Medieval Memoirist

Margery Kempe

(c. 1373–c. 1438)

In 1934, when Colonel William Butler-Bowdon discovered an original manuscript crushed amid the historic volumes in the library of his English country house, he suspected he had uncovered a rare treasure. Little did he know that the pages he had pulled from the stacks would come to be considered the first autobiography ever written in the English language. The Book of Margery Kempe, lost for centuries before it was unearthed in the colonel’s family library, was dictated in the early fifteenth century to two scribes by the illiterate Margery Kempe—daughter of an English mayor and Parliament member, wife of a medieval merchant, and mother to fourteen children.

Not Forsaken

Margery Kempe’s narrative opens with a description of her difficult first pregnancy. Gravely ill and fearing imminent death, she summoned a priest to hear her confession. The problem, however, was that Margery hid a deep secret of a sin so atrocious she was unable to bring herself to confess it to her priest. Fearing eternal damnation as the result of her unconfessed sin, Margery was overcome by hallucinations. As images of fire-breathing devils tortured her day and night, she threatened to commit suicide, thrashing in the bed and scratching and biting herself so violently that her husband tied her to the bedposts for weeks at a time. Then, almost as abruptly as the delusions began, Christ appeared to Margery. Clad in purple silk, he sat on the edge of her bed and gently asked her, “Daughter, why hast thou forsaken me, and I forsook never thee?” Before she could answer, he ascended to heaven on a beam of light, leaving Margery with a profound sense of peace and joy, as well as the desire to devote her life fully to God. This was the first of many visions Margery experienced over her lifetime.

Margery Kempe considered herself a mystic first and foremost, even above her duties as a mother and a wife. Although she bore fourteen children, she eventually negotiated a bishop-sanctioned vow of chastity with her husband after sexual relations with him became abhorrent to her. She also modeled her life after saints like Bridget of Sweden and holy women like the anchoress Julian of Norwich, who lived nearby and whom Margery met in person. She often fasted for days at a stretch, frequently waking at 2:00 a.m. to walk in the darkness to church, where she would pray on her knees until noon. As a daily penance she wore a haircloth, a rough garment made of goat’s hair, beneath her gown and hid it from her husband, even when they still shared the same bed.

Margery was not a quiet mystic. Her visions prompted her to weep and wail and fall prostrate on the ground, her arms spread wide in the form of a cross, moaning, sobbing, and “roaring,” as she described herself, for hours at a time. Embarrassed by his wife’s outbursts, her husband would often pretend he didn’t know her or slink away to a tavern or inn while they were traveling until she regained her composure. The public didn’t appreciate Margery’s visions either. Most of her contemporaries assumed she was intentionally creating a disturbance. As biographer Louise Collins notes, the public concluded “there was a devil in her, or else she was putting it on. She was some sort of heretic. She ought to be thrown out, arrested, got rid of.” As a result, public criticism and the charge of heresy dogged Margery Kempe for much of her life.

Jerusalem Journey

When she entered middle age, Margery struck a deal with her husband: she would pay off his debts with the inheritance left from her father, and he would grant her a chaste marriage and permission to travel to Jerusalem. Margery departed on the Jerusalem Journey, as it was often called, in the winter of 1413–14. While the Holy Land was considered the greatest tourist attraction of medieval times, the trip was also fraught with danger. Pilgrims were frequently attacked by robbers and often succumbed to illness and even death during the months it took to cross roiling seas, scale treacherous mountains, and traverse barren deserts as they clutched the back of a donkey and stumbled on foot to reach the final destination.

As a woman traveling without the protection of her husband, Margery also faced the unique threat of abandonment by her fellow travelers. In short, her constant chatter about religion, her pious refusal to eat meat or drink wine, and her frequent fainting and prolific tears of devotion irritated her companions. After weeks of friction and frayed patience, the group parted ways in Constance, Italy, at the foot of the Alps. Margery was left with only one companion, a feeble, elderly man whom she paid to accompany her over the formidable mountains. When the two finally descended through the deep, rocky ravines and emerged in the village of Bolzano, Italy, her former traveling companions eagerly reunited with Margery, convinced that only a God-given miracle could have protected her and the elderly man on such a punishing trip.

Ultimately, Margery made it to the Holy Land, where she toured dozens of sacred spots and shrines, including the room where Christ and his disciples ate the Last Supper together, the Pool of Siloam, the mount where Christ delivered his sermon, and finally the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Margery experienced her most violent and dramatic vision yet. She glimpsed the crucified Jesus himself, suspended on the cross before her eyes:

It was granted this creature to behold so verily his precious tender body, completely rent and torn with scourges, more full of wounds than ever was a dove house of holes, hanging upon the cross with the crown of thorns upon his head, his blissful hands, his tender feet nailed to the hard tree, the rivers of blood flowing out plenteously from every member, the grisly and grievous wound in his precious side shedding out blood and water for her love and salvation, then she fell down and cried with loud voice, wonderfully turning and twisting her body on every side, spreading her arms abroad as if she should have died, and could not keep herself from crying or from these bodily movings, for the fire of love that burnt so fervently in her soul with pure pity and compassion.

While weeping and praying aloud was customary behavior at the sacred sites, Margery’s extreme, screaming hysteria startled the pilgrims around her. “The crying was so loud and so wonderful that it made people astonished,” she wrote.Later, when she returned to England, the shrill cry accompanied her, first occurring once or twice a month, then once or twice a week, and then finally multiple times each day. On one particular day, she screamed fourteen times, and she could never anticipate when the piercing sound would burst from her mouth: “Sometime in the church, sometime in the street, sometime in the chamber, sometime in the field God would send them, for she never knew time nor hour when they would come.”

Trials of Heresy

Margery’s violent spiritual outbursts and the fact that she dressed all in white like a nun, despite that she was officially still a married woman, drew the attention of the public and both church and government officials. She was accused of being a Lollard, part of the group who proclaimed the Catholic Church to be corrupt and advocated for the reduction of the priests’ authority in favor of an emphasis on Scripture alone.

En route from a pilgrimage in Spain to her own village of Lynn, Margery was overcome by an extreme vision in a Leicester church. Appalled by her dramatic display and leery that she might be a heretic, officials seized her and turned her over to the mayor, who lambasted her as a “false strumpet, a false Lollard and a false deceiver of the people” and threatened to imprison her, to which Margery responded, “I am as ready, sir, to go to prison for God’s love as I am ready to go to church.” In the end, neither the Leicester court nor the Abbot of Leicester could find ample evidence to convict her as either a political agitator or a heretic, and she was allowed to continue her journey home.

Still, Margery couldn’t refrain from speaking about her God-inspired visions at every available opportunity. Only a few days after the inquiry in Leicester, she was detained again and required to appear at a hearing before the archbishop of York. Initially she wasn’t the least bit dismayed or intimidated. After all, these were the kinds of situations saints faced throughout their lives, and to be beatified as a saint was Margery’s greatest ambition. However, the archbishop proved to be a formidable opponent, and at one point Margery trembled with fear at the increasingly real possibility of being burned at the stake, which was the standard medieval punishment for heretics. Yet she held her ground. When the archbishop demanded that she swear not to teach or challenge the people in his diocese, she refused, stating, “No, sir, I shall not swear, for I shall speak of God and reprove those who swear great oaths wherever I go.” She also differentiated between speaking and preaching, insisting that she did not engage in the latter: “I preach not, sir, I go in no pulpit. I use but communication and good words, and that I will do while I live.” The archbishop of York finally released Margery, but she continued to endure trials during her journey home and even in Lynn, when she finally returned from her pilgrimage to Spain. It wasn’t until the townspeople credited her prayers with saving Lynn from a devastating fire in 1421 that she began to earn the lasting respect of both the people and the village officials.

The Book

Margery was familiar with the medieval tradition of monks, priests, nuns, and other holy people who left a record of their lives as a testament of their faith. Aspiring to follow in their footsteps on her way toward possible sainthood, Margery embarked on a similar project after hearing directly from God that he approved of her writing. “‘Dread you not, daughter. . . . He who writes pleases me right much,’” wrote Margery in Book One. “‘You should not please me more than you do with your writing, for daughter, by this book many a man shall be turned to me and believe therein.’”

It’s unclear exactly when Margery wrote her book, although we do know she began it long after she returned from her pilgrimages. The book is divided into two parts—the first two-thirds dictated to a scribe who died before it was finished, and the last third dictated to a priest who was initially reluctant to collaborate with such an infamously troublesome woman. Even after receiving his own vision regarding his role in writing the book, the priest constantly bemoaned the labor that was required to shape the book into publishable prose.

With its detailed descriptions of Margery’s visions and prayers, the book clearly emulates the genre. But what makes it unique are the insights it offers into the life of a medieval woman, atypical though she was. Margery had the gift of storytelling, and her book brings real-world medieval characters—from the archbishop of York to her irascible traveling companions to her henpecked husband—to life.

Margery Kempe did not achieve her lifelong aspiration: the Roman Catholic Church never canonized her, and she is not considered a saint today. In fact, many contemporary scholars don’t even consider her a mystic. Nonetheless, Margery and her story remain an important contribution to Christian history, not because of her status or her holiness, but because of her authenticity.

We relate to Margery because she is real and human—flawed and sometimes foolish, just like the rest of us. We see ourselves in Margery, a relatively average wife and mother, someone who wasn’t born into nobility and who didn’t benefit from the privilege of education or wealth, yet who strove in her daily life to heed what she heard from God. It’s true, Margery Kempe isn’t a saint. But that’s exactly what makes her so approachable and so appealing today.

50 Women Every Christian Should Know

Michelle DeRusha