ABSTRACT

The anonymous writer of A Revelation Showed to a Holy Woman was a woman leading a secluded, devout life, probably in Winchester in the early fifteenth century (see Ogilvie-Thomson 1980). She was clearly not a nun, as she lived with only a maidservant for company; nor was she a strictly enclosed solitary (like Julian of Norwich), for she was free to visit local priests and to make a pilgrimage to a local shrine. She was presumably a widow who had taken vows, or a noninstitutionalised devout woman like Margery Kempe.