KEMPE, MARGERY

KEMPE, MARGERY (c. 1373–c.1440), English pilgrim, autobiographer, and professional holy woman. Kempe was the daughter of a prosperous merchant of King's Lynn, England. Although happily married, she tended to have hysterical fits during which God spoke to her. At about the age of forty, having had fourteen children, she persuaded her husband that God wished them to take a vow of chastity. By this time the Deity was conversing agreeably with her nearly every day. Her meditations tended to concentrate on the Passion and to bring on wild lamentations, uncontrollable floods of tears, and rollings on the ground. These were widely acceptable signs of grace in the Middle Ages, but there were always some who declared her a fraud. Such charges were dangerous, as they several times led to her arrest as a heretic and a narrow escape from burning. For about twenty-five years, Kempe was a perpetual pilgrim, visiting not only every shrine in England but also the Holy Land, Rome, Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and various northern German centers, gradually establishing a reputation as a prophetess and seer among the less learned.

Kempe's importance for history lies in her autobiography, the first in English, a book intended for the edification of nuns. Although full of moralizing and sermons, it has a saving shrewdness and interest in the world. In the course of her travels, Kempe had numerous alarming encounters and met a host of people, from the archbishops of Canterbury and York, the holy Julian of Norwich, and innumerable friars to a wide range of fellow pilgrims and lesser government officials. It was her wish to write a mystical treatise, such as the famous Cloud of Unknowing, but what she did, in her autobiography, was to lay the fifteenth-century world before the reader in all its violence and piety; its blend of the spiritual and the venal, ignorance and learning, feudalism, democracy, and petty officialdom; its magnificence and utter filth. Here is the authentic background to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. No other medieval document enables one so clearly to realize what it was actually like for a humble pilgrim to live and to travel in fifteenth-century Europe.

Bibliography

The Book of Margery Kempe, edited by Hope E. Allen and Sanford B. Meech (London, 1940), is the text dictated by Kempe to a priest about 1438, in the original spelling and fully annotated. The narrative is confused in many places, and the reader will be greatly assisted by the only modern study, Memoirs of a Medieval Woman: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe, by Louise Collis (New York, 1964), also published under the title The Apprentice Saint (London, 1964). This biography places Kempe's adventures in their proper historical perspective, relating them to the wider political, social, and religious issues of the day.

Louise Collis (1987)