A Revelation of Love

A setting for unaccompanied soprano of selected passages from Revelations of Divine Love, by the 14th15th century mystic Julian of Norwich. Her work is widely acknowledged to be one of the great Christian spiritual classics. It is also the earliest surviving book in middle English written by a woman. The "short text" was written soon after Julian recovered from a severe illness and describes sixteen visions that she had received: revelations of Christ's suffering and God's love. The second version ("long text") was written perhaps twenty years later; it is a greatly expanded volume that includes her meditations on what she had been shown. This work begins with a spoken passage, the very first words of her work, directly followed by a soliloquy that includes some of Julian's best known quotations (e.g. "all shall be well"). I chose to adapt Julian's language into modern English, while remaining as faithful as possible to the style and intent of her original text.