In 1373, a woman in Norwich lay dying. She was thirty or perhaps thirty-one, an anchorite封闭 in a small cell attached to a church, and she had begged God for a deeper understanding of Christ's suffering. What came that night would become the earliest surviving book written by a woman in the English language. Through sixteen visions of extraordinary intensity, Julian of Norwich witnessed Christ's Passion, and found not wrath, but an almost unbearable tenderness. She saw sin as necessary to understanding grace, suffering as woven into love itself. Yet above all, she encountered a God whose nature is mercy. Her famous declaration:*all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well*:has echoed for six centuries. Written in vigorous Middle English by an unlearned woman who called herself a «simple creature,» this work moves from visionary experience to daring speculation in its longer form. It stands alongside The Cloud of Unknowing and Piers Plowman as a masterpiece of medieval English mysticism, yet it remains utterly singular: a work of profound theology authored by a woman who claimed no authority except what heaven had given her in her darkest hour.
