The life

We do not know her real name. “Julian” comes from St Julian’s Church in Norwich, where she later lived. She grew up in the second-largest city in England during the Black Death, which killed close to half of Norwich around 1349 and returned again and again.

In May 1373, when she was thirty, she fell so ill that a priest came to give her last rites. As she looked at the crucifix he held, she later wrote, she received a series of sixteen visions, which she called “showings.” Then she recovered.

She wrote a short account of what she had seen soon afterward, and over the next twenty years or more a much longer one. Revelations of Divine Love is the earliest surviving book in English known to have been written by a woman.

At some point she became an anchoress, a woman who lived enclosed in a small room attached to a church, with a window that opened onto the street. People came to the window for advice. One visitor, the mystic Margery Kempe, described their conversations around 1413.

Her best-known line, “all shall be well,” is quoted today by poets, hospital chaplains and T. S. Eliot.

“He showed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.”

Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 5.

Questions to talk about

1. Julian lived through plague, revolt and religious persecution. Why might “all shall be well” have mattered to people in her city?
2. Why do you think her name was not recorded, while her book survived?
3. What does the hazelnut image suggest about how she saw the world?

More lives

All the mystics →