Meet Margery Kempe: The Pilgrim Who Would Not Be Quiet

Too much for her town

Margery Kempe of Lynn was, by every polite standard of the fifteenth century, too much. Her brewing venture failed. Her mill failed. She wept loudly in church — sobbed, in fact, in a way that emptied pews. And when an inner life seized her that she could neither ignore nor explain away, she did not quiet down. She got louder.

The road as an answer

She left for Jerusalem in her forties, then Rome, then Santiago de Compostela — a middle-aged mother crossing a continent on foot and by leaking ship, ridiculed by fellow pilgrims who abandoned her on the road. Bishops interrogated her; one town nearly burned her as a heretic. She answered every examination so ably they had to let her go.

A book without a pen

Late in life, unable to write, she dictated everything — the failures, the visions, the ridicule, the road — to scribes who took years to get it down. The Book of Margery Kempe, the first autobiography in English, then vanished for five centuries until a copy surfaced in a country house cupboard in 1934. She was right: the truth of a life, told plainly, outlasts the laughter.

Why they belong at your table

Seat her when your conviction embarrasses the room. She has been laughed at on three pilgrim roads and examined by bishops — your skeptical colleagues will not impress her.