It was popular the 14th century for a number of English men and women to withdraw from the world as hermits, they were known as anchorites. Their hermitage, was a small room attached to a local church. Each room had two windows. One through the church wall permitting the anchorite to receive communion. Through the second window, the anchorite received food brought to him or her by village people. Thus they at all times had the window of their heart open to Christ, and open to the world. 

As a young woman, Julian, who was born about 1342, became an anchorite at the Church of St. Edmund and St. Julian in Norwich. When she was 30 Julian suffered from a severe illness. Whilst apparently on her deathbed, Julian had a series of intense visions of Jesus Christ, which ended by the time she recovered from her illness on 13 May 1373. Julian wrote about her visions immediately after they had happened (although the text may not have been finished for some years), entitled Revelations of Divine Love. It is believed to be the earliest surviving book written in the English language by a woman. Twenty to thirty years later, perhaps in the early 1390s, Julian began to write a theological exploration of the meaning of the visions, known as The Long Text. This work seems to have gone through many revisions before it was finished, perhaps in the first or even second decade of the fifteenth century. Until her death in about 1420, at the age of 78, Julian stayed in her simple room. Like most anchorites, she prayed, fasted, did penance, studied, sewed clothing for the poor, and advised the village people.

But, like several other anchorites at that time, Julian also wrote a book, Revelations of Divine Love. In it, she described her 16 visions of Jesus. As she wrote this book about God's great compassion for us, Julian developed a special vocabulary. She called the Creator our mother and our father. She called Jesus the Redeemer our brother. Revelations is a celebrated work in Catholicism and Anglicanism because of the clarity and depth of Julian's visions of God. Julian of Norwich is now recognised as one of England's most important mystics. 

@Evangelizo