They somehow survived the reign of Henry VIII, when the regime was burning books in order to make weapons out of the metal clasps that held them together. At some point, these books were passed out of the anchor-hold. Not far from her anchor-hold, where we assume Julian put pen to calfskin, people were being burned for doing the same. She wrote this book during a time when it was expressly forbidden by the archbishop of Canterbury for any woman to teach and for anyone to write a book of spiritual teaching in English. She was, as far as we know, the first woman to write a book in English. She tried to pass on what she had seen through two versions of the same book. She had a series of “showings”-as she later called them, searching for an English word that would express what she had seen-in which Christ revealed to her the depth of God’s love for humanity. In the anchor-hold, she was also writing a book about an experience from a time in her life when she had wanted desperately to die. We know people went to the anchor-hold to seek her advice and her spiritual care. Her writings and one first-person account reveal her to be a woman of strong practical wisdom and an earthy sensibility, even when she is quoting Augustine or Jerome. She gained a reputation for being a person of deep prayer and a good person to take your ordinary pains and struggles to. Read our latest issue or browse back issues. She lived there for the rest of her life. Eventually she took up residence in an anchor-hold at what we might call an inner-city church, surrounded by stockyards and a slaughterhouse and a very smelly tanner, not far from the charity hospital where the most desperate cases were cared for by nuns and beguines.
She lived through two devastating plagues-one that killed 75 percent of the population of Norwich when she was a child and a second that killed 75 percent of the children there when she was a young woman of childbearing age. The outlines of Julian’s life are all that anyone really knows about her. We cite her in search of personal spirituality and often use her for spiritual comfort, but less often do we allow her ideas and her unique approach to the spiritual questions of her day to penetrate our theological understanding.
Since her writings were rediscovered for a broader audience, she’s often been seen more as a spiritual curiosity than as a theologian whose thought deeply influences the tradition. Julian’s on the east coast of England and spent the second half of her long life writing two versions of the same book: A Revelation of Divine Love. Welcome to the 650th anniversary of the visions of Julian of Norwich, the woman who lived in an anchor-hold at St.
It’s rough to be a theologian of incredible insight and depth who is essentially forgotten or ignored for the first 550 years of your existence and then turned into a cliché for the last 100.
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