A fine translation brings the ‘shewings’ of the 14th-century mystic to a new audience
On the night of 8 May 1373, a woman aged around 30 experienced 15 visions – or revelations, or, in the original Middle English, “shewings”, in which God’s love for humanity was made clear to her, through the person of Jesus. Among them: “And in this vision he also showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came in a general way, like this: ‘It is all that is made.’”
One does not have to be a believer to appreciate this “shewing”. That the visions were the result of an illness so grave she was given the last rites (and for which she had prayed, so as to be “purged by the mercy of God”) can only have contributed to their intensity.
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