Julian of Norwich

In May 1373 a woman in Norwich, England, was dying. She was thirty and a half years old, by her own careful count, and a priest had propped a crucifix in front of her face so she’d have something holy to look at as her sight failed. Then the pain left her, and over the next day or so she saw sixteen visions. We don’t know her name. She’s called Julian because she later lived walled into a cell attached to the Church of St Julian in Norwich, as an anchoress, praying for the town through a window. She spent about twenty years thinking over what she’d seen and wrote it down twice, in a short version and a long one. The long one, usually called Revelations of Divine Love, is often described as the first book in English we know was written by a woman. ...