THE BOOK OF MARGERY KEMPE

Margery Kempe (c. 1373 – after 1438) was an English Christian mystic, known for
writing through dictation The Book of Margery Kempe, a work considered by some to
be the first autobiography in the English language. Her book chronicles Kempe's
domestic tribulations, her extensive pilgrimages to holy sites in Europe and the Holy
Land, as well as her mystical conversations with God.
The Book of Margery Kempe is a medieval text that was first published in 1501.
Margery Kempe is a well-off middle-class townswoman in the medieval English town
of King’s Lynn. She had 14 children. After the birth of her first child, Margery has a
nervous breakdown, seeing hideous devils all around her. Margery recovers after
having a vision of Jesus Christ, and she decides to devote her life to holiness and
contemplation of God. Margery’s devotion to Jesus is highly emotional and dramatic,
and she soon acquires a reputation as a religious eccentric, a potentially dangerous
reputation in a time when heresy was a capital offence.
Margery faces doubt and temptation, but she perseveres and often receives
guidance in her visions.
Margery makes several pilgrimages, the longest and most difficult of which is a
journey to Jerusalem, with a long stopover in Rome. During the pilgrimage, Margery
is shunned by her fellow travelers but is often accepted by the poor, a pattern that
repeats itself throughout her life. In Jerusalem, Margery has several intense visions,
and she begins to have spells in which she sobs and cries uncontrollably. Margery is
stranded in Rome for a time after giving away her money to the poor, and she makes
her way by begging. Eventually, Margery is given enough money to return home.
Upon her return to England, Margery does her best to live a life of devotion to Christ.
As a married woman, however, she is somewhat constrained, such as by the fact that
she cannot become a nun. Margery travels to various churches and holy sites in
England. At times, Margery is accepted as a holy woman, and her advice and
blessings are solicited. More often, she is treated as an oddity or a nuisance and
mocked.
Traveling through the north of England, Margery is arrested several times and almost
burned at the stake as a heretic, though she is saved by the intervention of the
church authorities. Each time she is arrested, Margery is respectful to authority but
firm in her beliefs, none of which are heretical, as her examiners soon see.
Margery continues to have mystical visions of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and several
saints. Margery’s devotion to Christ is particularly intense and is expressed in highly
physical, even sexual, terms.
Her dramatic weeping in church and elsewhere continues to draw attention and,
often, censure. Margery comes into particular conflict with a friar who moves to
Lynn and refuses to allow Margery to hear him preach because of her disruptive
weeping.

As time goes on, Margery’s husband becomes old and infirm, and Margery returns to
his household to care for him.
In her last extended journey, Margery accompanies her daughter-in-law back to
Germany. Home once again, Margery, now an old woman, decides to record the story
of her life and her devotions, and begins the dictation of her Book.

Proem
The proem is dated 1436 and is written by her priest-scribe. The purpose of the book
is to comfort sinners through a story of the inexpressible mercy of their Savior. He
states that many worthy clerics had urged Kempe to record her feelings but she
would not consent until twenty years from her conversion and only at the express
command of God. Her first scribe, a native Englishman who had lived in Germany (or
the Netherlands) produced an incomprehensible text. This priest-scribe, who knew
her well, had many scruples about writing, even sending her to another scribe and
delaying four years, but he is ultimately reassured through her prayers and his own
experience.

Chapter 26
(In 1413, Margery Kempe's father dies). Probably in the autumn of that year, she
embarks on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. She stops to pray at the cathedral of Norwich
and a church in Yarmouth, the port of her embarkation. Crossing the channel, she
passes through a "large town called Zierikzee," in the Netherlands. Her route is then
by land, during which she offends her companions

Chapter 27
Kempe arrives at Constance in late 1413. She meets with an English Franciscan who
has come to the city for its Council of 1414 when issues of heresy, including the
Lollard movement, are being discussed. She travels to Venice via Bologna.
Remaining in Venice for thirteen weeks, she again offends her English companions
by her piety.
Chapter 28
In spring, 1414, Kempe sails from Venice in a galley, lands in the Holy Land, and
travels to Jerusalem by donkey. She describes entering the church of the Holy
Sepulchre at evening and remaining there until the following evening. The
Franciscans who administer the church lead the pilgrims around the church to each
holy place. She then adds her reflections on this crucial moment when she received
her gift of tears.

Chapter 29
Kempe collapses with grief at the tomb of Christ and weeps at the place where
Christ was nailed to the cross and before the stone slab where he was prepared for
burial. She received communion at the place of his crucifixion. She later follows the
Via Dolorosa, the path Christ took carrying his cross through Jerusalem.

Chapter 30
Kempe goes to the River Jordan and Mount Quarantyne where Christ fasted for forty
days. She sees the birthplace of John the Baptist and also visits Bethany the site of
the grave of Lazarus. She revisits the Holy Sepulchre and mentions the chapel where
Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene. She then returns to Venice and sets out for
Rome. She describes traveling with two Franciscans and a woman who owned a
statue of the Infant Jesus. When they come to cities, the woman allows other
women to dress up the image and kiss it.

Genre: Spiritual autobiography. Though Kempe is illiterate, her Book has clear literary
ancestors. The genre of the Christian “spiritual autobiography” goes back to St.
Augustine (354–430 a.d.), whose Confessions tell the story of his early life and
conversion to Christianity.
The other major literary genre to influence Kempe was the works of the Christian
mystics. The medieval period was the golden age of Christian mysticism, which is a
spiritual discipline aimed at a direct union with God through intense prayer and
contemplation.
Language: Middle English
Time And Place Written: 1436, King’s Lynn, Norfolk, England
Date Of First Publication: 1501 (extracts); manuscript rediscovered in 1934
Narrator: Margery Kempe, who, toward the end of her life, looks back on her spiritual
journey.
Point Of View: The point of view of Kempe’s Book is unusual in that she tells her own
story, but does so in the third person, referring to herself as “this creature.” Even so,
the work is highly subjective, focusing exclusively on Margery’s own perceptions,
thoughts, feelings, and opinions.
Margery’s conflict is essentially that of self and society. Her claims of divinely
inspired vision and her ostentatious displays of emotion lead her into conflict with
her husband, her neighbors, and several political and religious authority figures.
Gender studies —> GS in the 1990s studied her book under the perception of the
GENDER. The Book serves as a literary representation of womanhood during the late
14th to the 15th centuries when Margery was writing, and also speaks to circulating
medieval discourses of religion, pilgrimage, and sexuality. Participating in medieval
women’s visionary writing as a genre, Margery’s visionary power is a tool by which
she is able to emancipate herself from the limiting roles of wife and mother.
Additionally, by working within the conventions of visionary writing, Margery is able
to exercise forms of private, public, and literary power that otherwise may have not
been available to her as a woman in her historical milieu. By using queer theory to
interpret The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery’s often challenging and subversive
behaviour is privileged as a method of critiquing boundaries of her role as a woman,
her place within the Church’s hierarchy and the mediation of Christ’s desires, as well
as the boundaries of an appropriate and acceptable sexuality. Thus, the queer in
The Book of Margery Kempe reveals tensions in the text that contest dominant
ideologies and values in the Middle Ages that are pertinent to the changing tides in
institutionalized religion, women’s roles, and genre in the fourteenth century.

1970: THE FEMINISM

In the 70s, with the birth of feminist criticism, the "canon of women’s literature"
began to be created, until then always represented as weak and submissive beings.
There have always been authors (women), only they were not considered worthy of
publication. Or they often did not even have the opportunity to become authors, as
women were denied education.
With the Cultural Studies:
- the canons begin to be questioned
- certain social groups, from the cultural and economic point of view, that
within the canonical literature are often represented in a position of inferiority,
subject to relations of power according to hierarchies, begin to take a voice.