Margery Kempe

[2] Kempe appears to have been taught the Pater Noster (the Lord's Prayer), Ave Maria, the Ten Commandments, and other "virtues, vices, and articles of faith".

[3] Kempe, like other medieval mystics, believed that she was summoned to a "greater intimacy with Christ" as a result of multiple visions and experiences she had as an adult.

[5] During her illness, Kempe claimed to have envisioned numerous devils and demons attacking her and commanding her to "forsake her faith, her family, and her friends".

[2] Kempe affirms that she had visitations and conversations with Jesus, Mary, God, and other religious figures, and that she had visions of being an active participant during the birth and crucifixion of Christ.

[4] These visions and hallucinations physically affected her bodily senses, causing her to hear sounds and smell unknown, strange odours.

At the end of their conversation, Julian of Norwich implores that "the more shame she [Kempe] elicits, the more merit she gains in the eyes of the Lord".

[2] Her visions provoked her public displays of loud wailing, sobbing, and writhing, which frightened and annoyed both clergy and laypeople.

[8] Possible reasons for her arrests include her preaching, which was forbidden to women, her wearing of all white as a married woman, i.e., impersonating a nun, or her apparent belief that she could pray for the souls of those in purgatory and tell whether or not someone was damned, in a manner similar to the concept of the intercession of saints.

Kempe was also accused of preaching without Church approval as her public speeches skirted a thin line between making statements about her personal faith and professing to teach scripture.

[9][10] During an inquiry into her heresy she was thought to be possessed by a devil for quoting the scripture, and reminded of the prohibition against women preachers in 1 Timothy.

Eventually turning away from her worldly work, Kempe dedicated herself completely to the spiritual calling that she felt her earlier vision required.

[18] However, Julian instructed and cautioned Kempe to "measure these experiences according to the worship they accrue to God and the profit to her fellow Christians.

The friar admitted to having read of Marie of Oignies and recognised that Kempe's tears were also a result of similar authentic devotion.

This boke is of Mountegrace," making certain that some of the annotations are the work of monks associated with the important Carthusian priory of Mount Grace in Yorkshire.

[25] A recipe, added to the final folio of the manuscript by a late 14th- or early 15th-century reader of the Book, possibly at the cathedral priory in Norwich, provides more evidence of its readership and has been determined to be for medicinal sweets, or digestives, called 'dragges'.

[26] Kempe's book was essentially lost for centuries, being known only from excerpts published by Wynkyn de Worde in around 1501, and by Henry Pepwell in 1521.

Although Kempe has sometimes been depicted as an "oddity" or a "madwoman", more modern scholarship on vernacular theologies and popular practices of piety suggests she was not as odd as she might appear.

Kempe and her Book are significant because they express the tension in late medieval England between institutional orthodoxy, and increasingly public modes of religious dissent, especially those of the Lollards.

The Bishop of Lincoln and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, were involved in trials of her allegedly teaching and preaching on scripture and faith in public, and wearing white clothes, interpreted as hypocrisy on the part of a married woman.

In the 15th century, a pamphlet was published that represented Kempe as an anchoress and stripped from her "Book" any potential heterodoxical thought or dissenting behaviour.

[31] In the 14th century, the task of interpreting the Bible and God through the written word was nominally restricted to men, specifically ordained priests.

[33] Margery Kempe's style of mysticism was very participatory, judging by the fact that, along with her visions, she had specific actions that she would complete as a way of devoting herself to God.

[36] She went to the River Jordan and Mount Quarentyne, which was where they believed Jesus had fasted for forty days, and Bethany, where Martha, Mary and Lazarus had lived.

[36] In 1417, Kempe set off on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, travelling via Bristol, where she stayed at Henbury with Thomas Peverel, bishop of Worcester.

After Kempe was able to insist on the right of accusations to be made in English and to defend herself she was briefly cleared, but then brought to trial again by the Abbot, Dean and Mayor, and imprisoned for three weeks.

She visited important sites and religious figures in England, including Philip Repyngdon (the Bishop of Lincoln), Henry Chichele, and Thomas Arundel, both Archbishops of Canterbury.

[41] The last section of Kempe's book deals with a journey, beginning in April 1433, aiming to travel to Danzig with her daughter-in-law.

[44] In 2018, the Mayor of King's Lynn, Nick Daubney, unveiled a bench commemorating Kempe in the Saturday Market Place.

[47] In 2020, a statue in honour of Kempe was erected at the entrance of a medieval bridge in Oroso in Northern Spain, on the pilgrimage trail she would have followed to Santiago de Compostela.

It is made of aluminium and depicts Kempe wearing a wide-brimmed hat typical of medieval pilgrims with her head bowed in prayer.