Julian of Norwich and Adam Easton, O.S.B. (original) (raw)

JULIAN OF NORWICH, HER SHOWING OF LOVE AND ITS CONTEXTS �1997-2022 JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY || JULIAN OF NORWICH || SHOWING OF LOVE || HER TEXTS ||HER SELF || ABOUT HER TEXTS || BEFORE JULIAN || HER CONTEMPORARIES || AFTER JULIAN || JULIAN IN OUR TIME || ST BIRGITTA OF SWEDEN || BIBLE AND WOMEN || EQUALLY IN GOD'S IMAGE || MIRROR OF SAINTS || BENEDICTINISM|| THE CLOISTER || ITS SCRIPTORIUM || AMHERST MANUSCRIPT || PRAYER|| CATALOGUE AND PORTFOLIO (HANDCRAFTS, BOOKS ) || BOOK REVIEWS || BIBLIOGRAPHY || Benedictinism Website To reproduce Amherst Manuscript, Add. 37,790, fols. 97-97v, apply to The British Library, The Picture Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB.

ANCHORESS AND CARDINAL:

JULIAN OF NORWICH AND ADAM EASTON O.S.B.

LECTURE, NORWICH CATHEDRAL, 1 DECEMBER 1998

St Birgitta presents her Revelationes to Christendom, the Cardinal at her right, Adam Easton, O.S.B., of Norwich. From the editio princeps, Lubeck: Ghotan, 1492.

Birgitta of Sweden, Revelationes , L�beck: Ghotan, 1492

****HEN I last visited Norwich /* Alan Oldfield, 'Revelations of Divine Love', owned by Friends of Julian of Norwich, in St Gabriel's Chapel, All Hallows Convent, Ditchingham, Suffolk. Rubricated footnotes with * (doubled for two images), describe the slides used in 1 December 1998 Lecture, Norwich Cathedral./ vergers were telling me of the exhibition held in this Cathedral of vast canvases painted by an Australian painter, Alan Oldfield. They thought it very strange that an Australian from far away and down under would be painting such huge pictures about a mere Norwich girl. Here we see an aged Julian the Anchoress in her cell before her lectern, a cross, a veronica veil - and then through the aperture comes the young handsome Christ in Mary's blue , in Aaron's blue , while beyond the whole cosmos wheels away. Julian is of all time and all space.

Alan Oldfield, 'The Revelations of Julian of Norwich', Friends of Julian of Norwich, St Gabriel's Chapel, Community of All Hallows, Ditchingham, Bungay, Suffolk.

This paper will discuss our anchoress, Julian of Norwich; a lawyer's daughter, Birgitta of Sweden ; a dyer's daughter, Catherine of Siena ; a mayor's daughter, Margery Kempe of Lynn; and a cardinal, Adam Easton , O.S.B., who may have linked them all together in a pan-European textual community, of women, literate and illiterate, who wrote visionary books./1

/1.The term 'textual community' used by Brian Stock, Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); it works equally well for the theological writings of the fourteenth-century Friends of God movement by women and men, some of whose texts are in the Amherst Manuscript with Julian's earliest surviving Showing, British Library, Add. 37,790./ There are four manuscript versions of Julian of Norwich's Showing of Love ,/2 /2. Westminster Cathedral , MS Treasury 4 (siglum W), on loan to Westminster Abbey; Paris , Biblioth�que Nationale, MS anglais 40 (siglum P); British Library, Sloane 2499 (siglum S1); British Library, Amherst , MS Add. 37,790 (siglum A). Sigla established by Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., University of Leeds, M.A. Thesis, 1947. Citations in this paper will be by siglum and folio, e.g. P141v./ further copies of two of these,/3 /3. Sloane 3705 (siglum S2), actually copies an exemplar rather than S1; Stowe 42 (siglum C1), copies exemplar to P or fair copy to Serenus Cressy's 1670 editio princeps. SS are shorter versions of the Long Text, but with added chapter descriptions; P,C1 and the Serenus Cressy 1670 editio princeps are a longer version of the Long Text without chapter descriptions./ two manuscript fragments,/4 /4. TheMargaret Gascoigne Fragment, scribe, Dame Bridget More, O.S.B., descendant to St Thomas More, and the Upholland Fragment , scribe, Dame Barbara Constable, O.S.B./ one report of a conversation held with her,/5 /5. The Book of Margery Kempe , British Library, Add. 61,823 (siglum M), M21-21v; ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, Early English Text Society (EETS) 212.42-43./ and four wills naming her. None of these are written in her own hand. There are no editions in print today that faithfully render what we have of Julian's Showing.

There may however be a manuscript that is written by her, in her own hand, though it is not Julian of Norwich's Showing of Love. It is in Norwich Castle and is a collection of texts written by an anchoress for anchoresses. It is beautiful, beginning with a lovely Gothic letter in gold leaf on apurple ground./6

Norwich Castle Manuscript, fol. 1

/6. Norwich Castle Museum, MS 158.926 4g.5, Theological Treatises in English. The use of gold on purple reflects imperial codices, adopted in Christianity for Bibles, and noted by St Boniface as having been particularly the production of English nuns./

St Birgitta at Prayer, Revelationes , L�beck: Ghotan, 1492

In the work of editing the Julian manuscripts, published by SISMEL in 2001, I encountered difficulties in dating the versions of her text. In 1990 I asked Westminster Cathedral if I could see their manuscript. the following year, after an awkward silence, for it had been safely placed in a safe and its whereabouts forgotten, then found again, I was told I could come back and edit it./7

/7. Translated, Betty Foucard, 1955; edited, Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., Leeds University Doctor of Philosophy Thesis, 1956, Appendix B; Julia Bolton Holloway in Edward P. Nolan, Cry Out and Write: A Feminine Poetics of Revelation (New York: Continuum, 1994), pp. 139-203; Hugh Kempster, Mystics Quarterly 23 (1997); it may have returned to England from Lisbon's Syon Abbey in the nineteenth century./ The manuscript begins with the date '1368', though it is copied out later than that.

Westminster Cathedral Manuscript, date of '1368', bottom first folio.

It is the second-oldest manuscript we have of Julian's Showing. It has no reference to the death-bed vision of 1373. In it Julian speaks of her desire to die when young, and God tells her this will happen soon. Julian in 1368 was just 25 years old. Yet the theology of this manuscript is brilliant. It opens with the Great O Antiphon, of '{ OUre gracious god ', as Wisdom and Truth, it shows the Nativity of the Word, surrealistically going backwards in time, becoming the Annunciation, the Word within Mary's Soul, like the book within Julian's and our hands. The Long Text refers back to this scene as its First Showing (P8-9,10v, 11-11v,13v-14,47v-48v,128v), which it is not there. It next includes the hazel nut passage, and it quotes again and again from St Gregory's Dialogues on the Life of St Benedict , on how when the soul sees the Creator all that is created seems little. Then it turns that inside out, like the Beatles' pocket, and speaks of God in a point, from Pseudo-Dionysius , the Greek Church Father, and from Boethius , the Latin Church Father. It discourses upon prayer, using Origen and William of St Thierry's Golden Epistle. It talks to us of Jesus as Mother , partly from John Whiterig's Meditationes,/8

/8. John Whiterig, 'The Meditations of the Monk of Farne', ed. Hugh Farmer, Studia Anselmiana 41 (1957); The Monk of Farne: The Meditations of a Fourteenth-Century Monk, ed., Dom Hugh Farmer, O.S.B., trans., a Benedictine of Stanbrook (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961), p. 64./ reflecting back to that opening of God and Mary being 'oned ' in the Great O Antiphon of Wisdom , rather than the noughting of this world. Throughout is the theme of Wisdom and Truth and the discoursing upon prayer. Julian uses the concept, from Pseudo-Dionysius, Marguerite Porete and Dante Alighieri, of the Holy Trinity, to which this Cathedral is dedicated, having the attributes of Might, Wisdom and Love. I dedicate this talk to God as Almighty, as all Wisdom and as all Love.

The Long Text version of Julian's Showing is copied out abroad, first by Syon Brigittine nuns in exile, then by Cambrai Benedictine English nuns in exile, in four manuscripts and was first printed in 1670. This version is structured as XV+I Showings (lacking as such in W and A) based upon the Crucifix and its bleeding that Julian saw when it was held before her as she and those with her thought she lay dying. Julian says within this version of her text that she wrote it 15-20 years minus three months after that 'death-bed' vision at 30 and a half, on 13 May 1373, thus writing it when she was 45-50, from 1388-February 1393. This version includes the Lord and the Servant Parable. What I especially like about this Long Text is that in the Brigittine Paris Manuscript Christ's words to Julian are given by the scribe in red , like a Red Letter Bible . We hoped to publish our edition of the manuscripts replicating those pages that way for you. Failing that, at least the paperback translation of the manuscripts.

The Short Text of the circa 1435-50 Amherst Manuscript of the Showing says that its one vision, 'Avisiou_n,' was shown to 'Julyan that is recluse atte Norwyche and 3ett ys ou_n lyf', and thus 70, its text being written out in 1413.

{ ere es Avisiou_n_. Shewed Be the goodenes of god to Ade=
uoute woman and hir Name es Julyan that is recluse atte
Norwyche and 3itt ys ou_n_ lufe. Anno d_omi_ni mill_es_imo CCCC
xiij [1413]. In the whilke visyou n er fulle many Comfortabylle wordes and
and gretly Styrande to all they that desyres to be crystes looveres.

By Permission of the British Library, Amherst Manuscript, Additional 37,790, fol. 97.

This Showing of Love manuscript version Julian scholars currently believe was written soon after the 'deathbed' vision of 1373, almost forty years earlier than 1413. But Nicholas Watson, in Canada, has been finding that it reflects the greater anxiety typical of that later period, when Chancellor Archbishop Arundel , countering John Wyclif's Lollard Movement, was prohibiting lay people from teaching theology, especially women, and from their using the Bible in the English language./9

/9. Nicholas Watson, 'The Composition of Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love', Speculum 68 (1993), 637-683; 'Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel's Constitutions of 1409', Speculum 70 (1995), 822-864. He argues as do others that Julian's Long Text is written later than the Short Text. I believe he is correct about the Short Text as late, but that instead the Long Text's traditionally-held dating is right, their order needing to be reversed. Julian would surely have been too old at 85-90 for such a drawn-out magnum opus. Similarly with Piers Plowman drastic revision is now in order: Jill Mann, ' The Power of the Alphabet: A Reassessment of the Relation between the A and B Version of Piers Plowman' The Yearbook of Langland Studies 8 (1994), 21-50, discusses A as not the first but a later edition of Piers Plowman, where Langland shortened and toned down his magnum opus to comply with political changes, and yet preserve it, allowing it continued circulation/ In 1401 the death penalty, De Heretico Camburendo, the Burning of Heretics, had been instituted for such teaching, and William Sawtre, Margery Kempe's curate of St Margaret's Church, Lynn, had already been so burned in chains at Smithfield./10 /10. David Wilkins, Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae (London, 1737), III.252-260: William Sawtre first on trial before Bishop Le Despenser of Norwich in Lynn, 1 May 1399, renouncing his errors, amongst them stating Christ in flesh and blood was more worthy of worship than the mere wood of a cross, 25 May 1399, two years later burned, 26 February 1401, as a relapsed heretic, Despenser bringing evidence to his London trial. Augustus Jessop, Diocesan Histories: Norwich (London: SPCK, 1884), pp. 137-138: 1389, Despenser only Bishop suppressing Lollardy; 1399, opposed Henry IV, arrested, imprisoned, 1401, reconciled./ In 1405 Archbishop Richard le Scrope was executed at York, by order of King Henry IV, following a scaffold sermon on the Five Wounds, it taking three blows of the sword to kill him, which Brigittines then took up as part of their propaganda for founding Syon Abbey./11 **/**11. Bodleian Library, Lat.lit. f.2=Arch.f.F.11, fols. 58v-60,146v; John Rory Fletcher, Syon Abbey Notebook 3, Exeter University Library./ In 1407-09, Chancellor Archbishop Arundel published his Constitutions , requiring the licensing of preachers and ownership of vernacular Bibles, prohibiting the translating of the Bible into English and limiting writing in the vernacular to such texts as the Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and standard doctrine. In 1411 at the Carfax at Oxford, and in 1413 in front of St Paul's, John Wyclif's books were publically burned. In 1413 there was further alarm as the Lollard Sir John Oldcastle escaped from the Tower and the Oldcastle Rising was in full swing./12 /12. We see evidence of the censorship in Nicholas Love's license from Archbishop Arundel for his Myrrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Crist, and in Syon Abbey's Myroure of oure Lady, the latter noting no one 'shulde haue ne drawe eny texte of holy scryptyre in to englysshe wythout lycense of the bysshop dyocesan ', which its writer has obtained, 'therfore I asked & haue lysence of oure bysshop to drawe suche thinges in to englysshe to your gostly comforte and profyt. so that bothe oure consyence in the drawynge and youres in the hauynge. may be the more sewre and clere ', ed. John Henry Blunt, EETS Extra Series 19, p. 71./ Therefore, given such a context, I concur with Nicholas Watson's observations concerning a later date for the Short Text, and take very seriously indeed the Amherst Manuscript version's own date of 1413, believing that it was written then, or rather dictated to a scribe, by a most courageous Julian at 70.

For in the Short Text Julian seems to comply with Archbishop Arundel's 1407-1409 Constitutions: revising the text; excising swathes of scriptural material; adding and engrossing a sentence on the Pater Noster, the Ave and the Creed (A109v); also adding and engrossing St Cecilia's three neck wounds, seeming to conflate those of the Roman martyr, who went on preaching for three days despite those mortal wounds, with those of the English Archbishop of York Richard le Scrope's three neck wounds at his 1405 execution, saying she has been told of St Cecilia by 'a man of Holy Kirk ', (A97.8-9); speaking of the now-mandatory worshipping of ' Payntyngys of crucefexes', albeit with some distaste (A97.16-17), and protesting she had never meant to teach theology (A101.4-16). The penalty for teaching or writing theology in English from the Bible at this date was death, either by being burned in chains or by hanging, drawing and quartering or both, the crime and the punishment being simultaneously heresy and treason. Such statements would not have been made at an earlier time, either close to 1373 or between 1388-1393, when scriptural study was instead encouraged rather than condemned. Moreoever the coeval Norwich Castle Manuscript complies with writing on the Lord's Prayer, and giving Carmelite Richard Lavenham's doctrinal Treatise on the Seven Deadly Sins. It was around 1413 that Margery Kempe from Lynn visited Julian in her anchorhold at St Julian's and even courageously visited Archbishop Arundel himself at Lambeth Palace, those two talking theology in the Palace's garden under the stars ./13

/13. The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS 212.42-43, 36-37. She is threatened by another woman at Lambeth with being burned at Smithfield. For evidence of the difficulties for women studying theology, see Ralph Hanna III, 'Some Norfolk Women and Their Books, ca 1390-1440,' The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women, ed. June Hall McCosh (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), pp. 288-305, where he discusses Margery Baxter and Avis Mone on trial, their leader William White burned, under Bishop Alnwick of Norwich, 1428-31./ Sawtre, Margery's curate, had been the first person executed in England during these purges. Margery herself was often imprisoned, put on trial by bishops, and frequently threatened with death. The words of the two texts, Julian's Amherst Showing of Love and The Book of Margery Kempe resonate with each other, almost as if we are listening to Julian in stereo. Both texts speak of God in the city of our soul, the body as its temple. Both thus argue from Paul in the Bible, at the risk of their lives, that their women's bodies do not exclude them from Christ's Church. Both texts quote material concerning the Discernment of Spirits (A114v-115, M21) from Birgitta of Sweden 's_Revelationes_, in its Epistola Solitarii , written not by Birgitta of Sweden herself, but by her editor, Bishop Hermit Alfonso of Ja�n,/14 /14. Eric Colledge, 'Epistola solitarii ad reges : Alphonse of Pecha as Organizer of Birgittine and Urbanist Propaganda', Mediaeval Studies 18 (1975), 19-49; Arne J�nsson, Alfonso of Ja�n: His Life and Works with Critical Editions of the 'Epistola Solitarii', the 'Informaciones' and the 'Epistola Serui Christi (Lund: Lund University Press, 1989); St Bridget's Revelationes to the Popes: An edition of the so-called Tractatus de summis pontificibus (Lund: University Press, 1997); Hans Torben Gilkaer, The Political Ideas of St Birgitta and her Spanish Confessor, Alfonso Pecha: Liber Celestis Imperatoris ad Reges, A Mirror of Princes, Odense University Studies of History and Social Sciences 163; Hope Emily Allen, Book of Margery Kempe, EETS 212, pp.lviii-lix, noting connections between Adam Easton, Alfonso of Ja�n and Margery Kempe; Rosalynn Voaden, 'The Middle English Epistola solitarii ad reges of Alfonso of Ja�n: An Edition of the Text in British Library MS Cotton Julius F ii, Studies in St Birgitta and the Brigittine Order, ed. James Hogg (Salzburg: Institut f�r Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1993), I.142-179./ and echoed in turn in the Defensorium Sanctae Birgittae, written by a Norwich Benedictine, one Adam Easton.

Of interest also is that this Amherst Manuscript, the earliest extant of Julian's Showing of Love, survived because it was safely within the cloisters of Brigittine Syon Abbey and Carthusian Sheen Priory,/15

/15. Michael G. Sargent, James Grenehalgh as Textual Critic, Salzburg: Institut f�r Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universit�t Salzburg, 1984, 2 vols, gives the Amherst Manuscript's Syon/Sheen matrix. The manuscript is not in Julian's Norwich dialect but that of Grantham, Lincolnshire: Margaret Laing, 'Linguistic Profiles and Textual Criticism: The Translations by Richard Misyn of Rolle's Incendium Amoris and Emendatio Vitae ', Middle English Dialectology: Essays on Some Principles and Problems, ed. Margaret Laing (Aberdeen: Aberdeen Univesity Press, 1989), pp. 188-223, its first two texts being the Lincoln Carmelite Prior Richard Misyn's translations of Richard Rolle for the recluse Margaret Heslyngton, 1434-1435, later than Julian's dates. The subsequent library of texts in the Amherst, which could represent Julian's own contemplative library, here copied for female contemplative readership, such as the nuns at Syon, may initially have reached Lincoln through Bishop William Alnwick's calling in of theological texts written in English when he was Bishop of Norwich, in compliance with Arundel's Consitutions. Bishop Alnwick, after first placing Margery Baxter and Alis Moon on trial for daring as women to propogate theology, 1428, was translated to Lincoln. Furthermore Carmelite Richard Misyn went from Lincoln to York, becoming Archbishop Richard le Scrope's Suffragan. Present in East Anglia, York and Syon were Brigittine monks, among them Brother Katillus Thorberni, seeking to establish a foundation in England. The Lincolnshire Amherst scribe is responsible for two other manuscripts, one of them, Mechtild of Hackeborn's Book of Ghostly Grace , for Richard and Ann of York. Mechtild's text was also present in the Vadstena library, Sweden, in numerous copies, its earliest one bound together, like Amherst, with Richard Rolle, Uppsala University Library, C17, transcribed by Brother Katillus Thorberni, who was at York, East Anglia, and Syon, 1408-1421. This same Brother Katillus is the scribe of Uppsala University Library, C193, which gives Cardinal Adam Easton and Hildegard of Bingen: Monica Hedlund, 'Katillus Thorberni, A Syon Pioneer and His Books', Birgittiana 1 (1996), 67-87./ following that, in the hands of recusant families in England. The earlier exemplars in Norwich were destroyed, likely either by Arundel's Constitutions for being Lollard, or by the Reformation for being Catholic. Though Ian Doyle cannot rule out the possibility that this section of this manuscript was written, as it says, in 1413.

Clustered with Julian's text in the Amherst Manuscript are others of great interest, one of them Marguerite Porete 's Mirror of Simple Souls,/16

/16. Published as by a male Carthusian, and with the imprimatur, in the same series of Orchard Books, as which presented Julian's_Showing_ in our century being then unaware that first the text and then its authoress had been burned at the stake in 1310 in Paris: [Anonymous], The Mirror of Simple Souls, ed. Clare Kirchberger (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1927; Revelations of Divine Love Shewed to a Devout Ankress, by Name Julian of Norwich, ed. Dom Roger Hudleston, O.S.B. (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1927). Its Middle English version in the Amherst Manuscript and in two others is accompanied by an authorizing gloss written by one' M.N.' Paul Verdeyen, 'Le proc�s d'inquisition contre Marguerite Porete et Guiard de Cressonessart, Revue d'histoire eccl�siastique 81 (1986), 47-94./ who was condemned on the basis of XV Articles by 21 doctors of theology of the university for the writing of that book, her Inquisitors including Victorines, Carmelites, Austin Canons, Cistercians and Benedictines, the Franciscan Nicholas of Lyra among them. Scholars on the Continent now claim that Marguerite Porete 's Mirror of Simple Souls, influenced by Guillaume de Thierry's Golden Epistle and Pseudo-Dionysius' writings, next influenced Meister Eckhart and the Friends of God movement. Another work called the Golden Epistle, Marguerite Porete 's Mirror of Simple Souls, Jan van Ruusbroec 's Sparkling Stone and an extract from Henry Suso 's Horologium Sapientiae, in Middle English are all included with the earliest surviving Julian's Showing text in the Amherst Manuscript.

With this hypothesis, of a woman able to write outstanding theology at 25, in 1368, in the Westminster Manuscript (W); at 45-50, in 1388-1393, in the Paris Manuscript (P); and at 70, in 1413, in the Amherst Manuscript (A), I next sought not just the evidence within her surviving manuscripts, where I first encountered it, but that of her own life's context. /* Fresco, Westminster Abbey, of Benedictine monk in prayer. Westminster and Norwich were both Benedictine houses in the Middle Ages. / And that was when I discovered a similarly brilliant Norwich Benedictine. Let me introduce you to a young working class novice named now Adam Easton , but who wrote his name as 'OESTONE' or 'Eston', perhaps from the village six miles to the west of Norwich, or who could have been 'OEstrewyk', 'Westwick', in Norwich's Jewry, whose inhabitants once paid for the building of this Cathedral, who would have paced the floors of this cathedral, and of this cloister, and read the manuscripts in its library and written manuscripts in its scriptorium./17

/17. De S. Birgitta vidua, Acta Sanctorum [ASS] (Paris: Victor Palme, 1867), October 8, Oct IV, vol. 50, 369A, 412A, 468A, 473C; Leslie John MacFarlane, 'The Life and Writings of Adam Easton, O.S.B.', University of London, Doctoral Thesis, 1955, 2 vols; Eric College, A Syon Centenary (Syon Abbey, 1961), pp. 5-6; Margaret Harvey, The English in Rome, 1362-1420: Portrait of an Expatriate Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 188-237. Adam Easton now has a website: http://www.adameaston.info/ whose webmaster has also published this material as a book. Amongst his schoolboy manuscripts are studies of Arabic mathematics and astronomy. One of these, now at Cambridge University Library, has his drawings of how to measure the height of the spire of this Cathedral and of the walls of Norwich Castle, in which these structures are clearly recognizable,/18

___

/18. Cambridge University Library Gg.VI.3, fols. 318,320, Norwich Cathedral Priory shelfmark, X.clxx. Another Easton manuscript on astronomy is Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 347, mentions St Dionysius, fol. 156v./ while also giving Grosseteste's Tractate on Squaring the Circle.

Adam Easton, together with Thomas Brinton, was sent to study at Oxford in 1350 where he was soon teaching the Hebrew of the Old Testament. He also discovered during this period the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius , who was thought in the Greek and Latin Churches to be the Dionysius converted by Paul on the Areopagus in Athens, together with the woman Damaris, in Acts 17./19

/19. Thomas Aquinas quoted Pseudo-Dionysius 1,700 times, believing him to be the Dionysius of Acts 17.34, and therefore an Apostolic Father; John Whiterig discusses him and Julian of Norwich also wrote of ' Seynte dionisi of france whyche was that tyme a paynym ' (P37-37v)./ Actually Pseudo-Dionysius is a Syrian theologian, who lived several centuries later, and who pretended to be the converted Athenian Dionysius. That's why we call him 'Pseudo-Dionysius'. He wrote marvellous but flawed theology. He invented, for instance, the most un-Christian word and concept, 'hierarchy '. Unlike Christ's Gospels, he believed intensely in hierarchies in the Church and among Angels. For this reason Emperors and Kings, both East and West, sought his collected Works and propagated them in manuscripts, one of which Adam Easton himself owned. It's a beautiful manuscript, in Latin and Greek, and the prayer to the Trinity as Wisdom is illuminated with a most lovely Romanesque
in gold leaf, lapis lazuli blueand leafy green intertwines./20

/20. Cambridge University Library Ii.III.32, fol. 108v, Norwich Cathedral Priory shelfmark X.ccxxviii (highest surviving manuscript number of the six barrels of books Easton willed to his monastery). Another of Easton's manuscripts, Origen, Homelia in Leviticum, Cambridge University Library, Ii.I.21, Norwich Cathedral Priory shelfmark X.cxx, includes, ' Aut tibi videtur Paulus cum ingressus est theatrum, vel cum ingressus est Areopagum, et praedicavit Atheniensibus Christum, in sanctis fuisse? Sed et dum perambulasset aras et idola Atheniensium ubi invenit scriptum ''Ignoto Deo'''; Origen's texts, written for nuns, are particularly sensitive to women in the Bible, discussing for instance the woman touching Christ's fringed garment. Both the Cloud Author and Julian also use that episode. Easton makes notes in the manuscript on priesthood./ Recall that the Kings of France are buried at the Benedictine Abbey of St Denis outside Paris, the French believing that this St Dionysius, their patron, St Denis, had written the theology Adam and Julian used, and even that he was also the martyred Apostle to France, who was beheaded on Montmartre, then picked up his head and carried it about, all as well as having been Paul's convert in Athens! The Gothic style, and its later ramifications, which this Cathedral and East Anglian churches came to use, /* Walsingham's Slipper Chapel, which survived the Reformation. I photographed it on pilgrimage there./ and which I showed at the lecture with a slide of Walsingham's Slipper Chapel, but which I can illustrate here with the cathedral itself in which this lecture was given,

_

Walsingham, Slipper Chapel Norwich Cathedral, West Nave and Window

began at the Benedictine Abbey of St Denis in response to Pseudo-Dionysius' Neoplatonist delight in hierarchy, mirroring it in stone tracery and glass. Similarly the Victorine monks poured over Pseudo-Dionysius, weaving from the text an elaborate theology, Easton himself being thoroughly immersed in the writings of Hugh and Andrew of St Victor on the priesthood. Abelard, alone, himself a monk of St Denis, observed the fraudulence of all this legendary material - for which he was not popular. The King of France's authority and the hierarchy of the French church and state greatly depended upon it. Interestingly, Julian does not like hierarchies but speaks instead of our 'even-Christians'. Nor does she appreciate the way clerks revere the ranks of angels, and she says so in the Showing of Love (P166v), in what is perhaps a dig at Pseudo-Dionysius, Adam Easton and Walter Hilton , all of whom were writing on angelic hierarchies, Julian speaking instead of our 'oneing' as Adam, directly with God, who created us in that image, which is his own.

Adam Easton was very happy at Oxford. Arabic mathematics, Hebrew philology, and Greek theology suited him fine. He was fascinated with time and eternity, with how to measure smaller and smaller amounts of time. He was also intrigued by time's immensity and writes out dates in arabic numerals, including those we would expect, 1368, 1373, but going on to not just our year 2000, but the years 40,000, 80,000, 100,000. He hated wasting time. Julian shares that concern (P134,141v,160v). Adam Easton was as well deeply versed in spirituality. A Benedictine student who overlapped with Adam Easton at Oxford was John Whiterig , who later became a Hermit on Farne Island, writing on St Cuthbert, and in the Meditationes, on Jesus as Mother, which Julian will quote in her Showing. Amongst Easton's lost Dionysan/Victorine writings, perhaps destroyed at the Reformation, are a work on the 'The Perfection of the Spiritual Life', and translations into the vernacular./21

/21. 'Totum vetus Testamentum ex Hebraeo vertit in Latinum', De perfectione vite spiritualis, 'De diuersitate translationum', 'De communicatione ydiomatum', 'De sua calamitate', amongst numerous other titles: John Bale, Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytannie, quam nunc Angliam et Scotiam vocant: Catalogus (Basle: Opinorum, 1557-1559); Ioannis Pisei Angli, Relationvm Historicarvm de Rebus Anglicis (Paris: Thierry and Cramoisy, 1619), I.548-549; Index Britanniae Scriptorum, ed. Reginald Lane Poole and Mary Bateson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), pp. 4-6./ He lived an active life as teacher and diplomat but yearned, too, like John Whiterig , to be a solitary, a hermit, an anchorite. I believe he was to make Julian be his contemplative surrogate while he paced corridors of power.

However, the Bishop of Norwich wanted him back from Oxford, along with a fellow Benedictine, ' Jo', likely the brilliant John Stukley. In 1352, Adam wrote to the Pope begging to be allowed to continue working towards his degree, appealing against his Bishop./22

/22. Joan Greatrex, Biographical Register of the Priories of the Province of Canterbury circa 1066-1540 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 502-503; John Lydford's Book, ed. Dorothy M. Owen, Historical Manuscripts Commission, Devon and Cornwall Record Society 19 (1974), 201, p. 106; 202, p. 107; ' A de E, monk of Norwich appeals again to Holy See to remain at Oxford until 12 June 1352', 20 (1974), 202. For a sense of the intellectual milieu of medieval Norwich Cathedral Priory, see William Courteney, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 275: ' Stuckely discussed the infinite capacity of the soul for beatitude, the latitude of forms, finite and infinite intensities, the augmentation and diminution of grace, maxima and minima, modal and tensed propositions, qualitatitive and quantitative infinites, the relation of grace and free will, predestination, divine responsibility for sin, and the possibility of the meritorious hatred of God' ./ The Prior of this Cathedral next demanded he and Thomas Brinton return and that they bring back with them all their books and plate. Benedictines must obey their Abbot or Prior as if he were Christ. So Adam and Thomas now dutifully came back to Norwich and were here from 1356 to 1363./23 /23. Joan Greatrex notes Easton preached in Norwich, Feast of Assumption, 14 August 1356, Norwich Record Office [NRO], DCN 1/12/29. Brinton's sermons survive, but not Easton's, The Sermons of Thomas Brinton, Bishop of Rochester (1373-1389), ed. Sister Mary Aquinas Devlin, O.P., Camden Third Series 85 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1954); Langland, Piers Plowman, ed. Walter W. Skeat, I.14-18, B. Prologue 139-215, based on Brinton's Sermon 69, II.317, allegory of Parliament and John of Gaunt, where rats and mice debate belling the cat; motif on Malvern Priory misericordia. Norman Tanner says Benedictines' sermons to the laity were lively, learned and appreciated, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich 1370-1532 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1984), p. 11; William Courtenay notes commitment to Biblical study, encouraged by the Papacy and the laity, including translation into the vernacular, excellent preaching, production of devotional treatises and participation in the controversy raging about Wyclif, characterized this period, 'The 'Sentences' - Commentary of Stukle: A New Source for Oxford Theology in the Fourteenth Century', Traditio 34 (1978), 435-438; Schools and Scholars, pp. 275, 373; Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich (London: SPCK, 1987), p. 22./ The Prior needed Adam Easton and Thomas Brinton to preach to the Norwich laity to woo them back from the Franciscans and the Dominicans, from the Carmelites and the Augustinians, who were becoming far too powerful and casting this vast Benedictine Cathedral into the shadows./24 /24. Prior of Norwich explains to Prior of Students at Oxford that he cannot yet send Adam Easton back to incept at Oxford, as he is needed at Norwich to help with the preaching and in silencing the Mendicants, promises to restore him to the bosom of the university in a year: Documents Illustrating the Activities of the General and Provincial Chapters of the English Black Monks 1215-1540, ed. William Pantin, Camden Third Series 45, 47, 54 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1931-1933, 1937), 3.28-29, from Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 682, fol. 116./ We learn that the sermons of the two young men were lively and well-attended by the laity. Adam's sermons could have included such material as Pseudo-Dionysius on God in a point , on God as 'I am' (Julian's 'I it am '), on God as Mother , on the Bible text translated directly from Hebrew into Middle English, and on the Trinity as Might, Wisdom and Love. All of this material is in Julian's '1368' Westminster Manuscript . During this period Easton copied out polemical works against the Franciscans, even illuminating in one of them grey-clad Franciscans, black-and-white clad Dominicans, white-clad Carmelites and grey-clad Augustinians, with devils at their throats./25 /25. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 180, Richard FitzRalph, Bishop of Armagh, writing against the Friars, Norwich Cathedral Priory shelfmark, X.xlvi, LIBER:DNI/DE:OESTONE:/MONACHI: NOR/WICENSIS' at fol. 88. The illumination of the opening folio recalls Julian's account of the devil at her throat (P142v, A111v), while a similar 1350 Norwich episode is given in Lambeth MS 432, fol. 87-87v. A companion manuscript is William St. Amour, Bodleian Library, Bodly 151, 'Liber ecclesie Norwycensis per magistrum Adam de Estone monachum dicte loci ', Norwich Cathedral Priory shelf mark X.xlvi./ Finally he was able to return to Oxford being Prior of Students there, 20 September 1366./26 /26. Greatrex, citing Pantin, Black Monks , 3.60./ We have a huge bill paid for the shipping by wagon of the manuscripts, 113 shillings and threpence./27 /27.'In expensis Ade de Easton versus Oxoniem et circa cariacionem librorum eiusdem, cxiijs iiid '. Greatrex notes total cost, 154s. 8d, NRO DCN 1/12/30, Sacrist contributes to his inception, NRO DCN 1/4/35, Refectorer, NRO DCN 1/8/42, Master of Cellar, 30s, to 'master of divinity', NRO DCN 1/1/49./ Julian's largest legacy, from Isabelle, Countess of Suffolk, was a mere 20 shillings. Among those manuscripts would have been Pseudo-Dionysius' Works, Origen on Leviticus, perhaps one by Rabbi David Kimhi on Hebrew philology, in Hebrew,/28 /28. David Kimhi, Sepher Ha-Miklol (Book of Perfection) Sepher Ha-Shorashim (Book of Roots), Cambridge, St John's College 218 (I.10); The Longer Commentaries of R. David Kimhi on the First Book of the Psalms, trans. R.G. Finch, intro. G.H. Box (London: SPCK, 1919), p. 16, noting of Deuteronomy 32.18, ' He is to you as a father, and the one that gave thee birth - that is the mother'. Easton's schoolboy manuscripts, now in Cambridge University, are on time, originally written here. He came back again to Norwich, in 1367-1368, and at the same time that Julian may have been writing the Westminster Cathedral Manuscript (W)'s original version at 25. Next, and now addressed as 'Master', Adam Easton left Norwich to work for Cardinal Langham at Avignon where the Pope was then residing. It was at Avignon that Master Adam Easton came to own John of Salisbury's Policraticus, now at Balliol, by writing it out himself./29 /29. Oxford, Balliol 300b, Norwich Cathedral Priory shelfmark X.clxxxxiii, with Easton's marginalia to passages used in Defensorium Ecclesiastice Potestatis, such as, 'Respublica beata est quando per sapientiam gubernatur ', fol. 63./ Julian will use its political language again and again in her 1388-1393 Long Text. Adam Easton was professionally jealous of his Oxford colleague, John Wyclif, and wrote to the Benedictines at Westminster Abbey asking that they send him reports on Wyclif's Oxford lectures against the Benedictines./30 /30. Westminster Abbey Muniment 9229*. Its scribe is the second, and un-English, hand in Easton's John of Salisbury's Policraticus , Balliol 300b, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Balliol College, Oxford , ed. R.B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 320./ Wyclif and Julian were for Gospel equality, Easton for Dionysian hierarchy. While at the Papal Curia in Avignon and later in Rome, when the learned and ambitious Adam Easton himself became Cardinal, he came to know Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena , and learned to admire them for their visionary writings. Perhaps because he already knew of a Norwich lass, writing a similar book. And perhaps because he already knew of Birgitta's Revelationes .

Diptych of Bishop Hemming of Turku, Birgitta of Sweden, Urdiala, Finland

At this point we need to voyage across the Northern Sea to Scandinavia, to Finland and Sweden. /* Urdiala, Finland, Diptych of Bishop Hemming of �bo, Finland, being mitred by an angel, and Birgitta of Sweden, in the act of writing the Revelationes . For a study of Birgitta in art, especially as writing her Revelationes , see Mereth Lindgren, Bilden av Birgitta (Hoganas: Wiken, 1991)./ This diptych showsBishop Hemming of Abo, Finland, andBirgitta of Sweden , whom he encouraged to write her Revelationes, her visions. Birgitta was a Swedish noblewoman, mother of eight children, widowed young, who had had an important vision in Arras in France when returning from pilgrimage to Compostela in 1342, the year Julian was born, and in which St Dionysius had spoken to Birgitta of the need for peace between the Kings Philip VI of France and Edward III of England./31

/ 31. Revelationes IV.104-5 ; Bodleian, Ashmole Rolle 26 (olim 27), verso, gives letter/vision for Edward III, Philip IV, 'Orante xi sponsa Beata Birgitta vidit in visione qualiter beatus Dionisius orabat pro Regno francie ad virginem mariam Libris Xo Celestium Revelacionem '; Colledge, 'Epistola', cites similar Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 404, fol. 102v./ Birgitta even sent envoys from Sweden to the Kings of England and of France and to the Pope, in 1347-1348, pleading for peace in Europe and the end to the Hundred Years' War, those envoys including Prior Petrus and this Bishop Hemming , who conveyed the text of her visions, the Revelationes, or Showings, introduced by Magister Mathias , a Swedish scholar who had studied Hebrew in Paris./32 /32. Revelationes I.3.8-9: ' Iste fuit quidam sanctus vir, magister in theologia, quo vocabatur magister Mathias de Suecia, canonicus Lincopensis. Qui glosauit totam Bibliam excellenter. Et iste fuit temptatus a diabolo subtilissime de multis heresibus contra fidem catholicam, quas omnes deuicit cum Christi adiutorio, nec a demone potuit superari, ut in legenda vita domina Birgitte hoc clarius continetur. Et iste magister Mathias composuit prologum istorum librorum, qui incipit 'Stupor et mirabilia' etcetera. Fuit vir sanctus et potents spiritualiter opere et sermone'

MagisterMathias ' commentary on Apocalypse, based in part on that of Nicholas of Lyra under whom he studied, influenced St Bernardino of Siena, Colledge, ' Epistola', p. 22, likely reaching Siena by way of Alfonso of Ja�n who had Sienese ancestry and who returned there in connection with Catherine of Siena. Magister Mathias refers to Cardinal Jacques de Vitry's support of the beguine Marie d'Oignies , a model Margery Kempe's scribe also used./

/* Manuscript illumination, Birgitta of Sweden's Revelationes, Book V./ Magister Mathias was brilliant, filled with doubts, and Birgitta proceeded to teach him his theology, writing this out in her vision of the ladder in Book V, the 'Book of Questions ', of the Revelationes, which came to her while journeying to the King's Palace at Vadstena, to be given to her for her convent. Julian, and her editor, will quote this text in her Long Text and Short Text Showing of Love (P59,93,153-155v, A107).

St Birgitta, Revelationes V, Book of the Questions, Doubting Monk (Magister Mathias) on Ladder, Nurenberg: Anton Koberger, 1500.

Thus England had already known of a woman's text called the Revelationes, the Showings, twenty years before Julian's hypothetical writing of the initial version of her Revelations or Showings./* Hans Memling, 'John Writing Revelation on the Island of Patmos', St John's Hospital, Bruges./

Hans Memling, St John Writing Revelation, St John's Hospital, Bruges

Birgitta's Revelationes are modeled upon John's Revelation, the Book of the Apocalypse, but written by a woman instead of a man. including the theme of theological doubting by men, countered by women's faith. It is also likely that those Baltic envoys disembarked at one of the Norfolk ports like Lynn. (In 1415 the Swedish Brothers and Sisters from Vadstena's Abbey so came to help Henry IV/Henry V found the English Brigittine Syon Abbey where Julian's manuscripts were to be so carefully preserved, Katillus Thorberni, coming from Vadstena on preparatory mission in England, 1408.) Perhaps the embassy visited Norwich, then the second largest city in England, on their way to King Edward III. The young Benedictine, Adam Easton, had not at that date left Norwich Cathedral Priory for Oxford University. Prior Petrus and Bishop Hemming could have been here, within these very cathedral walls, with that early version of Birgitta's Revelationes or Showings in their hands .

Spanish Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence X See detail below

/** 'Via Veritatis' fresco, Spanish Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, of Birgitta's prophecy of Pope and Emperor meeting, as they did in 1368, with Birgitta as black and white clad widow, her beautiful, simply-clad, daughter, Catherine of Sweden, beside the crowned Queen Joanna of Naples and behind Lapa Acciaiuoli, extreme right./ During the Black Death Birgitta herself left Sweden herself and came to Italy in 1350. In this political allegory painted on the walls of the Spanish Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, in Florence, we can see to the extreme right Catherine of Siena ,Birgitta of Sweden , her daughter Catherine of Sweden, Queen Joanna of Naples and Lapa Acciaiuoli, sister of Nicolo Acciaiuoli, who out of his guilt for his sins, had built the vast monastery of Certosa outside of Florence and who had died in Birgitta's presence, 8 November 1366./33

Queen Joan of Naples, Catherine of Sweden, Birgitta of Sweden, Lapa Acciauoli

/33. Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death: The Arts, Religion and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 86, 88, 91, 125; Anthony Luttrell, 'A Hospitaller in a Florentine Fresco: 1366/8', Burlington Magazine 114 (1972), 362-66; Julia Bolton Holloway, 'Saint Birgitta of Sweden, Saint Catherine of Siena: Saints, Secretaries, Scribes, Supporters', Birgittiana 1 (1996), 29-45./ Birgitta continued writing her_Revelationes_, her Showings, throughout her whole long life, now with the assistance and oversight of a Spanish Bishop become Hermit, Alfonso of Ja�n, who first was drawn into her circle in 1368, the year that Birgitta of Sweden succeeded in bringing both Pope Urban V from Avignon and the Emperor Charles from Prague, to Rome.

St Birgitta, Revelationes, Nurenberg: Anton Koberger, 1500.

Birgitta of Sweden gives her completed Revelationes to her editor, Bishop Hermit Alfonso of Jaen, the friend and associate of Cardinal Adam Easton, Benedictine of Norwich, from Lubeck: Ghotan, 1492 editio princeps.

/** Illuminated manuscript page in Siena, showing Birgitta in the act of writing the Revelationes, within the Revelationes./ Another illustration of Birgitta in the act of writing comes from a manuscript written for Cristofano Di Gano, one of St Catherine of Siena 's disciples and scribes, giving the entire Revelationes of St Birgitta, translated into Sienese Italian and today still in Siena;/34 /34. Siena, Biblioteca Communale degli Intronati, I.V.25/26, Colophon: 'Compagnia de la vergina maria di siena, posta nell ospedale di sancta maria della scala. E fecelo faro Ser xpofano di gano da siena. Frate notaio del detto spedale. Pregate dio per lui'. This is Catherine's cenacolo, which had accompanied her to Avignon in 1376, and which is still active eighteen years after her death, this manuscript being written out in 1399 and still in Siena./ while Christopher Di Gano's translation into Latin of Catherine's Dialogo in Sienese Italian will come to England and eventually be printed as The Orcherd of Syon./35 /35. The Orcherd of Syon ed. Phyllis Hodgson and Gabriel M. Liegey, EETS 258; Phyllis Hodgson, 'The Orcherd of Syon and the English Mystical Tradition', Proceedings of the British Academy 50 (1964), discussing its likeness to Julian's Showing. A similar cross-fertilizing occurs between Sweden and England, as between England and Italy, with Vadstena treasuring the writings of English mystics Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton amongst their manuscripts./ Another disciple to Catherine of Siena , and indeed her executor, was the Englishman, William Flete , who became an Augustinian Hermit at Lecceto, outside Siena, who had, like Walter Hilton , been educated at Cambridge,/36 /36. Catherine of Siena's Letters 64, 66, 227, 326, etc., are to William Flete. He wrote Remedies Against Temptations before leaving England, he sent 'Three Letters to the Austin Friars in England' from his hermitage in Italy: Aubrey Gwynn, The English Austin Friars in the Time of Wyclif, pp. 96-210, esp. 193-210/ and whose text, Remedies Against Temptations/37. 'Remedies Against Temptations : The Third English Version of William Flete', Archivio Italiano per la Storia della Pieta 5 (Rome, 1968), p. 223./ Julian quotes from Flete again and again in the W,P,A Showing of Love.

Master Adam Easton returned again to England and Norwich that same year, with a letter from Pope Urban V to Edward III, dated 3 May, 1368. He was back in Avignon in 1369. Julian's Westminster Cathedral Showing version of her text was perhaps written in 1368. I have told of its lovely opening invoking ' {O Ure gracious and good lord ', and its vision of the Virgin at the Nativity and the Annunciation, spoken of in the Long Text as the First Showing (P128v).

Then we move into her most moving vision. /* Michelangelo's David's hand, which is his own./

Hebrew has the letter that begins God's name, and Jerusalem's and Judea's and Joshua's and Jesus's and Julian's be the smallest letter of all yod, - and be the letter that means ' hand '.

/* God holding Cosmos He has created, as a fragile glass orb./

__

We have in medieval iconography the image of God holding in his hand all that is, the entire universe of which he is king, the whole cosmos as a ball, even as a fragile glass ball, surmounted by a cross. /* Richard II, Coronation Portrait, Westminster Abbey./

Similarly Richard II and Elizabeth II and countless other kings and queens have held orbs, the globe with the cross of Jerusalem at its top, in their imaging of God at their Coronation. But here it is not God or Edward III who holds all this fragile globe, this blue marble astronauts see from space.

It is Julian the Anchoress, and she holds in her hand a small thing, the quantity of an hazelnut , and she is told generally in her understanding - by God - that it is all that is made.

Julian, like Wisdom in Proverbs 8, like Gregory on Benedict , is playing with God marvellous sacred cosmic games of proportion. And she and God invite us to join in. Easton wrote that Adam was the first High Priest. We are the Royal Priesthood, priests and kings, each of us, being descended from Adam, in Julian's thought.

In the following year 1370 Birgitta of Sweden presented Pope Urban V and Cardinal Beaufort, who was to become the next Pope, Gregory XI, another edition of her massive book, the Revelationes , or Showings, and in that year the Dominican Thomas Stubbes and the Carmelite Richard Lavenham were lecturing on Birgitta's Revelationes or Showings at Oxford./37

/37. _ASS_October 4:409A: ' revelationes in scholis Oxoniensibus et in cathedris publicis magistralibus exposuerunt magni sua aetate doctores Thomas Stubbes, Dominicanus, Ricardus Lavynham, Carmelita, et adhunc alii ejus generis multi circa annum domino MCCCLXX'. / In that year, too, the Pope appointed Henry le Despenser Bishop of Norwich who had fought beside Sir John Hawkwood in Italy. /* Fresco by Paolo Ucello in Duomo, Florence, of Sir John Hawkwood. Florence had agreed to pay Sir John Hawkwood in part with a marble equestrian statue in his honour. They only half-honoured that debt with a seeming marble statue./

So we now begin to see that Julian's homely Norwich is really pan-European, with important links to Scandinavia and to Italy. The Italians call Sir John Hawkwood, 'Gianni Acuto', whom we see here in the fresco by Paolo Ucello in Florence's Cathedral, the Duomo. /** Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescoes of Siena at Peace and War, in the second where condottieri, hired mercenary soldiers, are about to commit rape./ In Siena's Sala della Pace we can see Ambrogio Lorenzetti's depiction of Siena at Peace, and of Siena at War, during warfare waged by these English condottieri. Terry Jones in Chaucer's Knight describes them well. St Catherine of Siena was so appalled at their brutality that she wrote to Sir John Hawkwood begging that he take such soldiers as Henry le Despenser away from Christian Tuscany and have them wage a Crusade instead against the Saracen. This enthronement as bishop of a condottiere came about because the Pope received word of the previous Bishop of Norwich's death while Henry le Despenser was standing before him and whom he had to pay. He did so with the Bishopric, and constantly called upon Bishop le Despenser to wage Crusades against fellow Christians who had elected an opposing Pope to himself. It is not likely that Bishop le Despenser, who was unlettered and martial, would have initially allowed Julian to become an Anchoress in the Anchorhold at St Julian's Church in Norwich. St Julian's Anchorhold and Church were under the patronage of the Benedictine nuns of Carrow Priory which in turn was under the patronage of the Benedictine monks of Norwich Cathedral Priory./38

/38. David Knowles, The Religious Houses of Medieval England (London: Sheed and Ward, 1940), p. 65; Roberta Gilchrist and Marilyn Oliva, Religious Women in Medieval East Anglia (Norwich: University of East Anglia, 1993)./ The Benedictines of Norwich Cathedral Priory and Bishop le Despenser thoroughly hated each other and were only reconciled years later. It is at this point we find the first references to Julian as being left money in wills to carry out her work of prayer at St Julian's. She may have earned her keep earlier, as had been typical for anchoresses, in teaching children their ABC and their Catechism. Under Archbishop Chancellor Arundel's Constitution such teaching came to be forbidden by the laity.

In 1371-1373 Cardinal Simon Langham and Master Adam Easton were asked by Pope Gregory XI to work on peace between England and France, /39

/39. Devlin, Sermons of Thomas Brinton, p. xiv/ in accordance with Birgitta of Sweden 's 1342 Revelation, which is copied out in English manuscripts, giving St Dionysius speaking to Birgitta in Arras of the need for peace between the Kings of France and England. We have further evidence of Easton's presence in England at this time./40 /40. Greatrex, noting Thomas Pykis, precentor of Ely, paying 40s to Easton's clerk, 1371-2, Cambridge University Library Add. 2957, fol. 45./ Easton would again have returned to his mother house, Norwich Cathedral Priory, around 1371-1373. He could even have been the 'religious person' at Julian's supposed deathbed, in May of 1373, for that is the term typically used of a Benedictine monk living under vows of religion. Julian tells us that when she told this person of her vision, of the Crucifix 'bleeding fast', he suddenly stopped laughing and took her very seriously indeed, of which she was greatly ashamed (P141v, A111v). Adam Easton at this time would have taken very seriously indeed a woman's vision, especially of the Crucifix, /* St Birgitta's Vision of the Crucifix Which Spoke to Her. Its iconography collapses the 'Crucifix in San Damiano Speaking to St Francis', with 'St Francis Receiving the Stigmata at L'Averna'./ for that was a most famous and recent vision his friend Birgitta of Sweden had had, of the Crucifix which spoke to her at St Paul's Outside the Walls at Rome, in 1368. But he would not have been the appropriate person to whom she could then make her confession concerning the Discernment of Spirits , and she is greatly troubled about making that confession.

Yet Julian's vision in Norwich is quite different from that of Birgitta's 1368 vision in Rome. As she gazed upon the Crucifix Julian began to see the blood flow from the garland of thorns about Christ's head. She describes it as like the rain upon thatched eaves - and we know that St Julian's Church roof was thatched at this time - /41

/41. Francis Blomefield, An Essay Towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk (London: William Miller, 1805-10), IV.79; British Library, MSS Add. 23,013-65, give these volumes with further annotations, sketches in colour, of which the relevant materials for Julian are in Add. 23,016./

_

/** Medieval Norwich's riverfront Dragon warehouse./ and she describes it also as like the scales of herring that would have been brought up the river so near to her church and along whose shores merchants built vast storage barns. Along that street also parchment was made for use by monks and friars and such like who would have been literate in Julian's day in Norwich. The parchment for Julian's own book, her Showing, would have been bought by her maid in that street. For Julian's maids Sara and Alice are named in wills made in her favour. She herself was enclosed and could do no shopping. One of the maids in turn perhaps became an anchoress, Alice Hermit, leaving a silver chalice to a Norwich church in her will. Julian simply refuses to make her crucifix vision political in the way that Birgitta of Sweden does. Instead she has it be homely and familiar, likening it to rain and herring. And she also evades it, distancing herself from it, speaking in the Amherst Manuscript even, like a Lollard, like the executed William Sawtre, Margery Kempe's St Margaret's chaplain, with distaste of the now legally mandated prayers to 'paintings of crucifixes'/42 /42. David Aers and Lynn Staley, The Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), pp. 77-178./ Julian also describes what she saw in relation to the Veronica Veil shown to pilgrims in Rome's Vatican Basilica on Good Friday. Sister Ritamary Bradley suggests from her words that Julian had actually travelled to Rome and seen this precious relic. If she had so travelled to Rome she would have likely stayed under the aegis of Cardinal Adam Easton and his household, composed of many people from Norwich, as we see from his Roman will, and which was headquartered at his titular church of St Cecilia in Trastevere. Much of that church has been altered. But to this day one can see in its crypt the ruins of a Roman house and bath with hot springs, the Sudatorium which features in the legend of Cecilia's martyrdom, the fine Byzantine apse showing the togaed Christ with scroll, Christ as Teacher, flanked by Paul and Peter, by Cecilia and Valerian, and by Pope Pascal I (816-821) carrying the model of this church, and St Agatha, whom Pascal made co-patroness of this church, as well as medieval buildings more in English, than in Italian, style, clustering about the now Baroqued Basilica.

In Julian's day an entire series of frescoes existed giving the life and miracles of St Cecilia , the marriage feast of Valerian and Cecilia, Cecilia having Valerian seek Pope Urban I, Valerian riding to Urban, Valerian's baptism, the angel crowning Valerian and Cecilia, Cecilia converting her executioner, Cecilia in the bath, the execution of Cecilia, her burial, then Pascal's dream, of which only the last fresco survives, copies of those which were destroyed being kept in the Barberini Library. Pope Pascal I described how he had a vision in St Peter's of St Cecilia where she appeared to him in golden robes telling him of her burial place, beside her husband and brother-in-law, in St Callixtus' Catacombs. He found them and brought them to her church the following day, reburying her there as she was. A sixteenth-century Cardinal then exhumed her, finding her incorrupt lying on her side robed in gold tissue, and commissioned Maderno, likewise an eyewitness, to sculpt her so. The mosaic similarly garbed Christ, Cecilia, Pascal and Agatha in cloth-of-gold./43

/43. Augustus J.C. Hare, Walks in Rome (New York: Routledge, n.d.), pp. 677-682, who notes English Chaucer's contemporary use of St Cecilia, and that Cecilia is one of the few saints commemorated daily in the Canon of the Mass, the other women commemorated so being Felicita, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucia, Agnes, and Anastasia./ .

St Cecilia, mosaic at Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome, commissioned by Pope Pascal I, on finding her incorrupt body at St Callixtus

In the Renaissance that body was again found to be incorrupt and Stephano Maderna sculpted it so, the head turned in shame, the sword wounds upon its neck:

If Julian had been a pilgrim guest at Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, walking beside the Tiber to Vatican St Peter's one Good Friday, these Roman memories would have heightened her use of the Veronica Veil, St Cecilia's martyrdom of three neck wounds and her three days' preaching,

By Permission of the British Library, Amherst Manuscript, Additional 37,790

and Julian's own ever-present theme of Christ as Teacher,/44 /44. Ritamary Bradley, 'Christ the Teacher in Julian's Showings: The Biblical and Patristic Traditions', The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July, 1982. Ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1982), pp. 127-142. Sister Ritamary Bradley communicated to me that she believed Julian visited Rome, seeing the Veronica Veil there.

Another Roman relic Julian compellingly palimpsests upon her vision of the Crucified Christ is that of a tawny board. 'Adam' in Hebrew means 'tawny'. Birgitta's board of walnut upon which she ate, wrote, and it is even said was laid at her death, is still kept as a relic in the room become a chapel where Birgitta lived and wrote and died, and which Margery Kempe memorably visited, perhaps on Julian's recommendation, Santa Brigida, Piazza Farnese, Rome, Book, EETS 212, ed. Allen, p. 95.. See Andersson and Franzen, Birgittareliker, pp. 33-44, 58-59./

of Christ as Master, the Galilean/Palestinian 'Master Jesus', shadowed by that of her Norwich/ Oxford /Avignon/Rome Master Adam, become Cardinal of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere and supporter of Birgitta of Sweden.

Birgitta of Sweden died the same year and in the month following Julian's illness, 23 June 1373, the vigil of Mary Magdalen, following her return from Jerusalem in Rome, /* St Birgitta's board for writing and eating, sleeping and dying, today still preserved in the room in which she lived and died in Rome./

her body first being laid upon this board upon which she customarily ate and wrote the Revelationes, /* Birgitta's Shrine in the Blue Church at Vadstena, Sweden./

then brought home to Sweden and laid to rest in this sumptuous shrine at Vadstena where her monastery was founded.Catherine of Siena was examined by the Dominicans in that year in the Spanish Chapel, Santa Maria Novella, Florence, amidst its frescoes of herself, her friend Catherine of Sweden and of Birgitta of Sweden. Birgitta's director and her appointed executor, the Hermit Bishop Alfonso of Ja�n, gave Birgitta's Revelationes to Pope Gregory XI and was next appointed by the Pope to serve as Catherine of Siena's director./45

/45. Alfonso of Ja�n served as spiritual director to Birgitta of Sweden, her daughter, Catherine of Sweden, also to her friend, Catherine of Siena, and to Chiara Gambacorta of Pisa: Ann M. Roberts, 'Chiara Gambacorta of Pisa as Patroness of the Arts', Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy: A Religious and Artistic Renaissance, ed. E. Ann Matter and John Coakley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 120-154./ At which point the illiterate Catherine miraculously began writing, or rather dictating, sometimes to three secretaries at once, letters to Popes and Emperors and even to our King Richard II and to the Englishman Sir John Hawkwood, the martial Bishop of Norwich's former companion as condottiere in Italy. Catherine of Siena, like Birgitta, next composed a theological visionary work, the Dialogo,/46 /46. Suzanne Noffke, O.P., The Texts and Concordances of The Works of Caterina da Siena: Il Dialogo, Le Orazioni, L'Epistolaria ; Letters 133, 138, 143, 312, 317, 348, 362, are written to Queen Joanna of Naples./ a copy of which which was brought here to England, likely by Adam Easton who knew her, and translated into Middle English_,_ perhaps by Easton himself who is noted to have made such translations: 'De communicatione ydiomatum', 'De diversitate translationum', 'De perfectione vite spiritualis'. /* Engraving in printed Orcherd of Syon of St Catherine of Siena receiving divine doctrine, reflecting her receiving the Stigmata, Santa Cristina, Pisa, 1375./ , later to be printed as The Orcherd of Syon by Wynken de Worde for Syon Abbey./47 /47. The Cell of Self-Knowledge: Seven Early English Mystical Writers Printed by Henry Pepwell MCXXI, ed. Edmund G. Gardner (London: Chatto and Windus, 1910), p. xviii, notes Catherine of Siena's connections with England though her Cambridge University/Augustinian Hermit disciples, William Flete and Giovanni Tantucci, and her Letter 14 to Sir John Hawkwood, and to Richard II, the latter not surviving; David Wallace, 'Mystics and Followers in Siena and East Anglia: A Study in Taxonomy, Class and Cultural Mediation', The Medieval Mystical Tradition in English: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1984, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1984), pp. 169-191; Jane Chance, 'St Catherine of Siena in Late Medieval Britain: Feminizing Literary Reception through Gender and Class', Annali d'Italianistica 13 (1995), 163-203; Phyllis Hodgson, ' The Orcherd of Syon and the English Mystical Tradition,' Proceedings of the British Academy 50 (1964), 229-249. Both Vadstena and Syon had cloistered orchards, pleasure gardens ('�rtag�rd', 'viridiarium'), in which the nuns could walk and talk. Alfonso had written the Viridiarium compiled from Birgitta's Revelationes of visions concerning Christ and Mary especially for the nuns of Vadstena: Colledge, 'Epistola', p. 34. The connections, as with The Orcherd of Syon , are far closer than commonly realized between Birgitta and Catherine, Alfonso and Adam. Vadstena in 1391 and Syon in 1415 were granted pardons, indulgences, equivalent to St Francis' Portiuncula, Margery Kempe mentioning this Pardon of Syon./

Transcription: �_Here begynneth the boke of dyuyne doctryne. That is to/ saye of goddes techyng. Gyuen by the person of god the fa/der to the intelleccyoun of the gloryous vyrgyne seynt Kathe-/ryn of Seene/ of the ordre of seynt Domynycke. Which was/ wryte n as she endyted i_n her moder tongue. Wha n she was in co_n/te_m_placyon & rapt of spyryte she herynge actualy. And i_nthe same/ tyme she tolde before many what our lorde god spake i_n_ her.

And here foloweth the fyrst/ chapytre of this boke. Which/ is how the soule of this mayde/ was oned to god & how then she/ made .iiii. petycyons to oure/ lorde in that tyme of contem/placyon and of the answere/ of god and of moche other do/ctryne: as it is specyfyed in the/ kalender before. Capt.1.

A soule that is reysed up/ with heuenly and/ ghostly desyers & af-/feccyo n s to the worshyp/ of god 000& to the helthe/ of mannes soules with a greate . . .

________

The Orcherd of Syon (Westminster: Wynken de Worde, 1519), Catherine of Siena's Dialogo in Middle English, its colophon: 'a ryghte worshypfull and deuoute gentylman mayster Rycharde Sutton esquyer stewarde of the holy monastery of Syon fyndynge this ghostely tresure these dyologes and reuelacions . . . of seynt Katheryne of Sene in a corner by itselfe wyllynge of his greate charyte it sholde come to lyghte that many relygyous and deuoute soules myght be releued and haue comforte therby he hathe caused at his greate coste this booke to be prynted'.

In 1379 Alfonso of Ja�n, 3 March, Adam Easton, 9 March, and Catherine of Sweden, Birgitta's daughter,10 March, all testified on behalf of the validity of Pope Urban VI's election./48

/48. Vatican Secret Archives, Armarium LIV.17, fols. 46-7, 'Venerabilis et reverendus pater et religiosus honestus magister Adam de Eston, magister magnus et profundus in sacra pagina, monachus Norwicensis, ordinis Sancti Benedicti, etatis XL et ultra, nacione Anglicus '; Colledge, 'Epistola', p. 35./ Adam Easton presented to Pope Urban VI his magnum opus, the Defensorium Ecclesiastice Potestatis, 'The Defense of Ecclesiastical Power', based on Dionysian hierarchies, /* Dante Alighieri in a fresco painted by Andrea del Castagno for the Cenacolo of Sant'Apollinare, Florence./ and for which he read - and countered - Dante Alighieri . It ends with the Augustinian, 'Thou hast created us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts can find no rest, until they rest in Thee', a passage Julian uses in the Westminster and subsequent Showings(W75-75v,P10,A99v-100). In that same year Alfonso of Ja�n wrote the Epistola Solitarii, in defence of Birgitta's visions, and he edited her entire Revelationes, in preparation for her canonization. The material of Alfonso of Ja�n's Epistola Solitarii on the discernment of spirits is found in William Flete 's pre-1379 Remedies Against Tempations; in the Cloud Author 's treatises on Discernment of Spirits; in the treatise on Catherine of Siena found in East Anglian Cloud manuscripts;/49 /49. Oxford, University College 14, ' doctrine schewyd of god to seynt Kateryne of seen. Of tokynes to knowe vysytacions bodyly or goostly vysyons whedyr thei come of god or of the feende ', East Anglian manuscript; British Library, MS Royal 17 D v, ' Here folowen dyuerse doctrynys deuowte and fruytfulle taken oute of the lyfe of that glorious virgyn and spowse of our Lorde Seynt Kateryne of Seenys './ in Adam Easton's 1390 Defensorium Sanctae Birgittae; in the Chastising of God's Children ;/50 /50. The Chastising of God's Children, ed. Joyce Bazire and Eric Colledge (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), uses William Flete , Jan van Ruusbroec , Alfonso de Ja�n, and significantly adds an interpolation to Ruusbroec's text of 'Cardinals', p. 35/ in Julian's 1413 Showing (A114v,115); and in Julian's conversation with Margery Kempe (M21)./50. British Library, Add. 61,823, fols. 21-21v; The Book of Margery Kempe, EETS 212, pp. 42-43. Among the materials is Alfonso's statement that writings by visionary women be examined by literate men of the Church. It is likely that the writings of all three women, Birgitta, Catherine and Julian, received that examination - and approbation. The Sloane Manuscripts give such a a statement as colophon, echoing that found in the Cloud of Unknowing and in Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls./ A manuscript of the Chastising, which had been at Sheen or Syon, was noted as uniquely attributed to Walter Hilton in the Sch�yen collection at http://www.nb.no/baser/schoyen/5/5.13/index.html, a link which no longer functions. The Epistola solitarii also exists translated into Middle English in a Norfolk manuscript of Birgitta's Revelationes./51 /51. Rosalynn Voaden, God's Words, Women's Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing opf Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (York: York Medieval Press, 1999), and 'The Middle English Epistola Solitarii ad Reges of Alfonso of Ja�n: An Edition of the Text in British Library MS. Cotton Julius F ii', Studies in St Birgitta, ed. Hogg, I.142-179. The Norfolk manuscript in question also includes Magister Mathias' Prologue , and much of the Revelationes. Hope Emily Allen had earlier hoped to publish it. Of interest is that Syon manuscripts in English, such as the Princeton University Garrett Revelations, use the Swedish form in English 'Birgitte ', while this text uses the Italian 'Brigid ', possible evidence of Adam Easton's acquisition of its exemplar from Alfonso of Ja�n in Italy. It makes use of careful cross-referencing to the Revelationes throughout in the same manner as does Julian's Long Text, but not her Westminster or Short Texts, and is likely evidence of university-trained male editing and authorizing of women's contemplative writings./ Catherine of Siena , the Dominican Tertiary, died in 1380, equally revered by Romans as had been Birgitta of Sweden. At her death she was surrounded by her disciples, women and men, and with her mother at her side, a scene strongly evoking that of 1373 at Julian's 'deathbed' in our Norwich.

In 1381 Adam Easton was made a Cardinal and given the Basilica of St Cecilia in Trastevere in Rome./52

/52. 'Hoc etiam anno, xi Kalendas Octobris, idem dominus papa Vrbanus fratrem Adam de Eston, Anglicum monachum ecclesie Norwycennsis, magistrum in theologia famosum, Rome in cardinalem erexit', Vita Ricardi Secundi, ed. George B. Stow (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1977), p. 70/_

Liber Regalis, Westminster Abbey, likely written by Cardinal Adam Easton with Bohemian artists when arranging for Pope Urban VI the marriage and coronation of Richard II and Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Emperor Charles of Bohemia of the Santa Maria Novella fresco.

/* Manuscript illumination in the Liber Regalis, Westminster Abbey./ As Cardinal, Adam Easton worked to effect the marriage/coronation between his King of England, Richard II, with Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles of Bohemia. This manuscript, the 1382 Liber Regalis illuminated by a Bohemian artist, which is still used for the coronations of our Queens and Kings, shows Richard and his consort Anne in Benedictine Westminster Abbey./53

/53. Liber Regalis seu Ordo Consecrandi Regem solum, Reginam cum Rege, Reginam solam (London: Roxburgh Club, 1870); in connection with Coronation is also Westminster Abbey Muniment 5664* in which Cardinal Adam Easton of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere conveys the order of the Pope that the Benedictines of Westminster Abbey are to have the Coronation offerings of gold and silver and cloth of gold and other things restored to them as is the custom, which have been despoiled from the Abbey by the Archbishop of Canterbury and various London clergy, 27 June 1383. The document opens 'ADAM miseracione divina titulo Sancte cecilie presbiter Cardinalis causa . . . .'/ The theology of the Liber Regalis is Adam Easton's, speaking of how the Abbot of Westminster must instruct the King in humility, and basing it upon Hebrew narratives of prophets and anointed kings, speaking of Aaron, Nathan and Zadok, the Epistle to the Hebrews, Jerome, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Victorines. /* Wilton Diptych, National Gallery, London./

The exquisite Wilton Diptych, again likely by Bohemian artists, shows Richard II in prayer, kneeling on the ground in a wilderness before his patrons, John the Baptist, Edward the Confessor and St Edmund Martyr. /* Frontispiece to Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge./

While yet another shows Geoffrey Chaucer reading his Troilus and Criseyde to Richard II. In that same year Adam Easton was appointed as one of three cardinals to have oversight of Birgitta's cause for canonization, and it was noted that, either then or more likely later, 'he was prepared to risk his theological reputation over the matter, in order to further a cause in which he believed, and moreover, one in which he was personally convinced './54

/54. James Hogg, 'Cardinal Easton's Letter to the Abbess and Community of Vadstena, Studies in St Birgitta, ed. Hogg, II. 21; 'Adam Easton's Defensorium Sanctae Birgittae', The Medieval Mystical Tradition, Volume 6, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1999), p. 234; MacFarlane, Thesis, 1955, p. 225./ In 1377 the townsfolk of Lynn had rebelled against, routed and wounded the Lord Bishop Henry le Despenser of Norwich because he insisted on their Mayor's mace being borne before him as he entered the city gates./55 /55. Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen (London: Smith, Elder, 1888), 14.411./ The particular mayor in question was one John Brunham, father of our Margery Kempe . In 1381 the Bishop of Norwich, true to form, acted swiftly to quell the Peasants' Revolt./56 /56. The Peasants' Revolt began with John Ball preaching on Blackheath on the Feast of Corpus Christi, 13 June, on 'When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?': Kenneth Leech, 'Contemplative and Radical: Julian meets John Ball,' Julian: Woman of Our Day, ed. Robert Llewlyn (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1984), p. 97, giving date as July, when it was June. See Mann, ' Alphabet', pp. 21-50. Piers Plowman B had been recited in the Peasants' Revolt./ The bishop, Thomas Walsingham tells us, 'dressed as a knight, wearing an iron helm and a solid hauberk impregnable to arrows as he wielded a real two-edged sword ', though clergy were forbidden to use more than a mace when fighting. Walsingham goes on to compare ' the warlike-priest to a wild boar gnashing its teeth, neither sparing himself nor his enemies '. In particular he oversaw the execution of the Peasants' Norwich leader, the dyer John Litester, the acclaimed 'King of the Commons', and the idol of the people, hearing his confession, and holding up his head during the drawing, before Litester's execution by being next hanged and quartered. Let me show some paintings of Crucifixes ./** Westminster Abbey fresco, contemporary with initial slide of Benedictine monk at prayer, and of a later Westminster Abbey manuscript illumination, contemporary with Adam Easton./ These are from Benedictine Westminster Abbey, the first a thirteenth-century fresco by St Faith's Chapel,

the second an illumination in a manuscript owned by Westminster's Benedictine Abbot Nicholas Lytlington between 1382-1386. /** The Norwich Cathedral Despenser Retable.

__
Despenser Retable, Norwich Cathedral

/ The Bishop of Norwich commissioned this commemorative retable, Sheila Upjohn notes, following Litester's execution. It is now restored to Norwich Cathedral for which it was originally intended after having spent some centuries as a table bottom following the Reformation. Apparantly someone discovered it in 1847 because he dropped a pencil during a meeting, crawled under the table to retrieve it - then looked up to see this gold-leafed splendour./57

/57. Sheila Upjohn, In Search of Julian (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1989), pp. 26-27./ Here I continue Sheila Upjohn's perception. Julian describes the head of Christ having the skin torn as if it had been dragged along the road - the medieval form of execution being preceded by the drawing of the victim along the street, as was done to Litester. Julian describes the drying of Jesus' body as it hangs upon the cross - far more like that of a body strung up for many days upon the gallows, drying in the Norfolk wind and the cold, than Jesus' Crucifixion of but six hours in Jerusalem. When I look at Bishop Despenser's retable I seem to see Despenser portrayed in the image of Pilate, Litester, the 'King of the Commons', in the image of Christ. The following year the Norfolk people attempted to revolt again and to kill their Bishop, but the Revolt was again swiftly put down. /* Engraving of John Wyclif, Julian's contemporary./ The Blackfriars Council, the 'Earthquake Council', instigated by Adam Easton and mentioned by Julian in the Showing (P158-158v), condemned Wyclif's writings, because Wyclif had condemned Benedictine wealth, John Wyclif dying at Lutterworth the following year. Wyclif was for equality, Easton for hierarchy, Wyclif for translating the Bible from Latin into English, Easton for translating the Bible from Hebrew into Latin, the Norwich Carmelite John Bale noting of him, 'Iste multa opuscula edidisse per ea tempora perhibetur, ac Biblia tota ab hebreo in latinum transtulisse'. Julian seems to mediate between them.

Then, for Adam Easton, on 11 January 1385 disaster struck. Pope Urban VI in his paranoia against his corrupt cardinals even punished those who were loyal to him, for their just criticism of his errors. Six cardinals were hurled into a dungeon at Nocera and cruelly tortured. One of them was our Norwich Benedictine, Cardinal Adam Easton of England. Immediately King Richard II, the English Benedictine Congregation, Oxford University and the English Parliament wrote letters in defense of Cardinal Adam Easton, begging that the Pope bind up his wounds with wine and oil (referring to the Good Samaritan Parable) and restore him to liberty and his Cardinalate./58

/58. [1387-1389] Richard II to Urban VI, 'Quod cardinalis liberetur a carceribus et ad statum pristinum reducatur,' Diplomatic Correspondence of Richard II, ed Edouard Perroy, Camden Third Series 48 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1933), pp. 63-4; CCLXIV, A Letter from the Presidents of the Chapter-General of the Benedictine Order in England to Urban VI, July 9, 1387, Pleading for Pardon for Cardinal Adam de Eston, Rolls Series 61, Letters from Northern Registers, pp. 423-425. MacFarlane notes further letters in Reading Abbey Formulary, p. 25. In July 1387 also, the Ramsey Benedictine, John Wells, was sent to Urban VI to intercede for the imprisoned Cardinal, but failed, dying the next year in Perugia, and was buried in the church of Santa Sabina./ Pope Urban VI had to flee 20 August to Genoa by ship, and on his arrival, 23 September, the other five Cardinal prisoners had disappeared, executed at sea. Easton, despite those passionate pleas, and despite his own continuing loyalty to the Pope, remained a prisoner until the following Pope's accession in 1389, nearly five years. At least his life was saved.

While in that dungeon awaiting death and so terribly injured from torture Easton had prayed that if he were to be spared he would work for the canonization of St Birgitta of Sweden , who had died twelve years earlier, in the year of and the month after Julian's Showing, and for whose cause for canonization he had been given responsibility with two other cardinals in 1382. When he was released he immediately made his way back to Norwich with the necessary documentation, including the massive illuminated Revelationes or Showings she had written. We have the bills for the shipping of his books to Norwich through Flanders, Norwich Cathedral Priory Master paying 48s 7d, the Almoner 10s 'pro cariagio librorum domini cardinalis', the Benedictine Prior of Lynn contributing 20s ' circa libros domini Ade de Eston'./59

/59. Greatrex, citing NRO DCN 1/1/65; 1/6/23; 2/1/17/ Remember that Julian's very largest bequest was a mere 20s. This is the evidence that in 1389-1390 Cardinal Adam Easton returned home, here to Norwich Cathedral Priory, and in this cloister he set to work writing the Defensorium Sanctae Birgittae, the Defense of St Birgitta, the document for her canonization, sent next to Pope Boniface IX, to the Brigittine Abbess in Vadstena, Sweden, and to Bishop Hermit Alfonso of Ja�n 'Et illum libellum per articulos declaratos transmisi domino Alphonso eius devoto ad Ianuam isto anno ', in February 1390, whom he does not yet know has died in Genoa, 19 August 1389./60 /60. Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library 114, fols. 23v-53v, Tuesday after Easter, 1409, giving Cardinal's 9 February 1390 Letter to Abbess of Vadstena; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Hamilton 7, fols. ccxix-cclviij; Universit�tbibliothek Uppsala C518, fols 248-273; I.263-275; ASS 468, ' Adamo Angliae Libri Attestationum ', implies he sent the books, was not himself present. Hogg, II,24; Colledge, 'Epistola,' pp. 27, 42-43; James Alan Schmidtke, 'Saving with Faint Praise: St Birgitta of Sweden, Adam Easton and Medieval Antifeminism', American Benedictine Review 32 (1982), 175-81, does not understand medieval dialectic and Easton's inclusion/refutation of mysogynist Nicholas of Lyra; James Hogg, 'Cardinal Easton's Letter to the Abbess and Community of Vadstena', Studies in St Birgitta and the Brigittine Order, ed. James Hogg, II. 20-26; F.R. Johnston, 'English Defenders of St. Bridget.'/ I learned of those bills because I was sitting across the table from Joan Greatrex in Cambridge University Library. I was admiring Easton's beautiful Dionysius manuscript with its lovely green leafy and gold leaf Gothic {T~ for the invocation to the Trinitas and she was working on Benedictine archival records throughout England.

The Devil's Advocate for the cause for the canonization, a Perugian theologian, using Nicholas of Lyra 's 1310 XV Articles against Marguerite Porete , had argued in XLI Articles that women are unworthy to have visions of God. (Margery Kempe similarly had such Articles placed against her by theologians.) Cardinal Adam Easton countered that claim, using Nicholas of Lyra dialectically in his Defensorium Sanctae Birgittae, speaking of the Old Testament women prophetesses, of the Holy Women at the Tomb who had the vision of the Resurrection and who were the Apostles to the Apostles of that Good News, the Gospel, which the disciples considered but ' idle tales ', and of Philip's four virgin daughters in Acts 21 who were all prophetesses. He continues by speaking of the Virgin Saints like Agnes (to whom St Peter appeared in a vision),

St Agnes, mosaic commissioned by Pope Honorius (625-638), and seen daily by Birgitta when in Rome, the saint often appearing to her in visionary sacred conversations, consoling her for instance for her Latin and teaching her that language. She promises Birgitta a crown like her own in this mosaic.

Detail of above mosaic

Agatha and Cecilia (co-patrons of his Cardinalate Basilica in Trastevere), all of whom are named in the Canon of the Mass. He next speaks of Peter's ' Quo vadis' vision of Christ at Rome, and Thomas' vision of Christ in Jerusalem. He speaks of women's far greater faith than men, the men denying and doubting Christ, the women staying at the cross. He states that women's visionary books are valid in the eyes of the Church. Consequently Birgitta of Sweden was canonized a saint in Rome, 7 October 1391, at which ceremony, Margaret Harvey tells us, Cardinal Adam Easton was present. Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls is included with Julian's Showing in the Amherst Manuscript. Adam Easton's Defensorium, echoed in the Amherst's Showing conclusion, was as a concluding imprimatur to manuscripts of the Revelationes, but was replaced in the editio princeps by Turrecremata's Defense, penned following the 1433 Council of Basel. Nevertheless the Prior of Norwich present at that Council continued Norwich's interest in the saint./61

/61. Harvey, p.205, on Easton's presence at the canonization, citingDiarium Vadstenense; F.R. Johnston, II,271, on Prior of Norwich, citing M.R. James, (1904), p. 11/. Our Norwich Benedictine Cardinal Adam Easton was here in 1389-1391. Indeed it is likely he, who as a ' man of Holy Kirk', (A97.8-9), told not only the Pope of Rome, the Abbess of Vadstena, the Bishop Hermit Alfonso of Jaen whom he thought was at Genoa, but also Julian here in Norwich the story of St Cecilia, the patron of his church in Rome as Cardinal, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. In 1390, Westminster Abbey received a copy of the Bull of Boniface IX, restoring to Cardinal Adam Easton his English benefices taken from him unjustly. We only learn of the Cardinal's return to Rome as late as 1396, apart from the dubious account in the later Diarium Vadstenense, which describes him as present at the Canonization of St Birgitta, 7 October 1391.

1388-February 1393 is exactly the time span the Anchoress Julian of Norwich tells us within her text that she was formulating and writing her second version of the Revelations of Divine Love, her Long Text Showing, her magnum opus of the same title as Birgitta's massive book. In it we can see she is building upon an earlier version of its text, expanding it, cross-referencing in it back and forth, often speaking of a First Showing, but which is not the Christological I Showing of the XV+I, for that is of the Crown of Thorns, but instead is of the opening and Marian First Showing of the Westminster Manuscript. She interestingly adds a magnificent section that is not in the Table of Contents of the XV+I Showings, the Parable of the Lord and the Servant. She tells us at the Showing's ending that it is not yet ended, that she is not yet satisfied with it, that she will write yet another version of it. That reminds one of the way Dante Alighieri writes his texts, their endings being their beginnings again. It is also how St Birgitta had constructed her magnum opus across almost half a century in edition upon edition, book upon book. Perhaps by this date, perhaps not, Julian was an anchoress at St Julian's Church, within walking distance of this Cathedral where the convalescing Cardinal is studying a book of the same title and likewise written by a woman, and edited by his friend and associate, Alfonso of Ja�n, in fulfilment of the vow he had made during his dungeon torture in 1385.

St Birgitta presenting Revelationes to Bishop Hermit Alfonso of Jaen

There are two versions of this Long Text written by our Julian of Norwich, the longer Long Text in theParis Manuscript (P), the Stowe Manuscript (C1), and the 1670 Cressy (C2) printed edition which lack chapter descriptions, and the two Sloane Manuscripts (SS) being the shorter version of the Long Text but giving a colophon like those of The Mirror of Simple Souls and of The Cloud of Unknowing, and chapter descriptions, which are written by a contemporary of Julian, who deeply admires her, who knows her identity as a holy woman, who associates her with God as Wisdom (P78v), who is editing her text, who authorizes her work and who requires that it not be altered. He seems to model his work of editing Julian's Showing on the editing of Birgitta of Sweden 's Revelationes, first by Magister Mathias in Sweden in 1345, then by Bishop Alfonso of Ja�n in Rome, through its final editing in 1379, following her death in 1373. I believe this editor is our Norwich Benedictine, Adam Easton, and thus colleague to three great fourteenth-century women theologians, Birgitta of Sweden, Catherina of Siena, Julian of Norwich. I believe he is the Benedictine monk who stopped laughing, back in May 1373, at her supposed 'deathbed' and that he began to take her very seriously indeed. I believe he is using her for political ends and that she is unhappy with being so exploited. I do not know whether the longer Longer Text versions (P,CC) precede or follow those of the shorter Long Text (SS). If they were earlier, then Julian next courageously stripped her text of his interference and his imprimatur , for the exemplar to the Paris Manuscript, which lacks the chapter descriptions, and went on later to write her final version, the exemplar to the Amherst Manuscript, or that gathering of the Amherst Manuscript written for her by a sympathetic scribe, without his XV+I Showings structuring. In both the P,CC and the SS versions she insists at the end of the XV+I Showings that she is not content with the work as it stands and promises us a further edition (172v-173), defying SS's editor's colophon. (For further discussion, see the essay, 'Julian's Web: The Structures of the Showing '.) I believe that future edition is to be Amherst, rather than Westminster, for the sequence of texts influencing the versions reverses the alphabet, giving us W, with Gregory, Benedict, William of St Thierry, William Flete, John Whiterig, Pseudo-Dionysius, Hebrew, and close scriptural references, Paris using the XV+I Showings structure, echoing the pseudo-Brigittine _XV O_s , of prayers to the Crucifixion supposedly given to St Birgitta by the Crucifix, while adding John of Salisbury, Birgitta of Sweden, and the Parable of the Lord and the Servant to these, A eliminating the XV+I Showings structure, eliminating great swathes of scriptural material, eliminating the Lord and the Servant Parable, and eliminating Jesus as Mother, while adding, in engrossed letters in the manuscript's brown ink, a sentence on a ' man of Holy Kirk' (A97.8-9) telling of 'St Cecilia' and the three sword wounds, likewise a similarly engrossed sentence on the 'Pater Noster, Ave and Creed', adding protests she never meant to teach, and adding further material from Alfonso of Ja�n's Epistolaria Solitarii and Adam Easton's Defensorium Sanctae Birgittae Discernment of Spirit material, which had served as the imprimatur to Birgitta's Revelationes . The consulting of these texts in this sequence correlates to their chronological acquisition by Adam Easton. While Easton delights in hierarchy, Julian seeks equality; while Easton and Birgitta espouse Dionysian angelology, Julian speaks for her even-Christian. Easton, because of his Dionysism, harnessed to Benedictinism's desire for power, property and wealth, opposed and destroyed Wyclif, who spoke for Gospel poverty in the Church; Julian strongly disagrees with her powerful patron, the Cardinal, and supports his Oxford victim's Gospel ideal. Amherst, if it is her final version, her swan song, with the greatest courage most emphatically ends with the Wycliffite, Lollard term, ' evencristen_n. Amen'._

Julian in the Long Text gives the most beautiful Parable of the Lord and the Servant. I read this Parable allegorically on many levels, in the way that Dante Alighieri writes in the_Commedia_. It is both scriptural exegesis about God as Man, God creating Adam in his own image, in Genesis; then God the Father sending God the Son in that same image, in the Gospels; as Jesus, which means in Hebrew, 'God saves', to save Adam, which in Hebrew means Everyman, Everywoman, Jesus himself in the Gospels calling himself 'Son of Man,' 'Ben-Adam', 'Bar-Adam' , our Brother, we his Mother, his Brothers, his Sisters. But it also reads like a political allegory, of the Pope and of his loyal Cardinal who has fallen into a dungeon, a deep slade, where he lies sorely wounded, from torture, and who seeks to return to his Lord./62

/62. Parable may also reflect Wyclif's 'Of Servants and Lords', The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted, ed. F.D. Matthews, EETS 74, p. 227; Herbert B. Workman, John Wyclif: A Study of the English Medieval Church (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), II.148, says 'Of Servants and Lords' written when Wyclif was translating Bible, founding Poor Preachers./ Julian next tells us that this Servant is Adam, and she uses the same words about the meaning of Adam as does Adam Easton in his own writings. Both know of the Hebrew meanings for Adam being 'Everyman,' 'earth,' 'tawny' ./* Simone Martini, Diptych, Museo Horne, Florence./

Simone Martini, Diptych, Museo Horne, Florence

I show here Simone Martini's diptych that beautifully illustrates Julian's W,P,A Showing of Love, its Marian First Showing, its Christological XV+I Showings. It shows Christ in the Pieta with tawny red hair, as Son of Adam, Son of David, for David also in Hebrew is ruddy, tawny, with beautiful eyes. /** God the Father, God the Son, enthroned side by side, Luttrell Psalter./ 63

/63. Flemish art, later than Julian, was to superbly illustrate Psalm 110, 'Dixit Dominus Domino mei: sede a dextris meis': Flemish Illuminated Manuscripts 1475-1550, ed. Maurits Smeyers and Jan Van der Stock (Ghent: Ludion Press, 1996), e.g., pp. 78-79./

Gradually in her allegory, the repentant fallen Adam, shadowing the imprisoned Cardinal, then turns into the risen Christ, the Son and heir of the Kingdom of Heaven who comes to sit at the Lord's right hand, of Psalm 110 and the Epistle to the Hebrews, but not in the literal sense, instead as being honoured (P93,106), as indeed Adam Easton was, the Pope writing to Parliament commending him. Both Adam and Julian in their theology, derived from Rabbi David Kimhi, speak of Adam as all of us, as the general man, all of us fellow-heirs with Christ in the Kingdom of Heaven. The biographies of Cardinal Adam Easton note that he translated the entire Hebrew Bible, though it was stolen from him except for the Psalter by a Carmelite named Richard Collier. He had lectured on the Hebrew Scriptures at Oxford and he owned the writings of Rabbi David Kimhi./64 /64. Cambridge, St John's College, 218 (I.10), Norwich Cathedral Priory shelfmark X.clxxxxij./ Kimhi countered Kabbalistic learning and Maimonides' scepticism, pleading for the return to philology in studying theology. He argued that 'Jerome, your translator, has corrupted the text by saying, 'The Lord said my Lord, '''Sit at my right hand, and I will make your enemies my footstool,' ' in Psalm 101, literally, that it meant instead to be treated honourably, which is precisely what Julian says in her text. Kimhi also says this reference is just to an ordinary lord, not the Messiah, which both Easton and Julian ignore, for their reading is in our Creed.

There is yet another layer to this allegory. Julian tells us that the Lord is garbed in blue seated on the ground in a Wilderness. That is the Virgin's colour. In the '1368' Westminster Manuscript version Julian had Jesus become our Mother, become his Mother. Adam Easton at Avignon would have been familiar with the fresco painted by Simone Martini of the Virgin in Humility, where she is seated in blue on the ground, with the donor of that painting, the Cardinal Stefaneschi, in his scarlet , kneeling in prayer before her. We recall Richard II the Lord and King of England in cloth of gold kneeling on the ground in a wilderness in the Wilton Diptych. But there is more. Cardinal Jerome had written to the Roman noblewoman Fabiola a treatise explaining the High Priest Aaron's garb in Exodus, specifically dwelling upon the hycinthine blue of his ephod./65

/65. Hieronymus ad Fabiolam de vestitu sacerdotum', 'compulisti me, fabiola, litteris tuis, ut de aaron tibi scriberem uestimentis', Opus Epistolarum diui Hieronymi Stridonensis, una cum scholiis Des. Erasmi Roterodami, denuo per illum non vulgari rocognitum, correctum et locupletum(Parisiis: Guillard, 1546), III.18v-21v./ Adam Easton won his Cardinalate through writing of that material on the Pope as Christendom's High Priest, as Aaron, using both Jerome and Pseudo-Dionysius, in his Defensorium Ecclesiastice Potestatis.

Cardinal Jerome , a model for Cardinal Easton, had left Rome for Bethlehem , being joined there by the noble Roman matron, Paula , and her virgin daughter Eustochium, in 386, and together they had worked at studying Hebrew, already having Greek and Latin, and together they translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin, the Vulgate Bible which served Latin Christianity until Vatican II. Birgitta of Sweden had a most beautiful married virgin daughter, Catherine of Sweden, friends with Catherine of Siena, Catherine of Sweden becoming the first Abbess of the Brigittine Abbey of Vadstena in Sweden. A painting, now in London's National Gallery, but formerly at San Girolamo (Jerome), Fiesole, shows Saints Jerome, Paula and her beautiful daughter, Eustochium, simultaneously portraying the last two also as Saints Birgitta and her beautiful daughter, Catherine of Sweden. Birgitta and her daughter Catherine and their labours at producing the Revelationes, were analogized to Paula and her daughter Eustochium and their labours at producing the Vulgate. A manuscript now at Lambeth Palace and associated with Norwich, speaks of Paula and ' the holy maid Eustace', or Eustochium./66

/66. Lambeth MS 432, 1350 Norwich miracle given of a man who is almost throttled by the devil but who had a vision of a book in which were written the words that whoever prayed to the Virgin would be saved from peril; at his prayer the Virgin removes the devil's paws from his mouth and nose, fol. 87, followed by Westminster miracle, of a widow'sa blind son cured by water used to wash the images of the Virgin and Child on St Ann's altar, fol. 87v./ The Norwich Castle Manuscript , which I believe is written by Julian of Norwich herself, echoes that phrase where it begins with a treatise translated into Middle English, supposedly of Cardinal Jerome, but actually the British Pelagius, writing to ' the holy maid Demetriade' on how to be an anchoress.

Birgitta's earliest editor, Magister Mathias, had studied Hebrew under the misogynist Jewish convert in Paris, Nicholas of Lyra , and had then translated the Bible from Hebrew into Swedish for Birgitta to use in her visionary writings, similarly modeling his role on that of Jerome, the great Doctor of the Church and his relationship with holy women. Master Adam had taught Hebrew at Oxford and translated the Bible. Julian's texts, especially the Westminster and Long Texts, though far less so, the Amherst, are filled with scriptural allusions to both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek Testament. The Wycliffite Bible was being produced during Julian's lifetime, but she is not using it./67

/67. Compare her citations with the Jerome Vulgate, and with The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal Books in the Earliest English Versions made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and His Followers, ed. Rev. Josiah Forshal and Sir Frederick Madden (London: Oxford University Press, 1850). An example is the Hebrew shalom, translated by Jerome and Wyclif as recte, ri3t , by the King James as 'all is well '. She also includes, in Middle English, a beginner's Hebrew translation of Genesis 1, God as 'I it am ' of Exodus, Jonah on the deep sea bed reciting Psalm 139, among other examples./ The Wycliffite Bible translates the Latin Vulgate into medieval English. That was one of the reasons for Adam Easton's scorn for his colleague John Wyclif. Easton believed the Bible should be translated, as was to be the King James Bible three centuries later, from Hebrew and Greek. When I study Julian's text, with Hebrew and Greek Bibles at hand, I find that was what she was doing, very quietly, very humbly, here in an obscure anchorhold in Norwich, and that she, with Adam Easton's help, was giving to her even-Christians the text of God's Word in our own words. Their model was that household of Cardinal Jerome and the Holy Paula and her daughter Eustochium in the cave adjacent to that of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

/* Birgitta's vision on pilgrimage in her seventieth year, of Mary giving birth to her Son, that Birgitta has in situ in the cave in Bethlehem, fresco in Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

St Birgitta to the right as a pilgrim widow gazes upon the just-born Word within the Bethlehem Cave. Fresco, Florence, Santa Maria Novella.

Chiara Gambacorta, Alfonso of Ja�n's protegee, in Pisa commissioned a similar and more beautiful version of the same scene./

Turino Vanni, St Birgitta's Vision at Bethlehem . Pisa, Museo Nazionale di San Matteo ( Courtesy, Soprintendenza ai beni ambientali, architettonici, artistici e storici, Pisa). These paintings shows the scene as Birgitta described it in Revelationes VII , with the Virgin taking off her shoes and blue robe [in Birgitta's text this is white], and veil, giving birth in merely her white shift, having brought with her two lengths of white linen, these lying beside her and the Child in which to wrap him. She addresses the Child: "Bene veneris, Deus meus, Dominus meus et filius meus!" ['Welcome, my God, my Lord and my Son'], words which are painted in the same scene in Birgtta's Vision of the Nativity in the Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Moreover we recall that both Birgitta in her seventieth year, in 1373 (the year of Julian's Showing), fulfilling her lifelong desire prophesied to her by St Dionysius as early as her Arras vision in 1342 (the year of Julian's birth), and Margery Kempe of Lynn, after talking with Julian in about 1413, actually went on pilgrimage to those caves, as centuries before them had an Emperor's Yorkshire mother, Constantine's Helena, and as centuries after them, /** Bethlehem Basilica and Grotto of the Nativity, in the latter an Arab Christian family have brought their new-born daughter whom the mother gently holds./

I also did, following their footsteps. The birth of the Word in that cave is the opening of what I believe to have been the earliest version of Julian's Showing, the opening of the Westminster Cathedral Manuscript , and which the Long Text Manuscripts forget and speak of as their First Showing, rather than that of the Crown of Thorns. The cave next to this one is where Jerome, Paula and Eustochium translated the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into the Vulgate Latin Bible.

But Julian's life puzzles me. She quotes directly and repeatedly from Gregory's Dialogues, giving the Life of St Benedict, on scale and proportion, in relation to the hazelnut image, how all that is made, all creation, seems full little in the presence of its Maker, the Creator, which indicates she probably was Benedictine. She is also deeply conversant in St Benedict's Rule. She could have been a schoolgirl, or a lay sister, or a nun at Benedictine Carrow Priory./68

/68. Blomefield, Topographical History of Norfolk, IV.524-530; Walter Rye, Carrow Abbey, Otherwise Carrow Priory, near Norwich, in the County of Norfolk: Its Foundations, Buildings, Officers and Inmates (Norwich, 1889), who owned the precints, despite the evidence of the records he reproduces, denies it was a school. Julian de Hedirsete, formerly a boarder, was cellaress in account rolls, Edward III's reign, pp. 50, 44. Veronica O'Mara sees connections between the Benedictines at Carrow and the Brigittines at Syon through Cardinal Adam Easton as spiritual advisor, given the contents of Cambridge University Library Hh.I.11, which is Benedictine, contains texts by Birgitta, Flete, and Suso, and is from the Norwich region./ Clearly she knows the monastic Offices and the Lessons from Holy Scripture with profound familiarity, these being further enhanced by her lifelong Benedictine lectio divina , her contemplation upon them.

But there is a reference in an Adam Easton manuscript to a deformed woman/69

/69. Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 74, Berengarius Biterrensis, Norwich Cathedral Priory annotation, shelfmark, 'liber ecclesie norwyce per magistrum adam de estone monachum dicti loci', X.xxxiiii, fol. CLXII, and noted in the index at fol. LXIII./ and I wonder if it is she, in pain, and frequently ill, as she herself writes of herself (W111v-112v,P3-4v,137,A97-97v,103.13,110v.11), not expecting to live long, yet brilliant, and succeeding in defying even her own expectations in living to a ripe old age. From her constant references to teaching, until that is forbidden by Archbishop Arundel, one can assume she may have earned her keep by teaching, for instance the A.B.C. (P104,166), she mentions twice in her text and by copying out manuscripts, frequently the work of others, rather than her own. There are manuscripts from Brigittine Syon Abbey contexts known as the _XV O_s/70 /70. These prayers on the Crucifixion exist in Latin and in Middle English and in one version in Latin and Swedish associated with a Swedish nun at Syon, Evelyn Underhill,The Essentials of Mysticism and Other Essays (London: Dent, 1920), p. 186, noting their relation to Julian; Nicholas Rogers, 'About the 15 'O's , the Brigittines and Syon Abbey', St Ansgar's Bulletin, 80 (1984), 29-30; The Revelations of Saint Birgitta, ed. William Patterson Cumming (London: Oxford Univesity Press, 1929), EETS 178, p. xxxviii./, and about a woman desirous to have a vision of Christ's wounds, in one manuscript being thirty, named in another manuscript 'Mary OEstrewyk ', in another associated with a convent, its nuns and their abbess, in another giving prayers for each wound that read like Julian's text./71 /71. British Library, Add. 37,787, fols. 71v-74, 'Sciendum est ante quod signis in peccatis esset triginta annis'; Harley 172, fols. 3v-4v; Harley 494, fols 61-62, naming visionary, ' mary OEstrewyk'; Bodleian Library, Don.e.120; Lyell 23, fol. 188v; Lyell 30, fol. 41v; Lambeth Palace, 3600. 'Westwick' is a Norwich place name, where the Jewry was situated./ They are frequently described in this almost exclusively English manuscript tradition as _XV O_s , as prayers about the Crucifixion taught to St Birgitta by the Crucifix vision she had had at St Pauls Outside the Walls in Rome in 1368. So it seems someone in England invented these Pseudo-Brigittine prayers, someone who wrote in a florid Dionysan/Victorine style, someone who wanted them to seem to be composed by a devout woman. Though they parallel Julian's Long Text XV+I Showings structure, they are penned in Easton's style. These are the straws in the wind that we have about our Julian of Norwich. That is, apart from her texts, The Book of Margery Kempe , and the wills which name her. Of interest too is the final folio of the Amherst Manuscript. It is a drawing of a Mother who holds a Child, but the Mother's head is pierced with three huge nails which make up the Cross-Nimbed Halo that is only worn by Christ in art, while the Child has no halo at all. Is it a drawing by a Brigittine nun of Julian's theme of 'Jesus as Mother'? Yet that section is omitted in Amherst's Short Text of the Showing.

By 1396 we know Cardinal Adam Easton had returned to Santa Cecilia in Rome for we hear of Archbishop Arundel being touched by his kindness to him there. Adam Easton died in 1397. /* Adam Easton's marble tomb, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome, Black Prince's tomb and memorials, Canterbury Cathedral./

_
Tomb of Adam Easton in Rome Tomb of Black Prince in Canterbury
with Royal Arms of England with Royal Arms of England

His tomb is not unlike that of the Black Prince, King Richard II's father, at Canterbury, beside that of Thomas Becket, both with the Royal Arms of England. But it is in Rome, in his titular church as Cardinal of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, /* Tomb of St Cecilia, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome./ and it is even

_

St Cecilia in mosaic Stefano Maderno, Saint Cecilia, tomb sculpture beneath altar, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere.

near her tomb. Julian's Amherst Showingof Love engrosses and underlines in red with great emphasis St Cecilia's name, desiring to share that saint's three neck wounds (A97v.16-17), while the Norwich Castle Manuscript likewise stresses St Cecilia as model for writer and reader.

By Permission of the British Library, Amherst Manuscript, Additional 37,790

When the bodies were later exhumed both Cecilia's and Adam's were found incorrupt. /* Detail of Adam Easton's tomb sculpted with Cardinal's Hat.

Tomb of Cardinal Adam Easton, O.S.B. of Norwich in Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, Rome

/ The tomb shows the Cardinal's hat with tassels he was entitled to wear, / Detail of Adam Easton's Tomb, sculpted with Royal Arms of England./ and like that of the Black Prince, the Royal Arms of England, whose Cardinal he was./72

/72. Sculptor, Paolo Romano, Paolo Salvati, beginning of fifteenth century, tomb spoken of as that of 'Cardinale Adam di Hertford (*1398)'; this misinformation appears to circulate at time of Council of Basle, ASS, 412A, ' Adamus iste dictus fuit de Eston, Herefordiae in Angliae natus, vir doctrina insignis ex Ordine S. Benedicti, et ex episcopo Londinensi, ut nonnullus placet, factus S.R.E. Cardinalis ab Urbano VI, a quo etiam unus ex examinatoribus Revelationum S. Birgittae constitutis fuit anno 1379 '; Bishop of Hereford may have ordered tomb at that time and Italians been confused./ But he is a son of our Norwich, just as much is Julian a daughter of this fair city. /* Norwich and its Cathedral, pretending to be Constantinople and the Hagia Sophia, Luttrell Psalter./

And here let me give the city of Norwich as Julian and Easton both knew it, from the Luttrell Psalter.

The first extant bequest to 'Julian anakorite ', is as late as 1394, of 2s left by the parish priest Roger Reed; following that is one in 1404 by Thomas Edmund, chantry chaplain, of 12d, and for her maid Sara, 8d; while in 1415, the merchant John Plumpton left 40d for her, and 12d for her two maids, one named Alice; in 1416 the Countess of Suffolk, leaving her the famous 'xxs '. Julian, as an anchoress, would have received Communion only fifteen times a year but daily could gaze upon the Sacrament upon the altar through a window let into the church from the anchorhold. So had Birgitta in Rome had a hagioscope looking onto the altar at San Damaso. Margery Kempe was to win from Archbishop Arundel, from talking with him under the stars in his garden at Lambeth Palace, the right to receive Communion every Sunday, then a most rare privilege. But she was the Mayor of Lynn's daughter. A second window in Julian's anchorhold would have looked out onto the street, through which she could speak with others, including, memorably, our Margery Kempe ./* Pietro Lorenzetti polyptych of Life and Miracles of St Umilta`, Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

St Umilta` Healing Monk

/ We lack illustrations of Julian, but we have a complete set painted by Pietro Lorenzetti of the life of St Umilta` , in this one, Umilta` leaning out of her anchorhold to bless a monk with a gangrenous leg brought to her by his desperate brother monks. He is of course healed. As an anchoress in an anchorhold, Julian's was a life of prayer and contemplation before a crucifix in her cell, being both withdrawn from the world, and yet counselling and consoling others who were troubled in that world and who came to her for advice, as did Margery Kempe from nearby Lynn around 1413. Other aspects of the life of St Umilta` remind one very much of Margery, including both women's persistent attempts to have their husbands' consent to vows of chastity.

Sometimes, in my wildest moments, I think of one crippled brilliant Mary OEstrewyk as having had an older brother named Adam OESTON (these being the spellings in an XV O's and an autograph Easton manuscript, where wick=town), a brother who teased her unmercifully, then came to take her seriously, and who helped her, because of his vow under torture in a dungeon, to write a massive version of a text he had formerly scorned, as it unfolded decade upon decade: just as in Sweden and Italy, Magister Mathias and Bishop Hermit Alfonso of Ja�n helped Birgitta unfold her huge book; women and men being Catherine of Siena's scribes, one of whom would later have Birgitta's Revelationes translated into Italian; and in Lynn various priests would assist illiterate Margery Kempe inscribe her Book, one of whom indexed Birgitta's Revelationes . Why do I think he is her brother? Perhaps because she keeps speaking of Christ as 'Master Jesus ' (P50,A105v) and as 'our brother ' (W87v,P15v,46v, 106v,124,127,A101), when ' Master Adam' was Easton's title before he was Cardinal. For in the Lord and the Servant Parable Julian turns Adam into Christ. Adam himself in his own self-conscious and sometimes acrostic writings played on the Hebrew meanings of his name 'Adam'./73

/73. For example, his youthful university _'_Questiones disputatio in vesperiis domine Ade de Estone monachi Norwicensis responsali Nicholao Redclyf' ,000000 where Easton equates Adam's perfect knowledge of God with his love of God, the immediate end of which is God: Worcester Cathedral F.65; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 692, fol. 21; MacFarlane, 1955 Thesis, p. 104; his mature Defensorium Ecclesiastice Potestatis having the acrostic upon ' A udite / D eterminatis / Angela / Materia' ; the Office for the Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth, composed on order of Urban VI, proclaimed by Boniface IX, using the Orthodox feast date of 2 July in order to heal that greater Schism, 9 November 1389, to heal the Schism, in which the antiphons for First Vespers, Magnificat, Matins and First Nocturn form ADAM CARDI[NALIS] , underlined in red , twice punning upon that colour, red in Hebrew meaning 'Adam', red being a cardinal's colour. It uses Victorine phrases: ' fons vivus. rosa de spinis, virga de Iesse, stella sub nube, lux mundi, thronum lucis, ancilla dei'/ Julian frequently, emphatically at times with repetition and with similar rubrication, likewise discourses upon 'Adam ' and all the meanings of his name 3,53v,95v,97,97v,98v,101v(7x),102(6x),103(4x),105v, 107,108,108v,110v,A106v).

Benedict had had a twin, a sister named Scholastica, their story appearing in Gregory's Dialogues immediately before the one that Julian quotes from again and again in her text.

The Long Text originally written 1378-1383 (P68-69), gives a strange addition to the traditional vita of John of Beverley, linking him with sinners like David, Peter and Paul. The only other version of such an addition of sin followed by conversion in John of Beverley's vita occurs in a Flemish text, dated 1512, where it has strong echoes to the story of Yorkshire Richard Rolle and his sister, a story which continued to be known in Syon and Vadstena circles. Adam Easton was connected with the Collegiate Church of St John of Beverley, being appointed its provost by Boniface IX within weeks of his restoration to the Cardinalate of St Cecilia. Otherwise, St John of Beverley was of little importance in England until Agincourt, 1415, following which his cult was strongly observed at Henry V's foundation, the Brigittine's Syon Abbey.

/Deighton, Alan. 'Julian of Norwich's Knowledge of the Life of St John of Beverley'. Notes and Queries 40 (1993), 4.440-43; James Hogg, 'Adam Easton's Defensorium Sanctae Birgittae ', The Medieval Mystical Tradition, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999), pp. 213-240./ The Amherst Manuscript too (A96v-97v) includes part of the Liber de modo bene vivendi ad sororem , called here 'The Golden Epistle', believed to be written by St Bernard to his sister, but in fact written by Thomas de Froidmont to his sister Margaret of Jerusalem , who were from a Beverley, Yorkshire, family. Birgitta had owned this text in a Spanish manuscript, keeping it always in her pocket, and it still proclaims: 'Hunc librum qui intytulatur doctrina Bernardi ad sororem portavit Beata mater nostra sancta Birgitta continuo in sinu suo ideo inter reliquies suas asseruandus est'. /74 /74. Uppsala University Library C240; Aron Andersson and Anne Marie Franzen, Birgittareliker (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1975), pp. 54-55, 60, fig. 46, who suggest it was given to her by Bishop Hermit Alfonso of Ja�n./

Uppsala C240, open to '{ Soror mea'

Nor were other friendships between men and women monastics, besides those between brothers and sisters, without precedent, Cardinal Jerome, Holy Paula and her Eustochium already being noted, while a troubled pair were Abelard and Heloise, who modeled their letters upon those of Jerome, Paula and Eustochium . Easton copies Abelard's title, 'De sua calamitate' when writing of his incarceration, Abelard's work of that title prompting Heloise's Letters to him, concluded by their Letters of Spiritual Direction. Another couple were Cardinal Jacques de Vitry and the Beguine Marie d'Oignies , whom both Birgitta's Magister Mathias , and Margery's scribe consciously took as their own models. While Adam with his brilliance was welcomed at Norwich Cathedral Priory, though working class, Carrow Priory was more snobby and less cultured. Julian there would have been used as a teacher in its school for girl boarders, but treated as a lay sister, the service she says she has done in her youth (P1v,4v,29-30v,171, A102). Then perhaps she had to leave on health grounds. That seems to be the sense of her words about her severe and youthful physical and mental incapacitation, her wanting of will, her wasting of time (W111v-112, P137v, A110v), which later she clearly outgrew.

Following Adam Easton's death in 1397, more than 228 of his manuscripts in six barrels from Rome were returned to this Priory's library in 1407./75

/75. H.C. Beeching and M.R. James, 'The Library of the Cathedral Church of Norwich', Norfolk Archeology 19 (1915-1917), 67-116, giving manuscripts with Easton's name and Norwich Cathedral Priory pressmark of X that survive; Joan Greatrex notes the king ordered the six barrels, brought to London from Rome, be delivered to Norwich and that the communar/pittancer paid 12s carrying charges NRO DCN 1/12/41, in accordance with Easton's will. While some of Norwich Cathedral Priory's books at the Reformation, among them some 10 of Adam Easton's, made their way to Cambridge and Oxford libraries, John Bale, p. 85, in his search found only 58 books extant out of the Cathedral Priory Library, ' Ex Bibliotheca Nordavicensis', others having been used by grocers, candlemakers, soapsellers and so forth./ When Julian was perhaps writing the last version of her text in 1413, Margery Kempe from Lynn visited her. Margery had gone mad with childbirth and had had many children and was very troubled. Julian, and it is as if one has a tape recorder in fifteenth-century Norwich, converses with Margery, and consoles her, Margery later giving their verbatim conversation. In it Julian repeats the splendid theology of the soul as a city in which God sits enthroned. Julian, enclosed in her anchorhold beside a small Norwich church with its Norman tower, then much taller before the bomb,/76 /76. Anon., An Introduction to the Study of Gothic Architecture, (Oxford: Parker, 1849), Round Tower, St Julian's, Norwich, engraving, p. 81./ encouraged the troubled and restless Margery to travel far afield, and perhaps to return and tell her of what she had seen, to be her surrogate self and her opposite. Margery obeyed her, had 'Seynt Brydis boke ' read to her, and did all the pilgrimages Birgitta of Sweden , likewise a mother of many children, had already done, to Compostela, to Cologne, to Gdansk, to Jerusalem, to Rome, where Margery even stood in the room where Birgitta had written her Revelationes and where she had died, and then she came home to write a similar book, The Book of Margery Kempe ./77 /77. Sir John Hawkwood and Thomas Brinton, O.S.B., Adam Easton's fellow monk at Norwich, Oxford and Avignon, founded the English College in Rome as a hospice for pilgrims next door to Birgitta's house, and Margery Kempe stayed under its begrudging roof: Sermons of Thomas Brinton, ed. Devlin, I.xiii. Gunnel Cleve, 'Margery Kempe: A Scandinavian Influence on Medieval England', The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Exeter Symposium V, ed. Marion Glasscoe, V.163-178; Roger Ellis, 'Margery Kempe's Scribes and the Miraculous Books', Langland, the Mystics and the Medieval Mystical Religious Tradition: Essays in Honour of S.S. Hussey, ed. Helen Philips (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990), pp. 161-175; Julia Bolton Holloway, 'Saint Bride's Books', Jerusalem: Essays on Pilgrimage and Literature (New York: AMS Press, 1998), pp. 142-172; 'Bride, Margery, Julian and Alice: Bridget of Sweden's Textual Community in Medieval England,' Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, ed. Sandra McEntire (New York: Garland, 1992), pp. 203-222./ What is interesting too is that Julian's extant manuscripts survive together with those of William Flete , The Cloud of Unknowing' s cluster, Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton , and with texts by Continental medieval mystics, Marguerite Porete , Birgitta of Sweden , Catherine of Siena ,Jan van Ruusbroec , Henry Suso , Alfonso of Ja�n , who also seem to have influenced her, all of which Adam Easton could have presented to her and many of which she quotes. These manuscripts were together at Brigittine Syon Abbey, first in England, then in exile at the Reformation. Part of that exile was instigated because Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent, was encouraged at Syon Abbey by such people as St Richard Reynolds and St Thomas More in the writing of a similar Revelations as Birgitta's Revelationes and Catherine's Dialogo (translated as The Orcherd of Syon, also perhaps even one of Syon's copies of Julian's Showing was given her as a model), her printed book next destroyed by Henry VIII's Act of Attainder, and for which Barton, Reynolds and More (who was reading William Flete in the Tower), were executed at Tyburn for the criticism in it of the English King's multiple marriages (St Birgitta similarly, and justly, criticised her Swedish King Magnus in her Revelationes , causing her to have to go into exile to Italy)./78 /78. L.E. Whatmore, 'The Sermon against the Holy Maid of Kent and her Adherents, Delivered at Paul's Cross, November the 23rd, 1533, and at Canterbury, December the 7th', English Historical Review 58 (1943), 469; A Denton Cheney, 'The Holy Maid of Kent', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , n.s. 18 (1904), p. 199; John Rory Fletcher, The Story of the English Brigittines of Syon Abbey, pp. 32-33; E. J. Devereux, 'Elizabeth Barton and Tudor Censorship', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 49 (1966), 91-106; F.R. Johnston, Saint Richard Reynolds: The Angel of Syon (Syon Abbey: 1971), p. 6; Hope Emily Allen, Book of Margery Kempe , EETS 212.lxvii-lxviii./ Thus we have had Marguerite Porete in Paris executed for writing her Mirror, Elizabeth Barton in London for writing her Revelations, Margery Kempe at risk for writing her_Book_, Julian and her Showing of Love surely not being totally out of danger.

Amherst, Westminster, and Paris all have Syon Abbey connections, Paris being written out in Antwerp around 1580 by exiled Syon nuns there, seemingly with the intent to publish it for the English Mission, then left behind in Rouen when the nuns fled to Lisbon. Later, Julian's Showing is found being copied out by English Benedictine nuns in exile in Cambrai and Paris, by scribes who include the descendants of Thomas More and of Thomas Gascoigne , to whom again they may have come by way of Syon for both men had the closest associations with that Abbey. They do not survive outside of those contexts. Easton is Benedictine and instrumental in assisting Brigittine monasticism throughout Europe. It seems no accident that it was Brigittines and Benedictines who preserved our Julian of Norwich's Showing in the security of their monastic cloisters. For centuries these texts could not be shown, they had to be concealed; they could not even be in England, they had, all but two, to be in exile, in Antwerp, Rouen, Lisbon, Cambrai and Paris; first because they could be seen as Lollard, then because they could be seen as Catholic, their ownership even punishable by death. Moreover all of them but one, the Amherst Manuscript , seem to have had cloistered women scribes.

Julian's Showing and Margery's Book are very different, one contemplative, the other active, one enclosed, the other far-flung, yet very much worth reading together. Their texts need also to be seen against the backdrop not just of England but of all Europe, a Europe perhaps opened up to them by our Norwich Benedictine, Adam Easton , Cardinal of England, friend and associate of Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena; perhaps even Julian's fellow Benedictine, who together could have worked quietly at making the Hebrew Bible, Hebrew philology, the Greek Testament and Greek theology, present in our English language.

For citations to sources see the following:

http://www.umilta.net
http://www.umilta.net/anchor.html
http://www.umilta.net/amherst.html
http://www.umilta.net/judaism.html

http://www.umilta.net/midrash.html
http://www.umilta.net/valour.html
http://www.umilta.net/buber.html
http://www.umilta.net/mystics.html
http://www.umilta.net/godfrien.html
http://www.umilta.net/sparklin.html http://www.umilta.net/birgitta.html
http://www.umilta.net/cathersiena.html
http://www.umilta.net/orcherd.html
http://www.umilta.net/flete.html
http://www.umilta.net/julian.html
http://www.umilta.net/westmins.html
also on mp3, /1Julian.mp3-/4Julian.mp3
http://www.umilta.net/Julianonprayer.html
http://www,umilta.net/LordServant.mp3
http://www.umilta.net/soulcity.html
http://www.umilta.net/soulcity.mp3
http://www.umilta.net/chuppa.html

This lecture was presented in Norwich Cathedral, 1 December 1998, under the auspices of The Friends of Norwich Cathedral. Earlier scholarship on the connection between Adam Easton and Margery Kempe: Hope Emily Allen, The Book of Margery Kempe , EETS 212, lviii, 280-281; Adam Easton and Julian of Norwich, Grace Jantzen, Julian of Norwich (London: SPCK, 1987), p. 22. A brief version of the essay was initially published as 'Chronicles of a Mystic', The Tablet, 11 May, 1996. The revised essay is a central chapter in Anchoress and Cardinal: Julian of Norwich and Adam Easton, O.S.B., published by Analecta Cartusiana, Salzburg, ed. James Hogg, and written to accompany Julian of Norwich, Showing of Love: Extant Texts and Translation , ed. by Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P., and Julia Bolton Holloway (Florence: SISMEL: Edizioni del Galluzzo , 2001):

Julian of Norwich. Showing of Love: Extant Texts and Translation. Edited. Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P. and Julia Bolton Holloway. Florence: SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2001. Biblioteche e Archivi 8. XIV + 848 pp. ISBN 88-8450-095-8. Obtainable from Editrice 'Aureo Anello'

Anchoress and Cardinal: Julian of Norwich and Adam Easton OSB.Analecta Cartusiana 35:20 Spiritualit�t Heute und Gestern. Salzburg: Institut f�r Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universit�t Salzburg, 2008. ISBN 978-3-902649-01-0. ix + 399 pp. Index. Plates. Type-set by author in Nota Bene.
Order from http://analectacartusiana.blogspot.com/2008/10/nouvelle-parution.htmlISBN

Teresa Morris. Julian of Norwich: A Comprehensive Bibliography and Handbook. Preface, Julia Bolton Holloway. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010. x + 310 pp. ISBN-13: 978-0-7734-3678-7; ISBN-10: 0-7734-3678-2. Maps. Index.

Julian among the Books: Julian of Norwich's Theological Library. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016. xxi + 328 pp. VII Plates, 59 Figures. ISBN (10): 1-4438-8894-X, ISBN (13) 978-1-4438-8894-3.

� Julia Bolton Holloway, 1998-2013, Hermit of the Holy Family

See Adam Easton, Visitation, Metropolitan Museum of Art http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/90.61.3

	If you have used and enjoyed this page please consider donating to the research and restoration of Florence's formerly abandoned English Cemetery by the Roma and its Library through our Aureo Anello Associazione's account with PayPal: Thank you!

JULIAN OF NORWICH, HER SHOWING OF LOVE AND ITS CONTEXTS �1997-2022 JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY || JULIAN OF NORWICH || SHOWING OF LOVE || HER TEXTS ||HER SELF || ABOUT HER TEXTS || BEFORE JULIAN || HER CONTEMPORARIES || AFTER JULIAN || JULIAN IN OUR TIME || ST BIRGITTA OF SWEDEN || BIBLE AND WOMEN || EQUALLY IN GOD'S IMAGE || MIRROR OF SAINTS || BENEDICTINISM|| THE CLOISTER || ITS SCRIPTORIUM || AMHERST MANUSCRIPT || PRAYER|| CATALOGUE AND PORTFOLIO (HANDCRAFTS, BOOKS ) || BOOK REVIEWS || BIBLIOGRAPHY ||