In Lyf of Soule, dialogue is exploited to arrange the material from diverse sources which compilation draws together, and the previous chapter has suggested parallels for this within the Revelation. There are, however, a number of voices resonating in the Revelation which are not controlled within the text's dialogue, whether Julian's interior dialogue or her dialogue with Christ. These voices provide some of the most suggestive evidence of actual processes of compilation in the Revelation, as well as the imitatory processes or gestures towards compilation in Julian's style. To examine the place of these voices within the structure of the Revelation, comparison will be made with Book to a Mother, a sophisticated latefourteenth-century compilation which, like Lyf of Soule, covers the items of Pecham's syllabus, but which treats its material in a very different manner, disposing it around central images. In Book to a Mother, the processes of compilation become intrinsic to its structure: the text exploits its own structure through the central image of Christ as book. After examining the form of Book to a Mother, this chapter will cite some examples of voices resonating beyond dialogue in the Revelation, and then explore how the Revelation too disposes material around the central images which are illuminated by different voices in turn.

Book to a Mother is structured around the central image of the book, and the development of the treatise is the development of that image. New significances for the image are constantly offered, never excluding each other but often stretching the abstract imagination.