Week 30 · mystical

Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich was a 14th-century English woman who, at age 30, became so ill she was given last rites. During that illness, she received 16 vivid visions of Christ's suffering and God's love. She recovered, had herself sealed into a small room attached to a church, and spent the next 20 years writing about what she'd seen. Her book, Revelations of Divine Love, is the first known book written in English by a woman.

“"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." She wrote that while sealed in a room the size of a closet, during a century of plague and war. The repetition isn't lazy writing. It's insistence.”