'Botte for I am a woman': Julian of Norwich, medieval Jewish mysticism, and the evolution of the divine feminine

Julian of Norwich (c. 1342--1416?) is currently one of the most commonly studied women mystics. Emerging scholarship frequently addresses her roles within the Christian mystical traditions of fourteenth-century England; however, in demonstrating the intertextuality in bodies of mysticism during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, her literary value extends beyond the boundaries of this mystical tradition. A distinct textual link between Moses de Leon's thirteenth-century Zohar and the fourteenth-century Shewings of Julian of Norwich suggests Julian's role in appropriating the ideas of her surrounding cultures into her mystical writings. Building on both the principle of the Divine Feminine and the allegorical nature of parts of the Zohar, Julian constructs a notion of God as Mother that combats the misogyny of medieval Christian doctrine and secures her place as a woman writer in a mate-dominated Church, defending a role as visionary and writer for herself and for her female successors.