Reading Julian of Norwich, Again and for the First Time

Like many of us, I've read bits and pieces of Julian of Norwich.  I first encountered her as I taught the first half of the British Literature survey class.  I wanted to include more female writers, and there weren't many to choose from.

Until yesterday, I hadn't read all of her Book of Showings.  It's one of the required texts for my certificate program in spiritual direction, so I was happy to have a chance to work my way through the whole thing.  I was surprised that the public library didn't have a copy, but it's available online, so that's how I read this one.

I made my way through the work, skimming the parts that were so very sin-heavy, relishing the parts that had more descriptive writing.  Some of it was offputting, like the descriptions that kept looping back to, of Christ bleeding on the cross.  Some of it was quite delightful, like the hazelnut imagery.  And some of it was radical, both for her day and ours.  We're still arguing about gender and Julian of Norwich explodes the gender binary and gives us a vision of God the Mother, God the Wife--and it's not the Virgin Mary, whom she also sees in her visions.

As I read, my English major brain was in high gear, and I'm happy to report that I found the writing solid.  I know that we sometimes include writers simply because we have so few of them; in her case, we have very few women writers from that time period.  But her work holds together, both as theology and as poetic prose. 

It's not a work that I'll read again and again.  In fact, it's a work that works well for excerpting.  The parts that find their way into anthologies are often the best, and they adequately represent the whole.  I didn't feel any more edified from reading the whole thing than I did from just reading the best chunks.

Not for the first time, I wonder what's been lost to history in terms of writing.  If she was thinking about some of these explosive ideas, might others have been even more radical?  What happened to them?

I'm grateful that we have her work--at least there's something that gives us a window into the medieval mind, which was more expansive than we usually give credit for.