Folio Archives 155: The Book of Margery Kempe 2004
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1wcarter
The Book of Margery Kempe; A Woman’s Life in the Middle Ages, edited by R.A.Windeatt 2004
Margery Kempe (c.1373 to c.1439) lived most of her life in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, about 100 miles North of London, and was the daughter of a wealthy man who was several times the mayor of that town. Hers is the oldest known autobiography of an English woman.
Margery was illiterate, and dictated her memoirs to priests. The fact that they exist at all is almost miraculous, as they were only found in the possession of a private Catholic family in 1934, whose ancestors had saved it from destruction during the Protestant Reformation.
Margery was a religious mystic, and had repeated visions of Christ, who regularly instructed her in her daily life. A lot of the book is taken up with detailing these visions, and her repeated and frequent episodes of prostelysing, crying and wailing, that quite disconcerted those around her. Today she would be considered by doctors to be suffering from paranoid delusions and probably schizophrenia. In between the innumerable religious revelations, her life can be constructed. She had 14 children, a long-suffering husband, and made pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome, and Compostella in Spain – extraordinary feats for a middle-class woman in the 15th. century. She also visited the family one of her sons in Germany, a journey that is far better recorded than the more exhausting one to the Holy Land.
The 297 page book is bound in cream cloth title blocked on cover and spine, with gilt illuminated letter surrounds. It is edited and introduced by B. A. Windeatt, there is a brief preface by Alice Thomas Ellis, and twelve woodblock illustrations by Chris Daunt. The book has been translated from Middle English. The light blue slipcase is 23.5x17cm. and the endpapers mottled cream.
An index of the other illustrated reviews in the "Folio Archives" series can be viewed here.
Margery Kempe (c.1373 to c.1439) lived most of her life in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, about 100 miles North of London, and was the daughter of a wealthy man who was several times the mayor of that town. Hers is the oldest known autobiography of an English woman.
Margery was illiterate, and dictated her memoirs to priests. The fact that they exist at all is almost miraculous, as they were only found in the possession of a private Catholic family in 1934, whose ancestors had saved it from destruction during the Protestant Reformation.
Margery was a religious mystic, and had repeated visions of Christ, who regularly instructed her in her daily life. A lot of the book is taken up with detailing these visions, and her repeated and frequent episodes of prostelysing, crying and wailing, that quite disconcerted those around her. Today she would be considered by doctors to be suffering from paranoid delusions and probably schizophrenia. In between the innumerable religious revelations, her life can be constructed. She had 14 children, a long-suffering husband, and made pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome, and Compostella in Spain – extraordinary feats for a middle-class woman in the 15th. century. She also visited the family one of her sons in Germany, a journey that is far better recorded than the more exhausting one to the Holy Land.
The 297 page book is bound in cream cloth title blocked on cover and spine, with gilt illuminated letter surrounds. It is edited and introduced by B. A. Windeatt, there is a brief preface by Alice Thomas Ellis, and twelve woodblock illustrations by Chris Daunt. The book has been translated from Middle English. The light blue slipcase is 23.5x17cm. and the endpapers mottled cream.
An index of the other illustrated reviews in the "Folio Archives" series can be viewed here.
2LesMiserables
Nice, I will have to get this.
