This study contends that many of the distinctive aspects of Julian's books – their textual strategies, Julian's situating of her own voice and ventriloquial adoption of others, her use of biblical language and echo, and the format of the manuscripts that have transmitted her Revelations to us – may find their origin in her familiarity with the techniques of vernacular devotional compilation. After an introduction that reviews Julian scholarship, and a chapter on ordinatio and compilatio with particular reference to the mise-en-page of the principal manuscripts, Elisabeth Dutton exemplifies this claim by reading Julian against a number of case studies: the Speculum Christiani, Chastising of God's children and Contemplations of the dread and love of God (chapter ii); Lyf of soule (chapter iii) and the fascinating Book to a mother (chapter iv). Although the close readings of Julian are often stimulating, it will be for its work with these lesser-known compilations – and the ‘culture of compilation’ to which they testify – that the study will be most valuable. Some of the book's arguments in respect of Julian have been made before, and with perhaps more authority. In particular, Vincent Gillespie and Maggie Ross have explored Julian's use of ventriloquism and heteroglossia (Gillespie in McAvoy's Companion to Julian of Norwich [Cambridge 2008], and Gillespie and Ross in the Mystics Quarterly xxx [2004]), while Felicity Riddy has anatomised – and given a name to – the ways in which Julian's prose and the manuscripts of the Revelations contextualise her voice in an essay on ‘Julian of Norwich and self-textualization’ (in A. M. Hutchinson [ed.], Editing women [Cardiff 1998]) None of these studies appears in Dutton's bibliography. Furthermore, given her interest in Julian and compilation, it is strange that Dutton has not made more use of the Westminster manuscript, in which excerpts from the Revelations are incorporated into a devotional compilation. But it is good to have a study that places this so often most decontextualised of English mystics amongst contemporary writings and readers.