Visionary, mystic, and anchorite Julian of Norwich (1342/1343–after 1416) is the earliest known English woman writer. She composed two closely linked versions of a book of visions, the Short Text (ST) and the Long Text (LT). Editors title the entire work A Revelation of Love. Her Christian name is the medieval equivalent of Gillian rather than a man’s name. Apart from the vocation of anchorite (a religious individual vowed to a confined existence in a cell attached to a church) and a few autobiographical glimpses in the text, little is known about Julian’s life. A Revelation of Love documents a series of mysterious visions that Julian experienced at 30. In her intricately woven composition, Julian pores over the visions’ spiritual import and transforms them into springboards for bold speculative theology. Scholarship has scrutinized A Revelation of Love as a work of theology and as a literary text. Theological appraisals consider Julian’s contributions to theology, mysticism, and spirituality, from her optimistic theory of salvation and presentation of God as a mother to her position in a fifteenth-century English landscape of heterodoxy and orthodoxy. Literary discussions examine how she positions herself as a woman writer, chart the interplay between embodied affect and apophasis, dissect gender-inflected images of enclosure (containment and being confined to an anchoritic cell) and embodiment, and map the formal dynamics of her text.