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

THE SOUL A CITY

MARGERY AND JULIAN

St Birgitta gives her Revelations to Christendom
Revelationes, Ghotan: Lübeck, 1492

{Margery Kempe visited Julian of Norwich perhaps before 1413 and later reported their conversations, thus providing for us not only the early written texts we now have, the Amherst, Westminster, Paris Texts, but also an Oral Text, spoken just prior to the time that the 1413 exemplar to the Amherst Text was being written. Margery's Manuscript thus allows us to go back to fifteenth-century East Anglia with, as it were, a tape-recorder. Both the Amherst and the Butler-Bowden Manuscripts, of Julian's Showings and Margery's Book, are in the British Library. This essay transcribes directly from the manuscript text in the hard copy form of the booklet; on the Internet, however, modernising the letters for thorn, yoch and the long-tailed median s. The foliation of the manuscripts is cited, preceded by A for Amherst (the Julian Showings Manuscript in the British Library, Additional 37,790), W for Westminster (the Julian Showings Manuscript owned by Westminster Cathedral and on loan to Westminster Abbey), P for Paris (the Julian Showings Manuscript in the Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Anglais 40), and M for The Book of Margery Kempe (the Butler Bowden Manuscript, now British Library, Additional 61,823). Letters and words rubricated here are so in the manuscripts. The hard copy booklet presents the original texts in larger type, modern explanatory material in smaller type.

Margery has her scribes tell us (M, folio 21)

Julian's 1413/1450 Short Text concludes with an essay on the 'Discerning of Spirits'. Indeed, if Julian of Norwich had been counseled by Cardinal Adam Easton of Norwich Cathedral Priory, who knew Bishop Hermit Alfonso of Jaén and his Epistola Solitarii, and who had together with him defended Birgitta of Sweden's canonisation, the Norwich anchoress certainly would have been 'expert' in the discerning of such spiritual matters and such revelatory showings, about which both the Cardinal and the Hermit Bishop had written. This was a matter, at this time when the pros and cons were being debated concerning women's visionary writings, of the greatest topical concern.

Margery and Julian's conversation continues

Again, we hear in this counsel the precepts written by Adam Easton and by Alfonso of Jaén (and by the Cloud Author in his various Epistles), concerning the discerning of spirits in connection with the validation of the visionary writings of Birgitta of Sweden, whose 1391 Canonisation was to be confirmed at the 1419 Council of Constance despite the 1415 objections of Jean Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, contained in his work, De probatione spirituum. That material had already been given in William Flete's Remedies Against Temptations. And William Flete had left England after writing that work to become the Augustine Hermit at Leccetto associated with St Catherine of Siena. In the passage we also hear Julian's own beloved phrase, 'euyne cristen', and we can clearly recognise the echoes to the concluding section concerning the 'Discernment of Spirits', in the Julian corpus unique to the Amherst Short Text (A114v-115), and which may perhaps be her last words:

Julian continues in her conversation with Margery, and is now reported in direct speech:

That image of the storm-tossed sea reflects that in the Cloud Author's A Pistle of Discretion of Stirings (EETS 231:64.7-23).

Julian next cites her authorities, Paul and Jerome, to Margery, who perhaps misremembers one of them:

The only possible corresponding passage in Jerome's writings occurs in the heavily philosophical and theological Epistula 84, Ad Pammachium et Oceanum, 'Iungamus gemitus, lacrimas copulemus, ploremus et conuertamur ad dominum, qui fecit nos; non expectemus diaboli paenitentiam. Vana est illa praesumptio et in profundum gehennae trahens; hic au quaritur uita aut amittitur'.(1) Perhaps Margery here misremembers and Julian was rather speaking of Augustine's account of Monica's tears, Confessions 3.12, recalled also by Birgitta's vision in the Holy Sepulchre concerning the fate of her son, Charles.(2)

Julian next discusses evil:

There is a parallel in Julian/Margery's wording here to the commentaries upon the Psalms Qui habitat and Bonum est, attributed to Walter Hilton and both present in the Westminster Cathedral Julian manuscript. Has Julian intended not 'city' but 'seat' in W101v, P116 and 144-145, A112, or has Margery misheard the word? But perhaps Julian deliberately plays upon the likeness of the two words. She may be using the concept expressed throughout Luke 14 where guests need to exercise humility to enter the Kingdom of God, a kingdom that is within us.

With that last comment, we realise that we certainly are listening to reported speech and that Dame Julian addressed Dame Margery, her 'evyn cristen', even as 'Sister'. The discussion of evil reminds one more of William Flete's Remedies Against Temptations than it does of Julian's 'sin as nought'. Interestingly, this phrasing concerning the soul as a city is closer to that of the Sixteenth Showing in the 1393/1580 Paris Manuscript (P143v-145v) and the 1413/1450s Amherst Manuscript (A112), which both give vestiges of the Lord and the Servant Parable, than it is to the earlier version, the Fourteenth Showing, present in the Westminster (W101-102v) and Paris (P116-119) Manuscripts.

This can be compared to the 1368/1500s Westminster Manuscript' more subtle account concerning Julian's vision of the Kingdom of Heaven, the City of God, within one's own soul (W101-102v):

The Paris Manuscript gives first the Westminster Manuscript version as part of the Fourteenth Showing, greatly expanding it, while noting that it is to be spoken of again later in the Sixteenth Showing (P116-119). In that Sixteenth Showing it is given just as in the Amherst Manuscript, where it appears to be in the form of Julian's consolatory sermon for those who would have felt lost and bewildered by the subtlety of the earlier, far more precocious account (P144-145). W101v-102v and P116-119 are now excised from the text. But elements of it can be traced elsewhere in Julian's words to Margery, especially where they all speak of 'communynge & da=liance therwith' (W101-101v), 'comenyng and dalyance ther with' (P118v.5-6), (though in Amherst these words, 'daliaunce'. 'commones', sadly occur only in connection with the evil spirit and the soul, A114v.31-115.1), and Margery's use of these same words for her soul talk with Julian: 'the holy dalyawns that the ankres & this creature haddyn be comownyng in the lofe of owyr lord Jhesu crist'.

Of interest, too, is that the Amherst Manuscript contains not only Julian's Showings but also Jan Van Ruusbroec's Sparkling Stone, translated into Middle English. Both Julian's Sixteenth Showing (P146) and the Sparkling Stone make use of Revelation 2.17. The Amherst Manuscript (A118), gives the text from Ruusbroec's Sparkling Stone discussing the Apocalypse of St John as the 'Book of the Secrets of God' addressed 'To him that overcometh', in which 'the spirit says in the Apocalyps vincenti says he schalle gyffe hym a lytil white stone and in it a newe name the whiche no man knowes but he that takys it'. This is material Julian well could have shared with Margery.

Julian continues:

Margery then ends her account by saying:

John Milton and George Eliot have spoken of books as souls and cities as souls. Julian and Margery inscribe within the pages of their books their souls and their cities, black-clad Julian in her anchorhold in Norwich inscribing within that small space all the cosmos and its creator while Margery in her white pilgrim robes trudges to Jerusalem and back.

Notes

1. CETEDOC CLCLT, Universite de Louvain, compact disk.

2. Saint Bride and Her Book: Birgitta of Sweden's Revelations, trans. Julia Bolton Holloway, pp. 113-119.

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