The earliest English book known to be by a woman came from a sealed cell
In May 1373 a 30-year-old woman in Norwich, given the last rites, saw a series of visions of Christ and then recovered. She spent decades reflecting on them, much of it walled into a cell beside St Julian's Church. Her Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest surviving English work attributed to a woman.
Almost nothing is known about her life before the visions, not even whether Julian was her real name; it may have been borrowed from her church, though it was also a medieval girl's name. Her writings suggest she was born in 1343 or late 1342, which means she was six when the Black Death reached Norwich, then England's second city after London. Some scholars think her tender language about God as mother reflects experience of raising children, and the authors of Julian Reconsidered concluded she was a young widowed mother, never a nun.
The illness struck at 30. On 8 May 1373 a curate held a crucifix at the foot of her bed; over the following hours she experienced 15 visions and a 16th the next night, recovering on 13 May. She wrote a short account soon afterwards and, perhaps from the early 1390s, a far longer theological exploration revised over decades, dropping personal details such as her gender along the way. Hers was the first major vision recorded by an Englishwoman in about 200 years.
Becoming an anchoress meant a ceremony resembling a funeral, with psalms from the Office of the Dead, after which the door was sealed for life. Yet she was no hermit in spirit: townspeople supported her, sought her counsel, and remembered her in wills. The earliest, from 20 March 1394, left 12 shillings to Julian anakorite, and a 1404 will also mentions a companion named Sarah. Around 1414 the mystic Margery Kempe came to her for advice and recorded the visit. The popular picture of Julian keeping a cat traces back to a medieval rulebook for anchoresses, the Ancrene Riwle.
The Reformation kept her book out of print. The Benedictine monk Serenus de Cressy first published the long version in 1670, and a British Museum manuscript edited by Grace Warrack in 1901 brought her wide attention. She is now regarded as a major Christian mystic and theologian.
Source: Julian of Norwich
