Women Mystics: Julian of Norwich course
This session will explore the fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich, considering her life and works in the context of medieval England and beyond.
Julian was born in 1342 and lived until after 1416, a particularly turbulent period in the Middle Ages. The lecture will first discuss Julian’s near-fatal illness—an event which preceded her mystical “showings” or revelations—against the backdrop of the Black Death, which ravaged the population of England throughout her life.
After this event of her illness and revelations, Julian entered into a life of enclosure or “anchoritism”, meditating on the meaning of her showings over many decades. She wrote and revised an account of these showings as her Revelations of Divine Love, which survives in two versions: a shorter and a longer version.
The session will cover some key themes in these texts, such as Julian’s theology of God as mother and her famously optimistic statement that “all shall be well”, as well as how Julian’s words have been received in modern times. While male voices have dominated our understanding of Christian theology and history, significant work over the last fifty years has sought out and made available the voices of powerful and important female theologians through the history of Christianity. First and foremost, these voices belong to female mystics.
Session leader
Hannah Lucas is the Newby Trust Research Fellow at Newnham College, University of Cambridge. Her research lies at the intersection of literary history, theology, philosophy, and the medical humanities. She focuses particularly on Middle English mystical literature, and the relationship between the medieval and the modern. She has published widely in medieval studies, including academic articles on Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe, and Thomas More. Her first monograph, Impossible Recovery: Julian of Norwich and the Phenomenology of Wellbeing is forthcoming with Columbia University Press, and explores the connections between Julian’s near-fatal illness and revelation, in conversation with post-Heideggerian phenomenologies of health and medicine.
About the Series
This series, run jointly by Sarum College and The Church Times, looks at five of the most important female mystics from Christianity in chronological order. Each session runs 7:30-9pm on a Monday and is led by an expert on the female mystic in question. Each webinar will consist of a lecture and a Q&A session.
Subsequent sessions:
14 April: Teresa of Avila, with Gillian Ahlgren
19 May: Thea Bowman, with Manuel Williams
Previous sessions:
13 January: Hildegard of Bingen, with Lauren Cole
10 February: Clare of Assisi, with Michael Hahn
Each session will be recorded and a link to the video provided to everyone registered.
Browse this list of specially priced books from Hymns Ancient & Modern related to the series
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