When Margery Kempe met Julian of Norwich

There are two female English religious figures of the middles ages who are famous above all others because their writings survive them: Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. And it’s rather wonderful to know that, despite their very different stories, in around 1413 they actually met. 

Their encounter is described by Margery, in her autobiographical work now known as The Book of Margery Kempe.

Julian of Norwich, famously author of Revelations of Divine Love with its best-known lines “All shall be well, and All manner of thing shall be well”, received many visitors while living the life of an urban hermit. She was an anchoress, living a secluded life of prayer in a small cell attached to the church of St Julian in Norwich. This peculiar form of monasticism was fairly widespread in the middle ages. Anchorites or anchoresses were expected to live alone but also to be part of their community. They would see people who came to seek advice, in the way that they have of oracles and holy people since ancient times. 

And one of these visitors was Margery, who says in her book that she made the short journey from King’s Lynn to Norwich and spent “many days” in conversation with Julian. This suggests that they might have got on rather well – although we only have Margery’s word for it – despite having little in common. 

In this essay Margery is described as “a medieval celebrity”, “brash, loud and unapologetic” and “a wife and woman about town, mother to at least fourteen children” who persuaded her husband to become celibate and made a number of pilgrimages, including to Jerusalem, after she started experiencing visions. She must have been a person of considerable determination and energy. 

By contrast, Julian comes across in her delicate, mystical writing as rather more modest. She didn’t travel anywhere, living sealed up in her cell and meeting visitors through a small window. 

It was Margery’s brushes with ecclesiastical authority that made her seek advice, as her habit of falling into fits of crying made people suspect she was possessed, and she had been accused of heresy. Were her visions godly or diabolic? She travelled from her home in King’s Lynn to Norwich and consulted first a priest who became her confessor, then a white friar, and then, she writes, she “was bidden by Our Lord to go to an Anchoress in the same city [Norwich], who was called Dame Julian” to be reassured that she was doing God’s will and not the Devil’s.

We only have her word for it, but Margery’s account is clear that each of her counsellors gave her the reassurance she was seeking, especially Julian. “The anchoress, hearing the marvellous goodness of our Lord, highly thanked God with all her heart for his visitation, advising this creature to be obedient to the will of our Lord and fulfil with all her might whatever he put into her soul, if it were not against the worship of God and the profit of her fellow Christians.” And Margery says Julian told her to “set all your trust in God and fear not the language of the world, for the more despite, shame and reproof that you have in the world, the greater is your merit in the sight of God”. Read Margery's full account here.

They might have made a peculiar duo, but Margery emphasises that their meeting lasted “many days… conversing in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ”. She says she came away feeling validated, strengthened to continue the idiosyncratic path she had chosen in celebrating her faith. Given her strong personality, it’s possible that Margery did most of the talking, and one wonders whether Julian was pleased or sorry to see her go.

The novelist Victoria Mackenzie has recently reimagined the lives of these two women in her book For thy great pain have mercy on my little pain.

See also:

When Milton met Galileo
When Conrad met Laurence of Arabia
When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

When James met Eliot

When Keats met Wordsworth

When Shaw met Kiping

Existential dread

There were just a few days between the lifting of the last legal Covid restrictions in England and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Happy days. Now, with Russian tanks bearing down on Kyiv and Putin talking about nuclear weapons, more than one commentator has remarked that as well as ‘living with the virus’ we are going to have to learn to live again with the 'existential dread' of East-West conflict and mutual incomprehension. I certainly recognise that from my childhood. 

How did we live through all those years of Cold War, with the actual idea of a nuclear holocaust at the back of our minds, not knowing how things would end? I remember sitting in a history classroom at school - maybe in about 1980 - in an upper floor building where of course the windows were too high for you to gaze out of, with a map of Europe and a large facsimile of Picasso's Guernica at the front - thinking just that: how will things ever change? How could they ever, when opposing ideologies are so entrenched and propaganda so effective? 

This is what the next generation may be entering, as another Iron Curtain threatens to fall across Europe, and it dawns on me not to patronise them with stories of how we soldiered on regardless. If they are scared, they have every right to be. They have lived through Covid. They saw democratic politics shaken by Trump. They expect they will live to find out whether we do manage to escape irreversible climate change by 2050. Now they have to live with global political upheaval, and the economic consequences of that at the least. 

But perhaps they can look back on the Covid lockdowns to remember that solutions can be found and the unexpected does happen, in the same way that I can look back at the fall of the Berlin Wall. I am also heartened by reports of protests in Russia against the invasion of Ukraine – mostly by young people it seems, who are quickly arrested. They will not change anything now, but they show that Putin is a rogue actor, another Stalin, who does not speak for his nation, least of all its youngest members. 

During most of my adult life, after the fall of Communism, we thought the world was heading in one direction - slowly and painfully, but inevitably - towards a greater unity and fellow-feeling; towards the Arthur C Clarke vision of a single planetary union, where barriers are broken down, racial differences are forgotten and wealth is more efficiently created and better shared. We witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and a reunited Europe, Nelson Mandela released and transforming South Africa, the first black American president, computing and the internet making communication instantaneous. And the brilliant, happy and unifying success of the 2012 London Olympics seems to represent that whole period of optimism. 

But we ignored that fact that the wealth gap kept on growing and that people still believe in the myths of national superiorities in the same way as our ancestors believed in spirits in the woods. And the world was being pushed in unhappy directions by minority fanatics and opportunists who pretended to speak for ordinary people. For me and I think most people, that realisation came when we woke up that morning after the EU Referendum in 2016 and realised we were living in a different country. 

I take heart from the values that the next generation hold to. They seem freer of the poison of prejudice. They didn’t want the UK to pull away from Europe. They are the ones motivated to act on climate change. They are on the streets in Russia right now. 

It was well said by Billie-Jean King in a TV programme which I watched in 2019. Talking about the difference between her own and the next generation, she said: "This is a monumental moment in our history. I tell millennials - you're the greatest generation in history for inclusion. They don't care where you're from, what religion... they have an opportunity to take this world further than any other and make it a better place."

In the meantime, we have much to be happy about – more, perhaps, than we thought. If we were beginning to take for granted the liberties we are just regaining after Covid, then we had better look at those refugees starting to pour out of Ukraine and remember that we should never do so.

When Milton met Galileo

The most recent account of this meeting is given in Joe Moshenska’s excellent book Making Darkness Light: the lives of John Milton.

In 1638, in a collision of such giants in their own worlds that their meeting is almost too good to be true, the young John Milton met Galileo at his villa in the hills outside Florence. 

Galileo, now in his seventies, had been living under house arrest since his conviction for heresy in 1633. His astronomical studies had eventually gone too far for the church hierarchy despite his best attempts for many years to avoid controversy. He was found to be sufficiently suspect of heresy in promoting the Copernican view that the Earth is not at the centre of the universe, which was well-known as a theory by that time but not one that the church could officially countenance. He lived out his remaining days at his villa, receiving visitors and writing his book The Two New Sciences which summarised some of his earlier work. By the time Milton visited, he had recently gone blind and was suffering from a hernia, and he died in 1642. 

The only account we have of this meeting is Milton’s own. He wrote that he had “found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought”. It’s a passing reference in his book Areopagitica, which was a defence of free speech – of the “liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience” - published in 1644. His intention was to use Galileo as an example of someone speaking out against authority, in the context of his argument that “Truth was never put to the worse in a free and open encounter.” 

Because this account was inserted to illustrate an argument, and because there is no direct evidence of it, some scholars have doubted it took place, and perhaps the church would have tried to prevent Galileo from meeting a foreigner and a Protestant.

I think we can assume that they did meet. But what was Milton doing there?

This was on Milton’s only foreign tour, a visit to Italy via France in 1638-39. Aged 29 and with considerable reading under his belt, as well as mastery of the Italian language, Milton was an earnest academic in search of a purpose, and it was during this trip that his idea of writing an English epic poem began to crystalise. No doubt he was deeply influenced by the introductions he gained to many learned people and by his exposure to the southern European (and Catholic) ebullience of art and architecture. As a convinced Protestant, Milton was of course suspicious of the richness of the Catholic church, which he would later increasingly denounce, but he seems to have enjoyed his time in Italy, including in Rome itself, relishing an injection of intellectual and artistic novelty.

Galileo actually makes an appearance in Milton’s cosmic imagining of heaven, earth and hell in Paradise Lost. We see through the eyes of the angel Raphael: “As when by night the glass / Of Galileo, less assured, observes / Imagined lands and regions in the Moon”. Satan’s shield “Hung on his shoulders like the Moon, whose orb / Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views”. And there’s a reference elsewhere to an astronomer looking “through his glazed optic tube”. [PL 5.261, 1.287, 3.588]

Milton and Galileo would certainly have valued their conversation. While Milton was not yet famous, word was going round about him in Italy and he was well-known enough to pique Galileo’s interest. This was not just a passing encounter, but an arranged meeting that they would have anticipated keenly. Maybe Milton was shown and tried out Galileo’s telescope, and surely Milton would have asked about his observations, but cautiously as they touched on theological matters. And given that they had both grown up in musical households, they might have shared an enthusiasm for music. But Moshenska speculates that above all they might well have discussed poetry. Galileo was known as an excellent writer of prose and poetry himself. He had strong views on the relative merits of Ariosto and Tasso, the two preeminent Italian poets after Dante, and Milton was familiar with and took inspiration from all three. 

Evidently Milton thought back to this encounter in later life, when he wrote Galileo into his great epic poem. And he may have imagined again the Tuscan sun on his back when he too was imprisoned for getting on the wrong side of the establishment, and when, by 1652, he had lost his own sight, “In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, And solitude” [PL 7.27-28].

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References
https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/2017/08/25/milton-galileo-affinities-art-science/
https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/milton-visiting-galileo-when-a-prisoner-of-the-inquisition-125949

See also: 

When Conrad met Laurence of Arabia
When Dr Johnson met Flora Macdonald

When James met Eliot

When Keats met Wordsworth

When Shaw met Kiping