By: Siena Di Sera
In 1373, Julian of Norwich wrote the first known book in English by a woman. This book was called Revelations of Divine Love and outlines her experiences as a religious anchoress in the medieval Christian church. In her work, she manipulates the dichotomy of gender through her lens of asceticism and divine visions. Her theology of Christ gained through her visions and explored in her text empowers and validates women’s presence as religious leaders. Christianity opened a door to Julian as an anchoress for her to assert authority in matters of theology, and gender.
https://qspirit.net/julian-norwich-mother-jesus/ 
http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/medieval/julian/anchoress.htm
Cherry, Kittredge. “Julian of Norwich: Celebrating Mother Jesus.” Qspirit, 8 May 2019, qspirit.net/julian-norwich-mother-jesus/.
“University of Saint Thomas-Saint Paul.” University of Saint Thomas-Saint Paul, 2003, courseweb.stthomas.edu/medieval/julian/anchoress.htm.
Blurring the gender dichotomy
A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich is written completely in the first person. It begins with Julian explaining that when she was thirty years old she became sick for three days, embracing her presumed death on the fourth day. Here Julian uses the physical body as a vehicle into the divine by writing her experiences on the brink of death. This propelled Julian of Norwich, as a woman, into the realm of spiritual knowledge and teachings reserved almost completely for men at the time.
Her visions of Jesus as a sorrowful and physically suffering caregiver contain interesting connotations about gender. In the article “In No Sense a Vision”, Jennifer Thompson writes that Julian of Norwich “redeems the body by writing extensively of the dichotomy between the body and the soul, but insisting upon their ultimate fusion in Christ”. This dichotomy between body and soul has very profound implications on gender. Characteristics about women in medieval times were centered around aspects of the female body, mostly negative. For example, women were seen as “leaky vessels” due to menstruation and lactation. Julian plays with these characteristics of women even as she denies the gendered soul or God. Though neither Jesus nor God are specifically called female and primarily maintain male pronouns, their roles as caregiver and creator, respectively, throw them into female sphere.
The direct address to the readers of A Book of Showings informs leaders that this is an account of a first person experience with God. The fact that no man can affirm nor deny her visions lends them to spiritual authority on matters of the soul. Julian of Norwich in her work is a woman of reason, speaking clearly and primarily unemotionally about matters of death, creation, and the Trinity. Julian’s work is a protofeminist embodiment of the social construction of gender, equating God to a mother and Jesus as a human sufferer, leaking blood from his wounds.