Julian of Norwich
Had herself walled into a room for life, then used the window to become the person everyone in Norwich came to talk to.
- Lived
- c. 1343 – after 1416
- Feast
- May 8
- Tradition
- Western
- Veneration
- Not canonized in the Catholic Church; commemorated in the Anglican and Lutheran calendars on 8 May, and venerated informally by Catholics on 13 May
- Patron of
- None formally assigned
At around thirty she survived an illness that nearly killed her, and during it she saw a series of visions. Then she did something more radical than the visions: she had herself sealed into a room.
The cell was attached to St Julian’s church in Norwich and was roughly a hundred square feet. One small window looked into the church so she could follow the services. Another looked onto the street. She stayed there for the rest of her life, and for more than twenty years she kept rewriting one short book about what she had seen — the earliest surviving book in English known to be written by a woman.
The street window is the part worth noticing. She was not hiding. People queued outside it. Around 1413 Margery Kempe came to Norwich for advice and got it. Julian’s most quoted line came out of that room: all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
- Born: Norwich
- Died: Norwich
- Worked: Norwich
No churches under this name are recorded in Wikidata.