Yesterday was the feast day of the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich (circa 1342–after 1416). Although she was never formally canonized, Julian’s legacy as the author of Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest book known to have been written by a woman in the English language, is an enduring one. In it, Julian recounts visions she experienced during a near-fatal illness and uses them to meditate on God’s mercy and love. She lived in England during a time marked by political upheaval, repeated outbreaks of plague, and religious conflicts. Though little is known about Julian’s personal life, it is speculated that she survived the plague herself, and we know that she chose to withdraw from the chaos of her world by becoming an anchoress. Her writings remind us that, no matter the tides of history, surrendering in trust to both the goodness and the unknowable immensity of the divine has always been a radical act. While Julian is well-known in certain academic and Anglican circles, her recent feast day is a good reminder of her lasting relevance to all Christians.
While I would, of course, recommend reading Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love itself, I recently enjoyed a fictional portrayal of her in Victoria Mackenzie’s 2023 debut novel For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain. The novel brings Julian into dialogue with her contemporary Margery Kempe (circa 1373–after 1438). Both women experienced religious visions, and Margery’s Book is often considered the first autobiography written in the English language. But this is where the obvious commonalities end. The two women lived radically different lives, and Mackenzie interweaves their contrasting voices to great effect. The result is a short but powerful insight into medieval female mysticism that avoids filtering their lives through modern feminism. Mackenzie’s light touch refrains from diagnosing or pathologizing these women (as many modern scholars tend to do), taking their religious experience at face value rather than dismissing them.
The sections written from Julian’s perspective are gentle and lyrical. As an anchoress, Julian committed herself to solitary contemplation in a cell adjoining a church. Although we know so little about her (even the name “Julian” may have been taken from the church her cell was attached to), Mackenzie crafts a voice that resonates with the writing in Julian’s Revelations: “I want my mind to be driven deep into God like a nail,” she reflects, capturing an intensely introspective spirituality. The medieval anchoritic life was even more extreme than joining a cloistered convent: “A nun is a bride of Christ and so has a nuptial mass, but becoming an anchorite is a death.” To symbolize this, Julian attends her own requiem Mass, lying on the floor of the church under a black pall. After receiving the last rites, she enters her cell, and the door is bricked up behind her. She is figuratively buried alive. From this moment on, her only connection with the world occurs through small windows; she can receive food, observe Mass, and impart spiritual counsel to those who come to seek it from her.
Julian initially finds it difficult to adjust to the confined space and turns inward: “I spent these early months in a state of nothingness and weeping. . . . Stone walls. Stone walls. Stone walls.” But it is this turning inward that eventually allows her mind to blossom into a comprehension of God’s omnipresence and love in even the smallest of things. Drawing on one of the most famous passages in Julian’s Revelations, in which she comes to understand all of creation as only a “little thing,” the size of a hazelnut, Mackenzie imagines Julian contemplating a literal hazelnut: “as I looked at the hazelnut nestling in my palm, I understood that all things have being through the love of God.” Julian does not seek recognition or an immediate audience to her insights: “I have never found it easy to begin speaking. To disturb the silence.” But in the silence of her cell, she writes down the visions she received before becoming an anchoress and the understanding she has gained during her enclosure. It is this capacity to disappear—into silence, into God, into the unknowing—that defines Julian’s spiritual genius.
The same could never be said of Margery Kempe who, in her lifetime, staunchly refused to disappear into any form of silence. Even now she is not silent: We know much more about Margery than about Julian, because Margery tells us a lot about herself in her autobiographical Book. She came from a well-to-do merchant family, was a wife, a mother of at least fourteen children, a businesswoman, and enthusiastic traveler, going on pilgrimages as far as Jerusalem. Those familiar with her original writings will recognize her strong personality, which Mackenzie has effectively captured. Margery’s visions are intense; she assists the Virgin Mary during childbirth, attends the crucifixion, and enters a marriage with Christ. Overcome by her experiences, she frequently weeps, roars, and writhes around on the ground. Some townsfolk dismiss her as a drunk, some clerics accuse her of heresy, but some are touched by her displays of passionate piety. Admiration and praise please Margery; she is satisfied—almost smug—when she elicits gasps or tears from her audience and is happy to take the coins offered to her. She takes pleasure in the idea that, as Christ tells her in one vision, “one day those few of my neighbours that are permitted into heaven will see me sitting beside God as the most beloved of all the saints.” The desire to be exceptional, and recognized as such, radiates both from Margery’s original Book and Mackenzie’s interpretation of her.
Mackenzie allows both the stillness of Julian and the tempest of Margery to unfold without authorial comment. When the two finally meet at the end of the novel, a meeting which we know from Margery’s own account did occur in 1413, the encounter feels like a spiritual summit. Though wildly different in temperament, they recognize a shared trust in the divine: “You saw what I see!”
As we mark Julian’s feast day, Mackenzie’s novel offers a fresh way into her luminous and mystical world. Among her most enduring words is that serene, almost defiant affirmation: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” This is not a naive platitude, but a hard-won spiritual truth. Julian lived through illness, as well as spiritual and social upheaval. And now, as Catholics stand at the beginning of a new papacy, it is worth remembering that the last time we had an Anglophone pope, he spoke the very language of Julian and Margery: Middle English. Then as now, the world felt uncertain, unstable, liable to break and tip over into chaos on many different horizons. The hazelnut in Julian’s palm, in which she sees all of creation upheld by divine love, is not so different from the Church in 2025: miraculously held together by grace.
