76 Primary Source Reading 7: Margery Kempe, Explorer
76 Primary Source Reading 7: Margery Kempe, Explorer
Primary Source Reading: Margery Kempe, Explorer
Margery Kempe was born in the town of Lynn (modern King’s Lynn) in England about 1373. Lynn was a port city whose merchants traded with Germany, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia. Her father was John Burnham, who served five terms as the mayor of Lynn and once as its delegate to the English Parliament. Kempe married John Kempe when she was about 20 years old, and gave birth to fourteen children over the next twenty years. For years, she lived an ordinary bourgeois life, and even operated her own brewing business, but she began to have visions of Jesus Christ during a period of post-partum depression after the birth of her first child. She continued to have visions throughout her life, and after her brewing business failed, she began to reexamine her faith in its entirety. She also became known for crying violently when she had her visions, which evidently angered many of the people who met her. Although her religious beliefs were fairly orthodox, she was physically threatened and often accused of heresy. In her old age, Margery dictated a spiritual biography to one of her sons. It was recopied and expanded by a traveling priest into the manuscript that formed the basis for the modern version of her story. The resulting work is one of the oldest biographies in the English language, and it remained lost for centuries until the manuscript was rediscovered in 1934 in the library of Colonel Butler-Bowdon of Pleasington Old Hall (Lancashire, England) by Hope Emily Allen (a noted scholar of the mystic Robert Rolle).
And the she said with great sorrow, “Forsooth, I had liefer see you be slain than we should turn again to our uncleanness.” And he said again, “Ye are no good wife.”
And then she asked her husband what was the cause that he had not meddled with eight weeks before, sithen she lay with him every night in his bed. And he said he was so made afeared when he would ‘a touched her that he durst no more do. “Now, good sir, amend you and ask God mercy, for I told you near three year sithen that ye should be slain suddenly, and now is this the third year, and yet I hope I shall have my desire. Good sir, I pray you grant me that I shall ask, and I shall pray for you that ye shall be saved through the mercy of our Lord Jesu Christ, and ye shall have more meed in Heaven than if ye wore a hair or a habergeon. I pray you; suffer me to make a vow of chastity in what bishop’s hand that God will.” “Nay,” he said, “that will I not grant you, for now I may use you without deadly sin and then might I not so.” The she said again, “If it be the will of the Holy Ghost to fulfill that I have said, I pray God ye might consent thereto; and if it be not the will of the Holy Ghost, I pray God ye never consent thereto.”
Then they went forth to-Bridlington-ward in right hot weather, the foresaid creature having great sorrow and great dread for her chastity. And as they