The Church in fourteenth-century England taught every Christian that sin deserves blame, that it angers God, and that many souls will be condemned to hell without end. Julian of Norwich wrote that she believed all of it, and also that in a series of visions she had looked for anger in God and found none. She would give up neither statement, and spent some twenty years asking how both could be true.
The visions came in May 1373, when she was thirty and a half and so ill that her parish priest was called to her deathbed. He held a cross before her face, and her mother stood at the bedside. Julian saw the figure on the cross bleed, and over the following hours received sixteen showings, as she calls them. Then the pain came back. A man from a religious order came to ask how she was, and she told him she had raved that day. He laughed, but turned serious when she added that the cross had seemed to bleed, and she writes that she was ashamed of having dismissed what she saw.
Little else about her is known, and even her name is uncertain. She lived as an anchoress, a woman enclosed for life in a cell built against a church, at the church of St Julian in Norwich. Julian is usually thought to come from that church, though it was also a woman's name at the time. A will of 1394 that leaves money to Julian the anchoress is the first document to mention her, and three more wills follow, the last in 1416. One of them names a Sarah who lived with her. Margery Kempe, a visionary from the Norfolk port of Lynn, travelled to consult her about her own visions around 1413 and described her as expert in such things. She calls herself unlettered, and she wrote in English.
She wrote the visions down twice. Comfortable Words for Christ's Lovers is the short first account; Revelations of Divine Love, in eighty-six chapters, is what that account became after two decades of thought. To her question about blame she was given only a picture: a servant runs to do his lord's errand, falls into a hollow and lies there hurt, and the lord looks at him with pity. By her own count twenty years save three months passed before she was taught how to read it.
She concluded that sin is necessary and has no substance of its own; it is known only by the pain it causes. God regards fallen people as the lord regards the servant. Christ is a mother, who carries his children and feeds them with himself, and in the end all shall be well. She put the plain objection herself: since the Church teaches that many are damned, she could not see how all could be well. She was told only that what is impossible for her is not impossible for God, who will do a deed on the last day that no creature can know beforehand. She left it there, holding to the Church's teaching and to the promise together. Readers still disagree about whether her book implies that everyone is saved.
A woman writing theology in English had reason to be careful. In the short account Julian denies that she is a teacher. In 1401 Parliament made heresy punishable by burning. No record survives of her being questioned. Her long book was not printed until 1670 and found a wide public after 1901. The Catholic Church has never canonised her; the Church of England commemorates her on 8 May, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes her assurance that all shall be well.