Julian of Norwich

Lived

c. 1343–c. 1416

Era

Medieval

Where

Norwich, England

Tradition

Roman Catholic

Revelations of Divine Love

An anchoress walled into a cell attached to a Norwich church, who at thirty received a series of visions during an illness she expected to kill her, and spent the next twenty years thinking about what they meant before writing the long version.

Why it matters

Hers is the earliest surviving book in English known to be by a woman. Writing in a century of plague and schism, she concluded that there is no wrath in God, and wrote of Christ as mother — an image with precedent but never developed at that length. She is read now more than at any time since, largely for one sentence: that all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.