Julian of Norwich: The Influence of Late-Medieval Devotional Compilations (review)

There has been a surge of Julian scholarship recently: a new edition of her Revelation of Divine Love by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (2006), and a number of book-length studies and collections of critical essays. This scholarship tends to fall into two general categories: theorized readings, focusing on issues such as gender and corporeality, and more historicized, codicological readings, excavating the ecclesiastical context of Julian’s Revelation (is it to be dated pre-or post-Archbishop Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409?) and interpreting the variations between the short and long texts, and between different manuscripts. Elisabeth Dutton’s book falls clearly within the latter category of approach. Building on essays by Vincent Gillespie, and more recent studies by Marleen Cré and Annie Sutherland, among others, Dutton seeks to contextualize the Revelation within a late fourteenth-and early fifteenth-century culture of devotional compilation, examining the possible influence of these compilations on the form and structure of Julian’s text, and on the way in which it mediates auctoritas.

The main devotional compilations selected for extended discussion in this study are Lyf of Soule (c. 1375–1400), Book to a Mother (c. 1370–80), Speculum Christiani (c. 1390–1425), The Chastising of God’s Children (c. 1391–1408), and Contemplations of the Dread and Love of God (c. 1375– 1425). Dutton offers a useful overview of these somewhat understudied texts, skillfully tracing the mechanisms by which they assemble and synthesize various sources in the process of reiterating the catechetical materials of Archbishop Pecham’s pastoral “syllabus” of 1281.

Points of possible comparison are identified between these compilations and Julian’s Revelation: in Chapter 1, Dutton examines the ordinatio (the arrangement of material) of the short and long texts of the Revelation, and views the table of contents and chapter headings of the latter in relation to similar organizational devices in Chastising and other early fifteenth-century compilations. She argues that these organizational devices (the table of contents probably authored by Julian in her judgment, the chapter headings far less certainly so) encourage the reader to adopt a selective and meditative approach to the text: to participate in a “bit” reading, in effect, whereas the absence of similar textual divisions in the Amherst manuscript of the short text suggests the expectation of a more extended, consecutive reading.

In addition to relating at the level of ordinatio, Dutton maintains that the Revelation also shows similarities to the devotional compilation in the textual markers that it uses to introduce and guide interpretation, and in the ways in which it presents source material. Adapting compilers’ techniques of citation, Julian cites Christ’s voice as though he were an auctor (“he seyth”), and the Revelation as though it were a source text, so that the Revelation “gives the appearance of compiling itself ” (84).

An appraisal of the roles played by voices in compilation texts carries into chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 uses the dialogic structure of Lyf of Soule, in which catechetical lists are arranged around questions that “Sir” puts to “Friend,” as a springboard for considering Julian’s Revelation as a dialogic text. The ways in which this dialogue is formulated and the nature of the voices in play can be construed variously. Dutton identifies ongoing interlocutions between the teachings of the holy church and the divine voice, and between Julian at the time of her visions and twenty years on, while also making extensive use of Nicholas Watson’s designation of the long text as an extended dialogue between the voices of “Julian-the-inspired-visionary” and “Julian-the-questing-believer.” Dutton sensitively explores the way in which the more questioning of the two voices within the Revelation is made available to readers for their own use and appropriation. In addition, she shows how the mise-en-page of one of the Sloane manuscripts of the long text supports this dialogic understanding, displaying the respective voices of the Revelation by means...