Margery Kempe

Kempe, Margery

(kĕmp), d. 1438 or afterward, English religious writer, b. King's Lynn. She was the wife of a prominent citizen and the mother of 14 children. Her autobiography, The Book of Margery Kempe (complete ed. 1940; ed. with modern spelling 1944), was known only in small excerpts until 1934, when the whole was discovered. She was a religious enthusiast whose loud weeping in church and reproof of her neighbors kept her in public disfavor. She traveled abroad as a pilgrim, and her work has rich details of the everyday life of her time. The narrative is occasionally interrupted with visions, prayers, and meditations, many of them of great beauty. The book may be the earliest autobiography in English. See mysticismmysticism
[Gr.,=the practice of those who are initiated into the mysteries], the practice of putting oneself into, and remaining in, direct relation with God, the Absolute, or any unifying principle of life. Mysticism is inseparably linked with religion.
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Bibliography

See biographies by M. Thornton (1961) and L. Collis (1964); study by R. K. Stone (1970).

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References in periodicals archive ?

Margery Kempe (circa 1373-1438) was willful, inner-directed and self-determined--many would say to a fault.

Three with the courage of their convictions

The story is based generally on the life of Margery Kempe, a mystic and writer in medieval England.

A journey to the Middle Ages

resurrect The Book of Margery Kempe from the medieval past and redeploy

From medieval mystic to early modern anchoress: rewriting The Book of Margery Kempe

The Book of Margery Kempe (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Press, 1996), ll.

Moral agency in Hamlet

Margery Kempe was often asked why she traveled dressed in white, but this seems never to have been a genuine request for information.

"Why gost thu in white?": A non-question reconsidered as a genuine request for information

The sources tend to be derived from ecclesiastical and judicial sources: statements from councils and synods; libri pontificales, visitation records, and other collections from various diocese; Mirk's Instructions for Parish Priests and Festiai, and, of course, the ubiquitous Margery Kempe.

Polluting the Sacred. Violence, Faith and the 'Civilizing' of Parishioners in Late Medieval England

The final two chapters of the book attempt to identify xenoglossia in a few works of Middle English literature, the "autohagiography" of Margery Kempe and three of the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer.

The Gift of Tongues: Women's Xenoglossia in the Later Middle Ages

Adrienne Williams Boyarin's "Sealed Flesh, Book-Skin: How to Read the Female Body in the Early Middle English Seinte Margarete" continues this theme, as do the contributions of Johanne Paquette, who offers a fascinating reading of the Book of Margery Kempe and the marginalia of the text's red ink annotator, and Jonathan Juilfs, who considers the textual transmission of Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Love from the mid-fifteenth century Amherst manuscript through its first printed manifestation in Hugh Cressy's edition of 1670.

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, ed. Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis

WHEN Margery Kempe wrote what is widely considered to be the first autobiography in the English language in the 15th century, it is doubtful she expected female confession to be quite where it is today.

REVIEW S; SARAH MILLICAN, GLEE CLUB, CARDIFF

The essay includes an edifying focus on Margery Kempe and the 'virtual' Jew in her visions of the Passion, despite the absence of Jews in England for over a century following their exile in 1290.

The Religions of the Book: Christian Perceptions, 1400-1660

The first woman to record her biography in English, Margery Kempe (c.

The Visions of Margery Kempe

Juliana of Norwich Marylouise Burke Margery Kempe Sofia Jean Gomez John Kempe Darren Goldstein Nurse Tricia Rodley Asmodeus, Jacob Will Rogers Father Thomas Jeremy Shamos