Julian survived a serious illness in May 1373, during which over the course of a single day she received what she called sixteen shewings of the suffering Christ and the love of God. After recovering, she wrote a short account of the visions soon afterward. Then she spent the next twenty years in her anchorhold attached to the church of St Julian in Norwich, pondering what she had been shown. The result is the Long Text, an expanded version that interlaces the original visions with two decades of accumulated reflection.
The book is gentle, fearless, and theologically inventive. Julian writes in the first person but is not interested in herself. She is interested in what she was shown. The visions themselves are concrete and brief: the bleeding head of Christ, a hazelnut held in the palm of her hand representing all that is made, a parable of a Lord and a Servant that runs to nineteen pages of meditation. Each is a window onto the love that she sees as the meaning of everything.
Her famous formulations have entered the language. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Love was His meaning. We are not made in stable substance until we come to heaven. Our courteous Lord willeth that we should be as homely with Him as heart may think or soul may desire. These are not pieties. They emerge from a sustained interior work.
Julian’s text was almost lost. It survives in a handful of manuscripts, including one preserved by exiled English Benedictine nuns at Cambrai. Grace Warrack’s 1901 modernisation in idiomatic English, used here, is the edition that introduced Julian to the twentieth century.
Of the first revelation
Chapter 1
This is a Revelation of Love that Jesus Christ, our endless bliss, made in Sixteen Shewings, or Revelations particular. Of the which the First is of His precious crowning with thorns; and therewith was contained and specified the Trinity, with the Incarnation, and the Unity betwixt God and man’s soul, with many fair shewings and teachings of endless wisdom and love.
Chapter 5
And in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall last for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God.
[ A representative passage. Julian’s text unfolds across eighty-six brief chapters, returning again and again to the showings she received during her thirtieth year and to the same patient assurance that all shall be well. The complete Warrack edition is at the source linked above. ]