The Soul a City: Margery and Julian

St Birgitta gives her Revelations to Christendom
Revelationes, Ghotan: Lübeck, 1492

argery Kempe visited Julian of Norwich perhaps before 1413 and later reported their conversations, thus providing for us not only the early written texts we now have, the Amherst, Westminster, Paris Texts, but also an Oral Text, spoken just prior to the time that the 1413 exemplar to the Amherst Text was being written. Margery's Manuscript thus allows us to go back to fifteenth-century East Anglia with, as it were, a tape-recorder or an IPod. For this reason we present this essay in an oral recording at soulcity.mp3 which can be read simultaneously with this text, giving the various Julian and Margery texts, on the screen. Julian functioned in her community much like a psychiatrist, healing souls, that Greek word, in fact, meaning 'soul doctor'. For the Middle Ages theology was psychiatry, making use of the Book of Job and of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. Julian helps heal Margery's soul, perhaps too by suggesting the therapy of the Jerusalem pilgrimage and the writing of the vast book of her travels, The Book of Margery Kempe.

Both the Amherst and the Butler-Bowden Manuscripts, of Julian's Showing and Margery's Book, are now in the British Library. This essay transcribes directly from the manuscript texts. The letter þ 'thorn' is the Middle English form for th, the letter 3, 'yoch', is g, y or gh, the median letter ∫ the scribal s. Contractions are spelled out in italics. The foliation of the manuscripts is cited, preceded by A for Amherst (the Julian Showing Manuscript in the British Library, Additional 37,790), W for Westminster (the Julian Showing Manuscript owned by Westminster Cathedral and on loan to Westminster Abbey), P for Paris (the Julian Showing Manuscript in the Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Anglais 40) which can all be retrieved from the edition by Sister Anna Maria Reynolds, C.P. and Julia Bolton Holloway, published by SISMEL, Florence, 2001), and M for The Book of Margery Kempe (the Butler-Bowden Manuscript, now British Library, Additional 61,823, discovered in 1934, and retrieved from the manuscript rather than from the edition by Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, Oxford: Early English Text Society, 212, 1939, 1961). Letters and words rubricated here are so in the manuscripts.

Julian next is reported as citing her authorities, Paul and Jerome, to Margery, who perhaps misremembers one of them:

Apart from the Hilton and Julian texts in the Westminster Manuscript, making this same point are other texts associated with Julian: Norwich Castle Manuscript, fol. 78v: . . . iusti sedes est sapiencie. ffor as seith holy write the soule of the ry3tful man or womman is the see & dwelling of endeles wisdom that is goddis sone swete ihe If we been besy & doon our deuer to fulfille the wil of god & his pleasaunce thanne loue we hym wit al our my3te; and likewise John Whiterig, Contemplating the Crucifixion; from Anima iusti sedes est sapiencie: Proverbs 10.25b; cited, Gregory , Hom. XXXVIII in Evang. PL 76, 1282.

With that last comment, '& ∫o I tru∫t, ∫y∫ter, þat 3e ben', we realise that we certainly are listening to reported speech and that Dame Julian addressed Dame Margery, her 'evyn cristen', even as 'Sister'. The discussion of evil reminds one more of William Flete's Remedies Against Temptations than it does of Julian's 'sin as nought'. Interestingly, this phrasing concerning the soul as a city is closer to that of the Sixteenth Showing in the 1393/1580 Paris Manuscript, P143v-145v, and the 1413/1450s Amherst Manuscript, A112, which both give vestiges of the Lord and the Servant Parable, with their echoes from Angela of Foligno and Catherine of Siena, than it is to the earlier version, the Fourteenth Showing, present in the Westminster, W101-102v, and Paris, P116-119, Manuscripts.

Of interest, too, is that the Amherst Manuscript contains not only Julian's Showing of Love but also Jan van Ruusbroec's Sparkling Stone, translated into Middle English. Both Julian's Sixteenth Showing, P146, and the Sparkling Stone make use of Revelation 2.17. The Amherst Manuscript, A118, gives the text from Ruusbroec's Sparkling Stone discussing the Apocalypse of St John as the 'Book of the Secrets of God' addressed 'To him that overcometh', in which 'the spirit says in the Apocalyps vincenti says he schalle gyffe hym a lytil white stone and in it a newe name the whiche no man knowes but he that takys it' . This is material Julian well could have shared with Margery.

The only known copy is preserved in the University of Cambridge. It is undated, but appears to have been printed in 1501. With a few insignificant variations, it is the same as was printed twenty years later by Pepwell, who merely inserts a few words like "Our Lord Jesus said unto her," or "she said," and adds that she was a devout ancress. Tanner, not very accurately, writes: "This book contains various discourses of Christ (as it is pretended) to certain holy women; and, written in the style of modern Quietists and Quakers, speaks of the inner love of God, of perfection, et cetera." No manuscript of the work is known to exist, and absolutely no traces can be discovered of the "Book of Margery Kempe," out of which it is implied by the Printer that these beautiful thoughts and sayings are taken.
     There is nothing in the treatise itself to enable us to fix its date. It is, perhaps, possible that the writer or recipient of these revelations is the "Margeria filia Johannis Kempe," who, between 1284 and 1298, gave up to the prior and convent of Christ Church, Canterbury, all her rights in a piece of land with buildings and appurtenances, "which falls to me after the decease of my brother John, and lies in the parish of Blessed Mary of Northgate outside the walls of the city of Canterbury." The revelations show that she was (or had been) a woman of some wealth and social position, who had abandoned the world to become an ancress, following the life prescribed in that gem of early English devotional literature, the Ancren Riwle. It is clearly only a fragment of her complete book (whatever that may have been); but it is enough to show that she was a worthy precursor of that other great woman mystic of East Anglia: Juliana of Norwich. For Margery, as for Juliana, Love is the interpretation of revelation, and the key to the universal mystery:

     "Daughter, thou mayst no better please God, than to think continually in His love."

     "If thou wear the habergeon or the hair, fasting bread and water, and if thou saidest every day a thousand Pater Nosters, thou shalt not please Me so well as thou dost when thou art in silence, and suffrest Me to speak in thy soul."

     "Daughter, if thou knew how sweet thy love is to Me, thou wouldest never do other thing but love Me with all thine heart."

     "In nothing that thou dost or sayest, daughter, thou mayst no better please God than believe that He loveth thee. For, if it were possible that I might weep with thee, I would weep with thee for the compassion that I have of thee."

     And, from the midst of her celestial contemplations, rises up the simple, poignant cry of human suffering: "Lord, for Thy great pain have mercy on my little pain."

Until Hope Emily Allen identifed the Butler-Bowden manuscript in 1934 this was all that was known of The Book of Margery Kempe.
She next edited it for the Early English Text Society, which has yet to edit the text of Julian of Norwich.

2 Saint Bride and Her Book: Birgitta of Sweden's Revelations, trans. Julia Bolton Holloway, pp. 113-119.

THE SOUL A CITY

MARGERY AND JULIAN