Anchorites: Life in Spiritual Self-Isolation
This week on The Medieval Podcast, Danièle talks about anchorites, men and women who enclosed themselves for life to contemplate their religious beliefs. She also explores some of the work of Julian of Norwich, perhaps the most famous anchorite of the Middle Ages.
Ecstatic Pain: manifestations of physical pain in the visions of Julian of Norwich and their implications for imitatio Christi
This thesis explores the manifestations of bodily pain in two visions received by the late medieval English mystical writer Julian of Norwich (c.1342-1416).
Julian of Norwich: The Quiet Voice of Contemplation
However you encounter Julian, whether for the first time or the hundredth, no doubt you will hear the quiet voice of a lifetime of contemplation.
Julian of Norwich: Mystic, Theologian and Anchoress
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
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
The Transformative Nature of Gender: The Coding of St. Brigit of Kildare through Hagiography Liliane Catherine Marcil-Johnston Master of Arts, The Department of…
Julian of Norwich’s “Christ as Mother” and Medieval Constructions of Gender
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
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
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
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
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
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
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)…