Margery Kempe

From an ordinary life as a middle-class housewife in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, UK, Margery Kempe transformed her fortunes by pursuing an unconventional path as a holy woman and author.

One of the greatest discoveries in the study of medieval literature started with a game of ping-pong (table tennis). It was 1934, and an English gentry family named the Butler-Bowdons were entertaining at their country home, Southgate House (now the Van Dyk Hotel) in Derbyshire. During a lively game of ping-pong, someone stood on the ball. When Colonel Butler-Bowdon went to get a new one from the cupboard, he found there a clutter of books and papers. ‘I am going to put this whole damned lot on the bonfire tomorrow and then we may be able to find ping-pong balls and bats when we want them!’, the frustrated colonel allegedly exclaimed. Luckily, their guest suggested that it might be worth getting the documents examined by an expert. So it was that the Book of Margery Kempe emerged into the modern world.

Scholars had known that the Book of Margery Kempe had once existed because seven pages of extracts from it were published as a printed pamphlet in 1501. Yet the manuscript that came to light in the Butler-Bowdons’ ping-pong cupboard was beyond anyone’s expectations. While the pamphlet promised a ‘treatise on contemplation’, the complete manuscript instead revealed a medieval woman’s account of her own remarkable life story, documenting the unconventional path she carved for herself, her frequent brushes with controversy, her travels across the Christian world, her struggles with inner demons and human adversaries, and her determination to tell her story against the odds.

Who was Margery Kempe?

Margery was born into a merchant family in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, around 1371. Aged 20, she married a man named John Kempe. Her life took an unexpected turn, when, after the birth of her first child she ‘went out of her mind’, as she put it. For nearly eight months she saw terrifying visions of demons and lost her faith in God. She self-harmed and was kept tied up. Then, one day, Christ appeared as a beautiful man sitting at her bedside, saying: ‘daughter, why have you forsaken me and I never forsook you?’. Margery recovered and went back to her duties as a housewife. But from then on, she continued to experience spiritual visions.

At the age of around 40, after giving birth to 14 children and trying her hand at two failed business ventures, Margery made the radical decision to devote her life to religion. This was a difficult choice for a married woman because in medieval Christian culture, those who pursued a religious calling were supposed to be celibate. Medieval marriage law held that married couples owed one another the ‘conjugal debt’ of sex. Margery could therefore only become celibate if John would also agree to it.

For a long time, John dismissed Margery’s requests for celibacy. Then one Midsummer’s Eve, they were walking from York to Bridlington in northern England on pilgrimage, eating cake and drinking beer. John chose this moment to pose a question: if faced with a choice between seeing John have his head chopped off or having sex with him, which would Margery choose? When she replied that she would rather see him killed, they made a deal. John agreed to have a sexless marriage and in return, Margery would pay off his debts and stop fasting.

What did Margery Kempe do on pilgrimage?

Released from the obligations of marriage, Margery was free to follow her own path. In an age when travel was slow and dangerous, she undertook three major pilgrimages: to Jerusalem, with a lengthy stay in Italy on the way back; to Santiago de Compostela; and to northern European cities including Gdańsk, Stralsund, Bad Wilsnack and Aachen.

Margery’s travels prompted powerful spiritual experiences. At Mount Calvary she had a vision of the Crucifixion which caused her such pain that she fell to the ground, roaring with tears and convulsing her body. This was the first of the outbursts of extreme weeping that were to become a hallmark of Margery’s devotion.

While visiting the church of Santi Apostoli in Rome, Margery had a vision in which she got married to God. He then invited her to love him in bed ‘as a good wife ought to love her husband. You may boldly take me in the arms of your soul and kiss my mouth, my head and my feet, as sweetly as you want to’. For Margery, a life of chastity was not a rejection of sexual desire, but rather a choice to redirect it toward her spiritual relationship with God.

Why was Margery Kempe accused of heresy?

On pilgrimage, Margery frequently alienated fellow travellers through her excessive weeping and constant talk of God. Contrary to popular representations of the Middle Ages as an age of credulity, the people who Margery encountered were often sceptical of her claims of holiness and considered her bouts of crying to be mere performance.

Yet Margery was risking more than derisive comments. She lived in a time of hypervigilance against perceived heresies. In late 14th- and early 15th-century England, a heretical group known as the Lollards were associated, among other things, with encouraging women’s participation and preaching. The approved religious careers for women were as nuns (members of a holy order living in a convent) or anchoresses (women who had taken a vow of enclosure and lived in a cell adjacent to a church). Margery’s unconventional choice to pursue a religious calling as an independent woman with a highly mobile lifestyle posed a threat to the status quo and smacked dangerously of Lollardy.

Despite taking care to demonstrate that her beliefs aligned with the official teachings of the Church, Margery came up against repeated accusations of heresy. In one particularly frightening episode, she was accused of being a Lollard by monks of Canterbury and was chased out of the city by townsfolk shouting ‘take and burn her!’ In York she was interrogated by the Archbishop Henry Bowet on suspicion of heresy. Margery’s responses to his accusations were unapologetic and feisty, imputing the archbishop’s moral integrity and refusing to stop teaching people about God. Although the archbishop concluded that Margery was not a heretic, he still had her escorted from the diocese.

Margery, for her part, seems to have courted the insults and mistreatment. They provided her with an opportunity to endure suffering comparable to that of Christ. When she was eventually released by the Archbishop of York, his steward scolded her for laughing, to which she retorted, ‘Sir, I have great cause to laugh, for the more shame I suffer, the merrier I may be in our lord Jesus Christ.’

Yet Margery also won the support of an impressive crowd of respected figures who encouraged, advised and defended her. These included Julian of Norwich (d. 1440), anchoress and author of the profound mystical treatise Revelations of Divine Love. Margery visited Julian’s cell to ask her about the veracity of her visions. Julian, already renowned as a holy woman, reassured Margery that the stirrings in her soul were caused by God.

Why did Margery Kempe write an autobiography?

Aged around 60, Margery resolved that her story should be recorded as a book. This was no easy task because Margery was illiterate, so she needed a scribe to write down her words for her. The first person who she enlisted for this task was her son, John Kempe, a merchant based in Gdańsk. He fell ill and died soon after. Two further scribes were reluctant to make copies of the text, claiming that the handwriting was illegible. Margery eventually persuaded a priest, probably her confessor Robert Spryngolde, to copy it in 1436. This was later copied by a Norwich scribe named Richard Salthows, and it was this manuscript that the Butler-Bowdons discovered in their ping-pong cupboard. In 1980, the British Library finally acquired this precious manuscript for the nation.

The Book of Margery Kempe is the earliest known autobiography in English. It is also probably the most frank and detailed account that we have of the lived experiences and inner psychology of any medieval person. And it is all the more fascinating because the author is the sort of person who rarely left a single trace in the historical record, never mind hundreds of pages of candid autobiography. Margery was a woman who divided opinions in her lifetime and still divides opinions among readers today. However we feel about her, we can surely celebrate the courage and self-belief that led her to transform her life and create such a remarkable book.