“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”Chapter XXVII
The Book
In May 1373, at the age of thirty and gravely ill, a woman in Norwich received sixteen shewings — showings — and then spent some twenty years thinking about what she had seen. The short account she wrote first; the long one, printed here, is the fruit of that long sitting with it. It is the earliest surviving book in English known to be written by a woman.
She calls herself “a simple creature unlettered.” The book is not simple. It holds together a clear-eyed account of the Passion, a theology of God as Mother as well as Father, and the famous parable of the lord and the servant — and it refuses, over eighty-six chapters, to let the problem of sin be settled cheaply. Its most quoted sentence is not consolation offered lightly: it is what she is told when she asks the question she cannot answer.
The Text
86The Volume
8Warrack printed far more than the text. Her introduction, her notes on the manuscripts, her glossary of Julian’s vocabulary and the scribe’s postscript are all here, as she set them.
The Translation
Grace Warrack (1855–1932) edited and translated the Long Text from British Library, Sloane MS 2499, and published it with Methuen in 1901. Hers was the edition that put Julian back into general reading; it went through many printings, and the text here follows the 1907 one. She modernised the spelling but kept Julian’s word order and much of her vocabulary, glossing the hard words in square brackets in the text itself — behovable, noughted, homely — rather than smoothing them away.
It should be said plainly that Warrack’s introduction is a document of 1901 and reads like one. Its Julian is a little softer, and a good deal more Victorian, than the one in the chapters that follow. It is printed here because it is part of the book, not because it is the last word on her.
This Edition
Text. Complete: all 86 chapters (50,371 words), Warrack’s introduction in three parts, her notes on the manuscripts and editions, the note as to two Julians, the glossary of Julian’s vocabulary, and the scribe’s postscript. 384 of her notes are carried, each opening in place where it stands and collected again at the foot of its page. One thing is left out: the forty pages of Methuen’s publishing catalogue bound into the back of the 1907 printing, which advertise unrelated books of that year and are no part of the edition.
Source. Wikisource’s page-by-page proofreading of the 1907 Methuen printing, assembled from 338 individually proofread pages. Chapter boundaries were located on Warrack’s own printed chapter headings rather than on the transcription’s section markers, which are not uniform.
Rights. Julian died about 1416; Warrack published in 1901 and died in 1932. Both the work and the translation are in the public domain.
What is not here: the Middle English. Every chapter carries a collapsed panel for Julian’s own words, and every one of them is empty. This is not an oversight. There is no public-domain Middle English text of the Long Text at all: the modern critical editions — Colledge & Walsh (1978), Glasscoe (1976), Crampton (1994) — are in copyright, the freely readable transcriptions online are published under an explicit reservation of rights, and every pre-1930 printing, including Warrack’s, is a modernisation. The manuscripts themselves are public domain, so the one honest route is a transcription made here from facsimiles. That is intended. It has not been done, and until it is, the panels say so rather than putting something else in Julian’s mouth.
And no manuscript is in her hand. The Long Text survives only in seventeenth-century copies — Sloane 2499 and 3705, Paris Fonds Anglais 40, Westminster 4. Warrack worked from the first of these. Even a perfect transcription would be a copyist’s Julian, not Julian’s.