1413
The first scribal manuscript version of Julian’s Short Text is finished 1413, (this is noted in the introduction to the 15th-century Amherst Manuscript which names Julian and refers to her as still alive). All three of the early manuscripts of the Shewings – two Short Text, one Long Text - have connections to the Brigittine Nunnery, Syon Abbey on the banks of the Thames – destroyed during the Reformation. In the 17th century, the Julian manuscripts were written out and preserved in the Cambrai and Paris houses of the English Benedictines. It was not until 1670 that the first English printed edition appeared edited by Cressy, the English Benedictine.
The Julian manuscripts secret and exclusive circulation can be attributed to a number of factors –
Her radical and inclusive images of Jesus as mother, while not new, go beyond anything written before, and her hopeful universalism as asserted by a loyal daughter of the church is also very ‘avant-garde’.
In a patriarchal age, when schoolmen seriously debated whether or not women have rational souls, the writings of female visionaries were always suspect. Given the right circumstances visions could confer great authority on a woman – as they did to Abbess Hildegard von Bingen in the thirteenth century. However, the history of Joan of Arc and the near escapes of Margery Kempe reveal that another outcome was always a danger. Also – however self effacing Julian is in her writings – she is the first English woman of letters (a dangerous innovator).
Julian translates some passages from the Latin and Hebrew texts of the Bible into English in the Shewings. At this date you could be burnt at the stake for owing a copy of Wycliffe’s ‘Lollard’ translation of the Bible into English. Julain makes her own translations – but her efforts could arouse suspicion.
Julia Bolton Holloway, a leading Julian scholar, has argued that Julian shows extensive knowledge of the Hebrew Bible when translating the Old Testament, the evidence being that she had access to the Hebrew of the Scriptures, likely gained through Cardinal Adam Easton of Norwich who had taught the Hebrew Scriptures at Oxford and who had translated them into Latin, correcting Jerome’s errors. Holloway argues that Julian understands that the Hebrew shalom meaning ‘peace, well-being, in all things’, is wrongly translated by Jerome with the Latin ’recte’, (rightness, correctness) and is better translated as ‘And all manner of thing shall be well’. Holloway even speculates that Julian was of Jewish ancestry. Whether or not this is so, Julian’s knowledge of Hebrew again makes her suspect.
(see bltnotjustasandwich.com/2013/02/ … f-norwich/)
In the final passage of the ‘Shewings’ Julian refers to her readers as ‘even Christians’ – that is Christians who she is ‘on a level with’, and bound to in reciprocal bonds of love rather than by hierarchy. There is nothing to suggest that Julian was a Lollard – far from it – but the phrase ‘even Christians’ was also used by the Lollards.