Juliana

By Stan Cosby

The Corona Virus of 2020 has brought a devastation of life and economy very few of us have seen in our lifetime. As many as 500,000 people may die before the pandemic is fully arrested, but can you imagine a pandemic so horrible and so deadly that 25 million people died? It took place over a four-year period from 1347 to 1351 and was called the Black Death or the Great Plague. By the time it was over, half the population of Europe had been wiped out.

Julian of Norwich was herself a victim of the deadly epidemic. Born in 1342, she was five-years-old when the plague swept through her home town in East Anglia, taking the life of her beloved mother. Through the grace of God, Julian would servive to enter the novitiate of a Benedictine convent and eventually become a highly revered Anchoress and Spiritual Director to countless hundreds who sought her advice.

This historical fiction, JULIANA, tells her story and the story of the young woman she befriended and guided by the name of Maggie. In the book, Maggie or Margery Kempe was physically abused by her own father, a prominent figure as the mayor of Bishop's Lynn. From such dark and desperate threads, this amazing mystic of the 14th century would weave a tapestry of incomparable beauty and hope. In these deadly and uncertain days of pandemic, do we not need now just such a path of light?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728361345

Stan Cosby

Stan Cosby is truly a son of the “High Lonesome.” Born in Canyon, Texas raised in Amarillo, Texas, the capital of the High Plains, he is a Pastor by vocation and thus, a writer and a story-teller by calling. Sermons, poems, essays, short stories, theological treatises, family histories – he has written them all. Pastor Cosby (or Pastor Papa as his grandkids call him) lives with his wife Susan on the “Old Home Place,” a Centennial Farm of his wife’s family near Hedley, Texas. HIGH LONESOME is his fourth book to be published.

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© 2020 Stan Cosby. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  05/14/2020

ISBN: 978-1-7283-6135-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-6133-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-6134-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020908630

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and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

An Introduction to Juliana

Juliana

Prologue

Chapter I     A Very Great Pity

Chapter II     From Under the Garland

Chapter III     When Adam Delved and Eve Span

Chapter IV     The Plowman at Work

Chapter V     The Handmaid of the Lord

Chapter VI     Adam’s Old Coat

Chapter VII     Revelations

Chapter VIII     Into the Heart of a Hazelnut

Chapter IX     Between Two Worlds

Chapter X     Hell’s Mouth and Heaven’s Mirth

Chapter XI     Even Travelers May Meet Again

Epilogue

AN INTRODUCTION TO

Juliana

Someone has described the historical novel as scholarly history’s illegitimate child. If that is so, it most certainly is a love child, for people who write historical fiction write it as lovers of history. Not the history of dusty dates and starchy facts, but the history of real people who lived and breathed, struggled and endured, married and bore children and who, caught up in the fervor of their own age, inspired others, and then just as often sealed their inspiration with martyrdom and sacrifice.

JULIANA is a fictional work about Julian of Norwich, a very famous, even-in-her-day, anchoress who offered profound spiritual direction to the East Anglians of the 13th and 14th century. Hers was the age of the Black Death, the Peasants’ Revolt, Piers the Ploughman, demons and angels, the crusading Lollards, and their extinction in the flames of martyrdom. It was a harsh and brutal world indeed.

The main events and the main characters of this novel are one hundred percent historical. Even the fictionalized conversations between Juliana and Maggie are laced with Saint Julian’s actual words and quaintness of expression. Her Revelations of Divine Love is a true spiritual classic and a literary monument of the 14th century. She was a woman of brilliant spiritual insight and incredible poetic imagination. And yes, according to the record, she did have a cat.

Margery Kempe was, likewise, a real person who knew firsthand the healing wisdom of Saint Julian’s friendship. She also wrote a book of her spiritual pilgrimages, The Book of Margery Kempe, which is considered in scholastic circles today the first autobiography of the English language.

But, of course, there is much in this book that is the product of my own imagination and years of study in the fields of spiritual formation and spiritual direction. Perhaps my most grievous injustice in this book has been to the character of Maggie’s father, Lord Brunham, the Mayor of Bishop’s Lynn. He may well have been a God-fearing man and a loving father, but in this account, he is the pivotal antagonist without whom Maggie would have never met Juliana. Should we ever meet in Heaven, I will earnestly crave Lord Brunham’s forgiveness, which I am sure he will give as Heaven, as we all know, is the home of eternal mercy.

Stan Cosby

April 28, 2020

Juliana

PROLOGUE

What am I to do? I have no one to turn to. No brother. No sister. No friends. No mother. Only a father who hits me. All I want is someone to talk to. But there is no one. I am alone.

Even God has left me. It is because I am very wicked. My father tells me so when he beats me. Since my first bleeding, it has been this way. I shall never forget that day. I awoke with my bed sheets wet. There was a great deal of blood and I hurt so badly, I thought I was dying. My father thought I had slept with the stable-boy. He struck me again and again and called me whore. But how could he have known better? Since my mother’s death, we are both alone.

My name is Maggie, the daughter of Lord Brunham, the mayor of Bishop’s Lynn. When I was a little girl my mother died. I saw the light go out in my father’s eyes. Only darkness then. Darkness and beatings and midnight visits to satisfy his urges. I was a wicked girl, for I never made a sound in protest.

On one particular day—my sixteenth birthday—my father came home early from the city—drunk. He sat at the table with his hands holding his shaggy head. For a long time, he stared wordless into the dark shadows of the barren room. I was tending the fire in the hearth, for the servants had retired early. Suddenly, he arose and as he did, the stool he was sitting on clattered to the floor. He lunged for me, ripping my clothes. With one hand he held me down; with the other he fumbled at his breeches to free himself.

I’m not quite sure what happened then. It was all blackness and a dream. Somehow, I must have pulled away from him and run from the manor. They found me the next morning at the convent door. I begged for mercy in the arms of the Church. The kindly nuns took me in. They fed me and washed me. They tended my wounds carefully but sadly concluded I would never bear children. With great love, they nursed me back to health. Slowly, my body began to mend; but my soul they could not reach.

Margery Brunham

1389 A. D.

The Convent of St.

Margaret’s

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CHAPTER I

A VERY GREAT PITY

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Margery Brunham stood trembling at the cell door. Sister Elizabeth stood beside her and knocked gently. Who is this Dame Julian anyway? wondered Maggie to herself. She wondered about many other things, too. It had been six months since they had found her on the steps of St. Margaret’s Convent. Since then, she had been tortured almost nightly with horrible dreams. Fiends howled at her. Shadow-shapes pummeled her and grabbed at her maidenhead. Even now, the fear began to rise within her at the memory of those dreams and the fiery damnation they surely foretold. If only there could be a death without the eternal waking. A long, senseless sleep. But that seemed a hopeless wish. Especially here.

St. Margaret’s had been established in the seventh century as a part of the growing expansion of the Northumbrian Church. Spiritually, the convent had been governed by St. Hilda, the famous abbess of Whitby. Even though the convent had been looted and destroyed in 860 by the Vikings, it had been repaired and enlarged in the eleventh century by the Normans and named, two hundred years later, for one of her greatest saints, Margaret, Queen of Scotland.

Maggie knew little of this history. She did not know that St. Margaret was remembered for her kindness to orphans and prisoners, was unaware of the servant-hood of the sainted queen who washed the wounds of lepers and the feet of beggars, was oblivious to the fact that she herself had been named for the great queen who was canonized in the year 1250. Maggie only recognized the convent as the walled enclosure near the sea with a dominating Norman tower – to her, a bulwark of hope.

To that bulwark she had fled, though frankly, she could remember nothing of the decision to do so. She remembered only running and running and running to the shore and toward the tower. Somehow, she had found the recessed door in the outward wall and flung herself into its protective shadows. They had found her there the next morning, shivering in the cold and barely conscious.

The nuns had been kind to her but still, it was hard to trust.