HIS 216 & REL 216 Church History I: Ancient & Middle Ages

Carefully edited for the undergraduate reader, this Norton Critical Edition includes an informed introduction, focusing on Julian's theology and preparing students to understand the complex, controversial themes of the text, particularly Julian's solution to the problem of evil in Revelation XIII and XIV. The text included is a Middle English edition, based on the Paris manuscript (1580-1650) of the long text, with language akin to Chaucer's and therefore more accessible than other Middle English editions.

Julian of Norwich (ca. 1343-ca. 1416), a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and John Wyclif, is the earliest woman writer of English we know about.

Many people, including trained church professionals, find Julian of Norwich very difficult to read. Translations in modern English don't even seem to help. It's hard to get past her medieval Catholicism to her radically inclusive ideas - to the insights that made Julian a spiritual giant. The Essence of Julian is the most accessible and lively translation of this difficult medieval masterpiece yet available. It is simply much easier to read and understand than any previous treatment of Julian's writings enthusiast will be satisfied for many years to come.

Despite the strange and distant nature of her life and subject-matter, the works of Julian of Norwich remain immediate and compelling. Her Revelations are recorded in two versions: the short text, or "first edition", written near the time; and the better-known second version, which is both longer and more complex, completed some twenty years later. The short text, offering personal details edited out in her "second edition", but which allow a better sense of Julian as a person, is presented here in translation. It includes also those chapters from the long text that describe Julian's doctrine of the Motherhood of God. The volume also contains an introduction, placing Julian in the larger context of the fourteenth-century English mystical tradition, and an Interpretative Essay.

This work examines the ways in which medieval mystics attempt to orient themselves to God through metaphorically organizing the spaces of anchorhold, bedroom, and pilgrimage. In this work, I have examined one type of mystical metaphor, the familial metaphor. By using the familial relationship as a referent for their metaphors, mystics speak of the ways in which they understand God's motherhood, fatherhood, childhood, brotherhood, sisterhood and spousehood.