On the Margins of “Alle”: Feminist Theologies of Enclosure in Julian of Norwich and Harriet Jacobs

Where Julian of Norwich was an English anchorite whose life spanned the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the antebellum Harriet Jacobs was a self-emancipated African American who escaped the chattel slavery of 1830s North Carolina. Ostensibly, the two figures have nothing in common, and yet both women are significant authorial "firsts" of the English language: vernacular theologians who redefined the reproductive body as a spiritual subject from within enclosed spaces on the literal, locational margins of their respective societies that actively protected these authors and helped produce their subversive spiritual texts. By reading these authors in tandem, with special attention to what I posit are parallel redemptions of the reproductive body, I hope to invite further conversation between the medieval and its transtemporal, cross-cultural afterlives: understanding Julian and Jacobs as connected by critical race theory's readings of the margins as a space that emancipates the female subject from a gendered objectification that began with a patriarchal church's theological vilification of the biblical Eve.