Mysticism and Materiality: Reading Julian of Norwich (circa 1342–1416) and Annie Dillard (1945–)

Abstract

Responding to Simon Critchley’s recent book Mysticism (2024), which engages with her earlier Christian Materiality (2011), Caroline Bynum compares two well-known mystics, Julian of Norwich and Annie Dillard, who lived six hundred years apart, and argues that to both the material world—nature, conceptions of it, and art in some way reflecting it—was key in her visions of what lay beyond that world. Stressing the different emphases of the two authors—Julian’s with sin and love, Dillard’s with nature’s cruelty and underlying structure—Bynum argues that to both authors engaging with nature was crucial to their insistence on giving voice to an experience of the divine in its essence unutterable.