The involvement of women in literature during the Middle Ages wasn’t limited to strictly reading the works of others—women were also telling their own stories through writing. Some women worked with the help of scribes, while others documented their own lives themselves. At this time, much of the literature being produced had strong religious ties—many of the educated female readers were nuns. One of the earlier female writers of the Middle Ages, Julian of Norwich, wrote about her own spiritual experiences, describing her personal relationship with Christ while also documenting the lives of women during the time period.
Julian of Norwich was an anchoress in the 14thcentury—meaning, she vowed to live in a cell for her entire life, concentrating only on prayer and God. She lived inside the one room for an estimated 30 years, never leaving, and only getting a semblance of the outside world when it came time to counsel people through her window. There’s little evidence to what her life before her anchorship was, as the only details we receive are from her books—nobody is sure of her birth name, her family members, or her birthplace. The details given from her books, however, allow us to get a good picture of her outlook on her life; Revelations of Divine Love describes her experiences with the divine while deathly ill. She’s also thought to be the first female author of a book written in English (Montgomery).
One of the interesting elements of Julian of Norwich’s accounts on her experiences with God is that she compares Him to a mother—in Chapter 59, she says,
“And thus is Jesu our mother in kind of our first making, and he is our very mother in grace by taking of our kind made. All the fair working and all the sweet kindly offices of dearworthy motherhood is impropered to the second person, for in him we have this goodly will, whole and safe without end, both in kind and in grace, of his own proper goodness. I understood three manner of beholdings of motherhood in God. The first is ground of our kind making, the second is taking of our kind, and there beginnith the motherhood of grace, the third is motherhood in working. And therein is a forthspreading by the same grace of length and breadth, of high and of deepness without end. And all is one love” (Julian 438).
I found this to be incredibly interesting, and important to the legacy of this text—the first woman author of a book written in English is explicitly comparing God, who is historically presented as a man, as a mother. In describing Jesus as a woman, while keeping the same male pronouns, Julian is giving a man feminine qualities and introducing the concept to her readers, who, at the time, were religious figures. Julian’s writings tell us of a woman who believed that God meant hope, love, and equality—something she came to believe while locked in her single room.
Work Cited
Julian of Norwich. “The Norton Anthology of English Literature.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, by Stephen Greenblatt et al., W.W. Norton, 2018, p. 438.
Montgomery, Linda. “The Anchoress, Julian Of Norwich.” CBE International, Priscilla Papers, 31 July 1994, www.cbeinternational.org/resources/article/priscilla-papers/anchoress-julian-norwich.