Please help up to keep these conversations going, and join our reading community, by supporting us over on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/c/solomonsmith/membership In this episode we talk to Professor Sue Niebrzydowski (Bangor) about Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe—two women who claimed to experience intense visions of the divine, but whose lives could not have been more different. Julian's visions drove her into intense isolation as an anchorite—and Margery Kempe's threw her out into the world, to travel, preached, and openly shar her experiences. The hidden world of anchorites and medieval solitude Public vs private expressions of faith Mysticism, madness, and medieval psychology How society judged female visionaries The origins of some of the earliest writing by women in English How people distinguished God visions from Devil vis ...