‘The showings are full of mysteries’: Translating Julian of Norwich

Abstract

Extract

The late fourteenth century was among the greatest periods of English literature. It was also an age when, alongside great poetry such as that of Chaucer and Langland, powerful religious Writings in English prose, like those of Richard Rolle, Walter Hilton, and the author of the The cloud of unknowing, were widely read. Only a few women had any education, so it is not surprising that most famous writers of the time were men; what is surprising is that one of them was not. Julian of Norwich, probably little known to her contemporaries but widely admired now, is the first writer in English who is known to have been a woman. Among her twentieth-century admirers has been T. S. Eliot, who quoted her prose as verse in Little Gidding