Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe

Description

My own misconceptions about Margery Kempe were addressed and corrected by this study which combines insight and sympathy with a lively and coherent prose style. Written for non-specialists as well as scholars it would appeal to anyone interested in the tradition of Christian spirituality, popular religion, women's history, medieval culture, or the life of this interesting woman.

Margery Kempe, a middle-class English housewife at the turn of the fifteenth century, was called to weep and to pray for her fellow Christians and to adopt an unconventional way of life. Separating herself from her husband and many children, she became a pilgrim travelling around England and as far away as Jerusalem. In old age, she dictated to scribes an autobiography that recounts her extraordinary intimacy with Christ as well as her intense, commotion-filled life. At first glance, she does not seem very "saintly" in character or disposition and her spiritual experiences can easily, appear to be extreme or egotistical.

To appreciate and interpret properly Margery Kempe's life and spirituality, one must go beyond conventional categories of social and religious history. Clarissa Atkinson, assistant professor of History of Christianity at the Harvard Divinity School, does this from six perspectives: the character of Margery's autobiography, her mysticism and pilgrim way of life, her social and family environment, her relations with her church and its clergy, the tradition that shaped her piety, and the context of late medieval female sanctity.

Margery's Book was shaped by the writings of famous holy women and by pressures on memory and motivation that come with age. Nevertheless, Atkinson shows, it is an authentic autobiography: the story of a life told by its subject.

The vocation that called Margery to mysticism and pilgrimage made her unusual, therefore open to suspicion. It required her to leave her husband and children, to dress in white (a color usually reserved for virgins), to go on pilgrimage as a way to participate in Christ's earthly life and death. It graced her with a conspicuous gift: tears she could not control or resist. With the help of repeated assurance from Christ and her advisors, Margery was convinced her mystical gifts and tears were intended to make her a mirror of penitence, compassion, and God's love for sinners.

Margery's domestic and social background gave her the courage to persist in her strange vocation and unpopular way of life in spite of current norms about the behavior of married women. She was not deferential or quiet; she came from a powerful merchant family, so she spoke to her contemporaries (even priests and bishops) with straightforward language. She met scorn from most of her relatives, but found encouragement in Christ, the saints, and the representatives of the Church.

During Margery's lifetime the Church displayed intense anxiety over the related issues of religious enthusiasm, discernment of spirits, and female visionaries. Margery consistently sought to have her religious "feelings" and way of life examined and approved. Many trustworthy persons, including Dame Julian of Norwich, advised Margery to accept what God sent her and judged her "feelings" to be "the work of the Holy Ghost."

Having examined these aspects of Margery's life and piety, Atkinson goes on to make an original and significant contribution by explaining their specific spiritual context. It is in the tradition of affective piety and of late medieval female sanctity, she argues, that Margery's religious emotions and expressions can best be understood.

From Anselm of Canterbury, through Francis of Assisi, to Nicolas Love, affective writers and preachers aimed to promote intense feelings. Principal among these were compassion, that enabled Christians to participate in the suffering of Jesus and his Mother, and contrition, that produced repentance and the emotive aspects of conversion. Margery incorporated these feelings in her own devotional life: identification with the human Christ, conspicuous humility inspired by Saint Francis, "boistrous" emotion in sympathy with Mary grieving-at the Cross. Against this background, the religious life of Margery Kempe seems neither aberrant nor even very unusual. Rather, it is her unique response to a tradition established by great saints.

Among the saintly persons of late medieval Europe were many women, for example, Catherine of Siena, Birgitta of Sweden, Joan of Arc, Julian of Norwich. They characteristically saw visions, communicated directly with God, found scribes or biographers who publicized their experiences. An increasing number of thema were wives and mothers who struggled, like Margery, with the married state and eventually "transcended" it, becoming in effect "honorary" virgins through their holiness and by God's special favor. Traveling widely, speaking publicly, departing from traditional women's roles, these women were a new creation of the late Middle Ages. Atkinson aptly demonstrates how their lives and works form the appropriate context in which we can recognize and appreciate Margery Kempe's life, Book, and vocation.

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