Abstract
This book contains ten chapters: 1. “The Westminster Manuscript,” 2. “Julian’s Showing in a Nutshell,” 3. “Julian’s Judaism,” 4. “Julian’s Benedictinism,” 5. “Julian and Cardinal Adam Easton, OSB,” 6. “Julian and The Cloud of Unknowing: Textual Communities and Gendered Audiences,” 7. “Saints, Secretaries, Scribes, Supporters: Birgitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena,” 8. “The Amherst Manuscript,” 9. “Julian and Margery: The Soul a City,” and 10. “Brigittines and Benedictines.” There are also seven beautifully produced color plates, numerous black-and-white images, two appendices, and a lengthy preface.
Julia Bolton Holloway is no stranger to scholars and friends of Julian of Norwich. In the course of a long and productive career she has published widely on devotional literature from the Middle Ages to the Victorian period and maintained a website that many have valued as a resource. The enticing title of the book and the publisher’s blurb (“brings together innovative research on aspects of the Showing of Love, especially the Pan-European background of its manuscripts”) suggested to me that it would be a scholarly reflection on the intertextuality of Julian’s book with perhaps some new insights from one who has read widely and thought hard about the topic for many years. Bolton Holloway is known not only for her learning but for her willingness to venture out on a limb with ideas and hypotheses that others would consider too daring. In Julian among the Books this latter is very much at the fore. This eclectic, idiosyncratic book, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, appears to be a collection of a variety of theories about Julian that couldn’t get past the skeptical gatekeepers of university presses, but that Bolton Holloway nevertheless wanted to put forth for consideration.
The preface states that “This book about books is structured like a fugue in music, like an arabesque in art, like fractals in mathematics, repeating and reinforcing its points” (xx), and that is an accurate description. It has primary themes that surface and resurface throughout the chapters, giving the book a somewhat rambling, conversational, meditative, stream-of-consciousness tone. Among the scholarly and historical hypotheses are personal reflections from her life experience. While one can often see how one thought has led to another (mentions of the Westminster Manuscript are associated with the painful rejection of her MA thesis on it, for example), the “fugal” juxtapositions often make the scholarly argument difficult to follow. The book wavers between memoir (a memoir of Bolton Holloway’s life, filled with fascinating people and experiences, would make a great read) and scholarly manifesto, but doesn’t really succeed at either.
What are the themes of the fugue? The Westminster Manuscript of Julian figures large. The first chapter provides some introductory codicological information on the manuscript, and then the body of the chapter is “a modernised and abbreviated version of the Westminster with some glimpses at its original form on the parchment folios as an accessus, an introduction, to this book on Julian” (8). The modernized text is somewhat incongruous alongside the other extensively quoted texts in the book, most of which are semi-diplomatic transcriptions of the manuscripts, and the dismissive remark in the preface that “Nicholas Watson’s teaching edition is not used as it normalizes texts” (xvi).
Chapter 2 provides bibliographical and codicological information about other important manuscripts, and introduces one of the main themes of the book: “Julian’s Judaism.” It seems that while studying Hebrew herself, Bolton Holloway “discover[ed] in an epiphany that [Julian] knew the Bible in its original tongue and script” (xiii). Cheered on by V. D. Lipman’s The Jews of Medieval Norwich (Jewish Historical Society of England, 1967), she pursued the idea and even found a reference to a “Juliana Jurnet” who converted to Christianity in 1308 (several generations earlier than Julian of Norwich, as she notes). Bolton Holloway then proceeds from fact (there was a Jewish community in medieval Norwich) to possibility (Julian could have been Jewish) to an unlikely conclusion (Julian knew Hebrew and translated from the Hebrew Bible).
Illustrative of her method is her analysis of Julian’s “alle maner of thing shall be welle.” Bolton Holloway sees this as a translation of 2 Kings 4:23: vade ergo in occursum eius et dic ei rectene agitur circa te et circa virum tuum et circa filium tuum quae respondit recte (in the Vulgate); Go than in to a
(in the Hebrew text);
ein commynge of hyre, and seye to hyre, whethir rit it is don aboute the, and thi man, and thi chylde? The whiche answerde, Rit (in Wyclif’s Middle English).t,” she is translating from the Hebrew text, since “well” better expresses the meaning of shalom (29). Bolton Holloway likewise sees as evidence of Judaism “echoes of the Hebrew Shema” in Julian’s “when we fele hym truly. wyllyng to be wt hym. wt all oure herte. wt all oure soule. and wt all oure myghte” (56–57), forgetting or ignoring that the allusion is more likely to “the greatest and the first commandment” of the gospel, as prominent in the Christian tradition as the shema is in Judaism (Matthew 22:34–38; Mark 10:28–30; Luke 10:25–27).
Another recurring theme is Cardinal Adam Easton, about whom Bolton Holloway has many theories. She suspects that he, too, was a Jew (99), the “religious person” who visits Julian in her illness (111), her collaborator and editor (92), and her biological brother (94). This last leads to even more unsettling suggestions: “I think of a crippled brilliant women [sic] in Norwich as having had an older brother named Adam Easton, a brother who teased her unmercifully, then came to take her seriously, and who then helped her, because of his vow under torture in a dungeon to write an edited, authorised and expanded version of a text he had formerly scorned” (132), and worse, he is the “fiend” who attacks her: “In this we may deduce a scene of not only clergy abuse but incest, where the perpetrator, in penance, finally comes to assist his victim, who may be his sister, to write the Showing as therapy, for herself and for her readers against trauma, creating a Viktor Frankl logotherapeutic Book, both being ‘wounded healers’” (112). No evidence is given for any of this other than hunch and intuition, reading between the lines. While I acknowledge that Julia Bolton Holloway is better equipped than most to have insightful hunches and intuitions about Julian, it is difficult to follow her here.
The chapters on The Cloud of Unknowing and related texts, the Amherst Manuscript, Julian and Margery Kempe, and Brigittines and Benedictines are shorter and deal with more familiar topics. Adam Easton emerges again, this time as the likely author of The Cloud, and so on. These texts are his “bildungsroman [sic], where he was teaching himself by teaching another” (167). Bolton Holloway notes that the author (for her, Adam Easton) has a good rapport with women: “The tone in which he writes is that used to an equal, often with the kind of bantering laughter that a man might use towards his biological younger sister” (155). This is an interesting idea, but concrete textual evidence and analysis would be welcome. In her discussion of the Amherst Manuscript, Bolton Holloway argues that Julian’s short text is the later version. She sees the long text as a collaborative project with Adam Easton that went on for decades, while the short version is a more ecumenical, “European” work, written after the death of Adam Easton, when “Julian would have been freer to associate with non-Benedictines, with Carmelites, Augustinians, Dominicans, and Lollards” (198).
The final chapters focus on the role of women religious in the preservation and transmission of Julian’s writings, and there are related appendices with transcriptions of fragments copied by the seventeenth-century English Benedictines Margaret Gascoigne, Bridget More, Barbara Constable, and Gertrude More in exile in France. These chapters are more informational than analytical or interpretive, but they point out implicit possibilities for further study.
Julian among the Books is a frustrating book. There are moments of insight and enlightenment, but they are too often obscured by assertions that (one has to acknowledge) are far-fetched. It is not a book I would recommend to students or readers with a non-scholarly interest: it could be seriously misleading. It never quite settles into a genre: the author is a seasoned scholar, but a work of scholarship it is not. She has also led an extraordinary life, and with refocusing the book could become a fascinating memoir (my vote) or perhaps a historical novel imagining a dramatic relationship between Julian of Norwich and Adam Easton. Bolton Holloway has not been served well by her publisher: at the editorial level there is a need for smoothing-out of the fugal themes, which tend to take on a tangled life of their own and become unruly, and there are far too many typos to mention—a shame for a book that is otherwise expensively and handsomely produced.