Margery Kempe

That incorrigible early fifteenth century pious pilgrim Margery Kempe (1373-1438) is being honoured today in her home town of King’s Lynn with the unveiling of a statue of her in the Minster church. The Eastern Daily Press website has a report about it which can be seen at New statue to be unveiled of town's most famous daughter

Her remarkable autobiography The Book of Margery Kempe, the manuscript of which was rediscovered in the early twentieth century, is now available not just in its original language from the Early English Text Society but also as a translation into modern English from both Penguin and Oxford World’s Classics as well as in other editions. It is a fascinating account of her life and full of insights into her own spiritual journey and also the daunting physical journeys she made, in the earlier ones dragging her husband along, and, then, after his death, venturing abroad and much of the time unaccompanied. This was a woman who travelled to Santiago de Compostella, to Jerusalem and to Rome, and later to the eucharistic shrine of Wilsnack in Brandenburg.

It is an insight into life in King’s Lynn - then known as Bishop’s Lynn - and the equal degrees of esteem and exasperation she aroused in different clergy, and also into life in early fifteenth century England. It is a testimony to an extraordinary life, yet also one that was in other ways doubtless typical for women of means in those decades. It is human, sometimes funny, often moving, and very memorable. Margery doubtless could be very irritating - the awkward parishioner par excellence - and in many ways self-obsessed,  not least in respect of her husband, yet she was resilient and redoubtable, walking the dusty and muddy roads of late medieval England defiantly clad in white, facing down allegations of being a heretic and perfectly assured to robustly tell the Archbishop of Canterbury’s gentlemen off for their louche behaviour before sitting up in the garden at Lambeth with His Grace in conversation until the stars came out.

Make her acquaintance …..you will enjoy the experience.