Julian among the Books: Julian of Norwich's Theological Library by Julia Bolton Holloway (review)

This book contains ten chapters: 1. "The Westminster Manuscript,'' 2. "Julian's Showing in a Nutshell,'' 3. "Julian's Judaism,'' 4. "Julian's Benedictinism,'' 5. "Julian and Cardinal Adam Easton, OSB,'' 6. "Julian and The Cloud of Unknowing: Textual Communities and Gendered Audiences,'' 7. "Saints, Secretaries, Scribes, Supporters: Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena,'' 8. "The Amherst Manuscript,'' 9. "Julian and Margery: The Soul a City,'' and 10. "Brigittines and Benedictines.'' There are also seven beautifully produced color plates, numerous black-and-white images, two appendices, and a lengthy preface.

Julia Bolton Holloway is no stranger to scholars and friends of Julian of Norwich. In the course of a long and productive career she has published widely on devotional literature from the Middle Ages to the Victorian period and maintained a website that many have valued as a resource. The enticing title of the book and the publisher's blurb ("brings together innovative research on aspects of the Showing of Love, especially the Pan-European background of its manuscripts'') suggested to me that it would be a scholarly reflection on the intertextuality of Julian's book with perhaps some new insights from one who has read widely and thought hard about the topic for many years. Bolton Holloway is known not only for her learning but for her willingness to venture out on a limb with ideas and hypotheses that others would consider too daring. In Julian among the Books this latter is very much at the fore. This eclectic, idiosyncratic book, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, appears to be a collection of a variety of theories about Julian that couldn't get past the skeptical gatekeepers of university presses, but that Bolton Holloway nevertheless wanted to put forth for consideration.

The preface states that "This book about books is structured like a fugue in music, like an arabesque in art, like fractals in mathematics, repeating and reinforcing its points'' (xx), and that is an accurate description. It has primary themes that surface and resurface throughout the chapters, giving the book a somewhat rambling, conversational, meditative, stream-of-consciousness tone. Among the scholarly and historical hypotheses are personal reflections from her life experience. While one can often see how one thought has led to another (mentions of the Westminster Manuscript are associated with the painful rejection of her MA thesis on it, for example), the "fugal'' juxtapositions often make the scholarly argument difficult to follow. The book wavers between memoir (a memoir of Bolton Holloway's life, filled with fascinating people and experiences, would make a great read) and scholarly manifesto, but doesn't really succeed at either.

What are the themes of the fugue? The Westminster Manuscript of Julian figures large. The first chapter provides some introductory codicological information on the manuscript, and then the body of the chapter is "a modernised and abbreviated version of the Westminster with some glimpses at its original form on the parchment folios as an accessus, an introduction, to this book on Julian'' (8). The modernized text is somewhat incongruous alongside the other extensively quoted texts in the book, most of which are semi-diplomatic transcriptions of the manuscripts, and the dismissive remark in the preface that "Nicholas Watson's teaching edition is not used as it normalizes texts'' (xvi).

Chapter 2 provides bibliographical and codicological information about other important manuscripts, and introduces one of the main themes of the book: "Julian's Judaism.'' It seems that while studying Hebrew herself, Bolton Holloway "discover[ed] in an epiphany that [Julian] knew the Bible in its original tongue and script'' (xiii). Cheered on by V. D. Lipman's The Jews of Medieval Norwich (Jewish Historical Society of England, 1967), she pursued the idea and even found a reference to a "Juliana Jurnet'' who converted to Christianity in 1308 (several generations earlier than Julian of Norwich, as she notes). Bolton Holloway...