Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Divine Love: The concept of LIGHT and the development of the mystic’s spirituality
Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Divine Love: The concept of LIGHT and the development of the mystic’s spirituality

Summary/Abstract: The fourteenth century is the golden age of English mysticism. One of the prominent figures of theday is Julian of Norwich, the author of The Revelations of Divine Love. The paper places the developmentof the mystic’s spirituality, reflected in her writings, against the backdrop of the late medievalculture. The paper adopts a Cognitive Linguistic perspective on the issue, focusing on the mystic’s useof conceptual metaphors related to the concept of LIGHT. The analysis shows that the metaphoricalnetwork derives, at least in part, from Julian’s situatedness in her sociocultural environment. The paperconcludes that the mystic uses the notion of LIGHT in a way that allows her to discard the orthodoxidea of a wrathful God, popular in the Middle Ages. Instead, she offers an image of God, full of loveand mercy for humankind. While this indicates the progress of Julian’s spiritual understanding of therevelations she received in 1373, it also helps shed light on the mystic’s spiritual worldview.

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