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.
