ST MARGARET’S IS THE CHURCH OF MARGERY KEMPE

 

 

The first page from the Mss of Margery Kempe

Her Life and Times

 

The Book of Margery Kempe

Bibliography

 

Julian Centre link

 

Link to Julian, Margery Duologue 

HER LIFE AND TIMES

  

St Margaret’s is the church of the medieval pilgrim and visionary Margery Kempe.

 

Margery was born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, then called Bishop’s Lynn,

Circa 1373, the year of Julian of Norwich Revelations and around the same period that Chaucer was writing his major works.

 

Margery was born into one of the most turbulent periods

in the history of England, it has been called the age of adversity and anxiety; ominously the century had begun with

wide spread famine throughout Europe including England.

This was a Century marked by long wars, plague, taxes, insurrection bad government, religious persecution and martyrdom.

 

St Margaret’s was the church of William Sawtre, (Sawtry) who was a Vicar of St Margaret’s Church and the first Lollard Martyr, condemned to death by burning in London.

 

The Continent had seen a golden age of spirituality, particularly female spirituality and mysticism, which would not be seen again.

For a while England seemed untouched by this, and then two women

appeared, different from each other, both remarkable in their own way. One, England’s first woman theologian Julian of Norwich-

The other woman almost bursts into the world of Bishop’s Lynn,

Margery Kempe.

 

 

MARGERY KEMPE       ‘The Gospel gives me leave to speak of God’.

 

Margery Kempe was no ‘ordinary’ medieval woman.

She came from one of the most prosperous and influential

family’s in Lynn.

She was a wife and mother of 14 children, and a Laywoman,

who felt she was called by God to live a life of prayer and contemplation, in the world.

She lived out this call to holiness, as a pilgrim, travelling the length and breadth of England and abroad, to pray at the famous Christian shrines. She experienced visions of Christ and Mary his mother,

Mary Magdalene and St Anne, and she had intensely passionate conversations with God and Christ.

For all this Margery was no quietly pious woman: She was a woman who liked good food, and fine dresses and hats, and to be seen by her neighbours.

She was independent, proud, outspoken and boisterous, and spoke candidly of her sexual desire and temptations. She wore a hair shirt, fasted, and persuaded her husband to join her in taking a vow of Chastity, and she failed in two businesses.

She suffered for most of her life with feeling a failure, uncertain

and afraid, unsure of the path she was following

Whilst she was generally welcomed on her travels

abroad, in England she found many were against her.

And when she is accused of Lollardy on a number of occasions,

Whilst there may have been some real concerns being expressed here, it is more likely that this was a hook on which to hang other objections and fears to Margery. All the evidence suggests that she was in fact faithful to the belief of the Church.

But it was in her home town of Lynn that Margery found the most opposition and hatred towards her.

Whilst Margery challenges Bishops, and ecclesiastical authorities,

it is they, more than the ordinary people who support her, and indeed encourage her.

 

 

THE BOOK OF MARGERY KEMPE

The Boke of Margery Kempe, is known as the first extant spiritual autobiography in English.

Margery claims she was illiterate, ‘not lettryd’.

According to her own story, Margery dictated her book.

It is not a chronological account.

It ignores anything that is not primarily the story of Margery’s relationship with God and her spiritual journey

The purpose of her Book is to reveal and authorise the meaning and truth she believes God had called her to follow.

 

The Book is divided into two parts

 

Book 1, is in many ways like similar devotional texts of the period particularly those by women mystics and visionaries.

Through various experiences, childbirth, madness and her

first vision of Christ Margery narrates her spiritual journey-

that leads into her travels, and the ’gift of tears’.

In England, where she is accused of Lollardy, the Holy Land,

Assisi, and Rome, where she enters into her mystical marriage,

and Santiago. The two great fires in Lynn.

 

Book 2, is more like a travel journal, or memoir.

John Kempe dies, as does Margery’s son,

Margery accompanies her daughter-in law back to Prussia.

And on to Danzig and Aachen, finally returning to Syon Abbey.

All of Margery’s travels symbolise her spiritual journey,

marked with transformative ‘turning points’.

 

It is clear from her book that Margery not only has an

extremely retentive memory, but that she is very familiar with

other books of devotion and spirituality, the Liturgy of the Church,

as well as the Bible.

In some ways Margery’s story is reminiscent of the style and genre of Augustine’s Confessions, and the story of the Conversion of St Francis of Assisi, both of which Margery probably knew well.

(See end Note)

 

 

 

Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich.

‘Set all your trust in God,

and do not be afraid of what people say.’

        Julian of Norwich- to Margery Kempe

 

When compared with Julian of Norwich, Margery has frequently

been cast as disappointing.

The reasons for this are complex.

Not least the kind of images and texts of Christian female spirituality and piety that have been traditionally authorised as acceptable.

Julian is an Anchorite and enclosed.

Margery does not conform to these images. A monk in Canterbury says to Margery, ‘I wish you were enclosed in a house of stone so that no one should speak to you’. !

 

One of the startling things that mark Margery out as different from the more usual models of female spirituality and piety is her ordinariness, her earthiness and her candour.

And perhaps, just as this was a very real question and problem in Margery’s own time, it still presents questions for us today.

For Margery is just as at home talking passionately to God, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, as she is wringing out her husband’s washing, travelling a country road with her husband and a bottle of beer, or finding swaddling clothes for the Virgin Mary.

 

Margery’s life is a life ‘lived in the world’, with all its difficulties, uncertainty, questions, struggle and messiness.

And she certainly knew all of these.

And she is a woman insisting on a direct relationship with God,

prior to priests and men, at this time a dangerous idea, especially for a woman.

Margery Kempe was a woman who truly and passionately

showed a profound love for God.

Her book does not give an ‘ending’, how could it,

Margery finally entrusts that to the God who begun it.

 

 End Notes

1. Ref Augustine’s Confessions-

Margery prays and weeps for her son to repent of his dissolute life-

In the same way that Monica, Augustine’s mother, prayed for him to turn to God, which Augustine later claims saved him!

2. In the story of St Francis of Assisi’s conversion, he too, from a wealthy background, gives away all his riches and takes up a life of poverty and obedience- and finds many people turn against him.

Margery would have known this story very well and the Biblical

Injunction. -  Ref- Matthew-chpt 19-v 20.Jerusalem Bible

It is more than likely that a lot of the hostility that she met with in

Lynn among her own wealthy class came from just this self interest.

 

The ‘Gift of tears’.

On practically every page of her Book, Margery weeps, cries, howls, and screams out her sorrow for her sinful life, her longing for heaven and need of salvation, and the sins of the world.

This was not something that could be controlled by the person having these experiences; it was uncontrollable and could only be stopped in the same way it was given, by God.

This was known as the Doctrine of ’Compunction’, essentially an awareness of one’s own sin and guilt, and sorrow for the sins of others. In many ways a spirituality that was a recognition of belonging to a community of all people.

This was expressed outwardly by tears and was believed to be a gift from God.

The model for this was the mother of Christ weeping at the foot of the cross.

Another was the repentant woman known as Mary Magdalene, who Margery strongly identifies with.

Besides grief over one’s sins and longing for heaven, compunction began to include during the 13th and 14^th century a heartfelt compassion for the sufferings of Christ at his Passion.

This type of devotion begun by St Anselm can also be seen in St Francis of Assisi and this stigmata.

 

Rosalind Mayo

July 2011