The Problematic Pilgrim: Rethinking Margery’s Pilgrim

Identity in The Book of Margery Kempe

Anne E. Bailey

The Chaucer Review, Volume 55, Number 2, 2020, pp. 171-196 (Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/751577

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 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.

KEYWORDS: female spirituality, female travel, Margery Kempe, pilgrimage, Wife of

Bath

Along with Chaucer’s fictional Wife of Bath, Margery Kempe is probably

the best known female pilgrim of the Christian Middle Ages. Born in about
1373, this spiritually ambitious wife and mother began traveling beyond
her native town of Bishop’s Lynn, in Norfolk, in her early forties. Having
decided to devote herself to Christ, Margery set off on a peripatetic mis-
sion around England to establish her reputation as a devout visionary and
holy woman.

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.

Margery the Pilgrim: Existing Scholarship

Pilgrimage ostensibly looms large in The Book of Margery Kempe: a large
proportion of the text is dedicated to Margery’s religious journeying.
However, although Margery makes frequent appearances in studies focus-
ing on medieval pilgrimage—with one commentator describing her Book
as “our most accessible and candid picture of the experience of a woman

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

pilgrim”—Margery Kempe scholarship often avoids this fundamental facet

of her narrative and historical identity.7 A Companion to the Book of Margery
Kempe (2004), for example, dedicates separate chapters to various aspects of
Margery’s life, but is virtually silent on the topic of pilgrimage. This seems to
be a perennial feature in the mainstream scholarship: the Oxford Bibliography
entry for Margery (2018) records only a handful of works dedicated to her
travels or pilgrimages, in marked contrast to the attention given to other,
more academically fashionable, features of Margery’s religious experiences,
such as her mysticism and spirituality.8
One reason for this disinclination to engage with the peripatetic nature
of Margery’s religiosity may be the sketchy treatment given to her various
journeys in the text. Unlike the pilgrim narratives produced by her medieval
peers, The Book of Margery Kempe lacks specific temporal and geographical
references, omits many descriptive details about religious sites and shrines,
and takes little interest in the landscapes and topographies encountered by
its protagonist on her travels.9 As many scholars have noted, Margery’s Book
describes her spiritual experience of places rather than the places themselves,
and, as a consequence, provides only a partial view of pilgrimage reality.10 As
a kind of unsatisfactory pilgrim narrative, Margery’s Book confounds modern
expectations of genre.11
Studies that do give consideration to Margery’s pilgrim identity tend to
approach the theme in one of three ways. The first is to view Margery’s journeys
to religious centers as pilgrimages, regardless of Margery’s stated motivations
or experiences. In this respect, the terms pilgrimage and travel are sometimes
used interchangeably, as if to suggest that the categories are synonymous.12

7. Hopper, Mothers, Mystics and Merrymakers, 5

8. Watt, “Margery Kempe.”
9. Samuel Fanous, “Measuring the Pilgrim’s Progress: Internal Emphasis in The Book of Margery
Kempe,” in Renevey and Whitehead, eds., Writing Religious Women, 157–76; Ruth Summar
McIntyre, “Margery’s ‘Mixed Life’: Place Pilgrimage and the Problem of Genre in The Book of
Margery Kempe,” English Studies 89 (2008): 643–61, at 647; Voaden, “Travels with Margery,” 185;
Diane Watt, “Faith in the Landscape: Overseas Pilgrimages in The Book of Margery Kempe,” in
Clare A. Lees and Gillian R. Overing, eds., A Place to Believe In: Locating Medieval Landscapes
(University Park, Pa., 2006), 170–87, at 172, 176; and Anthony Goodman, Margery Kempe and Her
World (Edinburgh, 2002), 162.
10. In addition to the texts cited in note 9, see Sue Niebrzydowski, “The Middle-Aged
Meanderings of Margery Kempe: Medieval Women and Pilgrimage,” in Isabelle Cochelin and
Karen Smyth, eds., Medieval Life Cycles: Continuity and Change (Turnout, 2013), 265–318, at 281.
11. For example, see Fanous, “Measuring the Pilgrim’s Progress”; and McIntyre, “Margery’s
‘Mixed Life,’” 643–61. David Wallace sees Margery’s Book intersecting with the genre of romance
(“Anchoritic Damsel: Margery Kempe of Lynn, c.1373–c.1440,” in his Strong Women: Life, Text and
Territory 1347–1645 [Oxford, 2011], 61–132).
12. For example, Voaden, “Travels with Margery”; and Bowers, “Margery Kempe as Traveler,” 1–28.
176 The Chaucer Review

Margery’s later wanderings in northern Europe—often described as a

pilgrimage—are particularly problematic in this respect, since the section
of the Book recounting this protracted venture unfolds more like a secular
travel account than a pilgrimage narrative. The choice of Danzig as Margery’s
destination, for example, may well have been promoted by a desire to visit a
Brigittine pilgrimage site (as proposed by Julia Bolton Holloway and David
Wallace), but the text records only a secular purpose for the journey: namely,
the chaperoning of her daughter-in-law to her hometown in Germany
(BMK, 392).13 As noted by Rosalynn Voaden, Margery’s impulsive decision to
travel to Germany renders her more an “accidental tourist” than a pilgrim.14
Other commentators interpret these later travels to the Continent as a series
of separate pilgrimages focusing on Aachen and Wilsnack, or argue that
Margery “turned herself ” from traveler to pilgrim as her journey progressed.15
The conflation of Margery the pilgrim with Margery the traveler rests on
underlying assumptions about what constituted a pilgrimage in the Middle
Ages. Definitions given by Margery Kempe scholars tend to mold themselves
around Margery’s own practices, and include activities that were not neces-
sarily common pilgrimage traits in the Middle Ages. Voaden, for example,
characterizes pilgrimage in Margery’s Book as “visiting shrines, holy sites and
devout persons throughout England and Europe,” while Clarissa Atkinson
describes Margery as “a typical medieval pilgrim” insofar as she “travelled to
greater and lesser shrines to venerate relics, to commemorate the lives and
deaths of Christ and the saints, and to expiate her sins.”16 As will be argued,
the Margery depicted in her Book is far from a “typical” pilgrim. A close
examination of Margery’s motivations and practices reveals that the venera-
tion of relics and the expiation of sins were not at the top of her travel agenda,
while seeking audiences with holy persons was far from the usual custom of
ordinary pilgrims.
The second, and most common, approach to pilgrimage in The Book
of Margery Kempe is to understand the category of “pilgrimage” more as
an interior journey of the soul than as a physical one of the body, and to

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

subsume Margery’s pilgrimage identity within her wider devotional p ­ ersona.

Here, Margery’s status as a flesh-and-blood pilgrim traveling through real
landscapes tends to be given less importance than her spiritual journey.
Atkinson’s 1983 study, Mystic and Pilgrim, for example, devotes only eight
pages to Margery as a “pilgrim,” on the basis that pilgrimage was one element
of Margery’s broader mysticism.17 “The mystic and the pilgrim are not sep-
arate in Margery Kempe,” Atkinson writes—a conclusion with which Ruth
Summar McIntryre agrees.18
Taking a slightly different approach, Dee Dyas argues that Margery is
more pilgrim than mystic insofar as her pilgrimages to Jerusalem and other
holy places are “part of her lifelong pilgrimage” and become “opportuni-
ties for moral or spiritual growth.”19 In this reading, Margery embraces the
“life as a pilgrimage” ideal by incorporating penitential activities, rituals,
and behaviors into her everyday life.20 From this perspective, pilgrimage
sites simply number among the many possible venues for Margery’s “spiri-
tual performances.”21 As Diane Watt explains, Margery’s “pilgrimage perfor-
mances” are enacted anywhere and at any time, in both public and private
settings, from churches to streets and fields.22
The notion of pilgrimage as a spiritual life journey to be practiced on a
daily basis was a popular theological concept in the fifteenth century, as will
be discussed. However, Margery’s travels were much more than a reflection of
her interior spirituality, and the difficulty with arguing that “pilgrimage was
a continuous and vital part of [Margery’s] religious praxis”23 is that it denies
the possibility that pilgrimage was—at least to most medieval laypeople—
a distinct ritual practice separate from routine activities and other religious
devotions. Pilgrimage, after all, is usually understood as being “beyond visits
of normal everyday worship.”24 This raises the question of whether Margery
saw herself as a conventional pilgrim, or whether she sought to experience
pilgrimage differently from other religious travelers. Given Margery’s pro-
pensity for challenging the expectations of accepted female behavior, we
might even ask whether the socially-conforming label of “pilgrim” was one
she would have chosen for herself.
17. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim, 51–58.
18. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim, 58; and McIntyre, “Margery’s ‘Mixed Life.’”
19. Dee Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 700–1500 (Woodbridge, 2001), 224.
20. Dyas, Pilgrimage, 226.
21. Voaden, “Travels with Margery,” 178.
22. Watt, “Faith in the Landscape,” 176.
23. Voaden, “Travels with Margery,” 178.
24. James Harpur, The Pilgrim Journey: A History of Pilgrimage in the Western World
(Oxford, 2015), 12.
178 The Chaucer Review

A third approach to Margery’s pilgrim identity is epitomized by Anthony

Goodman in Margery Kempe and Her World. Goodman addresses the paucity of
evidence for Margery’s wider pilgrimage interests by attributing to her the kind
of devotional practices recorded for other late-medieval pilgrims. Throughout
his book, he draws readers’ attention to the perplexing absence of relic and saint
veneration in Margery’s narrative, and he lists example after example of reli-
gious pursuits omitted from her Book, but which, nevertheless, we might imag-
ine her undertaking out of sight of her readers. Noting that Margery is strangely
silent about “the awesome relics in Venice,” for example, he conjectures that she
must have “visited Venetian churches to see relics and gain indulgences” and
was likely to have “responded to the city’s intense devotion to the cults of the
Virgin Mary.”25 Goodman repeatedly assumes a pilgrim identity for Margery
when none is suggested in her narrative, and tries to look beyond the page for
the “real” pilgrim Margery who is so disturbingly missing from the text.26
Goodman shares with many modern scholars an understandable desire
to conceptually place Margery in the role of pilgrim. While it is likely that the
historical Margery did indeed engage in many of the routine pilgrim practices
suggested by Goodman, the problem with focusing on Margery’s probable
“off-stage” activities is that our attention is drawn away from what Margery
herself is trying to tell us. A different approach to the anomalies noted by
Goodman might be to ask why it is that Margery’s religious journeys and devo-
tional experiences so often seem to differ from those of other pilgrims, and to
question—rather than take for granted—her pilgrim identity in the text.
The remainder of this article explores the problematic issue of Margery’s pil-
grim identity by examining her domestic and foreign travels as described in her
Book. It ascertains the specific nature of Margery’s various religious journeys,
considers her motivations for traveling, and finally poses a rarely asked question:
to what extent does Margery self-identify as a pilgrim in her travel reminiscences?

Margery’s English Journeys

In Medieval Hagiography, Thomas Head defines medieval pilgrimage as
“the process by which pious Christians come to the shrines of the saints in
search of their intervention.”27 Most medievalists would agree that this is a

25. Goodman, Margery Kempe, 178.

26. To further Goodman’s point, the fifteenth-century English pilgrim William Wey item-
izes no fewer than twenty-four “must-see” relics in and around Venice (The Itineraries of William
Wey, ed. and trans. Francis Davey [Oxford, 2010], 66).
27. Thomas Head, ed., Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology (London, 2001), 275.
 anne e. bailey 179

fair ­assessment of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages. Whether seeking cures

from local saints or indulgences at shrines further afield, pilgrims primar-
ily gathered at holy places to ask for intercessory aid from the “very special
dead”—as Peter Brown called the saintly immortals—through contact with
their material relics.28 Problems arise, however, when trying to fit Margery
into this standard model of pilgrimage because neither saints’ shrines nor
a desire for intercessory assistance seem to be particularly important in her
Book. Nowhere is this more evident than in Margery’s descriptions of her two
English tours taken, respectively, in 1413 and 1417–18.
Although given less scholarly attention than her overseas journeys,
Margery’s English travels are often seen as another facet of Margery’s pilgrim
identity. Diana Webb, for example, implies that Margery traveled as a “pilgrim”
in England, and Dyas explains that although Margery was renowned for her
overseas pilgrimages, she “was equally committed to visiting shrines within
England.”29 Along with Webb, Sue Niebrzydowski describes Margery’s visits
to York and Bridlington as “pilgrimages,” although Webb later admits that
Margery “says nothing specific about pilgrimage” in the case of Bridlington.30
Niebrzydowski adds the “shrine of St. Thomas Becket” as a further English pil-
grimage location visited by Margery, as does Webb.31 Implicit in these asser-
tions about Margery’s English pilgrimages is the assumption that Margery’s
presence at places associated with well-known saints’ cults must have had a
devotional purpose, and that Margery’s experiences at these locations were
those of a pilgrim. Goodman, for example, speaks of Margery’s “devotion”
to John of Bridlington, and describes Margery as “a devotee” of William of
York.32 Barry Windeatt similarly conjectures that the purpose of Margery’s
visit to Bridlington was to spend time at the shrine of John of Bridlington
“much visited by pilgrims.”33
There are, however, a few difficulties with imagining Margery as an active
pilgrim at Bridlington, Canterbury, and York. Neither of the Book’s fleet-
ing references to Bridlington mentions the cult of Saint John, for example
(BMK, 87, 257), and at Canterbury Margery seems more interested in con-
versing with monks than communing with saints (BMK, 92–95). At York she
28. Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Fall in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981),
69–85.
29. Webb, Pilgrimage, 206; Dyas, Pilgrimage, 130. Also see Barry Windeatt, “Introduction:
Reading and Re-Reading the Book of Margery Kempe,” in Arnold and Lewis, eds., A Companion to
the Book of Margery Kempe, 1–16, at 13; and McIntyre, “Margery’s ‘Mixed Life,’” 658.
30. Webb, Pilgrimage, 204–5; and Niebrzydowski, “The Middle-Aged Meanderings,” 267.
31. Niebrzydowski, “The Middle-Aged Meanderings,” 267; and Webb, Pilgrimage, 221.
32. Goodman, Margery Kempe, 136, 135.
33. BMK, 87–88.
180 The Chaucer Review

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

Persecution, rather than pilgrimage, soon becomes the main theme of

Margery’s post-­ Jerusalem English journeys. The pattern of detention,
incarceration, interrogation, and acquittal repeats itself again and again as
Margery moves from Leicester to York, to Bridlington, to Hull, to Beverley,
and to Lincoln, before finally arriving safely home in Lynn. Each episode is
framed as a kind of religious adventure story, portraying Margery as a saintly
heroine skillfully defending herself against the groundless accusations of her
enemies and winning over the ecclesiastical authorities with her wit, wisdom,
and unshakable faith. If comparisons with the apocryphal virgin martyr
Catherine of Alexandria suggested themselves to Margery’s readers, this was
surely intended.
While it is difficult to construe either of Margery’s two English tours as
pilgrimages in the conventional sense, there is one journey to a local place
of worship that is explicitly referred to in this way in the text. This is what
Webb calls a “miniature pilgrimage”: the two-mile trip made by Margery
from Lynn to the Church of St. Michael the Archangel, on the request of
two priests who wish to discover whether Margery’s somatic piety would
manifest itself without a public audience (BMK, 360).43 There are two points
of interest here. First, the visit to the church is not one that Margery chooses
to make of her own accord; the “pilgrimage” is the idea of the priests. Second,
the term “pilgrimage” in this episode does not come from Margery herself,
but from the two cynics who determine to test her faith by taking her “on
pilgrimage.”
The priests’ choice of the word “pilgrimage” in this passage might be
interpreted as their misunderstanding of Margery’s spirituality and their
willingness to set Margery within a more ordinary, conventional religious
context. Margery, it will be argued, purposely places herself outside the nor-
mative boundaries of pilgrimage, and in this episode we see her proving
this point—and allaying the priests’ reservations as to her genuine piety—
by ­crying “as lowed er ellys lowder as sche dede whan sche was amongys
the pepil at hom.” In other words, she demonstrates that she is no ordinary
pilgrim, but a genuine holy woman touched by God.
There is another oddity about this “pilgrimage” episode. If St. Michael’s
Church were indeed a pilgrimage destination, as the priests imply, then
Margery and her small party seem to be the only visitors. As elsewhere in her
English travels, Margery is rarely depicted among other pilgrims. Whether at
Canterbury or York, other lay devotees are strangely absent from the picture.

43. Webb, Pilgrimage, 206.

 anne e. bailey 183

This is an important characteristic of Margery’s depiction of herself, to which

this article will return.

Margery’s Overseas Journeys

Unlike Margery’s English travels, her overseas journeys more comfortably
conform to the conventions of medieval pilgrimage as recorded in contem-
porary texts. Her stated motivation for traveling to the Holy Land is far from
unique:

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)

Where Margery’s text diverges from contemporary pilgrim accounts, how-

ever, is the way in which she describes her encounters with these “holy
placys.” As many scholars have observed, Margery’s tendency to focus on
her inward spiritual experiences means that physical locations often “fade
into the background.”44 In Rome, for example, she names only a “handful of
churches and religious sites” and shows little interest in relics, despite a stay
of almost six months.45
The strangest narrative omissions in this respect concern two of the
most popular European pilgrimage destinations after Rome: Cologne and
Santiago de Compostela. Cologne, the location of the famed shrine of the
Three Kings, lay on the pilgrimage route between Wilsnack and Aachen, and
since Margery visited both Wilsnack and Aachen, her silence with respect to
Cologne is decidedly odd.46 Stranger still is her treatment of her pilgrimage
to Santiago de Compostela, home to the renowned relics of Saint James the
Greater (BMK, 227). The text indicates that Margery remained at Compostela
for two weeks, yet she reveals nothing about how she spent her time at
Christendom’s third most important shrine. Here, and elsewhere on her trav-
els, we may assume that Margery engaged in routine devotional activities
along with other pilgrims, so it is something of a puzzle as to why she decided
not to portray herself in this way.

44. Watt, “Faith in the Landscape,” 174.

45. Watt, “Faith in the Landscape,” 178. To put this into perspective, in the 1450s, Wey
describes seven principal churches and over a hundred lesser churches and chapels that pilgrims
might visit (Itineraries, ed. Davey, 191–99).
46. Wallace, “Anchoritic Damsel,” 120.
184 The Chaucer Review

While local pilgrimages were often motivated by health and family

­concerns, the appeal of long-haul destinations in the late Middle Ages lay
primarily in the indulgences granted at certain shrines and altars, which were
believed to shorten the time a soul spent in purgatory. When the German
Dominican preacher Felix Fabri made the journey to Jerusalem in 1483, he
recorded an astonishing number of altars and biblical landmarks offering
indulgences to the faithful. In his manuscript he dutifully recorded, with a
cross, each place offering indulgences (a single cross for an ordinary indul-
gence, a double cross for a plenary indulgence), suggesting that the collec-
tion of Holy Land indulgences was of great importance to contemporary
pilgrims.47 In this respect, Margery differs from her pilgrim peers because—
as other scholars have also noted—indulgences are barely mentioned in her
recollections.48 Since she believed that God had already absolved her from
her sins (BMK, 70–71, 101, 135), she had no need to seek remission for time
spent in purgatory (BMK, 170). Indulgences would have held little personal
relevance for her, in contrast to most other pilgrims in the late Middle Ages.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Margery’s overseas pilgrimages
is her alienation from other travelers and her persistent efforts to procure
the services of often reluctant or recalcitrant escorts. In the fifteenth century
it was the norm for long-distance pilgrims—particularly women—to join
organized or ad hoc companies of travelers for safety, convenience, and fel-
lowship.49 For pilgrimages to the Holy Land—which had become something
akin to commercial package tours by the fifteenth century—group travel was
virtually unavoidable. Wherever she journeys, however, Margery has a less
than amicable relationship with her companions. On the outward journey to
Jerusalem, they repeatedly abandon her, or try to humiliate her with spiteful
ploys such as trimming her gown (BMK, 152), forcing her to wear a garment of
sacking (BMK, 152–53), and ostracizing her at the dinner table by insisting that
she sit below them (BMK, 153). They also take her maidservant and money
(BMK, 152), and once onboard ship they confiscate her bedding (BMK, 160).
This unkind treatment continues after their arrival in Palestine: her party
leaves her to struggle up Mount Quarentyne without them (BMK, 172–73),
47. Aubrey Stewart, trans., The Book of the Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri, 2 vols.
(London, 1892–93), 1:282-321. Two other fifteenth-century pilgrims, Wey and Richard of Lincoln,
similarly itemize indulgences offered in the Holy Land (Itineraries, ed. Davey, 72–90); and Richard
of Lincoln, A Medieval Doctor’s Travels to Jerusalem, ed. and trans. Francis Davey [Exeter, 2013],
41–44).
48. Schein, “Bridget of Sweden,” 44–58; and Goodman, Margery Kempe, 154.
49. Sumption, Pilgrimage, 196–97; and Diana Webb, “Freedom of Movement? Women
Travellers in the Middle Ages,” in Christine Meek and Catherine Lawless, eds., Pawns or Players?:
Studies on Medieval and Early Modern Women (Dublin, 2003), 75–89, at 82.
 anne e. bailey 185

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

Yyf wyl gon in owyr felawshep, ye must makyn a new comnawnt,

and that is this: ye schal not [speke] of the Gospel wher we come,
but ye schal syttyn stylle and makyn mery, as we don, bothin at mete
and at soper. (BMK, 158)

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).

52. Turner, The Ritual Process, 134.

53. Voaden, “Travels with Margery,” 186.
 anne e. bailey 187

Indeed, Margery emerges as the sole performer at most religious destinations,

as might be illustrated at Aachen where, to all intents and purposes, the
expected pilgrims “fro many a cuntre” promised by her guide never materi-
alize (BMK, 400, 402). Her arrival in the city coincided with the seven-year
exposition of the cathedral’s famous relics, yet, as remarked by Wallace, read-
ers “get nothing of the experience of sharing all this with thousands of fellow
pilgrims.”54
Although, on the one hand, Margery often distances herself from other
pilgrims, on the other, the Book emphasizes her closeness to religious figures
of authority. Whereas in England Margery’s focus is on the hospitality of high-
ranking churchmen, in the Holy Land she emphasizes her elevated stand-
ing with the resident Saracens and Franciscans who treat her, she implies,
like an honored guest. The Saracens who befriended her, “mad mych of hir,”
and “conveyd hir and leddyn hir abowtyn in the cuntre wher sche wold gon”
(BMK, 174), while the Franciscans invited her to eat with them (BMK, 172),
gave her “many gret relykys,” and expressed a wish that she might stay with
them in Jerusalem (BMK, 174).
There is something suggestive here of famous pioneering female pilgrims
who enjoyed a special relationship with Jerusalem’s religious elite. One of the
earliest examples is the devout Spanish woman, Egeria, who traveled to the
Holy Land in the late fourth century and visited the Christian ascetics whose
exemplary way of life she had heard so much about.55 These “holy men” took
her under their wing and guided her around “the different places mentioned
in the Bible,” while the Bishop of Edessa provided her with a personal tour
of his province.56 In her journal Egeria repeatedly expresses gratitude for the
generosity of the monks and hermits who invited her into their cells and
allowed her to converse with them on religious matters.57 A millennium later,
of course, Margery also made a point of seeking out “Goddys servawntys,
bothen ankrys and reclusys” (BMK, 90) for holy conversation, guidance, and
hospitality.
The Roman widow, Paula, is another possible early role model for
Margery. A protégée of Jerome, Paula toured the Holy Land before settling
in Bethlehem and, like Margery, visualized “with the eyes of faith” events
that had happened in first-century Palestine. According to Jerome, places

54. Wallace, “Anchoritic Damsel,” 122.

55. “Egeria’s Travels,” in John Wilkinson, ed. and trans, Egeria’s Travels to the Holy Land
(Warminster, 1981), 91–147.
56. “Egeria’s Travels,” trans. Wilkerson, 101, 115–21.
57. “Egeria’s Travels,” trans. Wilkerson, 98; see also 93, 106, 119, 120–21.
188 The Chaucer Review

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.

Margery’s Devotional Activities in Context

The practice of pilgrimage had changed considerably since the fourth century
when Egeria and Paula were touring the Holy Land, and Margery’s apparent
detachment from many mainstream pilgrimage pursuits needs to be contex-
tualized within the religious climate of her time. By the fifteenth century, pil-
grimage had developed from a form of spiritual elitism practiced by the few
into a far more widespread, democratized, and commercialized undertaking.
Visiting local shrines had become a routine practice even for the peasantry,

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

and crossing continents on pilgrimage was so commonplace that Chaucer felt

obliged to satirize serial long-haul pilgrims in the figure of Alisoun the Wife
of Bath, who—like Margery—had traveled to Jerusalem, Rome, Compostela,
and Bologna.
Although criticism of Christian pilgrimage was nothing new, the late
Middle Ages saw a proliferation of anti-pilgrimage writing, perhaps in
response to a feeling that the practice was swerving dangerously towards
secularizing tendencies.60 It seemed to many hard-line contemporaries that
the true spirit of pilgrimage had been lost in an era of mass participation. At
best, pilgrimage was said to have become an excuse for revelry and frivolity;
at worst, it was claimed to be a screen for immorality and vice. As the Lollard
preacher William Thorpe famously declared in 1407, pilgrimages were often
more about bodily pleasures than about the health of the soul.61 Women in
particular were accused of being “false” pilgrims and of treating pilgrimage as
a form of recreation.62 Christine de Pizan, for example, warned wives against
going on pilgrimage “for no good reason,” and advised that a virtuous woman
should not use pilgrimage “as an excuse to get away from town in order to go
somewhere to play about or kick up her heels in merry company.”63 Tales also
abounded about wives who used pilgrimage as an excuse for sexual dalliances,
and women’s pilgrimages were often associated with “unbridled sexuality.”64
Many theologians—including those known to Margery through their
spiritual treatises—responded to the deepening disquiet about religious
mobility by promulgating the benefits of meditative spiritual pilgrimage over
physical ones, and advising Christians how to undertake a “pilgrimage of the
soul.”65 More controversial detractors, like the Lollards, took a stronger view.
Anticipating Luther, they proclaimed relic veneration to be nothing more
than superstition and idolatry, and declared that pilgrimage was a money-
wasting folly which enticed the gullible into religious error.

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

Margery’s spiritual identity, as articulated in her Book, should be

understood within these late-medieval cultural currents, and read along-
side Margery’s determination to portray herself as a “true” Christian who
faithfully followed Christ’s bidding. Margery resolutely upholds her pious
principles wherever she travels, and she is repeatedly disparaging towards
those—like the blaspheming clerics at Lambeth Palace (BMK, 109) and the
bishop of Worcester’s fashionably attired servants (BMK, 225)—who fall short
of her moral and religious standards. It may be indicative of Margery’s pur-
ist leanings that, in her Book, she seems to distance herself from many of the
popular beliefs and practices condemned by the Lollards such as indulgences,
the veneration of local saints, and the allure of healing shrines. Although
clearly not subscribing to the wider range of Lollard values, Margery’s avoid-
ance of some frequently criticized aspects of “popular” devotion suggests that
she was at least conceptually placing herself above the common, undiscrimi-
nating crowd.66
One way in which Margery draws readers’ attention to her “superior”
form of religiosity is in the descriptions of her Christocentric piety. Ignoring,
or skimming over, popular devotion to the enshrined bodies of saints, she
instead turns her attention to places and objects associated with Christ’s birth
and death. This might be demonstrated by the central role played by the Holy
Land in her text,67 by her interest in holy blood relics (BMK, 227, 227), by her
constant yearning to receive Communion, and by her dramatically emotional
response to the sacrament (BMK, 151, 169, 170, 182, 222, 222–23, 244–45, 274,
320–21, 404–405). A great deal of Margery’s emotional piety is also focused
on Mary as mother of Christ, and several Marian shrines feature as religious
destinations in the text (BMK, 150, 180, 394).68
Margery’s pilgrimage activities, then, seem to follow a particular pattern.
She is selective in the shrines she chooses to mention, and this selectivity
serves to present her as a discerning pilgrim favoring destinations that allow
her to connect imaginatively and spiritually with Christ as recommended in
the devotional literature that she so much admired. Her selective approach
seems to place her outside the usual sphere of mainstream pilgrimage and
distinguishes her from more conventional pilgrims found flocking to popular
miracle-working shrines.

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

a­ttention of the ecclesiastical authorities. Interrogated by the archbishop’s

clerics, and finally questioned by the archbishop himself, Margery again
assumes a pilgrim identity for her own protection.
As at Henbury, Margery takes a defensive stance, demanding of the arch-
bishop, “Why fare ye thus wyth me mor than ye don wyth other pilgrimys
that ben her?” (BMK, 246). This is an interesting remark because it can be
read on two levels. Ostensibly, it aligns her with other York devotees, and the
implication is that she is one amongst many pilgrims and should not be sub-
jected to different treatment. However, on another level, the question simul-
taneously works to flag up Margery’s uniqueness because it invites an obvious
response from her readers: Margery is treated differently from “other pilgri-
mys” because she is different from them. Far from suggesting that Margery
is just another pilgrim, the episode at York serves to highlight her excep-
tionality, demonstrating that she was singled out for special treatment by the
Church authorities just as she is singled out for special attention by God.
The most obvious place to search for clues for Margery’s self-image is
in the Book’s Proem, which summarizes those aspects of Margery’s spiritual
life that she considered important. As readers might expect, the Proem men-
tions facets of her experiences that frequently appear in her main narrative:
her weeping and sobbing, her contemplations, the “slawnder and repref ”
(BMK, 43) she suffered at the hands of others, and the support she gained
from her religious counselors (BMK, 41–50). In this respect, it is striking that
pilgrimage does not make an appearance; it is not listed among Margery’s
religious achievements. “Pilgrim,” we might surmise, was not a significant
element of her self-created devotional persona.

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

Margery’s choice of travel destinations, her motivations, and her

devotional practices, along with her apparent reluctance to self-identify as
a pilgrim, all suggest that she would not have particularly welcomed the
“pilgrim” label given to her by modern scholars. On the contrary, Margery
seems to have taken pains in her Book to disassociate herself from other
pilgrims and their activities. The text flags up her individuality at every turn,
often by recording the startled, horrified, or troubled reactions of onlookers.
However, for those in the know—such as the more discerning readers whom
she may have had in mind—her departure from the pilgrim norm also
signalled her movement towards a far superior spiritual destination.80
This conclusion is not to argue that the “historical” Margery did not
behave in a more conventional manner outside the pages of her memoires,
only to speculate that she did not wish her readers to see her in this undis-
tinguishing light. In this respect, it is notable that the one major pilgrimage
that we learn virtually nothing about is the one that may have been the most
“normal” and mundane, judging by the fact that it elicited no comment. This
was Margery’s trip to Santiago de Compostela. The only detail to which read-
ers are made privy is the fact that her travel companions did not desert her
as they did elsewhere and—somewhat remarkably given her track record—
“made hir good cher” (BMK, 227). This offhand remark, together with her
silence about the pilgrimage, indicates that—unlike many of Margery’s other
exploits—the journey did nothing to enhance Margery’s exceptionality, and
so was not worthy of note.
If, as proposed in this article, Margery did not view herself as a pilgrim,
this finding has important implications for medieval and wider scholarship.
First, and most obviously, it offers a deeper understanding of who Margery was
and enriches our appreciation of Margery’s motivations in writing her Book.
Second, it provides greater insight into the complexity of lay spirituality in the
late Middle Ages by drawing attention to the fact that visiting a holy place was
not automatically considered an act of pilgrimage in contemporaries’ eyes.
Third, it highlights a fundamental methodological issue recognized in the
field of pilgrimage studies: namely, that “pilgrimage” is an essentializing term
that Western scholars often employ somewhat loosely without giving much
consideration to the cultural context to which it is applied.81 In this respect,

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

envisaging Margery as a pilgrim not only risks misunderstanding her and

her motivations, but it also risks misunderstanding the nuances of religious
culture in the late Middle Ages. As I hope this article has shown, fifteenth-
century pilgrimage does not necessarily conform to modern ideas of pilgrim-
age, nor even to modern ideas about medieval pilgrimage. Margery—with
her non-pilgrim identity—has much to tell us about what pilgrimage was,
and was not, in her social and cultural world.
The realization that Margery may not have been a conventional pilgrim
also problematizes the scholarly pairing of Margery with Chaucer’s Wife of
Bath. Although Alisoun and Margery share similar travel itineraries, their
pilgrim personas could not be more different. On the one hand we have
the five-times married, sexually voracious Alisoun with her fine, expensive
clothes and her love of merry fellowship and, on the other, we have the chaste,
companionless Margery who spurned pilgrim sociability and viewed a fond-
ness for fashionable attire as sinful pride (BMK, 57, 225, 322, 388). While one
went on pilgrimage in search of amorous adventure, the other did everything
she could to ward off unwanted sexual attention and was “evyr aferd to a be
ravischyd er defilyd” (BMK, 412, and 176, 231, 406).
In other words, in embodying the late-medieval image of the female
pilgrim “gone bad,” Alisoun represents everything that Margery tries not to
be. It is, therefore, somewhat ironic that Margery and Alisoun are frequently
bracketed together in modern pilgrimage scholarship as famous female pil-
grims. Not only would the author of The Book of Margery Kempe have been
horrified at being associated with the impious, worldly Alisoun, but it is also
debatable whether Margery, the self-defined mystic, would have considered
herself a pilgrim at all.

University of Oxford
Oxford, England
(anne.bailey@history.ox.ac.uk)