Margery Kempe: a medieval voice

I've been reading the Book of Margery Kempe for over 30 years, and it's a source and a text I keep on coming back to and seeing new things in it. It's the most remarkable artifact from medieval England. I first encountered it as an undergraduate a long time ago. At this time, which was in the early 1990s, Margery Kempe was still a very marginal, forgotten voice. Her book wasn't on the university syllabus. A friend of mine and I had to kind of lobby to spend some time studying her, because she wasn't considered up there with Chaucer, Malory, Langland and the famous medieval English poets as worthy of study. I felt, even then as an undergraduate, that this source telling the story of a 15th century bourgeois woman opened an absolutely unique window onto the medieval past, onto details of everyday life – domesticity, embarrassment, caring for one's husband, food – these really important parts of being alive, and I've stuck with it since then. I find it's an absolutely remarkable source.

It's a very dramatic and romantic story of how it was rediscovered. Her book was not well studied until the 1980s and 90s. As well as the amazing story of the book itself, there's also this important story of its retrieval, which is partly a feminist story of the retrieval of women's voices from the Middle Ages.

She needed several scribes to write it down for her. I think it's fair to say it’s the earliest named story of someone's life, of a woman's life, from medieval England. Even if it's not the earliest, it's an absolutely remarkable source. It tells the story of Margery Kempe. She's a historically attested woman who was born in the late 14th century in the town of Lynn, now King's Lynn in eastern England, then one of the larger towns in England and a very important port with connections to Flanders, Prussia, the Baltic and the Hanseatic League, and she was quite well off in her background. Her father had been the mayor and a member of Parliament and was involved in a lot of trade between England, Gdansk, Stralsund and Lübeck, the Hanseatic towns of the Baltic coast. She wrote her book when she was an elderly woman looking back on her life. It describes a kind of mental, spiritual and physical crisis after she had her first child, her development from being a jealous, acquisitive merchant's wife into a mystic and into having spiritual conversations with Jesus, God, the Virgin Mary and the saints, and turning herself from what we might think of as a worldly person into a spiritual person. This takes the form in her book of great torment, great humiliation, lots of spiritual conversations with confessors and advisors, and also a remarkable set of pilgrimages to Rome, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, through Europe and around the British Isles – which are an ordeal for her but show her in an imitation of Christ as developing her spiritual authority through being an outsider, being mocked and being scorned.

This includes some of her distinctive kinds of spirituality: crying, wearing white clothing, marrying God in a ceremony of betrothal that she does in Rome – all of which you can see other female saints doing. She's putting herself in a relationship with people who had been well-known mystics or saints, women from recent times. These are mentioned in her book as some of her favorite spiritual figures. Part of what she's doing is constructing herself as a holy woman in that established model.

They're part of the same historical moment, which more broadly is about the regulation of the divine, of spirituality, and the regulation of charismatic people – not just women but in this case two women who have a charismatic spirituality, who demand to be heard and to intervene in their society in ways which are troubling to the authorities. In Margery Kempe's case, this is to do with the atmosphere in England at this time, with the regulation of thought in the light of Wycliffism and Lollardy, which is about enforcing the uniformity of the Catholic Church. This includes things which are uncontroversial to Kempe, like the veneration of saints, the importance of pilgrimage, the existence of purgatory, the transubstantiation of the Eucharist – these are all things that Kempe clearly believes. The Wycliffites, or the Lollards, also very much believe in vernacular scripture and vernacular translation, vernacular preaching; Kempe comes quite close to those things. They have these secret, or forbidden, what are called conventicles – meetings around prayer and preaching – in which women and men take part. There's the sense that Kempe is proximal to this kind of culture of lay English preaching. The regulation of what one thinks, the regulation of thought crimes, is very rigorously enforced in both Joan of Arc's and Margery Kempe's time by the same people, by the English authorities.

Her book discreetly draws a veil over this. It's tempting to think that she or her scribes thought it was still very dangerous territory. Kempe is threatened with being burnt at the stake many times, including publicly by strangers, often by women. This is a language which hovers over the whole book. It's important to note here that Joan of Arc's execution was unusual but not unique. The first person burnt in England at this time, under a new statute called de heretico comburendo, on the burning of a heretic, was a man called William Sawtry, who had been the parish priest at Kempe's church in Lynn and certainly would have been known to Kempe – if not closely related spiritually to Kempe. There is a possibility that she was quite closely linked to some of the people who had been burnt in England. For a modern audience, we need to remember that being burnt to death was not a kind of abstract threat. It was something that was quite real at this time.

She describes going out of her mind with distress during her first pregnancy in the aftermath of her giving birth to her first son. She describes in great detail this moment of distress for her, which includes her biting her own hand and leaving a scar there which she has for the rest of her life. She also describes how this is when she has her first vision of Jesus, and she says in Middle English that she was steadied in her wits by this vision. She is given a kind of consolation, which gives her emotional peace.

Jesus appears, sits on the end of her bed, calms her down and then disappears again. He appears as an incredibly good looking man. She repeatedly describes in the book Jesus as this very sexually attractive and physically available presence to her. She also describes her husband in sexual terms, and she describes this mortifyingly embarrassing episode where a man at her church asks her to have sex with him. She says yes, and she goes to meet him to have sex with him, and then he says, no, I was only joking; I was only testing you. Very closely linked to her spiritual, erotic life is also this public life of embarrassment and shame and mortification that she talks about in great detail.

In Jerusalem, when she's in Calvary, she receives this gift from God, and her crying is uncontrollable. It's noisy; it's expansive. It annoys people, and it's her signature move. It's a way of claiming space, of claiming the conversation without using words, of articulating her whole body. She often talks about her heart as this kind of touchstone, this focal point of emotion. Words like joy, distress, fear and pain appear throughout The Book of Margery Kempe. We often think about the history of emotions not as something which goes unchanged through history. Emotions are themselves historically bounded, and The Book of Margery Kempe is a very useful document in understanding what emotions meant in early 15th century England.

This is actually an experience of aging, of old age and of ill health, and of care in marriage, which we don't see in other sources from the Middle Ages – and often it's very hard to talk about today. She also talks about her misgivings around this but then reminds herself that she'd had so much sexual pleasure from his body when he was a young man that she should repay this now, as part of her marital contract and debt to him in her care for him. Also having that voice of doubt, that voice of obligation, is really how we all feel when we're interacting in our relationships, in our changing, and how relationships change throughout life. I don't want to say that Margery Kempe is a guide to how we can live today. There are moments of honesty and moments of compromise in it, which I think really speak to us today. For me, seeing her frankness around embarrassment and her frankness around shame, which are really crucial parts of being a social human being, of being a social animal, and having that from the Middle Ages is unparalleled and very touching. The modern reader can, with the caveat of historical distance, also think about subjectivity through The Book of Margery Kempe in a way which is absolutely unique.

I would remind readers of The Book of Margery Kempe, and I'd remind people thinking about their own emotions and emotions in the past that our emotions are not natural, and the ways we express them are not natural. They are socially determined; they are historically determined. The way we express emotions today might look ridiculous to people thinking about us in 100 years' time.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025