Mysticism, Midieval Mysticism, Charity, Love, Religious love, Private revelations 

Since the "discovery" - more accurately the rediscovery, of her Revelations in the nineteenth century, Dame Julian of Norwich has been the most widely read and best-loved of all the remarkable group of English mystical writers of the late Middle ages - the golden age of English mystical writing. Although there have been numerous editions of The Revelations of Divine Love, this version, edited and modernized by Fr. James Walsh, SJ, is the first to take into account the twofold manuscript tradition of the so-called "Longer Version" exemplified in three extant manuscripts: a sixteenth-century copy in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris and the two seventeenth-century Sloane manuscripts in the British Museum. In rendering the author's original Middle English more accessible to the modern reader, Fr. Walsh has followed the principle outlined in his Introduction - itself a notable contribution to the study of Dame Julian's writings in relation to theology and to other mystical writers - namely to retain wherever possible the vocabulary and syntax as well as the idiom of the original while modernizing spelling and punctuation throughout. He thus compels the reader to weigh the author's words more carefully than would be the case in a version put into twentieth-century English.

The result is a fresh and accurate version of the "revelations shewed to a simple unlearned creature living in this mortal flesh", who has been described by Professor David Knowles in his The English Mystical Tradition as possessing a mind that "can wrestle with the deepest mysteries of theology and life" while at the same time shewing herself "a generous and loving woman with an extraordinary delicacy of feeling . . . able to express this in language which goes directly home to the heart."

Taken from inside flap.