SOURCE: Introduction to The Book of Margery Kempe, translated by John Skinner, Image Books, 1998, pp. 1-11.

[In the following essay, Skinner offers a brief manuscript history of The Book of Margery Kempe and comments on Kempe's illiteracy, as well as the work's structure and historical context.]

News of the discovery of The Book of Margery Kempe was broken in a letter to The Times of London on December 27, 1934, by the distinguished American medievalist Hope Emily Allen. “Previously,” she wrote, “scholars had been forced to conclude that medieval old ladies did not write their reminiscences.” Yet now the first known autobiography in the English language had come to light, having lain hidden for four hundred years in the library of an Old Catholic family, the Butler-Bowdons. And, moreover, this unique document was written by a woman.

Hope Allen herself had been visiting London when the manuscript was first brought to the Victoria and Albert Museum for examination. A friend desctribes Allen's reaction, “her eyes shining with excitement,” as she told of the find; this was something a fortunate scholar handles only once in a lifetime. And her letter to The Times carries the same sense of discovery, for it was directed as much at the general public as at the rarified world of medieval scholars.

Up to this moment, little had been known of Margery Kempe, for only the barest selection of her extensive writings appeared to have survived. In 1501 these random fragments had been gathered together by Wynken de Worde, William Caxton's apprentice and successor. Printed as A shorte treatyse of contemplation, they were soon wrongly ascribed to “Margery Kempe … a devoute ancres.” Already, Margery had been grouped with the fourteenth-century English mystics in the same category as Richard Rolle and Dame Julian, the anchoress of Norwich, her exact contemporary and the author of A Revelation of Love.

Now at last the public was informed; we have the whole story. And what a surprise: Far from being a typical holy woman, an anchoress vowed to celibacy, a dedicated solitary like Julian, Margery Kempe was a married woman who had borne fourteen children. Moreover, she had been a woman of substance who had briefly run the largest brewery in Lynn; then, on turning to religion, she had traveled hundreds of miles on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, to Rome, to Santiago di Compostela in Spain.

These were some of the early surprises. More were to come, chief among them the difficulty of understanding the true nature of Margery Kempe's spirituality and the underlying reasons for the constant conflict and disputes that marked her life. Margery's account of her spiritual awakening, her conversion from her sinful way of life, is full of conflict and recrimination. She seems to have been incapable of sustaining any kind of harmonious relationship with either friend or passing acquaintance. What was the purpose of this new way of life that caused her so much trouble? Was this really the way to become a saint? The difficulty in answering these questions that present themselves so forcefully as soon as we meet her is that Margery herself remains, as we shall see, an unsure witness.

Hope Allen went on to collaborate with an English medieval scholar, Professor Sanford Brown Meech, in editing the new find for the Early English Text Society, from which this new translation derives. They established that the original had been copied probably before 1450, not long after Margery's death. The copyist put the name “Salthows” on his handiwork; Salthouse being a village on the coast of Norfolk. Because the manuscript is also marked as having belonged to the Carthusians of Mount Grace in North Yorkshire, and the Carthusians were great copyists of such texts, it is generally supposed that Salthouse was a choir monk there. In addition, throughout the text a sometime reader has added his own short comments, and even some little sketches in the same red ink. Once again, as several of these comments refer to the Mount Grace community, this is assumed to be the hand of an unknown Carthusian monk. Such are the interesting details that would have rewarded the diligent Hope Allen.

But a gap of sixty years separates us from the novelty of these events, and it would be wholly unhelpful to parade Margery Kempe's book before today's readers simply as autobiography. For one thing, that genre had yet to be invented; and for another, it would be unrealistic to anticipate the literary skills necessary for such an accomplishment in a woman who could neither read nor write. All Margery set out to do was, as she says in her own preface, to record for “sinful wretches” (like herself) how God showed his mercy toward her and the workings of his grace in her soul. But again, if the genre is perhaps more properly to be described as the “diary of a soul,” this is not to suggest that it matches the polish and sophistication of Saint Augustine's Confessions or of Margery's contemporary, Saint Catherine, who was writing at much greater length her account of yet another spiritual journey in faraway Siena.

It was not simply that Margery Kempe, like almost every woman of her day, was uneducated; the English language itself was still a spoken language. Its spelling was uncertain, its grammar and syntax still rudimentary; the very soil it sought to grow in was as yet undrained and, above all, still waiting to enjoy to the full the richly dunged matrix of its complex linguistic past. It would be another two centuries before the advent of printing and the rush of learning, when suddenly William Shakespeare would celebrate the fullness of that harvest crying out to be reaped. So it is that in Margery's book we must be content to listen to the repetitive echoes of common talk, as if we were merely listening to any chance conversation in the streets of fifteenth-century Lynn.

In one sense, given Margery's considerable skills as a conversationalist and even storyteller, it is surprising that her text is so impoverished in vocabulary while much of its structure remains obstinately repetitive. The reason for this might be as much pious intent, an awareness that the text should seem semi-sacred, as any lack of literary skills on the part of author and amanuensis. But in achieving a fresh version from the Middle English, it seems more important to offer today's readers a lively account by loosening the language, rather than adhering too tightly to the literal tautness of the Mount Grace version.

Since she herself could not write, Margery had to dictate what she wanted to say. She had two scribes. The first attempt to set down her book may have been by dictating her words to her son; he had lived for a long while in Germany, married a local girl, and then returned home with her, leaving their young daughter behind with friends. (There is only one drawback to this supposition, which has been closely argued: Her son died within a month of his return to England, leaving precious little time for such a labor.) Presumably at Margery's pleading, the first draft was then taken up by a priest with the intention of completing her task, only to discover that the manuscript was to all intents and purposes illegible—an indecipherable jumble of English and German.

After a delay of some four years, her new scribe virtually rewrote the book aided by Margery's memory and fresh dictation. And at this stage, ten further chapter were added, giving rise to “Book II.” The question occurs, How much did this new scribe import his own sense of style and expression into Margery's story? As a priest, he might be imagined tailoring and shaping the story so as to enhance its purpose, to edify the faithful who would someday come to read it. (Margery had stipulated that she would commit her experiences to paper on the condition that they would be made public after her death. She could hardly have guessed that publication would not occur until the twentieth century!)

We can never be certain how much Margery's original narrative was molded by her scribe. But it is quite clear in certain vivid passages—such as those dealing with her heresy trials and the stormy crossing of the North Sea—that it is Margery speaking directly onto the page. Moreover, given that her second scribe was an educated cleric, he seems to have offered very little help in structuring her book. It would seem most likely to have been written down more or less as it came to her mind; that is to say, in a series of events linked not chronologically, as we might expect of a modern biographer or medieval cleric, but thematically, as the woman's mind may have been pleased to work and sort.

This elected manner of telling her story, with very little regard to the true sequence of events, presents a sometimes confusing and at worst misleading impression to the reader. At a first reading, it is easy to imagine that once Margery took up with the idea of becoming a pilgrim, her lifestyle changed into a continual traipse from one holy site to the next. In fact, her story may be divided into three distinct periods. The first was her marriage and bringing up her family in Lynn; this included her failed business enterprises, her conversion, and the beginnings of her “visions.” Secondly, her pilgrimages: the eighteen-month journey to the Holy Land, and her return via Assisi and Rome; and after a gap of two years, at the conclusion of her journey to Santiago di Compostela, the succession of trials she endured when she was arraigned as a suspected heretic. And lastly, the final phase of her life, which she spent back at Lynn. Yet, not surprisingly, these remaining years continued to be punctuated by drama: her husband's horrific fall, followed by his death a year later; the great fire of Lynn; and the return of her son, followed by his own untimely death. Finally we hear how, on impulse, Margery set out upon her final journey, escorting her daughter-in-law home to Germany, only to stumble, almost by chance, on one last pilgrimage.

Margery Kempe lived in the last quarter of the fourteenth century and into the first half of the fifteenth. Since by deliberate choice, or by blind oversight, Margery chooses to remain silent on almost all the detailed background of her life, it may be helpful to offer a brief outline of the England of her day and, in particular, fourteenth-century Lynn.

In Margery's lifetime, England was prosperous, although sometimes swept by plague and common revolt. Her kings (Richard II, Henry V) were increasingly confident and in bullish mood. Margery would have heard of the English archers' exploits during Henry V's decisive victory over the French at Agincourt. Yet it would not have interested her a great deal. Closer to hand, she would also have witnessed the Peasants' Revolt: a serious nationwide uprising against the king's poll tax levied to fund his wars against the French. In East Anglia it came to a head when Geoffrey Litster and his cronies took Norwich by the scruff of its neck. Most in authority fled or fell to the mob, who would soon have taken control if not for the city's warring bishop. Calling his men to arms, bishop Henry Despenser soon rounded them up a little way outside Norwich. He heard their sins, which he was pleased to absolve, and then sent them on their eternal way.

In addition to such civil strife, the church was having to attend to considerable dissent among its members. The teachings of John Wycliffe, who died peacefully enough in a rural parish in 1384, were beginning to take insidious hold on ordinary folk; their clever mix of radical criticisms of church and state that empowered the common man was to prove a heady prelude to the upheavals of the Reformation. The Lollards, as they were known, held private prayer meetings away from church that grew increasingly popular, especially as members read aloud from their newly translated English bible. Their most prominent leader was Sir John Oldcastle, otherwise known as Lord Cobham. His rebellion was to prove a serious threat to the king and become the accidental cause of suspicion falling on Margery, which led to her heresy trials. Long after his execution, Oldcastle was rehabilitated by the reformers and deemed an early Protestant martyr. Indeed, Shakespeare's original name for Falstaff was in fact Oldcastle, but, after Protestant objections, he was forced to change it in favor of Sir John Fastolf, another Norwich worthy who served Henry V in France.

Into this busy scene, Margery Brunham was born, around 1373. Her background was secured in the merchant middle class: Her father, a wealthy burgess, almost certainly dealt in cloth, the staple source of wealth in that region. Five times he was elected mayor of Lynn, then known as Bishop's Lynn and today called King's Lynn. Six times over a period of twenty years, he was one of the town's two members of parliament.

Today East Anglia is something of a backwater, taking life as it comes and rejoicing in a rich, fertile land that yields the best cereal crops in the whole of Great Britain. But in Margery's day, is was wool that ruled. Sheep flocks teemed in every field, yielding their fleeces to the wool trade that plied through the ports of Lowestoft, Lynn, and Norwich to the Low Countries and thence to the rest of Europe. Raw wool was sold in great quantities to the Flemish weavers, but the local industry was also highly developed. The weavers of the little town of Worsted, just outside Norwich, lent their name to a cloth that was the envy of Europe. And even today London's tailors would not dream of cladding their city clientele in anything other than pure worsted. Yet the Norwich of Margery's day, second only to London in wealth and influence throughout the kingdom, is but a faded memory.

The important historical and personal dates in Margery's lifetime are summarized at the end of this preface. This will perhaps help to clarify the sequence of Margery's life that is at times barely discernible from her own account. Indeed, the purpose of her writings remains overtly spiritual throughout the book. As much as we would have appreciated detailed descriptions of the Holy Land in 1413 or what it was like to join the mass of pilgrims crowding into Compostela from across Europe, little or nothing is offered. In part, as has been suggested, this is due to the strictly spiritual intention of her book; but it may also speak of Margery's inward-looking manner of life. At one point she apologizes for misspelling place names, but adds firmly that she did not go on pilgrimage in order to write down accurately the name of every town she passes through.

I am reminded of my own encounter with the English Carthusians with whom I stayed for two weeks in order to write a book about their way of life. I was able to join them on two occasions for their weekly walk, when the community spends the day outside the monastery walking on the Sussex Downs. It was striking how little any one of them had eyes for the outside world, the great whale-backed downs, a lazy heron lifting off the river at our approach. Instead the monks walked two by two, changing companions every twenty minutes, and each gave the other their courteous and complete attention. The outside world was no longer of any great interest to them except in the context of their new interior world of prayer and silence.

Coming to the crux of the matter: How genuine was Margery Kempe, the mystic?

Certainly, in one chief respect she disappointed even her own best intentions. She has failed to be recognized officially either then or since as a saint. Yet there are plenty of uncanonized heroes and heroines whose holiness has gone unnoticed by the process of formal canonization; Julian of Norwich is one.

The first important correction that must be made is not to regard as a genuine vision every conversation with our Lord that Margery reports in such detail. It seems clear that on a number of key occasions these conversations are contradictory and simply not to be trusted; for instance, where our Lord tells her to write an extremely sententious letter to the widow of Lynn (see footnote 38). Even more pertinent, when she reports our Lord pleading with her to be silent at her prayers, she has him saying that if she will not listen to him she should at least listen to what her confessor tells her! (See Chapter 88.)

Clearly Margery's method of praying was largely circumlocutory. (See at end, “The Prayers of Margery Kempe,” her final say in this book: a method of prayer certainly not to be imitated!) Moreover, when she wasn’t addressing God with such lengthy and creatively emotional speeches she seems to have used a vivid method of meditational recall much loved and practiced in her day. This prayer of active and affective imagination was popularized by Bonaventure and Bernard, as well as in England by Anselm and Aelred before them, so that it became the familiar pabulum of preaching throughout the Middle Ages. As a tradition of prayer, it was still influential in the sixteenth century when Ignatius adapted it to play a prominent part in his method of prayer and meditation contained in The Exercises, his famous composition of place. Thus, when Margery describes in close detail how she helped our Lady care for the infant Jesus in Nazareth, there is no question of her literally enjoying such extravagant visions; we are dealing with her own affective meditations upon which she appears to have spent many long hours, creating her own inner world.

And yet there is something special about her description of her initial conversion vision (see Chapter 1), in which Christ comes to her wearing a mantle of purple silk and sits on her bed, saying: “My daughter, why have you left me, when I never for one moment went away from you?” Special, if only for the fact that it turned her life around. In psychological terms, what works is real. At the time, Margery was utterly stuck: This was her turning point. It is significant, too, that Margery places this encounter right at the very start of her book. And certainly this, together with her “mystical marriage” vision in Rome, seem to stand out apart from any other of her seeming “visions.” Her strangely threatening encounter with God the Father, experienced in Rome, in which the Son must mediate his Father's message to a reluctant subject, would appear to be in the same category. It sounds quite distinct from mere affective meditation, not least because Margery appears plainly terrified and quite resistant to this new kind of direct immediacy with the Godhead.

Having made this distinction between the two kinds of experience that Margery describes—her mediations and her visions—one might ask what she herself did with such experiences. When Margery goes to Julian for advice on her way of life, she is given the classic answer: “Be careful that these are not contrary to God's glory and to the benefit of your fellow Christians.”

It is Margery Kempe's propensity for upsetting all and sundry around her that has aroused most of the suspicion and criticism of her—both during her lifetime and since her book has come under the close scrutiny of more and more scholars. This process shows no sign of decline: A medievalist friend of mine in Oxford has lost count of the number of approaches he has had to decline from American students wishing to present their doctorate on some new aspect of Margery Kempe.

Let us hope that their many labors and diligent research will shine yet more light on a fascinating medieval lady. Margery will never be Saint Kempe, but the conudrum of her patience in suffering her own simple foolishness is a wonder to behold, and an example to us all. Like the Carthusians who first copied her words and deeds, at the very least she took God for real.