page_title: Revelations of Divine Love
section_title: Full texts
hierarchical_section_title: Revelations of Divine Love / Published editions / Full texts
context_page_description: Revelations of Divine Love is a medieval book of Christian mystical devotions. It was written between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by Julian of Norwich, about whom almost nothing is known. It is the earliest surviving example of a book in the English language known to have been written by a woman. It is also the earliest surviving work written by an English anchorite or anchoress.
  Julian, who lived all her life in the English city of Norwich, wrote about the sixteen mystical visions or "shewings" she received in 1373, when she was in her thirties. Whilst seriously ill, and believing to be on her deathbed, the visions appeared to her over a period of several hours in one night, with a final revelation occurring the following night. After making a full recovery, she wrote an account of each vision, producing a manuscript now referred to as the Short Text. She developed her ideas over a period of decades, whilst living as an anchoress in a cell attached to St Julian's Church, Norwich, and wrote a far more extended version of her writings, now known as the Long Text. She wrote straightforwardly in Middle English.
  Julian's work was preserved by others.
context_section_description: Serenus de Cressy, a confessor for the English nuns at Cambrai, published a translation—probably in England—of the Paris Manuscript in 1670. Copies exist in eleven British libraries, including the British Library and Dr Williams's Library in London. There is also a copy in Berlin, and three copies in the United States.
  Cressy's book was reprinted in 1843 in an edition by George Parker, which included biographical details about Cressy, and a detailed glossary. The American Roman Catholic priest Isaac Hecker reprinted Cressy's book in 1864, noting in his preface "how sweetly the voice of piety sounded in our good old Saxon tongue". In 1902 the Irish Jesuit priest George Tyrrell published another version of the book, which included a detailed preface.
  Modern interest in the text increased with the 1877 publication of a new edition by Henry Collins, and still further with the 1901 publication of the Scottish translator Grace Warrack's version of the book. The first modern translation, it included, according to the author Georgia Ronan Crampton, a "sympathetic informed introduction". It was based on "MS Sloane 2499", introduced early twentieth-century readers to Julian's writings, and was republished nine times (with revisions) before Warrack's death in 1932. Only one other complete version of the Long Text appeared in English between 1902 and 1958: Dom Roger Hudleston's translation of the Sloane manuscript, published in 1927.
  In 1910, Gabriel Meunier produced an edition in French, Révélations de l’amour divin, with a second edition made in 1925. During the 1970s, several new versions of the book were published: Marion Glasscoe, A Revelation of Divine Love, produced by the University of Exeter in 1976, and revised in 1989; Roland Maisonneuve's edition, Le Petit Livre des révélations (1976); Etienne Baudry, Une revelation de l'amour de Dieu: version brève des "Seize révélations de l'amour divin" (Begrolles en Mauges, 1977); and  A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, an edition in two volumes by Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (PIMS, 1978).
  In the 1990s, Georgia Ronan Crampton produced The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, (West Michigan University, TEAMS, 1993) and Frances Beer produced Revelations of Divine Love, (Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1998). New editions of Julian's book published this century include: Sr Anna Maria Reynolds, and Julia Bolton Holloway, Julian of Norwich: Extant Texts and Translation (Sismel, 2001); Denise N. Baker, The Showings of Julian of Norwich (Norton, 2004); Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins, The writings of Julian of Norwich (Brepols, 2006); Elisabeth Dutton, Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love (Yale University Press, 2010); and Barry Windeatt, Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love (OUP, 2015).
  The Short Text was first published in English by the Reverend Dundas Harford, the vicar of  Emmanuel Church, West Hampstead, in 1911, shortly after its discovery.
caption: Texts and manuscripts relating to Revelations of Divine Love. Following the publication of the Warrack edition, Julian's name spread rapidly and she has become a topic in many lectures and writings. Many editions of her book have been published, and it has been translated into French, German, Italian, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Catalan, Greek, Chinese, Modern Hebrew and Russian.[83]