The Writings of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love (review)

The premise of this excellent edition of the works of Julian of Norwich is to make available a Middle English edition of the works that will be of value to both scholars and general readers. This is indeed a major achievement, since the editors themselves note the difficulties presented by the manuscripts from which they are working and the complexity of Julian's prose.

The introduction to the editions is at once satisfyingly detailed, yet easily understandable, and this is a particularly important feature since interest in Julian's writings exists in both scholarly and general spheres. A clear explanation of the two works gives us a taste of the generic conventions found within each of the texts, and alludes to the particularly topical scholarly interest in the 'two Julians' – Julian the creature and Julian the interpreter. The editors indicate a companion volume will consider the theology and composition history of the works, the language and style, and its modern relevance, and here in this volume we can see the beginnings of this research.

The early readership of Julian's writings is necessarily speculative as the editors suggest the likely possibility that Julian wrote the works for a small community of religiously-minded individuals. It is clear from her work that she may well have intended the works to be better known, but its circulation seems not to have reflected this desire. Of particular interest here is the later reception of A Revelation of Love. The fifteenth-century manuscripts 'juxtapose Julian's words and the words of others with a familiarity born of closeness of time, finding no need to treat her thought as unique and taking no special interest in her as an individual. By contrast, the seventeenth-century manuscripts, both of them probably copied by nuns determined to retain an identity as English Catholics, treat A Revelation with the reverence reserved for a heritage that is precious partly because it has so nearly been lost' (p. 14). A generic comparison is raised briefly between Julian's works and that of Mechthild of Magdeburg, insofar as each is a complex visionary experience, yet it seems that in the reception history there are other similarities that could be noted. The issue of female authorship, understandably not engaged with by the editors, will undoubtedly be an important feature of future research, as prominence of the author as a female is frequently overshadowed by the spiritual content of the work, as was the case with Mechthild's Flowing Light of the Godhead.

The most controversial feature of these editions is the editors' decision to create a synthetic edition of A Revelation of Love. A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, extant in only one fifteenth-century manuscript, is understandably less complex to edit, but A Revelation, extant in fragments in a fifteenth-century manuscript, and then complete in two seventeenth-century manuscripts, poses significant challenges to the editors. Editorial decisions are never easy, and yet are a frequently overlooked intellectual component in the finished published work. Pleasingly here the editors explain in great detail the reasons behind their decision to create a synthetic edition, that is, an edition combining all of the extant manuscripts.

While the editors acknowledge the trend in manuscript editing of mouvance, they state that 'a synthetic approach to the manuscript evidence results in a more intellectually sophisticated representation of the text than the choice of either complete manuscript' (p. 28). This, I feel, would not be contested by anyone. Indeed each surviving manuscript does not, on its own, offer as much as a combined version might, but this does not necessarily require the editors to create what is essentially a 'new' text. The concern raised by Paul Zumthor, Derek Pearsall and other scholars about the critical edition is its implicit...