Tag Archives: Julian of Norwich

The Ram in the Thicket: A New Novel of Julian’s Norwich

by David Townsend
Book cover

“This book is begun… but not yet performed, as to my sight,” observes Julian of Norwich very near the end of the Long Text. The distillation of twenty years’ additional reflection on her vision of 1373 remains, she thus tells us, work in progress: to be completed not in her own further writing, but in the continuous unfolding of its meaning for those who take it up and read. Those multiple unfoldings will in turn, inexhaustibly, remain work in progress. Julian is grounded in absolute certainty that imagination is an essential mode of human cognition. There is no room in her theology for epistemological mistrust of subjective response. Her model of imagination is furthermore intersubjective: the Long Text is shot through with evidence of her interlocutors’ participation in the working out of her understanding.

     Despite her nearly total reticence about the details of her own life, the longing to know Julian herself, amidst the thick texture of her world both before and after her enclosure, is often enough one locus of imagination toward which her readers are drawn. One of the most vivid incitements to such an imagining comes not from Julian’s own writing, but from the chapter early in the Book of Margery Kempe in which Margery is recommended to Julian, after which they spend signfiicant time, we’re told, in “holy dalliance.”
     What, in God’s name, might that have been like, in the year 1413 when it appears to have occurred? In the middle of a prosperous and complex medieval city, where we know that rival factions were actively struggling for political and economic control? Where a thriving Jewish community had disappeared 120 years earlier, but its memory remained inscribed both in urban geography and in the local cult of Europe’s earliest blood libel “saint?” Where the stakes over accusations of heresy carried increasingly deadly potential consequences, especially in the wake of Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409?
     The enterprise of history is inevitably also the enterprise of disciplined imagination. I find it hard to think of a medieval author who gives a fuller warrant for disciplined imagination than Julian herself. And historical fiction is arguably a genre in which knowledge is not merely reflected, but in some important phenomenological sense actively created.
     I first became obsessed with the dynamics of Julian’s encounter with Margery over twenty-five years ago. I set out to imagine it for myself in the first draft of a novel. The end result of my impossibly protracted process has now appeared as The Ram in the Thicket: A Novel of Medieval Norwich, and in a Substack (@davidrtownsend) that offers short notes on the book’s background.
     Recovery of the lives of uncloistered religious women entails resistance to overly literal credence of severe ascetic restrictions that (male-authored) medieval sources set out to impose on anchoresses. Modern representations have often espoused a kind of reverse romaticism about their circumstances: literally bricked up, isolated, and unwavering in an intense devotion that keeps them from going crazy. It’s easy for the popular (and/or pious)  imagination to make Julian into a two-dimensional cutout of mystical fervour. Since I began work on this project, at least two other fictional narratives have appeared–each of which, to my taste, falls victim to insuffiiciently interrogated stereotypes.
     The Julian I’ve imagined has a grainy practical side. She’s unafraid of the life of the body, and she’s used to talking to women trapped in bad marriages. She knows what it’s like to doubt her own vocation, and occasionally to long desperately for the wider world she’s renounced. She’s survived trauma, and grieved the family she lost in the second wave of the Plague when she was eighteen. She has no use for religious austerity for its own sake. Her maid Alice has been her companion since long before she entered the cell. She dearly loves the wealthy merchant whose life she saved as a newborn orphan who needed a wetnurse to survive. She loves his feisty eleven-year-old daughter like her own. She banters back and forth with Alice about what’s happening in Norwich. She knows the stakes of running afoul of religious authorities. She finds Margery a handful. And needless to say, there’s a cat.
     The book is begun, but not yet performed, as to my sight.