Also a number of teaching editions have been published in recent years. It stands to reason that an extensive literature exists, trying to get a feeling for this extraordinary woman (see below). The Book of Margery Kempe survives in a single manuscript: London, British Library, MS Additional 61823. (Birgitta of Vadstena was married to a Swedish magnate furthermore her writings exist only in a Latin translation produced by her confessor).
As opposed to another lay mystic from the same time, the Swede Birgitta of Vadstena, she belonged to the urban middle classes. In short: The Book of Margery Kempe has become a major text in medieval studies, famed for its first‐person account of a lay woman’s quest for spiritual authority and mystic revelation in a period when many in England were imprisoned, and in some cases burned, for heresy. Since then medievalists, theologians, church historians and just plain spiritualists have mined her writings intensely in order to get a sense of the life and times of this psychologically and spiritually complex woman. However, in 1934 a manuscript – probably a copy of the original – was found in a private library of the Butler-Bowdon Family in Lancashire. The result of this – the Book of Margery Kempe – was for a long time known only from extracts. Later she went on a series of pilgrimages, which took her into basically every holy corner of the known world – from Jerusalem to Santiago de Compostela.ĭuring her lifetime she dictated the story of her life and her mystical experiences to clerics. During her lifetime she famously conducted a long series of mystical conversations with Christ beginning with the pain she experienced after her first child was born.
In 1393 she married a man from Norfolk, called John Kempe, with whom she had 14 children inside 21 years. Margery Kempe (1373 – 1483) was the daughter of a merchant in King’s Lynn. Here begins a short treatise and a comfortable for sinful wretches, wherein they may have great solace and comfort …
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