Concise historical introduction to Julian of Norwich and her continuing influence on the world and how we see it.
Over six hundred years ago a woman known as Julian of Norwich wrote what is now regarded as one of the greatest works of literature in English. Based on a sequence of mystical visions she received in 1373, her book is called Revelations of Divine Love.
Julian lived through an age of political and religious turmoil, as well as through the misery of the Black Death, and her writing engages with timeless questions about life, love and the meaning of suffering. But who was Julian of Norwich? And what can she teach us today?
Medievalist and TV historian Janina Ramirez invites you to join her in exploring Julian’s remarkable life and times, offering insights into how and why her writing has survived, and what we can learn from this fourteenth-century mystic whose work lay hidden in the shadows of her male contemporaries for far too long.
Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, and Master of Magdalen College Cambridge, said:
In this lively and appealing introduction, we are enabled to meet a figure who is not a stereotypical ‘mystic’ from an alien cultural world, but a vigorous, warm and deeply imaginative writer, quietly but firmly turning inside out a number of conventional understandings of the nature and work of God. Nina Ramirez presents a Julian who is very much of her own age, yet for that very reason speaks to us as a three-dimensional personality.