Title: “The Boke is Not Yet Performed”: Reading for Textual Performance in Julian of Norwich’s Long Text

“The boke is not yet performed.” Fourteenth-century anchorite Julian of Norwich ends her Long Text with this admission. By the standards of modern academic religious discourse, this admission might be read as evidence for failure. And yet, Denys Turner’s 2011 reading of Julian takes up this admission as key to Julian’s theological systematicity, albeit a systematicity expanded to mean the alignment of form with content. In this paper, I read Julian’s Long Text alongside those of her modern readers, like Turner, whose refusal to mine this text for its argument serves as a crucial example of the stakes of reading for what a text does, or performs, as it unfolds before its reader. I argue for renewed readerly attention to textual form as a constitutive of the text and trace a lineage of women's theological writing that uses  form as an intervention into normative conceptions of knowledge as argument.