"To See and to Know.Female Gazing in Julian of Norwich's Showings" (1997)

In 1373 of Norwich, an anchoress living in a cell at the of St. in Conisford at Norwich, England, experienced a series of visions accompanied by locutions, communications from God, on the passion of Jesus Christ. Julian's visions, her locutions and her meditations on them are recorded in two narratives, both entitled Showings. The first, referred to as the short text, was written soon after experienced the visions. The second, longer because it includes extensive explication, was written twenty years later in 1393.(1)Although frequently employs the customary medieval rhetorical device of philophronesis, apologizing for being lewd, meaning ignorant and unlettered, in reality was a masterful rhetorician. The editors of Showings, Edmund Coiledge and James Walsh, assert that her skill in adapting...rhetoricians' figures and modes of thought to the needs of English prose, is comparable to that of Geoffrey Chaucer.(2) Furthermore, her narrative suggests that was proficient in the Latin Vulgate text, and she seems to have been familiar with a wide range of the classical and spiritual writings that were the foundations of the monastic contemplative tradition of the Western Church (20). While little biographical information on is available, probably was educated by the religious order that joined as a young girl and in which lived, increasingly secluded from other members as well as the secular world, until her death in 1413.The feminist agenda of recovering women's histories, coinciding with the appearance of feminist theologies, has renewed interest in Showings, particularly passages in which feminizes divinity, referring to God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit as female and maternal. Many scholars have attempted to temper this newfound enthusiasm for the Mother-God passages by contextualizing them in medieval, Roman Catholic theological traditions. In the preface to the Coiledge/Walsh translation, for example, Jean Leclercq explains, This is not new, but part of a long tradition. The has always been aware of the maternal aspect of God and has given it expression in her theological formulations, particularly in the notion of providence (8-9).Although proclaims Julian's vision of God as mother one of the greatest reformulations in the history of Caroline Walker Bynum also considers it consonant with the medieval practice of applying maternal imagery to God, Jesus and male religious authorities.(3) In Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages concludes thatIt was not women who originated female images of God. And a list of the medieval authors in whom modern scholars have found the image of God as mother makes it clear that such language is in no way the special preserve of female writers: Anselm, Peter Lombard, the biographer of Stephen of Muret, Bernard, William of St. Thierry....(4)Although the most sophisticated use of the theme is of Norwich's Trinitarian theology, there is no reason to assert, as some have done, that the theme of motherhood of God is a `feminine insight.'(5)Bradley Peters identifies a similar desire to read Showings as a conventional text on the part of Elizabeth Robertson. In his article, Julian of Norwich and Ecriture Feminine: A Rhetorical Strategy for Reclaiming Women's Spirituality, Peters argues that Robertson does not recognize Julian's uniqueness. Certainly Robertson is even more pointed than Leclerq and Walker Bynum when claims that Julian's challenge to male constructs of the feminine had no revolutionary intent.... She wished to participate in the religious hegemony and had the same ultimate goals as did her contemporary male mystics.(6)The reluctance of theologians and some medieval scholars to superimpose a twentieth-century sensibility on Showings manifests a much needed, commendable concern for historical accuracy and intellectual integrity. …