The Book of Margery Kempe Read online

  THE BOOK OF MARGERY KEMPE

  MARGERY KEMPE, born c. 1373 of well-to-do middle-class parentage in King’s Lynn, in Norfolk, was married at twenty, had a vision of Christ in her madness following her first childbirth, and, after early failures as a businesswoman, saw visions and felt herself called to a spiritual life. At about the age of forty, when she had borne fourteen children, she persuaded her husband to join her in a mutual vow of chastity, and then embarked on an eventful life of pilgrimage in England, Europe and the Holy Land, visiting both great and humble religious figures of her day, ceaselessly seeking the counsel of mystics and recluses. Always a controversial figure, her devotion characteristically expressed itself in loud weeping and cries, which often divided priests, congregations and fellow pilgrims into friends or enemies, and she was several times in danger of being burnt at the stake as a heretic. Towards the end of her life she dictated in an account of her travels and visions her spiritual autobiography, and the discovery of a unique manuscript in 1934 has restored to English literature the earliest autobiography in English.

  B. A. WINDEATT is Professor of English in the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Emmanuel College.

  The Book of Margery Kempe

  Translated by B. A. WINDEATT

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  First published 1985

  Reprinted with a revised bibliography 1994

  Reprinted with revised Further Reading 2004

  26

  Copyright © B. A. Windeatt, 1985, 1994, 2004

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that In which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  Botte for I am a woman, schulde I therfore leve

  that I schulde nought telle yowe the goodenes of

  God?

  Dame Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love

  (The Shorter Version)

  For trusteth wel, it is an impossible

  That any clerk wol speke good of wyves,

  But if it be of hooly seintes lyves…

  By God! if wommen hadde writen stories,

  As clerkes han withinne hire oratories,

  They wolde han writen of men moore wikkednesse

  Than al the mark of Adam may redresse …

  Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue

  Contents

  Introduction

  Suggested Chronology of the

  Life of Margery Kempe

  THE BOOK OF MARGERY KEMPE

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Introduction

  The Text of Margery Kempe’s Book

  The Book of Margery Kempe, the earliest surviving autobiographical writing in English, was lost for centuries until, in 1934, a fifteenth-century manuscript came to light, which had long been in the possession of an old Catholic family, the Butler-Bowdons.1 In the late Middle Ages, however, the manuscript had been in the possession of the Carthusians of Mount Grace Priory, near Northallerton in Yorkshire, where it had been annotated by readers interested in mystical experience.2 Yet although her Book had disappeared, the name of Margery Kempe had survived, because of the printing (c. 1501) by Wynkyn de Worde of a seven-page quarto pamphlet of extracts from the more devotional parts of the book, A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lords Ihesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margerie kempe of Lynn. (A single copy of this pamphlet survives, in Cambridge University Library.) When Henry Pepwell came to reprint these extracts in a selection of mystical pieces in 1521, he described the authoress Margery Kempe as ‘a devoute ancres’ (i.e. anchoress, or recluse). When the Book was rediscovered this century it might thus have been expected to contain the writings of a religious recluse, perhaps another Julian of Norwich. In fact, the Book is as different from Dame Julian’s Revelations as Margery Kempe is from Julian herself. Of Margery’s devotion no reader can be in doubt, but the turbulent life that she looks back on in dictating her book is far removed from the peace and the withdrawal from the world which are the experience of the recluse.

  Margery could neither read nor write, as is indicated on a number of occasions in her Book. The story of how it came eventually to be written down is set out in the Proem and in chapter 89; her first attempt to dictate it (perhaps to the son who figures in Book II) results in a completely illegible text, and it is only with effort and time that she manages to get it rewritten by a priest and then adds the last ten chapters. In a work dictated to a priest many years after the events it describes, by a self-confessedly illiterate woman late in life, the texture of the written English and the overall organization of material may not be so entirely Margery’s responsibility as it would have been had she been capable of putting pen to paper herself. Yet many modern readers, noticing the links between the vigour of the Book’s style and the vigour of Margery’s character, will sense that in her Book we hear recorded, however tidied, much of the accent of an authentic voice, the voice of a medieval Englishwoman of unforgettable character, undeniable courage and unparalleled experience.

  Margery’s life and Book

  Margery Kempe was born in the prosperous medieval port of King’s Lynn in Norfolk (then called Bishop’s Lynn) in about the year 1373 – she tells us that she was about sixty in a late chapter of her book datable to 1433 (Book II, chapter 5). She was the daughter of John Brunham, a burgess who held a number of honourable positions in the Lynn of his day. Some cutting remarks at her husband’s expense reveal Margery’s pride in her father and family, while extant archives record John Brunham as being five times Mayor of Lynn (in 1370, 1377, 1378, 1385 and 1391). He was one of the town’s two members of parliament (in 1364–5, 1368, 1376, 1379–80, 1382–3 and 1384), an alderman of the influential Trinity Guild in the town, and coroner, justice of the peace and chamberlain at various times. At the age of twenty (i.e. in about 1393), Margery tells us she was married to John Kempe, whose family also appears in the Lynn records, although Margery’s husband never seems to have cut a figure in Lynn comparable to that of her father, and she touches in her Book on her husband’s concern with his debts.

  Passing in silence over her childhood – which she never mentions other than in recalling how on several occasions she confessed the sins of her whole life from childhood to the present – Margery opens her Book with the madness and spiritual crisis that followed the birth of her first child. She is rescued from this by a vision of Christ, but does not take to heart the spiritual lesson of her illness, and only the collapse of her subsequent business ventures bows her pride. Intimations of paradise soon follow, and sexual relations with her husband now disgust her, but he insists on his rights. At this time so
me of what are to prove Margery’s most persistent traits first appear – her frequent sobbing and weeping, and her continual thinking and talking of heaven. At this stage, too, she records how our Lord enters into conversation with her during her meditations – conversations that are to continue throughout the Book – and how in her contemplation she imagines herself present at the birth of both the Virgin and of Christ, and bustles about giving a helping hand with practical housewifery (chapters 6–7).

  After these early episodes of her post-conversion experience, the Book records Margery’s victory over her husband in her struggle to live a life of chastity, a victory which is formalized with a vow. In this our Lord lends her considerable assistance, sometimes terrifying her husband at his moments of desire, and later giving Margery the idea of a wily financial bargain when her husband threatens to resume his conjugal rights at the roadside, as they travel through the countryside on pilgrimage during a sultry June day (chapter 11). This memorable scene can be dated to what was approximately Margery’s fortieth year when, after twenty years of marriage, she had borne her husband fourteen children, as she reveals later in the Book. Apart from the son who figures briefly in Book II, none of these children is ever mentioned by Margery, apart from briefly and generally in several prayers.

  Margery now enters on a life of pilgrimage, and of travel to meet and converse with the spiritually minded. On these travels she meets with frequent criticism, detraction and even threats. At Canterbury she is chased by a crowd threatening to burn her as a Lollard (chapter 13), the first occurrence of an accusation that is to recur and bring many trials, despite Margery’s evident orthodoxy in her devotion to the sacrament, frequent confession, fasting, pilgrimages and holy images, all of which were questioned in Lollard writings.3 Throughout, she speaks her mind and gives more than as good as she gets, with many a swift answer and many an apt retort to those ostensibly much better educated and more experienced than herself.

  Margery visits and recalls her conversations with historically identifiable people, from the great and grand, like Archbishop Arundel and Bishop Repyngdon of Lincoln, to the less known female recluse in Norwich whom Margery refers to as ‘Dame Jelyan’, that same Julian of Norwich whose writings of her own revelations have secured her recognition nowadays as the greatest woman writer in English before the novelists.4 She also has a series of encounters with spiritually inclined men of quite humble lives and local fame, whose support for Margery is not fleeting, and sustains her across years of difficulty: the nameless Dominican anchorite at Lynn, the saintly Richard of Caister at Norwich, the Carmelites Alan of Lynn and William Southfield, her confessor Robert Spryngolde, and another unnamed priest who reads mystical texts to her. Such local figures are the outward supports to Margery in a world perceived by her as largely critical and hostile, where she is inwardly sustained by confabulations with our Lord – spiritual speakings to her soul that reaffirm her intentions and her longings, and enable her to assume something of a prophetic role, albeit at the homely level set by her personal horizons.

  Margery’s foreign pilgrimages certainly took her far beyond the horizons of Lynn – to the Holy Land, Assisi and Rome, and Santiago de Compostela – yet few travellers can have had less to say about the experience of travelling as such than Margery.5 She is not concerned with being a travel writer. We hear only of her immediate difficulties (especially the antipathy her fellow pilgrims have towards her) and of the visions and meditations experienced during her visits to the holy places.

  To read in some of the surviving memoirs of late medieval travellers to the Holy Land6 of all the fuss, the commotion, the claustrophobic crowding and lack of privacy or security on the pilgrim galleys sailing from Venice to Jaffa, to read of the tense and hurried tour under Moslem supervision of the Palestinian sites, quickly followed again by the trying return voyage to Venice, and then to remember that Margery Kempe describes almost nothing of what struck contemporary travellers as so memorably difficult and so nervously absorbing, is to register how utterly Margery’s memory excludes almost everything but what she sees as the spiritually significant side of life.

  She does, however, dwell upon her difficulties as a foreign pilgrim in Italy (chapters 30–42), but this is because of the way that her vocation as pilgrim is hampered by the difficulty of being a lone woman abroad, with little or no money, and no command of foreign languages. Predictably enough, the conspicuous behaviour of this woman dressed all in white, her weeping and crying out, attract criticism which, because she sees it as persecution endured for Christ’s sake, becomes by its very repetitiousness not so much a threat as a cumulative confirmation of the tightness of her own path. And alongside all her detractors, Margery finds friends and supporters among the clergy, the pious laity, and the humblest folk.

  It is not long after her return to Norfolk from Italy and the Holy Land that Margery is off once more, this time sailing from Bristol for Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. But characteristically, Margery gives us no descriptive detail of her voyage and her stay at the great shrine of St James other than the barest recollection of how many days the round trip took. Rather more space is spent upon her difficulties at Bristol before sailing, difficulties which as ever seem inseparable from the character she is, difficulties which as ever tend to vindication in Margery’s own eyes.

  On returning home, her travels through England are complicated by a series of arrests and examinations as a heretic (chapters 46–54). At Leicester the Mayor shows great animus against her as a suspected Lollard. While in custody, she thinks the Steward of Leicester is about to rape her. Her examination before the Abbot of Leicester, however, only reveals the orthodoxy of belief that she shows throughout her Book, and she is eventually able to leave. She proceeds to York, where she is again summoned to explain herself, this time before the Archbishop, who finds her orthodox, but orders her out of his diocese. When about to cross the Humber on her way south, she is again arrested as a Lollard and once again brought before the Archbishop, who soon lets her go, on condition that she proceeds to London to gain an authorizing letter from the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

  The scene of Margery’s Book now settles in Lynn and its environs, and is much occupied with the mixture of hostility and support that she receives on account of her weeping and crying. As ever, Margery recalls the cares of this world alongside her visions and her conversations with our Lord, which come more and more to dominate the latter chapters of the first book. In a series of Passion meditations Margery imagines herself present at the events of the first Easter from the betrayal of Christ through to the Resurrection (chapters 79–81), and not only present but actively involved as the busy and solicitous helper and handmaid of the Virgin. In these later chapters Margery’s spiritual recollections leave behind the more chronologically presented narrative of external events in earlier chapters. After some further chapters of conversation with our Lord (84–88), Margery left off her Book as dictated to her first scribe.

  When the whole Book was re-written up to this point some years later, Margery took the opportunity to add ten further chapters (a second, if unequal, ‘Book’), covering the most memorable events that befell her after the Book was first written. These chapters largely concern her remarkable and exhausting late travels, first accompanying her German daughter-in-law home by sea to Danzig in Prussia, and then her pilgrimages to Wilsnack and Aachen on her way home across Europe. Perhaps because Margery – by now older and infirm – could no longer take such travels as much in her stride as she had done when younger, she sketches much more here of the feeling of travelling, its moments of vulnerability, of terror and of longueur. Yet one theme which remains continuous with the earliest chapters is, of course, the constant and wearing difficulties presented by the attitude of other people, and the opportunities for self-vindication that these inevitably provided for Margery.

  No rounded conclusion is offered – simply Margery’s return home after her travels to Lynn, where she receives an unders
tandably grumpy welcome from her confessor, whom she soon mollifies, with God’s help. If we hanker for some kind of final vignette on which our own imaginations can linger as we take leave of Margery, we have to construct such a scene rather against the grain of Margery’s method, imagining her in old age, as she briefly says, reconciled in her home town to her circle of sympathizers. In fact, Margery’s dictation of her recollections ends here characteristically and authentically without any formally contrived or artistic sense of climax. She has simply ceased to speak.

  Margery’s Book and its Background

  ‘Bless us! How could a woman occupy one or two hours with the love of our Lord? I shan’t eat a thing till I find out what you can say of our Lord God in the space of an hour’ (Richard of Caister in chapter 17)

  As a woman who could not read or write, Margery finds visits to converse with sympathetic people especially important, and from many of these people she will have received the wisdom they themselves had gathered from reading contemporary spiritual writers. Because Margery herself could not read we should not under-estimate her access to the content of spiritual books. Indeed, in her consultation with Caister, she tells him how the Trinity sometimes spoke to her soul ‘so excellently that she never heard any book, neither Hilton’s book, nor Bride’s book, nor Stimulus Amoris, nor Incendium Amoris, nor any other book that she ever heard read, that spoke so exaltedly of the love of God…’ (chapter 17). And much later in her Book, when she tells how a young priest who came to Lynn was prepared to read to her, she again mentions the very same books: ‘He read to her many a good book of high contemplation, and other books, such as the Bible with doctors’ commentaries on it, St Bride’s book, Hilton’s book, Bonaventura’s Stimulus Amoris, Incendium Amoris, and others similar’ (chapter 58). Margery also tells how at her very first meeting with this priest and his mother the priest reads aloud from the Bible and moves her deeply, and how in later times she made him look up things for her in the scriptures and in the doctors.