Margery Kempe
&
The Fire of Love
Margery Kempe
- a Norfolk Enigma
Margery Kempe was one of the most complex figures in English history. Dating from about 1430, her account of her life - The Book of Margery Kempe - is the first autobiography by any English man or woman. Set mainly in Kempe's home town - the busy port of Bishop Lynn, now Kings Lynn, UK - it tells a story of trouble and turmoil, with failures in business, mental illness, sexual passion, religious visions and courtroom dramas.
As daughter of the mayor and wife of a wealthy burgess Kempe was dressy and proud in her younger days.
Transformed by her visions, she took up a life of hardship and rigour. She trekked for months to foreign shrines, giving birth on one expedition, increasingly lame as the years wore on and often with only beggars to guard her. But why only beggars? She did set out with pilgrim parties but her ranting self-righteousness drove her companions to give her the slip. ‘I never knew why they set off without me,’ she says in the Book!
By contrast, her religious experience is sublime and intense, yielding other-worldly episodes that jostle with earth-bound disputes and adventures throughout her Book. Red-blooded sex and religious purple aren’t kept completely separate, though, and a few scenes make for uncomfortable reading. ‘The fire of love,’ which burned increasingly hot in her breast, was beyond Kempe’s control.
A Book with a Story
Being semi-literate, Kempe dictated the Book to scribes, who copied it for monastic libraries. Nothing appeared in print for over 500 years except for meagre, pious extracts attributed to ‘a devoute ancres … of Lynne.’ Then all copies of the Book itself were lost and with them the story of Kempe and her life.
At last, in 1934, a copy was found in a private library, presumably smuggled there from a nearby religious house at the Reformation.
This precious copy, still the only one known, is the Book as Kempe dictated it. In the Norfolky English and scribal hand of the 15th century it's a treat for scholars (available here). Modern type suits a wider audience, and the manuscript page above yields the following mysterious content - a hard but not impossible read:
Sche sey many white thyngys flying al abowte hir on every syde... Sche sey hem ... both in chirche and in hir chawmbre, at hir mete and in hir praerys, in felde and in towne, both yn goyng and syttyng. And many tymes sche was aferde what thei myth be, for sche sey hem as wel on nytys in dyrkenes as on day-lygth, Than ... owir Lord seyd onto hir:
... thes betokyn that thu hast many awngelys abowte the.'
Modern translation and modern recording make the Book even more accessible! What's still lacking is a sound recording in Middle English (as 15th century English is called). Step this way if you're able to project a Middle English, middle aged Margery Kempe!
This website has various pages exploring Kempe's contradictions. Try Take her and Burn her!, Margery Kempe: an Overview or Kempe the Eccentric; or read about her pilgrim adventures to Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago and Wilsnack.
My play The Fire of Love brings Kempe loudly alive on the modern stage. To see how other writers and artists have brought her alive - or been brought alive by her - visit Agony and Ecstasy
Tony D Triggs
