The Fifteenth Century as the Golden Age of Women’s Theology in English: Reflections on the Earliest Reception of Julian of Norwich

The Fifteenth Century as the Golden Age of Women’s Theology in English:

Reflections on the Earliest Reception of Julian of Norwich

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

In his classic Constitutional History of England, William Stubbs wrote of the fifteenth century as ‘a worn-out helpless age that calls for pity without sympathy’. For Stubbs, ‘all that was good and great’ in medieval life ‘was

languishing even to death’ in that space between the Plantagenets and the Tudors, ‘darkest before dawn’.1 Beside this indictment, even C. S. Lewis’s ‘Drab Age’ and Nicholas Watson’s era of ‘draconian […] censorship’ after Arundel pale in comparison.2 Stubbs may look old fashioned now, but despite recent valiant attempts to raise the stock of Lydgate and his contemporaries, his com-ments stand as a stark reminder of the steep odds modern scholarship faces in revivifying fifteenth-century studies. There is at least one aspect of the period, however — one Stubbs and Lewis would never have dreamed of — in which the ‘dawn’ came early. The period after Arundel’s Constitutions actually saw an unprecedented rise in theological and mystical writing in English for and by women. Even as alternative theologies engaging women and laity sometimes

1 William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England, in its Origin and Development, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1875–83), iii, 637 and 631.

2 See C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), Part II on ‘Drab Age’ literature; Nicholas Watson, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 822–64.

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton is the Notre Dame Professor of English at the Department of English, University of Notre Dame.

Devotional Culture in Late Medieval England and Europe: Diverse Imaginations of Christ’s Life ed. by Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry, MCS 31 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014) pp. 573–591 BREPOLS PUBLISHERS 10.1484/M.MCS-EB.5.103054

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574 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton

struggled with inquisitors for official recognition on the Continent, at times losing, as in the case of John Hus at the Council of Constance, at times winning, as in the case of the sister houses of the Devotio Moderna (also at Constance), writing by women and for women streamed across the channel as never before.3 It arrived especially into Carthusian houses and nunneries, most notably the newly founded Syon, but also via translations often commissioned by laywomen for gentry and aristocratic homes.4 Even in the post-1409 period (a date that actually packed far less punch in a manuscript culture than recent scholar-ship has imagined),5 the translator of the Mirror for Devout People is able to speak of ‘approved women’ (as Ian Johnson and Paul Patterson have helped us understand) — authors such as Bridget of Sweden, Catherine of Sienna, and Mechthild of Hackeborn, all texts coming into translation in Middle English about this time.6 It is probably during this period that the anonymous trans-lation of Marguerite Porete’s banned text was done and that the Chastising of God’s Children (with which it has textual affinities) becomes increasingly well known, surviving in at least eighteen manuscripts and excerpts.7

3 John Van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 212–18.

4 See the brilliant chronology chart detailing these commissions, translations, and authors in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed. by Carol M. Meale, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. xi ff.

5 Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), appendix A.

6 The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280–1520, ed. by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and others (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), extract 1.12, preface to the Speculum Devotorum, ed. with commentary by Ian Johnson; and Paul J. Patterson, ‘Myrror to Devout People (Speculum devotorum): An Edition with Commentary’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Notre Dame, 2006); and his essay in the present volume, ‘Translating Access and Authority at Syon Abbey’. For recent analysis of the dissemination of Mechthild’s text among ‘exalted company’, both religious and lay, see Rosalynn Voaden, ‘Mechthild of Hackeborn’, in Medieval Holy Women in the Christian Tradition c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. by Alastair Minnis and Rosalynn Voaden (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 431–52 (esp. pp. 445–47); for Bridget’s, see Claire Sahlin, ‘Holy Women of Scandinavia’, in Medieval Holy Women, ed. by Minnis and Voaden, pp. 697–703; for Catherine of Sienna, see Suzanne Noffke, ‘Catherine of Sienna’, in Medieval Holy Women, ed. by Minnis and Voaden, pp. 601–24.

7 See especially the superb work of Michael Sargent on the Middle English translation of Porete, most recently ‘Marguerite Porete’, in Medieval Holy Women, ed. by Minnis and Voaden, pp. 291–309; p. 309 for a listing of his previous studies; on the Chastising and its manuscripts,



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News about women’s spirituality is everywhere in the fifteenth century: for instance, in the 1430s, the Chronicle of London, which survives in forty-one extant manuscripts, recorded the story of Joan of Arc.8 Even Thomas Netter, who made remarks against female preaching in his Doctrinale, and whose dictates likely once prohibited Alan of Lynn from conversing with Margery Kempe and possibly even interfered in Alan’s offer to write down the Book of Margery Kempe, was influenced positively by the fashion for extraordinary women of spirituality.9 He praised a Norfolk woman, ‘Joanna Methles, id est, sine cibo’, a woman, he claimed, who could live off the Eucharist alone.10 Even if she is simply an alle-gorical figment of his imagination (when one reads Piers Plowman for a living it is hard not to see allegory in a name that means ‘Meat-less’!), the fact that he celebrated her on parchment is, I would suggest, a reflection of the current wave of enthusiasm for women’s spirituality. In this complex post-Constance world (and, like Vincent Gillespie, I think the Council of Constance is a much more important date than 1409 if we are looking for watersheds),11 Kempe’s book is nonetheless written down; Capgrave felt able to create a powerful portrait of a woman intellectual and preacher in his Life of St Katherine; and the laywoman Elizabeth Berkeley — as Heather Reid has just shown us in this volume — prob-ably commissioned the Middle English translation of the Storie of Asneth.12

see The Chastising of God’s Children and the Treatise on the Perfection of the Sons of God, ed. by Joyce Bazire and Eric Colledge (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957); for its importance in the Carthusian reading circles that also transmitted the works of Margery Kempe, Marguerite Porete (via M. N.’s anonymous translation), and Julian of Norwich, see Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, chaps 6–8 respectively.

8 Mary-Rose McLaren, ‘The Textual Transmission of the London Chronicles’, English Manuscript Studies, 3 (1992), 38–72.

9 See Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, pp. 258–59.10 Thomas Netter, Doctrinale Fide Catholicae contra Wiclevistas et Hussitas, ed. by

B. Blanciotti (Venice: Antonio Bassanesi, 1757–59), 2. c. 376; cf. William Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-text, ed. by Derek Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008), IX. 297.

11 Vincent Gillespie, ‘The Haunted Text: Ghostly Reflections in the Mirror to Devout People’, in The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers, ed. by Jill Mann and Maura Nolan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 129–72.

12 See The Life of Saint Katherine by John Capgrave, ed. by Karen A. Winstead (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1999); and Heather Reid, ‘Patroness of Orthodoxy: Elizabeth Berkeley, John Walton, and The Middle English Storie of Asneth, a West Midlands Devotional Text’, in the present volume.




In fact Asneth, a sophisticated translation from Latin into alliterative verse of an ancient Hellenistic Jewish tale, is a perfect example of the kind of text that the Geographies of Orthodoxy project is helping us to rethink. Although highly ‘orthodox’, its showcasing of a strong, young woman who utterly renounces the religion of her parents and rejects their man-made idols must have had dar-ing and slightly uncomfortable resonance in the period.13 Not only was the text commissioned by an aristocratic woman (as the translator tells us in his Prologue),14 but it demonstrates the kind of iconomachia we too often asso-ciate only with Wycliffism. It is not, however, Wycliffite: there weren’t many Wycliffites around writing texts among the Hellenistic Jews, nor translat-ing them into Latin in the thirteenth century, and the Middle English text is extremely faithful to its thirteenth-century Latin source.15 Nor could we imag-ine the text as having been translated to appeal to Wycliffite sympathies: the theology of Asneth is in fact deeply sacramental and highly conservative; it even extols chaste marriage after Asneth and Joseph’s limited period of procreation — a text less appealing to Wycliffite readers would be hard to imagine. But, for all its faithfulness to the thirteenth-century Latin and even its Hellenistic source, the Middle English translation of this ancient classic does harness a key aspect of the early fifteenth century, that is, its energy for conversion away from the status quo — away from the everyday complacencies of ordinary parish life and towards more challenging spiritual alternatives. It was this energy that made the early fifteenth century an era of converts right across Europe — converts with ‘multiple options’ (to use John Van Engen’s phrase),16 or an era of ‘devo-tional cosmopolitanism’ to use Stephen Kelly’s and Ryan Perry’s.17 In Middle

13 See Katy Wright-Bushman, ‘Reading Lyric before Lyric: Medieval English Religious Poetry among its Fifteenth-Century Readers’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2014), especially chap. 3, ‘Poetry, Penitence, and Conversion: Asenath of Genesis and the Fifteenth-Century English Reader’.

14 Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse, ed. by Russell Peck, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), for the Prologue and the history of the text in its Latin and ancients forms.

15 The original Latin text can be found in Studia Patristica: Études d’ancienne literature chrétienne, ed. by P. Batiffol, vol. i (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1889), pp. 89–115.

16 John Van Engen, ‘Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church’, Church History, 77 (2008), 257–84.

17 Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry, ‘“Hospitable Reading” and Clerical Reform in Fif-teenth Century London’, Geographies of Orthodoxy <http://www.qub.ac.uk/geographies-of-orthodoxy/discuss/2009/04/24/hospitable-reading-and-clerical-reform-in-fifteenth-century-london/> [accessed 8 June 2011]. See also Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry, ‘Devotional




English studies we do not yet have many words or phrases to discuss a text like Asneth, which makes Kelly’s and Perry’s phrase ‘hospitable reading’ especially welcome. Reading the Geographies of Orthodoxy blog made me realize just what a struggle for new words we all face, since everything in the 1990s became defined by how ‘Wycliffite’ it is or isn’t; even when one is consciously trying to create newer paradigms, the vocabulary of binaries intrudes. I’m old enough to remember our field ‘before Wycliffism’ — when religious texts could just be religious texts; it was the ‘Wycliffite’ epithet that was unusual in those days. I’d like to propose that we all start rationing the phrase ‘not Wycliffite’ (I just used it myself above), because it implies that ‘Wycliffite’ is somehow the default posi-tion of Middle English writing. Whether we are, with Kelly and Perry, discuss-ing works of ‘devotional cosmopolitanism’ or, as I have elsewhere, ‘salvational generosities’ or ‘revelatory writing’,18 or innovative Lives of Christ or whatever we wish, this is the fifteenth century or, better, these are the fifteenth centuries we need to know more about: not the fifteenth century of stunted and timid devotional works that scholarly fixation on repression of Wycliffism — and therefore somehow of the vernacular imagination — has seen fit to paint for us.

The Geographies of Orthodoxy website and the present volume have provided us with a great breath of fresh air by drawing attention to a new focus on crea-tive uses of the Lives of Christ, with all kinds of implications. Take, for exam-ple, Katie Bugyis’s work on Pseudo-Bonaventure’s daring ‘rewriting’ of Mary Magdalen’s post-Resurrection encounter with Christ in which, contrary to the Gospel of John, she is allowed to touch her beloved Lord. This suggests to me that Sarah McNamer’s theory of early female authorship of that text must be right:19 perhaps only a full-blooded woman author could imagine so passionate,

Cosmopolitanism in Fifteenth-Century England’, in After Arundel: Religious Writing in Fifteenth-Century England, ed. by Vincent Gillespie and Kantik Ghosh (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), pp. 363–80.

18 Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, pp. 358–75 and 20–29 (and passim).19 Sarah McNamer, Affective Mediation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); see also Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, ‘Through the Looking Glass: Reflections of Christ’s “trewe louers” in Nicholas Love’s Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ’, in the present volume. For the French Life of Christ traditions, see Maureen Boulton, ‘The Life of Christ in Meditative Texts in Late Medieval France’, also in this volume; and her ‘Jean Galopes, traducteur des Meditationes vitae Christi’, in Traduction, dérimation, compilation, la phraséologie: Actes du colloque international, Université McGill, Montréal, 2-3-4 octobre 2000, ed. by Giuseppe Di Stefano and Rose M. Bidler, special issue, Le Moyen Français, 51–53 (2002–03), 91–102, on what she calls ‘the French counterpart’ to Nicholas Love’s English translation of the MVC.




confident, and sensuous a lover of Christ as to overturn Christ’s starkly clear ‘Noli me tangere’ (‘Do not touch me’) injunction in John 20. 17.20 Instead, the Pseudo-Bonaventurian writer perhaps chose to conflate it with the less inti-mate account in the Gospel of Matthew (28. 9), where Mary Magdalen ‘and the other Mary’ embrace Christ’s feet, unchallenged, but the medieval author would appear to be deliberately suppressing the more famous prohibition in John. Other possibilities for the Lives of Christ pushing back the boundaries of orthodoxy (and without a Wycliffite in sight) are the delightful childhood nar-ratives to which Denise Despres, Mary Dzon, and others have drawn our atten-tion.21 To my mind these infancy narratives offer a whole new parallel universe of theology that was every bit as radical in its way. Think about it: Wycliffism pales into orthodoxy next to a theology in which a young Christ is disturbingly prone to murder his playmates — a stock motif of these narratives!22

It is worth pausing over these a moment to exemplify what a real challenge to orthodoxy they actually are. These infancy narratives were pronounced unsuita-ble to Christians by the Early Church Fathers23 but showed a remarkable tenac-ity, partly and sadly owing to their anti-Semitism. They eventually appeared in England in an Anglo-Norman version and in stunning, ‘comic strip’ form in the early fourteenth-century Tring tiles (see the example in Figure 19.1).24 The

20 A gay male author is also imaginable here and is certainly possible in parallel erotic moments such as Rupert of Deutz’s famous visionary experience of a homoerotic kiss with Christ of the crucifix; see John Van Engen, Rupert of Deutz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).

21 Denise Despres, ‘Adolescence and Interiority in Aelred’s Lives of Christ’ in the present volume, and see too the essay by Mary Dzon, ‘Out of Egypt, into England: Tales of the Good Thief for Medieval English Audiences’.

22 James Robinson, Masterpieces: Medieval Art (London: British Museum Press, 2008), pp. 118–19, for a description of these narratives and colour images of all the Tring tiles.

23 Oscar Cullman, ‘Infancy Gospels’, in New Testament Apocrypha , ed. by Wilhelm Schneemelcher (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963), pp. 363–417 (especially p. 368 and p. 405); Mary Casey notes that ‘Jerome condemned the Infancy material under three popes. The Infancy Gospels are also believed to have been included in the fifth century decree, incorrectly attributed to Gelasius I, which contained a list of stories to be avoided by Christians’ in her ‘The Fourteenth-Century Tring Tiles: A Fresh Look at their Origin and the Hebraic Aspects of the Child Jesus’ Actions’, Peregrinations, 2.2 (2005), 1–53 (p. 1, n. 3), available with colour images of the tiles and of several of the Hebrew manuscript parallels at <http://peregrinations.kenyon.edu/vol2_2.pdf>.

24 Les Enfaunces de Jesu Crist, ed. by Maureen Boulton (London: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1985), p. 28, dates the Infancy Gospel contained in the illustrated version in Bodl.,




Figure 19.1. From ‘The Tring Tiles’, depicting scenes from the popular but daring apocryphal stories of Christ’s infancy and adolescence, which often involve the fatality of a child at Christ’s hands. The tiles measure 32.5 cm in length and 14.2 cm in width and are part of a larger cycle, now lost. London, British Museum. c. 1330. Photos © Trustees of the British Museum.




first two frames (Figure 19.1, top) show the young Christ playing at making pools in (in one version) the bank of the River Jordan, precociously using a compass rather than a stick (hinting at his role as Creator).25 The same image, a narrative composite, shows that he killed a young boy who damaged one of his pools with a stick (the unfortunate boy is shown upside down to indicate his violent death); at Mary’s command (note her authoritative declamatio gesture), Christ revives the boy — albeit by kicking him in the pants — while imitating Mary’s authoritative gesture and even holding a book from which he teaches. In the next two frames, heavily condensed composite narratives (Figure 19.1, righthand top), a boy jumps on Christ, who retaliates by killing him (shown again upside down); the boy is again restored to life after parental intervention (see next frame), but not before an attempt is made to civilize Christ by taking him to Jewish school (symbolized by a heavily caricatured zacharias seated in the first frame).26 Fascinatingly, the hero of the infancy narratives is not Christ, but Mary. In the logic, or better, theology of these narratives, Christ owes his compassionate nature as an adult entirely to the compassion Mary taught him as a boy. Without Mary, these childish Christs would leave only a litter of dead playmates and irate neighbours behind. What exactly the audience for the infancy narratives was I leave to the codicological experts such as Maureen Boulton, but the existence of these texts in the vernaculars, including Middle English, suggests that they, too, should be added to the list of literature for women that champions women — married women and mothers, I might add — as mightier even than the male Godhead. Now that beats Wycliffism for radical thought any day.

There is, then, quite a range of writing in Middle English religious texts that challenges orthodoxies and gender roles surprisingly. The remainder of this

MS Selden Supra 38 to c. 1325. See also the closely related old French manuscript, Evangile de L’Enfance, ed. by Maureen Boulton (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984). For the historical background and Anti-Semitic dimensions of the Tring tiles, see Casey, ‘Fourteenth-Century Tring Tiles’, pp. 1–13.

25 Casey, ‘Fourteenth-Century Tring Tiles’, p. 13, n. 28, notes that Maureen Boulton suggests that the insertion of a compass in this scene is a curious misinterpretation by the artist of the Anglo-Norman verb compassoit, from the word meaning to ‘arrange or construct’.

26 The bottom left two frames show a story in which Christ rescues a Jewish playmate who has been locked up by his parent to prevent his playing with Christ; the bottom right two show another attempt to send Christ to a Jewish school where he is slapped by the teacher, whom he ends up lecturing. For online images of the other Tring tiles not shown here, see Casey, ‘Fourteenth-Century Tring Tiles’.




paper I would like to choose as an exemplary and extended instance of both the ‘Golden Age of Women’s Theology’ and the impact of the Lives of Christ genre some evidence from the reception of Julian of Norwich’s Short Text. In the only extant manuscript, London, British Library Additional MS 37790, the evidence of the very earliest layer of marginal annotation suggests that Julian’s first text could be a kind of poster-child for our ‘Golden Age’.

One of the questions Ryan Perry and Stephen Kelly asked us to consider in their instructions for contributors is the role of affective piety:

Lives of Christ have regularly been historicized in relation to the phenomenon of ‘affective piety’. How helpful is the collocation in our efforts to better understand later medieval devotional cultures and practices? What does the term capture and what does it elide? (my emphasis)

Julian’s Short Text makes the perfect litmus test here, normally seen as hav-ing been built from the ground up out of her affective meditations concerning Christ’s Passion. But nothing, as I will show here, upends our easy collocation as quickly as the evidence from the first annotations to the Short Text — this our most ‘affective’ of her texts — which in fact do not emphasize affective piety in their treatment of the Life of Christ. Not all Lives of Christ do: Langland’s, for instance, contains no shred of it, as Derek Pearsall observed long ago.27

The handful of marginal comments written by the very first annotator(s) of the only extant copy of Julian’s Short Text of her Revelations of Love28 are min-

27 William Langland, Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C-text, ed. by Derek Pearsall, york Medieval Texts (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), p. 17.

28 The word ‘revelatioun’ is the one used throughout the Short Text by Julian herself (e.g. fol. 99v; chap. iv, l. 40, in extract 1 in the table below), so the title is appropriate to both the Short and Long texts. I follow traditional scholarly usage in referring to Julian’s earliest extant version as the ‘Short Text’ and her later extant version as the ‘Long Text’. The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006) adopt and adapt instead the scribal heading from BL, Additional MS 37790 as a title, A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, distinguishing it from the Long Text, which they title A Revelation of Love; the implication is that these are two different works, rather than the kind of rolling revision common to medieval texts in a manuscript culture (like the three versions of Piers Plowman). London, BL, Add. MS 37790 (dated s. xv med.) preserves the Short Text, opening with an editorial heading copied from an earlier exemplar, declaring that it is ‘Avisioun’ (a vision) shown to a ‘deuoute womann’ named Julian, a recluse at Norwich who ‘ȝitt ys onn lyfe’ in 1413 (‘CCCC xiijo.’). This heading is scribal: Julian would not refer to herself as a ‘deuoute womann’, given the universal decorum demanded by the medieval modesty topos. Citations in this essay are to Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. by Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, 2 vols (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978).




Figure 19.2. ‘Page from Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Love in the Amherst Manuscript, the only extant manuscript of the Short Text’. The top marginal annotation (reading ‘nota’) is very early and was written in red by the main scribe, who also rubricated the text. The second early annotation, written midway down the page (also ‘nota’), was supplied by a different scribe who annotated in two different stints using two different colours of ink. Here he writes in the dark brown ink matching the quire signatures, suggesting that he, too, was involved in the production of the manuscript. London, British Library, Additional MS 37790, fol. 108v. Mid-fifteenth century. Photo © The British Library Board.




ute and almost unnoticeable — and virtually ignored by modern scholarship.29 By contrast, the more famous annotations to our sole surviving manuscript of Kempe’s visionary life show a kind of exhaustive, even forensic marginal cam-paign to uncover the truth about the source of her religious experience,30 but Julian’s text attracted, not surprisingly, the opposite: an early, discreet set of nota marks, most likely written by one connoisseur (at most, two) of contem-plative theology, apparently at work alongside the scribe of the text (the scribe himself leaves one nota). What has not been noticed before is that one batch of the annotator’s ink matches the brown ink used for the quire signatures, sug-gesting to me that he was part of the original production team. This annota-tor is not at all interested in affective passages; rather, he is looking for more advanced insight into the great problems of salvation and mysticism.

Cré identifies him as Reader 7 and separates the notes into categories 7a and 7b to take account of slight differences in ink and formality. It is hard to be absolutely sure, given the tiny supply of letter forms, whether Reader 7 is one man returning back over the text at another time with different ink and pen (remembering that the cut of a pen affects a hand, too) or two very similar men working around the same time, but like Cré, I will refer to him as one person, which seems likeliest. There are eight simple nota marks, including one manicule, as the chart below shows.31 His notations were done in two different

29 The exceptions are, first, Marleen Cré, Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse: A Study of London, British Library, MS Additional 37790 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), pp. 281–98 and appendix 4. This annotator (most likely a single scribe, but as Cré notes, possibly two scribes identically trained) may also be an early corrector. The annotator is unnoticed by Colledge and Walsh in their editorial introduction, but they do mention that the main corrector’s hand in the Julian text (i, 2) seems ‘remarkably like that of the [main] scribe, and probably formed by the same writing master’. See also Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Maidie Hilmo, and Linda Olson, Opening up Middle English Manuscripts: Literary and Visual Approaches (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), chap. 4, pp. 239–44, which places this Amherst marginalia in the larger context of marginalia found in other major Middle English writers’ works and discusses its contents more generally (with a different application of the material in the chart below). This annotation supply is far too tiny for real comparative letter-form analysis, so, like Cré’s identifications, mine are offered with that caveat.

30 Kelly Parsons, ‘Red Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe and his Lay Audience’, in The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from the Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower. ed. by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo, ELS Monograph Series, 85 (Victoria: University of Victoria, 2001), pp. 143–216; and Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening up Middle English Manuscripts, chap. 4, § III.

31 Cré’s meticulous study does not treat non-verbal notes, and so does not list the mani cule; nor does she note that the brown ink used in these notes is also used in the quire signatures.




stints, using two different colours of ink. In the dark brown ink matching the quire signatures he made notes on fols 99r, 102v, 108v (see Figure 19.2), 111r, and 114r. At another time, and in a slightly more cursive hand, he made notes in black ink on fols 102r and 102v, and 109v, where he drew a manicule. What is further suggestive to me of his early role in the text’s production is that the main scribe of the Short Text, likely when he was rubricating, also supplied a nota in red on fol. 108v (Figure 19.2) and then (so far as we can tell today) underlined our annotator’s note on that page in red, as well as the one on fol. 111r. In short, he was a professional reader who, working with the scribe (who supplied his own annotations elsewhere in the manuscript), was offering in effect a recom-mended set of readings from Julian’s text for later generations of readers.32 They form what I have elsewhere called a tiny ‘reader’s digest’ of Julian’s more daring or original thought in her first version of the Revelations.33

These notations are set out below, with their accompanying transcriptions from the Amherst text of Julian, and underlining indicating what is underlined in the manuscript:34

32 The Julian text itself contains very little marginalia by the most famous Amherst annota-tor, James Grenehalgh, the much later Carthusian who was possibly transferred from Sheen to discourage textual intimacies, so to speak, with a Syon nun; see Cré, Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse, p. 338 where she notes only two entries (fols 110v, 112v) in his hand, neither very striking. Given the Carthusian context in which the manuscript was produced, the scribe who wrote our annotations is likely male. The gender of the composer of the annotations (who may or may not be different from the scribe of the Amherst notes) is likely male, but we can-not know for certain; it is not impossible that the nota marks date back to an earlier exemplar (or even Julian’s own). None of the notae highlights tell-tale gendered passages or issues (such as, for instance, Julian’s apologia for teaching as a woman or her devotion to the young Mary of the St Anne ‘Trinity’), but we would be wrong to assume that only women could note such pas-sages — or that only men would ignore them. See Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, ‘The Women Readers in Langland’s Earliest Audience: Some Codicological Evidence’, in Learning and Literacy in Medieval England and Abroad, ed. by Sarah R. Jones, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy, 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 121–34, for examples of female annotation of a broad range of topics having little or nothing to do with gender. The passages that are noted in the Short Text, however, do frequently have inclusive language (often, for instance, ‘mann and womann’, fol. 108v).

33 Kerby-Fulton, Hilmo, and Olson, Opening up Middle English Manuscripts, pp. 239–44.34 It isn’t always possible to be certain who is supplying the red underlining in the text, but

in this case the ink matches that of the scribe-rubricator’s. I would like to thank Sarah Dawson for sharing her transcriptions with me while I was preparing mine. Citations to chapter and verse are to Julian of Norwich, Book of Showings, ed. by Colledge and Walsh, vol. i; referred to in the chart as CW.




nota [dark brown ink]

. god schewyd it vnto me als litille as it hadde beene a hasylle notte . Me thought it myght hafe fallene for litille ./ In this blyssede revelacioun god schewyd me thre noughtes of whilke nouȝttes this is the fyrste that was schewyd me of this nedes ilke man and woman to hafe knawynge that desyres to lyeve contemplatyfelye that hym lyke to nouȝt alle thynge that es made forto hafe the love of god that es vnmade ./

(fol. 99v, corresponding to CW, chap. iv, ll. 37ff.)

nota bene [black ink]

And this ranne so plenteuouslye to my syght that me thought ȝyf itt hadde bene so in kynde for þat tyme itt schulde hafe made the bedde alle on blode and hafe passede ouer abowte ./ God has made waterse plenteuouse in erthe to oure servyce and to owre bodylye eese . for tendyr love that he has to vs ./ Botte ȝit lykes hym bettyr that we take fullye his blessede blode to wasche vs with of synne . for thare ys no lykoure that es made that hym lykes so welle to gyffe vs for it is so plenteuouse and of oure kynde

(fol. 102r, cf. CW, chap. viii, ll. 17ff.)

nota [brown ink] . aftyr this oure lorde sayde . I thanke the of thy servyce and of thy trauayle and namly in þi ȝough .

(fol. 102v, cf. CW, end of chap. viii, l. 53)

nota [in red ink, by Amherst Scribe]

Figure 19.2

for as it was be | Fore schewed to me That I schulde synne : ryghtso was the comforth schewed to me Sekernesse of kepynge for alle myne evencristen <what may make me mare to luff myne euencristen> than to see in god that he loues alle that schalle be safe as it ware alle a saulle . And in ilke saule that schalle be sayfe is a goodely wille that neuer assentyd to synne na neuer schalle .

(fol. 108r–v, cf. CW, chap. xvii, ll. 5ff.)

nota [brown ink, underlined in red]

Figure 19.2

Also god schewed me that syn is na schame bot wirschippe to mann for in this sight mynn vnderstandynge was lyfted vp into hevene . and thann comm verrayly to my mynde . David . Peter and Paule Thomas of Inde and the Maudelaynn howe thaye er knawenn in the kyrke of erth with thare synnes to thayre wirschippe . And it is to thamm no schame that thay hafe synned . na mare it is in the blysse of heven . for thare the takenynge of synne is tourned into wirschippe . Right so oure lorde god schewed me thamm in ensampille of alle othere that schalle cum thedyr . Synn is the scharpyste scourge that any chosene saule maye be bette with . whilke scourge it alle for bettes mann and womann and alle forbrekes thamm and noghteȝ hym selfe in thare awne syght sa fare forthe that hym thynke that he is noght worthy bot as it ware to synke into helle .

(fol. 108v, cf. CW, chap. xvii, ll. 17ff.)




[manicule in black ink] I Am grownde of thy besekynge first it is my wille that þou hafe it and syne I make the to will it and syne I make the to beseke it and ȝif þou beseke howe schulde it than be that þou schulde nought hafe thy besekynge

(fol. 109v, cf. CW, chap. xix, ll. 20ff. [subsequently repeated and underlined again on the same folio])

nota bene [brown ink, underlined in red]

for alle þis | [fol. 111r] lyfe in this langoure that we hafe here is bot a poynte . And whenn we ere takene sodaynly oute of payne into blysse it schalle be nouȝt and þerfore sayde oure lorde ./ Whate schulde it than greve the to . Suffere a while . senn it is my wille and my wyrschippe it is goddys wille that we take his behestys and his confortynges als largelye and als myghtelye as we maye take thame and also he wille þat we take oure abydynge and oure desese als lyghtelye as we may take thamm and sette thamm atte nought for the lyghtelyere we take thamm . the lesse price we sette by thamm for luff the lesse payne salle we hafe in the felynge of tham And the mare thanke we schalle hafe for thamm . In this blyssed revelacioun . I was trewly taught that whate mann or wommann willfully . cheses god in his lyfe he may be sekere that he is chosene . Kepe this treulye . for sothly it is godys wille that we be als sekere in tryste of the blys in heuene whiles we ere here as we schulde be in sekernesse whenn we ere thare .

(fols 110v–111r, cf. CW, chap. xx, ll. 23ff.)

nota [brown ink]

. for many menn and womenn leues that god is alle myghty and may do alle and that he is alle wisdome and can do alle . Botte that he is alle love and wille do alle, þar thay stynte . And this vnknawynge it is that most lettis goddes luffers . for whenn thay begynn to hate synne and to Amende thamm by the ordynnaunce of holye kyrke . ȝit þere dwelles a drede that styrres thamm to behaldynge of thamm selfe and of þer synnes before done . And this drede þay take for a mekenesse . bot this is a fowlle blyndehede and a waykenesse and we cann it nouȝt dispyse .

(fol. 114r, CW, chap. xxiv, beg. l. 19)

This, then, is the sum total of the extant early ‘professional reading’ of the text; only one highlighted passage relates to Julian’s account of the Passion (chap. viii, the second extract above), and even then the note does not highlight that dimension of the vision. What one can immediately see about these pas-sages is that they contain a system of nota marks and of underlining (sometimes in red)35 which pick out non-affective passages. I will treat first as a group all

35 Underlining without marginal notation also occurs at many points, e.g. fol. 111r.




those written in brown and black ink, and then return to the one in red (by the Amherst scribe) and the one marked only by a manicule (black). The first nota (fol. 99v) highlights the hazelnut passage, one of the most justly famous in this text. But it highlights, as Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest would put it, the ‘fruit’ of the passage, not the ‘chaff ’ (the image), and in so doing points up Julian’s move from the nut (‘notte’) to the first of three ‘noughtes’ for contemplatives — a pun of the very type that annotators were trained to look for as mnemonic devices.36 To use Augustine’s visionary hierarchy, a tier two image (the prod-uct of ‘imaginative’ vision) becomes a tier three imageless vision (‘intellectual vision’),37 as Julian moves us from what is ‘made’ to what is ‘vnmade’. The note, then, in true connoisseur fashion, picks out the ‘higher’ theological moment.

The next nota passage (a ‘nota bene’ on fol. 102r) occurs during Julian’s account of her near-death vision and is our only instance of an affective selec-tion. It highlights the remarkable scene when Christ’s blood seems to her to run so plentifully that, she comments, if it had been happening in reality (‘in kynde’), it would have overflown the bed upon which she lies. These are affective images, but, again, it is the ‘fruit’ the annotator goes for, highlighting Julian’s teaching that Christ prefers to wash us in his blood than in the water he — equally plenteously — created for ‘erthe’. This little passage uses the word ‘plen-teuouslye’ three times: of Christ’s blood in Julian’s vision, of God’s gift of water, and finally, of the availability of the gift of Christ’s blood, which is also of our ‘kynde’ (‘nature’), a concept also used three times in the same short space. The nota has moved the reader away from affectivity and firmly towards the sacra-mental. Over the same leaf (102v), another nota highlights not Christ’s life, but Julian’s own, as he thanks her for her service and ‘trauayle’ (with its rich French connotations), highlighting an autobiographical nugget: ‘namly in þi ȝough’.

The next nota in dark ink (brown, fol. 108v, Figure 19.2) highlights a daring passage, best compared to the one on the same topic that closed (and perhaps broke) Langland’s A-text (XI. 265–end):38 the list of famous sinners (David, Peter, Paul, Thomas of India, and Mary Magdalen) who now enjoy heavenly

36 See Despres, in Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Denise L. Despres, Iconography and the Professional Reader: The Politics of Book Production in the Douce Piers Plowman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 143–44.

37 On Augustine’s three levels of vision, as articulated in his De Genesi ad litteram, see Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, pp. 21–22.

38 William Langland, Piers Plowman: The A Version, ed. by George Kane (London: Athlone Press, 1960); the breakdown of the A-text is discussed in Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, pp. 337–41.




bliss. For Julian, unlike Langland or at least his narrator (whom this distresses), the sins of these saints are paradoxically precious commodities and proof of salvation despite failings.39 Julian’s passage goes even further, however, and in a striking parallel with Marguerite Porete’s daring theology (which is also in the Amherst Manuscript), insists that it is ‘no schame’ to these sinners to have sinned.40 These sinners are shown in ‘ensampille’ of all to come after, no less, but most heavily underlined (in red) and noted marginally is the idea that sin is the sharpest scourge that any ‘chosene saule’ may be beaten with: it ‘forbrekes’ (breaks utterly) any ‘mann and womann’, nullifies (again the word ‘noghteȝ’) the self ‘in thare awne syght’. This annotator especially loves to trace Julian’s use of concepts of ‘noughting’ (making into nothing, annihilating), a major and com-plex concept in mystical language, which the annotator understands well. He also noted it in Amherst’s copy of Porete’s Mirror (on fol. 171v), where it looms even larger.41

At fol. 111r, a nota bene again highlights the intellectual ‘fruit’ rather than the key image or feeling of yet another famous passage: Julian sees that all we suffer in this life is ‘bot a poynte’ and promises that when we are suddenly taken out of pain and into blisse ‘it schalle be nouȝt’. Therefore, she urges patience in suffering and detachment from suffering, all in a long a passage marked with underlining, but the nota bene occurs at the moment of real spiritual payoff: ‘In this blyssed revelacioun . I was trewly taught that whate mann or wommann willfully . cheses god in his lyfe he may be sekere that he is chosene . Kepe this treulye.’ In this quotation, I have retained the manuscript’s punctuation, which surely indicates where the emphasis should fall in reading or performance of this all-important sentence, with its marvellous play on the idea of choosing, and via the will. There, once again in gender-inclusive language, is the promise that any man or woman who willingly chooses God may be secure in the knowl-edge of being chosen. This is an enormous claim and promise. Colledge and Walsh go to great lengths to show the orthodoxy of this kind of thought and cite a parallel passage in Latin by William of Saint-Thierry (the theologian, by

39 Colledge and Walsh ( Julian of Norwich, Book of Showings, i, 255, n. 19) mention parallels in the Chastising of God’s Children and in Kempe’s Book.

40 See Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, chap. 8, on parallels between Porete and Julian, including this one.

41 See Wolfgang Riehle, The Middle English Mystics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 64–65, 74, 105, and 188, for its usage in Middle English, and Continental parallels.




the way, perhaps most influential on the more daring Porete).42 The annotating scribe knew it was extraordinary and clearly approved of it.

The last dark ink nota (fol. 114r) also marks a sophisticated, gender-inclu-sive passage that is reminiscent of the theology and even the tone of Porete, with her trademark defiant privileging of love above all else. In three perfectly parallel clauses, Julian lays out how many men and women believe that God is almighty and all wise, ‘Botte that he is alle love […] þar thay stynte [stop]’. She immediately goes on to speak of another thing that ‘most lettis [hinders]’ believers from realizing their potential, and that is that, just when they begin to ‘Amende thamm’ (the word is capitalized), they are gripped by a sense of their own sin, and this, she says, they ‘take for a mekenesse’, but it is instead a foul blindness and a weakness — harsh language for Julian. This not the kind of affect of standard Passion meditation, though it is affect — it is anger. Although this does not match more notorious ‘Free Spirit’–style impatience with penance and other practices (such as one can find even in Amherst’s own text of Porete), it is nonetheless on the same spectrum. This kind of discus-sion marks Julian’s text as aimed at advanced readers only (in fact, Julian’s Long Text, like Porete’s, travels with a colophon warning against too general a dissemination).43 Of this warning, Watson and Jenkins write memorably that it ‘present[s] the work as a sytematic theology, any statement of which has to be read in its total context, and demanding high standards of would-be readers’.44

I would suggest that our early Short Text annotations, too, for all their mar-ginal simplicity, preserve a sophisticated selection of passages from Julian’s text, unlike the annotation patterns more usually found in religious miscellanies in the Middle Ages, where an annotator will scour the text for conventional wis-dom, morality, affect, and non-challenging ideas generally, passing over uncom-fortable ideas in silence.45 Not so our early annotator, nor his colleague, the

42 Julian of Norwich, Book of Showings, ed. by Colledge and Walsh, i, 254, n. 9, and Introduction, pp. 117–18.

43 See Kerby-Fulton, Books under Suspicion, pp. 297–98, for the warning and discussion.44 Julian of Norwich, Writings, ed. by Watson and Jenkins, p. 11.45 For a male annotator creating a classic moral grid system out of the complexities of

Augustine, Bernard, and other religious thinkers, see John Cok’s fifteenth-century annotations in BL, Additional MS 10392. I would like to thank Nicole Eddy for sharing her work on this manuscript with me. Annotators dodging complex issues are common in Hildegard of Bingen texts; see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, ‘Prophecy and Suspicion: Closet Radicalism, Reformist Politics, and the Vogue for Hildegardiana in Ricardian England’, Speculum, 75 (2000), 318–41.




Amherst scribe,46 who, when wearing his rubricator’s hat, noted the passage on fol. 108v (see Figure 19.2). In his only note in the Short Text, he stresses the passage showing that in every soul that shall be saved there is ‘a goodely wille that neuer assentyd to synne na neuer schalle’. Though there are theologi-cal precedents for this kind of idea (Colledge and Walsh again cite William of Saint-Thierry), this is a bold theology, especially for a female vernacular writer. The manicule, written in his colleague’s, our annotator’s, black ink (109v), also picks up a similar, reader-empowering theme with yet another key word in advanced mysticism, ‘grownde’: ‘I am grownde [ground, foundation] of thy besekynge [asking, beseeching]’,47 along with the promise that, since God is (in scholastic terms) the ‘efficient cause’ of the asking, he will deliver.

Together these notes foreground passages of sophisticated, often Continental-style mystical language and daring theology, paralleled elsewhere in Amherst. Though one might expect otherwise of a largely vernacular col-lection, full of texts by and for women, Amherst was not for novices, nor for the theologically faint of heart or the emotionally inclined. This, too, should make us revise some of our expectations for the readership of women’s writ-ing in English. The Amherst Manuscript itself is a key to this readership: this large anthology contains copies of mostly mystical and contemplative treatises, several either written by or for women.48 Amherst is striking because of the numbers of its texts overtly attributed to female authors ( Julian and Bridget of Sweden), or dedicated to women (like Misyn’s translation of Rolle’s Fire of Love, for Margaret Heslington), or written with female allegorical figures, pronouns, and courtly love style (like Marguerite Porete’s Mirror, copied in Amherst without author attribution). But most striking is the fact that it was originally conceived and built up as three large booklets, each starting with one of three major texts copied by the same scribe: Rolle’s Fire of Love, Julian’s Short Text, and Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls, with all other texts providing

46 Cré, Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse, p. 337, lists this as his only note in the Julian text, but the theme of powerful assurance is also highlighted with red underlining near a red corrector’s mark on fol. 111r saying that God wills us to know that our enemy’s power is ‘is lokenn’ in the hands of a Friend, which allows us to set temporal troubles ‘atte nouȝt’.

47 On ‘grounde’ as a key but complex concept in mysticism, see Julian of Norwich, Book of Showings, ed. by Colledge and Walsh, i, 116–20; and see Riehle, Middle English Mystics, pp. 85, 88, 156, 159, 161, 195, and 213.

48 See Julian of Norwich, Book of Showings, ed. by Colledge and Walsh, i, 3–5, for contents.




filler.49 In other words, it was created deliberately as an anthology of women’s texts (in both senses).50

Much has been made of Julian’s affective piety and minute attention to Christ’s bodily suffering in the Short Text — thought so different in quality by its recent editors, Watson and Jenkins, that they gave it a different name from the Long Text, implying thereby that it is not simply an organic stage in the development of a single book, but a discreet text, much more ‘bodily’ and ‘affective’ than its later sibling.51 What I hope to have shown here is that Julian’s earliest readers (at least the earliest known to us) did not see it that way. They read it just the way early readers read the Long Text — not as an affective expe-rience of Christ’s Passion, but as the distillation of a remarkably serious theol-ogy. The poster child, I would suggest, of our Golden Age.

49 Cré, Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse, p. 21.50 Whether the Amherst manuscript itself reached a mixed audience has been the subject

of debate, but evidence is growing more generally for fifteenth-century Carthusian outreach to lay patrons and associates of both sexes in their vernacular book production. See Parsons, ‘Red Ink Annotator’; Cré, Vernacular Mysticism in the Charterhouse; Jessica Brantley, Reading in the Wilderness: Private Devotion and Public Performance in Late Medieval England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 45; Elizabeth Dutton, Julian of Norwich: The Influence of Late Medieval Devotional Compilations (Cambridge: Brewer, 2008); Johanne Paquette, ‘Male Approbation in the Sixteenth-Century Glosses to the Book of Margery Kempe’, in Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis, ed. by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (Victoria: ELS, 2009), pp. 153–69.

51 See note 28 above on the titles given by Watson and Jenkins.



The Fifteenth Century as the Golden Age of Women’s Theology in English: Reflections on the Earliest Reception of Julian of Norwich

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