The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a religious ferment and chaos. Multiple new devotions spread throughout Europe, institutional structures shifted, certain classes of laity suddenly found themselves confronted with religious and moral questions that had before only been dimly anticipated. Pilgrimage became a major form of both religious practice and recreation. Reading of devotional works -- whether by reading them oneself or having them read to one -- became more common. And as often happens in such times, there was an explosion of mystical and ascetical theology, one that pervaded large portions of society, as people of all sorts of backgrounds turned from merely following along with the religious experience formed for them by institutions and in some sense took charge of their religious experience, or at least large parts of it, for themselves.
Into this ferment plunged Margery Kempe. Born somewhere around 1373 as Margery Brunham (or Burnham), to a well-to-do and influential family in the busy and important port city of Lynn (now officially known as King's Lynn, of which her father was the mayor), she benefited from a surge in the good fortunes of the bourgeois and mercantile classes. We don't know what kind of education she had, although we do know that she never learned to read, but we also know that she seems to have had a good memory, and could retain a great deal of anything read to her. In 1394, at about the age of twenty she married John Kempe, a local official in Lynn, with whom she would eventually have fourteen children. We don't know exactly when her mystical experiences began, but she was definitely struggling with them shortly after the birth of her child, and they seem to have never let up. She eventually forced her husband to accept a chastity agreement and began actively engaging in pilgrimage; everywhere she went, her devotion was as public as it can get, with loud prayers and weeping sobs and sudden strange reactions that put everyone around her off (an effect that has never entirely vanished, because her practices of religious devotion were, shall we say, very far from common ideas about religious devotion today). She was tried for heresy several times (always acquitted, because it was never really her beliefs that were causing the problems others had with her).
Eventually she dictated the book, now known was The Book of Margery Kempe, that is sometimes considered the first autobiographical work in the English language, giving in detail her accounts of her devotions, her many trials, her pilgrimages, and giving us one of the clearest snapshots of the religious practices, people, and pilgrimage places of the day, many of which she knew personally. (One of the most famous scenes of the book is when she met Julian of Norwich, and it is very clear that, despite being a very different person from Julian, she is giving a very close and accurate account of their exchange.) She had difficulty getting people to help her to put the book together. Then after her death, at some point in the sixteenth century the book disappeared, except for a pamphlet with a few extracts, and was only re-discovered in 1934. And of course, The Book of Margery Kempe is the next fortnightly book.
