Margery Kempe
&
The Fire of Love

In I501, Wynkyn de Worde printed a pamphlet entitled A Shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Ihesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margerie Kempe of Lynn ('Lynn' being Bishop Lynn' now King's Lynn, in Norfolk). Twenty years later, Henry Pepwell reissued the text as part of a compilation of mystical works, and in doing so he enlarged the title to read ... margerie kempe ancresse of lynn.

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So began the notion that Margery Kempe had been a staid and saintly character like her mentor Julian of Norwich - a monumental error made possible only by the loss of The Book of Margery Kempe at the Reformation and revealed by the discovery of a manuscript copy as recently as 1934. Still the only known copy, it proves the sixteenth-century publications to have been a compilation of tiny extracts from a Book of 100,000 words. More important, they are a pious and unrepresentative selection from a pioneering autobiography marked by breadth of experience, embarrassing candour and a startling, even deranged individuality. In the unlikely event that Margery Kempe did become an anchoress, it was not until old age had changed her out of all recognition.

 

Being apparently illiterate, Margery Kempe dictated her Book. Her Introduction is dated 1436 and information elsewhere in the Book shows that she was in her sixties. From the start we see a unique personality, too frank or naive to conceal from us the mental, physical and moral pathologies which ruled her life. Only once does she own up to any concealment or inhibition, for she harbours a guilty secret which she cannot divulge to her priest or her readers:

 

When I was twenty or a little older, I was married to a well-respected burgess, and, things being what they are, I quickly found myself pregnant. During the pregnancy ... I was often quite ill; and when it came to giving birth ... I despaired of my life and thought I'd die.' Thereupon I sent for my priest to unburden myself of a secret sin. But he was a little too hasty; he condemned me before I'd even managed to say what it was.

 

Eventually, torn between fear of damnation and the priest's sharp tongue, I became insane, and for half a year, eight weeks and a few days I was prodigiously plagued and tormented by spirits.

 

A vision of Christ brought some degree of healing and sowed the seeds of her lifelong religious zeal - though for a while she gave priority to brewing and milling enterprises, both of which eventually failed. Whether proprietorship lay with her or husband John is a matter of doubt. She claims them as hers but Lynn's municipal records of 1404 and 1405 refer to a Johannes Kemp braceator (brewer), and in the Book Kempe boasts of paying off all John's debts. (She may have been able to do this after inheriting from her wealthy father John de Brunham, who had been Mayor of Lynn and its Member of Parliament). That the debts were her husband's, not Kempe's, suggest that the enterprises and failures were also his, not hers. Thus the Book must be read with circumspection. What appears to be female independence may in Kempe's case be female aspiration and wishful thinking.

 

Given Kempe’s self-regardancy, one may ask why she focuses on her eventual business failure rather than her three or four years as one of the leading brewers in Lynn. One may equally well ask why she brands herself with the commission of a quite unspeakable sin. This may be answered on two levels: on the more sublime level, her failure, wickedness and madness heighten the drama of God's intervention in her troubled life. He tells her that she is 'a specially chosen soul of his' and, in a visionary passage that still has the power to shock some readers, he makes her his bride and asks her to kiss him and take him to bed.

 

More mundanely, Kempe likes to tantalize. After bearing fourteen children, she eventually prevails on her husband to take a vow of chastity, ostensibly to free her body and spirit for God alone. To silence the tongues of sceptics they move into separate homes but gossip continues. Margery tells of rumoured matrimonial meetings in thickets and woods. She denies the accusations, of course – but not before she has seasoned her story with plausible details.

 

It is characteristic of Margery Kempe that she herself plays an important part in her visions. She helps to deliver the infant Christ; and after the Crucifixion she makes 'a nice hot drink' for his sorrowing mother. As for her starring role, it is surely her nuptials with God. Her self-effacing contemporary Julian of Norwich wrote Revelations of Divine Love, whereas Kempe's work is what its name suggests: a book of Margery Kempe herself.

 

Though centred on a single, distinctive ego, the Book reveals much about the time and cultural circumstances in which it was written. Thus Kempe's Introduction contains one of the first occurrences in English of the word 'spectacles' and one of the first accounts of their being worn, albeit unsuccessfully. It appears that when his eyesight gave trouble, the priest obtained (or Kempe obtained for him) some spectacles suiting long-sightedness rather than the short sight he suffered.

 

When the priest first started to write this book he had trouble with his eyes, and he couldn't see to form the letters or mend his pen, though everything else was perfectly clear. He tried to write with a pair of spectacles perched on his nose but they made things much worse.

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Lynn was a busy mercantile centre, and the spectacles had probably been shipped, along with other choice goods, from a port in what we would now call Holland. However, Kempe refers to a Deuchelond, or greater Germany, extending from modern Flanders or Holland to the Baltic ports, and Lynn and the Kempes had dealings throughout this area. The pylche or pelt Kempe sometimes wore may have come from the Baltic, an established trade in fur and hides explaining why 'Pilch' and 'Skinner' are common surnames in the Kings Lynn area. (According to the town's municipal records, Kempe's father-in-law was himself a skynnere).

 

Kempe visited both the Baltic and the Holy Land, and the Book is a most compelling travelogue. It includes valuable descriptions of shrines and devotions, and conveys Kempe's sufferings as she stumbled, often destitute and in fear of her life and chastity, through mountains and wastelands, aided by lifts on 'pilgrim wagons' when she could get them. (She must be almost the only medieval hitchhiking woman whose story survives.)

 

Most of Kempe's water-borne journeys were on large ships – the ocean liners of her time – but she may have travelled in riverboats too. Whatever her mode of transport, she often denounced the morals and impiety of her companions, not least if they were fellow pilgrims.