The Essence of Julian

Susan McKnight is an administrator of the Courts Technology Integrated Justice Project at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

Ralph Milton has been a student of Julian of Norwich (c.1342–c.1413)
and her Revelations of Divine Love for many years. The Essence of Julian
is his attempt, through paraphrase, to make her work more accessible to
all readers. His introduction makes it quite clear that this is his
personal interpretation and that he welcomes comments from critics, both
amateur and scholarly.

Julian of Norwich is considered to have been the first woman to write a
book in the English language. During an illness, she had several
visions, which she translated into two texts: the “Short Text” was
dictated to her mother and friends during her illness; the “Long
Text” she wrote herself about 20 years later. Her language is simple
but her ideas are complex.

The Essence of Julian is Milton’s paraphrased Long Text. Though he
has removed most of the repetition and some of the more obscure sections
and has changed the formatting so that the poetry stands alone within
the sections, Milton successfully captures the very essence of Julian,
which is that God is love. To quote Julian: “All shall be well, and
all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” Julian was
writing these thoughts in her own time of chaos; they still apply to the
current world.

Milton has been writing books on Christianity for many years. In 2002,
he completed a fictional work, Julian’s Cell, in which he imagines
what Julian’s life might have been like as an anchorite in the
turbulent 1300s.