The Repository Ancient Paths Faith

Julian of Norwich: Why She Wrote 'All Shall Be Well'

October 19, 2026 · Runtime 15:20 · Watch on YouTube

Julian of Norwich wrote that all shall be well, in England, in the century of the Black Death. In her own book the sentence is not a comfort she started with: it is the answer to a question she kept asking, why God did not prevent sin. We read her two versions side by side, the short one, which survives in a single manuscript, and the long one she wrote some twenty years later, and we show what she changed.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 All shall be well
  2. 0:31 England, and Norwich
  3. 1:14 The Black Death in the bishop's register
  4. 2:08 A child of the plague years
  5. 2:45 Three gifts she asked for
  6. 3:23 May 1373: the sickness
  7. 4:41 The hazel-nut
  8. 5:15 Why was sin not prevented?
  9. 6:07 She pressed again: the great deed
  10. 6:42 "I said I had raved"
  11. 7:14 The short version, and the date of 1413
  12. 8:10 "Because I am a woman": what she cut
  13. 9:03 The anchoress of St Julian's
  14. 9:34 The wills, and Margery Kempe
  15. 10:21 The reading: chapter twenty-seven
  16. 12:59 Love was His meaning
  17. 13:46 How the long version survived
  18. 14:36 Why she wrote it
  19. 15:00 Next: The Imitation of Christ

Transcript

All shall be well 0:00

Julian of Norwich wrote that all shall be well. She wrote it in England, in the century of the Black Death. And in her own book, it is not a comfort she started with. It is the answer to a question she kept asking.

So why did a child of the plague years write it, and what did she mean? We read her two versions side by side, the short one she wrote first and the long one she wrote some twenty years later. What she changed tells part of the answer.

England, and Norwich 0:31

This is England at night, seen from the International Space Station in October 2011. Six and a half centuries ago, none of these lights existed. Her city lies in the east, in the flat country called East Anglia.

Norwich, on the river Wensum. In the fourteenth century it had a cathedral, a castle, a market, and parish churches crowded inside its walls.

The painters of nineteenth-century Norwich drew the old city again and again. The cathedral, begun under the Normans. The castle keep on its mound. And the river, with its gates and wharves, running down past the parish of Conisford.

The Black Death in the bishop's register 1:14

In 1349 the Black Death reached East Anglia. In the eighteen eighties, a Norfolk clergyman, Augustus Jessopp, went through the bishop of Norwich's register, where every new parish priest was recorded.

In a normal year, he found, the bishop instituted about seventy-seven new priests. In July 1349 alone, he instituted two hundred and nine. In a single year, Jessopp writes, upwards of eight hundred parishes lost their parsons, eighty-three of them twice, and ten of them three times in a few months.

Those are priests, not townspeople. Jessopp himself warned that the figures given for deaths in the towns will not bear examination. Nobody counted the dead of Norwich. But a diocese that lost its priests this fast lost its people too.

A child of the plague years 2:08

Julian gives us one number about herself. In May 1373, she says, she was thirty years old and a half. So she was born near the end of 1342, and when the plague reached Norwich she was about six. It came back to England in the 1360s, more than once, while she grew up.

That is almost all we know of her early life. We do not know her family, or where she lived as a girl. We are not even sure that Julian was her name. It may come from the church in Norwich where she later lived.

Three gifts she asked for 2:45

Her book begins with three things she had once asked of God. The first was mind of His Passion, to see the suffering of Christ as if she had stood there. The second was bodily sickness in youth, at thirty years of age. The third was three wounds: contrition, compassion, and steadfast longing toward God.

She asked for that sickness to be so hard as to death, so that she might receive all the last rites, and everyone who saw her would think she was dying. She asked it with a condition. Lord, she wrote, if it be not Thy will, be not displeased.

May 1373: the sickness 3:23

Years later, it came. When I was thirty years old and a half, she writes, God sent me a bodily sickness, in which I lay three days and three nights. And on the fourth night I took all my rites of Holy Church, and weened not to have lived till day.

Her curate was sent for, to be at her ending. By the time he came, her eyes were fixed and she could not speak. He set the cross before her face and said: I have brought thee the image of thy Maker and Saviour. Look thereupon, and comfort thee therewith.

This was how a Christian of her century hoped to die. About a century later, printed books called the Art of Dying showed the same scene: the bed, the cross held up, the household around it, and the struggle for the soul.

Then her sight began to fail. It was all dark about me in the chamber, she writes, as if it had been night, save in the image of the Cross, whereon I beheld a common light. And suddenly all her pain was taken from her.

In the hours that followed she saw what she later numbered as sixteen showings, beginning with the Passion of Christ she had asked to see. The book gives the date: the thirteenth day of May, 1373.

The hazel-nut 4:41

One of the first is the smallest. He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand, she writes, and it was as round as a ball. I thought, what may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.

She marvelled how it might last, because it was so little it might suddenly have fallen to naught. And she was answered: It lasteth, and ever shall, for that God loveth it. God made it, God loveth it, God keepeth it.

Why was sin not prevented? 5:15

Then she raised an objection, and she raised it against God. In my folly, she writes, I often wondered why, by the great foreseeing wisdom of God, the beginning of sin was not letted, that is, prevented. For then, methought, all should have been well.

This is where the famous sentence comes from. Jesus answered, she says: It behoved that there should be sin. But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. It is not a greeting. It is an answer to her question.

Her own word, in the manuscript, is behovabil. Sin is behovable: fitting, in some way needed. She does not explain how. She says only that the words were said full tenderly, showing no manner of blame.

She pressed again: the great deed 6:07

And she did not let it go. Some chapters later she presses again. There be deeds evil done in our sight, she writes, and so great harms taken, that it seemeth to us that it were impossible that ever it should come to good end.

The answer she records is not an explanation. It is a promise. There is a deed, she says, which the blessed Trinity shall do on the last day, and how it shall be done is unknown of all creatures beneath Christ. By that deed, all that is not well shall be made well.

"I said I had raved" 6:42

Then the showings ended, and the sickness came back. A religious man came to her bedside and asked how she was. I said I had raved today, she writes. And he laughed loud and heartily.

Then she told him that the cross before her face had seemed to bleed, and he stopped laughing. He took it seriously, and she was ashamed, because she herself had not. In the book she writes the answer she received: it was no raving that thou sawest this day.

The short version, and the date of 1413 7:14

She wrote the showings down. Her first version is short, and it survives in a single manuscript, copied in the middle of the fifteenth century into a Carthusian collection of religious writings in English, now in the British Library.

Its scribe added a heading. Here is a vision shown by the goodness of God to a devout woman, and her name is Julian, that is recluse at Norwich, and yet is alive. And he gives the year: 1413.

For more than a century, writers read that date wrong. An eighteenth-century historian of Norfolk, Francis Blomefield, copied it as 1442, which would make her a hundred years old. Even our edition of 1901, Grace Warrack's, prints 1442. In 1911 Dundas Harford read the manuscript again: 1413, when she was about seventy.

"Because I am a woman": what she cut 8:10

The short version has a passage the long one does not. God forbid that ye should say, or take it so, that I am a teacher, she writes, for I am a woman, unlearned, feeble and frail. But because I am a woman, should I therefore leave it, that I should not tell you the goodness of God?

In the long version, that apology is gone. So are her mother at the bedside, who reached to close her eyes, and the child who came in with the curate. Instead, the long version says: that which I say of me, I say in the person of all mine even-Christians.

The long version took her decades. Twenty years after the time of the showing, save three months, she writes, I had teaching inwardly. Twenty years on one example she had been shown and had not understood, of a lord and a servant who falls.

The anchoress of St Julian's 9:03

By then she was an anchoress. An anchoress was enclosed for life, with the bishop's leave, in a cell built against the wall of a church. Julian's stood in the churchyard of Saint Julian's, Conisford, near the river, on what is now King Street.

Blomefield described the place in the eighteenth century. In the east part of the churchyard, he wrote, stood an anchorage, where a recluse dwelt till the Dissolution, when the house was demolished, though the foundations may still be seen.

The wills, and Margery Kempe 9:34

Other traces of her, from her own lifetime, are wills. In 1404 a chaplain, Thomas Edmund, left twelve pence to Julian, anchoress, and eight pence to Sara, her maid. In 1415 a merchant, John Plumpton, left forty pence to the anchoress at Saint Julian's, and something to her two maids. In 1416, the Countess of Suffolk left twenty shillings to Julian, recluse at Norwich.

Around 1413 a visitor came from Lynn, on the coast, a laywoman named Margery Kempe, troubled by her own visions. Years later Margery dictated what the anchoress told her: that the Holy Spirit never moves a soul against charity, for then he would be contrary to himself.

The reading: chapter twenty-seven 10:21

Now the chapter at the centre of her book, read without comment. Chapter twenty-seven, the thirteenth showing, in Grace Warrack's edition of 1901, from the Sloane manuscript.

Warrack modernised the spelling but kept Julian's old words, with the manuscript's own readings at the foot of the page. Where Julian writes letted, she means prevented. Where she writes behoved, she means it was fitting, it had to be.

After this the Lord brought to my mind the longing that I had to Him afore. And I saw that nothing letted me but sin. And so I looked, generally, upon us all, and methought: If sin had not been, we should all have been clean and like to our Lord, as He made us.

And thus, in my folly, afore this time often I wondered why by the great foreseeing wisdom of God the beginning of sin was not letted: for then, methought, all should have been well. This stirring of mind was much to be forsaken, but nevertheless mourning and sorrow I made therefor, without reason and discretion.

But Jesus, who in this Vision informed me of all that is needful to me, answered by this word and said: It behoved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

In this naked word sin, our Lord brought to my mind, generally, all that is not good, and the shameful despite and the utter noughting that He bare for us in this life, and His dying, and all the pains and passions of all His creatures, ghostly and bodily. All this was shewed in a touch, and quickly passed over into comfort: for our good Lord would not that the soul were affeared of this terrible sight.

But I saw not sin: for I believe it hath no manner of substance nor no part of being, nor could it be known but by the pain it is cause of. And thus pain, it is something, as to my sight, for a time; for it purgeth, and maketh us to know ourselves and to ask mercy.

And for the tender love that our good Lord hath to all that shall be saved, He comforteth readily and sweetly, signifying thus: It is sooth that sin is cause of all this pain; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. These words were said full tenderly, showing no manner of blame to me nor to any that shall be saved.

And in these words I saw a marvellous high mystery hid in God, which mystery He shall openly make known to us in Heaven: in which knowing we shall verily see the cause why He suffered sin to come. In which sight we shall endlessly joy in our Lord God.

Love was His meaning 12:59

She did not stop asking. In the last chapter of the long version she writes that she desired oftentimes to learn what was our Lord's meaning. And fifteen years after, and more, I was answered in ghostly understanding.

Wouldst thou learn thy Lord's meaning in this thing? Learn it well. Love was His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love.

And I saw full surely, she goes on, that ere God made us He loved us; which love was never slacked, nor ever shall be. In our making we had beginning; but the love wherein He made us was in Him from without beginning.

How the long version survived 13:46

The long version nearly disappeared. It survives complete only in copies made long after her death. One in Paris, from the sixteenth century. And one in London, written around 1650, perhaps by an English nun in exile, at Cambrai or in Paris.

In 1670 a Benedictine, Serenus Cressy, printed it for the first time, as Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love. Today Norwich Cathedral calls it the first surviving book written in English by a woman.

Her church did not survive intact. In June 1942, German bombs fell on Norwich, and the tower of Saint Julian's took a direct hit. After the war the church was rebuilt, with a chapel standing where the lost cell had been.

Why she wrote it 14:36

So why did a child of the plague years write that all shall be well? Not because she had not seen harm. She names it, and presses God with it. The sentence is an answer to her own question, a promise she says she cannot see inside. And when, years later, she asked what it all meant, the answer she wrote down was one word. Love.

Next: The Imitation of Christ 15:00

Across the North Sea, in the same years, another book began to travel, copied by hand and without a name. It came to be called the Imitation of Christ. Next time: who wrote it, and the signed codex of 1441, in Brussels, that settled the argument for many.

Description and sources

Julian was about six when the Black Death reached East Anglia in 1349; in a single year, by Augustus Jessopp's count of the bishop's register, upwards of eight hundred parishes of the diocese of Norwich lost their parsons. In May 1373, at thirty and a half, she lay dying, her curate held a cross before her face, and she saw sixteen showings. Then she raised an objection against God: if sin had not been, all should have been well. The answer she wrote down is the famous sentence, and she kept pressing it. The episode follows the two versions of her book, the copyist's date of 1413 that a historian misread as 1442, the passage in which she apologises for being a woman and later cuts, the wills that name her, Margery Kempe's visit, and reads chapter twenty-seven in full, in Grace Warrack's edition of 1901.

PRIMARY SOURCES

ARCHIVE PLATES — public-domain documents, with author, date, archive and licence.

  • Ars moriendi, woodcut, c. 1475. The Metropolitan Museum of Art | CC0
  • G. Warrack, Revelations of Divine Love (Methuen, 1901), p. 56. Internet Archive (3 images) | public domain
  • Triumph of Death, fresco, c. 1446. Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo | Public domain
  • D. Harford, Comfortable Words for Christ's Lovers (1911), p. 16. Internet Archive (2 images) | public domain
  • Nortfolcia, Norfolk, Atlas Van der Hagen, 1646. Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague | Public domain
  • John Sell Cotman, Norwich Cathedral: Entrance to Jesus Chapel, c. 1807. Google Arts & Culture | Public domain
  • E. T. Daniell, Norwich Castle before the restoration of 1834. Norfolk Museums Collections | Public domain

... and 48 more plates, each credited on screen in the video and listed in this project's manifest.

Ancient Paths Faith reads the Christian contemplative tradition, East and West, from the primary source: the life, the rule, the letter, the codex.

About the material. Paintings, prints and manuscripts: Yale Center for British Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Norfolk Museums Collections, National Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Musee Conde, British Library and other public collections, all public domain or CC0, credited on screen. Film: the International Space Station over Western Europe, NASA, 2011, public domain. Book pages: Internet Archive scans of public-domain editions. Julian's words are read from Grace Warrack's edition of 1901 (Long Text) and Dundas Harford's of 1911 (Short Text). Every diagram is drawn in code from the sources listed. Nothing in this video is AI-generated imagery.

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