Julian, who was born about 1342, in the reign of Edward III, grew up among the surroundings and influences natural to a deeply religious East Anglian gentlewoman at the close of the Middle Ages. Though she speaks of herself as “unlettered,” which perhaps means unable to write, she certainly received considerable education, including some Latin, before her _Revelations_ were composed. Her known connection with the Benedictine convent of Carrow, near Norwich, in whose gift was the anchorage to which she retired, suggests that she may have been educated by the nuns; and perhaps made her first religious profession at this house, which was in her time the principal “young ladies’ school” of the Norwich diocese, and a favourite retreat of those adopting the religious life. During her most impressionable years she must have seen in their freshness some of the greatest creations of Gothic art, for in Norfolk both architecture and painting had been carried to the highest pitch of excellence by the beginning of the fourteenth century. The great East Anglian school of miniature painting had already produced its masterpieces and was in its decadence. But if we look at these masterpieces—the wonderful manuscripts illuminated at Gorleston near Yarmouth, and other religious houses of the district—and remember that these are merely the surviving examples of an art which decorated the walls of the churches as richly as the pages of its service-books, we begin to realize the sort of iconography, the view of the Christian landscape, from which Julian’s mental furniture was derived. Some of the best of these manuscripts are in the British Museum; and those who wish to understand the atmosphere in which the mediæval mystics flourished would do well to study Julian’s _Revelations_ in their light. There they will find expressed in design that mixture of gaiety and awe, that balanced understanding of the natural and the divine, which is one of her strong characteristics. She, like these artists, can afford to wreathe her images of supernatural mysteries in homely details drawn from the common life. Moreover, the more pictorial her revelations become, the more closely they approximate to the pictures in the psalters and Books of Hours of her time. From this source came her detailed visions of incidents in the Passion—the blood that she saw running down under the garland of thorns, the dried, discoloured body, the gaping wounds, and “rueful and wasted” face of Christ—and those of the Blessed Virgin as a “little maiden,” as “Mater Dolorosa,” and as the crowned Queen of Heaven. All these were common subjects with the miniature artists and wall painters of the time, and the form which they took in Julian’s revelations must be attributed to a large extent to unconscious memory of those artists’ works.