Julian of Norwich's writings are centered in a vision of Christ's Crucifixion which she experienced while seriously ill--a vision so compelling and complex that it filled her life. She recovered from the illness to spend the next twenty years in meditation and study, writing two different narratives, one much longer than the other, which describe and analyze the event. The only absolutely solid fact known about Julian's life is the date of this vision, which she carefully records in the Revelations of Divine Love: it was "the year of our Lord 1373, the 8th day of May ... when I was thirty years old and a half." She was born, then, in 1342, close to the time of Geoffrey Chaucer's birth. She was still alive in 1416, when she was the beneficiary of a will so dated, but the year of her death is unknown. The very name "Julian" is not that...