Julian of Norwich (circa 1342-1416) and Annie Dillard (1945- ) both feature prominently in Simon Critchley’s recent book Mysticism. They are, however, very different writers, and Dillard explicitly rejects Julian’s well-known cry: “Love was His meaning.” Nevertheless, these two mystics, unlike many others, write in a prose saturated with an acute sense of what not just the body or the self but what the world is like. Why?
I will NOT be arguing that Julian and Dillard have similar responses to the world or are embedded in it in similar ways. Rather, I am going to ask similar questions about the context of their nature-imbued mystical experiences. How is their understanding of the world related to ideas about nature and matter contemporary with their visions? What understandings of art—devotional and secular—inform their mysticism? Is it significant that each wrote in a period in which women’s writing flowered? I shall suggest that the fact that they differ so radically in both the materiality with which they engage and the ways in which they respond helps us understand the complex ways in which a religious self can be embedded in the material world.