Margery Kempe

Anyone asking who was Margery Kempe must begin in the busy port town of Bishop's Lynn, now King's Lynn, in Norfolk, where she was born around 1373 ^[1]. Her father, John Brunham, was one of the most powerful men in the town: he served several terms as mayor of Lynn, sat in Parliament as one of its representatives, and held office as an alderman of the influential Trinity Guild ^[2]. Margery grew up, in other words, at the top of a prosperous merchant community on England's east coast, a place whose ships traded with the Baltic and the Low Countries.

Like most laywomen of her era, she never learned to read or write, a fact that shaped the whole later history of her book, which she had to dictate to scribes ^[3]. Her childhood coincided with turbulent decades in England: the aftermath of the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and the spread of the Lollard movement inspired by John Wyclif, whose followers were increasingly persecuted as heretics. That climate of suspicion toward unauthorized religious speech would follow her throughout her adult life ^[4].

At about the age of twenty, around 1393, Margery married John Kempe, a Lynn townsman of respectable but lesser standing than her own family ^[1]. The couple eventually had fourteen children, a number she states plainly in her book ^[3]. Her account is candid about her early married years: she admits to pride in fine clothing and to a desire to keep up the status she had known in her father's household.

She tried her hand at business twice, first as a brewer, reportedly one of the largest in Lynn for a time, and then as the operator of a horse mill grinding grain. Both ventures collapsed, failures she later interpreted as divine correction of her worldly ambition ^[2]. The turning point of her life, however, came earlier, after the birth of her first child. She suffered a severe mental and spiritual breakdown lasting the better part of a year, during which she was restrained and feared for her life. She recovered, by her own account, when Christ appeared beside her bed and spoke words of comfort ^[3]. Modern scholars have discussed this episode in terms of postpartum illness, though Kempe herself understood it entirely as a religious event ^[5].

In the years following her recovery, Kempe experienced conversations with Christ, the Virgin Mary, and various saints, which she described as happening within her soul rather than as bodily apparitions ^[3]. Her devotion took a highly public and physical form: fits of loud crying and sobbing, especially during sermons or at the sight of a crucifix. These outbursts divided opinion sharply. Some clergy and townspeople saw genuine holiness; many others saw disruption, illness, or fraud, and she records the mockery frankly ^[1].

Her central struggle for many years was with her own marriage. Convinced that God called her to chastity, she negotiated with her husband for a celibate union. In 1413, on the road near York, John Kempe finally agreed, on conditions that included Margery paying his debts, and the two took a formal vow of chastity before the Bishop of Lincoln ^[2]. That same period brought one of the most famous meetings in English religious history. Kempe traveled to Norwich to consult the anchoress Julian of Norwich, author of Revelations of Divine Love, who reassured her that visions accompanied by charity and tears could be trusted as the work of the Holy Spirit ^[6]. The encounter, recorded in Kempe's book, is the only surviving eyewitness account of Julian by a contemporary.

Among the most striking Margery Kempe facts is the sheer distance she covered. Late in 1413 she set out for the Holy Land, traveling through Constance and Venice and reaching Jerusalem in 1414, where she visited Calvary and reported the first of her most intense crying fits ^[1]. On the return journey she spent months in Rome, where she gave away her money and worked serving the poor. In 1417 she undertook a further pilgrimage to the shrine of St James at Santiago de Compostela in Spain ^[2].

Travel at home proved more dangerous than travel abroad. In an England alarmed by Lollardy, a woman who wore white clothes, wept in public, and discussed scripture without a license drew official attention. She was arrested and examined at Leicester, questioned at York, and brought before Henry Bowet, Archbishop of York, at Cawood. Each time she defended her orthodoxy on the articles of faith and was released, though Bowet reportedly tried to make her promise to leave his diocese ^[4]. She was threatened with burning by hostile crowds on more than one occasion. Her repeated acquittals matter historically: they show a laywoman successfully navigating church courts in one of the most anxious periods of English religious policing ^[5].

The achievement for which she is remembered took shape late in her life. Unable to write, Kempe dictated her experiences to two scribes in succession. The first, possibly her son who had settled in Danzig, produced a draft so poorly written that it was nearly unusable. A Lynn priest then agreed, after long hesitation, to rewrite and continue it, beginning in 1436, with a second part added around 1438 ^[3]. The result, known as The Book of Margery Kempe, is generally described as the earliest surviving autobiography in English ^[1].

The book is not a diary but a shaped spiritual narrative, told in the third person about a figure called simply 'this creature.' It mixes visionary conversation with vivid, earthbound detail: seasickness, quarreling fellow pilgrims, broken-backed falls, the price of a wedding ring. That texture is precisely what makes it valuable to historians, since few medieval sources record the daily frictions of a middle-class laywoman's existence ^[5]. For centuries the full text vanished. Only short devotional extracts survived in print, issued by Wynkyn de Worde around 1501, which presented Kempe as a conventional contemplative. Then, in 1934, a complete manuscript was identified in the private library of the Butler-Bowdon family, recognized by the American scholar Hope Emily Allen ^[7]. The manuscript, copied in the mid fifteenth century by a scribe named Salthouse, is now held by the British Library as Additional MS 61823 ^[7].

Kempe's final decades were marked by continued hardship and one last remarkable journey. Her husband John suffered a serious fall down a staircase and became incapacitated; despite their vow of separation, she returned to nurse him through years of incontinence and senility until his death around 1431, a duty she describes without sentimentality ^[3]. One of her sons, who had lived in the German merchant city of Danzig, died in the same period.

In 1433, when she was about sixty, Kempe accompanied her widowed daughter-in-law back to the Continent, sailing from Ipswich to the Norwegian coast and on to Danzig. From there she traveled overland to see the celebrated relic at Wilsnack in Brandenburg and the shrine at Aachen before making her way home, often ill, poor, and dependent on reluctant traveling companions ^[2]. The last documentary traces of her life come from Lynn itself: the records of the Trinity Guild, her father's old guild, show a Margery Kempe admitted to membership in 1438, the same period in which her book was completed ^[4]. Nothing certain is known of her death, which is presumed to have occurred in Norfolk sometime after 1438 ^[1].

Any Margery Kempe biography written before 1934 would have been impossible in its modern form, because her reputation rests almost entirely on the recovered manuscript. Since its rediscovery, the Book has been edited for the Early English Text Society by Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen in 1940, translated repeatedly, and absorbed into the canon of Middle English literature alongside Chaucer, Langland, and Julian of Norwich ^[7].

Assessments of Margery Kempe achievements have shifted with each generation of readers. Early twentieth-century critics often dismissed her as hysterical, contrasting her unfavorably with the serene Julian. Feminist scholarship from the 1980s onward, led by studies such as Clarissa Atkinson's Mystic and Pilgrim, reread her as a determined negotiator of female religious authority in a system built to exclude her ^[5]. Historians now also mine the Book for evidence about pilgrimage economics, urban life in Lynn, childbirth, and medieval attitudes to mental illness ^[8].

Her presence endures outside the academy as well. King's Lynn commemorates her as one of its most famous inhabitants, and the Church of England remembers her in its calendar of commemorations together with Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle among the English mystics ^[6]. Loud, stubborn, mocked in her own lifetime, she secured through dictation what her critics could never take away: the first sustained account of an English life told from the inside ^[1].