Julian of Norwich

Janina Ramirez is the course director on the Undergraduate Certificate and Diploma in History of Art at Oxford University. She has written and presented numerous BBC history documentaries, and is the author of The Private Lives of the Saints: Power, passion and politics in Anglo-Saxon England (W. H. Allen, 2015). Her most recent TV documentaries include ‘Chivalry and Betrayal: The Hundred Years’ War’ (2013), ‘Architects of the Divine: The First Gothic Age’ (2014), ‘Saints and Sinners: Britain’s Millennium of Monasteries’ (2015), ‘The Art of the Vikings: Secret Knowledge’ (March 2016) and ‘The Search for the Lost Manuscript: Julian of Norwich’ (July 2016).

In this lively and appealing introduction, we are enabled to meet a figure who is not a stereotypical 'mystic' from an alien cultural world, but a vigorous, warm and deeply imaginative writer, quietly but firmly turning inside out a number of conventional understandings of the nature and work of God. Nina Ramirez presents a Julian who is very much of her own age, yet for that very reason speaks to us as a three-dimensional personality.