Margery Kempe

← Encyclopedia

Margery Kempe (c. 1373–after 1438) was an English laywoman, mystic, and pilgrim from Bishop’s Lynn in Norfolk, remembered above all for the book she dictated late in life. The Book of Margery Kempe recounts her visions, travels, and recurrent trials for heresy, and is commonly described as the earliest surviving autobiography in the English language — though she could not write it herself, and gave it instead to two successive scribes. Through all of it she names herself not “I” but “this creature,” the small grammatical distance her own voice keeps from the woman it describes.

A life in the world

The outward life is unusually well documented for a medieval woman who held no office and entered no convent. The daughter of John Brunham — a Lynn merchant who served repeatedly as mayor and as the town’s member of Parliament — she married John Kempe around 1393, bore fourteen children, and ran a brewing and milling business that failed. The Book treats those failures as a kind of address: the brewery prospered briefly and then collapsed, the horse-mill stopped when the horses would not pull, and she read in the ruin a summons turned away too long. After the birth of her first child she fell into what the narrative renders as a months-long derangement — months of terror, self-injury, and the conviction of being damned — broken by a vision of Christ seated at her bedside in a mantle of silk, asking why she had forsaken him when he had never forsaken her. From that bedside scene the rest of the life unfolds.

She turned to devotion within the world rather than the cloister. This is the fact that sets her apart from almost every other English contemplative of her century: she was a married mother, a townswoman of trade and property, who sought a life of perfection without leaving the marketplace for the anchorhold. After years of pressing, she negotiated a vow of chastity with her husband — the Book stages the bargain on a road in midsummer, her offer to pay his debts before he set out for Jerusalem in exchange for his consent — and took to wearing white, the clothing of a maiden, which on a woman who had borne fourteen children struck her neighbors as a provocation bordering on blasphemy. She wanted, and eventually obtained from the Bishop of Lincoln and the Archbishop of Canterbury, a formal license to wear it.

The roads

The white clothes went on pilgrimage. Between roughly 1413 and 1433 she covered an extraordinary mileage for a woman traveling without husband or household: to Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, where on Calvary the weeping that would define her broke open for the first time at full force; to Rome, where she gave away her money, served a poor woman, and was for a season reduced to begging; to Santiago de Compostela; and, late and overland, to the shrine of the Holy Blood at Wilsnack in northern Germany and to Aachen, undertaken in old age in the company of her widowed German daughter-in-law. Inside England she went to Canterbury, to the cult of the Virgin at Walsingham near her home, and across the country to seek out holy persons whose approval might steady her. The travel itself was its own jeopardy. Her companions abandoned her on the road more than once, embarrassed by her tears and her refusal of meat and wine, and her foreignness and lone state exposed her to suspicion at every gate.

For the church of the late Middle Ages was prosecuting heresy in earnest. The English crown had made the burning of obstinate heretics law in 1401, and the Constitutions issued by Archbishop Arundel in 1409 had clamped down on vernacular scripture and on lay preaching — above all by women. A laywoman in white who quoted Gospel, rebuked clerics, and claimed direct colloquy with God walked straight into that machinery. She was arrested and examined at Leicester, at York, at Beverley, and elsewhere; she was accused of being a Lollard, of preaching in defiance of Paul’s prohibition, of carrying off other men’s wives. Each time she answered her examiners — the Archbishop of York among them — by reciting the Articles of the Faith without error and turning the charge of preaching aside with the distinction that she did not preach but only spoke in conversation, which no statute forbade. Each time she was let go. As often as hostile clergy harried her, sympathetic ones defended her: confessors, an anchorite of the Dominican house at Lynn who became her director, a Carmelite of repute, and the preaching friars who let her into their congregations and then sometimes wished they had not. She was never, in the end, condemned; on the documented record she was acquitted at every trial. The line between her and the fire was thin, and she knew it, but the institution that examined her also kept finding her orthodox. (On the penalty hanging over those it did not — see heresy and excommunication.)

The gift of tears

What set her apart, by her own account and her neighbors’, was her weeping. She was seized by loud, uncontrollable fits of crying and roaring at the thought of Christ’s suffering — sometimes for hours, sometimes in church, sometimes on the road, sometimes so violently that she fell down and turned livid, unable to stand. These “boisterous” tears, as the Book calls them, drew accusations of fakery, drunkenness, and demonic possession as readily as reverence. Some thought her epileptic or mad; some thought her a hypocrite weeping to be seen; some, hearing her cry out at a Crucifixion image or a mother carrying a boy, were moved themselves and counted the tears a grace.

Within the tradition she stood inside, the phenomenon had a name and a pedigree. Compunction — the piercing of the heart that overflows as weeping — was an old and honored sign in Christian contemplative life, and the high-medieval turn toward an affective devotion centered on the wounded humanity of Christ had made tears a recognized currency of grace. The Cistercian bridal-mystical tradition, the rise of meditation on the Passion, and the visionary women of the Low Countries and the Rhineland in the generations before her had all framed an ecstatic, embodied, often tearful piety as a legitimate route to God. That European map of mysticism held room for many registers — the speculative apophatic flights of a Meister Eckhart, the Latin visionary theology of a Hildegard of Bingen — and at the warm, bodily, affective end of it Kempe’s weeping belongs recognizably to the current of women’s devotional mysticism, even where the Book makes no claim to have learned it from anyone. Christ, in her telling, named the tears himself as his gift, given to her as a sharing in his Passion and as a force that drew souls toward heaven — and warned her she would have them whether or not the world approved. The world, much of the time, did not.

The visit to Julian

Sometime around 1413, before she left for Jerusalem, Kempe traveled to Norwich to consult the anchoress Julian of Norwich, whose reputation for spiritual counsel had spread. The Book reports that the two women spent several days in conversation, Kempe laying out her visions, her tears, and her fear that they might be delusion or the work of an enemy spirit, Julian weighing them against scripture and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Julian, by Kempe’s account, reassured her: tested feelings that accord with the worship of God and the profit of one’s fellow Christians come from the Spirit, and the more contempt and reproof Kempe suffered for them in the world, the more merit she stored against heaven. The meeting matters twice over. It is one of the only external corroborations of Julian’s existence in her own century — Kempe’s report of the visit is independent testimony that the anchoress of Norwich was a living counselor and not only a name on a manuscript. And it is, so far as the documentary record reaches, among the earliest recorded conversations between two Englishwomen, the one who could write the first book in English by a woman and the one whose dictated book is the first autobiography in the language, set down across a single grille in Norwich.

The Book is conscious of placing itself in company. Kempe sought out and was read the lives and writings of earlier visionary women — the revelations of Bridget of Sweden above all, whose canonized example of a married mother turned prophet and pilgrim gave Kempe a template the Book quietly leans on. She is the English heir to a continental form, not its inventor; what is new is the density of ordinary detail, the failed brewery and the road quarrels and the exact words of her examiners, pressed up against the visions.

The Book and its scribes

The Book’s composition is itself part of its story. Kempe was illiterate in the sense that mattered — she could not write, and her Latin was hearsay — so the text exists only because she dictated it and others wrote it down. A first scribe, said to be an Englishman who had lived abroad, took down a draft in a hand and orthography that proved, after his death, illegible to everyone who tried; a priest who agreed to copy it out fresh struggled for years with the unreadable exemplar and his own doubts before, on 23 July 1436, he set to the work in earnest, producing the first part of the Book as it survives, and a shorter second part the following year. The proem describes the whole machinery openly — the lost first draft, the doubting priest, the dating — so that the reader knows from the start that this is a remembered life filtered through at least two hands and several decades.

The single manuscript that carries the full text is now British Library Add MS 61823, copied around the middle of the fifteenth century by a scribe who signed himself Salthows. It passed to the Carthusian charterhouse of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, whose first leaf bears the ownership note Liber Montis Gracie, the book of Mount Grace. There it was read closely: four hands have left annotations, and the most active of them, writing in red ink, marked the margins with approving cross-references to the recognized ecstatics of his own order’s reading — comparing Kempe’s roarings and fervors to those of Richard of Hampole and the holy women of the Rhineland and the Low Countries — turning the manuscript into a record of one community’s verdict that her tears were genuine. After the Reformation the full Book vanished from view.

The lost Book and its return

For roughly five centuries Kempe survived only as a rumor and a fragment. Wynkyn de Worde printed a seven-page extract of contemplative sayings drawn from the Book around 1501; Henry Pepwell reprinted it in 1521 inside an anthology of devotional treatises, and in doing so quietly recast Kempe as a serene anchoress — the extract suppresses the tears, the pilgrimages, the trials, the marriage, the whole turbulent first-person life, leaving a conventional contemplative tract scarcely identifiable as hers. For four hundred years that bowdlerized scrap was the only “Kempe” anyone could read, and on its evidence she was filed among the placid mystics.

The full manuscript came back to light in 1934, in a country house at Southgate in Derbyshire belonging to the Butler-Bowdon family — recovered, by the account that has clung to it, from a cupboard searched for a misplaced ping-pong ball. The American scholar Hope Emily Allen identified it that same year as the complete Book of Margery Kempe, announcing the discovery in a letter to The Times on 27 December 1934. A modernized version by Colonel W. Butler-Bowdon followed in 1936; the full critical edition, edited by Sanford Brown Meech with Allen’s extensive notes, appeared in 1940 for the Early English Text Society. The British Library acquired the manuscript at auction in 1980. The recovered text overturned the Pepwell image at a stroke: the placid contemplative was revealed as a roaring, weeping, litigious, traveling, wholly singular woman, and the earliest autobiography in English turned out to be by a person almost no one had expected to write one.

What the Book is, and is not

Modern scholarship treats the Book with care. It is shaped by its scribes — the priest who wrote it down was also her reader, her doubter, and her partial co-author, and the conventions of saints’ lives and devotional revelation run through every chapter — so that where Margery’s memory ends and pious form begins cannot always be fixed. Some readers take the third-person “this creature” and the hagiographic frame as evidence that the priest’s voice has substantially overwritten hers; others argue that the very disorder of the narrative, its lapses, repetitions, and unflattering candor, preserves a dictating voice the conventions could not fully tame. The debate is unlikely to close, because there is only one manuscript and no draft behind it to check against.

What the Book offers, in the end, is not a doctrine but a voice — a married woman without Latin or office, insisting on a direct and turbulent access to God, and on her right to be heard saying so.

Texts and scholarship

The Middle English Book exists complete only in British Library Add MS 61823; the standard critical edition is Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, eds., The Book of Margery Kempe, Early English Text Society original series 212 (Oxford University Press, 1940), still the textual foundation of all later work. Lynn Staley’s student edition for the TEAMS Middle English Texts series presents the Middle English with apparatus and is freely available online: The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Staley (1996). Barry Windeatt’s annotated Longman edition (2000) and his Penguin translation, together with Anthony Bale’s Oxford World’s Classics translation (2015), are the standard modern reading texts. The only public-domain access to “Kempe” remains the seven-page Pepwell extract as modernized in Edmund G. Gardner, ed., The Cell of Self-Knowledge: Seven Early English Mystical Treatises Printed by Henry Pepwell in 1521 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1910), whose digitized text shows exactly how much the early-print transmission omitted; it is available at Project Gutenberg. The fullest single study of how the Book was composed is Nicholas Watson’s essay “The Making of The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages, ed. Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), pp. 395–434, which reads the proem’s account of the two scribes as a deliberate construction rather than transparent fact; an author’s copy is posted at academia.edu. The Europeana cultural archive collects digitized material on Kempe and the manuscript’s history at its Margery Kempe story. The wider frame — the affective, tearful piety she shares with the visionary women of the continent, and the disputed category of “the Middle English mystics” into which she was sorted by twentieth-century editors — is treated in Bernard McGinn’s Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (Crossroad, 2012) and, critically, in Nicholas Watson’s argument that the grouping is a modern construct rather than a medieval self-understanding.

→ In the library: Gardner — The Cell of Self-Knowledge: Seven Early English Mystical Treatises (1910) · The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912)

→ Related: Julian Of Norwich · Christian Mysticism · Mysticism · Medieval Women S Mysticism · Hildegard Of Bingen · Meister Eckhart · Bernard Of Clairvaux · Heresy · Excommunication · Asceticism · Middle Ages · Mary