addressed to women or thought to have been read by women. Focusing on narrative and devotional texts read in medieval England, and the role of romance and the body, it explores the rhetorical strategies by which the texts challenge medieval preconceived notions of women readers and interrogate the modern preconceptions imposed upon them as well. These strategies are brought into dialogue with similar strategies found in modern texts often coded feminine, such as modern romance fiction and fan fiction. Ultimately, this paper enhances our understanding of how medieval women writers and readers both question and absorb the manner in which their texts and they themselves were read and of how contemporary parallels can shed further light upon these responses.
In a fifteenth-century holy woman's dream, Christ makes quite a dramatic appearance: He throws th... more In a fifteenth-century holy woman's dream, Christ makes quite a dramatic appearance: He throws thistles on her bed, rolls around in them until his naked body is covered in blood, and prophecies "you must become like this, before you come to me." Shortly after, she falls ill. In spite of this thematization of suffering and somatic devotion, usually associated with male-authored women's vitae, this scene appears in a female-authored vita (the Deventer Sister-Book) from a late-medieval movement often associated with interiority: the Devotio Moderna. Likewise, Julian of Norwich is often praised for her serenity, yet her works open with her in severe pain, and present her as anxious and desperate during her visions. Juxtaposing the Diepenveen and Deventer Sister-Books and Julian's texts, I argue that they employ lived experience of physical and emotional suffering as well as Christus Medicus imagery think through not only sin, salvation history and community, but also the salutary effect of their text. This paper thus seeks to uncover a medieval bibliotherapy, exploring the health-giving qualities of reading in and of their works. In particular, it examines the texts' models of the dynamic, gendered interplay between interiority and exteriority, showing how both these texts draw on and challenge medieval medicine in order to transform the readers' mind and body to their characters' likeness, thus recreating the lived experience. I will tease out points of intersection disjuncture between these works' literary strategies and their complex responses to late-medieval gender discourses. Arguing for a more pan-European and comparative approach to medieval women's vernacular theology, this paper illuminates both Julian's and Modern Devout Sister's writings place in their international context and in the history of emotions and lived experience.
To the Devotio Moderna sisters, Saint Augustine was not only the source of their rule; their repr... more To the Devotio Moderna sisters, Saint Augustine was not only the source of their rule; their representations of the bishop of Hippo also formed sites for negotiating questions of identity, memory and history. In the Middle Dutch, late-medieval Sisterbooks of Diepenveen and the Meester Geertshuis in Deventer, several of these female-authored vitae offer strikingly personalized interpretations of the early Christian saint: Katharina van Naaldwijk is described as always saying that Augustine was her spiritual father; Gertrude of Rijssen claims that he protected her from demons in a vision, and Mette van Delden ‘s great devotion gives her “relatives in heaven” with Augustine as her brother. Such saints’ lives of deceased sisters served a memorial function in the convent community. In this paper, I therefore contextualize these scenes with not only medieval thought on memory and heritage, but also Augustine’s theory of memory. According to this model, knowledge results from memory creating a narrative out of sense impressions; this narrative ordering makes the subject aware of God’s presence within one’s memory. Reading Augustine’s appearances in these vitae alongside moments from hagiography and the liturgy, I argue that by means of these representations of Augustine the Sisterbooks challenge and modify his understanding of memory and of time, and promote impressions of both patron saint and sister that invite exactly such remembering. The Sisterbooks thus construct a convent identity with porous boundaries, replacing the self which Augustine sees as dwelling in memory with communal subjectivity called into being by the vitae themselves. Ultimately, I seek to illuminate how these texts conceptualize modelling the present on the past, and how these female authors rework narratives about male saints from the past to think through Modern Devout sisterhood.
With her fondling of Christ’s toes and loud weeping, Margery Kempe’s spirituality seems foremost ... more With her fondling of Christ’s toes and loud weeping, Margery Kempe’s spirituality seems foremost deeply somatic, performative, and material; critical discussions often center on this notable exteriority in The Book of Margery Kempe.Yet in one of the later chapters of the Book, Christ promises he will reward for Margery for her devout desires for charitable deeds as if she had performed them. I argue that across the Channel, contemporary parallels can be found for this intriguing blend of virtual actions and performative piety: the female-authored Middle Dutch texts from the Devotio Moderna, a lay and (semi)monastic movement, likewise brim over with somatic expressions and inner feats. Juxtaposing the Book with the Sister-Books, autobiographies such as Alijt Bake’s Mijn Begin ende Voortganck, and Modern Devout treatises, this discussion reads the Book as a Continental vita and a Continental mystical text. In particular, it examines the texts’ models of the dynamic, gendered interplay between interiority and exteriority, showing how both the Book and Modern Devout texts challenge medieval faculty psychology and transform the readers’ mind to the likeness of that of their characters’. I will tease out points of intersection between and disjuncture of these works’ literary and devotional strategies, contextualizing these with memoria to attend closely to the texts’ complex responses to fifteenth-century gender discourses. This analysis thus conceives of the Book as a literary and theological pilgrim, impressed by the European context through which Margery is described as traveling. Arguing for a more pan-European and comparative approach to medieval women’s vernacular theology, this paper illuminates both the Book’s place in its international context and its appropriative localization of Continental traditions.
In medieval England, devout individuals-women in particular-self-isolated professionally, living ... more In medieval England, devout individuals-women in particular-self-isolated professionally, living confined to little rooms attached to parish churches. Although discomfort constituted the heart of this vocation, guides written for these anchorites also envisage enclosure as bringing risks to physical and mental health. These risks map onto acedia and sloth, two overlapping sins against which these texts caution. I argue that the anchoritic cell as metaphor and matter mediates the anchoritic endeavour of generating acedia and sloth and overcoming them. Twinning a literary approach with a feedback model from cognitive behavioural therapy, my discussion juxtaposes two texts addressing female anchorites, the thirteenth-century Ancrene Wisse, and The Form of Living by Richard Rolle (1300-1349) with two texts by female anchorites, A Revelation of Purgatory by an anonymous fifteenth-century anchorite and A Revelation of Love by Julian of Norwich (ca. 1343-ca. 1416). It probes whether, in these texts, the cell shifts the dynamics of the feedback loop from self-reinforcing to selfstabilizing or maintains these self-reinforcing dynamics. This discussion concludes by examining the stakes involved in the texts' commitment to the cell's ascetic materiality. Charting parallels to the home during COVID-19 lockdowns and historicizing the gendered physical and mental effects of (self-)isolation in narrow spaces, this analysis of medieval enclosure resonates with modern concerns about how confined spaces materialize power.
This article results from ‘Women Making Memories: Liturgy and the Remembering Female Body in Medieval Holy Women’s Texts’, my MSCA-IF project at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 842443.
Summarizes the impact of my MSCA-IF project Women Making Memories, which ran from September 2019 ... more Summarizes the impact of my MSCA-IF project Women Making Memories, which ran from September 2019 to December 2022. This project received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 842443.
Reflection on four round tables held at Pusey House (Oxford) on 15 July, as part of the "New Visi... more Reflection on four round tables held at Pusey House (Oxford) on 15 July, as part of the "New Visions of Julian of Norwich" conference (15-16 July 2022, Oxford)
Collective blog post on our vIMC 2020 session “Boundless Devotion: Female Spirituality across Bor... more Collective blog post on our vIMC 2020 session “Boundless Devotion: Female Spirituality across Borders Organizers”. we reflect more broadly on common themes in our papers: what role does adaptation play in medieval women’s religious literature? What constraints did the adaptation process entail for these readers and writers, and what opportunities did it offer them?
This blogpost examines how a story from the medieval Sister-books of Deventer can teach us about ... more This blogpost examines how a story from the medieval Sister-books of Deventer can teach us about the tensions between self and community in both Alijt’s era and our own.
The pandemic of COVID-19 is often called “unprecedented” – and for many people cooped up in their... more The pandemic of COVID-19 is often called “unprecedented” – and for many people cooped up in their homes in different countries, the experience is both unparalleled and challenging. But in late-medieval Europe, individuals self-isolated professionally. Some people – women particularly – permanently withdrew from society to live walled in, alone in a room attached to a church.
Guides for, and texts written by, these female “anchorites” – as the women were known – from Britain and continental Europe give us descriptions of their way of living and recount their reflections. So what can these medieval women teach us about how to cope with self-isolation?
Godelinde Perk, Marly Terwisscha and Lieke Smits brought medieval sisters to life at the Internat... more Godelinde Perk, Marly Terwisscha and Lieke Smits brought medieval sisters to life at the International Medieval Conference in Leeds, 2018. How can research by performance lead to new insights?
On a winter’s day, in the Dutch city of Deventer, a group of semi-religious women, all Sisters of... more On a winter’s day, in the Dutch city of Deventer, a group of semi-religious women, all Sisters of the Common Life, start telling each other devotional tales, but their storytelling soon reveals that being a Sister does not make you a saint . . .
Retelling biographies from two collections from Modern Devout Sisters’ Houses, this theatrical reading in English reconstructs a medieval reading experience, including the modern audience in the community of holy women. We would like to welcome you to Master Geert’s House: join the Sisters as they wish to hear ‘edifying points of our elder Sisters’, but cannot agree on the most spiritually exemplary and enjoyable tale. At the same time, each Sister strives to tell the story of her own life, trying to fit into the community by adapting and adopting Modern Devout narrative conventions. Whose story will be heard and whose forgotten?
This performance brings to life the Sister-Books of Deventer and Diepenveen, two female-authored Middle Dutch texts. Originating from the bookish Devotio Moderna, a late-medieval religious movement encompassing both monastic and semi-monastic communities, these vitae are brimming with unforgettable scenes and local colour. Written and read in the very same Sisters’ House in which the narratives are set, these 15th-century texts not only recount Sisters’ lives; they also prompt the Sisters to overlay their lives with those of their predecessors and stage the departed Sisters’ devotional feats in the spaces inhabited by the living Sisters.
This theatrical reading explores how the Sister-Books construct the very community they describe, investigating how the Sister-Books surround the living Sisters with the presence of those gone before them. According to the Deventer Sister-Book, hearing these lives makes the departed Sisters ‘seem alive after death’; this research-by-performance event therefore also examines how the text includes and engages its audience. Ultimately, this performance illuminates medieval reading practices, the effect of aurality on text and reception, and medieval women’s literary activity. After the 45 minute performance, there will be time for discussion.
Conference paper presented at Leeds 2020, as part of "Boundless Devotion: Female Spirituality Acr... more Conference paper presented at Leeds 2020, as part of "Boundless Devotion: Female Spirituality Across Borders.” Virtual Leeds International Medieval Congress. 7 July 2020, Leeds.
UGPS Working Paper Series, Umeå Group of Premodern Studies, Jan 2014
“Exegesis in the Works of Julian of Norwich”
Fourteenth-century recluse Julian of Norwich per... more “Exegesis in the Works of Julian of Norwich”
Fourteenth-century recluse Julian of Norwich perhaps spent her entire life meditating upon a series of visions, which she experienced at the age of thirty. She first described these in A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and later in A Revelation of Love, more than four times longer than the earlier text and containing more exposition and a more accomplished theological argument. Many of these meditations on the “shewings” are highly reminiscent of Biblical exegesis: Julian skillfully brings techniques for interpreting the Word of God to her interpretation of her own words from God.
Having been a nun at the Benedictine convent at Carrow, Julian must have been closely familiar with medieval biblical exegesis, including the Quadriga, the four senses of Scripture. Exegesis was common in medieval preaching; Julian’s exegetic analyses of her revelations therefore allowed her to communicate her theology to her “evenchristen” or fellow Christian in a manner immediately recognisable to them. In A Revelation, exegesis often consists of glosses on words from Christ’s statements or paraphrases such as attributed speech. However, at several moments in the text, the visions and their exegesis –for instance, Christ’s words and Julian’s paraphrase– overlap or even become indistinguishable.
This paper will explore Julian’s exegesis of A Vision in A Revelation, its relation to its fourteenth-century theological environment, and its significance for her individual theology, focusing in particular on those complex, meaningful instances in both works where revelation and exposition – God’s words and Julian’s words– merge.
Both critical and popular descriptions are quick to compare medieval romances and religious writ... more Both critical and popular descriptions are quick to compare medieval romances and religious writing to modern romance fiction, hinting at an underlying association of women readers with romantic fiction, an assumption often found in modern literary discussions. This paper examines how medieval and modern preconceptions about women readers have shaped the reception of medieval texts addressed to women or thought to have been read by women. Focusing on narrative and devotional texts read in medieval England, and the role of romance and the body, it explores the rhetorical strategies by which the texts challenge medieval preconceived notions of women readers and interrogate the modern preconceptions imposed upon them as well. These strategies are brought into dialogue with similar strategies found in modern texts often coded feminine, such as modern romance fiction and fan fiction. Ultimately, this paper enhances our understanding of how medieval women writers and readers both question and absorb the manner in which their texts and they themselves were read and of how contemporary parallels can shed further light upon these responses.
In a fifteenth-century holy woman's dream, Christ makes quite a dramatic appearance: He throws th... more In a fifteenth-century holy woman's dream, Christ makes quite a dramatic appearance: He throws thistles on her bed, rolls around in them until his naked body is covered in blood, and prophecies "you must become like this, before you come to me." Shortly after, she falls ill. In spite of this thematization of suffering and somatic devotion, usually associated with male-authored women's vitae, this scene appears in a female-authored vita (the Deventer Sister-Book) from a late-medieval movement often associated with interiority: the Devotio Moderna. Likewise, Julian of Norwich is often praised for her serenity, yet her works open with her in severe pain, and present her as anxious and desperate during her visions. Juxtaposing the Diepenveen and Deventer Sister-Books and Julian's texts, I argue that they employ lived experience of physical and emotional suffering as well as Christus Medicus imagery think through not only sin, salvation history and community, but also the salutary effect of their text. This paper thus seeks to uncover a medieval bibliotherapy, exploring the health-giving qualities of reading in and of their works. In particular, it examines the texts' models of the dynamic, gendered interplay between interiority and exteriority, showing how both these texts draw on and challenge medieval medicine in order to transform the readers' mind and body to their characters' likeness, thus recreating the lived experience. I will tease out points of intersection disjuncture between these works' literary strategies and their complex responses to late-medieval gender discourses. Arguing for a more pan-European and comparative approach to medieval women's vernacular theology, this paper illuminates both Julian's and Modern Devout Sister's writings place in their international context and in the history of emotions and lived experience.
To the Devotio Moderna sisters, Saint Augustine was not only the source of their rule; their repr... more To the Devotio Moderna sisters, Saint Augustine was not only the source of their rule; their representations of the bishop of Hippo also formed sites for negotiating questions of identity, memory and history. In the Middle Dutch, late-medieval Sisterbooks of Diepenveen and the Meester Geertshuis in Deventer, several of these female-authored vitae offer strikingly personalized interpretations of the early Christian saint: Katharina van Naaldwijk is described as always saying that Augustine was her spiritual father; Gertrude of Rijssen claims that he protected her from demons in a vision, and Mette van Delden ‘s great devotion gives her “relatives in heaven” with Augustine as her brother. Such saints’ lives of deceased sisters served a memorial function in the convent community. In this paper, I therefore contextualize these scenes with not only medieval thought on memory and heritage, but also Augustine’s theory of memory. According to this model, knowledge results from memory creating a narrative out of sense impressions; this narrative ordering makes the subject aware of God’s presence within one’s memory. Reading Augustine’s appearances in these vitae alongside moments from hagiography and the liturgy, I argue that by means of these representations of Augustine the Sisterbooks challenge and modify his understanding of memory and of time, and promote impressions of both patron saint and sister that invite exactly such remembering. The Sisterbooks thus construct a convent identity with porous boundaries, replacing the self which Augustine sees as dwelling in memory with communal subjectivity called into being by the vitae themselves. Ultimately, I seek to illuminate how these texts conceptualize modelling the present on the past, and how these female authors rework narratives about male saints from the past to think through Modern Devout sisterhood.
With her fondling of Christ’s toes and loud weeping, Margery Kempe’s spirituality seems foremost ... more With her fondling of Christ’s toes and loud weeping, Margery Kempe’s spirituality seems foremost deeply somatic, performative, and material; critical discussions often center on this notable exteriority in The Book of Margery Kempe.Yet in one of the later chapters of the Book, Christ promises he will reward for Margery for her devout desires for charitable deeds as if she had performed them. I argue that across the Channel, contemporary parallels can be found for this intriguing blend of virtual actions and performative piety: the female-authored Middle Dutch texts from the Devotio Moderna, a lay and (semi)monastic movement, likewise brim over with somatic expressions and inner feats. Juxtaposing the Book with the Sister-Books, autobiographies such as Alijt Bake’s Mijn Begin ende Voortganck, and Modern Devout treatises, this discussion reads the Book as a Continental vita and a Continental mystical text. In particular, it examines the texts’ models of the dynamic, gendered interplay between interiority and exteriority, showing how both the Book and Modern Devout texts challenge medieval faculty psychology and transform the readers’ mind to the likeness of that of their characters’. I will tease out points of intersection between and disjuncture of these works’ literary and devotional strategies, contextualizing these with memoria to attend closely to the texts’ complex responses to fifteenth-century gender discourses. This analysis thus conceives of the Book as a literary and theological pilgrim, impressed by the European context through which Margery is described as traveling. Arguing for a more pan-European and comparative approach to medieval women’s vernacular theology, this paper illuminates both the Book’s place in its international context and its appropriative localization of Continental traditions.
Although smashing pagan idols was no longer an option, late-medieval readers liked their contempo... more Although smashing pagan idols was no longer an option, late-medieval readers liked their contemporary holy women to experience similarly radical conversions as the saints in the Legenda Aurea. The Book of Margery Kempe and the Sisterbook of the Modern Devout convent at Diepenveen (the Netherlands), a Middle English and a Middle Dutch text from the fifteenth century, offer such dramatic spiritual turning points. Margery and many sisters first live a life filled with fashion, riches and prestige, until a supernatural experience or a confessor makes them see the error of their worldly ways, after which they turn to a monasticism-inspired life.
Like the saints’ lives these vitae evoke, these texts encourage the reader to remember both the works themselves and the women. The Diepenveen Sisterbook was intended to prompt the Devotio Moderna sisters to “imitate the virtues and example” of their predecessors. Similarly, one of the Book’s scribes stresses in the proem that Margery’s life is “ower exampyl and instruccyon”.
This article therefore reads these conversion scenes —in their original vernaculars— through the lens of memoria, the craft and art of memory. Tracing how these moments appropriate familiar hagiographic loci, I examine how these texts seek to imprint these events indelibly on the readers’ mind. The mnemonic impressions thus promoted I bring into dialogue with each text’s understanding of sainthood, revealing different (auto)-hagiographic strategies and different conceptions of the secular and the deceased Other. Ultimately, I illuminate how both works —by means of these accounts of spiritual transformation— create transcendent memorial communities: the Book makes Margery join the ranks of her favorite saints while the Sisterbook unites the implied reader with the saintly sisters gone before her, fashionistas once more in the afterlife.
“In a Shewing, Mistely”: The Short Stories of Julian of Norwich (1343-1416)”.
Sometime in the se... more “In a Shewing, Mistely”: The Short Stories of Julian of Norwich (1343-1416)”.
Sometime in the second half of the fourteenth century, a young devout woman listened spellbound to a preacher telling the dramatic legend of Saint Cecilia. Some years later this woman, known as Julian “of Norwich”, would write in her first book, the first English text created by a woman, “God forbid that you assume that I am a teacher!”. Women were prohibited to teach or preach; nonetheless Julian in her second work creates a her own type of a sermon, using vivid short stories to appeal to a lay audience, just as male clergy were wont to do. In this paper I will discuss Julian’s use of exempla, short didactic narratives, in her two texts, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love. I will argue that these exempla do more than simply illustrate Julian’s highly original theological claims: the exempla function as both mnemonic devices and as structuring tools, forcing the audience constantly to pay close attention to each step in the development of Julian’s thoughts. Just as God constructs exempla out of the raw material of Julian’s mind as a response to Julian’s search for understanding, Julian creates a dynamic meeting of minds between her and her audience. Furthermore, Julian even turns the narrative of her visionary experience into an exemplum to her heterodox, subversive sermon; her life illustrates her proto-feminist theology, in which God is an ever caring mother who never feels wrath. Not once forgetting her own love for stories nor her audience’s, by her use of exempla Julian turns herself into a preacher, a teacher and a saint.
The piety of fifteenth-century Englishwoman, pilgrim and would-be-saint Margery Kempe has been de... more The piety of fifteenth-century Englishwoman, pilgrim and would-be-saint Margery Kempe has been described as “pure imitation” and her spirituality as a “competitive sport” (Newman 32) . The actions, visions and prophecies of the character Margery in The Book of Margery Kempe do indeed closely resemble those of St. Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine of Siena and other female characters from religious narratives. Margery even tries to compete with these saints, as well as with biblical women; in one vision Christ tells her “Birgitta never saw me this way,” and in another she –instead of the Virgin Mary- swaddles the Christ child. However, this behaviour can be read as more than simply mimetic. Drawing on scholarship on twenty-first-century fan fiction, I would like to argue that Margery can be seen as an authorial self-insert or “Mary Sue” with competitive traits: in the Book, the narrator creates fan fiction of Biblical and hagiographical narratives, into which she inserts an idealized alter-ego. This Mary Sue then not only interacts with familiar female characters such as Birgitta and Mary but also competitively appropriates their traits and behaviour, in particular those associated with motherhood and the female body. As a result, Margery makes her alter-ego more saintly and more visionary than the other characters and thus gives her a higher spiritual status. Simply put, Margery has herself out-saint Saint Bridget, and out-Virgin the Virgin Mary. Discussing Margery in this manner shows how a fifteenth-century voracious listener to religious tales could take the imaginative engagement with Biblical narratives recommended by meditation manuals several steps further and perform (fan) fictions of self and female sainthood.
Work cited: Newman, Barbara, ‘What Did It Mean to Say “I Saw”? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture’, Speculum, 80 (2005), 1–43
Like the major part of medieval devotional culture since the thirteenth century, medieval vision... more Like the major part of medieval devotional culture since the thirteenth century, medieval visionary writing was fascinated by the physical and emotional aspects of Mary’s motherhood. Striking depictions of these, as well as of Christ as a mother, can be found in the works of three near-contemporary female visionaries: St. Birgitta of Sweden (1303-1373), noblewoman, pilgrim and mother of eight, Julian of Norwich (1342- after 1416), anchoress, vernacular theologian and first known English woman writer, and Margery Kempe (c. 1373 - after 1439), businesswoman, pilgrim and mother of thirteen. Birgitta, Julian and Margery not only explore the mothering by the Mother of God and (as Julian writes) “God oure moder”, (self)-representations of earthly mothers and children occur throughout their texts as well.
In this paper I will discuss the unique yet interacting forms of what of Liz Herbert McAvoy calls the “motherhood matrix” (64) in these three medieval mystics’ texts, focusing on physical acts of mothering such as giving birth, swaddling a newborn, breastfeeding, chastising, and washing. I will argue that in their self-representation as and depiction of earthly mothers and children, each seeks to emulate divine motherhood and childhood in a distinct manner closely linked to their larger themes regarding self, body and God: Julian’s theme of mutual indwelling of God and mankind, Margery’s physical appropriation of Christ’s and Mary’s body, and Birgitta’s theme of the inscription of Mary’s sensations on her own body. Furthermore, Birgitta’s Liber Celestis being well-known in late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century England, the dialogue between these three motherhood matrices will be addressed. Finally, I will show that depicting themselves as similar in body and actions to the Mother of God and God our Mother allows Birgitta, Julian and Margery to create texts with both theological authority and strong narrative agency.
Skill: Aspects and Approaches. Ninth Oxford Medieval Graduate Conference.
“Exegesis in the Works of Julian of Norwich”
Fourteenth-century recluse Julian of Norwich per... more “Exegesis in the Works of Julian of Norwich”
Fourteenth-century recluse Julian of Norwich perhaps spent her entire life meditating upon a series of visions, which she experienced at the age of thirty. She first described these in A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and later in A Revelation of Love, more than four times longer than the earlier text and containing more exposition and a more accomplished theological argument. Many of these meditations on the “shewings” are highly reminiscent of Biblical exegesis: Julian skillfully brings techniques for interpreting the Word of God to her interpretation of her own words from God.
Having been a nun at the Benedictine convent at Carrow, Julian must have been closely familiar with medieval biblical exegesis, including the Quadriga, the four senses of Scripture. Exegesis was common in medieval preaching; Julian’s exegetic analyses of her revelations therefore allowed her to communicate her theology to her “evenchristen” or fellow Christian in a manner immediately recognisable to them. In A Revelation, exegesis often consists of glosses on words from Christ’s statements or paraphrases such as attributed speech. However, at several moments in the text, the visions and their exegesis –for instance, Christ’s words and Julian’s paraphrase– overlap or even become indistinguishable.
This paper will explore Julian’s exegesis of A Vision in A Revelation, its relation to its fourteenth-century theological environment, and its significance for her individual theology, focusing in particular on those complex, meaningful instances in both works where revelation and exposition – God’s words and Julian’s words– merge.
This study offers a narrative comparison of A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, the two texts created by the first known English woman writer, Julian of Norwich (c. 1343 – c. 1416). It focuses Julian as a storyteller rather than as a theologian, mystic or visionary, concentrating particular on her narrative strategies, that is, on the strategic use of formal narrative features and the changes in these between Vision and Revelation. This dissertation therefore examines Vision and Revelation in terms of three narrative features: plot, characterization and perspective or point of view (termed ‘focalization’ here). These three narrative features are brought into dialogue with Julian’s theology.
Three analytical angles help shed more light on Julian’s innovative use of these structures in her works: modern narratology, Middle English literary theory and practice, and the texts’ own literary concepts and self-referential comments. Two central narratological methods are used throughout. The first is to make a distinction between narrator Julian, who tells about the events, and character Julian, who experiences the events. The second is distinguishing several hermeneutic layers or levels of signification in a narrative. Following narratologist Mieke Bal, this discussion distinguishes between fabula (the raw material), story (the content of the text) and text (the linguistic construct).
On the basis of this exploration, this study argues that Revelation includes, expands and transforms the narrative structures of Vision, and thereby consciously draws more attention to the structures themselves. At the same time, however, within Revelation a similar narrative reshaping can be seen as between Vision and Revelation. That is, Revelation reshapes its own new narrative structures, in order to hint at God’s greater structure and envelop its own in His. This greatest structure, however, is only glimpsed. As regards these narrative structures, this study argues that linear finite narrative desire driving the plot of Vision is taken up into an endless, greater narrative desire in Revelation, creating a circular plot. At the same time, narrator Julian constructs an omnitemporal, non-sequential plot. Moreover, this analysis shows that the focalization already found in Vision is made more demonstrative in Revelation, while the narrator directs this gaze more towards the apophatic and what is always hidden. Finally, this study explores how many of the characters from Vision are made twofold in Revelation, while Revelation at the same time foreshadows the union this doubleness will achieve at the end of time. Revelation, in short, utilizes Vision’s structures and its own to implode structure.
Julian’s poetics thus is one of continuous developing and enveloping, which allows her to depict God, herself and the reader as characters in each other’s narratives and as participating in each other’s storytelling: she authorizes her own story by making it God’s and the reader’s as well. This more conscious structuring and simultaneous reshaping of the new structure in Revelation forms Julian’s most innovative narrative strategy and the most striking interaction between her art and theology: narrator Julian depicts her own storytelling as simultaneously participating in that of God and foreshadowing God’s ultimate storytelling at the end of time.
In medieval Europe, many devout men and women chose to spend their entire lives in small rooms at... more In medieval Europe, many devout men and women chose to spend their entire lives in small rooms attached to churches, never leaving, always praying and counselling. Who were these anchorites, and what did their lives look like?
Stories Heard Through Anchorhold Walls: Julian’s Narrative Art and Theology
“I heard a man of h... more Stories Heard Through Anchorhold Walls: Julian’s Narrative Art and Theology
“I heard a man of holy church tell the story Saint Cecilia,” Julian of Norwich recalls in her earlier text, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, a memory which illustrates how narratives saturated and appealed to medieval religious thought and Julian’s own. Yet her later, longer text, A Revelation of Love, excludes this scene: instead of a preacher, Julian lets God tell many short narratives, including a puzzling parable about a lord and a servant. This “mysterious…wonderful parable” wholly transfigures Julian’s thinking about sin and salvation and forms the foundation of her theology of Christ’s motherhood, as previous research has observed. I argue, however, Julian’s continuous re-telling of this exemplum also transforms her writing: it allows her to knit and narratives and theology inextricably together, uniting them to a single act of storytelling. Reading A Vision Showed and A Revelation through the lens of the parable, I not only trace the development of Julian’s narrative theology and theological narratology; I also examine her innovative use of vernacular narrative terms and concepts, such as “behovely”, “happe” and “aventure”. The exempla and A Revelation in general, I demonstrate, wrap these literary concepts in new layers of significance; these “image-knots” innovatively conceptualize the relationship between mother Christ and humanity. Telling stories thus allows for finding more inclusive and hopeful ways of thinking about God and humanity, while these stories remain appealing, powerful narratives, whose significance and events never end. Moreover, when we contextualize these concepts with anchorites’ bodily liturgical practices, it becomes clear that God and Julian’s joint storytelling form part of Christ’s continuous maternal care for each individual, and of Julian’s concern for her evencristen reader. Ultimately, I illuminate how Julian’s storytelling allows her to lovingly enclose God, her evencristen reader, and herself into the anchorhold of her story.
An introduction to Julian of Norwich, her "greatest hits" and some of her overarching theological... more An introduction to Julian of Norwich, her "greatest hits" and some of her overarching theological themes.
History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland, 2019
Review of Laughing at the Devil by Amy Laura Hall.
First posted (in March) to the H-WRBI site an... more Review of Laughing at the Devil by Amy Laura Hall.
This study offers a narrative comparison of A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of... more This study offers a narrative comparison of A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, the two texts created by the first known English woman writer, Julian of Norwich (c. 1343 – c ...
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This article results from ‘Women Making Memories: Liturgy and the Remembering Female Body in Medieval Holy Women’s Texts’, my MSCA-IF project at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 842443.
adaptation process entail for these readers and writers, and what opportunities did it offer them?
Guides for, and texts written by, these female “anchorites” – as the women were known – from Britain and continental Europe give us descriptions of their way of living and recount their reflections. So what can these medieval women teach us about how to cope with self-isolation?
http://leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/are-you-really-sisters-no-were-researchers
Retelling biographies from two collections from Modern Devout Sisters’ Houses, this theatrical reading in English reconstructs a medieval reading experience, including the modern audience in the community of holy women. We would like to welcome you to Master Geert’s House: join the Sisters as they wish to hear ‘edifying points of our elder Sisters’, but cannot agree on the most spiritually exemplary and enjoyable tale. At the same time, each Sister strives to tell the story of her own life, trying to fit into the community by adapting and adopting Modern Devout narrative conventions. Whose story will be heard and whose forgotten?
This performance brings to life the Sister-Books of Deventer and Diepenveen, two female-authored Middle Dutch texts. Originating from the bookish Devotio Moderna, a late-medieval religious movement encompassing both monastic and semi-monastic communities, these vitae are brimming with unforgettable scenes and local colour. Written and read in the very same Sisters’ House in which the narratives are set, these 15th-century texts not only recount Sisters’ lives; they also prompt the Sisters to overlay their lives with those of their predecessors and stage the departed Sisters’ devotional feats in the spaces inhabited by the living Sisters.
This theatrical reading explores how the Sister-Books construct the very community they describe, investigating how the Sister-Books surround the living Sisters with the presence of those gone before them. According to the Deventer Sister-Book, hearing these lives makes the departed Sisters ‘seem alive after death’; this research-by-performance event therefore also examines how the text includes and engages its audience. Ultimately, this performance illuminates medieval reading practices, the effect of aurality on text and reception, and medieval women’s literary activity. After the 45 minute performance, there will be time for discussion.
Fourteenth-century recluse Julian of Norwich perhaps spent her entire life meditating upon a series of visions, which she experienced at the age of thirty. She first described these in A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and later in A Revelation of Love, more than four times longer than the earlier text and containing more exposition and a more accomplished theological argument. Many of these meditations on the “shewings” are highly reminiscent of Biblical exegesis: Julian skillfully brings techniques for interpreting the Word of God to her interpretation of her own words from God.
Having been a nun at the Benedictine convent at Carrow, Julian must have been closely familiar with medieval biblical exegesis, including the Quadriga, the four senses of Scripture. Exegesis was common in medieval preaching; Julian’s exegetic analyses of her revelations therefore allowed her to communicate her theology to her “evenchristen” or fellow Christian in a manner immediately recognisable to them. In A Revelation, exegesis often consists of glosses on words from Christ’s statements or paraphrases such as attributed speech. However, at several moments in the text, the visions and their exegesis –for instance, Christ’s words and Julian’s paraphrase– overlap or even become indistinguishable.
This paper will explore Julian’s exegesis of A Vision in A Revelation, its relation to its fourteenth-century theological environment, and its significance for her individual theology, focusing in particular on those complex, meaningful instances in both works where revelation and exposition – God’s words and Julian’s words– merge.
This article results from ‘Women Making Memories: Liturgy and the Remembering Female Body in Medieval Holy Women’s Texts’, my MSCA-IF project at the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 842443.
adaptation process entail for these readers and writers, and what opportunities did it offer them?
Guides for, and texts written by, these female “anchorites” – as the women were known – from Britain and continental Europe give us descriptions of their way of living and recount their reflections. So what can these medieval women teach us about how to cope with self-isolation?
http://leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/articles/are-you-really-sisters-no-were-researchers
Retelling biographies from two collections from Modern Devout Sisters’ Houses, this theatrical reading in English reconstructs a medieval reading experience, including the modern audience in the community of holy women. We would like to welcome you to Master Geert’s House: join the Sisters as they wish to hear ‘edifying points of our elder Sisters’, but cannot agree on the most spiritually exemplary and enjoyable tale. At the same time, each Sister strives to tell the story of her own life, trying to fit into the community by adapting and adopting Modern Devout narrative conventions. Whose story will be heard and whose forgotten?
This performance brings to life the Sister-Books of Deventer and Diepenveen, two female-authored Middle Dutch texts. Originating from the bookish Devotio Moderna, a late-medieval religious movement encompassing both monastic and semi-monastic communities, these vitae are brimming with unforgettable scenes and local colour. Written and read in the very same Sisters’ House in which the narratives are set, these 15th-century texts not only recount Sisters’ lives; they also prompt the Sisters to overlay their lives with those of their predecessors and stage the departed Sisters’ devotional feats in the spaces inhabited by the living Sisters.
This theatrical reading explores how the Sister-Books construct the very community they describe, investigating how the Sister-Books surround the living Sisters with the presence of those gone before them. According to the Deventer Sister-Book, hearing these lives makes the departed Sisters ‘seem alive after death’; this research-by-performance event therefore also examines how the text includes and engages its audience. Ultimately, this performance illuminates medieval reading practices, the effect of aurality on text and reception, and medieval women’s literary activity. After the 45 minute performance, there will be time for discussion.
Fourteenth-century recluse Julian of Norwich perhaps spent her entire life meditating upon a series of visions, which she experienced at the age of thirty. She first described these in A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and later in A Revelation of Love, more than four times longer than the earlier text and containing more exposition and a more accomplished theological argument. Many of these meditations on the “shewings” are highly reminiscent of Biblical exegesis: Julian skillfully brings techniques for interpreting the Word of God to her interpretation of her own words from God.
Having been a nun at the Benedictine convent at Carrow, Julian must have been closely familiar with medieval biblical exegesis, including the Quadriga, the four senses of Scripture. Exegesis was common in medieval preaching; Julian’s exegetic analyses of her revelations therefore allowed her to communicate her theology to her “evenchristen” or fellow Christian in a manner immediately recognisable to them. In A Revelation, exegesis often consists of glosses on words from Christ’s statements or paraphrases such as attributed speech. However, at several moments in the text, the visions and their exegesis –for instance, Christ’s words and Julian’s paraphrase– overlap or even become indistinguishable.
This paper will explore Julian’s exegesis of A Vision in A Revelation, its relation to its fourteenth-century theological environment, and its significance for her individual theology, focusing in particular on those complex, meaningful instances in both works where revelation and exposition – God’s words and Julian’s words– merge.
Like the saints’ lives these vitae evoke, these texts encourage the reader to remember both the works themselves and the women. The Diepenveen Sisterbook was intended to prompt the Devotio Moderna sisters to “imitate the virtues and example” of their predecessors. Similarly, one of the Book’s scribes stresses in the proem that Margery’s life is “ower exampyl and instruccyon”.
This article therefore reads these conversion scenes —in their original vernaculars— through the lens of memoria, the craft and art of memory. Tracing how these moments appropriate familiar hagiographic loci, I examine how these texts seek to imprint these events indelibly on the readers’ mind. The mnemonic impressions thus promoted I bring into dialogue with each text’s understanding of sainthood, revealing different (auto)-hagiographic strategies and different conceptions of the secular and the deceased Other. Ultimately, I illuminate how both works —by means of these accounts of spiritual transformation— create transcendent memorial communities: the Book makes Margery join the ranks of her favorite saints while the Sisterbook unites the implied reader with the saintly sisters gone before her, fashionistas once more in the afterlife.
Sometime in the second half of the fourteenth century, a young devout woman listened spellbound to a preacher telling the dramatic legend of Saint Cecilia. Some years later this woman, known as Julian “of Norwich”, would write in her first book, the first English text created by a woman, “God forbid that you assume that I am a teacher!”. Women were prohibited to teach or preach; nonetheless Julian in her second work creates a her own type of a sermon, using vivid short stories to appeal to a lay audience, just as male clergy were wont to do. In this paper I will discuss Julian’s use of exempla, short didactic narratives, in her two texts, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love. I will argue that these exempla do more than simply illustrate Julian’s highly original theological claims: the exempla function as both mnemonic devices and as structuring tools, forcing the audience constantly to pay close attention to each step in the development of Julian’s thoughts. Just as God constructs exempla out of the raw material of Julian’s mind as a response to Julian’s search for understanding, Julian creates a dynamic meeting of minds between her and her audience. Furthermore, Julian even turns the narrative of her visionary experience into an exemplum to her heterodox, subversive sermon; her life illustrates her proto-feminist theology, in which God is an ever caring mother who never feels wrath. Not once forgetting her own love for stories nor her audience’s, by her use of exempla Julian turns herself into a preacher, a teacher and a saint.
However, this behaviour can be read as more than simply mimetic. Drawing on scholarship on twenty-first-century fan fiction, I would like to argue that Margery can be seen as an authorial self-insert or “Mary Sue” with competitive traits: in the Book, the narrator creates fan fiction of Biblical and hagiographical narratives, into which she inserts an idealized alter-ego. This Mary Sue then not only interacts with familiar female characters such as Birgitta and Mary but also competitively appropriates their traits and behaviour, in particular those associated with motherhood and the female body. As a result, Margery makes her alter-ego more saintly and more visionary than the other characters and thus gives her a higher spiritual status. Simply put, Margery has herself out-saint Saint Bridget, and out-Virgin the Virgin Mary. Discussing Margery in this manner shows how a fifteenth-century voracious listener to religious tales could take the imaginative engagement with Biblical narratives recommended by meditation manuals several steps further and perform (fan) fictions of self and female sainthood.
Work cited:
Newman, Barbara, ‘What Did It Mean to Say “I Saw”? The Clash between Theory and Practice in Medieval Visionary Culture’, Speculum, 80 (2005), 1–43
In this paper I will discuss the unique yet interacting forms of what of Liz Herbert McAvoy calls the “motherhood matrix” (64) in these three medieval mystics’ texts, focusing on physical acts of mothering such as giving birth, swaddling a newborn, breastfeeding, chastising, and washing. I will argue that in their self-representation as and depiction of earthly mothers and children, each seeks to emulate divine motherhood and childhood in a distinct manner closely linked to their larger themes regarding self, body and God: Julian’s theme of mutual indwelling of God and mankind, Margery’s physical appropriation of Christ’s and Mary’s body, and Birgitta’s theme of the inscription of Mary’s sensations on her own body. Furthermore, Birgitta’s Liber Celestis being well-known in late-fourteenth- and early-fifteenth-century England, the dialogue between these three motherhood matrices will be addressed. Finally, I will show that depicting themselves as similar in body and actions to the Mother of God and God our Mother allows Birgitta, Julian and Margery to create texts with both theological authority and strong narrative agency.
Fourteenth-century recluse Julian of Norwich perhaps spent her entire life meditating upon a series of visions, which she experienced at the age of thirty. She first described these in A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and later in A Revelation of Love, more than four times longer than the earlier text and containing more exposition and a more accomplished theological argument. Many of these meditations on the “shewings” are highly reminiscent of Biblical exegesis: Julian skillfully brings techniques for interpreting the Word of God to her interpretation of her own words from God.
Having been a nun at the Benedictine convent at Carrow, Julian must have been closely familiar with medieval biblical exegesis, including the Quadriga, the four senses of Scripture. Exegesis was common in medieval preaching; Julian’s exegetic analyses of her revelations therefore allowed her to communicate her theology to her “evenchristen” or fellow Christian in a manner immediately recognisable to them. In A Revelation, exegesis often consists of glosses on words from Christ’s statements or paraphrases such as attributed speech. However, at several moments in the text, the visions and their exegesis –for instance, Christ’s words and Julian’s paraphrase– overlap or even become indistinguishable.
This paper will explore Julian’s exegesis of A Vision in A Revelation, its relation to its fourteenth-century theological environment, and its significance for her individual theology, focusing in particular on those complex, meaningful instances in both works where revelation and exposition – God’s words and Julian’s words– merge.
This study offers a narrative comparison of A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, the two texts created by the first known English woman writer, Julian of Norwich (c. 1343 – c. 1416). It focuses Julian as a storyteller rather than as a theologian, mystic or visionary, concentrating particular on her narrative strategies, that is, on the strategic use of formal narrative features and the changes in these between Vision and Revelation. This dissertation therefore examines Vision and Revelation in terms of three narrative features: plot, characterization and perspective or point of view (termed ‘focalization’ here). These three narrative features are brought into dialogue with Julian’s theology.
Three analytical angles help shed more light on Julian’s innovative use of these structures in her works: modern narratology, Middle English literary theory and practice, and the texts’ own literary concepts and self-referential comments. Two central narratological methods are used throughout. The first is to make a distinction between narrator Julian, who tells about the events, and character Julian, who experiences the events. The second is distinguishing several hermeneutic layers or levels of signification in a narrative. Following narratologist Mieke Bal, this discussion distinguishes between fabula (the raw material), story (the content of the text) and text (the linguistic construct).
On the basis of this exploration, this study argues that Revelation includes, expands and transforms the narrative structures of Vision, and thereby consciously draws more attention to the structures themselves. At the same time, however, within Revelation a similar narrative reshaping can be seen as between Vision and Revelation. That is, Revelation reshapes its own new narrative structures, in order to hint at God’s greater structure and envelop its own in His. This greatest structure, however, is only glimpsed. As regards these narrative structures, this study argues that linear finite narrative desire driving the plot of Vision is taken up into an endless, greater narrative desire in Revelation, creating a circular plot. At the same time, narrator Julian constructs an omnitemporal, non-sequential plot. Moreover, this analysis shows that the focalization already found in Vision is made more demonstrative in Revelation, while the narrator directs this gaze more towards the apophatic and what is always hidden. Finally, this study explores how many of the characters from Vision are made twofold in Revelation, while Revelation at the same time foreshadows the union this doubleness will achieve at the end of time. Revelation, in short, utilizes Vision’s structures and its own to implode structure.
Julian’s poetics thus is one of continuous developing and enveloping, which allows her to depict God, herself and the reader as characters in each other’s narratives and as participating in each other’s storytelling: she authorizes her own story by making it God’s and the reader’s as well. This more conscious structuring and simultaneous reshaping of the new structure in Revelation forms Julian’s most innovative narrative strategy and the most striking interaction between her art and theology: narrator Julian depicts her own storytelling as simultaneously participating in that of God and foreshadowing God’s ultimate storytelling at the end of time.
“I heard a man of holy church tell the story Saint Cecilia,” Julian of Norwich recalls in her earlier text, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, a memory which illustrates how narratives saturated and appealed to medieval religious thought and Julian’s own. Yet her later, longer text, A Revelation of Love, excludes this scene: instead of a preacher, Julian lets God tell many short narratives, including a puzzling parable about a lord and a servant. This “mysterious…wonderful parable” wholly transfigures Julian’s thinking about sin and salvation and forms the foundation of her theology of Christ’s motherhood, as previous research has observed.
I argue, however, Julian’s continuous re-telling of this exemplum also transforms her writing: it allows her to knit and narratives and theology inextricably together, uniting them to a single act of storytelling. Reading A Vision Showed and A Revelation through the lens of the parable, I not only trace the development of Julian’s narrative theology and theological narratology; I also examine her innovative use of vernacular narrative terms and concepts, such as “behovely”, “happe” and “aventure”. The exempla and A Revelation in general, I demonstrate, wrap these literary concepts in new layers of significance; these “image-knots” innovatively conceptualize the relationship between mother Christ and humanity. Telling stories thus allows for finding more inclusive and hopeful ways of thinking about God and humanity, while these stories remain appealing, powerful narratives, whose significance and events never end.
Moreover, when we contextualize these concepts with anchorites’ bodily liturgical practices, it becomes clear that God and Julian’s joint storytelling form part of Christ’s continuous maternal care for each individual, and of Julian’s concern for her evencristen reader. Ultimately, I illuminate how Julian’s storytelling allows her to lovingly enclose God, her evencristen reader, and herself into the anchorhold of her story.
First posted (in March) to the H-WRBI site and listserv: https://historyofwomenreligious.org/amy-laura-hall-laughing-at-the-devil-seeing-the-world-with-julian-of-norwich-durham-duke-university-press-2018/