Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe: Oxford Worlds Classics

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THE BOOK OF MARGERY KEMPE

MARGERY KEMPE (ne Burnham, b. c.1373, d. after 1439) came from the town of Bishops Lynn (now Kings Lynn, Norfolk). She was the daughter of a successful and influential merchant. After her marriage and the birth of her first child, Kempe received her first vision of Christ. Following unsuccessful ventures in brewing and milling, and giving birth to a further thirteen children, Kempe made a vow of chastity and she embarked on a life of prayer, penance, and pilgrimage. The Book of Margery Kempe is the account of her spiritual conversion, her travels, and her mystical visions. In Jerusalem she had her first bout of irresistible crying and weeping, which would persist through much of her life. Kempe also visited Rome and all the major shrines of Europe. During the 1420s Kempe was afflicted by an illness that kept her in Lynn, and her husband suffered a serious accident that greatly incapacitated him. Kempes husband and oldest son died in the early 1430s, after which Kempe made one last difficult journey, to Prussia. She returned home via Wilsnack and Aachen, and then dictated her Book. In 1438 she was admitted to the prestigious Guild of the Holy Trinity at Lynn. The precise date of her death is unknown.

ANTHONY BALE is Professor of Medieval Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 13501500 (2006) and Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews, and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (2010). In 2011 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize. For Oxford Worlds Classics he has also translated Sir John Mandevilles Book of Marvels and Travels (2012).

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Anthony Bale 2015

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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 2015

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Acknowledgements

MOST of the work on this translation was undertaken during my tenure of the 201213 Walter Hines Page Fellowship of the Research Triangle Foundation at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina, USA. I am extremely grateful to the Center for providing such a congenial place to think and work, and to the staff and Fellows for a magical year. I would also like to record my thanks to the Leverhulme Trust which awarded me the Philip Leverhulme Prize, which has allowed me to undertake much of the research for this edition, in particular facilitating visits to East Anglia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Palestine, and Spain. The first fruits of my thinking about Kempe were fostered by an AHRC Research Networking Grant (ref. AH/J002704/1), and the contributors to the network Remembered Places and Invented Traditions: Thinking about the Holy Land in the Late Medieval West, in which we explored the travels of Kempe and analogous figures.

For various kinds of input into and support for this project, I would like to thank Jonathan Adams, Sarah Beckwith, Alastair Bennett, Emily Brand, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Dyan Elliott, Jess Fenn, Matthew Fisher, Christina M. Fitzgerald, Peter Gibbs, Vincent Gillespie, Caroline Goodson, Cordelia Hess, Bruce Holsinger, Jonathan Hsy, Stephen Kelly, Lisa Lampert-Weissig, Judith Luna, Will Liddle, Dorothy McCarthy, Jake Morrissey, Cath Nall, Timothy Phillips (and Percy), Derrick Pitard, Kyle Reeves, Emily Steiner, and Amanda Walling. I am especially grateful to Sebastian Sobecki for sharing with me his researches on the Kempe family in Gdask. I warmly thank those who have informed me aboutand accompanied me in Kempes footsteps aroundBethlehem and Jerusalem, especially John and Ruth Bale, Dana Brueller, Ariel Nura Cohen, Yahel Farag, Maya Lester, Ora Limor, Anna Messner, Mark Pace, and Katharina Palmberger. Isabel Davis, Elliot Kendall, Lara McClure, and Marion Turner gave immensely helpful feedback on drafts of my Introduction. Errors and omissions that remain are, of course, mine to deplore.

I am very grateful to audiences at those institutions where I have presented my work related to Margery Kempe and fifteenth-century pilgrimage, and for the feedback I have received, namely at Birkbeck College University of London, Duke University, Harvard University, Kings College London (Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies), University of Tennessee Chattanooga, the Kungliga Vitterhetsakademien Stockholm, and the University of York.

I would also like to record my gratitude to the staff of the British Library, the Custodial Library of the Custodia Terrae Sanctae Jerusalem, the London Library, the National Library of Israel, the exceptional librarians at the National Humanities Center, and the sisters of the Casa di Santa Brigida, Rome.

This book is dedicated to all my friends.