The "Comene Course of Prayers": Julian of Norwich and Late Medieval Death Culture

by Amy Appleford, Harvard University

Perhaps even more than in other areas of medieval scholarship, the study of sources in visionary writing is decidedly vexed. Philology—a methodology which traditionally views the identification of sources as an essential part of understanding a medieval text—has come under critical pressure in the last thirty years for historical positivism, a positivism which aestheticminded literary critics fear can transform a unique literary monument into an annotated historical document. but scholars studying the sources of visionary texts have the added difficulty of the rhetorical self-positioning of such works. "Mystic" texts, as Denise Baker points out, often deny "the contingency of [their] production." As Michel de Certeau suggests, this difficulty of "source" shadows that of the visionary author herself, who must carefully negotiate between the desire to preserve the integrity and truth claim of the mystical phenomenon but also be seen to defer to the authority of Church. The visionary author claims to be a conduit for the voice of God, and thus occupies a liminal position in relation to the received tradition:

[D]ivine utterance is both what founds the text, and what it must make manifest. that is why the text is destabilized: it is at the same time beside the authorized institution, but outside it and in what authorizes that institution, i.e., the word of God. In such a discourse, which claims to speak on behalf of the Holy Spirit and attempts to impose that convention on the addressee, a particular assertion is at work, affirming that what is said in this place, different from the one of magisterium language, is the same as what is said in the tradition, or else that these two places amount to the same.