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Margery Kempe Revisted
Margery Kempe Revisted
Anne E. Bailey
The Chaucer Review, Volume 55, Number 2, 2020, pp. 171-196 (Article)
[ Access provided at 29 Nov 2021 23:23 GMT from York Univ. Libraries (+1 other institution account) ]
The Problematic Pilgrim: Rethinking
Margery’s Pilgrim Identity in The Book
of Margery Kempe
anne e . bailey
ABSTRACT: Along with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Margery Kempe is the best known
female pilgrim in late medieval England. However, The Book of Margery Kempe por-
trays its pious protagonist as a radically different kind of pilgrim from that of Chaucer’s
fun-loving Alisoun, who represents a fairly damning critique of female pilgrimage in
the late Middle Ages. This article reassesses Margery’s pilgrim identity, particularly in
the light of fifteenth-century criticism of female pilgrimage. Focusing on Margery’s nar-
rative persona, it argues that the pilgrim label given to Margery by scholars is not one
intended by the author herself. Close examination reveals that Margery’s travel motiva-
tions, journey destinations, and religious activities place her outside normative pilgrim-
age practices. Given her lofty spiritual aspirations and her identification with saintly role
models, the article also asks whether Margery even envisaged herself as a pilgrim at all.
doi: 10.5325/chaucerrev.55.2.0171
the chaucer review, vol. 55, no. 2, 2020.
Copyright © 2020 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.
172 The Chaucer Review
During the next twenty years, Margery traveled extensively and visited
most of the major pilgrimage destinations in the Holy Land and Europe.
Owing to her unconventional expressions of piety—which included theat-
rical displays of emotion, spontaneous weeping, and noisy “roaring”—she
attracted a mixture of wonder, admiration, and ridicule wherever she went,
and on several occasions was arrested on suspicion of heresy. As a woman
traveling independently, Margery also encountered particular complica-
tions. These included a demand for proof that her husband had allowed her
to travel, and verbal abuse such as the barbed suggestion that she should “go
spynne and carde as other women don.”1 Margery, nonetheless, seems to have
been undaunted by her many tribulations. Comforted by her frequent spiri-
tual conversations with Christ and confident of her religious mission, she
continued traveling in her indomitable style well into her sixties.
In about 1438 Margery, now living a more sedentary life in Lynn, com-
posed her memoires. The Book of Margery Kempe follows its protagonist as
she embarks on a series of religious expeditions that take her back and forth
from Lynn between the years 1413 and 1433. Margery’s travels, which com-
prise a significant proportion of her narrative, might be divided into five
distinct itineraries and are grouped chronologically in the text. Chapters
10–18 depict Margery’s early English travels to “divers placys of relygyon”
(BMK, 90): specifically York, Bridlington, Canterbury, Lincoln, London,
and Norwich. Chapters 26–43 cover her Holy Land pilgrimage in 1413–15,
including her long sojourn in Rome on her return journey. The pilgrimage to
Saint James’s shrine at Santiago de Compostela in 1417 is dealt with briefly in
chapters 44 and 45, and chapters 46–55 describe Margery’s tour around the
northeast of England later in the same year, involving stops at Leicester, York,
and Beverley. Finally, Book Two relates Margery’s later trip, in 1433, to Danzig
and back, via the popular European pilgrimage destinations of Wilsnack and
Aachen.
Despite the attention Margery gives to her travel experiences, The Book
of Margery Kempe is far from a typical first-person travel narrative of the
period, and not least because its autobiographical content has been viewed
by scholars as problematic. Margery’s remembrances were committed to
writing by scribes (Margery herself was illiterate) giving rise to scholarly
1. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt (Woodbridge, 2004), 258 (hereafter cited as
“BMK”). The Book of Margery Kempe has been published in many editions since it was discovered
in a fifteenth-century manuscript in 1934, with the first scholarly edition appearing in 1940 as an
Early English Text Society volume.
anne e. bailey 173
questions about the Book’s authorship.2 In addition, the text refers to Margery
in the third p
erson, suggesting a desire by the author to create some distance
between herself and her narrative persona; many scholars separate “Kempe”
the author from “Margery” the protagonist.3 Others observe that Margery’s
Book is closer in genre to hagiography than to biography since Margery’s
presents herself as a spiritual heroine living her life in imitatio Christi and
modeled on religious exemplars such as Bridget of Sweden, Margaret of
Antioch, Katherine of Alexandria, and Mary Magdalen.4
Another way in which The Book of Margery Kempe veers away from stan-
dard travel writing is in its description of factual events and places, which
often seem to be of secondary importance to the protagonist’s inner spiritual
journey. Margery inserts herself and her travels into a spiritual metanarrative
informed not only by gospel precedent and hagiography, but also by con-
temporary devotional texts such as Bridget of Sweden’s Revelationes, Richard
Rolle’s Incendium Amoris, and Bonaventure’s Stimulus Amoris, leading to a
long tradition of interpreting Margery’s Book as a mystical discourse rather
than understanding it as a historical narrative.
As well as prompting a fair amount of scholarly head-scratching,
Margery and her Book are renowned for courting controversy, most notably
in respect to Margery’s dramatic public displays of piety, which are as note-
worthy and perplexing to readers today as they were to her contemporaries.
Other aspects of her Book—from its authorship to its textual precedents—are
2. For example, John C. Hirsh, “Author and Scribe in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Medium
Ævum 49 (1975): 145–50; Nicholas Watson, “The Making of The Book of Margery Kempe,” in
Linda Olson and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, eds., Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle
Ages (Notre Dame, 2005), 395–434; A. C. Spearing, “Margery Kempe,” in A. S. G. Edwards, ed.,
A Companion to Middle English Prose (Cambridge, U.K., 2004), 83–97; and Sebastian Sobecki, “‘The
writyng of this tretys’: Margery Kempe’s Son and the Authorship of Her Book,” Studies in the Age of
Chaucer 37 (2015): 257–83.
3. Most notably, Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park, Pa., 1994),
1–38.
4. Julia Bolton Holloway, “Bride, Margery, Julian and Alice: Bridget of Sweden’s Textual
Community in Medieval England,” in Sandra J. McEntire, ed., Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays
(New York, 1992), 203–21; Sylvia Schein, “Bridget of Sweden, Margery Kempe and Women’s
Jerusalem Pilgrimages in the Middle Ages,” Mediterranean Historical Review 14 (1999): 44–58;
Katherine J. Lewis, “Margery Kempe and Saint Making in Later Medieval England,” in John H.
Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis, eds., A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe (Woodbridge,
U.K., 2004), 195–215; Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, “Veneration of Virgin Martyrs in Margery Kempe’s
Meditation: Influence of the Sarum Liturgy and Hagiography,” in Denis Renevey and Christiania
Whitehead, eds., Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval
England (Cardiff, 2000), 177–95; Rosalynn Voaden, “Travels with Margery: Pilgrimage in Context,”
in Rosamund Allen, ed., Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers, 1050–1550 (Manchester, U.K.,
2004), 177–95, at 179; Terence N. Bowers, “Margery Kempe as Traveler,” Studies in Philology 97
(2000): 1–28, at 24; and Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and
Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago, 1989).
174 The Chaucer Review
endlessly discussed and debated.5 There is, however, one prominent feature
of Margery’s text that is rarely, if at all, questioned. This is Margery’s identity
as a pilgrim. Her travels to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela in
Spain, along with her visits to numerous other shrines and holy places, have
firmly attached the label “pilgrim” to her name.6
The purpose of this article is to discuss and reassess the pilgrim status
given to Margery by modern readers. Focusing on the textual Margery—
rather than on Margery Kempe the historical figure—it argues that the pil-
grim identity routinely attributed to Margery is not one that was necessarily
recognized, anticipated, or even desired by the author herself. Examining
Margery’s experiences through her own words, the article finds that Margery
rarely portrays herself as a conventional pilgrim. Her travel motivations and
her activities at holy places, as well as her relationships with other pilgrims,
are far from normative. Wherever she travels, Margery stands out from the
pilgrim crowd. More strikingly, Margery rarely refers to herself as a pilgrim.
What follows, then, problematizes Margery’s pilgrimage identity in
The Book of Margery Kempe. Drawing on the notion of the self-portrayed
Margery as a subtly modified version of its author, the article asks not what
kind of pilgrim the historic Margery Kempe might have been, but what kind
of pilgrim she wanted her readers to believe she was. Given Margery’s reluc-
tance to self-identify as a pilgrim, the article also questions whether she even
envisaged herself as a pilgrim at all.
5. See, for example, the bibliography for Margery Kempe in Diane Watt, “Margery Kempe,”
Oxford Bibliographies: British and Irish Literature (Oxford, 2018), at https://www.oxfordbibliogra-
phies.com/page/british-and-irish-literature.
6. For example, John Ure, Pilgrimages: The Great Adventure of the Middle Ages (New York,
2006), 65–74; Sarah Hopper, Mothers, Mystics and Merrymakers: Medieval Women Pilgrims
(Stroud, 2006), 43–55; Henrietta Leyser, Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England
450–1500 (New York, 1995), 226–30; Diana Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London, 2000),
passim; Susan Signe Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety as Public
Performance (London, 2000), 70–71, 130–38, and passim; Leigh Ann Craig, Wandering Women and
Holy Matrons: Women as Pilgrims in the Later Middle Ages (Leiden, 2009), passim; and Jonathan
Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Medieval Religion (London, 1975), 198–99 and passim.
anne e. bailey 175
13. Julia Bolton Holloway, “Bride, Margery, Julian and Alice,” 214; and Wallace, “Anchoritic
Damsel,” 115–18. For some interesting historical background to this incident, see Sobecki, “‘The
writyng of this tretys,’” 257–65.
14. Voaden, “Travels with Margery,” 188, 188–89.
15. Rebecca Krug, Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader (Ithaca, N.Y., 2017), 129; and
Caroline M. Barron, Pilgrim Souls: Margery Kempe and Other Women Pilgrims (London, 2004), 9.
See also Wallace, “Anchoritic Damsel,” 119.
16. Voaden, “Travels with Margery,” 178; and Clarissa Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The
Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983), 51.
anne e. bailey 177
only alludes to her devotion to the city’s famous saint, and her statement that
she had come “to offyr her at Seynt William” (BMK, 246) is somewhat mis-
leading. Not only was her stay in York “a much longer one than was necessary
simply to visit St William,”34 but her Book describes her various activities in
and around the Minster and ritual devotion to York’s principle saint is not
among them. It is perhaps telling that Goodman admits to being puzzled as
to why Margery should feel so attracted to a saint with “hardly any resonance
in Norfolk.”35
Just as saints’ shrines fail to feature heavily in Margery’s English journeys,
so too is there little evidence that Margery’s English travels were prompted by
what Head assumes is a pilgrim’s main motivation: the desire to seek divine
intervention. Throughout the Middle Ages, the form of spiritual mediation
most commonly sought at local shrines by the laity in general, and by women
in particular, is said to be healing for themselves and their families.36 In 1443,
for example, another Norfolk housewife, Margaret Paston, made a wax offer-
ing to Our Lady of Walsingham in return, she hoped, for the recovery of
her husband’s health.37 Walsingham was only a day’s journey from Margery’s
home in Lynn, and Lynn was a gathering point for pilgrims traveling from the
north to the shrine.38 Nonetheless, Margery’s sole recorded visit to England’s
most popular pilgrimage destination is given only cursory treatment and
not assigned any particular purpose (BMK, 394).39 As observed by Webb,
Margery’s local pilgrimages differed from those made by most women of the
period in not being motivated by “family concerns.”40 Given that Margery
weathers some serious health crises in her adult life—including the fatal ill-
ness of her son (BMK, 390), her husband’s dementia (BMK, 329–32), and her
own postpartum madness (BMK, 52–56)—it is particularly striking that she
never admits to resorting to pilgrimage as a means of asking for divine aid.
When Margery’s two English tours are considered in more detail, diffi-
culties in reading them as pilgrimages present themselves at every turn. With
respect to the earlier journeys which she takes before leaving for the Holy
Land in 1413, it is especially notable that it is living individuals, rather than
34. Goodman, Margery Kempe, 134.
35. Goodman, Margery Kempe, 135.
36. Morrison, Women Pilgrims, 16, and, more generally, 10–42.
37. Norman David, ed., The Paston Letters: A Selection in Modern Spelling (Oxford, 1983),
5–6. Contemporary wills indicate that Walsingham was “a big draw for women” (Morrison, Women
Pilgrims, 17).
38. James Harpur, Sacred Tracks: 2000 Years of Christian Pilgrimage (London, 2002), 167.
39. Fanous claims her visit was “undertaken only as an afterthought” (“Measuring the
Pilgrim’s Progress,” 159).
40. Webb, Pilgrimage, 207.
anne e. bailey 181
dead saints, who are the focus of her attention. At Canterbury her time is
spent regaling the monks with edifying stories (BMK, 92–95), and at Norwich
she even appears to bypass the cathedral with its much-visited shrine of
Little William in favor of conversing with the vicar of St. Stephen’s Church
(BMK, 113–14), the friar William Southfield (BMK, 117–19), and the celebrated
recluse Julian of Norwich (BMK, 119–23).41 As Margery herself explains,
her purpose in visiting holy places was to speak with “Goddys servawntys,
bothen ankrys and reclusys and many other of owyr Lordys loverys, wyth
many worthy clerkys, doctorys of dyvynyte, and bachelers also” (BMK, 90).
No mention is made of pilgrimage.
Instead of saintly intervention, then, it would appear that Margery’s goal
in her earlier travels was to win the ear of religious personnel and powerful
churchmen. In what might be interpreted as a public relations campaign, she
enjoys mealtime hospitality at various monasteries and obtains interviews
with bishops, abbots, priests, and friars to gain their approval of her
“contemplations” and idiosyncratic expressions of faith. Public relations
and d iplomacy—rather than pilgrimage—are her main concerns. So too is
sponsorship for her forthcoming Jerusalem pilgrimage: an audience with the
bishop of Lincoln, for instance, secures her a handsome sum of twenty-six
shillings and eight pence for her pilgrimage expenses (BMK, 109).
Margery’s second period of travel around England in 1417–18 is similarly
characterized by an apparent disinterest in saints’ shrines. Where it differs
from her first English tour, however, is in the strength of the hostility she
encounters in the towns and cities through which she passes. Much of this
animosity can be explained by the timing and location of her travels. Lollardy,
the movement inspired by the religious dissident, John Wycliffe (d. 1384), was
very much at the forefront of public consciousness at the time of Margery’s
tour, owing to the fact that the Lollard rebel and recently convicted heretic,
John Oldcastle, was on the run from royal justice. Lollard sympathy was espe-
cially strong in the midlands and northeast where Margery had chosen to
visit and, as a woman traveling alone whose activities seemed dangerously
close to preaching, Margery was immediately viewed with suspicion.42
Arriving in Leicester, for example, it is not long before Margery is
accused by the city’s mayor of being “a fals strumpet, a fals Loller, and a fals
deceyver of the pepyl” (BMK, 229) and taken into custody for questioning.
41. Goodman, Margery Kempe, 138. For Richard of Caister, vicar of St. Stephen’s Church in
Norwich, and the Carmelite William Southfield, see Windeatt, in BMK, 113, 117–19. For more on
these three individuals, see below.
42. Goodman, Margery Kempe, 142–46.
182 The Chaucer Review
a desyr to se tho placys wher [Christ] was born and wher he sufferyd
hys Passyon and wher he deyd, wyth other holy placys wher he was
in hys lyve and also aftyr hys Resurrexyon. (BMK, 101)
and in Venice on the return journey they refuse to have anything more to
do with her, informing her that “thei wold not go wyth hir for an hundryd
pownd” (BMK, 175). A similar pattern of hostility and rejection establishes
itself during Margery’s northern European travels in Book Two, culminating
in the final leg of her journey when we learn that Margery was the only pas-
senger disembarking at Dover without onward company (BMK, 414).
The repeated emphasis on Margery’s victimization by her travel compan-
ions can be interpreted in several ways. Terence Bowers, for example, notes
that Margery’s rejection by her compatriots and their mockery of her might
be read as a form of imitatio Christi, and Watt observes that Margery under-
stood such spite and malice as a penance.50 There is, however, an additional
explanation for Margery’s social isolation. Her companions shun her, readers
are told several times, because her pious behavior singles her out as being
different from them and, despite several attempts, they fail to draw her into
their circle. At Constance, for example, they request that she “etyn flesch as
thei dedyn and levyn hir wepyng and that sche schulde not speke so mech of
holiness” (BMK, 155). When Margery refuses to change her behavior, they try
once more, insisting
Margery at first agrees to these conditions, but then breaks this social con-
tract and consequently finds herself eating alone in her room for six weeks
(BMK, 158–59). It could be argued, then, that it is not so much that her com-
panions disown her, but that Margery consciously separates herself from
them by refusing to conform to established customs of pilgrim fellowship
and sociability, thus turning her back on the unspoken code of communitas.
Communitas, a term coined by the British anthropologist Victor Turner,
is the condition said to occur in pilgrimage when participants abandon their
everyday social identities and band together in a spirit of “homogeneity and
comradeship.”51 The practical, if not the ideological, benefits of communitas
might be said to be particularly relevant for long distance pilgrimage in the
Middle Ages when travel was a far riskier, and perhaps lonelier, business
50. Bowers, “Margery Kempe as Traveler”; and Watt, “Faith in the Landscape,” 173.
51. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York, 1997), 96
and, more generally for communitas, 94–95.
186 The Chaucer Review
than in the modern period, and when a certain amount of social leveling was
required to achieve solidarity within a pilgrim band. “Comradely h armony”
among Margery’s companions is certainly suggested in her Book: pilgrims
seem to speak and act with one voice, usually against her.52 From her compan-
ions’ perspective, it could be said that Margery falls outside the social ideal of
communitas. She is regarded as something of a misfit whose e ccentricities—
such as her mealtime piety and her noisy, emotional eruptions at sacred
sites—were deemed to be aberrant and antisocial.
Margery’s outsider status is repeatedly emphasized in episodes in which
her wisdom and ingenuity are pitted against those of her fellow pilgrims. Such
incidents usually function to portray her in a favorable light for her read-
ers, and a subtle game of one-upmanship is played out in the text between
Margery and other pilgrims. Thus Margery seems to delight in reaching
Bologna before her former companions (BMK, 157), and she surprises them
by the speed with which she reaches Rome (BMK, 181). Readers are also made
aware that her strategy of staying put in Bristol and waiting for a ship bound
for Compostela was superior to that of other pilgrims who wasted their
time and effort in running about from port to port trying in vain to secure a
passage (BMK, 222).
More pertinently, of course, Margery surpasses her fellow pilgrims in the
strength of her piety: her devotions at Jerusalem’s holy sites are demonstrably
more noisy, violent, emotional, and heartfelt than theirs. In some ways,
her exceptional behavior—which so blatantly contravenes communitas
ideology—is a notable achievement. In Muslim-ruled Jerusalem, where
pilgrimage was tightly regulated and pilgrims were herded around prescribed
routes by Franciscan guides, there would have been little opportunity for
devotional individualism.53 Nonetheless, Margery’s Book rarely shows her lost
in the pilgrim crowd. Whether being shepherded around the Holy Sepulchre
Church or visiting the standard tourist sights within and beyond Jerusalem,
she manages to distinguish herself noisily and dramatically by weeping,
sobbing, and crying out wherever she went (BMK, 160–72).
As was the case during Margery’s English travels, the presence of other
worshippers at pilgrimage destinations tends to fade into the background as
she takes the narrative spotlight. As she writhes and screams in imitation of
Christ on the Mount of Calvary, for example, the world around her seems
to dissolve to reflect her intensely focused spiritual experience (BMK, 169).
associated with Christ’s birth and death had a violent emotional effect on
Paula. Coming before the True Cross, she “threw herself down in adoration as
though she beheld the Lord hanging upon it.” At the Holy Sepulchre, Paula’s
faith was “so ardent” that “she even licked with her mouth the very spot on
which the Lord’s body had lain.” Jerome added, “What tears she shed there,
what groans she uttered and what grief she poured forth.”58
It is not known whether Margery was familiar with the stories of Egeria
and Paula, and her devotional behavior is more securely linked to a much
later exemplar, Bridget of Sweden (d. 1373), in whose footsteps Margery con-
sciously followed in Rome.59 For the purpose of the present article, identify-
ing individual precursors for Margery’s spiritual practices is less important
than recognizing that Margery’s religious exemplars were not ordinary pil-
grims, but women with privileged social and religious status who creatively
practiced pilgrimage according to their individual spiritual needs. Like
Egeria, Margery befriended the locals in Jerusalem; like Paula, she continu-
ally poured out her emotions at places associated with Christ; like Bridget she
spent many months in Rome living in poverty and caring for the poor and
sick. These were not the activities of everyday pilgrims in fifteenth-century
Rome and Jerusalem, but manifestations of what Margery would have under-
stood as the higher calling granted to the few who enjoyed a special relation-
ship with Christ. In other words, by moving away from a normative pilgrim
identity, Margery was drawing herself closer to her saintly heroines and, of
course, placing herself nearer to God.
58. “Jerome on the Pilgrimage of Paula,” in Brett Edward Whalen, ed. and trans., Pilgrimage
in the Middle Ages: A Reader (Toronto, 2011), 26–29.
59. See, for example, Schein, “Bridget of Sweden,” 50. It should also be noted that Marie
d’Oignies—another recognized exemplar—begged door to door for alms as did Margery in Rome.
See Jacques de Vitry, “The Life of Marie D’Oignies,” in Margot H. King, ed. and trans., Two Lives of
Marie D’Oignies (Toronto, 1998), 39–154, at 88-89.
anne e. bailey 189
60. Giles Constable, “Opposition to Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages,” in his Religious Life and
Thought (11th–12th Centuries) (London, 1979), 125–46; and Voaden, “Travels with Margery,” 181.
61. Josiah Pratt, ed., The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, 8 vols. (London, 1877), 2:268.
62. For this theme in general, and particularly in association with attitudes towards female
mobility, see Craig, Wandering Women, 21–78.
63. Christine de Pizan, The Treasure of the City of Ladies, trans. Sarah Lawson (London,
2003), 154, 135.
64. Morrison, Women Pilgrims, 107–119; and Craig, Wandering Women, 21.
65. For example, the second book of Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection (which was known
to Margery) discusses spiritual journeys to Jerusalem as a form of meditation. Other popular
fifteenth-century texts promoting the idea of interior pilgrimage include William Langland’s Piers
Plowman and John Lydgate’s The Pilgrimage of the Soul. For Margery’s Jerusalem pilgrimage as a
meditational experience, see Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa, “The Jerusalem Pilgrimage: The Centre of the
Structure of the Book of Margery Kempe,” English Studies 86 (2005): 193–205.
190 The Chaucer Review
66. In addition to Walter Hilton, Margery reveals that she was familiar with Bonaventure’s
Stimulus Amoris and Richard Rolle’s Incendium Amoris. See BMK, 294–96.
67. See, for example, Yoshikawa, “The Jerusalem Pilgrimage.”
68. As Gibson comments, Margery had a “fascination” with the nativity (“The Theatre of
Devotion,” 60). See also Wallace, “Anchoritic Damsel,” 122; and Windeatt, in BMK, 78.
anne e. bailey 191
If Margery did indeed wish to dissociate herself from the hoi polloi who
flocked to the latest fashionable shrine in the unseemly scrabble for indul-
gences and miracles, she had, of course, the perfect excuse. Unlike ordi-
nary pilgrims, she claimed to enjoy privileged access to the saints in heaven
through her visions and her ability to speak directly to God. Margery’s inti-
macies with Christ and her mystical marriage to the Godhead (BMK, 189–92)
take her firmly away from the milieu of commonplace pilgrimage and situate
her in the more refined domain of late-medieval female mysticism, which had
developed in the Low Countries and the Rhineland in the thirteenth century.
Indeed, Margery’s distinctive devotional repertoire, such as her Eucharistic
devotion, her emotional identification with Christ, her raptures, her conjugal
chastity, her charitable activities in Rome and, above all, her affective, somatic
piety, put her in the same league as a plethora of late-medieval visionaries
who may have provided Margery with models for emulation.69 To take just
a few examples, “clamouring and crying” was reputed to be a trait of Angela
de Foligno, while Jacques de Vitry reported that Marie d’Oignies—a known
exemplar for Margery (BMK, 292)—was prone to ecstatic shouting, and wept
such an abundance of tears that her outpourings muddied the ground.70
Catherine of Siena, who underwent a mystical marriage to Christ, was said
to communicate with Christ “more by way of tears than with her lips,” and
the Flemish nun Beatrice of Nazareth wept daily and believed tears to be the
first step on the ladder to virtue.71 Like Margery, Beatrice found that receiving
communion caused her to weep profusely.72
It is in this light that we might better understand Margery’s relationship
with her three Norwich mentors—the vicar Richard Caister, the Carmelite
William Southfield, and the anchoress Julian of Norwich—whose company
she chose in preference to visiting the shrines of local saints during her first
English tour.73 Caister, Southfield, and Julian all enjoyed reputations for holi-
ness during their lifetimes, and Margery later reacted to Caister’s death by
69. For example, female visionaries recorded as manifesting some or all of these tenden-
cies include Elisabeth of Schönau (d. 1164), Marie d’Oignies (d. 1213), Margaret of Ypres (d. 1237),
Lutard of Aywières (d. 1246), Beatrice of Nazareth (d. 1268), Angela de Foligno (d. 1309), Catherine
of Siena (d.1380), and Dorothy of Mantau (d. 1394).
70. The Book of Divine Consolation of the Blessed Angela of Foligno, trans. Mary G.
Steegmann (London, 1909), 167; and Jacques de Vitry, “The Life of Marie D’Oignies,” trans. King,
139, 60.
71. Raymond of Capua, The Life of St Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb (London,
1960), 99–101, 107; and The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth, trans. Roger de Ganck (Kalamazoo,
1991), 50.
72. The Life of Beatrice of Nazareth, trans. de Ganck, 82, 102.
73. The author is grateful to an anonymous reader of The Chaucer Review for prompting
this idea.
192 The Chaucer Review
weeping and praying at his graveside “as if he were a saint.”74 Southfield and
Julian were also renowned mystics. Here, then, were three individuals who
seem to have been living religious exemplars for Margery. Not only does she
choose her associates carefully, but those worthy of her emulation included
the living as well as the dead.
It is, then, among the rarefied ranks of female saints and other holy indi-
viduals where Margery would have her readers locate her. However, in order
to elevate herself to this level in her Book—and to demonstrate her valid-
ity as a bone fide holy woman on a mission from God—Margery needed to
show that she had little in common with the unrefined pilgrim masses who
received so much criticism in the late Middle Ages. She therefore created a
narrative persona for herself in which she stood apart from ordinary pilgrims
yet conformed as much as possible to carefully selected ideologies of holiness.
In this respect, we could argue that Margery saw herself less as a pilgrim and
more as a peripatetic visionary and mystic who toured her spirituality around
England, Europe, and the Holy Land. We may even understand Margery bet-
ter as a “religious tourist,” rather than as a “pilgrim,” and speculate that for
Margery—if not always for modern scholars—there was crucial conceptual
distinction between the two.75
Margery’s Self-Image
Borrowing from social science methodology, we can probe a little further
into Margery’s religious self-image by asking to what extent she self-identifies
as a pilgrim.76 This might be achieved by considering the number of times
she refers to herself as a “pilgrim,” and her activities as “pilgrimages.” First,
it should be noted that occurrences of the word “pilgrimage” and its deriva-
tives in the text suggest that, in general, Margery was not averse to the term.
Her fellow travelers are sometimes described as pilgrims (BMK, 222, 232, 233,
408); she mentions her son going on pilgrimage (BMK, 389); and others ask
her to go “on pilgrimage,” for example, to Wilsnack (BMK, 399) and—as has
74. See n. 41 above.
75. Religious tourism might be defined as “travel motivated by religion.” For the differ-
ence between pilgrimage and religious tourism, see, for example, Ruth Blackwell, “Motivations
for Religious Tourism, Pilgrimage, Festivals and Events,” in Razaq Raj and Nigel D. Morpeth, eds,
Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage Festivals Management: An International Perspective (Wallingford,
2007), 36–39.
76. As noted by Noga Collins-Kreiner, pilgrimage research has become more subject-based
in the last couple of decades, focusing on how pilgrims themselves interpret their own experiences
(“Researching Pilgrimage: Continuity and Transformation,” Annals of Tourism Research 37 [2009]:
440–56, at 448).
anne e. bailey 193
already been noted—to the Church of St. Michael the Archangel (BMK, 360).
Given these uses of the label, it is therefore intriguing that “pilgrim” is rarely
a word Margery associates with herself. Pilgrimage, it seems, was an activity
she related more to others.
Indeed, there are only two episodes in which Margery directly
self-references as a pilgrim and, in both cases, her adoption of a pilgrim iden-
tity should not necessarily be taken at face value. The first of these episodes
takes place when Margery is about to embark on her voyage to Compostela
(BMK, 224–26). After a frustrating six weeks spent in Bristol waiting for a
ship, her departure is further delayed by a mysterious summons from Thomas
Peverel, bishop of Worcester. No doubt exasperated at a further setback, and
perhaps worried about what the unexpected request might portend, Margery
duly arrives at the bishop’s residence at Henbury, three miles outside Bristol.
Evidently on the defensive, she complains to the bishop that the unexpected
detour to Henbury was “to hir gret noye and hynderawns, in-as-meche as
sche was a pilgryme, purposyng be the grace of God to-Seynt-Jamys-warde”
(BMK, 225).
These words were carefully chosen. Not only did her claim to be on pil-
grimage provide her with a moral license to travel, but, in fifteenth-century
England, identifying oneself as a pilgrim was a defense against Lollardy.77
Margery’s allusion to herself as an innocent pilgrim can therefore be read as a
defensive strategy intended to ward off suspicions about her activities as well
as a means of legitimizing her peripatetic lifestyle.78
The circumstance of Margery’s second reference to herself as a pilgrim is
not dissimilar to the first except that, given his anti-Lollard sentiments, her
episcopal interlocutor—Henry Bowett, archbishop of York—is potentially a
greater threat to her travel ambitions.79 In this episode, Margery is questioned
at York Minster and asked to account for her presence in the city. As has been
mentioned, her reply, “I come on pilgrimage to offyr her at Seynt William”
(BMK, 246), is not quite all that it seems. Not only does Margery fail to depict
herself venerating at the saint’s shrine, but her two weeks in York seem to have
been spent disturbing congregations with her noisy weeping and provok-
ing the irritation of a local cleric who no doubt brought her behavior to the
77. Lollards were known to repudiate pilgrimage and relic veneration. See John H. Arnold,
“Margery’s Trials: Heresy, Lollardy and Dissent,” in Arnold and Lewis, eds., A Companion to the
Book of Margery Kempe, 75–93, at 90.
78. For the wider theme of Margery’s pilgrimages legitimizing her mission, see McIntyre,
“Margery’s ‘Mixed Life.’”
79. This was Henry Bowett, archbishop of York; see Windeatt, in BMK, 249.
194 The Chaucer Review
Conclusion
Close analysis of The Book of Margery Kempe strongly suggests that Margery
did not depict herself as an ordinary pilgrim according to the conventions
of her day. In her earlier travels around England she behaves more like a
religious diplomat than a religious devotee, and in her later English journeys
she fashions herself as a persecuted religious heroine. In Rome and Jerusalem
she distances herself from other pilgrims and clearly feels greater affin-
ity with figures of spiritual authority than with her social peers. Margery’s
travel motivations and experiences seem to mark her out as an unusual
kind of Christian who practiced a limited, and refined, style of pilgrimage
rather different from those undertaken by other members of the laity of
the time.
anne e. bailey 195
80. We can only speculate on Margery’s intended readership. However, after her death the
manuscript was in the possession of the Carthusians of Mount Grace Priory, who valued the text as
a mystical treatise.
81. Most notably, Dionigi Albera and John Eade, eds., New Pathways in Pilgrimage Studies:
Global Perspectives (New York, 2017).
196 The Chaucer Review
University of Oxford
Oxford, England
(anne.bailey@history.ox.ac.uk)