Margery Kempe

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Standard Name: Kempe, Margery
Birth Name: Margery Brunham
Married Name: Margery Kempe
MK , called the first English autobiographer, wrote (in the earlier fifteenth century) an account of her life-experience as immensely significant to God and to herself. In a sense, though her subject is herself, she may be seen as writing hagiography. She was more concerned to record her religious experiences than her external adventures on pilgrimage.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Birth Elizabeth Meeke
Elizabeth Allen (later EM ) was born at King's Lynn, the youngest of three children. She was baptised the same day at St Margaret's Church there.
Legend had it that in 1421 St Margaret's...
Education Michèle Roberts
She chose the medieval option. Her tutor was Rosemary Woolf , and she studied no authors later than Shakespeare . She reports the results of this in two different ways. In one version the course...
Friends, Associates Julian of Norwich
Her reputation spread; she was visited in her cell by pilgrims. They included (some time before June 1413) Margery Kempe , who came to ask advice about her wish to stop cohabiting with her husband....
Intertextuality and Influence Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism aims at nothing less than providing a comprehensive description, a philosophical analysis, and also . . . a justification of these experiences, regardless of the specific cultural and historical moments in which they occur...
Other Life Event Elizabeth Bury
Passages in EB 's diary dealing with answers to prayer reveal a good deal about the dangers and hardships of her life. She thanks God for the recovery of many sick adults and children of...
Performance of text Eva Figes
One of EF 's radio plays, The True Tale of Margery Kempe, was broadcast this year.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Textual Production Julian of Norwich
Liam Peter Temple argues that to set Julian (and Margery Kempe ) in context it is necessary to de-emphasize their Englishness. They wrote as part of a transnational tradition of feminized affective piety,
Temple, Liam Peter. “Returning the Englsh Mystic to their Medieval Milieu: Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Bridget of Sweden”. Womens Writing, Vol.
23
, No. 2, May 2016, pp. 141-58.
142
strongly...
Textual Production Elizabeth Justice
With sublime disregard for relevance, her elaborate title-page further promises a translation from Spanish, collected by the author of the Russian parts of the book, of an account of relics at Oviedo. Despite this...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Monica Furlong
MF images these women, active between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, as a wave, slow and tentative at first, rising to a crescendo with Julian of Norwich , the one who speaks most clearly...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Kempe, Margery. “Introduction”. The Book of Margery Kempe, edited by Sanford Brown Meech et al., Oxford University Press, 1940, p. vii - lii.
Kempe, Margery. “Introduction”. The Book of Margery Kempe, translated by. Barry A. Windeatt, Penguin, 1994, pp. 9-30.
Kempe, Margery. “Prefatory Note”. The Book of Margery Kempe, edited by Hope Emily Allen et al., Oxford University Press, 1940, p. liii - lxviii.
Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. Editors Meech, Sanford Brown and Hope Emily Allen, Oxford University Press, 1940.
Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. Translator Windeatt, Barry A., Revised Edition, Penguin, 1994.