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The Showings of Julian of Norwich is one of the most remarkable texts of the Middle Ages. The personal experience of God which underlies the exposition of ways of living in Rolle, Hilton and the Cloud-author, is right at the centre of Julian's reason for writing. It was a visionary experience where visual imagery and language serve an awareness of God as a living reality and a transforming dynamic. This is manifested in Julian's own personal circumstances which encapsulate the visionary experience. In the early 1370s at the critical point of an illness which she desired in order to understand more deeply the sufferings of Christ, she felt herself dying. It was about four o'clock in the morning and a priest was called who set a crucifix before her face which, she says, was a source of light in surroundings which were dark to her. Suddenly her experience of pain was miraculously transformed to one of well-being and she had a series of visions on the nature of redemption which lasted until noon. They started with Christ crucified and ended with a visionary assurance of the metaphysical reality behind her own experience of release from sickness and pain: that ultimately she would be released from the process of suffering in time to a complete and lasting joy. She then experienced another return to and remission of her sickness before the final sixteenth showing of Christ ruling endlessly in the soul which appeared to her as having immense space—that of a kingdom. It is as if her experience in physical sickness of suffering and relief is both the initial condition for the understanding of the redemptive process and emblematic of it. Her visionary experience swings between two manifestations: that of God and sin: God as the ground of all things 'ther is no doer but he' (c.11, p. 14),[1] and sin as the ultimate in negation 'for I beleve it hath no maner of substance ne party of being, ne it myght not be knowin but by the peyne that it is cause of' (c.27, p.29). This experience, through the image of Christ's passion, illuminates for her the reality of a love which works by the means of time, suffering and failure to prove itself.[2] Her own suffering and deliverance from it stands as a witness to this process. Indeed, her sickness, which she experiences not only as physical pain but as alienation and self-doubt (c.66), is just part of a cosmological process:
But this failing process does not run its course: Julian recounts that as she contemplated the ebbing of the life-giving processes in Christ's passion:
For Julian the most crucial element in her visionary experience is her identification with the reality of pain and sin (witnessed to in c.19, p. 21, where she refuses to raise her eyes from the cross and chooses 'Iesus to my hevyn, . . . in al this tyme of passion and sorow') and her growth during this experience in assurance that, notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, 'al shal be wel' all shall be redeemed: "than shall non of us be stirid to sey in ony wise 'Lord, if it had ben thus, than it had bene full wele', but we shall seyn al without voice 'Lord, blissid mot thou ben! For it is thus, it is wele'" (c.85, p.101).
Our understanding of this remarkable account is circumscribed by factors concerning both the history of its transmission and the present state of scholarship. An examination of the evidence provided by the extant manuscript sources points to problems in establishing a Julian text of which perhaps those who love to read her are insufficiently aware. The aim of this paper is to highlight these difficulties by presenting some conclusions which follow from further study of the nature of the extant manuscripts and an analysis of significant variant readings they provide.
There exist two basic accounts of her experience, one very much more extended than the other. The shorter version is extant in a single manuscript copy, British Library Additional MS.37790(A). The fuller text is complete in three manuscripts: 1. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds Anglais No. 40(P); 2. British Library Sloane MS.2499(S1); 3. British Library Sloane MS. 3705(S2). Since Julian tells us in the longer text that she had inward teaching for twenty years save three months after the original experience (c.32 p.56), and since in the chapter headings recorded in the Sloane versions that for 86 says 'the good lord shewid this booke shuld be otherwise performid than at the first writing',[3] it is generally assumed that A represents an early version of Julian's experience and that the other longer manuscripts contain an account which includes the insights and understanding accumulated over the twenty odd years she speaks of. There is no external evidence to prove that the short version is not in fact excerpts from a longer account—indeed it occurs in a manuscript where such excerpts from other works appear—but the passages in A which do not occur in the long version are of such a kind as to render it unlikely that they would have been either added to excerpts, or extrapolated from the longer text like a précis. Some of these passages are
There are, however, differences between the manuscript copies of the longer version which raise further questions. Of the three complete versions, since S2 is simply an eighteenth-century modernisation of S1 it is not generally germane to these considerations. But between Paris and S1 there are differences which need to be taken account of. These need to be seen not only in relation to each other, but to A, where the short and long versions coincide, and also to two other early manuscript copies of excerpts from the extended version. The first of these is Westminster Treasury 4 (W), a collection of devotional pieces to promote meditation—commentaries on Psalms 90 and 91, extracts from Hilton's Scale and the pieces from Julian. It is written throughout in a very legible secretary hand of the early sixteenth century and the excerpts, which are taken from the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 9th, 10th and 15th showings and Julian's understanding of them, seem chosen to illustrate the intimately close relationship between man and God both in man's very being and in the work of redemption. This relationship is a source of joy to man and God: it is accessible to man through prayer, and can be expressed and understood in terms of God as a mother who nurtures a child to maturity, which signifies for man his fulfillment in heaven.
The second collection of excerpts is very short and comes from the 12th and 13th showings, chapters, 26, 27, 28, 30 and 32. They are concerned with God as the fullness of glory and with the barrier between us and this glory formed by sin which will itself ultimately be transformed through the work of redemption when 'al shal be wel' through the compassion of Christ. They occupy folios 114-117 of a seventeenth-century manuscript from the Upholland Northern Institute (formerly St Joseph's College) in Lancashire (U).
Of the two earlier manuscripts of the complete account, S1 is rather messily written in an early seventeenth-century cursive hand; it contains only Julian's showings and preserves linguistic forms which are closer to Julian's own time (late fourteenth century) than those in P. It also contains chapter contents at the heading of each chapter which are not present in P; furthermore not all the chapter divisions in S1 entirely correspond with those in P. P itself also contains only Julian's text. It is deliberately calligraphic, written in a simplified bastard hand with some elements of italic style, and belongs to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Its language is modernised—it also contains occasional passages omitted from S1
The following section concentrates on an analysis of representative variations, whether by commission or omission, between S1 and P in order to illustrate the pitfalls in presenting a clearly conclusive case for either: (1) adopting either S1 or P as preferred copy-text for Julian's work; or (2) arguing the validity of establishing a text eclectically. At the same time a case will be made for recognising qualities peculiar to S1 which have been overlooked by those who concentrate on the rhetorical superiority of P.[5] For the sake of the reader all references for quotations from P will be to the critical edition of Julian's showings by E. Colledge and J. Walsh.[6] The readings have been compared with the manuscript to which on occasions it will be necessary to refer directly. All italicised emphasis in the presentation of specific examples is mine to clarify the issues under discussion. Since substantiation of the argument depends on the presentation of a rather dense mass of textual detail it may be helpful to outline its main stages in advance.
It falls into three parts. The first will compare variants between P and S1 in those passages of the text which the short and long versions have in common so that comparison can be made with A in any attempt to determine their significance. The second will analyse different kinds of variation between P and S1 chiefly in passages peculiar to the long text. In both of these sections reference will be made to the relationship between the evidence afforded by the manuscripts and its availability to the reader in the text and annotations provided by Colledge and Walsh. The third section will concentrate on examples which develop this aspect of the investigation.
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