Margery Kempe

Margery Kempe is a fascinating personality, both for her unpretentious mysticism and for the psychological anxiety that her intense spirituality caused her. In her book, she is candid about her struggles with clerical hypocrisy, with sexuality, and with the negative reactions of others to the outward expressions of her visions (she seems to have spent an inordinate amount of time weeping and loudly crying out, manifestations of her grief at the sufferings of Christ's Passion). But for all the turmoil in her psyche, she evinces no skepticism about her mystical beliefs, relating as fact many of her conversations with God.

The text is repetitive and lacking in detail, even given its antiquity. However, Margery Kempe's guilelessness creates a vivid, revealing self-portrait. The Penguin edition I read was sparse in annotation. The Norton Critical Edition, which I haven't seen, might provide a better contextual framework for the book.… (more)

This is an autobiographical memoir of a Medieval women purported to be the first of its kind in English; written as told to a priest. She traveled extensively and had several businesses, not common for women of the day. She seemed to be half mad with visions and conversations with Jesus, Mary and the Holy Spirit. She's continually crying and arguing with her husband and many people in authority getting thrown in jail or kicked out of places. The text was continual run-on sentences. I did not enjoy this at all.… (more)

I don't get why people are giving Margery poor reviews. She's fantastic. She's a rare peek into a voice we don't hear often from Medieval Times - an illiterate, lower-middle-class woman.

It all started when Margery had her first child (the first of many). She experienced what we might call post-partum psychosis, but which they called "full of devils". After eight months tormented by insanity, a vision of Jesus brought her back to herself. Thereafter, Margery was able to converse with holy figures - Jesus, Mary, and even God himself, and often became so overwhelmed with her experiences that she fell on the ground, wept, screamed and cried.

Margery switches between lofty religious concerns to petty grievances at the drop of a hat - complaining about how her fellow pilgrims bullied her and stole her pillow, or acquaintances constantly trying to ditch her.

Even though I might not have tolerated her long as a companion, I can't help but admire her special brand of feisty derangement from this safe distance of 800 years. She travelled widely, visiting the Holy Land and Rome as a woman travelling alone (attaching herself to unwary pilgrimage groups or unlucky beggars). She was arrested more than once, and if you believe her, defended herself well.

I especially liked her response upon being told that women weren't to preach, essentially. "I'm not preaching, I'm just talking."

Her husband was a long-suffering fellow, who Margery said sometimes went away when the embarrassment came to much, but always returned in the end. She bullied him into taking a vow of celibacy with her, revealing to the bizarre sex-negativity of the of the Medieval Christian world - in which even consensual sex with one's lawfully-married spouse was considered unclean - and he eventually accepted under the threat of Jesus' wrath.

Margery still complains of the local gossips spreading awful rumours that she was having sex with her husband, and so she was forced to live apart from him to prove her nay-sayers wrong. This backfires when, nearing the end of his life, her husband has a dangerous accident, and the same gossips allegedly accuse her of being responsible for his injury since she wasn't home looking after him like a good wife.

She also claimed to have the gift of prophesy. One of her sons, married and living on the continent, considered visiting her, but was frightened of the dangerous journey. She consulted her visions, and assured him that he would arrive home in perfect health. So he and his wife came, only for him to fall ill and die shortly after arriving.

Margery, of course, reasons that her prophesy was correct, since technically he got home before dying. And anyway, going home to God is the ultimate and best sort of a homecoming.

Inexplicably, she later fell out with her daughter in law.

Margery is fantastic, unique, wacky, probably suffers from mental illness, feisty, insufferable, petty and an all-round character. I don't see how anyone can read her and not laugh, cringe, and at times sympathise at her antics.… (more)

Have you ever read a memoir by a woman written in the Middle Ages (or one a man or child wrote in the Middle Ages)? That is what this is, and it is amazing. Late in her life, Margery Kempe, who was English, "wrote" by dictating this book to a priest because she was illiterate. Life in the Middle Ages in Britain, the Middle East & Europe in the 15th Century is expressed throughout.

Her particular story is that she believed herself to be, and was believed by many to be, in direct contact with God, for many years. Many people, including many priests and 2 bishops, sought her out for her goodness & insight/guidance She was abused, threatened, beaten, abandoned, ridiculed and despised by a great many other people, who believed that the Devil or a demon had taken over her body. She expressed the closeness she felt to God by constantly talking about what God & Jesus told her & others to do, and she exploded in wild outcries and weeping that often went on for hours.

So, this is, in effect, an artifact of part of Christian Europe/Britain/Middle East. She once spent months in Germany and had one months-long pilgrimage to Jerusalem with many stops along the way, given the transportation choices available at that time. She had occasion to visit churches in France, Italy, Turkey, Syria and Palestine, among other countries. She talked with citizens of many places and had to wait for weeks, or change her routes, occasionally because of various war as well as one Crusade.

This book opened up a whole new world for me.… (more)