Laura Kalas

The Book of Margery Kempe, British Library Add. MS 61823, on display at the British Library’s Medieval Women: In Their Own Words Exhibition (c) British Library

Margery Kempe was born into a wealthy merchant family in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, then known as Bishop’s Lynn, in 1373. After a series of religious visions she was converted to a life of complete devotion to God. She continued to have ‘mystical’ visions and auditory revelations for the rest of her life, which she later recounted to two scribes. Her book became known as The Book of Margery Kempe and is considered to be the first female-authored autobiography in English.

Map of late medieval King’s Lynn, by Susan Maddock ©. Reproduced with kind permission.

The Book provides a rare glimpse into religious, and secular, life in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Margery was born Margery Brunham. The Brunham family had owned land in the Burnham parishes of north Norfolk for many decades. When she was around twenty years old she married John Kempe, a man whom she considered to be rather below her social station, and whom she must have married for love. Her Book tells us that she had fourteen children, few of whom are mentioned in detail; it is likely that not all survived.

Margery’s family home is thought to have been very close to her parish church of St Margaret’s, to which she was particularly devoted, now called the King’s Lynn Minster. Known for her copious weeping and devotional fervour in St Margaret’s Church and beyond, Margery was frequently criticised by priests and parishioners for these displays of high emotion. At times, however, they were well-received. When a ‘great fire’ threatened to burn down the nearby Hall of the Trinity Guild in Bishop’s Lynn in 1421, Robert Spryngolde, the parish priest of St Margaret’s Church, sought Margery’s advice and she was encouraged by the parishioners to cry copiously, in order that God would have mercy.

As a highly active religious lay woman, Margery travelled extensively to various parts of England and abroad. In 1413 she visited the famous anchoress, Julian of Norwich, at her cell at St Julian’s Church in Norwich, to ask for her counsel regarding the validity of her visions. Her Book also recounts terrifying arrests for her suspected heresy: in Beverley, and in Cawood, Yorkshire, where she was hauled in front of the Archbishop of York at his chapel and interrogated in 1413. She was also tried for being a Lollard in Leicester, in 1417, and subsequently released. Margery also ventured further afield on pilgrimage; in her forties, to Rome, Assisi, Middelburg, the Holy Land, and Santiago de Compostela, and in her sixties, to northern Europe.

But it is Margery Kempe’s deep affection for St Margaret’s Church that resonates throughout her Book. Today, that connection is still evident in King’s Lynn. In 2018 a commemorative bench in the Saturday Market Place, outside the Minster, was unveiled. In 2022, the Margery Kempe Centre was launched in St Margaret’s Church in collaboration with the Margery Kempe Society. In 2023 a sculpture of Margery Kempe entitled ‘A Woman in Motion’ by the artist Rosemary Goodenough was placed in the Minster. Although we have no record of Margery’s death, it is likely that she is buried somewhere in the grounds of St Margaret’s Church: the King’s Lynn Minster.

Commemorative bench, King’s Lynn, by Toby Winteringham. Photograph © Laura Kalas

‘A Woman in Motion’ by Rosemary Goodenough. Photograph © Laura Kalas

Further Reading:

1. Translations of The Book of Margery Kempe

Bale, Anthony, trans. and ed., The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

McAvoy, Liz Herbert, The Book of Margery Kempe: an Abridged Translation (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003).

2. Secondary Sources

Arnold, John and Lewis, Katherine, eds., A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe (D.S. Brewer, 2010).

Bale, Anthony, Margery Kempe: A Mixed Life (Reaktion Books, 2021).

Goodman, Anthony, Margery Kempe and Her World (Longman, 2002).

Kalas, Laura, and Varnam, Laura, eds. Encountering The Book of Margery Kempe (Manchester University Press, 2021).