Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Mystic & Anchoress
May 8 · d. 1416
also known as Dame Julian
Julian of Norwich was an English anchoress, enclosed in a cell against the church of St Julian in Conisford, Norwich, where four wills name her between 1394 and 1416. In May 1373, gravely ill at thirty, she received sixteen showings and spent the next twenty years and more writing what she had seen. Her Revelation of Love is the earliest surviving book in English known to have been written by a woman. She was never canonized; the Church of England, the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America commemorate her on 8 May.
When Julian of Norwich was thirty years old and a half, she fell so ill that everyone in the room expected her to die. She lay three days and three nights. On the fourth night she took the last rites of the Church and, in her own words, "weened not to have lived till day." Her curate was sent for to be at her ending. By the time he came she had set her eyes and could not speak. He held up a crucifix before her face and said, I have brought thee the Image of thy Master and Saviour: look thereupon and comfort thee therewith. Her sight began to fail. The chamber went dark around her as if it were night, and the only light she could see was on the cross.
And then, suddenly, all her pain was taken from her, and she was as whole as she had ever been.
What came next she called the showings: sixteen of them, in one day. She had asked God, years before, for three gifts, and one of them was exactly this, a sickness in youth so near to death that she would learn what dying was. She had asked for three wounds too, which she named the wound of very contrition, the wound of kind compassion, and the wound of steadfast longing toward God. She had asked, and she was answered, and the answering nearly killed her.
In one of the showings, God put a small thing in the palm of her hand, round as a ball, no bigger than a hazelnut. She looked at it and thought: what may this be? And the answer came, "It is all that is made." Everything, the whole world, the sea and the cities and every person in them, lying in her hand small enough to close her fingers over. She marvelled that it did not simply fall into nothing, being so little. And she was told why it lasts: "It lasteth, and ever shall, for that God loveth it." Three things she saw in that small thing: that God made it, that God loves it, and that God keeps it.
She was also shown the hardest question there is, and she asked it plainly. Why did God, who saw everything coming, not stop sin before it started? Then, she thought, all should have been well. The answer she was given did not explain sin away. It said that sin had to be, and then it said, three times over, that all shall be well: "It behoved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." She wrote that the words were said full tenderly, showing no manner of blame to her, nor to any that shall be saved.
Julian did not publish this. She sat with it. Twenty years after the showings, save three months, she was still being taught inwardly about a single parable she had been given. Fifteen years and more after the showings, still turning them over, she asked what her Lord had meant by the whole of it, and was answered: "Wouldst thou learn thy Lord's meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was His meaning."
By 1394 she was living as an anchoress, sealed into a small cell built against the wall of St Julian's church in Norwich, and she stayed there for the rest of her recorded life. It sounds like a tomb, and the rite that enclosed her was deliberately shaped like a burial. But she had a window onto the street, and people came to it. In about 1413, a woman named Margery Kempe travelled from King's Lynn to that window because she had been told to, and because nobody else would tell her whether her own weeping and visions came from God or from the devil. She stayed several days. Julian, Margery reports, told her the Holy Ghost never moves a thing against charity, and that she should set all her trust in God and not fear what the world says to her.
She had a household too, small as it was: a maid named Sarah, and later a maid named Alice, who went on to become an anchoress herself.
The last document that names Julian is a will from September 1416, leaving twenty shillings to "Julian reclus a Norwich." She was about seventy-three. After that the record simply stops, and nobody knows the year she died. What she left behind was a book, and near the end of it she wrote what she had learned lying in the dark with a cross held up before her face: that before God ever made us, He loved us, and that this love was never slacked, and never shall be.
You have probably met the sentence before you met the woman: all shall be well. Notice where Julian found it. Not in a settled life but flat on her back at thirty, given the last rites, watching the room go dark. And notice what she did with it, which was to spend twenty years and more testing it rather than repeating it. She asked God the hardest question she had, why sin was not simply prevented, and she did not get an explanation; she got a promise, and she was told plainly that she would not be spared trouble, only that she would not be overcome. So when you reach for a comfort like this one, is it something you have tested against your own worst night, or something you are hoping to use instead of going through one?
Almost everything known about Julian's life comes from two places: her own book, and four wills. Outside those, the record is very nearly silent, and the silence is not a gap in the research but the state of the evidence.
Her book gives her the date and her age. The Long Text opens by saying the revelations were "shewed to a simple creature unlettered, the year of our Lord 1373, the Thirteenth day of May," and a later chapter says she was thirty years old and a half when the sickness came. Working backwards from that gives a birth in late 1342 or in 1343, which is how the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1910 and modern accounts both arrive at their dates; it is a calculation, not a record. The same book floors the writing: she says that "twenty years after the time of this Shewing, save three months" she was still receiving inward teaching, which puts at least part of the Long Text no earlier than 1393, and modern scholarship allows that she may have gone on elaborating it into the 1410s or 1420s.
The wills are the hard evidence, and in the strict documentary sense they are stronger than anything in the Revelation, because they are legal instruments naming her. Roger Reed, rector of St Michael Coslany, left 12 shillings to "Julian anakorite" on 20 March 1394. Thomas Edmund, a chantry priest, left her 12 pence on 19 May 1404 and 8 pence to her maid Sarah. John Plumpton left 40 pence on 24 November 1415, with a shilling each to her maid and to Alice, a former maid who had herself become an anchoress. Isabel Ufford, Countess of Suffolk, left 20 shillings to "Julian reclus a Norwich" on 26 September 1416. Together they establish an anchoress of that name at St Julian's, Conisford, supported by her neighbours across at least twenty-two years. A note in one manuscript adds that in 1413 she was "ȝitt on lyfe," yet alive.
Nothing names her after 1416, and modern scholarship accordingly says she died after 1416 rather than giving a year. A bequest of 1429 to an unnamed anchorite at St Julian's is sometimes read as evidence she survived to about eighty-seven; it may equally mean a successor had taken the cell, anchorholds attached to named churches being characteristically reused. No source settles it.
Two points are contested and should not be settled quietly. The first is whether she was a professed religious. The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia says she was "probably a Benedictine nun," an inference from the nearness of Carrow Priory, which held the patronage of St Julian's; some later scholars have argued the opposite, that because none of her books can be traced to a monastic library she is more likely to have been a laywoman, an anchoritic vocation being open to either. No document names her as a novice or a nun anywhere. The second is the date of the showings. The Long Text witnesses read 13 May; older scholarship reported that the readings differ and gave 8 or 14 May, and no source consulted here establishes which reading is prior. The 8 May kept by the Church of England, the Episcopal Church and the Lutheran churches is a commemorative choice made centuries later, not a manuscript date, and should never be described as the day of the showings.
There is no medieval devotion to Julian to trace. She was never canonized and never beatified, no cause has ever been opened, and there is no shrine with relics, no translation, no recorded burial place. What exists instead is a contemporary reputation, a long silence, and a modern recovery.
The recovery came through print and translation. Serenus de Cressy, an English Benedictine, printed the Long Text in 1670; Grace Warrack's translation of 1901, made from a manuscript copied by an exiled English Benedictine nun, is the form in which most English readers still meet her. Her transmission is worth naming for its own sake: the Long Text survives only because English Benedictine and Brigittine nuns living in continental exile kept copying it.
Her cell was demolished at the Reformation, stonework believed to be from it was recovered from the churchyard in 1906, and the church itself was almost destroyed by a direct hit on 27 June 1942. It was rebuilt and reopened in 1953, alone among five bombed Norwich churches, with a chapel set where the cell is believed to have stood. The building pilgrims visit today is a twentieth-century reconstruction on a medieval footprint. It operates now as the Julian Shrine, with a study centre and a guesthouse alongside; the Diocese of Norwich marked the 650th anniversary of the revelations in 2023. Two communities carry her name: the Order of Julian of Norwich, founded on 30 December 1985 in the Diocese of Connecticut, and the Julian Meetings, a network of lay contemplative-prayer groups begun in 1973 and numbering around 150 today, which says frankly that its name is honorific rather than a claim to her teaching.
Every quotation above comes from the Long Text of Julian's book, in Grace Warrack's 1901 modernized-English translation from British Library Sloane MS 2499, available in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
The illness, the curate and the crucifix, and the sudden lifting of pain: chapter III (https://ccel.org/ccel/julian/revelations.i.iii.html). The date of the showings, "a simple creature unlettered," and the three wounds: chapter II (https://ccel.org/ccel/julian/revelations.i.ii.html). The hazelnut, "It is all that is made," and the three properties: chapter V (https://ccel.org/ccel/julian/revelations.ii.ii.html). "It behoved that there should be sin" and "showing no manner of blame": chapter XXVII (https://ccel.org/ccel/julian/revelations.xiv.i.html). "Thou shalt not be overcome": chapter LXVIII (https://ccel.org/ccel/julian/revelations.xviii.ii.html). "Twenty years after the time of this Shewing, save three months," within the parable of the Lord and the Servant: chapter LI (https://ccel.org/ccel/julian/revelations.xvi.viii.html). "Love was His meaning," "fifteen years after, and more," and the love that was never slacked: chapter LXXXVI (https://ccel.org/ccel/julian/revelations.xviii.xx.html).
The words attributed to Julian in the Story are reported by Margery Kempe in The Book of Margery Kempe, Book I chapter 18, dictated in the 1430s about a visit of about 1413, and are given here in modernized form from the Middle English ("The Holy Gost mevyth nevyr a thing ageyn charité"; "Settyth al yowr trust in God and feryth not the langage of the world"), as transcribed from the TEAMS Middle English Texts edition at https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2012/05/what-julian-of-norwich-said-to-margery.html. They are Kempe's report, not Julian's attested speech.
For the wills, the 1413 manuscript note, and the modern commemorations: Wikipedia, "Julian of Norwich," and Julia Bolton Holloway's summaries of the Norwich Record Office wills at https://www.umilta.net/anchor.html and https://www.umilta.net/amherst.html. For the 1910 positions on her birth date, the variant May readings, and the rejection of her identification with Julian Lampet: Edmund Gardner, "Juliana of Norwich," Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08557a.htm. For the church fabric, the 1942 bombing and the 1953 rebuilding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Julian%27s,_Norwich.
Two things are attested nowhere at all: her family, and any marriage or children. The popular picture of a widowed mother bereaved by plague has no documentary support whatever.
Her caution has a context. Archbishop Arundel's Constitutions of 1409 restricted unlicensed vernacular exposition of Scripture and were read as suspicious of theological writing by women, and her own diocesan, Henry le Despenser, was zealous in burning Lollards. No source records Julian being investigated or censured; this is the weather she wrote in, not a persecution she survived.
Readings for a Monastic or Religious
Lamentations 3:22–33Psalm 1Hebrews 4:1–13 or Acts 2:42–47Mark 10:23–31
O God, your blessed Son became poor for our sake, and chose the Cross over the kingdoms of this world: Deliver us from an inordinate love of worldly things, that we, inspired by the devotion of your servant Julian of Norwich, may seek you with singleness of heart, behold your glory by faith, and attain to the riches of your everlasting kingdom, where we shall be united with our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.