Willful Illness, Crip-Time, and Curative Soteriology in Julian of Norwich's "A Revelation of Love"

This paper reads Julian of Norwich’s 14-15th-century visionary text A Revelation of Love alongside Alison Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013). Kafer’s notion of “crip-time” provides a lens through which to theorize an “else-when” of disability in the medieval past and elucidate the mode of temporality deployed in mystical writing. Julian of Norwich’s A Revelation ––in its deep engagement with illness, impairment, and paralysis––has been read by scholars in religious/disability studies as a devotional and theological model of a disabled person experiencing God. However, considering the role of time in medieval mystical literature through disability studies exposes a complicated––perhaps theologically necessary––ambiguity between the somatic experience of illness and the curative temporality of Christian soteriology, inviting us to question whether the political goals of disability studies can work in tandem with the “crip” and curative temporalities of medieval mystical traditions.