Revelations of Julian of Norwich

by Derek Holman

Text: Julian of Norwich;

14th-century English anchorite, discount author and visionary. Texts excerpted from her Divine Revelation of Love

Julian of Norwich managed to successfully navigate the difficult trajectory of a female mystic remarkably well, however, her work is little known today except to medievalists, or only anonymously, as she is quoted famously by T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets (“And all shall be well; and all manner of thing shall be well”).

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In the six extracts I have chosen from Julian’s Revelation of Divine Love (ca. 1393), her commitment to the female image of God is striking. She also wrote many incitements to universal love as her direct transmission of God’s communication to her. She is  remarkably sure-footed in her own classification of various species of spiritual experiences, which she referred to as ‘the three sights.’ As such, she becomes a source of female esoteric teaching: a rarity in any culture.