Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays

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

Other essays make slighter contributions to our understanding. Susan Hagen argues that Julian added strangely vivid details about the passion to the long text to enable it to participate in the strategies of affective piety for lay people. It is a nice argument to consider in relation to Abbott's contention that Julian transcends such exercises. Jay Rudd tells us that Julian appropriates contemporary terms that idealize masculinity to talk of God, but for the devil, those that are more problematic. David Tinsley cites her description of the devil in the context of medieval diabology; his tendency to quote primary material without primary referencing is irritating. This practice occurs more than once in this collection. Is it now acceptable editorial policy? Sandra McEntire leans on the work of gender criticism to show how Julian negotiates her own space in traditional patriarchal theology. Any light that might be shed on Julian by Lacanian theory is obscured by the composition of Brad Peters's article. The reader has to work too hard to disentangle Julian's text from the forms in which it is referenced (page number only and with little allusion to context and structure) and weigh it against the Lacanian insights predicated on her by means of a tissue of decontextualized quotations from expositions of Lacan. But Peters's argument that Julian's text ultimately evades genre classification is interesting and is echoed or implied in various ways in both these books. So, in the end, this is neither bird nor fish, but something different.

MARION GLASSCOE UNIVERSITY OF EXETER