Margery Kempe: Housewife Gone Nuts

Margery Kempe: average wife, mother, businesswoman and the town nut. I honestly feel sorry for her because here’s a woman who was not educated and while her marriage seems to have been relatively happy, she was still at the whim of her husband. And with motherhood coming so quickly after her marriage, I think many women would feel the restrictions placed on them at the time.

            Margery suffered an illness after the birth of her first child and she sought spiritual guidance to confess an indiscretion from when she was younger. When the priest begins chewing her out for other, minor sins she seems like she begins to lose it. Lynn Harry Nelson on vlib.org says that “She broke. She tried to throw herself out of the window, screamed, blasphemed, and struck out at all who approached” (Nelson).This was a full-on mental breakdown and it resulted in her getting locked up.

            Before Margery embarked on her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, she gained the ridicule and suspicion of her neighbors. Nelson says that “she began to chat with God more frequently.,. Most important, she began to cry. Here she began to encounter trouble, for seizures of this sort could either be the work of God or of the devil, and opinion was split…” (Nelson.). This makes it sound like Margery is the rope in a tug of war between God and Satan. Her public acts don't really help her case for really talking to God. The public displays of extreme emotion would be enough for anybody to put several feet between themselves and Margery.

 

 Perhaps we saw Margery losing her faith and trust in the Church as an institution after the bad confession experience and so she turned more fully to the personal devotion to God. Perhaps she was dealing with post-partum depression. Maybe she had always been mentally unstable. What I found interesting is that in her writings, she refers to herself in the third person and calls herself “the creature” in the four excerpts from her book on luminarium.org. She is definitely an interesting person to read about because she did such extreme things that not a lot of women did at the time.