Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays

Modern Language Review, The, Oct, 2001 by Marion Glasscoe

Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays. Ed. by SANDRA J. MCENTIRE. (Garland Medieval Casebooks, 21) New York and London: Garland. 1998. xxi 341 pp. 70 [pounds sterling].

'You ought to look at that tree right over there', said Rabbit. 'I can see a bird in it from here', said Pooh. 'Or is it a fish?'. Looking at the text of Julian of Norwich, it is either 'autobiographics' or 'coinherently placental discourse', or, perish the thought, just data from which academics boost their CVs. They cannot be blamed for pressures that demand more publications than are consistent with matured thinking, and the upside of this situation is that stimulating lines of enquiry become readily accessible even if keeping pace with output seems impossible (witness gaps in the bibliographies to both these books). Both, however, do give the reader a purchase on a text too often referenced just for its sound-bite value. As Christopher Abbott observes: 'Few medieval religious writers are quoted as widely and as often and as briefly' (p. 2).

Although I cannot agree with his notion that 'Julian writes as a fifteenth-century woman' (p. 46) (whatever the truth about the dating of her long text, her cultural formation belongs largely to the fourteenth century), his analysis maps significant contours of a text that is structurally elusive. For him the key is in its personal nature. He examines 'autobiographics', the rhetorical strategies by which Julian distances herself from past experience and reconstructs it to convey her apprehension of the dynamic interconnection between individual religious experience and the mystical ecclesiological union of all Christians. Through these dynamics she understands Christ working within her, authenticating the particularity of her account of her visionary experience. Its revelatory function is to illuminate how fissures between individuals, and between individuals and God, may be transcended in union. Interestingly he sees Julian as moving from anxious, egocentric, self-dramatizing pre-visionary affective piety to internalized understanding of Christ which heals the strains of doubt and alienation. His excellent analysis of her incarnational theology centres, as does Julian's, on the example of the Lord and the Servant. He clarifies its relation to the whole of the long text. But in view of his appreciation of a subtle logic in Julian's text that demands 'a willingness on the part of the reader [...] not to imagine that Julian's remarkably coherent theological vision can be apprehended or put together in any old order' (p. 81), it is surprising that he disturbs her sequencing by examining the chapters on prayer after his analysis of the example which, in fact, succeeds and arises out of them. Abbott's account of the Showing for prayers in terms of Julian's pastoral intentions, and in relation to chapters from the end of the text, underplays her visionary dynamic. Significantly, it is in this section that he reduces the seventh revelation, where Julian understands the fundamental reality of certain joy despite contingent pain and insecurity, to a sense of 'precariousness and unresolvedness' because he is interested in Julian's account of spiritual praxis in relation to the individual's religious disposition. Although I found aspects of this book rewarding, I did not find it a lucid read, but it is always difficult to clarify a visionary understanding that resists verbal reduction and points rather to modes of being in faith, and of these Abbott gives profound intimations.

The essays edited by Sandra McEntire provide a range of approaches. Some make an outstanding contribution to historicizing and clarifying Julian's text. The reprint of Nicholas Watson's 1992 paper is interesting read in relation to Abbott. Both are concerned with Julian's reconstruction of her original visionary experience, but where Abbott foregrounds autobiographics, Watson finds Augustinian terminology expanded in a textual entanglement of visions, interpretations, and whole revelation which functions as a Trinitarian hermeneutic. Denise Baker demonstrates how Julian transforms the Augustinian model of the soul to express her own unique vision. Cynthea Masson examines her rhetorical use of the word 'poynte' and the figure of chiasmus as verbal entry to her apophatic consciousness. Alexandra Barrett delightfully historicizes Julian in the context of medieval medicine showing how the much-quoted 'hazel nutt' was actually a standard term of measurement, and how Julian's metaphors are coloured by the medical discourse associated with women's ailments. Hugh Kempster gives a scholarly account of the Westminster Cathedral Manuscript's cut-and-paste excerpts from Julian's text. It suppresses the intricacies of Julian's mystical theology in favour of material suitable for an audience involved with 'mixed life' and popular Marian devotions. Brant Pelphrey's attention to coincidence of understanding between Julian and the mysticism of Eastern Orthodoxy is illuminating.