24. In S. Medcalf (ed.), The Later Middle Ages (London, 1981), a modern diagnosis of Margery by Dr Anthony Ryle is recorded (pp. 114-15), and is here reproduced by kind permission:
As is so often the case, she revealed a great deal of herself in her opening statement; partly in giving the account of her puerperal breakdown following her first child, which seems to have been psychotic in nature; but more so by revealing her discontent with those who had attempted to help her at this time, and this became recurrent throughout her account.
Prior to her puerperal breakdown, she was already preoccupied with some secret guilt, and it seems certain, from the evidence later in the story, that this guilt was sexual in nature; thus, she is continually preoccupied with the bad thoughts of others, and even in her sixties, when travelling, was worried that she might be the victim of rape; and, on one occasion, fairly late in life, seems to have had a brief recurrence of a psychotic period lasting a week or two, in which she was deluded and possibly hallucinated about the sexuality of the males surrounding her. Given, therefore, that this preoccupation was probably persistent, whether conscious or unconscious, a great deal of her subsequent behaviour can be seen as some form of defence against this. The defence she has chosen is one which, within the culture, was clearly the most powerful one, namely the assumption of a direct and special link with God. I feel this was a spurious claim, because her main concern, despite the attempts at visionary writing, would seem to be with the view others held of her as a person of particular religious capacity.
Her claims to the special relationship were made manifest through conspicuous activities, like dressing in white, weeping copiously and persistently, howling, grovelling on the floor, etc. Those around her, in general, are unimpressed by these various behaviours but, in her own system, their failure to acknowledge her claim was one more proof of its lightness because she could convert their rejection to a persecution, which she bore for Christ’s sake. This system seems to have been, therefore, coherent and largely impenetrable, and she received enough reward from it to maintain her in a reasonable equilibrium but, I imagine, at considerable cost to those around her for most of her life.
I don’t think that there is any evidence of a continuing psychotic process at work here. The most satisfactory description would be of a hysterical personality organization; her behaviours served as a constant source of attention and, in her own terms, of confirmation from others around her.
The Proem
1. Margery consistently refers to herself in the third person throughout her Book.
2. Literally ‘how homely our Lord was in her soul’; also a frequent idea in Julian of Norwich: cf. ‘in us is his homeliest home’ (Revelations of Divine Love, tr. C. Wolters, Penguin, 1966, chapter 67).
3. Margery’s word is ‘Dewchlond’, an inclusive term for the German-speaking lands, and usually including the Low Countries.
The Preface
1. The Carmelite, Alan of Lynn; see chapter 9.
2. i.e. 23 July.
Book I
Chapter 1
1. In Book II, chapter 5, which probably records events in 1433, Margery describes herself as about sixty years of age, which suggests she was born c. 1373 and married c. 1393. Margery begins abruptly at marriage and first childbirth and passes over her childhood, unlike many biographies of saintly women that Margery would have known, where the saint evinces signs of exceptional devotion from an early age.
2. Square brackets indicate additions by medieval annotators of the Mount Grace MS. Margery at first seems to conceal the identity of her home town and indicates it by the letter ‘N’. Later, the town is openly named.
3. The nature of this unconfessed sin is never revealed by Margery. Some past sexual sin has been suggested, or some connection with William Sawtre, the first Lollard to be burnt for his beliefs in 1401, who was a priest in Lynn for some time before 1399.
4. i.e. confessed. Auricular confession was deemed essential.
5. In her Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Cornell, 1983), p. 209, Clarissa W. Atkinson suggests Margery is here suffering from ‘postpartum psychosis’, a much more severe condition than common post-natal depression and sometimes involving delirium.
Chapter 2
1. Probably referring to the crespine, fashionable female head-dress of gold wire and mesh, sometimes shaped into the elaborate ‘horns’ frequently attacked by contemporary preachers. In head-dress and clothes Margery follows latest fashion.
2. i.e. her madness.
Chapter 3
1. Melody is a traditional accompaniment of mystical experience; see Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love, tr. C. Wolters (Penguin, 1972), chapters 33, 34.
2. Margery here acquires three persistent features of her subsequent life: her weeping, her continual thinking and irrepressible talking of heaven, and her wish for chastity.
3. i.e. the right of both parties to sexual intercourse within marriage under medieval canon law.
4. Excessive bodily penance – more common among continental mystics – was discouraged by such influential English guides as the author of the Ancrene Riwle, Richard Rolle, and Walter Hilton.
5. Frequent confession was recommended to the devout and noted in the lives of such female visionaries familiar to Margery as St Bridget of Sweden and Mary of Oignies.
6. cf. chapter 4: three years of temptation followed two years of quiet. As the Proem warns: ‘This book is not written in order…’
Chapter 4
1. St Margaret of Antioch, a legendary virgin martyr (supposedly martyred in the persecution of Diocletian) whose cult was very popular in later medieval England. Olybrius, governor of Antioch, tried to marry or seduce her, but she declared herself a Christian and rebuffed him. She was subjected to torture, and was swallowed by a dragon, which exploded into pieces when she made the sign of the cross. She was eventually beheaded. Her feast day was 20 July.
2. i.e. the church of St Margaret which still survives in King’s Lynn, although the nave was rebuilt after a spire fell causing damage in 1741. The church belonged to the Benedictine priory of Lynn, which was itself a cell of Norwich Cathedral monastery.
Chapter 5
1. Advent was traditionally a season for thoughts of penance and of the Last Judgement.
2. A repeated conviction in Margery: see chapters 8, 15, 22, 29, 36, 57.
3. cf. the inscription on Margery’s wedding ring to Jesus in chapter 31, and God’s words in chapter 65.
4. At her audience with Archbishop Arundel (chapter 16), Margery gains permission to receive communion every Sunday, and this is later confirmed so that she may receive communion as often as required (chapter 57). Such frequency of communion was most exceptional at the time, although St Bridget of Sweden and her daughter St Catherine were allowed weekly communion, as was Blessed Dorothea of Montau.
5. i.e. cod-fish cured and dried; a commodity in medieval Lynn.
6. i.e. a recluse attached to the Dominican house at Lynn; he is later (chapter 15) described as a doctor of divinity, and as Margery’s principal confessor (chapter 18), as well as being credited with a ‘spirit of prophecy’, which suggests he was himself inclined to mysticism. He is consistently loyal to Margery (chapters 18, 19), but evidently dies before she returns from Jerusalem (chapter 58).
7. cf. ‘The human mother will suckle her child with her milk, but our beloved Mother, Jesus, feeds us with himself’ (Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, tr. C. Wolters, Penguin, 1966, chapter 60).
Chapter 8
1. Margery evidently lay on the ground during her devotions (see chapters 6, 22, 23, 38, 87).
2. Presumably the Master Robert Spryngolde named as her confessor in chapter 5 7. God again alludes to his role as ‘executor’ in chapters 63 and 88.
Chapter 9
1. The words in brackets are added by an annotator in the MS margin. But in chapter 11 Margery reminds her husband that she told him he would be suddenly slain, and s
o she perhaps did believe that John Kempe would have been struck dead by God if he had not refrained from intercourse with her. Such married women mystics as St Bridget of Sweden and Blessed Dorothea of Montau were eventually able to live chaste by their husbands’ consent, while Mary of Oignies and St Catherine of Sweden managed to remain virgin wives.
2. Probably 26 April 1413, i.e. two months before Margery’s argument with John Kempe in chapter 11 (datable to 23 June 1413), when he is said to have gone without sex for eight weeks.
3. John Wyrham, a mercer, is mentioned in the medieval records of Lynn, and was a member of the Guild of St Giles and St Julian.
4. This Carmelite friar, Alan of Lynn (born c. 1348), was a Cambridge doctor of divinity and, among his writings, is recorded as having made indexes of the revelations and prophecies of St Bridget of Sweden, and of the pseudo-Bonaventuran Stimulus Amoris. A native of Lynn, he was to prove a good friend to Margery.
Chapter 10
1. cf. John xiv, 20; xv, 4–5; xvii, 23; vi, 57; also I John iv, 1, 6, 12, 13. God repeats this assurance to Margery in chapters 34 and 35.
Chapter 11
1. Probably 2 3 June 1413. After seeing Philip Repyngdon (who became Bishop of Lincoln in 1405) about her vows of chastity (chapter 15), Margery later visits Archbishop Arundel (chapter 16), who died in February 1414. Moreover, Margery – married c. 1393 – records that she bore her husband fourteen children (chapter 48). Between 1405 and 1414 Midsummer’s Eve fell upon a Friday only in 1413. As Corpus Christi Day in 1413 fell on 22 June, it is likely that Margery and her husband had seen the Mystery Plays performed at York.
2. Surviving Lynn records refer to Margery’s father, John Brunham, as alive but in ill health on 19 December 1412, and on 16 October 1413 as deceased. Inheritance of a legacy may have helped Margery to strike this bargain with her husband.
Chapter 12
1. Even the Franciscans in the Holy Land have heard that God speaks to Margery (chapter 29). After her trials for heresy she later becomes more cautious (e.g. chapters 46, 55, 63).
2. cf. Chaucer’s portrait of the Monk in the General Prologue: ‘… a monk, whan he is recchelees, / Is likned til a fissh that is waterlees -/ This is to seyn, a monk out of his cloystre …’ (179-81).
Chapter 13
1. Probably John Kynton (d. 1416), formerly chancellor to Queen Joanna, wife of Henry IV, before becoming a monk of Christ Church, Canterbury, in 1408.
2. Possibly enclosure as an anchoress, but perhaps imprisonment.
3. i.e. a heretic with opinions derived from John Wyclif or his followers. Among their other beliefs, Lollards were held to question the authority of the priesthood and the institution of religious orders, and to maintain that every Christian could discover for him or herself the true sense of the Bible and live by it.
4. A note here in the MS margin comments that Richard Methley ‘was wont so to say’. Methley (b. 1451), a Carthusian mystic of Mount Grace, translated into Latin The Cloud of Unknowing and The Mirror of Simple Souls, with a preface on pseudo-Dionysian mysticism. Of himself he wrote: ‘My life consists of love, langour, sweetness, heat and melody…’
5. The MS margin here contains a drawing of a pillar. Some medieval German women mystics also thought of themselves as chosen in this way.
Chapter 14
1. cf. Isaiah xlix, 16: ‘Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands…’
2. cf. Isaiah xlv, 15: ‘Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself.’ Hilton, Scale of Perfection, I, chapter 49, also citing this verse, comments: ‘Jesus is treasure hid in thy soul.’
3. Margery is assured of the importance of the gift of tears by Julian of Norwich (chapter 18), and by her Dominican anchorite (chapter 19); they are later seen as a most important token of love (chapter 64), a gift of God (chapters 61, 67, 68).
4. Mark iii, 35.
Chapter 15
1. i.e. probably in 1411, as Margery apparently left for the Holy Land in 1413, and visited the shrine of St James at Santiago de Compostela in north-west Spain in 1417.
2. White clothes would be taken as a claim to special virtue (chapter 33) or virginity (chapter 52).
3. Philip Repyngdon, Bishop of Lincoln 1405-19. Margery visited him sometime after 23 June 1413 (probably because the Bishop of Norwich had died in April 1413, and his successor died without having visited his diocese in 1415). Repyngdon had long ago abjured his earlier support for Wyclif at Oxford, where he had defended Wycliffite doctrine on the sacrament ‘but had won universal esteem for his moderate and kindly bearing’ (DNB). Archbishop Arundel later regarded him as a most orthodox bishop, who energetically pursued Lollards. Repyngdon seems to have heard of Margery before.
4. For Margery as prophet, see chapters 17, 23, 24, 71; for contemporary religious as prophets, see R. M. Clay, The Hermits and Anchorites of England (London, 1914), 155ff.
5. The mantle and the ring would indicate the taking of a vow of chastity before a bishop.
6. Those in heaven are clothed in white; cf. Revelation iii, 4; iv, 4; Matthew xxviii, 3.
7. Repyngdon ‘was described in his lifetime as a “powerful and God-fearing man, a lover of truth and hater of avarice” … He does not appear to have possessed any great force of character, and his promotion was perhaps chiefly due to his friendship with Henry IV’(DNB).
8. Thomas Arundel (1353-1414), third son of Richard Fitz Alan, fourth Earl of Arundel. Enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1397, he was banished in the same year by Richard II, returning to England with Henry IV, when he was restored to the archbishopric. A vigorous opponent of the Lollards, he presided at the trials of the heretics William Sawtre, John Badby, and Sir John Oldcastle. See M. Aston, Thomas Arundel (Oxford, 1967).
Chapter 16
1. The first of many rebukes that Margery’s book records her as giving to those who sin by swearing. Oaths by aspects of the Passion and Christ’s body were felt to torture our Lord all over again, as Chaucer’s Parson says in his tale: ‘For Cristes sake, ne swereth nat so synfully in dismembrynge of Crist by soule, herte, bones, and body. For certes, it semeth that ye thynke that the cursede Jewes ne dismembred nat ynough the preciouse persone of Crist, but ye dismembre hym moore …’ (X, 59off.). See also G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford, 1966), pp. 414-25.
2. A garment made of skin dressed with the hair.
3. William Sawtre, sometime priest of Lynn, was burnt for Lollardy at Smithfield in 1401.
Chapter 17
1. The Vicar is later named (chapter 43) as Richard of Caister (d. 1420). He has been credited with writing one of the most popular Middle English devotional lyrics, Jesu, horde, that madest me, although ‘he may well have expanded and rearranged an already popular poem’ (Medieval English Lyrics, ed. R. T. Davies, London, 1963, pp. 146-8, 332). After his death Margery seems to pray to him as to a saint (chapter 60).
2. The Scale of Perfection of Walter Hilton, the Revelations of St Bridget of Sweden, the Stimulus Amoris of the pseudo-Bonaventura, and the Incendium Amoris of Richard Rolle. Margery here mentions the same books as those later read to her by the young priest (chapter 58). On Margery’s reading, see Introduction, p. 15ff.
3. St Katherine of Alexandria, supposedly a fourth-century virgin martyr, whose cult was very popular in the Middle Ages. A girl of noble birth, and persecuted for her Christianity, she refused marriage with the emperor because she was a bride of Christ; she triumphed over fifty philosophers enlisted to persuade her of the errors of Christianity. She was tortured by being broken on the wheel that became her symbol, and then beheaded.
4. As Richard of Caister is known to have died on 29 March 1420, this would date Margery’s appearance before the Bishop’s officers to c.1413.
Chapter 18
1. The Carmelite William Southfield is reported to have received supernatural visitations, and the Virgin appeared to him.
2. Wisdom i, 4, 5.
3. Psalms li, 17.
4. Isaiah lx
vi, 2.
5. i.e. Dame Julian of Norwich (born c. 1343), anchoress at St Julian’s Church, Norwich. Julian’s revisions of the account of her meditations on her own visions, in the two versions of her Revelations of Divine Love, suggest her scrupulous and anxious care in the correct interpretation of such experiences.
6. I Corinthians vi, 19.
7. James i, 8.
8. James i, 6-7.
9. Romans viii, 26.
10. Popularly attributed to St Jerome, although no precise equivalent has been found in his writings. The Middle English treatise Speculum Christiani has St Jerome say, ‘Prayers please God but tears constrain him,’ and St Bernard says, ‘Tears of a sinner torment the devil more than every kind of torture.’
11. cf. II Corinthians vi, 16; Apocalypse xxi, 3; also Ezekiel xxxvii, 27-8; and the texts from St John echoed in chapter 10 above.
12. Luke vi, 22-3.
13. Luke xxi, 19.
14. This abrupt transition suggests that in the unique MS this material has been wrongly brought forward from the end of the next chapter, which concerns Margery’s dealings with several widows.
Chapter 20
1. The model for herself provided by the example of St Bridget of Sweden was evidently much in Margery’s thoughts; in this chapter God confirms the connection explicitly.
The Book of Margery Kempe Page 31