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{Two essays by Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., long ago pioneered Julian scholarship, yet are as fresh today as they were then. The first, 'Some Literary Influences in the Revelations of Julian of Norwich', was initially published in Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages , 78 (1952), 18-28, the second, 'Courtesy and Homeliness in the Revelations of Julian of Norwich', in The Fourteenth-Century English Mystics Newsletter, 2 (1979), 12-20. Because they are difficult to obtain today, the Juliansite, out of courtesy, makes them more homely, more familiarly known, to us. Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., after many years of teaching, including university-level courses in Africa, has retired to Ireland, her native country, and to St Brigid's Kilcullen. She is currently working on the definitive edition of all the extant manuscripts of Julian of Norwich, which she first edited for her University of Leeds Theses in 1947 and 1956. She may be reached at Cross and Passion Convent, Kilcullen, County Kildare, Eire. She has no e-mail address or Internet access, but letters can and do reach her.
{Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love would be a remarkable book in any age; as a product of fourteenth-century England it is something of a miracle. To begin with, its author is a woman, a fact that at once challenged contemporary English convention, firmly set as it was against women's receiving mystical favours at all, and still more against their desiring to blaze them abroad, if such favours were actually experienced.(2) Moreover, despite the profoundness and sublimity of its subject-matter, the Revelations is written in the most lucid and expressive English prose, with just enough rhetorical device to place it unmistakeably in the tradition of the Ancren Riwle and of Rolle.(3) Most surprising of all, perhaps, the matter of this book, written in English by an anchoress of Norwich, has little in common with the works of those great spiritual writers to whose age and country she belonged: Rolle, Hilton, and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing; and no affinities whatever with The Book of her famous contemporary and fellow-visionary, Margery Kempe of Lynn.
Dame Julian's (4) book is extant in several manuscripts, of which four are in the British Library, one is owned by Westminster Cathedral and one is in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Of the British Library Manuscripts, Additional 37,790 [also known as the Amherst Manuscript, and giving the Short Text] is mid-fifteenth-century, and Sloane 2499, Sloane 3705 [and Stowe 42], giving the Long Text, are mid-seventeenth-century, the Westminster Cathedral Manuscript is circa 1500, while the Paris Manuscript [the earliest extant version of the Long Text] is sixteenth-century.
The apparantly simple manuscript relationship is complicated by the following circumstances: Additional 37,790 contains only about one-third of the matter contained in each of the others, Paris, Sloane and Stowe, and the same is true of Westminster. The neatly-written Paris Manuscript, though it gives Julian's name and has a fuller text than have the Sloane Manuscripts, is slightly modernized in diction and has several inferior readings; while Sloane 2499, though a later manuscript and most carelessly written, with a number of doubtful readings, yet appears to preserve on the whole the idiom and vocabulary of a later fourteenth or early fifteenth-century original.
Several modernized versions (6) and foreign translations of all or part of the Revelations have been printed (7), and the task of preparing a critical edition undertaken by the present writer. In addition, numerous essays and also full-length studies of Julian and her writings (8) have appeared. All this activity testifies to the strong attraction to the modern mind of this medieval recluse.
Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love is a series of meditations made over a period of nearly twenty years(9), based on a vision of Christ in His Passion granted to the author when she was about thirty years old(10). In describing the circumstances under which the vision was experienced, Julian alludes to herself as 'a symple creature unlettyrde'(11), the precise significance of which statement is difficult to ascertain (12). Her book in no way suggests an untutored mind. Though it contains, apart from Biblical sayings, but one direct quotation, the Revelations is nevertheless so full of scriptural allusion and imagery, so shot through with echoes of other spiritual writings, as to compel the belief that its author, through whatever medium, was familiar with at least the common stock of ideas in a vigorous mystical tradition, and with the classic expositions of those dieas. In the following pages an attempt, by no means exhaustive, is made to distinguish some of the literary influences apparently discerible in the Revelations.
By far the most important single influence is the Bible, both Old and New Testaments (13). This scriptural element is present in three forms: as more or less direct quotation; as the source of concepts adopted and expanded by Julian; and as the unconscious borrowings of a mind steeped in the language and thought of the Bible. Examples of the first type are few in number, quotations are usually short and sometimes inaccurate, as if Julian were relying on her memory:
'Loo me here, God's handmayden!'
'And in the tyme of Joy I myght haue seyde with Seynt Paule, ''Nothing schalle departe me fro the charyte of Crist''. And in the tyme of payne I myght haue seyd with Seynt Peter, ''Lorde, saue me, I peryssch''.
' . . . thys is an awter of the Unknowyn God'. (14)
The second category of borrowings is more considerable than the first. Julian devotes nearly two whole chapters to the theme 'verely God is oure mother', a concept derived ultimately from such passages as Isaias 49.1, 49.15, 66.13, Matthew 23.37, etc., though the anchoress's immediate inspiration may have been Meister Eckhart(15). Again, the imagery of 'God enjoyeth that he is our very spouse, and our soule his lovyd wyfe' (16) comes from The Canticle of Canticles; and the metaphor of the soul as the City of God, which is mentioned in Chapter 51 and developed in Chapter 67, comes from Psalms 45, 47, 86, 121 and 126.
Borrowings of this type are also made from the New Testament. For example, the Pauline writings provide two figures highly important to Julian's thought: the duality of man's nature, expressed in Romans 7.15-25, 2 Corinthians 4.16 etc (17); and the image of the Church as the Body of Christ, found in 1 Corinthians 12.27, Romans 12.5, Ephesians 1.23, etc.
What is described above as Julian's 'unconscious' use of scripture, namely the clothing in Biblical language of a theme not in itself Biblical, is by far the most pervasive of the three types of influence mentioned. Almost every page of the Revelations is steeped in Biblical reminiscence. The allegory of the Lord and the Servant, for example, is a marvellous blend of many scriptural ingredients: the Fall of Adam, Isaias' Song of the Servant, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the Labourers in the Vineyard, the Treasure hidden in the Field, the Gospel accounts of the Passion - to name but the most obvious. Nor is this an isolated instance, for the same sort of thing is illustrated in Chapters 10, 14, 51, etc., of her work (19).
The anchoress' spontaneous use of scriptural phraseology illustrates another aspect of the same unconscious borrowing, and seems to point to close familiarity with the text of the Bible, either in the Vulgate or in the vernacular:
`. . . the blessydfulle Trinitie made mankynd to his ymage and to his lykenes . . . '
'Whan God shulde make mannes body he toke the slyme of the erth, whych is a mater medelyd and gaderyd of all bodely thynges . . . . '
'touch we him [Christ] and we shalle be made cleene.' (20)
It is interesting to observe that the shorter text of the Revelations, while showing scriptural influence in the first and the third of the ways here indicated, does not to the same degree make use of Biblical concepts (21).
As far as the Patristic writings are concerned there is some evidence in Julian's book of an acquaintance with the works of St Augustine of Hippo. Several Julian passages call to mind at once the writings of Augustine. (22). This is one striking instance:
'And than shall we alle come in to oure Lord, oure selfe clerely knowyng and God fulsomly hauying; and we endlesly be alle hyd in god - verely seyeng and fulsomly felyng - and hym gostely heryng and hym delectably smellyng and hym hall swetly swelwyng. And ther shall we se God face to face, homely and fulsomely . . . .' (23) Compare St Augustine: `Quid autem, amo, cum te amo? Non speciem corporis, nec decus temporis, nec candorem lucis . . . . Non haec amo cum amo Deum meum; et tamen amo quamdam cibum, et quemdam amplexum, cum amo Deum meum, lucen, covem, odorem, cibum, amplexum interioris hominis mei . . . . ' (24)
The only direct non-scriptural quotation in the Revelations is from Gregory's Life of St Benedict. 'For a soul that seth the Maker of al thyng, all that is made semyth fulle lytylle'( 25) is Julian's beautiful rendering of 'quia animae videnti Creatorem angusta est omnis creature'.(26)
Possibly Julian was familiar with the Benjamin Minor of Richard of St Victor, current in her day in an English translation usually attributed to the author of The Cloud of Unknowing (27). She mentions Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite by name as 'Seynt Dyonisi of France' (28). She is quite likely to have known his Mystical Theology, also translated by the author of The Cloud (29), and perhaps his Divine Names through some similar channel. Julian's peculiarly Dionysian use of the word 'touch' (epaphe) signifying God's direct action on the soul, her fondness for numbers (especially triads), and the numerous echoes in her book of Dionysius' thought suggest a knowledge of the Areopagite's writings, though it is worthy of note that her treatment of the problem of evil (30) owes little to that of Dionysius.
A single instance must suffice to illustrate Julian's affinities in thought with Pseudo-Dionysius. The eleventh chapter of her book begins: `And after this I saw God in a poynte . . . by which syght I saw that he is in al thyng . . . . (31) It is hard to believe that this statement owes nothing to the following utterance of the Areopagite, in which, after remarking that Existence belongs to the `Absolute and Transcendent Goodness' in an incomprehensible and concentrated oneness, he goes on: `All the radii of a circle are concentrated into a single unity in the centre, and this point contains all the straight lines brought together within itself and unified to one another, and to the one starting-point from which they began . . . . ' (32)
Julian's debt to earlier and contemporary English writings is chiefly one of form. But there is a similarity in spirit to the Ancren Riwle, as well as some obvious, though probably unconscious, borrowings (33). This indebtedness to the Ancren Riwle is most likely due to Julian's close acquaintance with the earlier book, which is just what one would expect, since the Riwle was written for anchoresses. With The Cloud of Unknowing the Revelations have little in common, despite the fact that both works deal primarily with the higher forms of mystical experience. The homely spirit of The Scale of Perfection is more akin to that of the Revelations; but the scope of Hilton's book is wider, and the speculative element, so surprisingly present in the Revelations, is absent from The Scale. The two writers express at least on truth in identical terms (34) and several others in similar form (35).
While Julian may have known the writings of Richard Rolle, there is lttle evidence in her book to support such a conjecture. The two mystics differ fundamentally in temperament; and one may reasonably doubt whether the rather emotional style of the Hampole hermit would be congenial to the rationalizing mind of the anchoress; all the more so as most of Rolle's treatises (36) were intended for souls less advanced in the way of virtue than was Julian. On the other hand, Rolle's devotion to the humanity of Christ, his predilection for the Passion as a subject of meditation, and the vivid pictorial quality of his English writings in particular, find their counterpart in the Revelations of Julian (37).
The Book of Margery Kempe is not likely to have been in circulation during Julian's lifetime (38), but Margery paid a visit to Julian and they had a long talk together on the subject of Margery's trials (39). The Book is in strong contrast to the Revelations in tone and subject-matter, and would scarcely have appealed to the reticent nature of the anchoress.
This brief survey must suffice to show the truth of the contention that the subject-matter of the Revelations not only shows little trace of English formative influence, but differs strikingly in important respects from contemporary religious treatises. For it is less theoretical, less ascetic and severe in tone than The Cloud; more limited in scope, more personal and speculative than The Scale; more intellectual in approach than Rolle's writings; and more spiritual than The Book of Margery Kempe.
Since Julian was a contemporary of several famous continental women mystics and ecstatics, it is interesting to inquire how much she has in common with them and to what extent she was influenced by them. It has been suggested that the Revelations may reflect an acquaintance with the letters of St Catherine of Siena (40), and it is not unlikely also that she had at least heard of the Revelationes of St Birgitta of Sweden (41) as well as those of earlier women visionaries of Helfta, like St Gertrude of Helfta and St Mechthild of Hackeborn. Even if this is true, however, their chief importance for Julian was that their writings helped to establish a new spiritual fashion, as it were, and possibly weakened contemporary English prejudice against female mystics. With the actual writings of these women (those of St Catherine perhaps excepted) Julian's work appears to have but few points of contact. While Catherine, Birgitta and Dorothea of Prussia in their writings are 'prophetical or practical;, intent on finding and interpreting the intensely active and world-reforming will of God' (42), there is a detachment and remoteness, an absence of topical allusion and denunciation in the Englishwoman's book, that contrast strangely with the writings of her continental sisters (43).
Perhaps it is even stranger that Julian seems to have more in common with the Flemish and German mystics of her century than with her own native brethren (44). The writings of Ruusbroec, Tauler and Suso furnish many parallels with her work in imagery and ideas (45), while Johannes Eckhart would appear to have influenced her strongly (45). Julian's tendency to speculate, her concrete imagery and a certain forthrightness of expression would certainly seem to give her kinship with this great German thinker. And while this resemblance may be accidental, it is a tempting surmise that two of the English writer's most daring pronouncements - on the Motherhood of God (47) and the 'godly wylle' (the only passage in her book which approaches unorthodoxy) - owe either their form or their matter, or both, to the Dominican (48). Compare, for instance, the content of the following passages, the first from Julian, the second from Eckhart: '. . . in ech a soule that shall be safe is a godly wylle that never assentyd to synne ne nevyr shall: whych wyl is so good that it may nevyr wylle evyll but evyr more contynuly it wyllyth good and workyth good in the sight of God . . . .' (49) '. . . the spark of the soul is [God's] light satriking down from above, the reflection of his divine nature and ever opposed to anything ungodly . . . a permanent tendency to good; aye, even in Hell it is inclined to good . . . . ' (50)
Nevertheless, despite these apparent reflections of foreign influence in her book, Julian contrives triumphantly to preserve her own personality. `The first English Woman of Letters', as Miss Underhill styles her (51), she is as original as a Christian writer can well be' (53); and yet, at the same time, she is securely entrenched in the religious traditions of her age. Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love is unique in this respect, that it combines the fervour of the continental women mystics with the speculativeness of the continental male mystics, and adds to both the sanity, balance and sobriety characteristic of English mysticism (53).
Notes
This essay was first published in Leeds University Studies in Language
and Literature 7-8 (1952), 18-28, and is republished with the kind
permission of Leeds University and of Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P.
1.Dr Hope Emily Allen gave Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., important information concerning Julian's dates from a will of 1394, Roger Reed, priest, vicar of St Michael's, Coslany; as did Dom Aelred Watkins, O.S.B., from wills of 1404, Thomas Edmund, chantry chaplain of Ainsworth, Norwich, and 1415, John Plumpton, merchant of Conisford.. A fourth will is that of 1416, Isabella Ufford, Countess of Suffolk.
2. Both Hilton and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, like the writer of the Ancren Riwle, were distrustful of such phenomenoa. See J. Morton, Ancrene Riwle Camden Society 57 (1853), 224; Phyllis Hodgson, The Cloud of Unknowing, EETS 218 (1944), Chapter IX; Rev. J.B. Dalgairnes, The Scale of Perfection (London, 1901), I.x-xi; Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen,The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS 212 (1940), I.lxvii, p. 259, note on 6/9, p. 315, note on 126/14; Julian's own fears expressed in the Short Text of the Revelations, Chapter 6; Rev Dundas Harford, Comfortable Words for Christ's Lovers (London, 1925), p. 42.
3.R.W. Chambers, The Continuity of English Prose London, 1932), xcvii-cii; Sister Agnes Margaret Humbert, Verbal Repetition in the Ancren Riwle, pp. 101-4.
4. Serenus Cressy, O.S.B., editor of the first edition (1670) in print, used title 'Mother Juliana' [it earlier appeared in the Cambrai/Paris Catalogue, now in Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarin. J.B.H.]; Margery Kempe gives 'Dame Ielyan', p. 42; Additional 37,790, 'Iulyan'; Paris, Anglais 40, 'Iulyane' (genitive). The Sloane Manuscripts do not give Julian's name.
5. It is not known which of the two versions, the Long or the Short, was first composed, but internal evidence favours the supposition that the Short Text was written soon after the visions of 1373 were experienced, and the Long Text in the course of the 'twenty yere' mentioned in Revelations, Chapter 51, fol. 96v. For a suggested explanation see John Lawlor, 'A Note on the Revelations of Julian of Norwich', Review of English Studies, NS 11 (1951), 255-8.
6. Chapter references are to Grace Warrack's edition of Sloane 2499; capitalization and punctuation are modern.
7. A useful account of the versions is given in the Orchard Series edition of the Revelations, ed. Dom Roger Hudleston, O.S.B. (London, 1927), vii-ix. Tersteegen's German extract, which is not continuous, is based on the 1670 edition by Serenus Cressy. Dom Meunier's valuable French edition of Sloane 2499 - Révèlations de l'Amour Divine (Tours, 1925) - errs in stating Sloane chapter headings are in Paris version.
8. R.H. Thouless, The Lady Julian: A Psychological Study (SPCK, 1924); R.H. Flood, St Julian's Church, and Dame Julian (Norwich, 1937).
9. Revelations, beginning, Chapter 51.
10. Chapter 3.
11. Paris Manuscript, Chapter 2, fol. 3.
12. It is just possible that this phrase means that Julian could not read; Eileen Power, Medieval English Nunneries (Cambridge, 1922), p. 260; Dialogues of St Catherine of Siena, trans. A. Thorold (London, 1905), viii, Acta Sanctorum Oct.13, col 538, on two famous but illiterate women mystics who were Julian's contemporaries; however, Julian's later remark, 'I have techyng within me as it were the begynnyng of an ABC . . . ') fols. 103v-104, suggest she had mastered the art of reading; Hope Emily Allen read phrase as meaning unlettered in Latin.
13.T.W. Coleman, English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century (London, 1938), p. 149, remarks that Julian in the Revelations seldom quotes the Bible, and contrasts, p. 163, the talk of Julian with Margery Kempe, The Book, pp. 42-3, on this point. This distinction does not commend itself to the present writer, who finds the scriptural content of Julian's conversation identical in kind with that of the Revelations.
14.Revelations, Chapter IV, fols 31-31v, Chapter VIII, fols 37-37v. Compare with Like 1.38, Romans 8.35, Matthew 8.25,14.30, Acts 12.33. References are to the Douay Bible.
15. Revelations, Chapters 59 and 60. Compare with The Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. C. de B. Evans (London, 1924), I.427. See also Sister M. Albert, O.P., 'God is Our Mother', Life of the Spirit, Blackfriars, May 1945; André Cabusset, O.S.B., 'Une Dévotion Médiévale Peu Connu: La Dévotion a ''Jésus notre Mère''', Revue d'Ascétique et de Mystique, 99-100 (Avril-Décembre 1949).
16.Revelations, Chapter 52, fol. 106v. For a short history of the image see Dom Cuthbert Butler, Western Mysticism (London, 1922), p. 160. On the whole, the absence of erotic imagery in the Revelations is one of its salient characteristics.
17. Revelations, Chapters 19, 52.
18. Revelations, Chapters 51,53,54, etc.
19. Matthew 26.67, 14.25-33, Luke 14.16-17, Matthew 6, passim.
20. Revelations, Chapter 10, fol. 21v; Chapter 53, fol. 112v, Chapter 77, fol. 162. Compare with Genesis 1.26, 11.7, Matthew 8.3.
21. If the shorter text be the earlier of the two versions, the omission may then be accounted for by the fact that the teachings of which they form the kernel had not yet been given to Julian. [However, see the arguments of Nicholas Watson concerning the censorship by 1413, when the Short Text proclaims itself that it was being written down, due to Arundel's prohibitions against the Bible being used in the vernacular without license. J.B.H.]
22. As there was, in Julian's day, an Augustinian friary in the very street where stood (until destroyed by enemy action in 1942) St Julian's Chruch, the anchoress could easily have become acquainted with the spirit and ideal of its friars.
23. Revelations, Chapter 43, fol. 80v.
24 Confessions, X.6 (Migne, Patrologia Latina vol. 32, col. 782). Other Augustinian passages are found in Revelations, Chapters 9, 51, etc. Compare, Epist, ad Parthos, Tract. X (PL 35.2060); In Ps. CXXIX (PL 37.1696-1703), etc.
25. Revelations, Chapter 8, fols. 16v-17.
26. Gregory's Life of St Benedict, Chapter 35 (PL 66.200). The use of this quotation is noted in Father Hudleston's edition of the Revelations, p. xii; by Dom Meunier, op. cit. 34; and by Dom David Knowles, The English Mystics (London, 1927), 132.
27. Phyllis Hodgson, op cit., pp. lviii, lxxviii.
28. Revelations, Chapter 18, fol. 37. Julian, like other medieval writers, erroneously identifies St Denis of France (Martyred c. 250 A.D.) with Denis the Areopagite, who was converted by St Paul's preaching (Acts of the Apostles 17.34). See Butler, op. cit., 180-1; also Von Hügel, The Mystical Element in Religion (London, 1908), II.92 f.
29. Op. cit., pp. lviii, lxxviii.
30. Revelations, Chapter 32. Compare, Dionysius, Divine Names, Chapter 4 (Migne, Patrologia Graeca, 3.731.
31. Revelations, fol. 22v.
32. Divine Names, Chapter 5 (PG 3.821. The translation is that of C.E. Rolt, The Divine Names and Mystical Theology of Pseudo-Dionysius (London, 1920), p. 137.
33. Revelations, ed. Warrack, p. 152, n. 2.
34. Noted by Coleman, op. cit., p. 148.
35. See Revelations, ed. Warrack, p. 140, n. 2. For a theory about the possible mutual influence of Julian and Hilton, see Scala Perfectionis, a French translation by Dom M. Noetinger and Dom E. Bouvet, O.S.B. (Tours, 1923), II.191-3.
36. For example, Emending of Life and Fire of Divine Love.
37. Many of the lyrics on the Passion composed in Julian's day possess the vividness of detail and intimate personal tone found in both the Revelations and the writings of Rolle. See C. Brown, Religious Lyrics of the Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1924), nos. 64, 67, 76, 79, etc.
38. See The Book, op. cit, p. li.
39. Ibid. pp. 42-3.
40. See Catholic Encyclopaedia VIII, St Catherine of Siena. For an account of the English Augustinian Hermit, William Flete, and his relations with St Catherine, see A. Gwynne, The English Austin Friars in the Time of Wycliff (Oxford, 1940), pp. 161 f. Sister M Albert, O.P., in a study as yet unpublished, finds a strong similarity in outlook between St Catherine and Julian. The present writer feels that, despite a fundamental spiritual kinship, there is a dynamic quality in the Italian mystic's method which differentiates her completely from the English recluse.
41. St Birgitta died in 1373 and was canonized in October, 1391. See The Book, p. 95.
42. W.P. Cummin, The Revelation of St Birgitta, EETS 178 (1929), p. 123, note on 1/1.
43. This may be due to the fact that Julian, as a recluse, was withdrawn from external affairs, while these other women mystics lived all or most of their lives 'in the world'.
44. For commerce in Flanders at this period see F. Blomefield, History of Norfolk (1739-1775), 5 vols, II.61-3.
45. Dom Meunier, op. cit., quotes several instances.
46. It is possible that Julian had a Dominican confessor or director; the dominicans were a great power in Norwich in Julian's day.
47. See above, p. 21, n. 15.
48. See Knowles, op. cit., p. 144.
49. Revelations, Chapter 53, fol. 111.
50. The Works of Meister Eckhart, op. cit., II.113.
51. Ibid., I.88.
52. Cambridge Medieval History VII.807.
53. Knowles, op.cit., p. 131.
54. Acknowledgements are due to Mr. R.M. Wilson, University of Sheffield, under whose supervision the writer of this article prepared an edition of the British Library Sloane Manuscript 2499 for the M.A. degree of Leeds University, 1947.
Alan Oldfield, 'Julian's Showings'. From the painting in St Gabriel's Chapel, Community of All Hallows, Ditchingham, Near Bungay, Suffolk. Photograph, Sister Pamela, C.A.H. © Reproduced by kind permission of the Community of All Hallows and the Friends of Julian, Norwich.
The remark serves as an apt introduction to the purpose of this essay, in which I intend to look closely at two sets of words used by Julian of Norwich. My aim is to recapture what Mr Page describes as 'the precise sense of the meaning carried by these words for the writer and her contemporaries,' and in the light of this knowledge to identify our responses to the truth which they enshrine.
Even a casual reading of Julian's book makes one aware of the frequency with which the words courtesy and homeliness, with their derivatives, are used in the Revelations: their constant recurrence indicates that these two sets of words, the warp and the woof of her writing, express key-concepts in the anchoress' experience of God.
The provenance of the two qualities is very different. Courtesy is a word whose ramifications and overtones embrace the social, moral and literary history of Western Europe from the twelfth to the fifteenth century: the world of troubadors, minnesingers and writers of romance, the world of the Roman de la Rose and the Courts of Love. It was a leisurely, aristocratic world, where courtoisie governed the whole pattern of social intercourse and relationships between men and women and between men and men.
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries courtoisie had been closely connected with the convention of Courtly Love. According to Richard Barber:
Any love worth his salt was at once cortes, a word that meant both 'courteous' and 'courtly' and implied a knowledge of the conventions. Certain things were not cortes: Falsehood in love, miserliness, infidelity and lack of restraint or secrecy.(2)
By the end of the thirteenth century the Minnesang had disappeared into contests of technique on the one hand and social satire on the other. The amours which had inspired the lyric poetry of chivalry and the social convention of love attached to it, were becoming discredited. But the idea of 'love-service' survived well into the fifteenth century, long after the social and poetic impulses which gave it life, had died out. The decline was so slow, almost imperceptible, so that accepted ideas of knightly society as to love in 1250 would have been perfectly understood in 1450.
Towards the middle of the fourteenth century in England, chivalric fashions were set almost entirely by the French, and the virtues of prowess, loyalty, largesse, franchise and courtesy were held above all to mark the good knight.(3)
Courtoisie, the attainment of all worldly virtues, becomes the keynote of chivalry. Much of courtoisie was concerned with questions of manners: hospitality and a warm welcome; debonairte or gaiety and openheartedness seemed to be as essential as loyalty, and generosity is as vital as compassion.(4)
Its characteristic and permanent traits are listed as follows by a modern scholar:
Observation du salut, du baiser et du congeé, pratique de l'acceuil
et de l'hospitalité, soyauté et fidelité, bonté
et pitié, douceur, liberalité et largesse, joie, souci de
la renommée, mesure, amour et, dans l'amour même, application
des vertues courteoises s'ils n'en sont pas l'achèvement.(5)
By the fourteenth century courtoisie had become synonomous with curialitas, the nobilitas morum, 'the cardinal virtue, so to speak, of the chevalier, the embodiment of the social and ethic ideal of chivalry.'(6)
This aristocratic genealogy of courtesy, with all its associations and resonances, is clearly brought out in the fourteenth-century English alliterative romance (whose author was a contemporary of Julian) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In this poem, according to one critic, 'the central interest is not the Green Knight but Gawain and the cortays Arthurian civilization he represents'.(7) Gawain is shown to be not only a brave man but one who is invariably well bred, polite and urbane in conversation and behavior, deferential to all women, tactful, gentle, modest and self-effacing. His cortayse is implicitly contrasted with vilaynye, the behaviour appropriate to a vilain or peasant. Indeed, the courtly code is so important to Gawain that he goes against his conscience rather than rebuff a lady - noblesse oblige.
Julian's use of the courtesy concept subsumes and sublimates all these earlier connotations: lordship, prowess, fidelity, gentleness, generosity, and service. The Christ of her experience is Lord, All-Mighty, All Wisdom, All Love:
See, I am God; see, I am in all things: see, I do all things: see, I never
lift my hands off my works, nor ever shall, without end: see, I lead all
thing to the end that I ordain it to, from without-beginning, by the same
might, wisdom and love that I made it with. How should anything be amiss?(8)
He is the glad giver who, with supreme tact,
ever taketh but little heed of the thing that he giveth . . . And if the
receiver take the gift gladly and thankfully, then the courteous
giver setteth at nought all his cost and all his woe, in return for the
joy and delight that he hath; for he hath pleased and solaced him that
he loveth.
He is the knight par excellence, who, deprecating his great deeds,
of his great courtesy . . . doeth away all our blame, and beholdeth us, with ruth and pity, as children innocent and loveable.
He manifests the welcoming joyfulness characteristic of the perfection of chivalry:
Then our courteous Lord sheweth himself to the soul cheerfully with glad countenance, with a friendly welcome.
There is a divine munificence in his working:
Grace worketh with mercy, by lifting up, rewarding, endlessly surpassing
all that our loving and our travail deserveth, spreading abroad and making
plain the high abundance and largesse of God's royal Lordship in his marvellous
courtesy.
Knightly pity is transformed into divine compassion:
I saw that only pain blameth and punisheth; but our courteous Lord comforteth and soccoureth.
And again:
Our Lord of his mercy sheweth us our sin and our feebleness, by the sweet gracious light of himself. For our sin is so foul and so horrible that he, of his courtesy, willeth not to show it us except by the light of his mercy.
He is the personification of fidelity and trustiness:
Also, our courteous Lord, in that same time, shewed full sweetly
and full mightily the endlessness and immutability of his love.
But this courteous Lord of might and majesty is also the Lord who condescends to treat with his own creatures as with an equal:
The place that Jesus taketh in our soul-he shall never remove therefrom
without end. For in us is his homeliest home and his endless dwelling.
Homely and homeliness have no such distinguished and scintillating history as courteous and courtesy: their associations, literary and social, are at the opposite end of the knightly spectrum - the equivalent, in fact, of vylanye in knightly estimation.
The words derive, of course, from home, of Old English origin, and though in modern English homely and homeliness convey a mild suggestion of patronage and in their meaning of 'plainness ', and 'simplicity', in Julian's day the usual meaning of homely was 'familiar'; or 'intimate'. The word homeliness occurs in Rolle and is used of Christ by Wyclif with the sense 'familiar'. Significantly, these words do not occur in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Indeed, there appears to be no literary precedent for Julian's coupling of homeliness with that of courtesy; the words belonged to different worlds and had less in common that have the connotations of 'nature' and 'nurture' for present-day readers.
The homeliness of God is a paradox which filled Julian with astonishment and delight:
For truly, it is the greatest joy that could be, as I see it, that he who
is highest and mightiest, noblest and worthiest, is the lowest and meekest,
homeliest and most courteous.
What this homeliness of our Lord involves is carefully explained by Julian:
He cometh down to us, to the lowest part of our need. For he despiseth
nothing of what he hath made. And he disdaineth not to serve us in the
simplest offices that belong, in kind, to our body, for love of the soul
that is made to his own likeness. For as the body is clad in clothes, and
the flesh in skin, and the bones in flesh, and the heart in the breast,
so are we, soul and body, and more homely: for they all vanish, wasting
away. But the good of God is ever whole and most neart to us, without any
compassion
Homeliness, therefore, implies nearness - more, an active, loving presence to us and in us on God's part; not the aloofness, formality and reverence of the courteous knight, but the closeness, warmth and tenderness of the loving mother whose service is always 'nearest, readiest and surest'.
Julian actually uses the words 'God is our Mother' and expounds the implications of this (ultimately scriptural) image with a wealth of detail:
This office no one might nor could ever do to the full, except he alone.
We know that all our mothers bear us to pain and dying; a strange thing,
that! But our true Mother, Jesus, he alone beareth us to joy and to endless
living . . . Thus he sustaineth us within him in love and in travail, unto
the full time in which he willed to suffer the sharpest throes and most
grievous pains that ever were, or ever shall be; and he died at the last.
Yet all this might not fully satisfy his marvellous love.
The fusion is complete. Courtesy and homeliness become one in the single daring image, 'our true Mother, Jesus'. Only in Christ, Redeemer as well as Creator, can the qualities both of the perfect knight and of the perfect mother be combined.
It remains now to see what the response of good souls should be to the
courteous and homely action of God in Julian's words:
It is his office to save us. It is his worship to do it and it is his will
that we know it. For he willeth that we love him sweetly and trust in him
meekly and mightily. And this showed he in these gracious words 'I keep
thee full surely'.
Early on in her book Julian had given us a reason for this trust in God, his courtesy and homeliness:
He will be trusted, because he is full courteous and homely.
Blessed may he be.
Later, she makes clear that our attitudes to God should also reflect the courtesy and homeliness with which he treats us:
And thus we shall, in love, be homely and near to God, and in dread, gentle and courteous to God both qualities united equally.
She goes on to say:
For our courteous Lord willeth that we be as homely with him as heart can think or soul desire.
She adds, however, a timely warning:
But we must beware lest we take this homeliness so recklessly as
to forsake courtesy. Our Lord Himself is sovereign Homeliness.
But as homely as he is, even so courteous he is; for he is
very Courtesy.
Such loving, reverent dependence is very pleasing to God:
The highest wisdom is for a creature to do according to the will and counsel
of his highest sovereign Friend. This blessed Friend is Jesus; it is his
will and counsel that we hold us with him, and fasten us, homely,
to him evermore, in what state so ever we be.
In other words, to quote a modern spiritual writer, we must be willing to live the following truth:
The daily life of the Christian is summed up in the word receive. Every
challenging thing that God demands of me - long-suffering, meekness, humility,
goodness, holiness, joy - is not something I am or something I do, or some
virtue I acquire or attain to. It is Christ in me. Each is the manifestation
of Him. (9)
When we are weak, then we are strong, provided we are firmly fastened to God: this is the supreme message of the Revelations. Characteristically, Julian expresses it in concrete terms which recall the 'unless you become as little children . . . ' of the Gospel:
And I understood that there is no higher stature in this life than childhood-in
the feebleness and failing of might and understanding-until the time that
our gracious Mother hath brought us up to our Father's bliss. And there
shall truly be made known to us his meaning, in the sweet words where he
saith: 'All shall be well; and thou shalt see it thyself that all manner
of thing shall be well'.
We have come a long way from the convention of the Courts of Love and the sophistication of the Roman de la Rose; yet Julian was a product of the age and of the culture which revelled in both. She understood her world, however, saw what was good in it but realized, too, that it had gone astray in divorcing human from divine love.
Julian's special blessedness lies in this, that she learnt from experience that Divine Love embraces, enriches and ennobles human love:
God is all that is good, as I see it. And God hath made all that is made;
and God loveth all that he hath made. Thus he that loveth the whole - all
his even-christians - for God, loveth all that is. (For in mankind that
shall be saved is comprehended all, that is to say, all that is made, and
the Maker of all. For in man is God, and in God is all.) He that loveth
thus, loveth all.
Perhaps this message too, is of particular significance for our own day: 'He that has ears to hear, let him hear'.
Notes
This essay was first published in the Fourteenth-Century English Mystics Newsletter, 2 (1979), 12-20, and is republished with the kind permission of that Journal's editors and of the author.
1. Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen (Oxford, 1972), p. 56.
2. Richard Barber, The Knight and Chivalry (London, 1970), p. 78.
3. Gervase Matthew, 'Ideals of Knighthood in Late Fourteenth-Century England', Studies in Medieval History, ed. R.W. Hunt (Oxford, 1948), p. 360.
4. Barber, p. 148.
5. Quoted, A.J. Denomy, 'Courtly Love and Courtliness', Speculum 28(1953), 48.
6. Denomy, p. 48.
7. A.C. Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry (London, 1964), 38. See also J. Lafitte-Houssat, Troubadours et Cours d'Amours (Paris, 1966), Ch. IX, 'L'Amour courtois: ses caractères'.
8. Quotations from the Orchard edition of the Revelations, ed. James Walsh, S.J. (London, 1961); Penguin edition, ed. C. Wolters (London, 1966), offers a completely modernized text.
9. Watchman Nee, Changed Into His Likeness (London, 1971), p. 82.
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