The Writings of Julian of Norwich Book

Julian's brilliance is a given. Brief snippets from her have become broadly known thanks to Eliot and others, but even aside from those moments (which lose nothing by familiarity) the whole of her achievement is simply astonishing. She combines a language of almost poetic specificity, a tremendously lucid emotional sensibility, and a theological gift for-- call it faithful catholic invention. Kierkegaard might be comparable, or Job.

Watson & Jenkins present here an authoritative modern edition of Julian in Middle English. Their introductory material is fulsome and precise about Julian, level-headed about her cult, which seems about right. The strictly scholarly parts (bibliography, textual apparatus, et al) are of course first-rate. Certain features of the editing (e.g. consistently preferring the "-hede" ending to "-ness" in defiance of some of the textual evidence) have a sentimental flavor to them, but really, that just boils down to loving the medievals for being medieval. I can hardly fault that. A little silliness is a price most of us will gladly pay for love.

More lovers of Julian, I think, should try her Middle English. It forces a slower and fuller reading and preserves the precise character of her paradoxes. Take her most famous line: "Sinne is behovely, but all shalle be wele . . . ." The word "behoove" remains in the lexicon of modern English, and its resonances are true, I think, to Julian's meaning in this passage. The standard translation, "Sin is necessary", is very twentieth-century, a more straightforwardly tragic irony. Julian's actual language, even as we read it as moderns, retains subtleties that defy paraphrase, possibilities deeper and stranger and happier. Watson & Jenkins point to the Exsultet ("O felix culpa, O necessarium peccatum"); I'm not sure that's exactly right either, but that context is at least relevant as as Eliot's Blitz. To read Julian in the original is to confront not standard untranslatability (this is still English after all) but the limits and potential of linguistic and prayerful memory.

My rule of thumb has been that anyone who reads Shakespeare easily and Latin or French a little bit can handle Chaucer without hand-holding. Julian is less French than Chaucer and less Norse than, say, the Pearl poet (whom I struggle with), which is to say she's more English than either. Watson & Jenkins provide the perfect opportunity to find out for yourself.

Addendum 12/16: I hadn't read the Short Text in ages till this past week. It's a bit slept-on but shouldn't be. The analogy is to the Second Gospel: Punchy, direct, and exhilarating.