The New Murrey and Blue blog

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07l6bd0

I would highly recommend this documentary by Janina Ramirez, whose book on the subject will soon be available

. She showed how Julian, who was female by the way, was born during the fourteenth century. She may well have had a husband and children but lost both to the Black Death before becoming an anchoress at St. Julian’s, Norwich.

Ramirez spoke about Julian’s magnum opus: Revelations of Divine Love, the first known book in English by a female author, quite revolutionary in tone and probably composed during the reign of Richard II and prominence of John of Gaunt. On the deaths of these two men, the religious atmosphere changed dramatically. Under the Lancastrians, Lollards were regularly burned and already being dead, as Wycliffe could testify, did not ensure safety. Julian would have been in great danger if her manuscript had been read more widely at this time.

She died early in Henry V’s reign of natural causes and was probably in her seventies at the time but the story does not end here. Her manuscript was taken to France to avoid the Reformation only for the French Revolution to strike. The nuns caring for the document saw some of their French sisters mount a tumbril and return in two pieces for their burial. The manuscript re-emerged during the last century, to be viewed as a feminist tract.