History is a construction reflecting contemporary sensibilities, and historical reconstruction is selective. The figure of Julian of Norwich is no exception to this construct. Few records detailing Julian of Norwich's life survive. Julian's anonymity makes the interpretation of her text more pliable, therefore driving her notoriety and allure. Julian's textual progeny includes not only editions, translations and versions of Shewings, but also critical and scholarly constructions built from the extant records of Julian's life. Review of scholarship about Julian shows that the works reflect standards of a particular time and offer different interpretations when read from various vantage points. The tendency to generate an amalgamation of medieval and progressive figure carries not only the potential for anachronism, it views the past through a contemporary socio-political lens. An appreciation of the medieval environment (cultural, physical, spiritual), alongside of a review of contemporary authors, can shed objective light on Julian's influences and aims. Review of historical documentation and contemporary criticism is essential to understanding the way others have constructed the medieval figure, how those constructions reflected attitudes endemic to the time and not Julian's, and how those misrepresentations were assumed fact and subsequently propagated by others. The author of Shewings has been described as a proto-Protestant, an early ecumenist, and a Catholic Modernist and, more recently, a radical and a proto-feminist; however, I argue that Julian's spiritual expressions, when placed in context, were orthodox and conformed to the acceptable limits of spiritual expression of the time.
