18 - The Book of Margery Kempe

Summary

(Chapters 17, 18 with cuts, 35, 36)

Margery Kempe, daughter of John Brunham – who was member of parliament, justice of the peace, and five times mayor of King's Lynn – was married aged twenty to John Kempe, who proved a less successful man than her father. After a vision of Christ during a breakdown following her first childbirth, and after early failures as a businesswoman, Margery Kempe saw further visions and felt herself summoned to a spiritual life. Around the age of forty, when she had borne fourteen children, she persuaded her husband to join her in a mutual vow of chastity and then embarked on an eventful life of pilgrimage in England, Europe and the Holy Land, seeking counsel from both great and humble religious figures of her day (including, at Norwich, the saintly Richard of Caister and Dame Julian). Her devotion characteristically expressed itself in loud weeping and crying out, which repeatedly divided priests, congregations and fellow-pilgrims into friends or detractors, and she was sometimes suspected of heresy despite the evident orthodoxy of her devotion. Margery Kempe could neither read nor write, but towards the end of her life she dictated (twice over, for the first version proved illegible) her recollections of her visions and experience. Conversation – from intimate confabulations with God, or with the spiritually minded, to sharp exchanges with her critics – is what structures Margery's recollections and hence her Book, which nevertheless shows the imprint of the mystical literature that she has heard read.