Very little is known of her actual life, not even her real name. We do know she wrote two texts in English on her visions and their meaning
Virgins, mothers, monsters : late-medieval readings of the female body out of bounds
February 17, 2014 By
This dissertation examines representations of female corporeality in three late-medieval texts: the Pseudo-Ovidian poem, De vetula (The Old Woman); a treatise on human generation erroneously attributed to Albertus Magnus, De secretis mulierum (On the Secrets of Women); and Julian of Norwich’s Showings, an autobiographical account of visions she experienced during an illness in 1373
The Transformative Nature of Gender: The Coding of St. Brigit of Kildare through Hagiography
September 26, 2013 By
The Transformative Nature of Gender: The Coding of St. Brigit of Kildare through Hagiography Liliane Catherine Marcil-Johnston Master of Arts, The Department of Theology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada December (2012) Abstract This study examines how gender is portrayed in the hagiographic tradition surrounding St. Brigit of Kildare. In particular, it provides an in-depth look […]
Julian of Norwich’s “Christ as Mother” and Medieval Constructions of Gender
April 13, 2013 By
Recent Christian feminists have revived an interest in women mystics and feminine religious imagery. In light of what most people generalize about medieval misogyny and about the veneration of the Virgin as a surrogate for a female divinity, Julian of Norwich’s trope of Christ as Mother seems even more remarkable.
Rhetorics of Pain and Desire: The Writings of the Middle English Mystics
December 3, 2012 By
This dissertation “Rhetorics of Pain and Desire: The Writings of the Middle English Mystics,” seeks to explore the connections between desire and pain in the writings of Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Walter Hilton. All four writers develop a rhetoric that allows them to use pain and/or desire as a catalyst through which their writing becomes embodied.
Lordship, service and worship in Julian of Norwich
August 26, 2012 By
Both lord and servant, as Rosemary Horrox puts it, lived in ‘a society where standing was intimately bound up with “face” – what contemporaries called worship’.
Love, Labor, Liturgy: Languages of Service in Late Medieval England
April 14, 2012 By
Working with three major Middle English texts – William Langland’s Piers Plowman, Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love, and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde – my thesis argues that the languages of service available to these writers provided them with a rich set of metaphorical tools for expressing the relation between metaphysics and social practice.
The Paradox of Evil: a Study of Elevation Through Oppression
March 18, 2012 By
For medieval mystical women, the ability to maintain two opposite concepts simultaneously seems to be requisite for spiritual development. Not only were women asked to comprehend humanity’s otherness from God, as women, they were assumed subservient to men and, paradoxically, as able to receive redemption as their male counterparts; women understood their nature as both inferior and worthy, lesser than and equal to.
Through the veiled window: feminine autonomy, masculine authority, and discursive tension in anchoritic writings
February 5, 2012 By
Contemporary framings and traditional scholarly discussions of anchoritic women have tended to view them as powerless and silenced due to their life of permanent enclosure within their hermit’s cell. This thesis argues for a more nuanced view of the personal freedom these women enjoyed and of the awareness of that freedom possessed by anchoresses and by the male religious authorities who supervised them
An Anchorhold of Her Own: Female Anchoritic Literature in Thirteenth-Century England
September 9, 2011 By
An Anchorhold of Her Own: Female Anchoritic Literature in Thirteenth-Century England Roberston, Elizabeth Equally in God’s Image: Women in the Middle Ages (1990) Abstract For all its extremes, anchoritism among medieval English women cannot be dismissed as an eccentric and inconsequential movement. In addition to its distinctive popularity, female anchoritism should be noted because it […]
The Writings of Julian of Norwich as Accomodation and Subversion
November 17, 2008 By
Julian’s status as presumed virginal celibate female mystic and anchoress (hermit) separated her from, and elevated
her above, the conventional status of “woman” during the medieval period
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