The fire of love that burned so fervently in her soul
There may be something of real interest there which you may not at the moment realize
In a bid to locate the lost ball, one of the children stepped directly on top of it, crushing it beneath their feet. It was hardly the end of the world, of course. There was an entire cupboard of replacements located just off the side of the fireplace. A houseguest lodging with the family offered to fetch a replacement.
His efforts, it seems, were in vain. Colonel W. Butler Bowden, who had inherited the home following the death of his father a decade prior, insisted that there were plenty of replacement ping pong balls stashed away. All his friend was able to find, however, was a mess of small books.
“I am going to put this whole lot on the bonfire tomorrow,” Bowden said, by way of apology, “and then we may be able to find the ping pong balls and bats when we want them.”
They were accounting books, he explained – albeit ones which had been bound in leather for some unknown reason.
The texts were, ultimately, clutter left behind at the time of his father’s passing. And more importantly, they were impeding upon the family’s ability to locate their stash of fresh ping pong balls in timely fashion. The houseguest thoughtfully objected to the wanton destruction of the leather-bound volumes, suggesting an acquaintance be allowed to visit the Chesterfield, Derbyshire home. “[A]fter all,” he explained, “there may be something of real interest there which you may not at the moment realize.”
A self-described "independent scholar" who’d spent her life avoiding professorships, Hope Emily Allen was visiting from the United States when presented with the books. Among them, she identified a work thus far unknown outside select pamphlets published in the early 16th century. Wynkyn de Worde, a London-based publisher, had excerpted piece of a strange work by a little-known woman who is believed to have died the year Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press.
What we now know about Margery Kempe is largely derived from the copy identified by Allen. Whether The Book of Margery Kempe can be considered the oldest known autobiography in the English language is somewhat hotly contested. Written in the late-1430s, the work was dictated by Kempe – who is believed by many to have been illiterate.
“It is only in a limited sense autobiographical,” writes biographer A.E.Goodman. “It does not provide a rounded pen-portrait of its subject, a history of her sentimental attachments or of her secular careers as housewife and businesswoman. Such matters are, indeed, discussed or alluded to, but only insofar as they illuminate various spiritual planes and states. The work is modeled on religious genres, and the mentality which is presented is one heavily influenced by their themes and conventions.”
That the conventions of autobiography were considerably less established nearly 600 years ago is certainly worth remembering, though the work is perhaps more comfortably considered a confession of faith. Written in the third person, the author refers to herself as “this creature” throughout – a signifier of humility before God. The act of writing is not intended to glorify herself, but rather offer witness to the divinity of her creator.
Kempe would ultimately give birth 14 times, but it was the first that sets her story in motion. Devils and demons commanded her to forsake her family and take her own life in the eight months following her first pregnancy. God, the evil forces insisted, had abandon her. She soon discovered the opposite, as Jesus Christ visited her in human form.
A modern translation captures the moment,
Our merciful Lord Christ Jesus . . . appeared to this creature who had forsaken him, in the likeness of a man, the most seemly, most beauteous, and most amiable, . . . sitting upon her bedside, looking upon her with so blessed a countenance that she was strengthened in all her spirits, and he said to her these words: "Daughter, why have you forsaken me, and I never forsook you?" And as soon as she heard these words, she saw truly how the air opened as bright as any lightning. . . . And presently the creature grew as calm in her its and her reason as she ever was before.
The spirit of God never leaves Kempe over the course of the 300+ page manuscript, as she travels to the holy sites of Jerusalem on a spiritual quest. At the Mount of Calvary, she is overcome with visions of Jesus being beaten and crucified, causing her to cry and wail for much of the trip.
“[T]hen she fell down and cried with a loud voice,” Kempe writes, “twisting and turning her body amazingly on every side, spreading her arms out wide as if she would have died, and could not keep herself from crying and these physical movements, because of the fire of love that burned so fervently in her soul with pure pity and compassion.”
Her frequent visions met with several charges of heresy and accusations that her open weeping was, itself, the work of evil forces. She only narrowly managed to avoid a death penalty for those charges. Unable to write herself, Kempe convinced a local priest to take down her story, an act he completed in 1438.
She is believed to have died not long after
Sources:
The Rediscovery of Margery Kempe: A Footnote https://www.jstor.org/stable/42554480
Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays Edited by Sandra J. McEntire
Margery Kempe and Her World by A.E. Goodman
Books by earliest women writers in English on display together for first time https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/18/books-by-earliest-women-writers-in-english-on-display-for-first-time