Revelations of Divine Love belongs to the same genre of texts based entirely upon mysterious visions imparted through what is believed to be a divine goodness. In this case, the year was 1373 and a woman who has become known as Julian of Norwich became violently ill and pushed to the brink of death. A combination of high fever, extended periods of dehydration and paralysis situated the woman into a position in which visions of a crucified Jesus appeared. Today, the symptoms that are described in these revelations have been linked with Guillian-Barre syndrome or possibly an extreme case of botulism.
A much greater mystery than what exactly caused the near-fatal state of illness into which the author slipped is the how she was able to produce such graphically complex imagery replicating these visions of a fevered brain with such startling literary power in both English and Latin. The details of the woman know as Julian of Norwich are sketchy at best and it was certainly not common for just anyone of the period to gifted with bilingual writing skills.
The name Julian is today, of course, primarily associated with males. Oddly enough, even the name of the writer of the Revelations of Divine Love has a strange connection with one aspect of the book which might confound many contemporary readers. The visions that inspired Julian to write the text relentless feminize Jesus Christ. Christ is routinely referred to as a Mother figure. While this might seem iconoclastic to the modern day reader, in fact it was not at all uncommon during the Medieval Age.
