Edited Frances Beer (1978). Edition From BL Add. MS 37790
The shorter version of the Revelations of Divine Love is one of the most important texts of the Middle English mystical tradition. It is preserved only in the Amherst manuscript and prior to this edition had not been printed in its Middle English form. In 1978 an edition of the Shorter Version appeared also in Edmund College and James Walsh, eds, A Book of the Showings of the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, 2 vols (Toronto: PIMS). The most recent translation is by A. M. Reynolds (London, 1958) appears in Sister Anna Maria Reynolds and Julia Bolton Holloway, eds, Julian of Norwich: Extant Texts and Translation (Florence, 2001). Frances Beer’s edition aims to restore the original text, where necessary by reference to the longer (later) version, to reconstruct the manuscript history of the shorter version, and to explain its relationship with the longer version. Julian’s life and literary importance are seen with regard to her place in the fourteenth-century English mystical tradition.