Julian of Norwich. Credit: Flickr/Matt Brown. CC BY 2.0.
Julian of Norwich was born in 1342. No stranger to violence and suffering, she grew up in a world ravaged by the Hundred Years’ War between England and France and torn apart by the Great Papal Schism. She also lived through the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, during which thousands of disenfranchised tenant farmers and laborers marched all over England looting monasteries, burning records of their serfdom and debt, and killing their hated overlords. Most tragic of all, from the time Julian was six years old, she endured repeated outbreaks of the Great Pestilence - later termed the Black Death - which eventually killed more than half the population of Europe, some 50 million people. It was no less than apocalyptic.
