The Julian Page

I have discovered that all research begins with curiosity, insatiable curiosity. When I first discovered Julian I was intrigued. She was a rhetorical outlier on the list Michael and I had prepared for our Scholar's class, and while I knew about her for many years, I found that the more I knew the more I wanted to know. After reading her tender and loving book, Showing of Love, the first written in English by a woman, I began thinking about Julian's spirituality and her positive outlook that superseded everything negative, including plague, war, rebellion, famine. Julian could look at the world and say, "All shall be well." I knew I couldn't do that so I wanted to know more.

As I said above, research begins with curiosity. Who, what, where, when, how? Each flash of insight leads to another; each snip of information compels further investigation. And then, we discover we are immersed in it. In this case, I am immersed in Julian, her works, things written about her, scholarship about her, places where she lived, her anchorhold, her church, her city, and how, just how does all of this affect us today in the twenty-first century.

This immersion led me to seek out Julian scholars. Luckily, Michael knew one such an internationally known scholar, Julia Bolton Holloway.

While Julia has contributed an excellent translation of Julian's book, keeping the strength of its Anglo Saxon origin, by using words such as "Showings" instead of "Revelations," and "oneing," instead of "uniting," she has also researched the history of the book and brought together enormous scholarly sources in her new book, Julian Among the Books.  From this new book I discovered other directions for research including The Cloud of Unknowing, and the work of St. Brigitta of Sweden, and The Book of Margery Kemp.  I will have to read all of these so that Julian's world seeps into my psyche!

As we continue, I will review some of these as well.