The Search for the Lost Manuscript: Julian of Norwich

This is the story of a book hidden for centuries

in the shadows of history.

Gosh, here it is.

An unknown jewel of the English canon

and the first book ever written by a woman -

Julian of Norwich.

What a book, what an accomplished and magnificent

and sophisticated book.

Revelations of Divine Love, written in 1373,

dared to present an alternative vision

of man's relationship with God.

She is blazing a trail. She's doing something quite unprecedented.

'A theology fundamentally at odds with the church of her time.'

You wanted to prevent yourself going to hell.

'Hidden away for 500 years,

'the book re-emerged as an iconic text for the women's movement...'

-Look at this!

-May I undo it?

-Please!

'..and is now acknowledged as a classic.'

It's one of the first great masterpieces of English prose.

This is the incredible story of the survival of Julian's book.

We're not going to open it?

'And the brave women who championed it.'

We would not have Julian without you and your community.

Squeeze!

I'm Dr Janina Ramirez, mother-of-two and Oxford academic

with a passion for all things medieval.

Let's get this on.

So, this is the story, the story of a book -

The Revelations of Divine Love.

For me, I first encountered it when I was an undergraduate

studying Middle English at St Anne's College, Oxford.

It's captured me ever since.

'This is an impressive book.

'It's the expression of a brilliant mind

'and feels as relevant and fresh today

'as it did when it was written over 600 years ago in 1373

'by Julian of Norwich, who was a woman.'

-Right, all ready for school? BOTH:

-Yeah!

Come on then. Let's get you out to the car.

'This was a time when most women's lives

'were confined to the domestic sphere.'

-Bye!

-See you later!

'Very few women had access to an education.'

It would be another 500 years before women

were allowed to study here at Oxford.

In Medieval England,

almost all intellectual thought was framed by the church

and written in Latin by men.

Women were certainly not encouraged to think or speak about God.

But, speak or write, Julian did

in English - the language of ordinary people.

Her vision of an unconditionally loving God

was fundamentally at odds with a church

that believed in eternal damnation.

In fact, for Julian and those who read her book,

it was potentially life-threatening.

I'm starting my exploration of Julian's text

by reliving a bit of my own history.

I studied Medieval Literature here at Oxford University.

My first tutor is now the JRR Tolkien Professor of English,

Vincent Gillespie.

So, Vincent, I first fell in love with Julian in your classes

at the age of 18, learning English Literature with you.

It's one of the first great masterpieces of English prose

and the first great masterpiece of English prose written by a woman.

So, can you read me a little bit of Julian, then?

Yes, of course.

-TRANSLATED FROM MIDDLE ENGLISH:

-"And these words, Thou shalt not be overcome,

"was said full sharply and full mightily, forsaken this and comfort

"against all tribulations that might come.

"He said not, thou shalt not be tempested.

"Thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be diseased.

"But he said, Thou shalt not be overcome."

We know some big names

that are coming from around the time of Julian,

people like Chaucer.

Does she stand up to being read alongside such a great author?

That's a big challenge, isn't it? It's a big ask.

But I think, in terms of the sheer beauty of her prose,

there's nobody else of that period

who I think can really challenge her.

Some scholars have said

that if Chaucer is the father of English poetry,

then Julian is the mother of English prose.

But Chaucer was widely known and read in his own time,

while Julian and her book, Revelations of Divine Love,

were cast into oblivion.

What I find incredible is that this amazing little book survives at all.

That it does is nothing short of a miracle.

Almost nothing is known about Julian herself and her text remains unread.

It was sidelined, repressed,

vilified and forgotten down the centuries.

But it was also kept secret, treasured,

guarded and defended by a series of women.

Pilgrims, nuns and suffragettes have all played a part.

The story of the survival of this book is an extraordinary one.

After all, Julian's text proposes an optimistic theology

in which God promises her that,

"All shall be well and all shall be well

"and all manner of things shall be well".

To understand why Julian's book was so challenging,

I'm meeting former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams.

If you think, you know, she's the

first serious woman writer in the English language.

Certainly the first...

woman writer to write like that about the things of God.

So, she's blazing a trail, she's doing something quite unprecedented.

Would you consider Julian to be a radical theologian?

In a sense, she is a very radical theologian,

because she thinks things through in first principles.

It's the time of the burnings of heretics and the Black Death

and, you know, all those grim aspects of the 14th century.

And in that world she's not turning away from the reality of suffering,

not at all.

And when she writes about the promise

that all things will be well,

all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well,

I don't think the reader feels that it's a bit of...

empty optimism, it's all going to be all right in the end,

it's just this steady gaze of God looking at her and saying,

"Trust me, I will bring it all together."

And one of the marks of her real genius as a writer

is that she is able to present that in sequence,

to sort it out into, not a system, but a kind of story.

Julian's own story started here in Norwich.

Her book gives few autobiographical details,

but during her lifetime Norwich was the second city of England.

A busy, prosperous, mercantile metropolis.

Today, much of the medieval past is still easily visible

in the castle, the cathedral, the city wall

and over 30 medieval churches.

This modern bridge is named after Julian and the River Wensum

was actually the secret of Norwich's success during her lifetime.

The Hundred Years' War was raging on the Continent and the coastal ports

along the south were vulnerable to attack,

but Norwich was further upriver, which meant it was safer,

so people could come in here, trade in goods and ideas.

Into this cosmopolitan city

Julian was born in 1343,

most probably into a reasonably affluent merchant's family.

You can imagine the vibrancy of the medieval market

when Julian came here shopping.

There'd have been lords, artisans, peasants,

alongside priests and friars

and then there'd have been all the languages you'd have heard.

English for the common people, French for the aristocracy,

Latin for the church, some German,

some Flemish and perhaps even a spattering of Italian.

But even though literacy rates were growing at this time,

probably only 20% of men would be able to read English.

For women, the rate would be much lower.

But it would also have been crowded and smelly,

with slops and offal running in trenches

down the middle of the street.

When Julian was just a young girl, six years old,

plague swept through the city.

Lying in her bed, she'd have heard the death carts rumbling through the

alleys and smelt the bodies piling into unmarked pits.

With accidents and epidemics round every corner, life was tenuous,

so it was no wonder that people were turning to religion

for the promise of an eternal life.

In the 14th century, religious and secular life

were totally intertwined.

The church year with its fasts and festivals was as much a part

of daily life as fetching water from a well.

We can assume that Julian and her family would have gone regularly

to church, and for special celebrations,

they'd have visited the great cathedral.

It's amazing to think that Julian would have stood here.

She'd certainly have come to the cathedral

and would have gone through these doors

during big celebrations like Easter,

when all of the city would flock here.

Little did she know, 700 years later,

her own statue would be up here.

She's looking out from the doors of Norwich Cathedral.

The Church in Julian's time

was presided over by a feared and unpopular bishop, Henry Despenser,

known as The Fighting Bishop.

To find out more about him and his church,

I'm meeting with the current Bishop of Norwich, Graham James.

So, tell me a bit more about what the traditional church would have

been like at the time that Julian lived.

Well, it would have felt an extremely powerful

and I think judgmental body.

I mean, my...

predecessor then, Henry Despenser,

saw himself of course as God's servant but also the King's servant.

He was willing to go into battle,

he would put down as he did the Peasants' Revolt.

He would be perfectly content to see Lollards put to death because they

were protesting against the character of the Church of the time.

And hell, it was a reality,

wasn't it, for most people in the medieval period?

Yes, they feared it, they saw images of it.

I mean, this cathedral would have been full of paintings of hell,

every church was.

You wanted to prevent yourself going to hell

and hell was a place of terrible and eternal torture,

and remember these were often people who experienced a great deal

of pain in their earthly lives,

so the thought of that pain being intensified forever

was something you wanted to avoid.

'It was Bishop Henry Despenser who commissioned this decorative panel

'to commemorate the suppression of the Peasants' Revolt'.

I suppose the thing to remember when looking at things like this,

they're there to help people understand the big themes of Christianity, aren't they?

Absolutely. These would have been the magazines,

the newspapers, you know, the websites.

This is what all this was.

I think you're so right and again what's remarkable is this dates

-from Julian's lifetime.

-Lifetime, yes.

So, this is the sort of imagery she would have seen.

She would have seen it all the time,

and of course the churches at the time

were absolutely full of this.

As a young woman, Julian could be in no doubt that defying the power

of the Church led to death in this life

and eternal hellfire in the ever after.

This thatched building dates back to at least 1420,

so it gives us some idea of the sort of house

where Julian could have lived.

It's now the Britons Arms cafe.

But where did women fit into this picture of medieval life?

Well, for most ordinary 14th-century women,

their lives revolved around the domestic sphere.

They received very little education

and most girls were married by the time they were 15.

We know very little about Julian's early life.

We can assume that she followed the general custom,

married and perhaps even had children.

When she was just 19, the plague came to Norwich again

and it was in a form that was particularly virulent to children.

Perhaps she lost a husband and children in this plague?

From her writing,

it seems likely that Julian was a devout layperson

who was familiar with death and sorrow.

I'm making my way up to the attic room,

which may have been used as a bedroom.

Julian describes herself as "an unlettered creature",

but even if she could read English,

she'd be unlikely to have access to anything more than a prayer book.

The majority of books were written in Latin and expensive.

Even the very wealthy probably had 25 books at the most.

This really is an atmospheric space.

Look at those amazing medieval beams

and you can even see the wattle and daub

that's gone into making the walls.

There are these incredible Baltic pine floorboards.

They date to 1402.

I could really imagine her being in a room like this.

When Julian was 30 years old, she herself became ill and nearly died.

For three days she lay prostrate

and on the fourth day she was given the last rites.

But she lingered on.

With paralysis creeping up her body,

a priest was called and he brought with him a crucifix,

which he held up before her eyes as the darkness came closer.

Julian entered into a visionary state,

where the crucifix became living and real.

She had a series of mystical revelations,

in which God spoke directly to her, a simple woman.

She now had a direct, bodily experience of the divine.

I'm really excited.

I'm going behind the scenes at the British Museum

to a place I haven't been before.

I'm going to see a crucifix,

which may have been the type that Julian actually gazed on

as she thought she was dying.

Well, we've got a lovely example here

of a 15th-century figure of Christ.

The cross has been lost and his arms originally would've come upwards

at quite a sharp angle and quite a lot of care has been taken

to paint on these very gory, dripping bits of blood.

The crucifixion itself wasn't necessarily a bloody act.

Most people that are crucified suffocate

from the pressure of their bodies pulling down on the cross,

but in the 15th century,

there's an increasing elaboration on the blood

that came out during the crucifixion.

I can really picture the scene in Julian's sickroom.

She's ill,

she thinks she's about to die

and the priest holds a crucifix up in front of her

and she sees a vision of pain, of suffering.

She says, "And in this suddenly I saw the red blood trickle down

"from under the garland, hot and freshly, plenteously and vividly."

She is describing this hot blood, this pain

and it's amazing to be in the presence of an object

that would've inspired her.

But Julian didn't die.

'Over the next day and night, she had 16 visions, or revelations.'

It's quite moving, seeing that crucifix.

It actually really helps me to make sense of her revelations.

It's also amazing to think that after she saw that,

her life changed completely.

'As a mystic, Julian now had a direct relationship with God,

'unmediated by the church.

'She made a drastic decision.

'She became an anchoress.

'An anchoress was a female religious hermit,

'who devoted her life to God

'by living as a solitary, walled up in just one small room.'

Julian spent the rest of her life in a cell

attached to Saint Julian's church in Norwich.

'She may even have taken the name of the church.'

Wow! Look at this place, it's amazing.

The original church was bombed in the Second World War,

but has since been restored.

It's incredible to think that on this spot

Julian would've taken her anchoritic vows of poverty,

chastity and stability of abode.

She was essentially dying to the world,

and as she'd have sat here during those rites,

it would be like being a witness at your own funeral.

It's also incredible to think that, once she went inside this room,

she wasn't to come out again for the rest of her life.

And this is it.

The room where Julian spent the rest of her life.

It's amazing to think of someone being in one room for 30 years.

This isn't actually the original,

but it is built on the foundations of the 14th-century cell

that Julian stayed in.

In fact, Julian might even be buried underneath here,

as a number of anchorites were buried beneath their cells.

There'd have been three windows,

the first one here that looked out onto the street

and here she might have acted almost like an agony aunt,

providing counsel to the people who passed by on this very busy road

to the port, and here she could provide counsel to everybody,

from lords and ladies to prostitutes.

Then there would've been another window over here

that looked out to an alcove,

and here Julian would've had a maid,

provided her with food and drink and also removed any waste,

so, all the nitty-gritty of life.

Then there was one more window up here,

which looked out into the church,

and from here Julian would be able to watch the service and take part

in the daily activities of the church.

God had spoken directly to Julian.

But the problem was her God was unconditionally loving,

caring for all humanity with the tender love of a mother

for her children,

looking on sinners with pity, not blame.

In other words,

Julian's God was fundamentally at odds

with the views of the church at her time.

Given how dangerous some of these ideas were,

Julian simply could've kept them to herself,

but instead she took the extraordinary decision

to write them down, and to write them down in English,

so that everybody could understand them.

This is at a time when heretics

are being burned for reading the Bible in English.

I've written books myself and anyone who's tried it

knows it's an incredibly hard thing to do,

but imagine if no woman has done it before you,

if you have to learn to read and write in order to do it

and if you're tackling ideas that are potentially life-threatening.

Julian must have had great courage and determination.

She says, "But just because I am a woman,

"why must I not write of the goodness of God?"

That is what she did.

Here in this room for 30 years, she interrogated her revelations,

developed her own profound theology and recorded it all

in an incredible book.

"These revelations were shown to a simple,

"uneducated creature in the year of our Lord 1373,

"on the eighth day of May."

Julian's book describes her vision

where the suffering of Christ on the cross and the suffering of humanity

are transformed into joy by the unfolding, unconditional,

maternal love of a God, who is able to make all things well.

To understand the full implication of Julian's writing,

I'm meeting with Dr Sarah Salih,

reader in medieval literature at King's College, London.

So, we've been on this journey understanding Julian the woman,

but what's so special about the book,

The Revelations of Divine Love?

She's the first woman author we have in the English canon

and what a book.

What an accomplished and magnificent and sophisticated book

that she wrote.

So it really is a remarkable starting point

if you're interested in the history of women's writing.

Julian's seen as a bit of a feminist icon, isn't she?

We don't even need to make that much of a drama about the fact

that she's a woman, she's just a brilliant writer, isn't she?

She is. Absolutely superb.

The directness of that address, that opening scene on the deathbed,

it's so vivid, so accessible,

you're immediately thrown into the turmoil

and the emotions of the sickroom

and then you go on this tremendous cosmic journey.

"He showed a little thing, the size of a hazelnut,

"lying in the palm of my hand, and it was round as a ball.

"I looked at it with my mind's eye and thought, what can this be?

"And the answer came...

"It is all that is made."

She makes some quite dramatic statements, doesn't she?

So, I see no hell.

Yes, I find that fascinating.

You know, she starts off worrying about the teaching of holy church,

which she understands to be that non-Christians are damned

and she clearly isn't happy with that.

She is not prepared to accept that at some level,

but she is very careful to say that nevertheless,

she doesn't doubt what holy Church teaches.

She does realise that she's potentially on some,

some quite controversial ground here.

"I saw truly that our Lord was never angry, nor never shall be,

"for he is God.

"God is the goodness that cannot be angry,

"for he is nothing but goodness."

She talks about God as mother, doesn't she?

She does, she talks about the motherhood of God,

that Christ in a sense births humanity

in his suffering on the cross,

that God is a mother because he nurtures and cares for

and disciplines the child,

that Christ is a mother because he feeds the child, you know,

with his blood and so the Eucharist is...

is then made equivalent to a mother's breast-feeding her child.

I think that she's a very radical writer.

I find her very brave, very inspiring.

She is, yes.

There is something remarkably fearless in the way

in which she pursues her thought.

I've been reading this book for 20 years and more

and it's different every time you read it.

It is the kind of book that lives with you.

'Julian had done what no woman had done before.

'She'd written a book in English

'because she was determined to share her vision

'of an unconditionally loving God.

'But because her views challenged the Church of her time,

'she was understandably cautious.'

Julian died sometime around 1416,

at which point only a handful of close friends

would've known her text.

But this was a dangerous text to have.

No hell, a loving God and written in English by a woman.

It's no wonder that the manuscript disappears.

Revelations of Divine Love was kept secret.

The manuscript would most probably have been passed from hand to hand

by sympathetic individuals, starting in Norwich and spreading slowly.

'This is where I turn detective,

'to find out what happened to Julian's manuscript.'

Julian lived and died in one room in Norwich,

but her words were on the move.

Pilgrimage was big in the medieval period.

People would travel across the country by foot, but also by donkey.

Even women, usually wealthy ones, were able to travel as pilgrims.

One female pilgrim we know of was Margery Kempe.

Margery Kempe, a woman from King's Lynn, was an intrepid pilgrim.

She travelled across England, Europe,

all the way to the Holy Land.

She came here to the shrine of Mary in Walsingham.

But she also visited Julian in her cell, just before Julian died.

We know that Margery visited Julian,

because she wrote about it in The Book of Margery Kempe,

which she dictated to a scribe in 1436.

This is the first autobiography in English.

Now, where did Margery get the idea to write a book?

Perhaps Julian entrusted her manuscript to Margery,

and Margery, as she travelled the country,

passed it to people sympathetic to Julian's ideas,

leaving it in the library of a monastery or private house.

Julian's book was a dangerous read,

but it was about to get even more dangerous.

During the Protestant Reformation,

the Church of England broke away from the Roman Catholic Church.

Monastic life was regarded as ungodly and abolished.

In 1534, Henry VIII, with the help of Thomas Cromwell,

passed the Act of Supremacy

and began the Dissolution of the Monasteries,

also known as the biggest land grab in history.

Walsingham Abbey was destroyed

and all its possessions were given to the king.

In religious institutions across the country,

this process was also taking place

and the manuscripts of the great libraries were either destroyed

or sold off.

During the Dissolution of the Monasteries

and the Reformation that followed,

a great many religious books were lost forever.

Protestants regarded visionary experiences such as Julian's

with suspicion and sometimes even denounced them as witchcraft.

'Julian's manuscript, read by only a few,

'appeared to be one more casualty of the religious turmoil

'of the 16th century.

'But as it turned out, Julian's manuscript had escaped destruction.'

'We owe the survival of Julian's book

to nine adventurous young women,

'who in 1623 left England to set up a monastery in exile in France,

'as all monastic life was banned in England.

'They had a copy of Julian's manuscript.

'Without them, Julian's writings would have been lost forever.'

I'm driving into the heart of the North Yorkshire moors,

because there's someone here who can help me pick up the trail

of Julian's lost manuscript.

'Stanbrook Abbey in Wass

'is the new home of the order of Benedictine nuns,

'first established in France by those nine young English women.'

This award-winning building is a fitting testimony

for the indomitable spirit

of the founding sisters and the generations that followed them.

I've come to meet Abbess Andrea.

Hello, welcome to Stanbrook.

-So lovely to see you.

-It's lovely to meet you. Come on in.

-Thank you.

BELL RINGS

GENTLE ORGAN MUSIC

# Call out my sisters... #

THEY SING INDISTINCTLY

Abbess Andrea and Sister Scholastica

explained why the nine young women who founded their order

play such a vital role in the survival of Julian's text.

So these nine young women, they fascinate me.

They're obviously coming from a long tradition of educated...

educated women.

I mean, they clearly had vocations. It was a spiritual call,

they were searching for God,

but it was also an opportunity for them to continue their education,

continue to read, to write, to study.

This is what I find fascinating, as a female academic,

that would've been the life I would've chosen,

not the rounds of having babies and being, you know,

responsible for the household.

For so many of women who went into religious life,

it was their only opportunity to further their education.

What sort of activities are they doing?

And obviously they're writing, aren't they?

They're engaging with texts.

They were doing what age-old monasticism has always done,

you know, they were getting hold of manuscripts and copying them.

So am I right in thinking that one of the texts the nuns copied

very early on was Julian's Revelations?

Yes. Julian must've been there amongst them.

The nuns were clearly reading Julian,

because excerpts from her book were being copied out

'in their personal prayer books in 1649.'

This whole manuscript is a collection of writings, meditations

and Julian is part of it,

so everything that's in here

reflects what they were reading and using for prayer.

And what it shows us, then, is that this text, Julian's text,

is being written, copied and meditated on.

'But sadly, the order no longer has Julian's original manuscript.'

But your archives, they're not complete, are they?

I mean, we lost absolutely everything at the French Revolution.

-That is just astonishing.

-We lost everything.

To discover what happened to the nuns' copy of Julian's manuscript,

I need to leave England behind and cross the Channel.

We know that the nine young women who founded the monastery in France

had access to Julian's text.

We don't know if they took a copy of the manuscript with them,

or if it was smuggled out later, but, somehow,

those nuns had a copy of the Revelations of Divine Love.

The young women were from wealthy and high-ranking Catholic families,

and included Gertrude Moore,

the great granddaughter of Sir Thomas Moore.

Possibly, Julian's text had come

from one of their family's libraries.

Roman Catholics still valued visionary experiences of the divine,

like Julian's.

Gertrude Moore was only 17 and the oldest of the group was just 23.

'They must have been motivated by religion,

'but perhaps they were also driven by a sense of adventure.'

By the desire to travel and explore the world.

Why would they be any different from young women today?

'For a woman in the 17th century,

'life as a nun could give far more freedom and independence

'than marriage.'

The young women had arrived here, in Cambrai.

It's now part of northern France,

but at the time it was part of the Spanish Netherlands.

I'm here on the Rue des Anglaises,

which is actually named after the nine Benedictine nuns

who set up their convent just down there.

There, they were ordained, they lived, they worked,

they studied.

Their lives would've been very similar, in fact,

to that of the nuns at Stanbrook Abbey.

There's very little left of the original monastery,

but it is marked on a 17th-century map.

Throughout the century,

the monastery grew, as more young women from England

joined the founding nine.

'In 1670, the man who was chaplain to the English nuns in France,

Serenus Cressy, published a printed translation of Julian's text,

based on a handwritten copy made by the nuns.

He played down Julian's more challenging ideas.

Even so, back in England,

the book was vilified as the fanatical revelations

of a distempered brain and dismissed.

But the English Benedictine nuns in Cambrai

continued to treasure and defend Julian's writing.

In fact, when their male superiors in the Benedictine order

demanded to inspect their library for poisonous material,

the nuns refused to hand over their books.

-Lovely to see you.

-Nice to meet you.

Fabien Laforge, curator at the municipal library in Cambrai,

has evidence of just how impressive the nuns' library was.

So, we've got these wonderful manuscripts.

Your store of manuscripts is incredible.

-So, this was in the library of the Cambrai nuns?

-Yes.

-Brilliant.

Oh, look at this!

Oh, wow!

This is an English manuscript

and this, er, this book of sovereign medicines.

This is a compilation.

You have, the receipt, er...

-Oh, now that...

-to fight the plague.

-What? The plague?

-Yes.

-Oh, my gosh.

-To fight the plague.

Yes, this is an antidote against the plague.

-Mm.

-I wonder if it works?

-I never try it.

You haven't tried it?! They might have had the answer all along.

Gosh, look, so you need saffron, shell, egg white,

oh, this is it, we've got the key,

now we know what to do next time there's a plague.

What a practical book.

And it does make you think, doesn't it,

if this is coming out of the convent in Cambrai,

they're really interested in a variety of things?

Fabien also has an 18th-century catalogue

of the nuns' books, made 170 years after the order was founded.

How many manuscripts and books do they list for Cambrai?

We have 1,000 manuscripts, handwritten manuscripts.

-Handwritten manuscripts?

-Yes.

Wow, so that again makes me think, this is an active scriptorium,

this is a busy library where they're copying texts...

Yes, this is one of the clues.

Do we have any evidence then for Julian coming out of this catalogue?

Yes, in the catalogue we have one...

particular occurrence.

'The catalogue shows that the nuns had 15 printed copies

'of Julian's text but the original manuscript is not listed.

'However, some pages of the catalogue

'are damaged and unreadable.'

It lists no manuscripts of Julian?

No known manuscripts.

-No known manuscripts. So it still could be found?

-Yes!

-Oh!

Got to keep looking for it!

For six generations,

the English Benedictine nuns in France

had preserved Julian's manuscript,

copying the text and defending their right to read it.

But the French Revolution was to change all that.

The revolutionary government abolished the French monarchy

and declared the church an oppressive institution.

For nearly two centuries,

the nuns were left to their prayers and their books

but in 1793, a group of revolutionary Horse Guards

turned up here

and they told the nuns they had just a quarter of an hour

to get their stuff together and get out.

They weren't allowed to take boxes or trunks,

just a small bundle each, and all their books were confiscated.

The monastery of the English nuns,

including their library of books and manuscripts,

was confiscated by the revolutionaries

and the nuns were imprisoned.

They shared their prison with 16 French Carmelite nuns

until, one day, open wagons arrived

to take the French nuns to trial in Paris.

I'm here at Place de la Nation in the shadow of Lady Liberty.

Just over there, one of the busiest guillotines in the city was set up.

Over 50 people a day were being led to their death.

On the 17th of July, 1794,

the 16 Carmelite nuns that were imprisoned with

the English Benedictines

went to the guillotine singing.

The French Carmelite nuns were executed...

..and the English nuns believed they would go next.

This is a private graveyard, Picpus Cemetery,

where the bodies of the French nuns are buried.

Wow.

Amazing to think that, tucked behind all those other graves,

there's this separate section where you've just got two

great, big squares in the ground,

designating pits where 1,306 bodies were dumped

and they're referred to as martyrs' graves.

Over there, in amongst all the other bones,

are the bodies of our Carmelite nuns.

The English nuns expected that they, too, would die.

But before they faced the guillotine,

the French Revolution ended and the nuns escaped back to England.

Unable to wear their habits to travel in,

the only clothes they had to wear were those left behind by

the murdered French Carmelite nuns.

The English nuns returned home

wearing the clothes of their martyred French sisters.

Back at Stanbrook Abbey, Abbess Andrea and Sister Scholastica

take me to their private chapel for a rare glimpse

of their most treasured holy relics.

SHE GASPS

This is the reliquary of the Carmelite martyrs.

It's the relics that survived, that came back.

It's actually some of the clothes that our community wore

-when they came back from prison.

-Really?

Which... They realised that the Carmelites had been guillotined,

they realised they were martyrs and they realised just how valuable

those clothes were and, later, this beautiful reliquary was made.

This is the actual story.

You can see the Carmelites getting into the open wagons

-and you can see us looking out the window.

-Oh, yes, there you are!

-Goodness!

-So we were looking down onto the sisters

as they got into the open wagons

-that were going to take them to the guillotine.

-The guillotine.

And the central picture, obviously, is the guillotine.

Obviously, this is the shrine.

Inside, we have the relics.

We're not going to open it?

-SHE GASPS

-Those are the seals that were put on

when it was actually authenticated as being the real relics.

There inside, you can see a little bit of a shoe -

I think it was like an espadrille -

and there's some little bits of the material that you can see.

-You can still see the pattern on the material.

-Look at that!

You can see the colours. Red and...

There's a flower there in red and pink!

-It's been preserved so well, hasn't it?

-I can't believe it!

That's what the Carmelites wore until

they went off to the guillotine.

That's what our community wore in 1795 when they came back.

Wonderful!

'The nuns were lucky to escape with their lives.'

For six generations,

they had protected and kept alive Julian's book,

but now their original manuscript and all their copies were lost...

..or were they?

Perhaps somewhere on the Continent,

a copy of Julian's manuscript made by the English Benedictine nuns

was waiting to be discovered.

For nearly 500 years,

Revelations Of Divine Love had been suppressed

because it was written by a woman

and because it challenged the orthodox views of the Church of

Julian's own time and of the centuries that followed.

But at the beginning of the 20th century,

a tide was rising in the sea of history.

Throughout the country, women's voices were pressing to be heard.

Women were beginning to experience greater freedom

and to demand access to power and education.

Oxford University had opened its doors to women,

despite the fact that this was widely condemned

as unchristian and dangerous.

In 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst

founded the Women's Social and Political Union

and their members were the first to be known as the suffragettes.

For the first time in history,

women were actively campaigning for equality with men.

By now, a woman from a wealthy family had the freedom to study,

to write and to travel.

In 1901, a middle-aged, single woman got off the train from Edinburgh

and was heading for the British Museum.

Grace Warrick had come to London on a mission.

She planned to publish a modern translation of Julian's text.

Hi there. British Library, please.

Grace Warrick was from a staunchly Presbyterian Scottish ship-owning

family but we really don't know much more about her.

How a Scottish Presbyterian came across the writings

of an obscure 14th-century English mystic is a complete mystery.

Grace is the most unlikely of heroines,

but it turns out she was the right woman at the right time.

The woman Julian's text had been waiting for.

She wanted Julian's voice to sing out to the world.

Grace owned a rare printed copy of Revelations Of Divine Love,

but this was a 17th-century male interpretation of Julian.

Grace was looking for Julian's original manuscript

and she had an idea of where to find it.

I'm following in Grace's footsteps

and I've come here to the British Library

to see if I can find Julian's manuscript.

At the Reading Room of the British Library,

then part of the British Museum,

Grace probably went through the 18th-century catalogue

of the Hans Sloane collection.

Hans Sloane was an extremely wealthy doctor

who, at his death in 1753,

bequeathed his collection of 71,000 objects to the nation.

This formed the basis of the British Museum

and included some 50,000 books, manuscripts and prints.

The manuscripts were listed by number.

No-one knows how a copy of Julian's manuscript

came into the Sloane collection

but filed in the 18th-century catalogue, under the heading

Magic And Witchcraft, was the manuscript Grace was after.

MS Sloane 2499.

Entitled only "Revelations to one who could not read a letter, 1373".

Gosh.

Here it is.

MS Sloane 2499.

This is probably as close as I will ever get to the original manuscript

of Julian's Revelations Of Divine Love.

This is a 17th-century copy of a now lost medieval manuscript.

It was made by one of the English Benedictine nuns in France.

It's written in an East Anglian dialect

and is believed to be the nearest we can get to Julian's original text.

You can almost hear that East Anglian voice coming through.

Here's that famous line, "Sin is behovable but all shall be well,

"all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

This is the actual manuscript that Grace copied out by hand

in the Reading Room at the British Museum

and it took her just one month.

I'm surprised at the condition of this.

It's really hard to read.

The paper's incredibly stained,

the ink is biting through from the other side,

so it's hard to make out the individual words.

I'm amazed that Grace was able to transcribe from this.

She then went back up to Edinburgh

and translated it into modern English.

She managed to persuade Methuen

to publish it and Grace's translation was hugely popular.

It's been reprinted multiple times and, thanks to her,

the Revelations Of Divine Love have never since been out of print.

Because Grace played such an important role in the contemporary

recognition of Julian's writing,

I went to meet her great-nephew, John Warrick, and his wife, Lucy.

Do you have any memories of her? Do you actually remember her?

I must have been just four and we were taken to see Aunt Grace and her

elder sister, Robina, Aunt Bina.

-Aunt Bina!

-And I just can remember

these two old ladies sitting, one on

each side of the fire in the house,

a very nice atmosphere of warmth and kindness.

John's grandfather was a Wee Free Presbyterian.

You know, everything very, very fierce,

nobody was allowed to read any books except the Bible and

The Pilgrim's Progress on a Sunday, that kind of thing,

and there she was,

plunging into this late medieval Catholic world and producing this

brilliant translation and notes and introduction and book and everything

about somebody you would think

very alien to the atmosphere in which she was living.

She has no training in medieval languages and yet she wants to

go into these mystical texts, these medieval texts.

It's perfectly possible that in a school room

she would have read Chaucer.

The move into Julian's kind of English

wouldn't have been that difficult.

'I've brought a special surprise to show John and Lucy.

'Grace's handwritten copy of Sloane 2499.'

Stanbrook Abbey have very kindly let us have a look at some of

the materials they've got from Grace.

-Look at this!

-May I undo it?

Please!

Left to the Abbey by Grace.

This is it. An amazing discovery!

These are all the notes she made originally

while she was translating Julian.

This is what was coming off her pen

as she was looking at the original manuscript.

-This is really good.

-Absolutely fascinating.

Isn't this wonderful?

-Fascinating.

-And here she says,

"This manuscript is said to be in a 17th-century handwriting,"

but that it's coming from the 14th-century text.

"Here beginneth the first revelation

"of the precious crowning of Christ in the first chapter

"and how God fulfilleth the heart with most joy."

It's just... I think it's just so wonderful to rediscover her

through these texts all this time later

and the more detective work we've done, the more is coming to light.

There are currently over 20 modern English translations

of Julian's text available,

mostly based, like Grace's, on the Sloane manuscript.

But maybe the story of the book is,

to use Julian's own words,

not yet performed.

Manuscripts turn up all the time

and that's the great excitement of being a medievalist

is that, all of a sudden, your knowledge about a text

can be transformed by a new manuscript that comes to light.

Maybe somewhere in a monastic library or

a municipal library in France,

there is resting an early copy of the long text of Julian.

But thanks to Grace Warrick, Julian now has the reputation she deserves.

This stained glass window was made in 2002 for the Chapel Royal

at St James's Palace, the Queen's private chapel.

Julian is now acknowledged by both Catholics and Anglicans

and her writing is respected worldwide,

translated into every major European language,

even Finnish and Catalan.

People travel from all over the world to visit her cell in Norwich.

Today, St Julian's church is hosting a group of pilgrims

from North Carolina.

Welcome. Welcome properly.

So, you've come to see the cell of Julian.

-It's my second time.

-Really?

-Yes.

This is my first visit to Julian's shrine.

-Is it?

-It's beautiful, it's peaceful.

So, coming to Julian's cell, then,

it's helping you to tap into the history

but also her own spiritual view.

Her spiritual view and her view that women did have a place back then

because we think of them as a minor historical footnote and

this is... You know, you could be influential then,

you could make a difference.

This has been the most incredible journey,

trying to make sense of a text

that's had a really profound effect on me.

I think for any woman who wants to share their ideas,

Julian is the starting point, the inspiration.

It's been emotional, exciting, at times excruciating,

trying to access this woman

who still seems out of reach across the centuries.

So I've come back to where it all began -

the cell that Julian spent her life in

and wrote her revolutionary text in.

She describes seeing the whole universe in a simple hazelnut and,

as I reflect on my experiences,

I also feel like they've reached a sense of completion.

Julian couldn't leave this cell,

but I can.

My journey is now complete.