SOURCE: "Julian of Norwich and Her Audience," The Review of English Studies, n.s. Vol. xxviii, No. 109, February 1977, pp. 1-17.

In the following essay, Windeatt compares the early, shorter version of Revelations with the later and longer edition in order to demonstrate the sense of authority and control over her material and awareness of her audience that Julian developed during the years between the two works.

It is an unusual opportunity, but in the manuscript situation of the Revelations of Julian of Norwich there is indeed a chance to see a mystic's literary revision of her account of her experience and of her interpretation of it.

Julian's text in its usually read form is extant in three manuscripts of post-medieval date.' But a shorter form of the text, apparently complete in itself, survives in a fifteenth-century manuscript.² Critics of Julian generally accept that this A (Amherst)³ text...