The Book of Margery Kempe

Picked up for 59p at the Help the Aged charity shop.

It's an interesting little book, the autobiographical ramblings of a woman, born at the end of the 14th century, who may have been a true mystic, receiving many communications from Christ, or a raving psychotic, depending on your world-view. The non-chronological anecdotes were transcribed at her behest by two scribes who worked under her close scrutiny and are remarkable in the picture that they present of her life as a comfortably-off medieval gentlewoman, and of her frequent pilgrimages both throughout England and abroad. The writing is unaffected and direct and tells us much about both her everyday and interior life, and her frequent mystical experiences which left her weeping copiously, leading to much hostility from those around her.

I get the impression that she would not have been an easy person to live with - she was seized not only with floods of tears (c/w moaning and loud wailing) but sudden desires to forgo meat and wine, wear only white clothing, attend confession on a very regular basis, and to live in a 'chaste marriage' with her long-suffering husband, John. He, unsurprisingly, is less keen on all of her enthusiasms but- to give him his due, he seems to have loved her, stuck up for her against her detractors and reached a cordial accommodation with her whims. Actually, she seems to have brought her own money to the marriage, so perhaps he had little say in it all. I'm about halfway through the book at the moment. Being Lent, it is indeed appropriate spiritual reading. I find that I am warming to her, although she is almost piteous in her determination to be seen as misunderstood. I think that she almost certainly had severe post-natal depression, not to say psychosis after the birth of her first child and that it was this that pre-disposed her to her mystical 'attacks'. I can truly sympathise with her in this. Following the birth of my third child there were a number of occasions where I really felt that I was losing my grip on reality and was subject to a number of inner locutions that d.g. lead me back to sanity, rather than in the opposite direction. Maybe it is the thinning of the psyche that primes people for mystical experiences, and how it is viewed depends on the recipient's willing acceptance, or revulsion, of the supranormal.

Margery went on to have thirteen more children. I myself stopped at four.