Abstract
The medieval Julian’s life as an anchoress, her experiences as a visionary and mystic, and her authority as a woman writer continue to generate significant interest in the contemporary cultural imagination. Almost nothing is known for certain of her life, and yet, as a character, she has found a relatively frequent home on the stage, popular with a limited but diverse audience of churchgoers, academics, and feminists. There is much in the prolonged meditation on the series of visions she experienced—recorded in A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love—that could properly be called dramatic, and that could easily, even successfully, be transformed to theater; however, it is, paradoxically, her enclosure that most intrigues audiences and fascinates playwrights, challenging them in their attempts to represent Julian on the stage.1 In this chapter, I consider three published and produced plays based on the writings of Julian of Norwich and on popular beliefs about her life: James Janda’s Julian: A Play Based on the Life of Julian of Norwich, Dana Bagshaw’s Cell Talk: A Duologue between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, and Sheila Upjohn’s Mind out of Time: A Play on Julian of Norwich.2 As my title suggests, my focus is the relationship between the anchoritic cell and performance, both in the dramatic performance of enclosure—that is, the cell in theater—as well as in the way or ways the cell enables the performance of a particular kind of holy life—that is, the cell is theatre. This chapter will also consider the equally difficult relationship between the constructions of Julian the anchoress and the author of A Revelation of Love offered by the separate plays and the critical positions of the playwrights: priest and poet; feminist and popular theologian; and “friend of Julian.”
This essay considers three late twentieth-century plays based on the life and writings of Julian of Norwich, with particular reference to the dramatic representation of enclosure.
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James Janda, Julian: A Play Based on the Life of Julian of Norwich (New York: The Seabury Press, 1984)
Dana Bagshaw, Cell Talk: A Duologue between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (London: Radius, 2002)
Sheila Upjohn, Mind out of Time: A Play on Julian of Norwich, 2nd ed. (Norwich: Julian Shrine Publications, 1992)
Eve Ensler wrote The Vagina Monologues in 1996 (New York: Villard, 1998)
In reading Julian’s emphasis on maternal imagery in her elaboration of “God oure moder” (“Revelation of Love,” 14.59, in Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Watson and Jenkins, p. 309) as evidence that Julian had, and presumably lost, a family before her enclosure, Bagshaw may simply be echoing the critical trend in recent years to read such imagery in A Revelation of Love as autobiographical. See, for instance, Benedicta Ward, “Julian the Solitary,” in Kenneth Leech and Sr. Benedicta Ward, S.L.G., Julian Reconsidered (Oxford: Sisters of the Love of God Press, 1988), pp. 11–35.
Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2001), p. 167.
Revelations of Divine Love Recorded by Julian, Anchoress at Norwich, Anno Domini 1373, ed. Grace Warrack (London: Methuen, 1901). For evidence of the influence of Warrack’s edition, see Alexandra Barratt, “How Many Children Had Julian of Norwich? Editions, Translations and Versions of Her Revelations,” in Vox Mystica: Essays on Medieval Mysticism in Honor of Professor Valerie M. Lagorio, ed. Anne Clark Bartlett with Thomas H. Bestul, Janet Goebel, and William F. Pollard (Cambridge, UK: D.S. Brewer 1995), pp. 27–39
Sheila Upjohn, Why Julian Now? A Voyage of Discovery (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1997).
Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp..
Cornelia Parker and Tilda Swinton, The Maybe (London and Rome, 1995). For more information about this performance, see Cornelia Parker, Bruce Ferguson, and Jessica Morgan, Cornelia Parker (London: The Institute for Contemporary Art, 2000), pp. 30–35
Cornelia Parker, Avoided Object (Cardiff: Chapter Gallery, 1996), pp. 11–20.
See, among others, Mignon Nixon, “Dream Dust,” October 116 (Spring 2006): 63–86.
For medieval rites of enclosure, see Warren, Anchorites and their Patrons, pp. 97–100. In an interview with Lisa Tickner, Cornelia Parker referred to the performing Swinton as “a non-performing performer, a sort of absent presence”; she noted further that although sleeping, “Tilda stood in for everyone,” she was nevertheless “curiously absent.” See Lisa Tickner, “A Strange Alchemy: Cornelia Parker,” Art History 26.3 (Spring 2003): 384
Alexandra Barratt, ed., Women’s Writing in Middle English (London: Longman, 1992), p. 108.
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© 2009 Sarah Salih and Denise N. Baker
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Jenkins, J. (2009). Playing Julian: The Cell as Theater in Contemporary Culture. In: Salih, S., Baker, D.N. (eds) Julian of Norwich’s Legacy. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101623_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101623_8
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