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The Present Time of ThingsPast: Julian of Norwich'sAppropriation of St. Augustine'sGenerative Theory of MemoryErin T. Chandler aa University of AlabamaPublished online: 17 Aug 2012.

To cite this article: Erin T. Chandler (2012) The Present Time of Things Past: Julianof Norwich's Appropriation of St. Augustine's Generative Theory of Memory, RhetoricReview, 31:4, 389-404, DOI: 10.1080/07350198.2012.711197

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Rhetoric Review, Vol. 31, No. 4, 389–404, 2012Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0735-0198 print / 1532-7981 onlineDOI: 10.1080/07350198.2012.711197

ERIN T. CHANDLER

University of Alabama

The Present Time of Things Past: Julianof Norwich’s Appropriation of St. Augustine’s

Generative Theory of Memory

Reading Julian of Norwich through an Augustinian lens allows us to positionher within extant rhetorical tradition while showing ways she revised that tradi-tion. Engaging the Augustinian rhetoric of memory by focusing on the interpretivemoves that Julian made to produce her texts reveals the important role of bothmemory and time in Julian’s compositional process. Read this way, we see thatJulian provided us with a hermeneutic for reading her texts within the vernaculartradition that reconceptualizes Augustine’s generative theory of memory.

To create an expansive and inclusive history of rhetoric, feminist histori-ographers have regendered the rhetorical tradition in order to remap women’srhetorical accomplishments.1 Creating this new history of rhetoric, as Xin LiuGale has noted, is an important and complex task, but is not without its problems.The complexities of writing alternative histories are particularly problematic ifwe, as scholars of rhetoric, “valorize women’s ways of thinking, talking, writingand researching” without due concern to extant traditions (363). It is my con-cern that in the midst of our remapping, we have done exactly this. Studies onJulian of Norwich, specifically, are engaging in this enterprise of creative histori-cal recovery and paradoxically abandoning the voices of the women they attemptto praise.

Reading Julian of Norwich through an Augustinian lens allows us to posi-tion her within extant rhetorical tradition, while at the same time showing waysshe revised the tradition to create a speculative vernacular theology.2 Engagingthe Augustinian rhetoric of memory (that is, the effect of memory on persuasive

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discourse) by focusing on the interpretive moves that Julian necessarily made toproduce A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman, and the much longer revision,A Revelation of Love, reveals the important role of both memory and time inJulian’s ten-to-twenty-year compositional process.3 Read this way, we see thatJulian provided us with a hermeneutic for reading her texts within the vernaculartradition that reconceptualizes Augustine’s generative theory of memory.

To justify these claims, I outline Augustine’s theory of memory as wellas its roots in extant rhetorical tradition. With this rhetorical history in mind,I complete a textual analysis that focuses on Julian’s revisions. This analysisemphasizes the importance of the passage of time in making knowledge in lightof the Augustinian concepts of memory, intellect, and will. Finally, I commentbriefly in the conclusion on the importance of Julian’s texts to modern rhetoricalscholarship.4

From 1373 to 1393: Julian’s Mystical Visions

As a believer in the power of the mystical experience, established as earlyas Paul and elaborated on by Augustine, Julian of Norwich explores Christianvisionary practices in A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation ofLove. An introduction to Julian, based strictly on her texts, would read, “Julian ofNorwich—‘a simple unlettered creature, living in the mortal flesh, the year of ourLord one thousand, three hundred and seventy-three [who] desired three gracesby the gift of God’ to teach all Christians about the passion of Christ” (Colledgeand Walsh 177). Yet Julian’s more complicated biography reveals that she wasthe earliest woman writer of English, born to an affluent family, and eventuallya nun and anchoress at the Benedictine convent at Carrow near the Church ofSt. Julian’s (Watson 4). It was here that she might have encountered Augustiniantheology. As an anchoress, Julian meditated for at least fifteen years on the natureof her mystical encounter. In the mystical experience, she nearly suffered death,all the while witnessing scenes from Christ’s Passion and being taunted by twodemonic figures. Her challenge was to recover her bodily experience from mem-ory not only once, to record the events around 1388, but twice, to reveal “fifteenyears after and more . . . the lord’s meaning in this thing [the original vision]”(Revelations 342). Religious knowledge through direct experience is indeed themost basic tenet of mystical belief rooted in ancient pagan practice, yet Julian’svision was valuable beyond her own understanding only after it was written andrevised. Unfortunately, very little information about Julian’s writing or revisingprocess remains, but we do have two substantially divergent texts that should notbe read independently. When read together, it becomes clear that Julian actuallyleft us with a powerful hermeneutical determinant within the bounds of her texts.

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Because the original text was circulated only after its revision, we must con-sider the possibility that Julian saw the texts as commentaries on one anotherand thereby must pay attention to the revisions Julian made to A Vision toproduce A Revelation. The delay between the date of Julian’s mystical vision(1373), the composition of the short text (probably 1388), and the revision of thattext (probably 1393) should inform our understanding of Julian’s texts (Watson1–4). Although these dates identify Julian’s relationship to and participation infourteenth-century dialogues and form the basis for debate about Julian’s differentpurposes and audiences in A Vision and A Revelation, my argument emphasizesthe time lapse between the texts to point to an additional reason for Julian’srevision of the shorter text: her Augustinian impulse to constantly transformher understanding of God, her understanding of self, and her impulse to revealknowledge to a broader audience.

The predominant concern in research about Julian is her authority over hertext, and in most instances, scholars try to establish this authority with tex-tual comparisons to instructive anchoritic literature including the Ancrene Riwle,Rolle’s Form of Living, or Hill’s Scale of Perfection.5 However, we have verylittle historical evidence to determine whether Julian read these texts and hencevery little reason to assume that they provide a hermeneutic for reading hers.6

Denise Baker, for instance, accounts for the possibility that Julian read theseand other texts while continually acknowledging the possibility that she did notread them.7 At the same time, she, like nearly all scholars weighing in on thisdebate, agrees that Augustinian theology undoubtedly influenced Julian’s life.8

As Cheryl Glenn has noted, both “Paul and Augustine had laid the groundworkfor Julian’s mystical revelations, their own relationship with God having alreadyvalidated the visionary medium and supported such individualistic interpretationsas Julian’s” (95). We also know that Augustine was an influence on the AncreneRiwle, Form of Living, and Scale of Perfection. This fact allows us to consider thelonger rhetorical tradition that encompasses these texts, yet scholars continue tocompare Julian’s texts to anchoritic guides rather than the primary sources thatinfluenced these guides.9

Nicholas Watson suggests that Julian makes an important rhetorical move inthe revision, positioning herself as an interpreter and not simply a participant.10

The first text is a narration of the experience whereas the second is a speculativeargument (Watson and Jenkins 2). For this reason Watson labels the combinedtexts a “speculative vernacular theology.”11 As a speculative vernacular theology,A Revelation, according to Watson, has “no real precedent.” Therefore, to saythat Julian dismisses, corrects, or otherwise revises a tradition, we must makesome connections to earlier mystical writers, thereby reaching outside the feministrhetorical tradition. If we do so, it makes good sense to return to Augustine’s

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Confessions as one way to understand how to read Julian because (1) it is similarin genre to Julian’s A Revelation and (2) it provides the theological framework forother texts that scholars claim may have informed Julian’s thinking.12

Scholars with overtly feminist historiographical projects, including BradPeters, Cheryl Glenn, and Denise Baker, argue that to refer to Augustine wouldonly show that Julian submitted to Augustinian dogma as represented in DeTrinitate and Ancrene Riwle. Peters, for instance, reminds us that Julian wrote“in an age when Augustinian dogma permeated the sensus communis sharplydividing body and soul, female and male” (361). Glenn claims more emphat-ically that Julian sought her “own personhood” as a response to the “age-oldemphasis on women as matter and men as essences” (116). These historiogra-phers admirably work to resist patriarchal narratives, yet in this resistance tends todelineate an exclusive rather than inclusive map of women’s rhetorical history.13

Women, including Julian, altered rhetorical history, but they also participated inextant traditions. I consider my argument a part of this revisionary history, whichquestions the boundaries of protofeminist readings of medieval mystics, whilespecifically examining how Julian functions within a male-dominated vernaculartradition. I am not in the least opposing feminist readings of Julian; in fact, I wishto strengthen the feminist rhetorical tradition.14 Feminist historiographers haveanswered Glenn’s call to “risk . . . getting the story crooked,” but in Julian’s casewe may have risked too much and thereby failed to see clues Julian herself left usas a hermeneutic for reading her texts.

From the Ancients to Augustine:The Generative Power of Memory in Extant Tradition

Ancient philosophers, including Plato, defined the philosopher by the way helived: “Above all the goal was to become better; and discourse was philosophi-cal only if it was transformed into a way of life” (Hadot 173). This philosophicaltruth continued through the Middle Ages. For anchoresses, like Julian, the wayof life is God, and life is contemplative by nature. The contemplative life allowsthe anchoress to transform herself as well as others and is a key tenet of not onlyanchoritic discourse with God but also discourse with other believers. Discourse“is a privileged means by which the philosopher can act upon himself and others;for it is the expression of the existential option of the person who utters it, dis-course always has, directly or indirectly, a function which is formative, educative,psychagogic, and therapeutic” (Hadot 176). Discourse “create[s] a habitus withinthe soul,” and for the Christian mystic, this habitus allows the contemplation ofGod to become a way of life. The mystic’s nature is constantly transformed by

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the discourse she has with God and the transformation of that discourse to others.Her personal experience with God is a spiritual exercise that allows her to concen-trate both on the self and the expansion of the self (Hadot 189). In this sense, thenarratives of the mystics operate both in the world and in the consciousness of thebeliever. Although God may act in a particular time and place, it is his universalredemption and sacrifice that must be revealed through discourse.

Like the medieval mystics, their predecessors, the Platonic philosophers,concentrated on the relationship between bodily experience and the making ofknowledge.15 Their intent was to disconnect the body from the objects of itsdesires (Hadot 190). This disconnect allowed the ancient philosopher to concen-trate on the universal versus individual understanding and thereby have a morecomplete experience with God. Hadot refers to this transformation as the deathof the “I,” and Julian acts in this tradition. She asks God to let her experiencedeath so that she might understand life more fully. The physical nature of themystical experience is what Julian, as well as other Christian mystics, believedcreated a habitus within the soul. Upon the death of the I, the experience can beturned into an outward expression of faith, yet only through memory and revi-sion can this outward expression come to fruition. In Julian’s case the outwardexpression survived in the form of a written text that serves as a mechanism todeepen a believer’s understanding and enrich her faith. Julian takes the receivedfacts of the story and gives them an emotional power that transcends her time andplace.

Following Plato, Augustine sees memory as the provider of knowledge, the“great field or . . . spacious palace, a storehouse for countless images of allkinds,” a place to which we can constantly return to create as well as assureus of our knowledge (10.8). For Augustine the narration of the mind’s imagesproduces knowledge, and the narrative actually provides more clarity, more truth,than the memory itself. Augustine’s theory of images is a prominent concern inConfessions:

I could see [mountains and waves and rivers and stars] inwardly withdimensions just as great as if I were actually looking at them outsidemy mind. Yet when I was seeing them, I was not absorbing them inthe act of seeing with my eyes. Nor are the actual objects present tome, but only their images. And I know by which bodily sense a thingbecomes imprinted on my mind. (Confessions 10.8.15)

Once the things are imprinted on the mind, sensory perception allows one toextract buried memories in the act of narration. By charting the mind’s landscape,

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Augustine is able to transcend the earthly world and enter the spiritual, mystical,realm of God. Only by transcending the earthly world can we truly decipher thescripture, which Augustine believes is “opaque and obscure” (Confessions Book10). Augustine does call attention to the instability of the written word but estab-lishes that man can encounter himself with meditation and the sense perceptionof the body.

Memory provides order to these sensory perceptions, creating a completeand more understandable order to previously experienced events. A narrative, inother words, is absolutely necessary for Augustine to have knowledge of God.Without “bodily words and sounds but with words uttered by the soul and withoutcry of thought, of which [his] ear has knowledge,” he cannot know God.Augustine explains that the memory is in correspondence with both understand-ing (or intellect) and will—the image of the Holy Trinity in humans, as he wouldhave it (Confessions Book 10). God, who is true knowledge, resides in the mem-ory and can be made present (or makes himself present) through contemplation.Augustine says in this way the memory is like the “stomach for the mind andthat joy or sadness is like sweet or bitter food. When the food is committed tothe memory, it is as though it has passed into the stomach where it can remainbut also loses its taste” (Confessions 10.14). Although Augustine acknowledgesthat this metaphor is not precise, his point is that God is always present in thememory, while sensory perception allows us to discover and rediscover this pres-ence. Augustine’s knowledge of God is dependent on his confession and hencethe memory of those events that must be confessed. These memories become theonly way that Augustine can reveal his knowledge of God, so he concludes “I too,O Lord, make my confession aloud in the hearing of men. For although I can-not prove to them my confessions are true, at least I shall be believed by thosewhose ears are opened to me by charity” (Confessions 10.3.3). He places a sub-stantial amount of emphasis on his memory, which is the most proof he has of hisconversion as well as his most complete access to truth.

Furthermore, Augustine, unlike earlier classical authors, concentrates on therelationship between memory and time. It is in this sense particularly that he isconcerned with a theory of memory rather than the practice of it. He comments inConfessions that time will change the memory, and the experiences stored therewill change when retold:

There too [in the huge court of my memory] I encounter myself;I recall myself––what I have done, when and where I did it, andin what state of mind I was at the time. There are all the thingsI remember to have experienced myself or to have heard from oth-ers. From the same store too I can take out pictures of things which

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have either happened to me or are believed on the basis of experience;I can myself weave them into the context of the past, and from themI can infer future actions, events, hopes, and then I can contemplateall these as though they were in the present. (10.8)

The importance of narrative for the memory, according to Augustine, is its abilityto link past, present, and future, and in this sense narratives become teachingtools for the narrator and the audience. The narrative, in other words, is also partof the memorial process that allows the narrator to move beyond speculation tomore exact knowledge. The rhetorical act of producing the narrative allows thenarrator to encounter the self through memory and retrieve her past life to showwhat she was before Christ inspired her. Through this personal understandingof her relationship with Christ, she can then reveal her identity in the presentas a model for other Christians. Memory in this sense becomes habitus, or the“link between knowledge and action, conceiving of good and doing it” (Hadot;Carruthers 64). For Augustine the memorial act is part of recrafting and is notprior to but part of the rhetorical act. He asks us to acknowledge that throughconstantly recrafting our narrative from images implanted in our memory, we cancome to greater knowledge of both God and ourselves.

From Recollection to Revelation:Julian’s Use of the Augustinian Theory of Memory

Augustine, then, expanded the classical rhetorical tradition in the context ofChristianity by emphasizing the importance of memory for understanding, andJulian practically applies Augustinian theory. The fact that Julian revises the orig-inal mystical vision and then identifies it as a revelation to teach other Christiansexhibits her participation in the classical as well as the Christian rhetorical tradi-tion in which she wrote. Although we cannot prove her intent, we can say thatshe is part of the developing theory of memory; because she produces a complexrevised text, she forces the reader to grapple with both the original and revisedversions if we are to fully understand the value of the mystical experience. Readtogether, the texts suggest that memory unites Julian with people from her past,present, and future. In other words, her mystical experience promotes collectivememory that allows the spiritual visions to persist. She even says she “may notand cannot show the spiritual visions as plainly and fully as [she] should wish.But [she] trust[s] in our Lord God almighty that he will . . . make you accept it”(192). This reading asks us to acknowledge the role that memory must play inthe production of narrative and consequently of knowledge. Unknowingly, Julianprovided herself a means of retrieval in her first text, a way for her to retrieve, to

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speak out, and hence produce a more exact text filled with more exact knowledge.Only when we read the texts together do we understand this process. A Revelationprovides Julian the opportunity to encounter herself through narrative and hencerediscover the meaning of God and his judgments.

Julian tells us that she “desired three graces by the gift of God. The first wasto have recollections of Christ’s Passion. The second was a bodily sickness, andthe third was to have, of God’s gift, three wounds” (Walsh and Colledge 125).In the mystical tradition, she asks God to disconnect her body from the objectsof its desires through her bodily sickness so that she may outwardly express herfaith and love for God. This statement serves as part of Julian’s introduction to hershorter text, in which she also calls the reader’s attention first to the fact that thisrecollection is “a vision showed by the goodness of God to a devout woman . . .

in which vision are very many words of comfort, greatly moving for all thosewho desire to be Christ’s lovers” (125). Yet in the longer text, Julian makes adifferent rhetorical move, outlining instead what she now identifies as a “reve-lation of love” (175). Julian suspends a description of the mystical experienceuntil the second chapter of the longer text, after she humbles herself before herreader. In the shorter text, Julian’s focus is simply to narrate her experience, andshe signals as much by calling attention to herself in the first paragraph of theintroduction: “Here is a vision shown by the goodness of God to a devout woman,and her name is Julian, who is a recluse at Norwich and still alive, A.D. 1413”(125). In the longer text, by contrast, she does not speak of herself until the secondchapter. Instead the chapter opens very simply with “Here begins the first chapter.This is a revelation of love which Jesus Christ, our endless bliss, made in six-teen showings” (175). In the context of my argument, Julian makes two importantmoves here: First, she changes the focus from recollection to revelation, and sec-ond, she promotes an understanding of her text instead of herself. This recraftingreveals Julian’s desire to disconnect herself from her story and thereby concen-trate on the universal versus the individual understanding. Although her physicalbody figures prominently in her experience, she wants the reader to understandthat her experience was meant to give meaning to all.

The move from the strict focus on recollections to the focus on revela-tion demonstrates Julian’s dependence on memory to form knowledge. Julian’sshorter narrative is simply an ordering of the mystical events that she experienced.The longer text reveals the knowledge Julian gained through these experiences.Because the shorter and longer texts are separated by at least fifteen years, wemust account for at least two different functions of memory in Julian’s texts. In thefirst text, she must remember the sensual experience in order to narrate the eventsby returning to the great field of memory; she must, however, revisit this originalnarrative to remember the original experiences and interpret them for her reader in

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the second version. God is made present again through contemplation and givesJulian the authority to contemplate and hence interpret her original vision. Heroriginal visions are only a means provided by God to continually access his pres-ence in her memory. In A Vision Julian is a vessel through which God can revealhis message, but in A Revelation she is an interpreter of this message. In A Vision,Julian asks her reader not to “say or assume that I am a teacher, for that is not andnever was my intention; for I am a woman, ignorant, weak and frail. . . . You willsee this clearly in what follows, if it be well and truly accepted.” She furthermorewants the reader to “soon forget me who am a wretch, and do this, so that I am nohindrance to you, and you will contemplate Jesus, who is every man’s teacher”(135). In the longer text, she instead completely changes the paragraph, begin-ning, “I speak of those who will be saved, for at this time God showed me no oneelse” and ending, “And to this end and with this intention I contemplated it as Godintended” (192, emphasis added). In A Vision she explicitly asks the reader not tothink of her as a teacher, and we are left questioning the role that she is playing asauthor. In A Revelation, however, she positions herself as an interpreter by remov-ing herself from the text so that the reader may fully experience the revelations.She positions herself as a teacher of the Holy Church, and she acknowledgesthat through God’s instruction to contemplate and interpret the visions, she nowhas a more complete understanding of God. Importantly, she also says that faithwas within her before she had understanding, and the life of prayer that she livesbetween texts one and two is a key part of her eventual understanding.

By focusing on Augustine’s relationship between receiving and revealing,we can see that Julian’s meditational period allowed her, through memory,to turn visionary perceptions into theological knowledge. In chapter eight ofA Revelation, for instance, she discusses the importance of time and contempla-tion in understanding her vision:

God showed me this in the first vision, and he gave me space and timeto contemplate it. And then the bodily vision ceased, and the spiritualvision persisted in my understanding. And I waited with reverent fear,rejoicing in what I saw and wishing, as much as I dared, to see more, ifthat were God’s will, or to see the same vision for a longer time. (190)

Julian’s past, present, and future collide in the memory, allowing her to possessfully and to reveal the theological message contained in the visionary experiences.She reveals the meaning of her sensual perceptions, but the two texts exemplifywhy Christians must maintain a quality prayer life—only through meditation canChristians have a more exact knowledge brought about by the collection of scat-tered perceptions. Augustine says that he “turned [his] thoughts into [himself]”

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and that this “inner part is the better part; for to it, as both ruler and judge, allthese messengers of the sense report the answers of heaven and earth and allthe things therein.” Augustine’s concept of the inward turn accounts for Julian’smeditation period in which she too turned inward to negotiate the physical andpsychological realms. Her inward turn allows her to “compare the voice receivedwithout to the voice received within” (Confessions 10.6). In Augustinian terms,Julian’s A Revelation is an outcry of thought that develops the relationship amongmemory, narrative, and knowledge. The original narrative allows her to retrievepast experiences, reexperience them to come to understanding, and then reveal toall men God’s will for his people. Julian notes that “in all of this,” presumably hervisions and the times she was given by God to meditate on them, she was “greatlymoved in love towards [her] fellow Christians, that they might all see and knowthe same as I saw, for I wished it to be a comfort to them, for all this vision wasshown for all men” (190).

The experiences were retrieved from memory in order to write the narrativethat will later be interpreted, and both A Vision and books one through nine ofConfessions show the importance of retrieving earlier impressed images of theself. Julian explains in chapter nine of both texts that “all of this was shown inthree parts, that is to say, by bodily vision and by words formed in my under-standing and by spiritual vision. But I may not and cannot show the spiritualvisions as plainly and fully as I should wish” (135, 192). Yet in the longer text,Julian follows this summary with a chapter nearly entirely absent from the shortertexts. In this chapter she inserts a paragraph that explains how the visions havefunctioned since the time she had them until the time of revision: “[F]or we arenow so blind and foolish that we can never seek God until the time when he inhis goodness shows himself to us. . . . So I saw him and sought him, and I hadhim and lacked him; and this is and should be our ordinary undertaking in thislife, as I see it” (193). She has only fleeting memories of the actual visions, butthose memories connect her to God, serving constantly to strengthen her knowl-edge and relationship with him. She cannot show the “spiritual visions as plainlyand fully as [she] should wish,” but she narrates her visions with hope that Godwill reveal more to her audience’s understanding if he so desires (192–93). The“words formed in [her] understanding” function only as signifiers that might jarthe reader into undertaking her own spiritual quest to understand God.

Because Julian’s writings are separated by at least fifteen years, during whichshe meditates on her mystical experiences, A Revelation required that throughmemory those past experiences be brought again into the present. Julian mustweave past and present together in order to access God as well as to make clearfor her audience the importance of these past events to their futures. Particularly,

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in A Revelation she shows how perceptions become revelations through the act ofmemory. In Augustinian terms Julian accesses God who has always been presentin her memory, yet the sensory perceptions that he provided must be interpretedthrough the act of memory and revision. Augustine explains this process:

It is now, however, perfectly clear that neither the future nor thepast are in existence, and that it is incorrect to say that there arethree times—past, present, and future. Though one might perhaps say:“There are three times—a present of things past, a present of thingspresent, and a present of things future.” For these three do exist inthe mind, and I do not see them anywhere else: the present time ofthings past is the memory; the present time of things present is sight;the present time of things future is expectation. (Confessions 11.20)

The construction of A Revelation was, then, based on the understanding Juliangains in this meditational period, and in an additional section in A Revelation,chapter six, Julian shows not only that she understands why she must representher experiences and their interpretations coherently but also that readers mustcontemplate their experiences in the same way she has between writing A Visionand A Revelation. She explains that “there is no created being who can know howmuch and how sweetly and how tenderly the Creator loves us. And therefore wecan with his grace, and his help persevere in spiritual contemplation” and throughthat contemplation “never stop willing or loving until we possess him in the full-ness of joy,” and then we “can will no more, for it is his will that be occupiedin knowing and loving” (186). Julian teaches that without contemplation we can-not know God, and we cannot understand his grace, as she could not in A Vision.The memory of those visions makes God present again, and based on this pas-sage’s placement in the introduction to her first revelation, Julian wants to revealto her readers that they too can discover the presence of God in their memories.In A Revelation, Julian understands that this two-part process, one part is “seek-ing” and the other “contemplating” (196). “Seeking,” she says, “is common toall” but contemplation is much more complex:

This vision was revealed to my understanding, for our Lord wantsto have the soul truly converted to contemplation of him and of allhis works in general. For they are most good, and all his judgementsare easy and sweet, bringing to great rest the soul which is convertedfrom contemplating men’s blind judgements to the judgement lovelyand sweet, of our Lord. (198)

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A Revelation, as a concrete record of Julian’s contemplation through the memorialact, validates and hence reveals the presence of God in the narrative. The narrativecan then function as a theological tool, revealing the value of the visionary experi-ence and the contemplative prayer life. Based on Julian’s understanding, A Visionwas recorded only based on her “blind judgement,” but A Revelation is based onthe judgments of the Lord.

In the concluding chapter of A Revelation, Julian explains the importanceof her revelation to her readers—the performance of the text comes from oth-ers acting on it, learning from it, or understanding their own relationships withGod. She begins the chapter by acknowledging that “this book is begun by God’sgift and his grace, but it is not yet performed, as I see it” (342). In what followsshe explains that she learned from her experiences, but learning apparently didnot take place immediately. She says, “And from the time that it was revealed,I desired many times to know in what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen yearsafter and more, I was answered in spiritual understanding” (342). A time of med-itation was necessary for Julian to interpret the visions that she revealed in AVision. Thus in A Vision, Julian’s text ends, “[F]or God wants us always to bestrong in our love, and peaceful and restful as he is to us, and he wants us to be,for ourselves and for our fellow Christians, what he is for us” without revealingunderstanding (170). This “new form of contemplation” that “at least in the initialstages [is] hidden from the eyes and experience of the soul” does not give under-standing but only awareness of God. The value of this “form of contemplationis that it constitutes the essence of union with God and hence it should endurefor one’s whole life” (Molinari 118). In Augustinian terms Julian has received amessage from God that memory has allowed her to reveal.

Only by concentrating on Julian’s revision are we able to see the role memoryplayed in producing personal knowledge and are likewise able to see how memoryshould function in the mind of Julian’s readers. Her texts serve as stimulants to thememory, promoting knowledge of God through retrieval of the implanted memo-ries of him. She provides us with a method for discovering the truth of God in ourown remembered experiences. The pedagogical value of her texts, especially forher Christian readers, is their emphasis on memorial and rhetorical practices. Hertrue experience is not germane to the value of her text. Rather, her texts ask us torevisit our own experiences with the intention of producing more exact knowledgeof God.

Rereading Julian: The Protofeminist Tradition in Rhetorical Studies

To understand Christian rhetorical practice during the Middle Ages, we canlook to classical authors who began establishing the importance of memory to

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the intellect. Augustine expanded this tradition, and Julian practically appliesAugustinian theory. The fact that Julian revises the original mystical vision andthen identifies it as a revelation to teach other Christians reveals not only howJulian sought to gain authority but more importantly that she participated in theChristian rhetorical tradition in which she wrote. Although we cannot prove herintent, we can say that she is part of the developing theory of memory. She pro-duces a complex revised text that must be read with the original version. Thisreading asks us to acknowledge the role that memory must play in the productionof narrative and consequently of knowledge. Unknowingly, Julian provided her-self a means of retrieval in her first text, a way for her to speak out, to retrieve,and hence produce a more exact text filled with more exact knowledge.

I have established that memory allows Julian to pursue knowledge andthereby allows her to conclude that an understanding of God is constantly depen-dent on the weaving together of past and present experiences. Augustine proposesthat narrative helps us access memory whereas narrative revision allows us tojudge our inner conception of God and then produce more exact knowledge of thedivine. More exact knowledge is therefore dependent on accessing our inner con-ception of God through memory and then revealing this inner conception throughnarrative to the outer world. It is in this sense that Augustine’s rhetorical the-ory allows us to negotiate the physical and psychological realms. A Revelation,when read through this Augustinian lens, becomes much more than a humblenun’s intellectual pursuit. Memory of Julian’s texts becomes part of the intel-lect of all who read them, and their ultimate power is in their display of thecreation of knowledge through memory. These texts become “personal sourceswhose function is to provide memorial cues to oneself,” which can function as“divine influences being able to prophesy through the images of letters on thepage” (Carruthers 163).

In arguing that we should read Julian of Norwich through an Augustinianlens, I highlight Julian’s power as a rhetor while strengthening our methodol-ogy as scholars of rhetoric for reading protofeminist texts. It is surprising thatnearly all comparative analyses of Julian’s texts point to Augustinian influenceyet fail to compare Julian’s text to St. Augustine’s primary texts. In suggestingthis comparison, I propose a feminist historiographical methodology that morethoroughly considers the extant tradition in which protofeminists practice. As wecan see through my example, placing female rhetors within the extant traditiondoes not jeopardize previous feminist interpretations of Julian but instead givesthem a firmer base on which to build their revisionary arguments. The relation-ship Julian forges between the physical and psychological, the sensual and thetheoretical, is a key theme for medieval rhetorical figures, and Julian fully par-ticipates in this tradition. She shows in material form how Augustine’s theory

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of memory works. The recrafting of her narrative provides clues for understand-ing how mystical experiences can produce knowledge and that this process is notexclusive to women’s mystical texts.

Notes

1I thank RR reviewers Andrew King and James Murphy, and also Stephen Schneider, James A.Andrews III, and my University of Alabama colleagues for their criticism of this article.

2As I note below, Augustine was an influence on many of the texts to which Julian’s workis compared. I use Augustine’s Confessions because of its influence on mystical writing. This is notto say that we could not look to other philosophers or theologians to place Julian’s text within anextant tradition. There is nothing unique about her use of Augustinian heuristics, and this is preciselymy point. She is part of a very long history of rhetoric that in recent scholarship is beginning to beignored.

3In Pierre Hadot’s terms, memory allows one to concentrate on the past self, yet that concen-tration produces knowledge that is the expansion of oneself and transformative for the future. Thisknowledge can be communicated to the self or a broader audience.

4A Revelation, the revised text, continues to be used as a spiritual guide for Christians, buta close study of how Julian’s continued influence lies outside the scope of this article. For sake ofbrevity, I will note that Revelation is one of the more valued spiritual guides of The Order of Julianfounded in 1985, for instance. They emphasize personal as opposed to institutional devotion that islargely a result of what has been called the Fourth Great Awakening in America.

5I use “authority over her texts” to refer to two veins in Julian scholarship. These two veins areconcerned with the relationship Julian has with her text—the amount of input she had while writingand revising and the authenticity of the vision she revealed. One vein includes Lynn Staley Johnson’s“The Trope of the Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of Julian of Norwich andMargery Kempe” and Liz Herbert McCavoy’s Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julianof Norwich and Margery Kempe, which address questions of textual authority caused by medievalscribes. Because scribes could often “project authorial personas” for women mystics, scholars questionthe control the scribes may have had over the women’s texts (820). The other vein is in the traditionof Paul Molinari, who uses the term to denote the authenticity of Julian’s revelation. He approachesthe text through a medical/psychoanalytic lens, revealing information about “Julian the creature” andleaving out information about Julian “the interpreter.” For more on these traditions, see NicholasWatson and Jaqueline Jenkins’s introduction to The Writings of Julian of Norwich.

6See, for instance, Nicholas Watson and Jaqueline Jenkins’s introduction to The Writing ofJulian of Norwich or Brad Peters’s “Julian of Norwich’s A Vision and the Ancrene Riwle: TwoRhetorical Configurations of Mysticism” for textual comparisons.

7For the extended discussion on texts that may have influenced Julian, see Denise Baker’s“Julian of Norwich and Anchorite Literature,” Mystics Quarterly 19 (1993): 148–60.

8See for instance, Brad Peters’s article “Julian of Norwich’s A Showing and the AncreneRiwle: Two Rhetorical Configurations of Mysticism” and Cheryl Glenn’s chapter “Medieval Rhetoric:Pagan Roots, Christian Flowering or Veiled Voices in the Medieval Rhetorical Tradition” in RhetoricRetold.

9Carole C. Burnett, in her forthcoming article “Julian of Norwich” in The Oxford Guide tothe Historical Reception of Augustine, speculates that Julian may have had access to the library ofthe Augustinian friary near St. Julian’s church and that if she did not read him herself, she may have“absorbed his theology through meditation of Anselm of Canterbury or other theologians.” She also

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speculates that Julian could have heard sermons of Adam Easton. In this article Burnett calls for moreresearch connecting Julian to Augustine, and my argument is one response.

10Two secondary mystical experiences in 1388 and 1393 may have allowed Julian to interpretthe original experiences and hence reveal their significance.

11Watson’s definition of “speculative vernacular theology” is fairly straightforward:“A Revelation is . . . a speculative vernacular theology, not modeled on earlier texts but structuredas a prolonged investigation into the divine, whose prophetic goal is to birth a new understandingof human living in the world and of the nature of God in his interactions in the world, not just fortheologians but for everyone” (3).

12To be clear, I am not claiming that Augustine caused Julian to think in the ways she does. Goddid this. I am, however, insisting that Christianity has a long history of ways to reveal God’s speech tohumans. Augustine discusses God’s speech to humans through humans in the prologue to On ChristianTeaching, for instance. My point, and Augustine’s point as well, is that we are always influenced by ourprevailing culture. It’s important to acknowledge that in the Julian groups within Anglicanism today,the meditations are drawn from the core of the liturgy. They seek to make the received narrativesintellectually and emotionally more compelling. They are concerned with our contemporary historicalmoment but use their antecedent, Julian, to come closer to God so that he might speak to them and sothat they might continually express clearly what God continues to reveal.

13The idea of exclusionary and inclusionary histories is Glenn’s, but I have configured it differ-ently here. In Rhetoric Retold one of her goals is to reveal “broad definitions of rhetoric that moveit from an exclusionary to an in clusionary enterprise” (4). The picture that Glenn, Peters, and Bakerpaint ex cludes rich readings of Julian within the paternal tradition. Julian should be in cluded in thelong rhetorical tradition in which she participates even though these readings may not enable us todefine her position in protofeminist terms.

14See Glenn pages 4–10 for her explanation of “re–mapping.”15For instance, Plato’s Phaedrus contains one theorization of the classical concept of memory

related to the mystical tradition. Plato proposes that we gain knowledge through sensual experience,and the memory of those sensual experiences promotes just living. See Phaedrus 250a, for instance.The philosopher can uncover, indeed recover, forms of knowledge within the soul that were lost whenit became embodied in human form. Instances in everyday life allow us to uncover these embeddedtruths. Outward experience, then, influences the soul, and the written word “remind[s] one who knowsthat which the writing is concerned with” (Plato 275.d). For Plato knowledge must precede the rhetor-ical act, and through memory knowledge is “written on the soul of the learner” (276.a). The writtendiscourse becomes “a kind of image” from which discourse can proceed (276.a).

Works Cited

A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich. Trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh.New York: Paulist P, 1978.

A Companion to Julian of Norwich. Ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy. D. S. Brewer: Rochester, 2008.Ancrene Wisse. Ed. J. R .R. Tolkien. New York: Oxford UP, 1962.Baker, Denise. “Julian of Norwich and the Varieties of Middle English Mystical Discourse.” A

Companion to Julian of Norwich. Ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008.53–63.

Burnett, Carole C. “Julian of Norwich.” Ed. K. Pollmann et al. The Oxford Guide to the HistoricalReception of Augustine. Oxford: Oxford, UP, 2013, forthcoming.

Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory. New York, Cambridge: UP, 1990.

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Gale, Xin Liu. “Historical Studies and Postmodernism: Rereading Aspasia of Miletus.” CollegeEnglish 62.3 (Jan. 2000): 361–86. Web.

Glenn, Cheryl. Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance.Carbondale: Southern, Illinois UP, 1997.

Hadot, Pierre. What is Ancient Philosophy? Cambridge, Cambridge: UP, 2004.Hilton, Walter. The Scale of Perfection. London: J. M. Watkins, 1923.Johnson, Lyn Staley. “The Trope of the Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of

Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.” Speculum 66.4 (Oct. 1991): 820–38.Julian of Norwich. The Writing of Julian of Norwich: A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and

A Revelation of Love. Ed. Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins. University Park: Penn State:UP, 2006.

McAvoy, Liz Herbert. Authority and the Female Body in the Writing of Julian of Norwich and MargeryKemp. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004.

Molinari, Paul. Julian of Norwich: The Teaching of a 14th Century English Mystic. New York:Longmans, 1958.

Peters, Brad. “Julian of Norwich’s A Showing and Ancrene Riwle: Two Rhetorical Configurations ofMysticism.” Rhetoric Review 27.4 (2008): 263–78. Web.

Plato. “Phaedrus” The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. NewYork: Pantheon, 1961. 475–525.

Rolle, Richard. The Form of Living. Ed. Hope Emily Allen. English Writings of Richard Rolle. Oxford:Clarendon, 1963. 82–119.

Saint Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin. London: Penguin, 1961.Watson, Nicholas, and Jacqueline Jenkins. The Writing of Julian of Norwich. University Park: Penn

State: UP, 2006.

Erin T. Chandler is a PhD student at the University of Alabama. Her work focuses on the inter-play of rhetoric, religion, and culture. She is currently working on her dissertation, which explores theSocial Gospel Movement in the American South, focusing primarily on the work of Alva Taylor andhis disciples.

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