In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  Nothing then seems to change in her life for about another fifteen years, and she carries on living as she was and having more children. She believed that Christ physically appeared to her and that he was concrete. In later visions, she touched him and felt him. In modern terms, it might be described as some kind of mental illness or psychosis, but that was not at all how she saw it. The book is clear that the visions came from God, but one of the main themes of the book is that Margery Kempe questions the source.

  KATHERINE LEWIS: She believed they came from God, but sometimes she very properly doubted this because even the most learned theologian could have difficulty discerning whether they had come from God or from the devil, let alone a woman. This is what makes women’s visions problematic, because of all the stereotypical ideas about their intellectual and moral failings, and this sense that they really would not be capable of discerning the origins of the vision.

  There had been some significant instances of women in northern Europe having visions and recording them, before Margery Kempe. Miri Rubin pointed to Hildegard of Bingen from the twelfth century, who had the intellectual skills to command her own writing project within her monastery. From the thirteenth century, there were women who were not in religious houses but who developed a spirituality that was noticed and written down by priests, who were fascinated by them. Marie of Oignies, from the diocese of Liège in modern Belgium, was a major intellectual figure, and Jacques de Vitry wrote down her visions. These were translated widely throughout Europe, and Marie wrote about crying and how she found her way to a chaste marriage.

  MIRI RUBIN: Above-all important, to my mind, is Bridget of Sweden. Felicitously, the year she dies in is the year we think Margery was born, in 1373, an extraordinary Swedish aristocrat who moves from marriage and bearing eight children to a life of chaste marriage and, after the death of her husband, pilgrimage throughout Europe. Margery mentions her, Margery’s inspired by her and, particularly, by her devotion to the Virgin Mary.

  We know of Margery Kempe’s life from the book she dictated, which was apparently finished in her last years. The first person she asked to write it down was a man who had lived in Prussia for some time and was almost certainly her eldest son. That version was so ill written that nobody could understand it.

  ANTHONY BALE: The text that we now have says, this is so misshapen in Deutsch letters, in German letters. Then the book is given to another man, who had been a friend of this man from Prussia, and he can’t understand it either. It’s then given to a priest who tries to read it and can’t do anything with it and then, somewhat later, miraculously, this priest is able to work on it.

  The text makes obvious this difficult route to completion, an account of collaborative authorship that was very much in keeping with how medieval texts were written. Texts would have a listener, a reader, a writer, a scribe and these were all parts of what it was to be an author in the Middle Ages. The account of Margery Kempe’s life is reliable, up to a point.

  ANTHONY BALE: This is not an impartial document, this book is designed to show Kempe in a particular way. It’s modelled on sacred precursors, particularly Bridget of Sweden and Marie of Oignies, and it looks like a saint’s life in some ways, it looks like a confession in other ways. And, of course, one of the famous generic tags that’s given to it is that it’s the first autobiography in the English language. And, to some extent, that’s true – it’s the story of Kempe’s life – but it’s not the whole story.

  That uncertainty is the case in so many medieval documents, Melvyn observed, you just have to take a deep breath and say, ‘Well, we’ll go with it.’

  About fifteen years after the first vision of Christ sitting on her bed, Margery Kempe started to have conversations with Christ, Katherine Lewis continued, and he reassured her again about her sin and told her he had now forgiven all of her sins. She would never go to hell, she would not even go to purgatory. This took the form of direct speech from Christ, after he ravished her soul.

  KATHERINE LEWIS: This is where he also starts outlining for her aspects of what go on to be her vocation, what we might describe as the public ministry she creates for herself. Really importantly, one of the things that he says is that she’s to go and see a local anchorite (again, it comes back to this issue of discernment of spirits) and the local anchorite will be able to reassure her. And, indeed, when he hears about the revelations that she’s already had, he’s moved to tears by them and says that she’s sucking at the breast of Christ.

  The anchorite told her she was to come back whenever she had other visions and he would be able to reassure her about their origins. She was to travel around the country and tell people of her visions. When she went on to ask Christ why he had not shown these visions to professional religious people, Christ talked about the fact that a lot of sin hid under the habits of holiness. Her role then was to go out to correct what she saw as problems.

  Her travelling away from Bishop’s Lynn and telling of her visions put her on really dangerous ground.

  ANTHONY BALE: It’s something that she has to make very clear, that she’s not preaching. Obviously it’s forbidden by St Paul for women to preach and it’s forbidden in the medieval Church, and she makes that very clear that she’s not preaching. But she does. Particularly when she’s at the Bishop of York’s house in Cawood, it’s very clear that she is, effectively, preaching, she’s telling a parable and she’s getting herself in very dangerous territory there.

  When she was about forty, Margery Kempe went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, an event that had a lasting impact on her. It was important for her to find people to travel with, at a time when travelling in groups was the safe thing to do. She dressed in white, a sign of purity and probably virginity. She had a servant with her at first, but then her servant abandoned her, part of a series of trials. One of the most symbolic rejections of her was when her fellow pilgrims refused to eat with her, an exclusion from a Christian group that she found very painful. She also said they stole her money, and they dressed her in a ridiculous cloak made of badger fur.

  MIRI RUBIN: The groups find her irksome because she does go about correcting people, constantly inveighing when people want to settle down and have a good time, like the Canterbury pilgrims of Chaucer, and she’s always there reminding them, ‘Don’t mention God’s name in vain,’ or don’t behave this way or the other. But, when she reaches Jerusalem, everything comes together in the most extraordinary fashion – and remember that Jerusalem at this time is under Mamluk control but, nonetheless, Christians have access to the holy places, the Franciscans have created a trail of pilgrimage that allows people to walk in the footsteps of Christ, the Via Dolorosa. And you can imagine, for a woman who’s been communicating regularly with Christ, what this means.

  One of the things to bear in mind, Anthony Bale added, about this account of her persecution was that this authorised her in a way, this was her Via Crucis, she was like Christ. Being a renegade, being someone who saw the truth that others did not see, then became a very authorising position for her.

  Back in England, in Leicester, Margery Kempe was investigated for Lollardy and was examined for her opinion on the articles of the faith. The authorities were hoping to catch her out, Katherine Lewis said, focusing on the Mass and her opinion on the true presence in the Mass. It was not only her potential heresy that attracted attention; the mayor of Leicester had noticed her white clothing.

  KATHERINE LEWIS: He asks her why she goes about in white and then he says to her, ‘I think you’ve come to lead all our wives away.’ And there is this fear that she is setting a very subversive example because yes, she’s still married, but she’s taken a vow of chastity and her husband has authorised her pilgrimage, but he’s not there, and she’s earning a living for herself as a holy woman, she has a purse of money that she carries around with her. The Bishop of York asks her where she gets the money from and she says, ‘Well, people pay for me to pray for them.’

  Portrait of Bridget
of Sweden.

  She also came to the attention of the most powerful man in England at the time, John, Duke of Bedford, who was governing England in the absence of Henry V. He sent his men to arrest her, fearing Lollardy, and the men told her they would have a £100 reward for that work, which was a lot of money. Also, Margery Kempe had been in the household of the Duke of Bedford’s aunt, Joan Beaufort, whose daughter she allegedly counselled to leave her husband. She denied that claim, but that was the kind of accusation she faced.

  The thing about Margery Kempe, Miri Rubin said, was that she was abroad and visible and audible. A woman could be a bride of Christ if she was in a monastery, or she could be out of the way like Julian of Norwich, the anchorite she visited, but Margery was out and about.

  When she was sixty or so, Margery Kempe set off for Gdansk on the journey that appears at the end of the book.

  ANTHONY BALE: She sets off for Gdansk as a renegade. She is accompanying her daughter-in-law, who was from Gdansk, to Ipswich. Her son had died and she was going to put her daughter-in-law on a boat to send her back to her own family in Prussia. And then Kempe, who’s been told not to go, gets on the boat and she goes off to the Baltic. The boat is blown off course and ends up in Norway over Easter, and then they make their way to Gdansk. Then she undertakes an incredible journey.

  She had an injured foot, yet travelled something like 800–1,000 miles, partly on wagons, partly walking. Margery went to see the Holy Blood at Wilsnack, which was a famous pilgrimage location, and then went on to Aachen and then to Calais and then back home. She struggled, and the text is very detailed about how difficult this journey was.

  Some people may have thought she was a hypocrite who wanted to draw attention to herself, Miri Rubin suggested, but, just as many would have found her exemplary. People thought she might be a prophetess and she had a constant stream of patronage and support. Very respectable monks in the course of the fifteenth century wanted to have a copy of her book, and, thanks to them, there is a surviving manuscript.

  MIRI RUBIN: Her story also fits into the biblical story and, indeed, The Book of Marjory Kempe is full of citations from the Bible, of suffering, of prophecy, a lot from the Hebrew prophets. She’s also building really importantly on the deep carnality of the religion of incarnation; the body is a vehicle, Christ offered his body after all. She’s making something quite unique (and, being a woman, it’s troublesome) out of the resources of Christianity.

  She felt compelled by Christ to do what she did – he gave her a sense of mission. She was also very aware of earlier female mystics, and the potential that she, too, might earn a reputation for holiness.

  KATHERINE LEWIS: There is no English counterpart (with the exception of Julian of Norwich, who wasn’t known as a visionary at the time). I think one of the things that we’ve got going on here is an attempt, collaboratively with Kempe and her scribe, to provide the English answer, if you like, to Bridget of Sweden, to provide a homegrown manifestation of holiness within that urban setting.

  The manuscript that we have was held by the Carthusian monastery of Mount Grace in Yorkshire in the late fifteenth, early sixteenth centuries, when the monks read it very sincerely, very piously as evidence of devotional practices, and we can tell from their marginalia that they were taking the spiritual message from it. Later on, there were early printed versions in 1500 and then again in 1521, but they were heavily edited.

  ANTHONY BALE: They take most of her life out and they just give us a few bits of her visions and they call her a devout anchoress of Lynn, which she wasn’t. An anchoress is someone who’s withdrawn; she was someone very much in the world. Her reputation does endure but in a quite small way. She certainly didn’t become a saint. And then, really between the English Reformation in the sixteenth century and 1934, she more or less disappears.

  She was exactly the kind of figure who was so much connected to the old religion, he added, with her faith in the sacrament, her faith in pilgrimage, her love of indulgences, which were really not appreciated by the Church of England. Yet, in her lifetime, she was also suspected of being a Lollard.

  MIRI RUBIN: [When the book] is discovered in the 1930s and is then published, both in modern English and in middle English, what’s fascinating is that Catholics like Graham Greene are enthusiastic about it as well as the Church of England, because, for Catholics, she talks about the old religion and, for Anglicans, she’s just a wonderfully colourful English religious character.

  In the studio afterwards, there was more discussion of Margery Kempe’s husband, who was described as forbearing in many ways, even if, while in Canterbury together, he apparently left her alone as she embarrassed him. When she first suggested they live chastely, Katherine Lewis said, he was like St Augustine, saying that’s a really good idea but just not yet.

  KATHERINE LEWIS: Yet he does enable her to follow that lifestyle and, later on in life, when he has this terrible accident and he gets brain damage and she has to look after him, she says she doesn’t want to look after him, but Christ reminds her that really her husband has enabled her to follow the vocation because he was prepared to let her live this different form of life.

  ANTHONY BALE: And she points out that they’d had so much enjoyment of each other’s bodies when they were young that it was now fitting that she should look after him when he’s fouling his own linen by the fireplace and the table.

  While there is a certain type of criticism that makes him into a villain, Miri Rubin noted, where she maybe would have wanted to start her chaste life earlier but they produced fourteen children, their marriage was also a framework of respectability, a household, a safe haven. And the book itself is a revelation.

  MIRI RUBIN: Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own, ‘Ah, if only some historian here in Girton would write a book about, say, a Tudor woman, just a normal woman.’ To me, this is the book.

  LIST OF PROGRAMMES TO DATE

  15 OCTOBER 1998

  War in the Twentieth Century

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  Space in Religion and Science

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; Artificial Intelligence

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  13 MAY 1999

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  20 MAY 1999

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  27 MAY 1999

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  3 JUNE 1999

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  10 JUNE 1999

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  17 JUNE 1999

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  24 JUNE 1999

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  1 JULY 1999

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  Truth, Lies and Fiction

  22 JULY 1999

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  23 SEPTEMBER 1999

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  30 SEPTEMBER 1999

  Maths and Storytelling

  7 OCTOBER 1999

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  14 OCTOBER 1999

  The Nation State

  21 OCTOBER 1999

  The Individual

  28 OCTOBER 1999

  Atrocity in the Twentieth Century

  4 NOVEMBER 1999

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  11 NOVEMBER 1999

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  18 NOVEMBER 1999

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  25 NOVEMBER 1999

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  2 DECEMBER 1999

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  9 DECEMBER 1999

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  16 DECEMBER 1999

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  23 DECEMBER 1999

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  30 DECEMBER 1999

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  6 JANUARY 2000

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  13 JANUARY 2000

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  20 JANUARY 2000

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  27 JANUARY 2000

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  3 FEBRUARY 2000

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  Goethe and the Science of the Enlightenment

  17 FEBRUARY 2000

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  2 MARCH 2000

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  9 MARCH 2000

  The Age of Doubt

  16 MARCH 2000