Julian of Norwich (1343-c. 1416)
Filed under the name Julian · June 6, 2026
Julian of Norwich wrote Revelations of Divine Love, considered one of the first books written in English by a woman, back in the 1300s when that alone would have been an enormously unusual thing for anyone to have accomplished. I think about "firsts" a lot, honestly, being one of the first in my own family to go straight from high school into a four-year university on a scholarship I almost talked myself out of applying for, and there's a specific kind of loneliness in being first at something, doing it without a clear map of how it's supposed to go. She was an anchoress, which meant living a genuinely isolated, devoted life, and still managed to produce something that outlasted her by seven hundred years and counting. I don't know much about medieval English mysticism, I'll be honest, that's pretty far outside my usual scroll, but the basic shape of her story, quiet person, isolated circumstances, producing something that turns out to matter enormously later, is one I recognize even across seven centuries.