Margery Kempe

Their life

English mystic and pilgrim who dictated The Book of Margery Kempe — often called the first autobiography in English. A brewer and mother of fourteen who failed at business twice, she walked away from ordinary life to travel to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago, weeping openly, arguing with clergy, and insisting on the authority of her own experience in an age that gave her none.

Known for

• The Book of Margery Kempe
• First autobiography in English
• Pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago
• Public weeping as spiritual practice
• Negotiated chaste marriage
• Clashes with church authorities over heresy

The road they walked

Margery Kempe was born around 1373 in Bishop's Lynn, a busy Norfolk port, the daughter of John Brunham, a merchant so prominent he served five times as mayor and once as the town's representative in Parliament. She married John Kempe, a fellow burgess, around 1393, and settled into the life expected of a woman of her class: childbearing, housekeeping, and eventually two attempts at running her own business, a brewery and then a horse-mill, both of which failed. She read her failures as a judgment on her pride, a sign that God wanted her attention elsewhere.

That attention arrived violently. After the birth of her first child, she suffered a breakdown so severe she was, by her own account, restrained and thought to be possessed, until a vision of Christ calmed her. It would be years before that early crisis matured into a settled vocation. In her forties, having borne fourteen children, she persuaded her husband to live with her chastely, and set out on pilgrimage: to Jerusalem, to Rome, to Santiago de Compostela, and to shrines in Germany and Prussia. Along the way she wept — loudly, publicly, uncontrollably, by her telling a gift from God — and the weeping cost her the patience of fellow travelers, the suspicion of clergy, and formal examinations for heresy, including one before the Archbishop of York. She was never convicted, but she was often alone.

She could not read or write, so late in life she dictated her story to a scribe, a priest who found the first version of her manuscript nearly illegible and had to recopy it with a second man's help around 1436–38. The result, known now as The Book of Margery Kempe, is widely regarded as the earliest surviving autobiography in English. It vanished from view for centuries and was found again only in 1934, in a country house library, restoring to English literature one of its strangest and most stubborn early voices.

How their story ended

The last certain trace of Margery Kempe is a 1438 entry in the register of Lynn's Trinity Guild, after which the record falls silent. No account survives of where or how she died, and historians have no firm answer — only her final documented appearance, and then nothing.