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Julian of Norwich, Her Showings
and Its Contexts, Website © Julia Bolton Holloway, 1997
Simone Martini, Museo Horne, Florence © Editrice Giusti de Becocci,
SRL, Italy
PREFACE: CONTEMPLATING ON JULIAN
{Simone
Martini painted this diptych, like two leaves of a book, in Julian's century.
Its two icons, to be used for prayer, are Julian's own, her vision of Mary,
the Mother of her just-born Creator, 'contemplating all these things in
her heart' (Luke 2.19), and of the Pietà, Birth and Death, joining
together, becoming one, with the diptych's closure.
{Similarly we use throughout this Website Julian's own two opposing colours, the blue of eternity, of Mary's robe (though here it is the Byzantine blue-black and red) and of the robe Julian gives the Lord in her Parable. These are the colours as well of Aaron's High Priestly robe, his cloak for prayer, which was blue like the sky, embroidered with scarlet pomegranates, perhaps by his wife, Elizabeth, perhaps by his sister, Miriam. For Christ is our one High Priest, so garbed in his mother's blue cloak, and her white veil, and so wounded with our humanity, with our red blood and mocked with our purple pomp. Medieval manuscripts, including those of Julian's Showings, make such use of the two colours of Aaron's robe, for their capitals, alternating the colours, as a book of memory for their readers. Put on these texts as you would put on your robes for prayer, your 'Bells and Pomegranates', 'oneing' yourself to eternity.
THE JULIAN LIBRARY PROJECT
{This Preface attempts to explain these booklets and the Julian Library Project:
The Julian Library Project includes:
The hard copy version of this Preface, which can be ordered from juliana@tin.it, gives sample but reduced pages of the forthcoming Edition of Julian of Norwich's Showings, from the Westminster, Paris, Amherst, and Sloane Manuscripts, collated with all other extant manuscripts, as parallel text and translation, with variants and explanatory notes. All this material is to be ancillary to Julian's own 'oneing' with the Gospel and God.
THE JULIAN LIBRARY PORTFOLIO
{When Dante wrote the Vita Nuova here in Florence he gathered up together, like a bunch of wild flowers, scarlet poppies and blue cornflowers, from the hills of Fiesole, a florilegium of his past poems and then explained them. This gathering of material is both for academic scholars researching Julian and for those who turn to Julian for guidance to God. The edition and a forthcoming book on Julian of Norwich's Showings: Texts and Contexts are based on a study of all the known manuscripts containing Julian's text, including the Westminster Cathedral Manuscript, which had not previously been published in its Middle English form. The edition and translation makes much use of the two Leeds University Theses written by Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., in 1947, 1956. These companion booklets survey women and theology through time.
*
The various booklets in the Julian Library Portfolio serve several purposes. Augustine was converted through reading a book left lying in a garden in Milan. A Yorkshire contemplative composed a most beautiful illuminated manuscript about past contemplatives, like St Jerome, Richard Rolle, and St Hilda, and asked that his book be left lying about so that it might convert other readers, too, to the contemplative life. Upon his pages he paints the images of these contemplatives, stressing for Richard Rolle, his garb embroidered with Jesus' name upon its breast. These booklets, likewise, are modeled on Benedictine English exiled nuns' contemplative writings, and are sewn together in fascicles like theirs, which could have engravings pasted in of a Benedictine monk at prayer before a Crucifix, and which were to be found in a nun's cell at her death and be treasured and recopied by the other Sisters in their devotions. Quaker women and men similarly had a tradition of writing Journals (like Augustine's Confessions, Dante's Vita Nuova, Julian's Showings), centred on their contemplations, to be read when they died.
During the entering of the hard copy booklets into HTML code and the creating of their links it became clear that women's presence is and always has been woven into the tapestry of the Gospels and the Bible, though unnoticed in universities' lecture halls where theology has been taught for centuries in their absence. Without his mother, his sister Miriam, and Pharoah's daughter, Moses would have been killed in infancy, rather than lived to save his people from bondage. Had David loved only Jonathan there could have been no Jesus. Without Mary, and Mary Magdalene, and the other Maries at the Tomb, telling their 'idle tales', the 'Good News' to the Apostles, what Gospel of Christ, the Anointed One, could have been proclaimed? The Book, the Bible, and the World, the Creation, coexist, as early Christian women, like Helena, Egeria, Paula and Eustochium knew when making their arduous, joyous pilgrimages. Later women joined them, too, like Birgitta and Margery, Myra Luxmore, the painter, Sisters Veronica and Joan of my Community of the Holy Family, Rose Lloyds and myself. And those who could not travel, like Hilda of Whitby and Julian of Norwich, designed memory systems of those sacred places, as in the Ruthwell Cross and the Showings. The links especially crisscross between the booklets on the Bible, early women pilgrims, the Ruthwell Cross, and Rose Lloyds' Magnificat account of her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I had wanted to write a book to be called 'Miriam and Aaron: The Bible and Women', but I no longer can use the Community of the Holy Family's splendid theological library on the Scriptures and the Mystics required for that task. Yet I now find that book being written in a new and more living form that it would have been as a scholarly study. This Juliansite, contemplated upon, like Julian's Showings, in work, study and prayer, similarly creates a map, a web, across time and space, of women proclaiming, living and being God's Word, in secret codes and open kerygma. Let this and all other means at hand 'one' ourselves, all our selves, children, women and men, to God. In Simone Martini's Diptych we similarly see the Mother and Child and the Man, as the 'oneing' of the Holy Family to God. We are that Holy Family, no one to be excluded.
*
The booklets are to be as treasures, old and new, dipped into, studied, altered, edited, absorbed and read. Strands that run through the booklets are of women, as well as men, being mystical theologians throughout Christian history. With that Gospel message is the sense that there are no boundaries between nations, between genders, between classes. The booklets therefore begin and end with the Sacraments and the Gospels: with the Sacraments because Julian herself received the Last Rites of Bread and Wine and Oil in 1373, having received that of Water in 1342, yet lived beyond 1413, to go on telling her tale; and because Jesus' and Julian's Gospel is for all as one's 'even Christians', it is of the love of God and one's neighbour. The two essays, 'Sacrament and Gospel: Water, Wine, Bread and Oil' and 'Royal Priesthood: Theory into Praxis', especially discuss the Sacraments of the Church and women. Julian's reception of Extreme Unction, according to Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580, in her own medieval culture would have set her apart as though like one ordained to the priesthood. In her writing she uses the Parable of the Lord and Servant, garbing her Lord in the blue robes of the Hebrews' High Priest, in a Parable that is about priestly formation and about its need for suffering and humility. Julian writes for the Magnificat people. Much of her thought may have come from the similar theological studies of Adam Easton on the Priesthood. Both are using Jerome's Letter to Fabiola upon Aaron's High Priestly blue garb. Thus there is an initial cluster of booklets on the Bible, both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek Testament, as well as from the Greek and Latin Fathers, of material shaping Julian and her Showings.
*
To explain the presence of women theologians during Julian's period and later, one has to go back into the dim past, back to the origins of Christianity as the 'religion of women and slaves', where its Gospel was 'to proclaim liberty to the captives'. Two booklets demonstrate that aspect in England's ecclesiastical history, revisioning Bede's writings. For Julian's Showings echoes in subject and structure the earliest poem that has survived written in the English language, in runes upon the Ruthwell Cross, describing the Cross speaking to its Anglo-Saxon poet, who may be Caedmon writing for Hilda. That poem in turn had been influenced by Saint Helena, Constantine's mother from York, who excavated Calvary, finding there the True Cross, and Saint Paula, whose vision of the Crucifixion both she and Saint Jerome described in their Epistles sent back to Rome from the Holy Land. And then to that message being heard by such women as St Hilda of Whitby. The Cross casts its shadowing light, crisscrossing centuries and climes.
It especially prevails in the fourteenth century with Birgitta of Sweden, Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich. Through Adam Easton, her fellow Norwich Benedictine, Julian was likely grounded in the knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, which he read and translated from their original language. He could also have exposed her to the writings of Rabbi David Kimhi, who spoke of God as Mother, and of Pseudo-Dionysius, who wrote on God in a point and sin as nought, and whose works Easton himself owned in manuscripts that he had shipped from Oxford, where as Master Adam Easton he taught theology, to Norwich, where, with Thomas Brinton, he preached to the laity, and from Norwich to Oxford again, then Avignon, and then from Rome, where he became Cardinal Adam Easton, again to Norwich, all during Julian's lifetime. Adam Easton strongly defended Birgitta of Sweden's canonization, arguing for women's importance in early Christianity.
*
A cluster of texts appear together with Julian's Showings in the British Library's Amherst Manuscript. They are theological texts written by Continental Mystics: one of them Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls, for which she was burnt at the stake in 1310; another, Jan Van Ruusbroec's The Sparkling Stone; another, an excerpt from Henry Suso's Horologium Sapientiae. A cluster of booklets describe this movement, called the Friends of God, as well as transcribing two of these Amherst Manuscript texts. Yet another booklet gives a transcription from a Julian-related manuscript in Norwich Castle. Other women's texts could also have been present in Julian's anchorhold, among them those of Birgitta of Sweden and of Catherine of Siena, both of whom Adam Easton had known. These texts give testimony to the kinds of contemplative works Julian herself might have owned and used. They represent an Internet of Mystical Writings across the map of Europe.
*
Julian's Showings survive today only because they continued to be read, contemplated upon and copied out in women's contemplative orders: first that of Saint Birgitta's Syon Abbey, its Brigittine nuns then going into exile at the Reformation, to Antwerp and Rouen, then Portugal, before returning to England in the nineteenth century. Later we shall find Benedictines such as Margaret Gascoigne, Barbara Constable, and Bridget More copying out Julian, in a foundation begun at Cambrai and then a daughter house in Paris, founded by Thomas More's descendants, Dames Gertrude and Bridget More, O.S.B. These booklets replicate the format of those nuns' writings, who frequently did so in unbound fascicles to be found in their cells at their deaths, and then treasured, used and copied out in turn by their Sisters. Studying Julian one finds she is not alone, but part of a vast, Pan-European network of mystical theologians, women and men, linking together their writing and their contemplation. With the Reformation it goes underground and becomes rigorously enclosed in the English convents in exile on the Continent, where Brigittine and Benedictine nuns carefully copy out Julian's treasured text. With the Oxford Movement it became possible for Protestant women also to study the writings of Julian, Florence Nightingale reading the Showings, it is said, while in the Crimea, and certainly writing to Benjamin Jowett about Julian, and Mother Agnes Mason, C.H.F., founding her Community of the Holy Family, basing it upon those of Saint Teresa of Avila and Dame Gertrude More, and carefully stocking its fine library with the writings of women mystics, expecting of her Sisters the scholarly standards required for priestly ordination, garbing them in Aaron's High Priest's blue, while centring upon Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich. Making use of all that material this gathering of flowers ends with a Judaeo-Christian and Sacramental argument for the presence of women in the Church.
*
Initially it was only my voice, crying in a wilderness. But then a chorus came to join us, among them the Quakers who first encouraged these booklets, and Asphodel P. Long and Doreen Jones, one Jewish, one Roman Catholic, both King's College theological students, who used our Holmhurst Theological Library so well in their praxis of theology that we came to call ourselves 'Godfriends', those who put God first in our lives, after the medieval Friends of God with whom Julian was associated, finding in doing so no theological boundaries between us. In our Theological Library we debated such issues as Lesbianism, realizing that what is legally permitted amongst the Laity is renounced by Baptismal, Marriage and Monastic Vows in Religion. Now others are submitting booklets. We are republishing Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P.'s two splendid essays on Julian, whom Tony St Quintin, found, retired from her teaching in Africa to St Brigid's Kilcullen, County Kildare. The nuns sat me down in their library in the Comunità dei figli di Dio and had me read their Father Founder's essay on Julian. And I begged them if I could translate it for the Internet. It is Don Divo Barsotti, C.F.D.'s essay. Maiju Lehmijoki is writing about Birgitta in Finland, her homeland. Elisabetta Peregrini Sayiner translated the Westminster Cathedral Showings text into Italian. Rose Lloyds, before she died, wrote her Magnificat story, 'An English Rose'. She came to Holmhurst St Mary as a guest. Hers is the lived Parable of the Mistress and the Servant. Hazel Oddy, who as a child in England loved to run away to the gypsies, and who is now in Canada, has told another tale, 'Martha's Supplication'. Both Rose and Hazel have earned their blessed olive leaves of healing. These booklets are their Showings and are to be found in the Oliveleaf Website.
*
When Julian said that her work was begun but not yet performed, much the same can be said of this gathering of texts. The booklets are not a finished product. There are still further booklets to be composed, for instance, on Marguerite Porete and on Hildegard of Bingen. The English exiled nun's 'Colections' needs further transcription. It is my hope, with these booklets, to fund yet more research travel (I journey as the poorest pilgrim) and complete the checking of all these manuscripts, as well as pay the printing bill for the two volume edition of Julian's Showings. It is also my hope that others will submit similar booklets to this gathering. You, as their Readers, are welcome to criticise them and make suggestions for their improvement. It is hoped that you will write and submit your own. These booklets are not only to be academic, as historical studies; they are to be rooted and grounded in prayer, in the love of God and one's neighbour. At times they have to deal with dark subjects, bringing them out into the healing light. They are for Godfriends everywhere. In their Website form they are open to all Web-browsers. If you wish to use the texts, cite the source. For images, it is necessary to ask for permission from their copyright owners. As for the hard copy, hand-sewn, form of the booklets, which may be ordered from juliana@tin.it, it is strongly urged that they be left lying about for further readers. We recall that Augustine was so converted in a garden by means of a such a book. And an enchanting illuminated manuscript in the British Library about hermits, giving their lives, suggests likewise it be left lying about to convert readers to the life of the anchorhold.
*
Medieval women, such as Hildegard of Bingen and Christine de Pizan, daringly portrayed themselves in their books' illuminations as the writers of those books, an iconography that goes back to the Gospellers' portraits as holding the Book of God's Word, and ultimately God with the Book of the World he has created held in his hand, just as Julian held in the palm of her small hand the whole cosmos as though it were the size of a hazel nut. The Christian's task is to follow Christ, to restore the image of God in which we are made, within ourselves, our souls being God's City. May these booklets enable such as you hold them in your hand. We are, and always have been, part of the Church's 'Sacred Conversation', much as were once Miriam, Aaron and Moses, Christ and Mary Magdalen, and Saints Monica and Augustine; Paula and Jerome; Scholastica and Benedict; Lioba and Boniface; Clare and Francis; and even Heloise and Abelard; Beatrice and Dante; as well as Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena with Adam Easton and then Margery Kempe of Lynn with Julian of Norwich, even the voices of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, Margaret Gascoigne and Bridget More, Arthur James Mason and Agnes Mason, C.H.F, don Divo Barsotti, C.F.D and Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P, Maiju Lehmijoki, Rose Lloyds and Hazel Oddy. These voices, and ours with them, can become a sacred conversation, not only a Gregorian Dialogue, but rather a full choir of base and treble voices, with tenors, altos, contraltos and sopranos all for the glory and praise of God.
THE EDITION AND TRANSLATION OF JULIAN OF NORWICH'S SHOWINGS
{This work began nine years ago. I had asked Westminster Cathedral about their manuscript of Julian of Norwich's Showings. After a long silence, they wrote to tell me I could see the manuscript. It had been carefully placed in a safe and then forgotten and my query had caused consternation, until it was found again. It is now on loan to Westminster Abbey. It was with such joy that I would fly from America during vacations and transcribe that small volume. I continued with the work, travelling to Paris to transcribe the Long Text of Julian's Showings there, as well as working with the Short Text in the British Library Amherst Manuscript, using the Professorship to fund the research travel.
But it did not seem right to edit Julian of Norwich's Showings in an academic context. Her text, found in medieval and later manuscripts, kept demanding from me also such a life of prayer. So, like Augustine, I gave up my Professorship and Directorship of Medieval Studies, and entered the Anglican Community of the Holy Family. While in England I encountered Nota Bene's Tony St Quintin, a mage with computers, who became as obsessed as was I in replicating the manuscripts folio by folio, line by line, letter by letter. One day I said on the telephone that I much needed to find Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., the best editor Julian ever had. He said he'd look and in twenty minutes called back, 'I've found her! She's eighty. She's in Kilcullen, County Kildare. I've spoken with her. She wants to speak with you'. Since then Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., and I have worked together on the project, in which we are essentially publishing her 1947 and 1956 Leeds University Theses, checking these against the computer transcriptions I have made. She had carried out her two editions in war-time conditions, from microfilms read with a microscope a word at a time, the manuscripts being buried under the ground for protection from bombing. Her work is far more accurate than that of current editions in print, though their editors used her work.
Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P.
Then, four years later, I found myself cast adrift from my convent, with only the editing of Julian, the computer and a few, but by no means all, of the books necessary for the task, left. Timothy E. Thompson, Librarian of the Syracuse in Italy Program in Florence, stepped in and offered to set up the Julian Website. Next came Otfried Lieberknecht, a Dante scholar, in Berlin, who gave us space and is now Webmaster. Here, in Florence, with no funds, but in prayer, while trying to live a life like Julian's, and with the help of countless individuals, the work continues.
And last came the Comunità dei figli di Dio, the Community of God's Sons and Daughters, the astonishing young contemplative group of monks and nuns and lay people clustered about an aging mystic theologian, don Divo Barsotti, C.F.D. They adopted this aging Julian scholar, themselves loving 'Giuliana di Norwich', who has been translated three times into Italian and who is enshrined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Their Father Founder, in his Canticle of St Sergius, incorporated much of Julian's theology. I would find myself walking to Mass at San Sergio, in the winter under the stars, through olive groves. I was given permission, though an Anglican, by the Cardinal Archbishop of Florence to receive Communion with them. This Candlemas, to the hymn Cardinal Newman composed, 'Lead Kindly Light', I became Catholic. I continue as the Hermit of my Anglican Community of the Holy Family to live its Vows and its Rule, saying the Sarum Offices, but I am now twinned to this flourishing new Catholic Community of God's Sons and Daughters, drawing nourishment from don Divo Barsotti's daily sermons and Eucharist, with which to continue the labour of love of Julian.
Julia Bolton Holloway
Hermit of the Holy Family
Montebeni, Fiesole
The Julian Project Cooperative: Sir Harold Acton Library, Florence, Italy; Don Divo Barsotti, C.F.D., Don Serafino Tognetti, C.F.D., Don Bernardo Ravano, C.F.D., Suora Maria Chiara, C.F.D., Settignano, Italy; Rev. Ronald J. Boccieri, M.M., Hadley, New York; Community of All Hallows, Ditchingham, England; Comunità dei figli di Dio, Settignano, Italy; Cross and Passion Convent, Kilcullen, Ireland; Right Rev. Eric Devenport, Former Chaplain, St Mark's English Church, Florence, Former Archdeacon of Malta and Italy; Professor Thomas J. Elliott, Claremont, California; Friends Hill Quaker Worship Group, Quincy, Illinois; Friends of Julian of Norwich, Norwich, England; James Hannay, Hastings, England; Hazel Oddy, Canada; Maiju Lehjimoki, Finland; Professore Claudio Leonardi, Firenze; Otfried Lieberknecht, Berlin, Germany; Eunice Martin, Folkestone, England; Professor Lynne McDonald, Toronto, Canada; Mark Moore, Bay Village, Ohio; Giorgio Nencetti, Florence, Italy; Professor Tore Nyberg, Odense, Denmark; Order of Julian of Norwich, Waukesha, Wisconsin; Order of the Holy Paraclete, Whitby, North Yorkshire, England; Pluscarden Abbey, Elgin, Scotland; Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., Kilcullen, Ireland; Elisabetta Sayiner Pellegrini; SACI, Florence, Italy; Tony St.Quintin, Leeds, Yorkshire, England; Timothy E. Thompson, Florence, Italy; Robin Waterfield, Oxford, England.
LINKS ( = highest recommendations):
Return to the Juliansite Homepage.
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Book Reviews. Submissions Encouraged.
Bibliography. Submissions Encouraged.
The Julian Library Portfolio, 1996.
© Copyright Julia Bolton Holloway (juliana@tin.it),
Fiesole
Website Design: Timothy E. Thompson (tethomps@syr.fi.it),
Florence
Webmaster: Otfried Lieberknecht (lieberk@berlin.netsurf.de),
Berlin
Nota Bene Consultant: Tony St Quintin (tony.stq@zetnet.co.uk),
Leeds
This site last updated 7 May 1999
