Margery Kempe

Abstract

Margery was the daughter of John Brunham, a merchant who served as mayor of Bishop’s Lynn and the town’s MP. She married a brewer called John Kempe. After the birth of her first child, she suffered severe postnatal depression, which was finally cured by a vision of Christ, but it was only after another thirteen births that she determined to become a vowess and live chastely. She traveled extensively, including to Jerusalem and Rome in 1413–1415, Santiago de Compostela in 1417, and various German cities in 1433–1434. All the while she experienced visions, including a mystical marriage to the Godhead, but it was the outward manifestations of her spiritual life—white penitential clothing, loud crying and roaring in church—that attracted attention and led to accusations of heretical Lollardy, imprisonment, and examination by senior clerics, who found her Christian faith to be orthodox. In the 1430s she set about recording her spiritual development and worldly travails. The result exists in only one manuscript, now in the British Library (Add. MS 61823). Oxford Bibliographies Online includes another article on Margery Kempe, compiled by Diane Watt with the needs of English literature students in mind (see “Margery Kempe”). The present work has a slightly different emphasis, which explains why the sections on Reference Works, Overviews, and Kempe and her Scribes are followed by TheBook of Margery Kempe: Renaissance and Modern in order to emphasize its Renaissance credentials and modern rebirth. Thereafter, the distinction is made between Editions of the Book, which are most likely to be examined in detail by literary scholars, and Translations of the Book from Middle English, which can be used by students who wish to consult the text for other than philological purposes and also read by general readers. A few Other Sources also exist. Kempe-related articles tended to appear in Journals and Collections of Papers before monographs explored the Worlds of Margery Kempe. For present purposes, her physical world appears as Lives and Times, her mystical life as Spirituality, and her travels under the heading of Pilgrimage.