My Medieval class is keeping me very busy reading about women in the 14th century. First, I read about Julian of Norwich and her book, "Revelations of Divine Love", which I found to be very wordy and dense. "The Book of Margery Kempe" was easier, in that the theological development is embryonic, and therefore easier to understand, and the reader gets more information about Margery and her personal life.

Margery Kempe lived in England in the 14th century. The daughter of a well-to-do who served as mayor of his town, Margery seems to have had high expectations for her life that weren't realized. She married a man who had money problems, had fourteen children, and ran a brewery business that failed. After the birth of one of her children, Margery had a vision of Christ, and her life was forever changed. The bulk of the book details her various pilgrimages and adventures, as well as detailed accounts of her discussions with Christ.

While this is quite a colorful book, in an emotional sense, Margery doesn't come across as a very sincere person, which is what one would expect from a bride of Christ. One small incident that comes to mind is when Margery is praying for one of her religious instructors to get well. She doesn't pray that he will get healthy for his own sake, but so that she will be able to talk to him again. This theme of self-centered behavior runs throughout the book. Problems are seen not as tests of her faith or spirit, but as personal attacks on Margery, and they are something to be confronted instead of endured, although Margery pays lip service to the concepts of patience and humility.

What got Margery into so much trouble in the first place was the expressions of her intimate dialogues with Christ. Margery would weep, cry, roar and scream whenever God willed her to do this. Of course, this often happened in church and at meals. This often infuriated people, who were convinced that Margery was faking her behavior. Some of the fits do seem to be descriptions of temper tantrums more befitting a child. Margery also had some fits in which she turned blue and twisted from side to side. The classic child tantrum! Another annoying habit was her constant talking about God, Christ and all the spiritual things that those two figures entail. It's not hard to imagine that this would have gotten old fast.

The book reads quick and the endnotes are very helpful in providing dates and places, as well as biographical information on some of the important people that Margery encounters in her travels. The timeline at the front of the book helps keep events in order, as Margery dictated her story to a priest, and her memory doesn't always place events in the right chronological order.

I read the Penguin edition and found it to be most enjoyable. Anyone interested in Medieval history or Christian mysticism should certainly give this one a spin.

As the earliest piece of English writing (in the sense of first-hand account of life rather than fiction) this book is irreplaceable.
I was quite surprised at the readable quality of the book, compared to other medieval writings. True, the book was dictated to an amanuensis by Margery, but that makes it all the more surprising - dictation generally does not have the flow that one's own writing has.
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There are some drawbacks ... the book is written with hindsight, and the facts are necessarily clouded by time and memory, but what does come across is that Margery was a sick woman, mentally, physically and spiritually.
She makes it very clear that she abhors the carnal side of marriage, yet dwells upon it at great length, as if 'the lady doth protest too much'.
Her frequents outbursts of wailing and self-abasement come across as an extreme form of PMS or hysteria brought on by self-denial.
Her excessive praying strikes one as an excuse for anything that she doesn't want to deal with normally.

As others have pointed out, she was well-to-do, had a thriving business, was not molested by her husband (apart from his alleged sexual demands, which do not seem excessive) yet spends an inordinate amount of time bemoaning her fate and her husband's demands on her.

Putting that to one side, there is a lot in this book to make one re-think our views of medieval life and the specifically the role of women.
For a woman to have a good business-head; have her own means of support; dictate conditions of marriage to her husband; travel as and when the mood took her; this doesn't sound like your archetypal medieval goode-wyfe...

Maybe this book should be more widely read ???

Just wanted to point out: Margery Kempe was actually extremely wealthy, not "lower class." There is evidence that John Kempe married her for her money. She was the operator of a brewery, which also provided a great deal of income. Lower class medieval women usually didn't have the means to travel around evangelizing.

This book manages to be of interest to anyone who wishes a travelogue of medieval pilgrimages, a humble recognition that even the oddest among us can have their minds very occupied with the divine, a look at the first autobiography of an English woman, or a case study in obsessive compulsive behaviour. Margery's disjointed recollections, coupled with her constant references to her revelations and retroactive "virginity," admittedly are not a fun pursuit, but her extreme case does seem to place much of the deficiencies inherited from the worst in medieval spirituality (a legacy of the Plague ... even if the best of the era was the finest in history) into perspective. I guarantee that, while one may find Margery as troublesome as did those of her time and place, one will never find her recollections dull.