These two books take radically different approaches to the study of Julian of Norwich. While the essays in the Companion work within the acknowledged limitations of information on Julian's life, and the accepted ordering of her texts, Holloway in Anchoress and cardinal, seeks to augment Julian's biography, to establish a new chronology for what she sees as three separate texts of Julian's revelations, and to chart more clearly the transmission of those texts.

In her introduction to the Companion, Liz Herbert McAvoy states the volume's two purposes: to place Julian in her literary and historical context and to examine the manuscript tradition and matters of interpretation. Thus the volume is divided into two sections. Part i, ‘Julian in context’, confronts the dearth of biographical information by examining the social, geographical and literary contexts in which Julian most likely found herself. Most of the contributors to this section, rather than trying to recreate Julian's life, provide instead contextual information designed to help the reader better to understand the world in which Julian lived and wrote. To this end Kim Phillips explores the various roles open to women of what Alexandra Barratt has posited as Julian's gentry status. Cate Gunn evokes the sensory aspects of medieval Norwich. Alexandra Barrett, Denise Baker, Diane Watt, E. A. Jones and Annie Sutherland take on the iconographic, liturgical and pietistic climate of Julian's time and place.

Those authors dealing with the manuscript tradition accept the commonly held premise that Julian wrote the short text (A vision, BL, ms Add 37790) shortly after experiencing her revelatory illness and that she meditated on and expanded her thoughts in the long text (A revelation, Paris, BN Fonds Anglais, ms 40; BL, mss Sloane 2499, 3705). Westminster Cathedral Treasury, ms 4, while the earliest witness to the long text of the revelations, is held by most to be a compilation of extracts, seen by Hugh Kempster and others as independent of Paris and Sloane (see appendix A, ‘The writings of Julian of Norwich’, ed. Watson and Ena Jenkins). The Companion's discussion of manuscripts includes Barry Windeatt's thoughtful analysis of Julian's expansions in the long text, Marleen Cré's examination of the Westminster Cathedral excerpts in the context of the entire manuscript and Elisabeth Dutton's exploration of the manuscript traditions and the influence of Augustine Baker on the seventeen-century transmission of Julian's text.

Elizabeth Robertson, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Laura Saetveit Miles, Ena Jenkins and Vincent Gillespie present readings that take their cues from Auerbach, Freud, Kristeva, Bachelard, Rowan Williams and other modern thinkers. Sarah Salih finishes the volume with a lively examination of what she terms ‘Julian's afterlife’. While some of these essays say as much about us as twenty-first century readers as they do about Julian, they provide an interesting window on Julian's enduring appeal and the ability of audiences to find validity in her words despite significant differences in time and place. Taken in the aggregate, they give the reader a sense of the social, aesthetic and pietistic milieu which surrounded Julian and her anchorhold.

Julia Bolton Holloway takes the opposite approach to Julian's life in Anchoress and cardinal. Rather than admitting the futility of constructing a biography for Julian, she speculates broadly on aspects of Julian's life to explore a possible relationship between Julian and Cardinal Adam Easton. Holloway begins by enumerating precursors to Julian and Easton, including Jerome, Paula and Eustochium; Benedict and Scholastica, ‘The Friends of God’, English Benedictines and contemplatives, Catherine of Siena and Birgitta of Sweden. She then attempts to define a relationship between Julian and Easton, noting their common connections to Norwich, shared concerns in their writing. She raises some interesting speculations regarding the degree to which Julian and Easton may have known each other, suggesting that they may both have come from Norwich's community of Jewish converts and goes as far as to posit the possibility that they were siblings and that Easton was the priest whose presence Julian notes in the short text. Her documentary support for this comes from her examination of what she sees as strong Hebraic influences in the work of both. While this raises an interesting idea, the internal evidence of the texts she examines provides little clear connection between the two, with no definitive supporting material, leaving her readers with an argument based on speculation. Often, in her zeal to promote her thesis, she presents as fact associations that she has earlier based on assumptions not fully documented.

In addition to expanding the boundaries of Julian's biography, Holloway wishes her readers to rethink the order in which Julian composed her texts and the transmission of the texts to the extant manuscripts. She maintains that the Westminster version is an early, pre-visionary work by Julian, followed by the long text. The short text she sees as a reduction of the long text, possibly made with canonisation in mind. She ends her book by discussing the dissemination of Julian's texts, seeking to establish more fully the link between Brigittine Syon Abbey and the extant manuscripts, arguing that the Paris manuscript was copied by the Brigittines in exile rather than the Benedictines.

Holloway's teasing ideas in this volume push the reader to examine what is really known about Julian. While she could indeed be correct in her conjectures regarding Julian's life and the transmission of her ‘Showings’, Holloway presents little firm evidence to make her case convincing. Beyond that, she would have been better served by a stronger editorial hand. She provides translations for many of the passages she quotes, including single lines of Middle English; however, she is not consistent and leaves several long passages of Latin text untranslated. She might also have taken greater advantage of her endnotes to give her readers more complete information about her sources, thus more fully supporting her premises regarding Julian's connection to Easton and her opinions regarding the manuscripts. While Holloway raises interesting questions and possibilities regarding our understanding of both Julian and Easton, and brings much learning to bear on her subject, the reader of this book will need patience and discrimination to sort out fact from conjecture.