Julian of Norwich, an anchoress attached to a church in Norwich, England, describes receiving a series of sixteen visions, which she calls showings, in May 1373 during an illness so severe that she and those around her believed she was dying, visions centred on the crucified Christ and unfolding into extended reflection on divine love, sin and the nature of God's relationship to humanity. She wrote a shorter account of these showings relatively soon afterward, and then, over the following twenty years or more of continued reflection, produced a much longer and theologically more developed version of the same material, so that the surviving Long Text represents decades of sustained meditation on a single set of visionary experiences rather than a record set down once and left unchanged.
Among its most distinctive features is Julian's repeated use of maternal imagery for Christ, describing Jesus as a mother who feeds, nurtures and suffers for his children, alongside her famous, carefully qualified assurance that despite sin and suffering, all shall be well, a phrase that has become one of the most widely quoted lines in the whole of English religious writing. Julian remained an anchoress attached to her church for the rest of her recorded life, continuing to reflect on the same visions long after first receiving them.