She indulged in an extraordinary amount of weeping and wailing: God gave her a great gift – the Gift of Tears! Margery enjoyed the gift so loudly and enthusiastically that she made herself unpopular in many places and was sometimes asked to leave church.

She set forth on a career of extraordinary adventure and activity, including pilgrimages in Europe and the Holy Land, accusations of heresy (a burning offense in those times), thirteen more children, and a great many conversations with Jesus, Mary, and the saints. Then Margery tried again, and this time stuck to her resolve.

There were a few setbacks: she couldn’t give up vanity and greed all at once and tried to make a lot of money, but business reverses taught her a sharp lesson. After that she got well, got up, and resolved to serve God. Margery recovered after Jesus “in the likeness of a man” (a sweet, handsome, friendly man in a purple robe) sat on her bed and reassured her. I’ve called it a breakdown Margery called it a “great bodily sickness, through which she lost her reason for a long time,” and commented later, more precisely, that “this creature went out of her mind and was amazingly disturbed and tormented with spirits for half a year, eight weeks and odd days.” She always referred to herself as “this creature” – that is, part of the Creation. She called it “a short and comforting treatise for sinful wretches,” and her intention was to display divine activity in her life after she met God in person during a breakdown following the birth of her first child. It was the first autobiography in the English language, although Margery didn’t think of it that way. Margery Kempe was an English woman of the late 14 th, early 15 th centuries who “wrote” a kind of memoir – dictated it, really, as she couldn’t read or write. Frontispiece to my book: Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Cornell University Press, 1983)

The book of margery kempe online