Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 08:3 (Summer 1994)
Article: The Anchoress, Julian Of Norwich
Author: Martha Linda Marion Montgomery

PP 8:3 (Summer 1994) p. 13

The Anchoress, Julian Of Norwich

Linda Marion Montgomery

Linda Marion Montgomery has extensive experience in Christian education. Her MTS thesis was on fourteenth-century mystics, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.

An anchoress was a woman vowed to chastity and stability of abode. She was enclosed in an anchorhold for life. There was no release from her cell until death, on pain of excommunication. The object of her life was contemplation, the unceasing concentration upon God in prayer.

In the fourteenth century, a woman named Julian was living the solitary life of an anchoress. Her cell, adjoining the parish Church of St Julian in Norwich, England, is estimated to have been only one hundred square feet It had three windows. A church window was for viewing the sacrament and taking communion. The house window was to be used by the anchoress and her servants in the course of their daily lives. (Julian had two servants, Sarah and Alice, who saw to her needs.) The parlor window looked outside and through it the anchoress communicated with the world. Through it she confessed to her priest, spoke to visitors, and dealt with business matters. All three windows were to be kept closed when not in use.

In her anchorhold, Julian lived and prayed, ate her meals and slept, worked at some simple task such as needlework, meditated on her revelations, wrote her book, and counseled people through her window. She spent twenty, thirty, perhaps forty years there, never going out.

Few factual details are known about Julian, apart from what she chose to tell us, and what can be deduced from the evidence furnished in her book, Revelations of Divine Love. We do not know where she was born, who her family members were, what her religious history was, or when she died.

Probably was born in Norwich in 1342, has been surmised that she lived to about eighty years. Her grave is without trace. We don’t even know her name, for it is generally assumed that she took the name Julian from the little church to which her cell was attached, a church then some four hundred years old.

She may have been from a merchant family, and probably attended school at the Benedictine convent at Carrow within a mile of her later anchorage. This convent held the benefice of St. Julian’s Church and would have had a voice in who lived in its anchorhold. Therefore, it is almost certain that she had dealings with the convent, although there is no evidence that she was a professed religious (one bound by vows).

Why Enclosed?

A laywoman, as well as a nun, could choose the profession of anchoress. Julian would have gained a certain amount of freedom by becoming an anchoress: She could practice ...