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In Our Time
Margery Kempe and English Mysticism (Archive Episode)
00:47:11
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Margery Kempe, the medieval English mystic
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- [00:00]
Anthony Bale
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.
- [00:06]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. The holiday season can be exhausting with all the parties and the end of year celebrations, but don't forget to take care of yourself by stocking up on your favorite nutritional products. Now through December 30th. Shop in store and online and save on items like Cliff Snack Bars, Luna Bars, Boost Nutritional Energy Drinks, Premier Protein Shakes, Z Bar Variety Packs, Open Nature Powder and Body Fortress Protein Powder. All offers end December 30th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details. Discover the wit, romance and charm of Jane Austin like you've never heard before. From Pride and Prejudice to Emma, Experience all six classics in full cast BBC Audio dramatizations. Featuring David Tennant and Benedict Cumberbatch, these productions bring Austin's timeless world to life.
- [00:55]
Catherine Lewis
I cannot tell you how welcome your words are, how I have wished for them.
- [00:59]
Melvin Bragg
My dearest Elizabeth, can it be true that but you love me too?
- [01:04]
Catherine Lewis
It is true.
- [01:05]
Ryan Seacrest
Listen to the Jane Austen BBC Radio Drama Collection, available wherever you get your audiobooks.
- [01:12]
Pets Best Insurance Announcer
Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line, but.
- [01:18]
Catherine Lewis
First.
- [01:31]
Pets Best Insurance Announcer
There the last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes.
- [01:44]
Caitlin Moran
To celebrate Melvyn Bragg's 27 years presenting in Our Time.
- [01:48]
Catherine Lewis
Some well known fans of the program have chosen their favorite episodes.
- [01:52]
Caitlin Moran
Here's the author and columnist Caitlin Moran. I love In Our Time because it's basically a university, but for the whole world. These are lectures that float through space wherever you are and give you, week by week, the finest education possible. I didn't go to school. I was home educated. So having Melvin's intellectual Narnia to wander through felt like the most lavish and occasionally ludicrous joy possible. There's a real sense of fun in our time. Basically a 40 minute, frantic, all you can eat buffet of stories, facts, discoveries, history and people. I love meeting the people and then presiding over it all. You've got Melvin, like a big brainy Gandalf, briskly keeping all the plates spinning as we sprint through every fascinating thing humanity has ever studied. And Melvin only occasionally bugs out. I don't know if you heard the one he did on mitochondria. Someone was explaining how much electricity was passing through the body every second, which is apparently equal to a lightning bolt. And understandably Melvin was murmuring, extraordinary. Just extraordinary. Kind of like he was a bit stoned, but stoned on knowledge, which is very noble. What David Attenborough has done for nature, Melvin Bragg has done for human achievement and knowledge. And he is beyond a national treasure. He is the national iq. For my episode, I chose the mystery Margery Kemp. Seven centuries after she was alive, you can still feel what an extraordinary and occasionally exasperating woman she was. And obviously I mean that in the best possible way. A lot of women in history are so little known that they tend to come across as rather pious ghosts being married off in silly hats. But Marjorie, Margery Kemp was talking to Jesus. She was preaching in public. She traveled to both Norway and Jerusalem, being an absolute nuisance and legend all the way. Marjorie's thing is that she was really big on crying. She sobbed a lot and I love how much she cried because I can feel her menopause from here. And most importantly, she wrote the first ever English language autobiography. Despite being illiterate, which is simply solid, iconic behaviour, she's still as vivid now as she was then. And if I sadly cannot get into a TARDIS and go and visit her, then in our time is the next best thing.
- [04:23]
Melvin Bragg
The English mystic Margery Kemp led a remarkable life at a turbulent time, from 1373 to 1438, after the birth of the first of her fourteen children, and again from her forties and to the rest of her life. She had visions of Jesus Christ that were so intense she wept profusely, to the amazement of many and annoyance of some. She felt the pain of the crucifixion and she imagined herself married to Christ, living as man and wife. This was a time when England was on high alert for heretics and Marjorie Kemp was threatened with burning at the stake. Interrogated as she traveled from her home in Norfolk across the country by land and sea to Jerusalem, Rome, Norway, Poland, Germany and Santiago de Compostela. We only know of her life now because she dictated her story to scribes. Towards the end of her life, that book disappeared until the 1930s, when it tumbled from a cupboard at a country house as guests were looking for a spare ping pong ball. With me to discuss Marjorie Kemp and English mysticism are Miri Rubin, professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London, Catherine Lewis, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield, and Anthony Bale, professor of Medieval Studies at Birkbeck University of London. Miri Ruben. What do we know about Marjorie Kemp's early life in King's Lynn?
- [05:39]
Miri Rubin
Margery was probably born around 1373. She's born to a very, very distinguished family in Lynn. At the time it was called Bishop's Lynn. Now, Lynn at the time, in the early 15th century, was a very, very important port. It was connected to a whole network of cities that were bound together around the Baltic and the Northern Sea, the Hanseatic League, so that the traders from all these cities had equal rights and moved between them very easily. So was her father, John Brunham, or Burnham, a major, major traitor who was also elected to office. He served as coroner and juror and MP and five times as mayor as Lyn. So she really grew up in a very, very grand, well to do family. And as was normal in those circles around 20, because in England on the whole, women were a little bit older than their counterparts, say in Italy at the time, around 20, she married John Kemp. John Kemp, also from a merchant family maybe. Well, definitely not as distinguished as her own, but also part of the elite of this bustling city. And then she gets pregnant soon after. And in that pregnancy, that first pregnancy, clearly she suffered a lot, both physically and personal, spiritual, mental anguish. And in the course of that, she has the first revisions of Christ, and that's very helpful to her. But she goes on with her life. And she has four.
- [07:11]
Melvin Bragg
What is the vision she has?
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Miri Rubin
The vision is an extraordinary appearance to her of the second person of the Trinity, that is Christ the man and God, but very, very much a physical Christ who comforts her, who encourages her. And she's very much afraid that she's just admired in sin and that her pain is thus.
- [07:31]
Melvin Bragg
She also, as I read, a massive scratching of herself. The scars remain.
- [07:34]
Miri Rubin
Terrible, terrible. Literally a scratching of herself that leaves scars for a lifetime, as she says. And really the description in the book of the anguish is extremely, extremely troubling and moving. But she still goes on. And she has 14 children. Now, we don't know if these are 14 births or 14 children. If 14 live children, it may well have been more births than more actual births than that, given the given child mortality at the time. And then around middle age, now we're.
- [08:03]
Melvin Bragg
Not going to get to middle age yet. What was the position of women in relation to the established church at this time?
- [08:10]
Miri Rubin
Okay, so a woman like Marjorie would have had a certain amount of numeracy and literacy just from being really part of a merchant environment and working in it. She would have had her religious education partly at home, but then of course, through the services of the very Grand Church of St. Margaret's was her church in which she went to regularly. That would mean partaking in the sacraments, that would mean confession.
- [08:36]
Melvin Bragg
I mean, Roman Catholicism at that Time was spectacular, extravagant, impressive and meant to be, but also encouraging the domestic imitations of Christ. So what was woman's relationship with that church then?
- [08:49]
Miri Rubin
Well, a woman like her would have had, for example, her own book of prayer, as we know that Marguerite had. So she had. She was able to afford that sort of extra, as it were, help in her devotions as she went to church. She would have had the whole array of sacraments, as I said. But also in a city like Lynn that had so many preachers and religious and monks and friars, she would have heard quite a lot of really rather interesting preaching. And she says she learned a lot from that type of preaching.
- [09:17]
Melvin Bragg
As a woman she had no actual place in the established hierarchy of the.
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Miri Rubin
City, no official place.
- [09:22]
Melvin Bragg
Anthony Bale, what were the authorities or why were the authorities on the lookout for heretics at this particular time? We're talking about the end of the 14th, beginning of the 15th century.
- [09:33]
Anthony Bale
Yes. Marjorie is accused of heresy at various points in her life. And this is really part of the playing out of the Wycliffe heresies of the late 14th century. These were what we might now recognize as proto Protestant or pre Protestant heresies based on the thought of John Wycliffe, who was an Oxford theologian and cleric. And Wycliffe had developed a theological position which became known as Lollady. Not in Wycliffe's time, it became much more a kind of spectral, unidentifiable movement called Lollady, which is what Kemp is is accused of in the 15th century.
- [10:23]
Melvin Bragg
And can you give us some examples of that? Because it came Wycliffe was defended by John of Gaunt at the time of the early 1380, 182he03, where he got out, he didn't write it, but he got out this first English, full English translation of the Bible, which was illegal. And he was. When he was protected, it was okay. When he was. When he was show trial, put him in jail and then finished off his life, he wasn't, especially after John of Gaunt. But then they turned on the English Bible and everything else. The Lollards developed. So can you give the listeners some things of what they were saying? Some of it is remarkably contemporary. When you say proto Protestantism, let's go for it. What were they saying in the 1390s?
- [11:02]
Anthony Bale
Well, the distillation of what we might think of as Lollard thought arrives in 1395 in the 12 Lalard conclusions which are presented to Parliament and pinned on the doors of St Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. And these 12 conclusions include statements such as worship of the bread and wine of the sacrament is a kind of idolatry, that confession to priests is illegitimate because only God has the right to absolve human beings of sin, that clerical celibacy leads to sodomy, that. And that pilgrimage and devotion to relics is a kind of idolatry. And so these are.
- [11:44]
Melvin Bragg
And that the Bible must be in English.
- [11:45]
Anthony Bale
Yes, and this is much more, I think, a move towards a congregational religion as opposed to a clerical religion, and is therefore extremely hostile towards the established church and the clergy. And one of the particular points that the Wycliffeites make is that clerics should not have temporal offices or own land or have temporal employment, that they should be busying themselves with the cure of souls rather than looking after the Church as well.
- [12:18]
Melvin Bragg
It's very much a more intellectual point of view. The same thing that John Ball was stirring up crowds before, about 15, 20 years before. So it's very much in the air. But they turned against it. The Church is tightening its grip on all sorts of things, including that the dodges, you'll be chased and so on. So what was it like for ordinary people? These are the. They pin them to the door. Maybe Luther got the idea then from that. They pin them to the door. And do ordinary people go about their lives in a completely different way? Are they sniffing out lolides in their own villages? What's happening?
- [12:55]
Anthony Bale
Heresy is essentially a thought crime. It's a crime which exists in people's minds, in people's devotional selves. And so identifying it, finding it, actually involves a degree of surveillance and drilling down to what normal people are doing. And from the early 15th century, so by this point, 20 years or so after Wycliffe, in the early 15th century, you get this incredible culture of surveillance and censorship.
- [13:25]
Melvin Bragg
Who's doing the surveillance?
- [13:26]
Anthony Bale
Well, it starts off being the established church and particularly Archbishop Arundel, who. Who is a very keen persecutor of Lollards. And what we see in the book of Marjorie Kemp is how this surveillance drills down to the level of both secular and ecclesiastical officers. So it could be a bishop, it could be a. It could be a confessor, it could be the steward or the mayor of Leicester. It's something which is being carried out across all different parts of society and across the country.
- [14:01]
Melvin Bragg
And by that time it's become very serious, because in 1401, a statute came out which was on the burning of heretics, and the first heretic was burned then, and on it went. Catherine Lewis, what kind of vision? Let's get back to Migocamp. What kind of visions did she have at first?
- [14:16]
Catherine Lewis
So as Mary's mentioned, the very first vision actually happens just after or about six months after she gave birth. And as we were saying, it was a very difficult experience for her. She was physically, physically ill and then she had a lot of mental anguish over an unconfessed sin. Now, she never tells us what this sin was, and there's been lots of speculation about its nature. I suspect it might have been some kind of sexual sin because she's absolutely preoccupied with sexuality and with the fact that she lost her virginity. And many times in the book she tells us she wished she'd never married and never had sex. So she goes to her confessor, she wants to confess this sin because she thinks she's going to die. The confessor is very sharp with her and she can't get the sin out. And so then she goes into this frenzy. And the first visions that she has are terrifying visions of demons breathing fire and attacking her and pulling her about. And this is when, as you were saying, she starts to self harm because they're encouraging her to try and kill herself because then she'll go to hell and be damned. But then in the middle of all of this, just when it seems as though she really has lost her, her mind, Christ appears. And it's a wonderful vision. He appears, he's a very handsome man, he's clad in purple, and he just sits on the side of her bed and he says, daughter, why have you forsaken me when I never forsook you? And then he disappears elegantly, as Anthony says in his translation, off up into heaven again. And that's it. But it restores her senses again, it brings her back to herself. But then nothing seems to then change in her life for about another 15 years. She. She has this very important vision, but she carries on living as she was.
- [15:53]
Melvin Bragg
And having children.
- [15:54]
Catherine Lewis
And having children, exactly, yes. And then she has another vision that we're not. So we're not really sure of the.
- [15:59]
Melvin Bragg
Dating, but let's wait for the next. Okay, because I just want to go into the, the, the what you've mentioned, which is really important. Where did they come from? Because she did. She was worried whether even towards the end of her life, when she went to see Julian of Norwich, did they come from God or did they come from the Devil?
- [16:16]
Catherine Lewis
Well, she believed they came from God, but sometimes she very properly doubted this because even the most learned, the most well educated theologian could have difficulty discerning the origins of A vision discerning whether they had come from God or from the devil, let alone a woman. And this is what makes women's visions problematic because of all the stereotypical ideas about their intellectual and moral failings and this sense that they really would not be capable of discerning the origins of the vision. And so this is why this is one of the main themes of the book. Over and over again, Margery questions this.
- [16:53]
Melvin Bragg
One of the key questions here is how seriously. Maybe that's the wrong word, let's use it anyway. How seriously do we take the word visions? Because lots of people have said since then, oh, she had this sort of breakdown, or it was this post. Post birth crisis, or it was. Or it was that always the other. Now we're going to come across many more visionaries. Would you. How would you explain the vision at the time? What do you think was happening at the time?
- [17:21]
Catherine Lewis
It's very difficult to know what's happening. All we can really go on is what she tells us. So she believes that she sees this. She believes that Christ physically appears to her and that he's concrete. She says in other visions she touches him, she feels him. And yes, perhaps we might want to talk in modern terms about it being the product of some kind of mental illness or, or psychosis, but that's not how she sees it. When people in the book explain her visions as madness or as illness, the book is very clear that they are wrong and that these are visions that have come from God.
- [17:53]
Melvin Bragg
Yes. And what's more interesting is that what is equally interesting, Sorry, not morning. Is that lots of. Lots of other people believe it. And Mary Ruben there. It's a time of mystics. It's a time and also women mystics that in northern Europe. Let's stick to northern Europe. Who. Can you give us one or two instances? And how did the tradition grow in northern Europe and how is Marjorie Potter it.
- [18:14]
Miri Rubin
Absolutely, yes. From about 1100 we really have quite a lot of texts. It begins in the 12th century with really nuns writing, say like the famous Hildegard of Bingen, actually in charge of her writing project. She's a person who's able to do so. She has the intellectual skills. From the 13th century, we start fighting women who aren't nunneries in cities or just living outside nunneries or outside religious houses, but also developing a spirituality that gets noticed. And then their visions are often taken down by priests who are fascinated by them. One such very important person is Marie of Oigny from the diocese of Liege in Belgium. Of today. And a very, very major intellectual and churchman, Jacques de Vitry, writes down her visions. These are translated widely throughout Europe. And she's one of the people who clearly influenced, 200 years later, Marjorie's own mental religious world, particularly around the issue of crying as allowed. And also a person who had been married as Marie of Oigny, had been finding her way to a chaste marriage. But above all important to my mind is Bridget of Sweden, who felicitously, the year she dies in is the year we think Margery was born in 1373, an extraordinary Swedish aristocrat who moves from marriage and bearing eight children to a life of chaste marriage. And after the death of her husband, pilgrimage throughout Europe. Marjorie mentions her. Marjorie's inspired by her and particularly by her Marian devotion, her devotion to the.
- [19:52]
Melvin Bragg
Virgin Mary and sort of competes with her really. Indeed, yes. Anthony, we know Marjorie Kemp's life from the book of Marjorie Kemp apparently dictated in the last two or three years of her life in two books. Can you give us some idea of that book or a total idea?
- [20:11]
Anthony Bale
Well, the. The book by its own account has a very difficult passage into existence. She asks somebody to write it down for her. And the person she first asks is a man who has lived in Prussia for some time and is almost certainly her oldest son. It doesn't say it's her oldest son in the book, but we can extrapolate from this that it was almost certainly her oldest son and he tries to write down a version of her life. And when it's then read, it turns out to be so evilly written, so ill written that nobody can understand it.
- [20:45]
Melvin Bragg
Who uses the word evilly?
- [20:46]
Anthony Bale
The book, that's the text that we now have, says that this is so misshapen in Deutsch letters, in German letters. And then the book is given to another man who had been a friend of this man from Prussia, and he can't understand it either. It's then given to a priest who tries to read it and can't do anything with it. And then somewhat later, miraculously, this priest is able to work on it. And so the text sets itself up from the very beginning, is having a very difficult relationship with its own self. And it makes clear that it's written out of order and that there's several different amanuenses and scribes involved in the production of the text. The actual manuscript that we have today, which is held by the.
- [21:32]
Melvin Bragg
I think before we go there, how reliable do you think it is? Do you think she did right dictated?
- [21:39]
Anthony Bale
I personally see no reason to disbelieve the text's own account of collaborative authorship, because that's very much in keeping with how medieval texts are written. That people would have a listener, a reader, a writer, a scribe, and these were all part of what it was to be an author in the Middle Ages. In terms of how reliable it is. This is not an impartial document. This book is designed to show Kempe in a particular way. It's modelled on sacred precursors, particularly Bridget of Sweden and Marie Douagny. And it looks like a saint's life in some ways, it looks like a confession in other ways. And of course, one of the famous generic tags that's given to it is it's the first autobiography in the English language. And to some extent that's true. It's the story of Kemp's life, but it's not the whole story. It's very interesting to us as a historical document, but it's also a work of rhetoric and has an ambivalent relationship with the whole truth.
- [22:40]
Melvin Bragg
That's. That's the case with so many medieval documents. You just have to take a deep breath and say, well, we'll go with it.
- [22:45]
Anthony Bale
That's what we've got. Yes, absolutely.
- [22:49]
Melvin Bragg
Yeah. It's 9, 20. We're going with it. We're gonna keep going with it for the rest of the. But it does seem who else would have written the story of Marjorie Kemp or except Marjorie Kemp and so on, and her son. And the evidence is as near conclusive as. Damn it.
- [23:03]
Anthony Bale
Absolutely. Yes. Yeah.
- [23:06]
Ryan Seacrest
Hey, it's Ryan Seacrest for Albertsons and Safeway. The holiday season can be exhausting with all the parties and the end of year celebrations. But don't forget to take care of yourself by stocking up on your favorite nutritional products. Now through December 30, shop in store and online and save on items like Cliff Snack Bars, Luna Bars, Boost Nutritional Energy Drinks, Premier Protein Shakes, Z Bar Variety Packs, Open Nature Powder and Body Fortress Protein powder offers end December 30th. Restrictions apply. Offers may vary. Visit albertsons or safeway.com for more details. Discover the wit, romance and charm of Jane Austen like you've never heard before. From Pride and Prejudice to Emma, Experience all six classics in full cast BBC audio dramatizations. Featuring David Tennant and Benedict Cumberbatch, these productions bring Austen's timeless world to life.
- [23:55]
Catherine Lewis
I cannot tell you how welcome your words are, how we have wished for them.
- [23:59]
Melvin Bragg
My dear Elizabeth, can it be true that you love me too?
- [24:04]
Catherine Lewis
It is true.
- [24:05]
Ryan Seacrest
Listen to the Jane Austen BBC Radio drama collection. Available wherever you get your audiobooks.
- [24:12]
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- [25:13]
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- [25:45]
Melvin Bragg
Okay Catherine, we you we. She has this vision when she's in her early 20s, when she had her first child. We don't hear much more about visions until quite a few years later when they come on. Was this after her first great pilgrimage to and this to Jerusalem and to Calvary and so on? Was it? Did the visions and the conversations with Christ and that come on then?
- [26:09]
Catherine Lewis
No, they start before then and actually the pilgrimages come out of the visions in fact. So yeah, it's about 15 years later and I mentioned that the first vision of Christ that she has, it's a very brief encounter. So he appears and sits on her bed and restores her to herself. But then about 15 years later, it's more of a, I suppose, an auditory experience because this is when the conversations with Christ start. And I think he's in chapter five of the book. So it's, it's early on, even though we, we know it didn't happen until later. And this is where Christ for the first time tells her, he reassures her again about this sin, and he tells her that she is saved. Essentially, he has now forgiven all of her sins. She will never go to hell. She'll never go to purgatory, even.
- [26:52]
Melvin Bragg
Does she actually quote him in her book?
- [26:54]
Catherine Lewis
It's direct speech from Christ. Yes. So she says that she. She hears him, he ravishes her soul, and then you get direct speech of Christ speaking to her. And this is where he also starts outlining for her aspects of what go on to be her vocation, what we might describe as the public ministry she creates for herself, essentially. And really importantly, one of the things that he says as part of this is that she's to go and see a local anchorite. And again, it comes back to this issue of discernment of spirits. And the local anchorite will be able to reassure her. And indeed, when he hears about the revelations that she's already had, he's made moved to tears by them and, and says that she's sucking at the. The breast of Christ, essentially. And again importantly, he also says to her, come back and tell me every time you have another vision and I'll be able to help you. I'll be able to reassure you about their origins.
- [27:46]
Melvin Bragg
So she made an agreement. Well, I don't know how much he agreed because he grumbled later or did more than grumble. Anyway, she made a deal with her husband that there'll be no sex, therefore she'll be chased from then on. And she would eat no meat. And this is somehow part of it. You said you used the phrase she was creating her own public ministry. What do you mean?
- [28:07]
Catherine Lewis
The sense that she, she must go around, she travels around the country and she must tell people of her visions. And in particular, one of the things that Christ talks to her about, he. She says to him at one point, why, why haven't you shown these visions to professional religious, essentially to clerics? And Christ talks about the fact that a lot of sin hides under the habits of holiness. And so she is essentially going out to correct what she sees as problems.
- [28:36]
Melvin Bragg
And this is where she gets in trouble because she is preaching and women are not allowed to preach then, although the Lollards, one of the Many radical things that are proposing that women could preach. Mary, come in.
- [28:47]
Anthony Bale
Well, that was just going to pick up that point about. That's where she's on really dangerous ground. And it's something that she has to make very clear that she's not preaching. Obviously, it's forbidden by St. Paul for women to preach and it's forbidden in the medieval church. And she makes that very clear that she's not preaching. But she does, particularly when she's at the Archbishop of Yorkshire, so the Bishop of York's house in Cawood. She is. It's very clear that she is effectively preaching. She's telling a parable and she's getting herself in very dangerous territory there.
- [29:21]
Melvin Bragg
Can I switch to Jerusalem? She made a great pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Pilgrimages were another thing the Lolads didn't believe in. So she was on the side of the establishment in that one. And that seems to be had when she was about 40. That seems to have had a seismic.
- [29:38]
Miri Rubin
Effect on her life that is quite extraordinary. And it follows this sort of midlife change of life that we've mentioned in bits, getting out, as it were, of this framework of marriage for long periods of time, obviously receiving a sort of blessing and agreement of her husband, which she would have been required to have in order to travel in this manner, and also becoming the ultimate pilgrim and in poverty and in suffering. And even the way to Jerusalem is a martyrdom of sorts, as she's being mocked and she's being abandoned and so on. But she reaches Jerusalem.
- [30:14]
Melvin Bragg
Sorry, you say she. You all say she travels alone. She was a rich woman. Did she not even have a servant or was she alone? Alone.
- [30:21]
Miri Rubin
She had a servant. And then she's forsaken by her servant. So it's a series of absolute trials and also finding people to travel with. Everyone traveled in groups in the Middle Ages groups was safety, and that's clearly a problem. She joins groups and then the group groups find her irksome because she does go about, in a way, correcting people, preaching. Well, maybe not preaching, but constantly in vain when people want to settle down and have a good time, you know, like the Canterbury pilgrims of Chaucer, in a way. And she's always there reminding them, don't, don't. Don't mention God's, God's name in vain, or don't behave this way or the other. But when she reaches Jerusalem, everything comes, Comes together in the most extraordinary fashion. And remember that Jerusalem at this time is under Mameluke, under Muslim control. But nonetheless, Christians have access to the holy places. The Franciscans have created, in a way, a trail of pilgrimage that allows people to really walk in the footsteps of Christ, the Via Dolorosa. And you can imagine, for a woman who's been communicating for some years now, regularly with Christ, what this means. And she says to actually, actually be in the place where his infancy was, where his suffering was. It's just absolutely extraordinary.
- [31:36]
Melvin Bragg
She goes to Bethlehem as well.
- [31:37]
Miri Rubin
She goes to Bethlehem as well.
- [31:39]
Melvin Bragg
That she gets what is called, and Joan of Arc had it as well, the gift of weeping.
- [31:43]
Miri Rubin
No, that happens already in Calvary in Jerusalem, in the place of the trip, as you can imagine. Yes, totally in this trip. And it really is quite extraordinary. What great remediacy can you imagine? But also imagine that the Franciscans are very, very good with their own brand of effective piety, of working people up. You know, there's a leader like a tourist leader today, leading with the cross, preaching the sounds, the cries, people crawling on the ground still in Jerusalem in Holy Week. You can see that. So this is all. Everything comes together in terms of her very intimate contact in Christ and as you say, the weeping, the weeping that then will start, stay with her her whole life. An extraordinary form of expression, but also, in a way, acting as a channel for some sort of divine inspiration in.
- [32:31]
Melvin Bragg
Her mind and annoying and impressing people in almost equal measure. Anthony Bale and that's partly why she, we are told, she wasn't too popular with her fellow pilgrims.
- [32:41]
Anthony Bale
Yes. On her major pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1413-14, she, as Mary says, she. She is effectively ejected from the pilgrimage group that she's traveling with.
- [32:53]
Melvin Bragg
We forgot to say she dressed in white all the time. She annoyed people as well. Given that she was married and had.
- [32:57]
Anthony Bale
14 children, she dressed in white, which was certainly a sign of purity and probably virginity. So she's adopting a Persona of a virgin with 14 children. And she is repeatedly bullied on her way to Jerusalem. And I think one of the most symbolic things that the pilgrims do is refuse to eat with her. And they sit her at the end of the table, they don't speak to her. And to eject her from this kind of commensality, this eating together, which is the corporate body of the Christian group, is very, very painful to her. They also, she says they steal her money. They dress her in a ridiculous kind of cloak made out of badger fur, and her maidservant abandons her and they cut down.
- [33:48]
Miri Rubin
They cut her dress. So it's like a really miniskirt sort of thing.
- [33:51]
Anthony Bale
Yeah. So she's made to look like a fool and also she's made to look poor. And that then becomes a Persona that she adopts. I think one of the things that we have to bear in mind with this account of her persecution is that this authorises her in a way. This is her via crucis. She is like Christ. She's got a gift which not everyone believes she needs to prove herself through the ordeal of.
- [34:19]
Melvin Bragg
In other words, the more she's mocked, the more she believes her faith is right.
- [34:22]
Anthony Bale
She absolutely says that, yes. In fact, she has Jesus say that to her. So being a renegade, being someone who sees the truth which others don't see, then becomes a very authorizing position for her.
- [34:36]
Melvin Bragg
It's been a remarkably strong woman, mustn't she? I mean, not only the traveling and being abandoned by Mason, but being. Being exiled, as it were, from the table in the evening, being mocked by. By her fellow pilgrims. Extraordinary. What. What did the authorities think of her as she traveled? Right, because she did pilgrimages in England to York, Walsingham, the obvious places, and took them on wherever she went. It seems to me there's an encounter with the Mayor of Leicester, isn't there, where she. He has a go at her and she has a go back at him. He really wants to imprison her or even put her on trial.
- [35:08]
Catherine Lewis
Can you talk about that? That's right, yes. So in Leicester, she is actually more or less formally tried for lollady and she's examined as to her opinion on the articles of the faith and they're hoping to try and catch her out. They focus on the. The. The Mass, essentially, and get her opinion on the true presence in the Mass. But interestingly, it's not just the. The perception that she might be a heretic. One comment that the Mayor of Leicester makes to her, and it relates to her white clothing, is that he. He asks her why she goes about in white and then he says to her, I think you've come to lead all our wives away. And there is this. This fear that she is setting a very subversive example because, yes, she's still married, but she's taken a vow of chastity and her husband has authorized her pilgrimage. But he's not there. And she's essentially, she's earning a living for herself as a holy woman. She has a purse of money that she carries around with her. The Archbishop, the Bishop of York, rather, asks her where she gets the money from and she says, well, people pay for me to pray for them. So this is, I think, Something that's worrying, something that's challenging, and that she might encourage other wives to do the same. And intriguingly, she also, she comes under the attention of the most powerful man in England at the time, and that's John, Duke of Bedford, who's governing England in the absence of Henry V. And again, he's obviously concerned about her in relation to Loladi, because there's just been Oldcastle's revolt, the famous Lollard lord, and he's actually on the run at this point, this is 1417. And so he sends his men to arrest her and they say they're going to get a reward of £100 for arresting her, which is, yes, it's a lot of money. So the Duke of Bedford is worried about her. But again, there's an interesting more personal sideline onto that because we also discover that Margery Kemp had been in the household of the Duke of Bedford's aunt, and that's Joan Beaufort, and allegedly she had counseled Joan Beaufort's daughter to leave her husband. And so again, you've got that same motif that Margery is setting a very bad example. She denies it, but that's what she's accused of.
- [37:10]
Miri Rubin
Mary, that's a really important point because a lot of the scholarship and general interest in her has been as somebody who was persecuted by authorities. But in fact, almost in every single city where she was examined by the authorities, you find people who take her in, you find people who give her lavish table and, you know, she enjoyed her food, she loved sitting at table and talking. So there is this way in which the population, in the population there were those who were open to her example.
- [37:37]
Melvin Bragg
Because what was going on at the time, I mean. I mean, I'm reading a lot about anyway, is the idea that women could be brides of. Now, this is encouraged by the Church, you, not only the nuns, you are a bride of Christ. Now, it isn't a big step to say, okay, therefore, he is my husband. And she said, well, she sells a ring. So maybe the popular sympathy for us to do is, well, a lot of us wish to be brides of Christ and you have, as it were, made it. And we want to know about your experience.
- [38:09]
Miri Rubin
Exactly. But the thing is that you can be a bride of Christ if you're in a monastery, even if you're in an anchor hold like Julian of Norwich, that's fine, you're not a danger. The thing about her is that she's abroad and she's visible and she's audible. Some hate her, some absolutely Admire her and. And there is a sort of Christian communality that develops around her amongst her followers.
- [38:31]
Melvin Bragg
She goes to visit Julian of Norwich's strange, not strange woman, this extraordinary woman, strange, too strange to wrote and some a reputation unlike Marjorie's, endures strongly to this day. The former Bishop of Oxford thinks very highly and so on and so forth. So was she going to the Jewel in Norwich to confirm her own position or to tell us why you think she won't?
- [38:55]
Miri Rubin
For all that Margery is so strong and opinionated, she's very open to hear good advice. She often goes and asks, we already heard about going to the hermit. And so she goes early in her career, in that middle age moment, she goes to Julian in Norwich in the church anchoress at St Julian's Church, to ask for advice and discernment and they stay together for days together and discuss all of that. Now, Julian herself had already committed her first visions, which she got as a young woman, a young sick woman in her 30s, and she had written down around 1373, and then she had written them again, interestingly, after a life of reflection. But there was never any question. I don't think that people really knew very much about these writings. I think scholars know about them now. I don't think Julian of Norwich at the time was known for her visions. She was known for exemplary life. So she's a sort of person. Exactly. And particularly being a woman, how attractive to see someone who would really, really understand. And they go and they spend quality time together. This is clearly a very important encounter for Margery in terms of someone to talk to.
- [40:05]
Melvin Bragg
Anthony Antebell in. She made many pilgrimages. We talk about her going to Rome, to Assisi. We talked about her going to Norway. Well, we aren't talking about her going there more accurately anyway, she did. And then towards the, when she was 60 or something, she sets off for Gdansk. Why is that?
- [40:24]
Anthony Bale
This is a really remarkable moment in the book and it really provides the kind of formal end of the book where after the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, as a woman of about 40, is the kind of spiritual high point. The journey to Poland and then Germany is kind of the end journey of the book. And the book says that.
- [40:46]
Melvin Bragg
Let me clarify these journeys a little bit because we haven't. I mean, she sometimes was walking, she sometimes on a cart. She wasn't using her wealth from King's Lynn as it were, all Bishop's Lynn as it was then called, to get her there the easy way.
- [40:58]
Anthony Bale
Well, in fact, it's clear in the book that she Gives money away to make the pilgrimage more difficult and that she then gets more money from supporters, which she then repeatedly gives away. That's very clear on her journey to Santiago, but she sets off for Gdansk as actually a renegade. She is accompanying her daughter in law who was from. From Gdansk to Ipswich. And this is after her son had died and she was going to put her daughter in law on a boat to send her back to her own family in Prussia. And then Kemp, who's been told not to go, she then gets on the boat and she goes off to. To off to the Baltic. The boat is blown off course and ends up in Norway over Easter. And then they make their way to Gdansk and then she undertakes an incredible journey. This is a woman in her 60s who has a bad foot. She says she's injured her foot and she walks something like 800 to 1,000 miles, partly on wagons, partly on foot. From. She takes a boat from Gdask to Stralsund and then she goes to see the Holy Blood and the Holy Eucharist at Wilsnack, which was a famous pilgrimage location. And then she goes on to Aachen and then to Calais and then back home. As a woman who is really struggling. The text is very detailed about how difficult this journey was.
- [42:24]
Melvin Bragg
Do you think, Mary, that her experience was seen at the time she thought of herself to be a mystic. She had no doubt about her beliefs. The more it was mocked, the stronger it was. And the visions were clear and they were transparent. He came, he said that I was there and they're rather domestic, he's sitting on the edge of the bed and that sort of thing. And they're always sexual, either in one way or another. Do you think that people saw it as an enrichment of the life of the general community, of how you lived, or an enrichment of her life? Do you think that people thought that she was doing it? This was all to her benefit?
- [42:58]
Miri Rubin
Some people thought she was instrumental, that she was a hypocrite who wanted to draw attention to herself. But as many, I would have thought, found her exemplary. And the fact that she got so much patronage, she got so many offerings, people at least thought she might be a prophetess. Let's ask her an important question, like when might I die? Or when might a relative die? And so on. And that's why the constant stream of patronage and support. But the thing is, her story also fits into the biblical story and indeed the book of Marjorie Kemp is full of citations from the Bible, obviously in the Middle English, mostly of suffering, of prophecy, a lot from the Hebrew prophets. She's also building really importantly on the deep carnality of the religion of incarnation. The body is a vehicle. Christ offered his body, after all. So in a lot of ways, she's just making something quite unique. And being a woman, it's troublesome out of the bits and pieces, the material, the resources of Christianity. And in that sense, it was possible for many to appreciate her, including very respectable monks in the course of the 15th century who wanted to have a copy of her book. And that is our sole surviving manuscript.
- [44:16]
Melvin Bragg
Catherine, can you see a plan in what you. She's doing? She goes to all these places, massive traveling and in this country, and she gives money away and gets. Is there a plan? Can you say she did this because of that?
- [44:30]
Catherine Lewis
I think. I think she did it because she. She was compelled to do it by Christ, essentially. And again, this. This sense of mission. But I think there is also. She's very aware of these. These other female mystics. And there is a sense in which there's very much an awareness of a future reputation for holiness as well. And what's really fascinating, of course, is that in all the lists that Miry told us about, there is no English counterpart, with the exception of Julian of Norwich, who wasn't known as a visionary at the time. So I think one of the things that we've got going on here, perhaps, is an attempt, collaboratively with Kemp and her scribe, to provide the English answer, if you like, to Brigid of Sweden, to provide a homegrown manifestation of holiness within that urban setting.
- [45:12]
Melvin Bragg
It has been suggested this. This was her attempt to turn her into a saint. This was her attempt to turn herself into a saint. Yes, but I'm shaking head for Mary.
- [45:20]
Catherine Lewis
Yeah, only. Only in the broadest sense. It's not. This would not be a document that you'd prevent present for canonization, for example. That would be a Latin document, a very different kind of document.
- [45:29]
Melvin Bragg
Anthony. So the book is written, dictated, whatever it is, and then copied. What influence? What do we know of its influence?
- [45:38]
Anthony Bale
Well, that's a really good question. We know that the manuscript that we have was held by the Carthusian monastery of Mount Grace in Yorkshire in the late 15th, early 16th century. And there we know that Carthusian monks were reading it very sincerely, very piously, as evidence of devotional practices. Yes. We can tell from their marginalia that they are saying that they're taking the spiritual message from it. And then in around 1500, and then again in 1521, early printed versions of the book of Margery Kemp are produced. They are very, very heavily edited, almost censored. They take most of her life out and they just give us a few bits of her visions. And they call her a devout anchoress of Lynn, which she wasn't. She wasn't an anchoress, someone who's withdrawn. She was someone very much in the world. And so her reputation does endure.
- [46:29]
Catherine Lewis
But.
- [46:29]
Anthony Bale
But in a quite small way, she certainly wasn't made a saint. She certainly didn't become a saint. And then really between the English reformation in the 16th century and 1934, she more or less disappears.
- [46:42]
Melvin Bragg
Do you have an explanation for that?
- [46:45]
Anthony Bale
I think in the harsh terms of hagiography, the cult fails. She isn't made a saint, but also because she's exactly the kind of figure who is saint. So much connected to the old religion that she's very. This is something that Protestants would have been very hostile towards. Her faith in the sacrament, her faith in pilgrimage, her love of indulgences. These are things which were, you know, really not appreciated by the Church of England.
- [47:15]
Melvin Bragg
If we simplify it, and talk of two sides. A great Roman Catholic establishment, spectacular, theatrical, in control, all pervasive. And the Protestant, starting with the Lollard, let's say, starting with the Lollard, she offended both. You're nodding, Mary.
- [47:29]
Anthony Bale
She certainly wasn't a Lollard, but she. She has. She strikes some poses which make people think she might be. And yes, she is. She. She speaks truth to power. That's one of her things.
- [47:42]
Miri Rubin
But what's fascinating in the when, when it is discovered in the 1930s and is then published both in modern English and in Middle English. What's fascinating is that Catholics like Graham Greene are enthusiastic about it as well as, of course, just the Church of England, because for Catholics, she talks about the old religion, and for English, he's just. For Anglicans, she's just a wonderfully colorful English religious character and she's all over the front pages of the TLS and so on. There's a great enthusiasm about her when she's rediscovered.
- [48:13]
Melvin Bragg
Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Mary Rubin, Catherine Lewis and Anthony Bale. Next week we'll be talking about penicillin discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming in 1928. You can follow us, I'm told, on Twitter. BBC In Our Time. Thank you very much for listening.
- [48:27]
Catherine Lewis
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [48:34]
Melvin Bragg
So what did we miss out that was important?
- [48:37]
Miri Rubin
Melvin, one of our wonderful colleagues, David Wallace has just gone into the whole history of the actual reception in 34. And then during the war cause the translation is published and the edition in 1940, and she becomes almost a counterpart to Joan of Arc. They have La Pucelle. We have extraordinary, resilient, tough eccentrics like Marjorie Kemp was the idea.
- [49:04]
Melvin Bragg
Catherine, what do you think?
- [49:05]
Catherine Lewis
I would have liked to say more about her husband and her son, I think.
- [49:10]
Melvin Bragg
What about her husband?
- [49:12]
Catherine Lewis
He's. He's a very interesting character and I think he is very. He is very forbearing in many ways, albeit that when they're in Canterbury together, apparently she's embarrassing him so much that he pretends he doesn't know her and sort of leaves her alone. But I think actually. Well, but I think actually the relationship that they have is. Is very interesting. And so, for example, when she first says to him that she wants to have Liv Chaste, he says, like St. Augustine, he says, well, that's a really good idea, but just not yet. But yet he does enable her to follow that lifestyle. And later on in life, when he has this terrible accident and he. He gets this. This brain damage and she has to look after him. He's. He's infantilized at this point, and she says she doesn't want to look after him, but Christ reminds her that really, her husband has enabled her to follow the vocation because he was prepared to let her live this. This different form of life. So, yes, I would like to.
- [50:05]
Anthony Bale
And also points out. She points out that they'd had so much enjoyment of each other's bodies when they were young that it was now fitting that she should look after him when he's fouling his own linen by the. By the fireplace and at table. And this is, I think, in English writing, this is unique to have a portrait of old people in their marriage, this domesticity, which is. And actually, I find this part of the book very moving. He's fallen down the stairs and she's looking after him. And this is something which. It's a portrait of.
- [50:37]
Melvin Bragg
I wish you got that in, actually. That was good. That's good.
- [50:40]
Miri Rubin
Because usually there is a certain type of criticism that makes him into a sort of villain.
- [50:46]
Catherine Lewis
Yes.
- [50:46]
Miri Rubin
You know, she maybe would have wanted to start her chaste life earlier, but he. You know, they produced 14 children and so on. But. So it's quite interesting to see, because marriage is also a framework of respectability. It's a household, it's a safe haven.
- [51:01]
Anthony Bale
But that's one of the things which is so amazing about the book for us that it's so full and that people come back to it and find.
- [51:07]
Catherine Lewis
Every time I read it, I find something new.
- [51:10]
Melvin Bragg
Apart from anything else. It gives us an awful lot about medieval England, doesn't it? And women at the time, you know.
- [51:16]
Miri Rubin
When Virginia was writes in a room of one's own. Ah, if only some historian here in Girton would write a book about, say, a Tudor woman. Just a normal woman. To me, this is the book.
- [51:29]
Catherine Lewis
This episode of In Our Time with.
- [51:31]
Caitlin Moran
Melvin Bragg was produced by Simon Tillotson and first broadcast in June 2016.
- [51:38]
Ryan Seacrest
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