Julian of Norwich

Who Was Julian of Norwich?

Julian of Norwich was the first woman known to have written a book in the English language and one of the most profound Christian mystics of any era — an anchoress whose Revelations of Divine Love (also called Showings) constitutes the most theologically sophisticated and most personally immediate account of mystical experience in medieval English literature. We know almost nothing about her life beyond what she tells us in her book: she was probably born around 1342, she received her revelations during a serious illness in May 1373 when she was thirty years old, and she spent the rest of her life as an anchoress attached to the Church of St. Julian in Norwich — from which, presumably, she took her name.

The revelations she received during her illness were a series of sixteen “showings” or visions, centered on the Passion of Christ, which she then spent the following decades meditating on and writing about in two versions — a shorter text written close to the events and a longer text written perhaps twenty years later, incorporating the theological reflections of two decades of prayer and contemplation. The longer text is one of the great works of Christian theology in any language.

Her most famous sentence — “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well” — is not a piece of spiritual optimism but a theological claim grounded in her vision of the love of God and the meaning of the Passion: that the God who suffered in Christ has already accomplished what is necessary for the healing of all things, and that this accomplishment, though not yet fully visible, is already real.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Revelations of Divine Love (Short Text) — c. 1373
• Revelations of Divine Love (Long Text) — c. 1393 — the standard text