Julian of Norwich in Her Phenomenology (PDF)

«You have done a magnificent study of Julian. The initial chapters are splendidly researched though I missed the Syon Abbey contribution. Then I loved your final chapters where the footnotes keep giving Julian's text. I especially applaud your seeing the Carmelite aspect which I don't think others have.»

(Julia Bolton Holloway, Hermit of the Holy Family, Florence)

«A new work on Julian of Norwich is always a cause for celebration and Dr Clemmer's book is no exception. The reader is enabled to follow Julian closely before, during and after her unique visionary experience, examining contemporary history and spirituality from many angles. And the story continues right up to Edith Stein in the twentieth century. This book will delight all Julian lovers, as well as others who want to know Julian better and appreciate her in greater depths.»

(Sr Elizabeth Ruth Obbard ODC, Quidenham Carmel, Norwich)

Julian of Norwich in Her Phenomenology engages Julian's primordial religious experience of May 1373; her subsequent definition to its revelation within her spiritual texts; and their hermeneutics made manifest from centuries of historical context. The meaning of Julian's experience continued to unfold throughout her life: with its grace, and by insight with her own use of phenomenological method. The historical manifestation of Julian's graced experience is given its closest phenomenological expression within her Short Text (Amherst) and in her Long Text (Sloane), with their collective human-Divine collaborations. But first, they arise phenomenally for Julian in the reciprocal gaze exchanged between her God and her soul. It is by God's Trinitarian gift of love, and in her grace-filled collaboration with others, that Julian's spiritual texts preserve, and guard, her experience of prayer and contemplation grounded in God: namely, with humanity's resting in God's substance, and with God's resting and ruling in her own soul as God's homeliest home.