The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Lists of Diagrams and Figures
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- The Colours of Contemplation: Less Light on Julian of Norwich
- Behold Not the Cloud of Experience
- Walter Hilton on the Gift of Interpretation of Scripture
- Numeracy and Number in The Book of Margery Kempe
- Religious Mystical Mothers: Margery Kempe and Caterina Benincasa
- Authority and Exemplarity in Henry Suso and Richard Rolle
- Mortifying the Mind: Asceticism, Mysticism and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114
- The Meditaciones of the Monk of Farne
- Envisioning Reform: A Revelation of Purgatory and Anchoritic Compassioun in the Later Middle Ages
- Walton's Heavenly Boece and the Devout Translation of Transcendence: O Qui Perpetua Pietised
- Reformist Devotional Reading: The Pore Caitif in British Library, MS Harley 2322
- Richard Whytford, The Golden Epistle, and the Mixed Life Audience
- Afterword: Future Prospects
- Index
The Colours of Contemplation: Less Light on Julian of Norwich
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Lists of Diagrams and Figures
- List of Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- The Colours of Contemplation: Less Light on Julian of Norwich
- Behold Not the Cloud of Experience
- Walter Hilton on the Gift of Interpretation of Scripture
- Numeracy and Number in The Book of Margery Kempe
- Religious Mystical Mothers: Margery Kempe and Caterina Benincasa
- Authority and Exemplarity in Henry Suso and Richard Rolle
- Mortifying the Mind: Asceticism, Mysticism and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114
- The Meditaciones of the Monk of Farne
- Envisioning Reform: A Revelation of Purgatory and Anchoritic Compassioun in the Later Middle Ages
- Walton's Heavenly Boece and the Devout Translation of Transcendence: O Qui Perpetua Pietised
- Reformist Devotional Reading: The Pore Caitif in British Library, MS Harley 2322
- Richard Whytford, The Golden Epistle, and the Mixed Life Audience
- Afterword: Future Prospects
- Index
Summary
In chapters 83 and 84 of her Long Text, with a hard-won confidence and expositional clarity that is the fruit of many years of reflection and rumination on her showings, Julian of Norwich finally presents her ‘even-cristen’ with the apotheosis of her thinking about the three core properties of God ‘in which the strength and effect of all the revelation stondith; and thei were seene in every shewing’:
The properties are these: lif, love and ligte. In life is mervelous homlihede, and in love is gentil curtesye, and in lyte is endless kyndhede. These propertes were in on goodness; into which goodnes my reason wold ben onyd and cleve to with all the myte. I beheld with reverent drede, and heyly mervelyng in the syte and in the feling of the swete accord that our reason is in God, vnderstondyng that it is the heyest gifte that we have receivid, and it is groundid in kinde.
On one level they appear to be unexceptionable restatements of an essentially Augustinian metaphysics of desire for union with God. Taken out of their narrative context in the unfolding psychodrama of her struggle to develop an appropriate way of beholding her showings, the force of these comments might appear muted, almost conventional. But Julian finesses the Neoplatonism of the Augustinian tradition through the highly personal lexis of her struggle to express and articulate the distinctiveness of her own showings and her fastidious attempts to record, reflect on and represent the nature of her fleeting ability to attend to and grasp their meanings and valencies.
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- The Medieval Mystical Tradition in EnglandPapers Read at Charney Manor, July 2011 [Exeter Symposium 8], pp. 7 - 28Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2013