Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Motherhood and Margery Kempe
- 2 The Motherhood Matrix in the Writing of Julian of Norwich
- 3 Discourses of Prostitution and The Book of Margery Kempe
- 4 ‘3yf thowe be payede,’ quod oure lorde, ‘I am payede’: Hermeneutics of the Holy Whore in Julian of Norwich
- 5 Margery Kempe: Wisdom, Authority and the Female Utterance
- 6 Julian of Norwich: Voice of the Wise Woman
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Julian of Norwich: Voice of the Wise Woman
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Motherhood and Margery Kempe
- 2 The Motherhood Matrix in the Writing of Julian of Norwich
- 3 Discourses of Prostitution and The Book of Margery Kempe
- 4 ‘3yf thowe be payede,’ quod oure lorde, ‘I am payede’: Hermeneutics of the Holy Whore in Julian of Norwich
- 5 Margery Kempe: Wisdom, Authority and the Female Utterance
- 6 Julian of Norwich: Voice of the Wise Woman
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This booke is begunne be Gods gift and his grace, but it is not yet performid, as to my syte. (LT, 134)
At the climactic moment as the Long Text draws to a close, Julian of Norwich admits to having experienced a secondary vision ‘xv yer after [the original vision] and more’ (LT, 135). Julian tells us that it was in this secondary revelation (which must have occurred some time during or after 1388) that she was made privy to the crucial and transforming insight that ‘love was our lords mening’ (LT, 135), and it is an insight which crowns the entire Long Text and brings it to its close:
And I saw ful sekirly in this and in all, that ere God made us he lovid us; which love was never slakid, no never shall. And in this love he hath don all his werke; and in this love he hath made all things profitable to us; and in this love our life is everlestand. In our making we had beginning; but the love wherin he made us was in him from withoute begynning; in which love we have our beginning. And all this shall be seen in God without end. (LT, 135)
In his examination of this passage, Watson has pointed out its similarity in tone and content to the wholly undeveloped allusions to divine love which appear at the end of the Short Text, a correlation which suggests that both passages originate from this secondary insight dating from the late 1380s.
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- Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe , pp. 205 - 234Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004