Julian of Norwich, Her Showings and Its Contexts, Website © Julia Bolton Holloway, 1997

BOOK REVIEWS: JULIAN OF NORWICH

Caveat Lector/Skull and Crossbones: These book reviews include academic and theoretical books about Julian of Norwich and her Showings; and they also include practical books about living - and dying - contemplatively, while in the world, which surprisingly are two very different modes of being. Books will be found here side by side which scholars will hate, which contemplatives will hate, and which general readers will hate. Areopagitica!

David Aers and Lynn Staley. The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-271-01542-X. 310 pp. Bibliography, index.

A English Marxist and an American Feminist come together to do Theory upon Wyclif, Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich and Chaucer. The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture is thus an important, and deeply scholarly, book. But excised from it is the Power of the Holy, the reason for being of medieval literature, architecture and art, which then so clearly transcended merely mortal authority that it has now become suppressed everywhere. Today's fashionable academic discourse upon Julian is clearly uncomfortable with theology, and struggles, paradoxically, to win authorized approval through having co-opted Marxism, while obliterating its Gospel, and Feminism, while obliterating its Liberation. Nevertheless, in the final pages of this book all these obtain a shadow victory.

What is especially interesting in many of the scholarly books that follow in these review pages, by Baker, Beer, Glasscoe, is their thesis that the Short Text is earlier than the Long Text. Nicholas Watson in two brilliant Speculum articles has argued for the Short Text as later, but still earlier than the Long Text. In Aers and Staley there is uneasiness about the accepted paradigm, but not yet a willingness to shift, this anxiety being particularly noted in the footnote to p. 79, where they take issue with Watson's pushing of the dating of the Long Text into the reign of Henry V. Far better would be for all concerned to returned to what Julian's texts and manuscripts themselves say, that the Long Text was originally finished 20 years after the 1373 Revelation, in 1393; and that the Short Text was originally finished when Julian was still alive, 'yet on live', the manuscript's text giving that year as 1413. That date accords with everything that Watson has demonstrated concerning the anxiety of that period. While the Long Text accords with everything that Watson says about the halcyon confidence of the earlier period about 1393. Had this brilliant pair worked with the other, and historically likely, ordering they could have carefully demonstrated the suppression that takes place, in lieu of 'development', within Julian. And they could have celebrated Julian's courageous St Cecilia-like compliance/countering even of that suppression. The paradox is that it is in countering that censorship against women doing theology that Julian autobiographically enters the foreground of her text as visionary, as censored, as gendered. She is seventy. She will not be silenced. She speaks like Anna in the Temple, like Magdalen in the Garden.

David Aers, p. 95, rightly senses Julian's use of Piers Plowman's allegorical mode of thought in her Chapter 51 on the Lord and the Servant. Both texts are seeped in Wyclif's milieu. (Lynn Staley will note the relation to orthodox Thomas Brinton's Sermons 99, 100, pp. 151-152.) He also brilliantly notes how Julian counters other women's feminist use of milk and blood in relation to Christ. Lynn Staley begins her Julian chapter discussing the chronology of the writing of the various layers of the Showings, again with the premise that the Short Text is early. As before, Watson is discussed, pp. 110-112. By p. 126, Staley states correctly that the Long Text is clearly of the fourteenth, rather than the fifteenth, century, in so doing disagreeing with Watson, because its serenity would not be appropriate to the tensions of the Lancastrian period. On pp. 118-120 she falls into the slade of misreading 'soul' as 'soil', excrement. There is only one reading in the Middle English Dictionary of 'soul' in any way connected with filth, where 'foul' was written of a festering wound, but where the 'f' failed to get crossed, leaving it a long-tailed 's'. This accident has given rise to a generation of textual misreading that fall foul of the substance of what Julian wrote. Staley is particularly good on the context of the 'Lord and Servant' Parable. Indeed, throughout, the pairing of their work is always complementary one to the other.

Aers and Staley are correct in their dating of the Long Text's composition, Watson, in his of the Short Text. However, the proof of this ordering needs to await the publication of the five volume edition and translation of Julian of Norwich's Showings.

Denise Nowakowski Baker. Julian of Norwich's Showings: From Vision to Book. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-691-03631-4. xi+215 pp. Bibliography, Index.

A young scholar's book, and perhaps the one which most profoundly discusses the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius and other Patristic material upon Julian of Norwich's Showings. Yet its thesis could have benefitted from even greater scholarship, combining its theological study with that of paleography and codicology, questioning its own thesis about the development of 'From Vision to Book'. An investigation of the Amherst, Westminster, Paris, Sloane and Stowe Manuscripts themselves of Julian's text of the Showings, or of their contexts, or of both, seriously undermines the standard assumption of Julian's textual development, of Vision, then Short Text, then Long Text, all of which is the premise of this particular book. Princeton University Press 'spams' the Internet with this book rather annoyingly!

One hopes Denise Baker will continue to write on Julian of Norwich, deepening her insight through the study of Julian in her medieval context, as well as that of the patristic world. Perhaps even deepening it through the practice of mysticism.

Frances Beer. Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love, Translated from British Library Additional MS 37790; The Motherhood of God, an Excerpt, Translated from British Library MS Sloane 2477, with Introduction, Interpretive Essay and Bibliography. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998. The Library of Medieval Women. ISBN 0 85991 453 4. viii + 93 pp. Bibliography and index.

Frances Beer had already edited the Amherst Manuscript Short Text of Julian of Norwich's Showings, from British Library Additional Manuscript 37,790, excellently, publishing that work in 1978, with Carl Winter of Heidelberg. This introduction and translation gives both that text and an excerpt from British Library Sloane 2477 on the Motherhood of God. Throughout, Frances Beer acknowledges the pioneer editing carried out by Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P. She observes that the Short Text is a fine introduction to Julian studies.

Like most modern scholars, though not earlier ones, Frances Beer considers the Short Text early, the Long Text late and the work of Julian's 'greater spiritual maturity'. (Yet she puts the XVI Showings of the Long Text, into the Short Text's 25 chapters, indicating these in square brackets, as if the XVI Showings' structure already existed at the time of the supposed earlier writing.) She adheres to Julian as having participated in Benedictine contexts, which Sister Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., denies. She carefully notes Augustine and Dionysius on mystical experiences as used by Julian. She also discusses the Ancrene Wisse cluster of texts, Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton and the Cloud of Unknowing cluster of texts in relation to Julian. (In this last instance the bracketed citation to 'Johnston' has one hunt in the Bibliography to find 'Johnson' given as translator of The Cloud of Unknowing, the reference being to William Johnston, S.J.; likewise 'Sara McNamer' p. 74, versus 'McNamer, Sarah', p. 86, both of which can be corrected in a subsequent printing.) She discusses the careful attention given to autobiographical detail characteristic of the Short Text, and elaborately plots out the correspondences between the two versions. But she does not mention or study the second earliest Julian manuscript, that of Westminster, which again is different from the Short or Long Texts, and likewise a fine introduction for students to Julian, concise, yet giving the hazel nut/Nativity/Annunciation scene, God in a circle and as 'I it am' and the entire presentation of Jesus as Mother.

Francis Beer's translation begins with the head note about Julian being alive in 1413 at the time of the text's writing. She footnotes that statement to say it is not the date of composition but the year in which this copy was made. Yet the Amherst Manuscript begins, in the same hand, with texts dated as written in 1434 and 1435, and which are Richard Misyn's translations of Richard Rolle for the anchoress Margaret Heslyngton. The possibility Julian could have written or dictated this text when she was seventy is not entertained at all. The next footnote is to the 'paintings of crucifixes', noting that Norwich had fine wall paintings, but not discussing Archbishop Arundel's stress upon worshiping painted rood screens in churches as indicative of orthodoxy in this later period. The footnote to St Cecilia could have noted that the Norwich Benedictine, Adam Easton, friend of Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, was Cardinal of the Basilica of St Cecilia in Rome, and by 1413, buried near St Cecilia's tomb. It was in this period also that Archbishop Arundel sternly forbade laypeople, especially women, from teaching theology and reading the Bible in the vernacular. In a note Frances Beer discusses Nicholas Watson's arguing for a later date for the Short Text.

The translation is excellent and a labour of love. As one reads it one is struck again by Julian's brilliance and compassion. A similar note to 'I it am', here translated 'It is I', could have been given on the order of that for 'reparation' as having been 'aseth'. For Julian's 'I it am' transcends gender yet stresses presence, oneness; the modern rendition changing the 'I am' of God into 'it is' thus branching away from Julian's stress upon the Hebrew meaning of God's name.

This shall be a fine volume to put into students' hands. But could Boydell and Brewer reconsider the cover? It presents four faces taken from different periods and different countries, one an angel, the others of women, as a quatrefoil upon black. Excellent for the Short Text would have been the Crucifixion from the Despenser Retable in Norwich Cathedral. It and Julian's coeval writing belong together.

Ritamary Bradley. Julian's Way: A Practical Commentary on Julian of Norwich. London: Harper Collins, 1992. xvi+231 pp. Bibliography, Index. Also Praying with Julian of Norwich: Selections from 'A Revelation of Love' with Commentary. Mystic: Twenty-Third Publications, 1995. ISBN 089622-601-8. 184 pp.

I remember first reading Julian's Way: A Practical Commentary on Julian of Norwich in St Deiniol's Library in Wales and being entranced by it. In my poverty I am afraid I shamelessly begged Sister Ritamary Bradley for a copy. I here attempt to repay a debt

Ritamary Bradley, having given on its cover a painting of a wise woman, book and medicinal jars at hand, begins with the paradox that the practical mystic is the one who is the real mystic, while the one who studies mysticism theoretically remains outside of its circle of meaning.

Ritamary Bradley brings to her reading of Julian profound depths of theology and poetry, ancient and contemporary. A subtle, unacknowledged, and splendid agenda is, of course, that in Julian's Way we have a woman writing on a woman writing on God. Because the context of both women, the one in the fourteenth, the other in the twentieth, is that of monasticism, being oned with God, the first as authorial anchoress, the second as professor and nun, this subtle awareness works. It has all the openness and humility of Mary at prayer, and of her Magnificat. Quietly, the title takes over as Julian and Ritamary together live theology, not merely study it, and with their words the reader too is swept up into the hermeneutic circle of Wisdom.

Martin Buber. Ecstatic Confessions: The Heart of Mysticism. Ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr. Trans. Esther Cameron. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996. The Martin Buber Library. ISBN 0-8156-0422-X. xxxv + 160 pp. Bibliography.

I am asked to review this book for 'Mystic-L: Academic Discussion of Mysticism', and I realize that in that context both this book and I transgress boundaries. In Academicism the first person is expunged as being too emotionally involved to see issues objectively and clearly, and such writing, such study, is condemned as the 'personal heresy'. In my work on medieval pilgrimage poets I have discussed how the presence within the poem of the poet as pilgrim, as with Brunetto Latino, Dante Alighieri, Juan Ruiz, William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, creates a sacred paradigm in which what is said in the first person of the poet is mirror-reflected within the soul of the reader of the poem, engendering mystical experiences shared by writer and reader. Similarly, for this ecumenical collection of first person mystical experiences collected and introduced by Martin Buber, the reader finds him/herself gazing into first the kindly eyes of the editor himself, pictured on the paperback cover, then into the souls of the writers whom he bares in this text. This book is a living confession with God and neighbour, of 'I and Thou', across time, space, religion, gender, death itself.

Paul Mendes-Flohr's brilliant introduction tells us that Martin Buber's Ekstatische Konfessionen was first published in an exquisite art volume in 1909. Martin Buber's doctoral dissertation had been on individuation in Nicholas of Cusa and Jakob Böehme, then, following a study of Jewish mysticism, he had also worked in Chinese, Finnish and Welsh literatures, including the Kalevala, the Mabinogion. Martin Buber in general translated his selections himself, Esther Cameron translating these likewise from his German into our English. Martin Buber's own introduction interrupts itself with the story of St Bernard's sermon interrupting itself while it was being preached, to confess in first-person ectasy, '"When I gazed out, I found it beyond all that was outside me; when I looked in, it was further in than my most inward being. And I recognized that what I had read was true: that we live and move and are in it; but he is blest in whom it lives, who is moved by it.'"

Martin Buber's Selections from Ecstatic Confessions, which repeat in a myriad ways Bernard's ecstatic confession, begin with Indian mystics, then Sufi, for whom the only example is the woman Rabi'a, Greek, then European monastic mystics, such as Hildegard von Bingen, the Franciscans, Mechtild von Magdebourg, Mechtild von Hackeborn, Gertrud von Helfta, Heinrich Seuse (Suso), Cristina and Margareta Ebner, Adelheid Langmann, a song attributed to John Tauler, entries from the German Sister Books, many of these from the convent of Töss written by Elsbeth Stagel, Suso's friend and supporter, Birgitta of Sweden, Julian of Norwich, Gerlach Peters, Angela of Foligno, Catherine of Siena, Catherine of Genoa, Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi, Teresa de Jesus, Anna Garcias, Armelle Nicolas, Antoinette Bourignon, Jeanne Marie Bouvieres de la Mothe Guyon, Elie Marion, Jakob Boehme, Hans Engelbrecht, Hemme Hayen, Anna Katharina Emmerich, with a Supplement of selections from the Mahabharatam and from Chinese and Jewish mystics, from the Church Fathers as mystics, and from the 'Sister Katrei' ascribed to Meister Eckhart. That the entries may be so heavily overweighted on the distaff side is likely due to women's exclusion from university training, and thus, as with monastic men, being drawn more purely from lectio divina, from contemplative practices. Strangely the volume lacks the major exemplar, Augustine's Confessions. But then so does Dante's Commedia.

Though first published almost a hundred years ago this book is both mint-new and transcends beyond the bounds of time. Unerringly Martin Buber has chosen the best passages both for himself and for us, in a marvellous generosity. Let me select from his selections from Julian of Norwich's Showings:

Our banker-theologian-Alcoholic-Anonymous contributes a truly fascinating review. I've been finding this argument true as well, that though poverty was thrust upon me malevolently its curse is a blessing. I long ago decided money itself is without meaning, its meaning only coming from what it can purchase, a kind of hollow language about things. Thanks.

James Buchan. Frozen Desire - An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money. Picador, 1997. ISBN: 0 330 36931 8. 320 pp. £7.99 paper.

"Frozen Desire" doesn't sound like quite the right title for review here and, indeed, some heads craned when I had to shout the name at the slightly deaf lady who presides over Olio Bookstore, Hastings, E. Sussex. So I quickly added the sub-title, "An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money". For James Buchan, descendant of the Scottish polymaths, former Financial Times writer and Whitbread Prize winner in the novel, has produced a series of meditations that lead one, as if through a wonderful museum, to his conclusion: meaning of money = frozen desire.

The 320 page pathway Buchan has constructed is well worth taking even though the destination is known. His raw material is roughly one part history, one part anecdote and one part motif criticism. It is this latter that may interest Godfriends. Chapter Three is entitled "Thirty Pieces of Silver".

"The implications of Christian poverty are very profound: for if the poor are the image of salvation, then the daily struggle to ward off poverty -- the whole worldly existence of accumulation and provision -- is merely a side-show to the true drama of life. In time, of course, that side-show will become so elaborate and various that it will gain its own self-evident authority and displace the other attractions of existence." That is how he begins an analysis of the "money" motif in the Synoptic Gospels.

Money, we have learned in Chapters One and Two, has an otherworldly quality that is hard to capture. It is, as he says, "diabolically hard to comprehend with words." But the point he makes, the way he makes it and the way he sums it up in the last chapter, "Money: a Valediction", is that Jesus would have us know money is fundamentally set against the Christian notion of "the Kingdom". Diabolical, indeed. "For in this flash of recognition," (he is talking here about Rembrandt's "Judas, Repentant, Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver"), "the miller's boy, the Dutchman, saw into the marrow of history: that the divine in man is dead beyond all resurrection; that there is nothing left to us but a few coins on a dusty floor and our bestial natures; and that in every monetary transaction, wholesale and retail, Christ is re-crucified."

Whew! And that's before he writes the killer concluding paragraph to the chapter. Go buy this book.

Go buy it for its prescience too. At one point Buchan recites the familiar tale of the Dutch tulip bulb speculative bubble of the early 17th Century. He tells us an amusing story of how a sailor, "coming on a bulb of Semper Augustus, worth as much as an Amsterdam town house and garden, thought it was an onion and ate it with bread." Then he says, "There were wild speculations before the Dutch "tulpenhandel", for example in the stock of the Dutch East India Company in the first quarter of the century; and there have been countless since, from the railway shares in the 1840s to Florida real estate in the 1920's and Internet stocks in the 1990s." He might have added that last category yesterday.

Mr. Buchan is a highly educated man. In following the motif of money in literature he has chosen important works that reflect our changing attitudes: Cervantes' "Don Quixote" written at the height of the great silver inflation from the mines of the New World for example. William Langland's "The Vision of Piers Plowman" and Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" are also used - and much, much more. To his treatment of all these, and their treatment of money, he has brought much erudition, wit and, I suspect, originality of thought.

"Frozen Desire - An Inquiry into the Meaning of Money" by James Buchan. Picador, 1997, 320 pgs. £7.99 paper.

Robert H. Calderwood. Julian's Challenge. New York: Vantage Press, 1995. ISBN 0-533-11143-9. 102 pp. Appendices, Bibliographies.

This book came to me from Stella Maris, from two Anglican Hermits closely associated with Roman Carmelites, in the wilds of Canada.

The book is written by a male Anglican clergyman who delights in Julian's Wisdom of God as Mother and Wisdom and in her cherishing of the sacredness of the 'person' in relation to the cosmos. He places Julian of Norwich in the context of modern feminist theology and current issues, such as abortion, and he employs strategies similar to Julian's own, presenting arguments 'doubly', giving both what is acceptable and what is challenging, allowing the two sides of the debate full play against each other, while omitting his own determination concerning them, a strategy Julian had needed to employ in her day.

I was concerned to find on page 75 that Rev. Robert H. Calderwood gives the Hebrew for Wisdom as 'Hokinah'. Had he given his printer or typist a manuscript with 'Hokmah' and not adequately proofread the text? Or is the error his own? I quibble over these jots and tittles, because he is right where he sees that Julian had had 'well-learned cleric tutor', p. 2. Julian's Master and Rabbi was likely the Norwich Benedictine, Oxford Master, and Roman Cardinal Adam Easton, whose Hebrew was better than that of St Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. For the Lady Julian displays a better knowledge of the Hebrew Bible than does the clerical writer of this book. This is not Rev. Robert H. Calderwood's fault so much as it is that of the Church of England, which is the one Lutheran Church that has officially abandoned the study of Hebrew and Greek for priestly ordination.

The author of this study is right to see that 'shalom' in its sense of wholeness, wellness, peace, is a concept in Julian's vocabulary of ideas. With only a little further study the book's author could have recognized that phrase, 'Shalom' 'All is well', 'And all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well' as from 2 Kings 4. 23, 26, where it is used concerning Elisha and the raising of the dead child of the Shunamite woman, at first with the greatest sarcasm, then the word coming into its true and peaceable meaning.

I had treasured that use by Julian of 'Shalom', for it embodies the grief, then joy, not only of the Shunamite, but of her Syro-Phoenician counterpart, and of the widowed mother of the dead son at Nain, and of Mary's own loss of her cherished son to the Roman soldiery's cruelty in Jerusalem, followed by Easter joy. Then, the other day, at an old Carmelite monastery here, now inhabited by Australian nuns, I looked at the frescoes, realising that one is of Mount Carmel and of Elisha and his raising of the dead child. We know that Julian not only had Benedictine associations but that also Margery visits her straight after talking with a saintly Carmelite in Norwich, William Southfield, who had likely sent Margery on to Julian for counselling and consoling.

Though Rev. Robert H. Calderwood's book is somewhat loose in its structure, and perhaps too careful in not giving an opinion to issues that it raises, it does point to another area in which Julian's wisdom can console: to the parents of dead, even aborted, children, who carry with them a haunting burden of guilt, blame, and sorrow. In this Rev. Calderwood is not unlike his predecessor, the saintly Norwich Carmelite William Southfield, who understood that women are in need of the wise counsel of women.

The Cloud of Unknowing. Ed. Patrick J. Gallacher. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Western Michigan University, 1997. TEAMS: Middle English Texts. ISBN 1-879288-89-3. ix + 132 pages. Introduction, Bibliography, Text with Textual Gloss, Notes, Glossary.

The Middle English Texts Series is designed for classroom use, making available texts adjacent to the readily available classics by Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet and Malory. The Cloud of Unknowing is already available in an excellent edition by Phyllis Hodgson for the Early English Text Society, Original Series, 218, and thus shelved in most academic libraries. But the present edition has an excellent introduction placing the Middle English text in the context of mystical theological writings, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the Victorine, Thomas Gellus and the Carthusian, Hugh of Balma, an up-to-date, though brief, bibliography. Its text, presented without the Middle English manuscripts' thorns, yochs, and italicized contractions, makes for easier reading for the undergraduate student. It is pleasing that the editor chose to bold the chapter headings, which the EETS editor had not done. Medieval manuscript scribes took care to differentiate their scripts by engrossing, bolding or rubricating in this manner.

Phyllis Hodgson consulted all manuscripts but chose as base text one that did not reflect East Anglian/Scandinavian area characteristics. Similarly the three manuscripts Gallacher consulted do not come from those families. The manuscripts of those families tend also to include 'doctrine schewyde of god to seynt Kateryne of seene [Catherine of Siena]. Of tokynes to knowe vysytacions bodily or goostly vysyons whedyr thei come of god or of the feende'. Neither Hodgson nor Gallacher comment on the probable gender of the recipient of this and its related texts. A lively literature had grown up in the British Isles and elsewhere in which men counseled women how to live the anachoritic or enclosed life. Where they did so to fellow men they wrote in Latin. But to women they wrote generally in the vernacular, referred to both 'men and women' in their examples, and cited scriptural texts concerning women. All this the Cloud Author likewise does in his texts. The Cloud Author is himself shrouded in a cloud of unknowing. But there was a Norwich Benedictine, Adam Easton, who taught at Oxford University, became Cardinal of St Cecilia in Trastevere, defended St Birgitta of Sweden's canonization on the basis of her visionary writings, the Revelationes,, who also knew St Catherine of Siena and the spiritual director to both women, the Bishop Hermit, Alfonso of Jaén, whose text on spiritual discernment was copied out in its own right into Middle English in a Norfolk manuscript, as well as being restated in the Cloud Author's Epistle, and being repeated in Julian of Norwich's Showings.

Adam Easton wrote many works, some extant, others lost. Among those which are lost is a Treatise on the Spiritual Life of Perfection and various other texts in the vernacular. Besides all of which Adam Easton, O.S.B., when preaching to the laity in Norwich and later, owned and intensely used a thirteenth-century manuscript of Pseudo-Dionysius' Works, now at Cambridge University Library. Its prayer invocation to the Trinity in the Mystic Theology has a most beautiful Gothic T intertwined in green and gold leaf. That invocation the Cloud Author feminized for his recipient, having the Trinity become the Sovereign Goddess Wisdom, where he translated that text in Dionise Hid Diuinite. He had also addressed her in the opening of the Cloud of Unknowing as the Bride of Christ, language frequently used of anchoresses and by Saints Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. It is just possible that the Cloud Author and the Cardinal are the same person. It is even just possible that he wrote for a Norwich anchoress who may have once been herself a Benedictine at Carrow. St Julian's was under Carrow's Benedictine Priory, which in turn was under Norwich Cathedral's Benedictine Priory. Again and again reading the texts of Julian of Norwich and of the Cloud Author one comes across the same words, oneing, noughting, sovereign, and the same concepts. Especially these swirl about the feminizing of the Trinity, of God as Mother. Likewise the Prologue to the Cloud is echoed in the Envoi to the Sloane Manuscripts' Showings.

This review, in a shorter version, is appearing in Arthuriana, which graciously gives permission for its republication.

Membership in the International Arthurian Society-North American Branch, and its Journal, Arthuriana, may be obtained by writing to Professor Joan Grimbert, Department of Modern Languages, Catholic University, Washington, DC 20064.

Marion Glasscoe. English Medieval Mystics: Games of Faith. London: Longman, 1993. xii+359 pp. ISBN 0-582-49517-2. Bibliography, Index.

Reviewed originally for Medium Aevum.

The Virgin at the Annunciation, when told of the Word become Flesh, was often shown as in the act of reading, and as reading Isaiah's contemplative prophecies concerning the Messiah. St Augustine in his Confessions spoke of his conversion wrought through a child's voice, as if in play, telling him to take up a book and read. Marion Glasscoe has written such a playful book about books of contemplation, games of spirituality, for us to take up and read. She studies in turn (and closely studies their texts), fourteenth-century Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton writing for women recluses, the unknown author of the Cloud of Unknowing writing supposedly for a Carthusian novice, and East Anglian Julian and Margery's books of showings of revelations, written for women and men everywhere.

Marion Glasscoe has access to important materials, her University of Exeter having inherited the Syon Abbey library of Brigittine books: Danzig/Gdansk, to which Margery went on pilgrimage, was and is a major Brigittine pilgrimage shrine; St Birgitta's marriage to Christ was the model for Catherine of Siena and for Margery Kempe. This study could have discussed the pattern in which books self-referentially prompt books, engender books, for instance St Birgitta's Revelationes as model for Julian and Margery's Showing and Book.

Marion Glasscoe has written a finely detailed book on the English Mystics, playfully harnessing for her purpose T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets as touchstone and some, but not all, modern critical theory. One can read this book as a scholar, or one can read this book as a contemplative, and, in either category, gain from it a fresh vision of the authors and texts it discusses.

Its extensive and careful use throughout of manuscript texts is of great value (though it omits the Wesminster Cathedral Julian Showings manuscript). The typesetting is sometimes difficult to read. The cover design, with the Virgin at the Annunciation from Thomas Boleyn's alabaster tomb in Wells Cathedral, repeated again on the book's spine, is excellent and well encloses this timely book.

Julia Bolton Holloway. Saint Bride and Her Book: Birgitta of Sweden's Revelations. Translated from Middle English, With Introduction, Notes and Interpretative Essay. Newburyport: Focus Texts, 1992; Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998. xv + 164.

Of use for placing Julian's Showings in her context of continental writings by women of Revelations, including Birgitta of Sweden's Revelationes. The text translates a manuscript at Princeton University which originally came from Syon Abbey, whose nuns also preserved Julian's texts, in the Amherst, Westminster and Paris versions. She was asked to write this book by Professor Jane Chance, the series' editor, because of her previous work, The Pilgrim and the Book: A Study of Dante, Langland and Chaucer.

Asphodel P. Long. In a Chariot Drawn by Lions: The Search for the Female in Deity. London: Women's Press, 1992. 279 pp. ISBN 0 7043 4295 2. Bibliography, Index.

I was running a theological library in an Anglican convent in Sussex, and repairing thousands of dilapidated books and shelving them so they could once again yield treasure. Suddenly a group of students appeared, women studying theology. The teacher of their teacher was Asphodel Long. So she also came later to explore the library and to talk and to lecture and to be for us the presence of Wisdom. She loaned us a book, Hear Our Voice: Women Rabbis Tell Their Story, which I should dearly love to see reviewed here. The first woman Rabbi, like Edith Stein, died at Auschwitz. In its different essays one learns that the Song of Solomon is composed by a woman, that women Rabbis' ministry truly works, and about the need to heal the cracks of the world

Asphodel Long had written this book, In a Chariot Drawn by Lions, as a Thesis in Theology. They rejected it because she would not remove a statement critical of Christianity's rejection of Judaism. Published now in paperback in a delightfully lurid cover, it is deceptively a most scholarly study of God as Wisdom, Hochma, Chokmah, in Hebraism, and which profoundly explains Julian's concept of God as Sovereign Wisdom. If one takes this modern book and the medieval writings of Rabbi David Kimhi, which Julian's Adam Easton possessed and taught, it is to find the source for God as Mother lie in the materials Christ himself knew and used.

Another King's College theological student also appeared, this time Roman Catholic, rather than Jewish. Plus Quakers and Methodists. Our band of library readers came to realize we were reliving the medieval Friends of God movement, transgressing all boundaries. So we renamed ourselves 'Godfriends'. We had so much to teach each other. And this all came about through Julian.

But this was seen as threatening by our Bishop, who ended the Community, and my Novitiate, and placed the building and its books in a Charitable Trust that can only be used by those within the Anglican Communion according to its terms. For a long time the books gathered dust, vandals came, finally they were packed up in boxes and are in storage, I am told, somewhere in London. But when I had to flee my convent and its magnificent library, we came to reform ourselves in cyberspace. Contact juliana@tin.it if you wish to subscribe to Godfriends-L.

Lynn Staley. Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii +224. ISBN 0-271-01030-4. Bibliography, Index.

Reviewed originally for Mystic-L and republished here with gracious permission by David A. Salomon

Professor Lynn Staley's book upon Margery Kempe's Book is a magisterial study. Titled Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions, it deconstructs Margery by giving her scribal activity the name of her husband 'Kempe', and allows this perceptional duality of 'Kempe' versus 'Margery' ('Staley' versus 'Lynn'?) full play within her own text. It makes use of Professor D.W. Robertson's later work in 'New Historicism', seeing Margery's 'Progress' upon the map of England and of Europe, in terms of the Royal Progress of Henry V, and of the 1415 Council of Constance, while it also employs strategies from such works as Peggy Kamuf's 'Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise', which was a clever book but a misreading of its text. Other studies upon which Lynn Staley draws ably are those written by Karma Lochrie, 'The Book of Margery Kempe: The Marginal Woman's Quest for Literary Authority' Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 (1986), 33-55, and Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, Philadelphia: 1991, and Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages, Chicago: 1989 (also published as 'St. Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe' in Equally in God's Image: Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Julia Bolton Holloway, Joan Bechtold, and Constance S. Wright, New York: 1990, pp. 144-163).

There are significant omissions from the study. When Margery goes to Sheen to benefit from the St Peter in Chains Pardon finally awarded to Vadstena and to Syon, Lynn Staley fails to notice an impelling and feminist history. For neither Gibson nor Staley adequately read the Birgitta of Sweden documentation back into The Book of Margery Kempe that they study. Birgitta of Sweden had to battle long and hard from many Popes for that indulgence, which had been awarded finally and reluctantly also to St Francis for the Basilica in Assisi, for her Abbey in Vadstena. Similarly as had St Francis, in a vision, Christ told Birgitta the indulgence was hers regardless of what the Church authorized. Those words are so inscribed upon her Blue Church at Vadstena. After her death that indulgence was won for both Vadstena, from Pope Urban VI, 1378, and Syon, at the instigation of Henry V, whose aunt married Sweden's king, when it was promulgated by Pope Martin V in the Papal Bull, Mare Anglicum, 1419. Much of this struggle was being waged at the 1415 Council of Constance, which Lynn Staley discusses at length - but without the awareness of the agitated debate flurrying about the tiny figure of a Swedish wife, mother of eight children, then widow and Foundress of an Order, and finally, questionably canonized, 'saint' Birgitta Birgersdottir, and at which magnificently illuminated manuscripts of Birgitta's Revelationes were being circulated. That debate largely centred upon the validity of women's visions and women's visionary writings, such as Birgitta's Revelationes which Margery herself had had read to her in Lynn and which served as clear model for her own pilgrimages in turn to Compostela, Rome and Jerusalem and for her own subsequent Book. Margery speaks of the Pardon, the indulgence, but displaces it upon male Carthusian Sheen rather than upon female/male Brigittine Syon (p. 169).

A further omission concerns the significance of Margery Kempe's maiden name shared with her father, John Brunham, and the Book's assertion that Margery is even 'Lord Cobham's daughter' (pp. 175, 138-141). For there is a clear relation between the two that centres upon rebellion against ecclesiastical authority. John Brunham had been the Mayor of Lynn when Henry Le Despenser, Julian of Norwich's Bishop, had visited that city and had insisted upon the Mayor's mace being borne before himself in 1377. But the burghers had refused to give up their civic privileges to the Bishop and a melee ensued during which the Bishop was even wounded and fled. (Staley does mention this in her book co-authored with David Aers, reviewed above, The Powers of the Holy, pp. 155-156, but without noting its relationship to Margery's father.) Likewise the Lord of Cobham was Sir John Oldcastle, the leader of the Lollard Revolt againt the established Church, who was imprisoned and later executed. See especially in this connection Nicholas Watson's two articles in Speculum on Julian of Norwich and Censorship. Women do not really have last names, like Brunham or Kempe, for they are first the property of their fathers, then of their husbands, only coming into their own legal rights (and names?) as widows. Margery's white robes signify her chaste freedom from such naming practices - which bishops and others are most reluctant to grant to her.

This tension that swirls about gender becomes deeply embedded as well even in the scribal act of the Book's formation. Lynn Staley has already written in Speculum most brilliantly about Margery's scribes. But no Margery Kempe scholar has seemed to notice the one real fiction in the text, that the initial scribe is authorizingly 'male'. Margery is visited by her son and her German daughter-in-law. Her son almost immediately dies, but her daughter-in-law, like Ruth, stays with her for over a year and a half. That unnamed daughter-in-law comes from Gdansk, a city famous as the resting place of Birgitta of Sweden's body when ice in the Baltic delayed its further journeying into Sweden and its final resting place at Vadstena. (Interestingly Pope John Paul II deeply reveres St Birgitta of Sweden, for Lech Walensa started Solidarity in Gdansk's Church dedicated to her memory.) This daughter-in-law is clearly familiar with the writings by Continental visionary writers. The text that is initially produced is more German than English in both vocabulary and in handwriting and causes great difficulties for its second scribe, who may well be the first male and English scribe to indite that text. That had similarly been Birgitta's practice, to write out her visions in Swedish on patched, hand-sewn, pieces of Sienese paper, then to have them be written fair, in Latin, as fine illuminated manuscripts upon vellum by a team of male ecclesiasts in her household. That practice in turn was adopted most certainly by the illiterate Catherine of Siena, who was awarded Birgitta of Sweden's editor, Alfonso of Jaen, by the Pope, in 1373, and whose team of secretaries included a woman as well as men. It was also likely adopted by Margery of Lynn.

One further quarrel I have with Lynn Staley's otherwise excellent book is that she feels Margery's Jerusalem pilgrimage is a fiction, culled from pilgrim writings (I have heard Sister Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., make the same assertion), and that even her presence in Rome is dubious. It was -and is - the practice of pilgrims to turn to the authority of the Book and of books when travelling (I see this today in Florence where tourists have their heads so buried in their guidebooks that they do not look about them). Where Lynn Staley says that Margery does not give us Rome, I disagree. The English College, where Margery stayed until she was evicted, is cheek by jowl to the building in which St Birgitta died and which became St Birgitta's Church. St Birgitta herself had been evicted from another nearby building owned by a Cardinal with a hagioscope looking onto the altar of San Damaso. It is most clear that Margery travelled in Birgitta's footsteps and visited the room itself in which Birgitta died, in the Piazza Farnese, as I in turn did, and then on to Bethlehem and Calvary, visited by Birgitta the year before her death, as I in turn did, and that she even talked with Birgitta's Flemish maidservant Katherine, who was, in fact, a witness at the Processus or trial for Birgitta's canonization and whose moving testimony I have read in parchment pages in both Stockholm and in Rome.

I recommend this book highly for its placement of Margery Kempe's Book within a landscape of religious - and gender - dissent. But I beg to differ and to dissent from its thesis. I see Margery's Book as seeking and even gaining authorization from, for instance, Birgitta of Sweden's Revelationes, and from Julian of Norwich's own scribal acts, first twenty years following her 1373 vision (the year of Birgitta's death), then perhaps in 1413, at the time that Margery talked with her. Eventually Margery, the author of the Book is admitted to the prestigious Lynn Guild of the Trinity. That admission may well be because of her authorship of her Book which mirrors the Revelationes, a work already deeply revered in Scandinavia, Poland, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Italy, all places with which Lynn and Norwich traded.

Lynn Staley has also published an excellent teaching edition of The Book of Margery Kempe. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1996. TEAMS/Medieval Institute Publications. ISBN 1-879288-72-9. viii+255 pp. Words and phrases are glossed in footnotes to pages, notes and glossary are given at end of book.

Ambrose Tinsley, O.S.B. A Neighbour Kind and Known: The Spirituality of Julian of Norwich. Dublin: The Columba Press, 1997. ISBN 1 85607 199 5. 160 pp.

This book arrived today, August 25, 1997, and was given to me, by way of the nuns of the Comunità dei figli di Dio, by Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., and I read it walking back from Mass through the olive groves above Florence. Reading it, the tears were running down my cheeks, for I was remembering Father Ambrose and Sister Anna Maria and myself discoursing on this then 'not yet performed' book that Christmas in Ireland. My mind was filled with Edith Stein's play about Ambrose and Augustine, and about the Carmina Gadelica and St Patrick's Breastplate, 'I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trinity'. It was one of those moments in which the world becomes bound back together with the Creator, Ireland, Israel, France, Germany, Italy, England, America, linked across vast distances by its monks and nuns in prayer, its cracks repaired, its tottering righted, into a glorious dance of poise and grace and love.

What is special about this study by Father Ambrose Tinsley, O.S.B., is his Benedictinism, which resonates with Julian's own contemplative use of scripture in profound ways. He has not written an academic study. It is a monastic book. He has not written a book only for the intellect. It is a book for the soul. It is a delight. He is not afraid to give personal stories that illustrate Julian's text, bridging the gap between the fourteenth and the twentieth centuries, making her our neighbour, and a kind and known one at that.

As a scholar I would say that that particular passage used for the book's title is likely a post-Agincourt interpolation by a Syon nun into Julian's text - for St John of Beverley, the 'neighbour kind and known' of the text only came into prominence with Henry V's devotion to that saint and to Syon Abbey. He does not really fit the sequence of David, Peter, Magdalene, of great saints who were also great sinners, and is wrenched into the one list Julian gives of saints. Another qualification I would make is that Julian studies are not helped by the cast-in-concrete acceptance of the Short Text as early, the Long Text as late, with the Westminster Text not even considered, especially when that particular manuscript is the one which has remained in its Catholic context, being owned by Westminster Cathedral, and before that, having connections with Syon Abbey.

But the amount of dross is very small, and the gold infinite, for Father Ambrose draws upon the well of Scripture to illustrate that of Julian, showing them to be the same.

Sheila Upjohn. Why Julian Now: A Voyage of Discovery. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977. ISBN 0-232-52217-0. 132 pp.

This is an excellent, popular book, similar to the author's earlier In Search of Julian of Norwich, in both of which the author studies Julian's text in its context and in our own with sensitivity and wisdom. In In Search of Julian Sheila Upjohn had dared to rush in where academic Julian scholars would fear to tread, and had bravely discussed the execution of John Litester, King of the Commons, in the Peasants' Revolt and the Bishop of Norwich's celebration of that event by the commissioning of a polyptych of the Crucifixion. One yearns now for a study of Julian against the backdrop of Norwich paintings and Norwich architecture fashioned during her lifetime. Indeed Sheila Upjohn begins this book with the desire for whiskey overborn by her discovery and love for Norwich's glorious roof bosses unfolding the Bible story and remarks about how remarkable it was that Norwich in one short span of time produced such glory for God. Even through such horrors as the Black Death and the Peasants' Revolt.

Both books by Sheila Upjohn use paintings by the Australian artist Alan Oldfield on their covers, while yet another of his paintings, the one used on this Website, hangs in St Gabriel's Chapel at All Hallows Convent, Ditchingham, in the Gatehouse of which Sheila Upjohn composed this book. Julian, Alan and Sheila make the world as small and as glorious as a hazel nut in one's pocket, on the palm of one's hand. One error leaped at me. Sheila Upjohn fell for the modern cliché, the Renaissance fallacy, that the Middle Ages thought the world was flat, p. 10. But the Middle Ages, including Julian's own King Richard II, who is portrayed with the round orb of the world, Jerusalem's cross at its top, and Julian herself, knew that world to be round, but nevertheless small in comparision to the Universe and to God who created them all. I mentioned this fallacy on the Internet, on a Medieval Studies List, asking how we could go about correcting modern misconceptions of the Middle Ages. And overnight we had a book in the making with chapters on misconceptions on the flat/round earth, on chastity belts, on Jews, and much else. However, Sheila Upjohn's page 10 fallacy becomes the truth of her pages 131-132, where the astronauts look upon the small and beloved blue marble - just as had, fourteen centuries centuries before Julian, Cicero described that scene in the Somnium Scipionis, from whence Boethius took it for his Consolation of Philosophy, a book which functioned in the Middle Ages as best seller and as medicine for the soul, just as does today Julian of Norwich's book of the Showing of Love for our troubled times.

Alan Oldfield, 'Revelations of Divine Love', 1987, St Gabriel's Chapel. Reproduced by kind permission of the Friends of Julian of Norwich and the All Hallows Convent, Ditchingham.

I pick up the book again and read a chapter, each chapter being a voyage of discovery, imposing as it were Dante upon Julian, for Julian does not travel but remains in her anchorhold. They have lovely titles, these chapters, these islands in space/time, such as: 'Black Holes and Double Vision', 'Dark Forest', 'Adam's Old Shirt', 'The Ladies' Room'. The chapter 'Descend Lower' is especially finely written, and an excellent discourse for us today, a means for us, through Julian, to seek God in our soul. It reminds one of Robert Llewelyn's With Pity, not with Blame and J. Neville Ward's Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy.

Sheila Upjohn not only has written these two books about Julian, she has also wrought a play, and, most successfully of all, though anonymously, translated Julian for Robert Llewelyn's Enfolded in Love, 1980. Her familiarity, her 'homeliness' with Julian's text, is bred from her deep knowledge of the Lady Julian's words, one women transmitting another women's text, from the Middle into the Modern Age, making them one.

Books and the Internet seem at odds with each other. But I came by my copy of this autographed book through the Internet. I have never met Sheila Upjohn though Father Michael Mclean urged me many years ago in Norwich's Cathedral Close to do so. I heard on Sister-L of Barbara O'Cleirig going to hear Sheila Upjohn speak and begged her to tell me about it. She did and sent me this book. I have not met Barbara O'Cleirig either but we have held in our hands the same book, in England, in Canada, in Italy, a book which gives us Julian in a hazelnutshell. And then Sister Ritamary Bradley asked me to review it. And because Sister Ritamary Bradley has also given me a copy of her book I review that as well.

Rosalynn Voaden. God's Words, Women's Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries. York: York Medieval Press, 1999. Available from Boydell and Brewer. ISBN 0 9529734 2 1

Taking Birgitta of Sweden and Margery Kempe, Rosalynn Voaden sets their texts within the discourse concerning the 'Discernment of Spirits'. She opens the book with the negativity concerning women in Christianity, rather than observing positive qualities. Following that, she discusses Birgitta of Sweden mainly through materials in Middle English, Roger Ellis' Early English Text Society edition of her Liber Celestis and through Alfonso of Jaen's Epistola solitarii ad reges, given in its Norfolk Middle English in her Appendix. (In the body of material on Discernment of Spirits it was being said that intellectual visions were of the greatest worth, imaginative ones less so, physical ones, such as Julian's Bleeding Crucifix or her dream of the burning stench of the devil at the bottom end of the scale.) Voaden describes Birgitta's success as due to her skilfull use of the Discernment of Spirits and recourse to Spiritual Directors, such as Magister Mathias and Alfonso of Jaen and the two Peters Olavi. Voaden next evaluates Margery Kempe's comparative failure, due to her disobedience to her confessors.

This book is valuable for its firm anchoring on an actual text, in this instant Alfonso of Jaen's Epistola solitarii. Despite some references to Julian of Norwich, Rosalynn Voaden fails to see that Julian's text is likewise seeped in this material concerning the Discernment of Spirits, and from direct contact with it, the ending of both the Long and the Short Texts being taken from the Revelationes and the Epistola solitarii, both of which were present in Norwich in Cardinal Adam Easton's hands while he was writing the Defensorium Sanctae Birgittae at exactly the same time that Julian was penning her Long Text Showing of Love. Had Rosalynn Voaden's text dealt with the three, rather than only the two, women, it would have been truly excellent and productive.

Rosalynn Voaden, Ed. Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late-Medieval England. Cambridge: Brewer, 1996. ISBN 0 85991 425 9

Again an excellent book but with the same curious flaw, the exclusion of Julian of Norwich. Kathrhyn Kerby-Fulton writes on Hildegard of Bingen in English manuscripts, Nicholas Watson on the Middle English of Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls, Rosalynn Voaden on Mechtild of Hackeborn in England, Roger Ellis and Joan Isobel Friedman on Birgitta of Sweden in England, the first on the Rule, the second on the Revelationes, Janette Dillon discussing holy women and their confessors with Margery Kempe, Denise L Despres, the Orcherd of Syon, Diane Watt, on Elizabeth Barton as influenced by Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena. Ian Johnson in general discussing holy women and their texts.

Despite the apophatic vanishing act of Julian of Norwich in these texts they are worthwhile reading for Julian scholars. The type of scholarship carried out in them is textual and historical, densely packed with primary information, rather than flimsy secondary theory. Moreover they demonstrate the powerful 'clout' the distaff side had in this period in the form of books by and for women; likewise the transcending of language barriers with continental women writers/authors being presented in Middle English texts for English women and men readers. The book and the essays also manifest the great cooperation taking place across language and gender differences to bring about this 'textual community' of women's revealed theology. Such a presence of women's books shall be not seen again until the Victorians and then those books shall be secularized as novels, rather than the talking of and with God.

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