SOURCE: "Culmination of the Tradition in Julian and her Revelations" in "God Is Our Mother": Julian of Norwich and the Medieval Image of Christian Feminine Divinity, pp. 46-69, Institut fir Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universitat Salzburg, 1982, pp. 46-69.

In the following excerpt, Heimmel credits Julian with being the first Christian writer to synthesize a cohesive image of "God the mother" from the suggestions of feminine divinity scattered throughout the Bible and other traditional sources.

It was not until approximately 1393 that the medieval image of a Christian feminine divinity reached its culmination in the single work of an English anchoress and mystic. Despite the setting of the concept of the motherhood of God by numerous preceding and contemporary authors in an already established tradition, it is Julian of Norwich who gives this idea a full birth in the way no other writer had. She does so in her revised version...