“This
is a fine, and very welcome addition to the growing corpus of
scholarly work on what may well be the most important work of
Christian reflection in the English Language” —Rowan
Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
“This is an edition like no other. Word for word and thought
for thought, Watson and Jenkins give Julian’s texts the closest
reading they have ever had. The editors’ daring break with
current trends will make it much easier henceforth to read A Revelation
of Love and much harder to evade the challenge of its intricate
and radical thought. Adopting a wholly new approach to Julian’s
sources, the copious notes initiate the novice reader gently into
the mysteries of Middle English, while inviting specialists to
enter more fully than ever before into the process of making this
book, which, in the final words of its author, ‘is begonne
by Goddes gifte and his grace, but it is not yet performed.’” —Barbara
Newman, Northwestern University
Julian
of Norwich (c. 1343–c. 1416), a contemporary of Geoffrey
Chaucer, William Langland, and John Wyclif, is the earliest woman
writer of English we know about. Although she described herself
as “a simple creature unlettered,” Julian is
now widely recognized as one of the great speculative theologians
of the Middle Ages, whose thinking about God as love has
made
a permanent contribution to the tradition of Christian
belief. Despite her recent popularity, however, Julian
is usually read
only in translation and often in extracts rather than as
a whole.
This book presents a much needed new edition of
Julian’s
writings in Middle English, one that makes possible the serious
reading and study of her thought not just for students and
scholars of Middle English but for those with
little or no previous experience
with the language.
Some of the key features of this edition are:
• Separate texts of both Julian’s works, A Vision Showed to a
Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love, with modern punctuation
and paragraphing and partly regularized spelling.
• A second, analytic edition of A Vision printed underneath the
text of A Revelation to show what was left out, changed, or added as
Julian expanded the earlier work into the later one.
• Facing-page explanatory notes, with translations of difficult words and
phrases, cross-references to other parts of the text, and citations of
biblical and other sources.
• A thoroughly accessible introduction to Julian’s life and writings.
• An appendix of medieval and early modern records relating to Julian and
her writings.
• An analytic bibliography of editions, translations, scholarly studies,
and other works.
The most distinctive feature of this volume is the editors’ approach
to the manuscripts. Middle English editions habitually retain
original spellings of their base manuscript intact and only emend that
manuscript when its readings make no sense. At once more interventionist
and
more speculative, this edition synthesizes readings from
all
the surviving manuscripts, with careful justifcation of each choice
involved in this process. For readers who are not concerned
with textual matters, the result will be a more readable and satisfying
text. For Middle English scholars, the edition is intended
both
as a hypothesis and as a challenge to the assumptions the
field brings to the business of editing.
