Julian of Norwich: Her Life in Three Volumes

Julian of Norwich was thirty years old and thought to be dying when the visions came. A priest stood at her bedside in Norwich holding up a crucifix for her failing eyes, her mother present to close them when the moment arrived. Instead of dying, she watched the image on the cross begin to bleed, and over the following hours she received sixteen showings of divine love that she would spend the rest of her life trying to understand. She recovered. She wrote a short account of what she had seen. Then, across twenty more years, she wrote it again, longer, deeper, until it became Revelations of Divine Love, the first book in English known to have been written by a woman.

Who Julian of Norwich Was, and Why She Is Still Read

Julian of Norwich was an anchoress, a laywoman of fourteenth-century Norwich who, after her illness and her showings, was enclosed for life in a small cell built against the wall of a parish church, and who is remembered today as one of the great voices of Christian mysticism. She is famous for two things above all: the visions themselves, sixteen showings centered on Christ's Passion and the tenderness of God, and the sentence she drew from them that has outlived every century since, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

We do not know her birth name. Julian is very likely a name she took, or was given, from St. Julian's Church in Norwich, where her cell was built; this was common practice for anchorites, who were in a real sense reborn into the church they were sealed beside. We know almost nothing of her life before the illness, whether she had been married, whether she had lost children to the plague that repeatedly struck Norwich in her lifetime, whether she had any formal education. The evidence suggests a laywoman, possibly of a merchant family, not a nun and not a noblewoman, though even this remains argued among those who study her. What we have instead of a biography is something rarer: a mind, caught on the page in the act of thinking about God for twenty years without once growing tired of the question.

The Catholic Church has never formally canonized Julian of Norwich. She is nonetheless venerated widely, kept in the calendar of the Church of England and honored by countless Catholics as well, her memory observed on the eighth of May by those who follow the Western calendar, with some communities keeping the thirteenth instead. She has no place in the Eastern calendars. None of this uncertainty has ever slowed her readers. Sainthood by paperwork was never the point of her; the point was what she saw, and what she made of it.

The Three Volumes: The Wound, the Enclosure, and the Afterlife

The trilogy All Shall Be Well: The Life and Light of Julian of Norwich tells her story in three movements, each covering ground the others do not touch.

The Wound She Asked For opens before the illness, with the young woman's own request: she had prayed for three gifts, to witness Christ's Passion as if she stood at the foot of the cross, to suffer a sickness that would strip her to the root, and to receive the wounds of contrition, compassion, and longing for God. The fever that followed was not sent against her will. It came, in a sense, because she asked, and this volume follows her from that prayer to the priest's crucifix to the hours in which the showings themselves unfolded, one after another, while her family believed they were watching her die.

Enclosed in Endless Love begins after her recovery, when Julian of Norwich made the decision that shaped everything after: to be enclosed for life as an anchoress in a cell built against St. Julian's Church. A rite resembling a funeral was read over her before the door was sealed. This volume covers the strange, disciplined shape of that hidden life, the small window through which she counseled visitors, including the mystic Margery Kempe, who sought her out for wisdom; the maidservants who attended her; and above all the twenty years in which she turned her short account of the showings into the long, patient book that would outlast her by centuries.

Love Was His Meaning carries her story past her own death, into the long silence in which her manuscripts survived only through secret copying, smuggled across the Channel and preserved by hands unknown to her, in periods when owning such a book could be dangerous. It follows her rediscovery, her slow rise from a name in an anchorite's register to one of the most read mystics in the English language, and asks why her theology of love, tested against plague, unrest, and her own near-death, still answers questions readers bring to her now.

Who This Trilogy Is For

This trilogy is for anyone who has heard the words all shall be well and wanted to know the woman who first wrote them, and the fever, the cell, and the twenty years of thought that stand behind them. It is written for readers of Christian mysticism, for those drawn to medieval women's writing, and for anyone who wants Julian of Norwich's life told whole rather than reduced to a single quotation.

Each volume of the trilogy stands complete on its own, in ebook, audiobook, and print. Readers new to her can begin with the free Invitation volume of All Shall Be Well, which opens the whole series before any purchase is asked, or explore the full library of lives through membership, where her story sits alongside the other sacred figures Brick Hut Press has given the same reverent, three-volume treatment.