Margery Kempe

English mystic

• Born: c. 1373
• Birthplace: Bishop's Lynn (now King's Lynn), Norfolk, England
• Died: c. 1440
• Place of death: Unknown

Margery Kempe was one of the earliest creators of travel literature and memoir in England, and her religious visions place her among the early English mystics.

Early Life

Margery Kempe was born into a prosperous merchant family in Bishop’s Lynn in the English county of Norfolk. Lynn was then among England’s leading seaports and, in terms of size and density of population, was second only to London. German merchants of the Hanseatic League, despite occasional conflicts with English merchants, landed goods directly in Lynn; from there, the wares could be transported to village and town fairs and to London. In this environment, merchants formed a kind of middle-class aristocracy, and, through guilds, took responsibility for civic government.

Kempe’s father was probably John Brunham. Although Brunham’s occupation is unknown, he became an important force in governing the town, serving as mayor in 1370, 1377, 1378, 1385, and 1391. He was probably the John Brunham who served as alderman of the important Holy Trinity Guild from 1394 to 1401. If this identification is correct, Margery Kempe would have been raised in some luxury. Kempe herself records little detail of her early life, but the suggestion of prosperity is reinforced by her distaste for the filth and vermin she encountered on her travels and by her admission to the Guild of the Trinity in 1437-1438. She was, however, apparently illiterate; possibly, she was literate enough for daily affairs but not skilled enough to read or write her own account of her visions, sufferings, and travels. Instead, religious writings were instead read to her and she had scribes write for her.

John and Margery Kempe were married when she was about twenty; she then bore fourteen children. Only one is mentioned in her memoirs, but in an age of high infant mortality and in a seaport ravaged by frequent epidemics, only one may have survived to adulthood. After the first difficult childbirth, Kempe lapsed into insanity. Apparently feeling herself guilty of some unnamed sin she could not confess, she became self-destructive, vividly envisioning hell and envisioning herself swallowed up by demons. She had to be restrained with chains from harming herself, and scars on her hands remained with her through her life. In the midst of this torment, Christ appeared to her, offering her consolation. She was immediately healed, but, according to her memoirs, she lapsed back into worldliness and vanity. Dissatisfied with her life, she became a brewer, a trade often practiced by women. For several years, she was among the most important brewers in Lynn, but the brewings failed. Still determined to become wealthy, she bought a mill, two horses, and a servant and went into business grinding customers’ corn until her horses refused to work and her servants quit. At this point, she finally renounced her worldliness.

Life’s Work

After experiencing a vision of heaven while lying in bed, Kempe committed herself to frequent churchgoing and lengthy fasts and urged her husband to live with her chastely. Because of his refusal, she continued to bear his children. (He apparently did not notice the hair shirt she wore beneath her clothing as part of her penitence.) Her church attendance was marked by loud crying and wailing. This would increase with time, especially after her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, but, from the beginning, neighbors thought her visions and emotional outpourings marked the return of her insanity. Although her emotionalism was in the tradition of personal religion in her time, she began to arouse considerable hostility and needed the approval of Roman Catholic churchmen and churchwomen.

She began with a series of pilgrimages to shrines and to individuals within England. In the period between 1413 and 1415, she visited Norwich, Great Yarmouth, Canterbury, London, York, and Bristol, among other places. Traveling mainly on foot, she visited individuals such as the mystic Julian of Norwich and religious houses such as that maintained by the Order of Minoresses in Cambridgeshire. Together, John and Margery Kempe visited Bishop Philip Repingdon of Lincoln, who granted their wish to take public vows of chastity. Kempe’s voices, however, also had commanded her to wear white clothes, and this proved controversial throughout these years. Repingdon deferred the matter. White was symbolic of purity, especially sexual purity, and Kempe had born fourteen children. From Bishop Thomas Arundel of Norwich she received permission to select her own confessor and to take weekly communion; during this time period in history, Roman Catholics were required to attend mass weekly but to take communion only once a year.

Margery Kempe ventured abroad without John Kempe, primarily to Rome, the Holy Land, and the Spanish shrine of Saint James Compostela, the three principal overseas pilgrimages in her time. To reach the Holy Land, Kempe embarked at Yarmouth, landed in the Netherlands, and, with a party of pilgrims, set out from Venice. From there, after a lengthy stay, they sailed to Jerusalem. Kempe spent about three weeks in the Holy Land before returning to Venice. From there, she set out for Rome. The trip to Spain was a later, separate, venture.

Both types of journeys, local and international, exposed Kempe to extreme peril. In England, she risked being burned as a heretic. As early as 1401, new laws permitted royal officers to arrest suspected heretics and the government to burn relapsed heretics; these laws allowed the burning of Kempe’s great French contemporary, Joan of Arc, by the English. The first person to be executed under these laws was William Sawtre, a parish priest in Lynn. Kempe must have been aware of the risk she was running when, as frequently happened, she was accused of being a Lollard. Lollards shared no common creed but generally were followers of John Wyclif of Oxford, who had condemned the corruption and wealth of the Church and questioned the reality of transubstantiation in the mass and the need for priests to intervene between Christians and God. Lollards were “accused” of allowing women to speak in church. Kempe’s insistence of the validity of her visions and voices, her outspoken criticism of some clerics, and her habit of calling attention to herself placed her in grave danger. When she was tried, she escaped punishment, probably because she made a point of deferring to the wisdom of Catholic churchmen.

Her problems on her international trips were more mundane. Just as she aroused criticism among her neighbors, she irritated her fellow pilgrims who refused to put up with her behavior. Kempe apparently monopolized mealtime conversation with her account of her meditations, life, and visions; she refused to tolerate worldly conversation and pleasures, and she frequently succumbed to violent sobbing. Other travelers ousted her from their companies. In Rome, for example, she was forced to find a German confessor when deserted by the English. The German assigned Kempe, no longer a young woman, to be servant to a destitute woman; Kempe slept on the floor amid vermin and was forced to beg.

She returned safely to England. John and Margery Kempe had lived separately for many years, but, at about the age of sixty, John fell, badly injuring his head. At the insistence of the community, his wife took him in, caring for him as his body and mind failed and he became incontinent. He died in 1431, shortly before the death of their son, the only child mentioned in the memoirs, who had come from the Continent with his wife on a visit. Kempe’s last journey was to accompany the younger woman back to Danzig (now Gdansk), although Kempe’s confessor had forbidden her the journey. This trip, too, was fraught with problems and ended as a pilgrimage to the Precious Blood at Wilsnak. Some time before 1436, Kempe, determined to record her memoirs, dictated to at least two scribes. She was known to be alive as late as 1440. The circumstances and date of her death are not known.

Her memoirs, in their existing form, consist of two parts, the first of eighty-nine chapters, the second, ten. The copy that survives, presently in the British Library, was made by a scribe known only as Salthows and was held in the library of Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire. English printer Wynkyn de Worde published seven pages of devotional extracts in 1500-1501 under the title Here begynneth a shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Jhesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margerie Kempe of Lynn. These passages were reprinted by Henry Pepwell in 1521. The body of the text remained unknown until discovered in the Butler-Bowdon family library in Lancashire. The first scholarly, annotated edition was published in 1940 as The Book of Margery Kempe . Other translations have followed.

Significance

Kempe’s emotionalism and self-righteousness, which pervade her book, often disturb later readers and scholars as badly as they disturbed the neighbors and traveling companions of her time, but, through this material, Kempe emerges as a figure who, like Joan of Arc, was standing on the bridge between the medieval world and the modern. She earnestly attempted to submit herself to the Roman Catholic Church; that her strong personality kept her from entirely doing so is transparently clear. This conflicted personality is why Kempe’s work remains readable to ordinary readers as well as those interested in religious mysticism. In the literature of her time, her memoirs are unique in depicting a woman wrestling with the problems of religion, marriage, childbearing, and a sense of personal destiny.

Bibliography

Ashley, Kathleen. “Historicizing Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe as Social Text.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (Spring, 1998): 371-388. Analyzes Kempe’s memoir as a reflection on the social life of the times.

Atkinson, Clarissa W. Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983. Offers a clear description of Kempe and her time, especially the ways in which she violated social convention and religious conformity.

Collis, Louise. Memoirs of a Medieval Woman: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe. New York: Harper, 1983. This reprint of a 1964 publication offers an unparalleled and lively glimpse of life on religious pilgrimage in Kempe’s time. The author, generally more sympathetic to Kempe’s fellow travelers than to Kempe herself, uses contemporary writings to fill in the detail of everyday life that Kempe herself omits.

Gallyon, Margaret. Margery Kempe of Lynn and Medieval England. Norwich, England: Canterbury Press, 1995. A readable, serious study of Kempe as mystic, with a clear explanation of the rites and customs of the Roman Catholic Church in Kempe’s age.

Goodman, Anthony. Margery Kempe and Her World. London: Longman, 2002. A detailed, readable account, especially of Kempe’s surroundings and the urban gender roles of her time.

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness from the Middle Ages to Eighteen-Seventy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Places Kempe within a tradition of feminine mysticism that redefined women’s roles in the process of finding salvation.

McEntire, Sandra J. Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays. New York: Garland, 1992. This collection includes essays for the general reader among those directed to scholars. Among those for the general reader are “Margery Kempe and Her Calling” and “Margery Kempe and King’s Lynn.”

Rawcliffe, Carole. Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England. Phoenix Mill, England: Alan Sutton, 1995. While Kempe is only briefly mentioned, this volume examines how her contemporaries would have viewed her mental breakdown after childbirth and similar problems.

Staley, Lynn, trans. and ed. The Book of Margery Kempe: A New Translation, Contexts, Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. Provides critical essays designed for advanced students and readers and also contains excerpts from the mystics, such as Julian of Norwich and Saint Brigit of Sweden, who most influenced Kempe’s life and thought, and an excerpt from The Constitutions of Thomas Arundel (1409), which laid the groundwork for eradicating the heresy for which Kempe was accused.