A Companion to Julian of Norwich (review)

How to confront the lack of definitiveness surrounding the life and work of Julian of Norwich is the stated challenge of Liz McAvoy’s rich Companion to Julian of Norwich. Since, as the volume’s introduction remarks, “it becomes very problematic to talk definitively about [Julian’s] ‘texts,’” McAvoy joins other authors of the volume in considering “Julian and her writing in less teleological terms: as plural, as multiple, as variable, as unstable, metamorphosing between the centuries and becoming different things for different audiences, and, yet, containing at the core the stability and consistency of God’s message to humankind, common to all manuscript versions, that ‘love was his mening’” (8). This appeal for both due circumspection and centrifugality produces an admirable set of essays on a writer whose very evasion of “definitive categorization and knowing” (2) enables her to represent a panoply of communities—communities of which, McAvoy remarks, “the present-day reader is no less a part” (9).

Part 1 of the Companion, “Julian in Context,” deploys careful research to demonstrate Julian’s deep imbrication in contemporary artistic, social, and religious communities. The section opens with Kim Phillips’s discussion “Femininities and the Gentry in Late Medieval East Anglia,” a response to what she describes as Alexandra Barratt’s “historicist challenge” for reconstructing not “biography as such” but, rather, a “social Julian” (21). Cate Gunn’s essay on the sensory richness of Norwich continues this section’s productive contextual trajectory, as does Alexandra Barratt’s piece on contemporary Trinitarian iconography. If in these and other essays, as the introduction notes, “Julian’s exceptional contribution to medieval theological exegesis is regarded as a given, implicit rather than explicit” (9), the next two pieces offer more direct expatiations on Julian’s theology. Denise Baker thus writes of Julian’s “metaphoric language of mysticism” (54), while Diane Watt, situating Julian in a larger prophetic tradition, discusses issues of salvation and apocalypticism. This illuminating first section concludes with E. A. Jones’s research on anchoritical contexts and Annie Sutherland’s examination of the distinctiveness of Julian’s liturgically allusive voice.

Part 2 of the volume, “Manuscript Tradition and Interpretation,” offers fruitful scholarship on the manuscript contexts, dissemination, and reception of Julian’s work. Marshaling rich textual evidence to chart “the development of a mystic mind” (101), Barry Windeatt reveals how Julian issues a “re-edition” with A Revelation (102), one in which “the unity of a narrative line” yields to “the more exploratory continuum of a meditative commentary” (102–3). Marleen Cré then explores the Revelation fragments preserved in London, Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4, reading the compilation in “positive terms, as a text with a clear focus on one particular theme— contemplation” rather than “in the negative terms of loss and simplification of the source texts, and repression of some of their material” (117). Elisabeth Dutton, meanwhile, analyzes the revealing differences among three seventeenth-century manuscripts that preserve the full Long Text; she also offers an important examination of MS St. Joseph’s College, Upholland, discussing the way in which Augustine Baker exerted a “vital influence in the spiritual formation of those who read A Revelation and transmitted it to us” (135).

The final essays of the Companion represent rewarding theoretical interventions and sensitive literary analyses. Elizabeth Robertson, drawing on Auerbach’s discussion of Woolf, argues persuasively for Julian’s “‘modernist’ stylistic strategies, including her self-effacement, her presentation of herself as doubting, hesitating, or wondering, her violation of linear teleology, [and] her layering of time strata” (153). Laura Saetveit Miles, reading the space of the anchorhold as “a paradigmatic example of Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopia,’” elegantly demonstrates that Julian negotiates a “tripartite system of enclosures: the physical space of the ancho-rhold, the visionary space of the revelation and the authorial space of the text” (155). McAvoy, offering a Kristevan analysis of Julian’s work, uncovers “a vision of ultimately ungendered wholeness” (14). Eva Jenkins, writing on Julian’s “lyric fragments,” calls attention...