From The Book of Margery Kempe: The Trials and Triumphs of a Homeward Journey

Margery Kempe (c. 1373-1438), the author—not the writer—of The Book of Margery Kempe, lived—when she was not traveling to the Holy Land or Assisi, the Shrine of St. James at Compostela, the Chapel of St. Bridget in Rome, or to Norway, Danzig, or Aachen—in the prosperous East Anglian town of Lynn. She was the daughter of John Burnham, who, she did not hesitate to say when required to identify herself, was five times mayor of Lynn; the wife of John Kempe, a respected burgess; and the mother of fourteen children. Her adversaries saw Margery Kempe as a heretic, a Lollard, and hence a danger to the social order. She saw herself, if not as a potential saint, at least as a servant of God who lived a life comparable to that of St. Bridget of Sweden. Richard D. Altick tells the story of how The Book of Margery Kempe came to be made accessible to readers of our time (1960:298-300). As he presents it, the twentieth-century discovery of Margery Kempe’s story of her own life seems to have been almost inevitable. Altick begins by tracing the first part of the Book to be set in print to an eight-page leaflet called A Shorte Treatyse of Contemplacyon . . . Taken Out of the Boke of Margerie Kempe of Lynn. This small part of Margery’s life history was published by Wynkyn de Worde in about 1501 and reprinted in a collection of religious treatises in 1521. Then in 1910, almost four centuries later, Professor Edmund Carter published The Cell of Self-Knowledge, a collection that contained some of Margery’s reflections. This publication came at a time of growing interest in mysticism and the contributions of women to the literature of religious experience. And then, in 1934 Colonel William Erdeswick Ignatius Butler-