Don't Forget Your Sweater (Motherly Love at the Highest Level)

Understanding some of this week's material was...difficult. Julian was great at establishing her ideas, but after a while her message, at least to me, became muddled in repetition of God's love and how God's love is great in this way and that way. It made me wonder if being an anchoress for so many years finally got to her.

The face of true sanity and serenity.
(Source: www.juliancentre.org)

Joking aside, I wonder how Julian's book was received at the time of writing - I couldn't find any era-specific response to it, which was surprising considering a woman (gasp!) had a controversial view of the Church. The God and Jesus as mother of humanity idea is very interesting and makes a lot of sense, even in the context of the Bible and popular Church belief, but was surely put down by male clergy. Or maybe not? It is known that Julian was highly respected in her community, so perhaps her anchoress status gave her extra sway to at least express her ideas.

I do wish, though, that later religiously-prominent figures (looking at you, Luther and Bodin!) had taken a leaf out of her book regarding God's love. Julian focused on love and understanding and left out most of the "punishment of the wicked" rhetoric that pervades many other religious writings, which along with Hildegard's writing and music was a nice change of pace for this class. I'm still confused as to the criteria the Church used to determine who was a witch, when so many parallels can be found between magic users and visionaries. The only major difference I can see is the inherent "badness" of the visions seen by those accused of witchcraft. But, Hildegard and Julian lived quite a while before the height of the witch craze, so maybe that will become clearer as we move on.