The Book of Margery Kempe Read Online Free Page A

influence on Dorothea’s life was the example of St Bridget, whose relics were carried through Danzig on their return from Rome to Sweden in 1374. And, like Margery Kempe, this middle-class married woman who struggled to lead a religious life tells how she experienced a kind of spiritual drunkenness, and was also noted for her frequent and sustained holy tears. 22
    Both Angela’s weeping and shrieking, and her intensity of feeling, and the life of the married Dorothea and her gift of tears, offer parallels with the experience of Margery Kempe, whose own life was made so persistently difficult by her gift of loud and frequent tears. It is essential to retrieve some sense of the spiritual value and desirability that was accorded to the gift of such tears in those days. Their spiritual value was confirmed to Margery – in a discussion of her understandably recurrent concern with discerning authentic tokens of the Holy Ghost – by no less an authority on the contemplative life than Julian of Norwich (‘When God visits a creature with tears of contrition, devotion or compassion, he may and ought to believe that the Holy Ghost is in his soul,’ chapter 18). It is this sense of the value of holy tears that lies behind Margery’s exchange with the Archbishop of York, to whose rough question ‘Why do you weep so, woman?’ she replies firmly, ‘Sir, you shall wish some day that you had wept as sorely as I.’
Reading Margery’s life
    â€˜And therefore she would not for all this world say otherwise than as she felt…’ (chapter 61).
    In these dictated recollections of a woman who could not read or write it is human speech itself which continually catches and sharpens the attention and offers a clue to reading Margery’s life. Margery’s
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was not, after all, set down to answer the expectations of later readers of autobiography. 23 Margery would probably not have believed that human experience was worth recording for its own sake. The Proem makes clear that this life is being recalled because of God’s wonderful dealings with Margery, to God’s glory rather than Margery’s. The perceiving of pattern in one’s life, which has determined the art of more modern autobiographers, is thus undertaken by Margery from a rather different vantage-point. Indeed, by later standards of autobiography, the presentation of pattern and progression mayseem disconcertingly absent or elusive. There is little concern with chronology and with noting the passing of time, little sense of ageing and of the changing phases of life. The presentation of the subject’s relationships with her chief friends is mostly rather interrupted. Touches of local colour and realistic detail come vividly and spasmodically before the reader’s eyes, yet observation of the outward world – often significantly hazy and offhand anyway – was very far from what Margery would have seen to be her purpose, as a woman gifted with revelations. In spite of this we cannot claim Margery’s
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to be the autobiography of a great mystic – the quality of her mystical experience prevents this – but it remains one of the most immediate ‘Lives’ of the period.
    For Margery, the form of her writing was predominantly directed by the strong continuity of purpose that she saw in her own life. By comparison with the recollected revelations of the great mystics, Margery’s
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is almost too autobiographical, too concerned with the mundane difficulties and obstacles that confronted Margery in life. Her record of those visionary experiences which were to her own mind most extraordinary – particularly her conversations with our Lord – are often among the least individual and lively parts of her work in both style and content, while other parts of her text may seem individual at the expense of authentic spiritual understanding.
    Margery may be observed consistently