I’ve written about Margery Kempe before in this blog (https://carmelbendon.com/2018/09/04/yes-power-2/ ) and I’m really pleased to be able to reblog this post on Margery from one of the world’s “Margery Kempe experts”, Clarissa Atkinson. Her book, “Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe” was ground-breaking at its time of release, and remains essential reading for students of Margery. By the way, Margery Kempe was, in part, the inspiration for the modern-day character, Sister Margery Plimsoll, in my novel “Grasping at Water”.
In the mid-1970s, casting about for a dissertation topic, I stumbled over Margery Kempe. In those days you had to stumble over her – she did not appear in the syllabus of any course in medieval studies, nor did she haunt the ether. (Not that we would have known if she had.) Students of medieval Christianity had probably heard of Margery, but very vaguely, with few specifics about her life or work. She was a mystic, sort of, but her book was not read along with Julian’s Revelations or The Cloud of Unknowing. It was not assigned.
Frontispiece to my book: Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Cornell University Press, 1983)
Margery Kempe was an English woman of the late 14th, early 15th centuries who “wrote” a kind of memoir – dictated it, really, as she couldn’t read or write. It was…
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Carmel Bendon 
Thank you!
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