ABSTRACT
Julian of Norwich was an anchoress1 and the author of the rst Middle English book to be written by a woman. We know relatively little about her life beyond the few precise details and inferences that we can draw from her text because her writings are relatively self-eacing and anchoresses were advised to refrain from involvement with worldly aairs such as business transactions which might have le written records. However, we do know that she was born in 1342 and alive in 1416 since she is mentioned in wills up to this point. Such longevity enabled her to observe and experience several epoch-altering events. ere was the terror of the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, the Hundred Years’ War between 1337 and 1453, civil unrest (such as the 1381 Uprising) and the high perinatal mortality rate (although the latter was not conned to the fourteenth century). She would doubtless have been troubled by the Papal Schism – the dual papacy of Rome and Avignon from 1378 to 1417 – and the less than smooth transition from Richard II to Henry IV. Such turbulence and suering inevitably inform her writing.
