Margery Kempe (ca. 1373 - ca. 1439) is best known for writing The Book of Margery Kempe , a work considered to be the first autobiography in the English language.

She was born Margery Brunham in King's Lynn, Norfolk, England and married at the age of 20 to a local man named John Kempe, with whom she had 14 children. At around the age of 35, after a failed confession that resulted in a bout of self-described "madness," Margery claims to have had a vision that called her to leave aside the "vanities" of this world. From that point forward, Kempe avoided sexual intercourse with her husband, and began to make pilgrimages around Europe to sites that were holy to her, if not to others. The stories surrounding these travels are what eventually composed her book. From 1413-1420, Margery went to the Bishop of Lincoln, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Julian of Norwich, Santiago de Compostela in Spain, Rome, and Jerusalem. Her thoughts concerning these trips and her revelatory experiences make up much of her book, but a key focus is also her persecution by civil and religious leaders. The last section of her book deals with a journey in the 1430s to Norway and Germany. Two different scribes did the writing for Margery, under her strict supervision.

Part of Margery Kempe's significance lies in the autobiographical nature of her book: it is the best insight available that points to the middle class experience in the Middle Ages. Kempe is admittedly unusual among the more traditional holy exemplars of her time, such as Julian of Norwich. Though Kempe is often depicted as an "oddity" or even a "madwoman," recent scholarship on vernacular theologies and popular practices of piety suggest she was not, perhaps, as odd as she appears compared to more traditional, cloistered holy women.

Kempe and her "Book" are also significant because they record the tension in late medieval England between institutional orthodoxy and increasingly public modes of religious dissent, especially those of the Lollards. Throughout her spiritual career, Kempe's adherence to the teachings of the institutional Church are challenged by both church and civil authorities, most notedly the Bishop of Lincoln and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, who acted rigorously against heresy, enacting laws that forbade the translation of the Bible into English and teaching laypersons to read scripture. Kempe was tried several times for such illegal acts as allegedly reading scripture, teaching and preaching on scripture and faith in public, and wearing the white clothes of the consecrated virgin. She proved her orthodoxy in each case, but came dangerously close to heterodoxy in her challenging responses to clerical authorities. Had Kempe's book been fully extant prior to the Reformation, it would likely have been destroyed. The fact that it was lost until 1934 is undoubtedly the only reason it is available to us today. In the 15th century, a pamphlet was published which represented Kempe as an anchoress, and which stripped out of her "Book" any potentially heterodoxy thought and dissenting behaviour. Because of this, scholars believed that she was a vowed religious holy woman, like Julian, and were surprised to encounter the psychologically and spiritually complex woman described in the "Book."

The last record of her is in the city of Lynn in 1439, and it is not positively known when and where she died. Her book remained essentially lost until a manuscript was found in a private library in Lancashire in 1934.

External links

• Mapping Margery Kempe a site including the full text of her book with explanations
• Anthology of Middle English Literature