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.

All this talk about magic and mysticism.

When we were given the assignment to read about Hildegard von Bingen and Catherine of Sienna and about mysticism, I did't even know know what that meant. So, of course I looked it up on Merriam-Webster dictionary and it said mysticism is "a religious practice based on the belief that knowledge of spiritual truth can be gained by praying or thinking deeply" and it also said, "the belief that direct knowledge of God, spiritual truth or ultimate reality can be attained through subjective experience (as intuition or insight)". Thank you to http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mysticism. 

Source: http://radix24.deviantart.com/art/Strange-lights-in-the-sky-4400158

Okay so do you guys believe that someone who prays so deeply can really understand the knowledge of God? I mean do you really believe that this could possibly happen? I thought that God was suppose to be infinitely powerful and have infinite amounts of knowledge and from the religious perspective God is so holy that a mere human being can not see him, can not touch him, let alone for a mere human to actually understand the knowledge of God is mind boggling. I would think that if you were to attain the direct knowledge of God you would just burst into tiny million pieces because God's knowledge is infinite. It makes me question if these people were like crazy or what? I dunno...

Source: http://www.vasc.org/rental/bday.html

This also sort of reminds me of the class discussion we had a while back when our classmates asked the question "could magic be an illusion?" From what I have actually seen about magic, which is not a lot, I think so. I mean, the rabbit coming out of a hat, the deck of cards tricks, making things disappear they are all just like mind tricks. There's a reason why a magician says oh I don't reveal my trick secrets because its just a trick. It's not like they have supernatural powers. What do you think? 

A Rose By Any Other Name

Yeah, I went there, I quoted Shakespeare. And this is why:

Magic? Mysticism? What? Okay, so I have a really hard time differentiating between the two. They seem awfully similar… So similar in fact, that I would argue that they’re synonymous. Does the difference between names even matter?

Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena did the same exact things that many witches were accused of. They incorporated religion in their books on healing remedies, they described the manner in which one should prepare salves and potions to cure various ailments, and they candidly spoke of sex. These are all things that a common woman would have been burned at the stake for! So what gives these two women the right to practice something so similar to witchcraft?

This guy is obviously confused too.

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That Papacy, that’s who. Yep, the guy with the really cool hat and the head of a religious empire is all it takes to obtain a glorified “get out of jail free” pass. Because really, isn’t that what he gave them? With the Pope’s blessing, Catherine of Siena and Hildegard were able to document their findings in relation to healthcare, human life, and music. Let’s also remember that Catherine of Siena claimed that she had a direct connection to God and that he spoke to her in dreams. That’s totally normal. Meanwhile common women mixing herbs in their kitchen to help soothe a stomachache had the potential to be tried executed alongside unlucky midwives and women accused of adultery.

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This brings up two interesting implications. First, if the Pope gives his stamp of approval to someone doing something that would otherwise be labeled as heretic, it’s okay. We all now that the Pope has more power than pretty much anyone else in medieval Europe, including the monarchs, but it’s entirely different seeing that play out in this manner. His say so has effectively changed the label of witchcraft to holy. If he made a blanket statement along the lines of “if you wanna mix herbs to help the health of the community or help educate others, it’s cool” he could have saved countless lives.

The second thing this makes me think of is that these women needed the Pope to okay their doings. They were aware of what they were doing and they knew that if they didn’t have Papal approval, their head was on the chopping block. They knew that if they didn’t get the go ahead from the Pope that they could be tried as witches – this implies that they were aware of exactly how their practices could be perceived!

Basically the line between magic and mysticism is so blurry to me that I can’t see where one ends and the other begins. I’ve honestly been coming to the conclusion that there is in fact no difference because of the way in which Catherine of Siena and Hildegard went about their professions. The only difference in my eyes is that one is approved by the Church because it is devoted to God, while the other is not.