senza compagnia.”
III
JULIAN OF NORWICH.
All that we know directly of Julian of Norwich—the most attractive, if not the greatest of the English mystics—comes to us from her book, The Revelations of Divine Love, in which she has set down her spiritual experiences and meditations. Like her contemporaries, Walter Hilton and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, she lives only in her vision and her thought. Her external circumstances are almost unknown to us, but some of these can be recovered, or at least deduced, from the study of contemporary history and art; a source of information too often neglected by those who specialize in religious literature, yet without which that literature can never wholly be understood.
Julian, who was born about 1342, in the reign of Edward III, grew up among the surroundings and influences natural to a deeply religious East Anglian gentlewoman at the close of the Middle Ages. Though she speaks of herself as “unlettered,” which perhaps means unable to write, she certainly received considerable education, including some Latin, before her Revelations were composed. Her known connection with the Benedictine convent of Carrow, near Norwich, in whose gift was the anchorage to which she retired, suggests that she may have been educated by the nuns; and perhaps made her first religious profession at this house, which was in her time the principal “young ladies’ school” of the Norwich diocese, and a favourite retreat of those adopting the religious life. During her most impressionable years she must have seen in their freshness some of the greatest creations of Gothic art, for in Norfolk both architecture and painting had been carried to the highest pitch of excellence by the beginning of the fourteenth century. The great East Anglian school of miniature painting had already produced its masterpieces and was in its decadence. But if we look at these masterpieces—the wonderful manuscripts illuminated at Gorleston near Yarmouth, and other religious houses of the district—and remember that these are merely the surviving examples of an art which decorated the walls of the churches as richly as the pages of its service-books, we begin to realize the sort of iconography, the view of the Christian landscape, from which Julian’s mental furniture was derived. Some of the best of these manuscripts are in the British Museum; and those who wish to understand the atmosphere in which the mediæval mystics flourished would do well to study Julian’s Revelations in their light. There they will find expressed in design that mixture of gaiety and awe, that balanced understanding of the natural and the divine, which is one of her strong characteristics. She, like these artists, can afford to wreathe her images of supernatural mysteries in homely details drawn from the common life. Moreover, the more pictorial her revelations become, the more closely they approximate to the pictures in the psalters and Books of Hours of her time. From this source came her detailed visions of incidents in the Passion—the blood that she saw running down under the garland of thorns, the dried, discoloured body, the gaping wounds, and “rueful and wasted” face of Christ—and those of the Blessed Virgin as a “little maiden,” as “Mater Dolorosa,” and as the crowned Queen of Heaven. All these were common subjects with the miniature artists and wall painters of the time, and the form which they took in Julian’s revelations must be attributed to a large extent to unconscious memory of those artists’ works.
Another more inward aspect of contemporary religion has also affected her: the cult of the Holy Name of Jesus. This beautiful devotion was specially characteristic of English personal religion in the late Middle Ages, and is strongly marked in the writings of the mystics; especially Hilton and Rolle. The great popularity in England of the hymn Jesu Dulcis Memoria, and the many vernacular imitations of it current in Julian’s day, helped in the spread of this cult; with which was associated that intense and highly emotional preoccupation with the physical accidents of the Passion so constantly reflected in her visionary experience. “O good Jesu!” cried Rolle, “my heart thou hast bound in love of Thy Name and now I cannot but sing it”; and he spoke not for himself only but for all the best religious lyrists of the early fourteenth century, whose characteristic mood was that of personal, intimate, and sorrowing love of Jesus.
“Sweet Jesu, now will I sing
To thee, a song of love longing.
Teach me, Lord, thy love song
With sweet tears ever among.”
Thus, one of these Middle English poets could write: