A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman

A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman is the shorter of the two accounts Julian of Norwich left of the showings she received in May 1373, when, at thirty and a half years old and so ill that she had been given the last rites, she watched a crucifix held before her face begin to bleed. Over the course of roughly a day she received sixteen revelations of Christ's Passion and of God's love. The text is known from a single mid-fifteenth-century manuscript, which introduces it as a vision shown "to a devout woman, and her name is Julian, who is a recluse at Norwich." It is the earliest known book written in English by a woman, and it is distinct from the far longer work, usually called A Revelation of Love, that Julian produced after years of further reflection on the same events. The short version is the nearer witness: it still carries the details of the sickroom, her mother standing at the bedside, the cleric who laughed when she said the cross had bled.

Julian begins by recalling three things she had asked of God: to share in Christ's suffering through a vivid recollection of the Passion, to be brought near death by a bodily sickness at thirty, and to receive the three wounds of contrition, compassion and longing for God. The showings answer that prayer. She sees the blood run down under the crown of thorns, and in the same moment is shown something small, the size of a hazelnut, lying in her palm, and understands that it is everything that is made, held in being only because God loves it. From there the work moves between the physical detail of Christ's dying and the meaning she is given alongside it: that he suffered gladly and would suffer more, that sin is the cause of all pain yet all shall be well, that God's attitude toward those who fall is not blame but pity and welcome. Julian interprets as she goes, testing what she sees against the teaching of the church and insisting that she is no teacher but only a messenger. She also asks plainly whether, because she is a woman, she ought to keep silent about God's goodness, and answers that she should not.

The short text matters because it shows what Julian saw before she had fully worked out what it meant. The great parable of the lord and the servant and the extended teaching on Christ as mother are not yet here; what is here is the raw material of a spirituality built on the conviction that God is never angry, that fear and shame are not from him, and that love was his meaning. Read beside the longer work, it lets a reader watch a theologian being formed by her own experience.

Who should read this: those meeting Julian for the first time and wanting her account in its most immediate form, and those who already know the long text and want to see what she later chose to add and remove. It is not the place to go for Julian's mature theology of sin and the motherhood of God, nor for anyone looking for a systematic treatise rather than a reported vision.