The Walled-In Window

Julian of Norwich and the Architecture of the Medieval Anchorhold

Attached to the south stone wall of St. Julian's Church in the English trading city of Norwich stood a sealed masonry room measuring roughly twelve feet square. Its outer timber door had been bricked shut with flint and lime mortar. Three narrow openings punctured the walls: an angled squint cut through the thick interior church masonry allowing a view of the high altar, a shuttered hatch opening into a servant's anteroom for passing bread and removing waste, and a small barred window hung with a black wool curtain facing the public street. Inside this stone cube lived a woman whose family name vanished from the municipal archives, known to history solely as Julian after the parish church to whose wall she was permanently joined.

In May 1373, when she was thirty years of age, Julian had lain on her bed at home dying of an acute illness while her parish curate held a brass crucifix before her failing eyes. Over forty-eight hours of fever, as her lower limbs went numb and the room darkened around the cross, she experienced sixteen distinct perceptual and conceptual sequences before her fever abruptly broke on May 13. Rather than returning to ordinary domestic life in one of England's largest wool and leather ports, she petitioned the Bishop of Norwich for enclosure as a solitary anchoress. During the liturgical Rite of Enclosure, the bishop chanted the Office of the Dead over her prostrate body, sprinkled grave dust over her head, stepped across the threshold, and ordered masons to seal the doorway. Under medieval canon law, she was legally dead to the world.

Whereas monastic communities regulated behavior through collective chanting, agricultural labor, and seasonal movement across cloisters, the medieval anchorhold operated by radical spatial subtraction. By eliminating horizontal locomotion across geography for more than four decades, Julian's stone room removed the shifting visual horizon that ordinarily occupies human attention. Outside her flint wall, fourteenth-century Norwich was convulsed by recurring waves of bubonic and pneumonic plague in 1375, 1383, and 1390 that killed nearly half the city's population. The city also endured the violent urban warfare of the 1381 Peasants' Revolt and the public burning of Lollard dissidents in the nearby Lollards Pit. Inside the twelve-foot chamber, with no travel, household commerce, or social hierarchy to navigate, Julian spent twenty years subjecting her sixteen brief visions to relentless philosophical analysis. She drafted first the Short Text and then the expanded Long Text of Revelations of Divine Love—the earliest surviving books in the English language written by a woman.

Her sharpest conceptual subtraction appeared in the first vision, where she perceived a small spherical object resting in the palm of her hand, no larger than a common hazelnut. When she asked inwardly what this tiny round mass could be, she understood that it was the entirety of created existence—every ocean, kingdom, planetary sphere, and historical century compressed into the diameter of a nut on human skin. Contemplating that miniature sphere inside a twelve-foot room, Julian isolated three foundational properties of contingent reality. Every finite thing exists only because it is brought into being; it endures from moment to moment solely because it is sustained; and taken by itself, the entire macroscopic cosmos is so slight that it appears ready to crumble into nothingness at any instant.

By shrinking the visible universe to the scale of a hazelnut, Julian stripped macroscopic size and historical turbulence of their power to intimidate the mind. What looked outside her wall like an overwhelming succession of plagues, insurrections, and ecclesiastical terrors became, under spatial compression, a finite and bounded surface held securely in existence. When plague survivors and the restless pilgrim Margery Kempe traveled to Norwich around 1413 to consult Julian through the black curtain of her street window, the anchoress had spent four decades inside a single stone room without ever stepping across its mortared threshold.