Revelations of Divine Love

Revelations of Divine Love is a book of Christian mystical devotions written in Middle English by Julian of Norwich, an anchoress about whom very little is known with certainty. It is the earliest surviving example of a book in English known to have been written by a woman, and also the earliest surviving work by an English anchoress.

Julian lived all her life in Norwich, an important commercial and religious centre in medieval England. In 1373, at the age of thirty and seriously ill, believing herself close to death, she received sixteen mystical visions, or "shewings", of the Passion of Christ. Most appeared to her over several hours in a single night, and the final one came the following night. After recovering, she wrote an account of each vision; this first account is known as the Short Text. Over the following decades, while living enclosed in a cell attached to St Julian's Church, she developed her ideas into a much more extended version, the Long Text.

The work survives in several manuscripts of both texts, along with extracts. Its first publication was a translation of the Long Text in 1670 by the Benedictine monk Serenus de Cressy. Interest grew in the nineteenth century, and in 1901 Grace Warrack's translation of the manuscript known as Sloane 2499 brought the book to twentieth-century readers. It has been published many times since, in English and other languages.

Julian is known to have been alive in 1413, from the visit paid to her by the mystic Margery Kempe and from her name appearing in a will dated 1416. She called herself "a simple creature unlettered", a phrase perhaps chosen to avoid antagonising a church hierarchy unlikely to welcome a woman's voice. Her use of Middle English, the vernacular, suited the difficulty of describing experiences she presented as personal encounters with the divine.

Her writings had little influence in the Middle Ages, and there is no evidence that more than a handful of people read them. Their modern rediscovery made her one of the most admired voices of English mysticism.