17 - Revelations of Divine Love (longer version)

Summary

(Chapters 51 and 60)

The rubric to the last chapter of Julian's longer version declares ‘the good Lord shewid this booke shuld be otherwise performid than at the first writing’ (ch. 86), while the chapter itself suggests that Julian regards even this longer text as still uncompleted (‘This booke is begunne be Gods gift and his grace, but it is not yet performid, as to my syte …’). The same chapter reveals that the teaching it contains (‘Love was his mening …’) was not vouchsafed until fifteen years after the shewings (i.e. in 1388), while Julian's receiving of ‘techyng inwardly’ on her vision of the Lord and Servant1 did not occur ‘for xx yeres after the tyme of the shewing, save iii monethis’ (i.e. not before March 1393). Such references underline how Julian's longer text is the outcome of her many years of meditation on her shewings. The focus shifts: visionary shewing leads on even more to contemplative insight, in an intricately structured text. The narrative of what was seen, itself revised and augmented, is now framed within a commentary of Julian's extended meditations on those revelations. The author's relation to her audience and her material is comparably altered: the text now addresses and identifies with all ‘even-Cristen’, its serene assurance reflected in an eloquent style.

Julian's transformation of her shorter into her longer text, involving numerous interpolated passages of varying lengths, is too diverse a process to be summarized.