'Gentille, curteyse, fulle delectabile': the courtly in Julian of Norwich's mystical practice and theology

Abstract

Julian of Norwich’s style is notable for its serenity and lyricism. Particularly in the Long Text, the beauty of her prose is matched by the grace of the subjectivity Julian models in her relationship with God, a subjectivity that draws significantly on the honour-based courtly identity of late-medieval England’s knightly class. Julian’s imagery depicts God in the roles of courtly lord and warrior knight, and herself and her readers as feudal retainers, fellow knights and loyal servants. This courtly imagery contributes significantly to Julian’s theology, particularly her discussion of human nature, with its two parts of ‘substance’ and ‘sensuality’, and her unique soteriology that sees sin as ‘no shame but worship to man’. Julian’s vivid invocation of her readers in courtly terms gives them a heuristic fantasy by means of which to experience themselves as worthy and beloved. Yet more significant is the courtly imagery’s role in Julian’s mystical practice. Mysticism as a theoretical concept must be applied with care to medieval texts; a suitable approach, drawn from the work of Michel de Certeau, defines a mystical encounter as a meeting with an Other who exceeds all human symbolic systems, an encounter that is like being hailed by an utterance beyond words. The mystical utterance cannot be captured or recreated; rather, the practices by means of which the mystic responds to it must be explored. Julian’s visions hail her from outside familiar devotional frameworks; their mosaic-like style locates meaning in the interstices between the showings rather than in explicit statement. Her texts recreate this hailing, developing a range of mechanisms that draw attention to the limitations of the discourses, registers and traditions they use, and challenge readers to pass beyond the texts and open themselves to their own encounters with transcendent meaning. The ‘knowledge’ that results from the mystical encounter is a continual unsettling of symbolic systems, and mystical subjectivity therefore predicated on desire. In Julian’s texts, courtesy as a rhetoric of behaviour becomes an image that expresses the combined intimacy and distance the mystic experiences with the divine. The courtly subjectivity Julian models for her readers offers them a style in which to live out mystical desire.