March 11, 2013 • 46 mins
Born in the 1300s, Margery had 14 children with her husband before dedicating her life to God. In her 40s, she began a vision-inspired pilgrimage to visit holy sites, and these travels became the basis for her spiritual autobiography,
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hi, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry Holly,
and today we're talking about one of those cool elements
of history that I think if you had never been
(00:22):
interested in history before and you heard the story, you
would suddenly become a fan of all history, Like you
would just want to dig three books for more of
this kind of stuff. Yes, well, and if the thing
I learned about studying literature, So it's one of those
things that intersects a lot of different pieces. We're going
to talk to me about a woman who lived in
the Middle Ages, so the late fourteenth and early into
(00:43):
the mid fifteenth century. Her name was Marjorie Kemp and
seems like pretty ordinary woman. She was a wife and
a mother of fourteen children, which was a pretty normal
number of children at that period. In spite of this
apparently typical side of her, she also had, especially in
(01:03):
the latter part of her life, some pretty intense spiritual visions. Yes,
she's often cited as a mystic. Now, yes, um, During
the Middle Ages, men definitely ran the church. They were
in charge. They were the people who were the priests
and the clerics and the ones who made all of
the decisions UM. And then there were women that also
(01:24):
had these very deeply spiritual lives and would talk about
having visions and UH and having really intense religious experiences.
Most of them were reclusives also UM. They were called
anchorites or anchoresses who lived either within the church or
sometimes literally within a wall of the church, so they
(01:45):
would have a tiny, tiny cell tinier than the room
that we record podcasts in that they would spend their
entire lives in. And those were some of these women
UM had their own followers and sort of that there
would be sort of like a cult of people that
followed their teachings. UM. Marjorie Kemp was a very spiritual person,
(02:07):
but she traveled with her husband and it was not
an anchor right, not at all. She went on pilgrimage
and traveled all over UM for a period of several years,
so that kind of sets her apart from some of
the other mystics who were happening in the same era.
At that point. When she began traveling, she had kind
of established that she was dedicated to her religion and
(02:33):
to the visions that she was having and to following
um religious doctrine. And so she eventually, and we will
get to this in more depth. You know, had this
claim to chase life. But she was traveling with a
man who was her husband, which confused some people who
had fathered fourteen children. Yeah, they had a whole brood
of kids together. Um, and so that that confusing some
(02:57):
of her children she did have after she started having visions,
but before she and her husband stopped the sexual part
of their relationships. So uh, some of the visions that
she had were while she was pregnant. And and we're
of Jesus telling her it's going to be okay, I
will arrange for your child to be taken care of
while you go on pilgrimage for me. And what's really
interesting is that she's often credited as, uh, the creator
(03:19):
of the first autobiography and English for sure. Yeah uh,
and she dictated it because she was not literate herself. Um.
So yeah, it's the oldest known autobiography and in English,
and it isn't written in chronological order. Uh, it isn't
a full account of her life. She leaves out big
chunks and she really just focuses on her spiritual journey. Uh,
(03:44):
and she focused on it in sort of in the
order that she remembered things. So scholars have kind of
gone back and pieced together a timeline based on her
references to holidays and world events that we know when
they happen. So when we talk about sort of the
chronology of her life, that's been pieced together based on Yeah,
that is not her laying out her autobiography like I
was born here and she's kind of all over the place,
(04:07):
and she did dictate it sometime after most of the
events she talks about, so it is all you know,
it's subject to human recollection, but to start at the beginning.
So she was born around seventy three to her father
who was John Brunham. It may also have been Burnham,
(04:28):
it's not quite sure. We've seen both ways, Yes, we've
it's written down in more than one spelling. And he
was the mayor of King's Lynn, which was then called
Bishop's Lynn, which is on just in case anybody needs
a quick geography checkpoint, it is on the side of
England towards the Netherlands, in a little inlet. Yes, it
was a coastal town. So there was a lot of
(04:49):
money to be made in the world of merchant work,
so things that had to do with buying and selling
and shipping. It was a lot of what was going on.
Her father also served as one of the town's two
representatives to parliament six times, as well as a lot
of other positions. He was a very notable and successful
person and Marjorie was very proud of that fact. She
(05:11):
was a very proud person, which is the theme that
will come up in her life later. Yeah, I mean
she was a child of a wealthy pillar of the community. Um.
Not not a mystery why she would be proud of that.
She did get married roughly twenty which is pretty late
(05:34):
in life for most girls at that time, to John Kemp,
who was also the son of a successful merchant, and
he was a merchant to not really as successful as
his father, but they did well enough. Um. Her first
pregnancy was really hard. She was very sick for a
lot of it, and then after the baby was born,
she had a period of more than a year of
(05:56):
what she herself describes as madness. You know, things that
we would reckon nys as being signs of being mentally
ill today. So she talked about having hallucinations, being just
very verbally abusive to her family, having to be restrained
to keep from injuring herself. UM. A lot of people
today sort of say that she she must have had
some kind of postpartum psychosis going on during this period. Um.
(06:20):
And then one day she had a vision while she
was very sick, and during this period, she had a
vision of Jesus. Uh. And during this vision, Jesus asked
her why she had forsaken him when he had never
forsaken her. Uh. And she was sort of like, well,
that's a good question, and then started to recover from
this illness that she had had. Um. It was not
(06:42):
a light switch, though. That was not the thing that
led her to then become a very devoted religious person.
She continued to sort of live life as she had
been before. She described herself as pretty proud and stubborn. Um.
She went into some of the more mundane job that
women had in in the Middle Ages. She worked for
(07:03):
a brewer as a while for a while, and as
a miller um. And both of those businesses failed. Um.
It wasn't great at those things yet, well she was
really She made good beer, but she couldn't like, repeatedly
make enough good beer to sell it. Like she she'd
make a good batch and then the next one would
be terrible, and uh, the the mill had problems with
(07:26):
the horse, like one of the team of horses just
refused to turn the mill and it. So both of
those businesses failed, and that started to become a more
humbling experience. Um. It's still though, was a period of
years before before she started on a just very deeply
(07:46):
religious path. Um. She started to become more and more
preoccupied with what Heaven was like and how in her
mind Heaven was this amazing place and Earth was pretty terrible,
so let's figure out how to get to Heaven faster.
She started spending more and more time in shirt. Um.
(08:07):
She gave up meat and alcohol and eventually sex as
penance for previous sins. And she also did a thing
that was kind of a common practice during the Middle Ages,
which was the mortification of the flesh. And she did
this by wearing a hair shirt. And if you don't
know what a hairshirt is, it's a very coarse or
prickly shirt that you wear under your clothing so that
(08:29):
it physically irritates your skin all day long, constantly. Um.
And she actually that she started wearing that before she
stopped having sex with her husband, because she wore it
while she was pregnant at one point, which sounds like torture.
It does sound horrible. I I've never had a child,
but knowing from the descriptions of other people what being
pregnant is like that it can be very uncomfortable, and
(08:52):
it's exhausting already and sometimes you already feel like prickly
and rashi anyway, So to add a hairshirt on top
of that, no, it's horrible. Yes. And then she had
a couple of years that were kind of the easy
part of her right where she was fasting, she was
you know, acts of contrition, they weren't terribly difficult. But
(09:13):
then she had three years of temptations, yes, including when
a man tried to seduce her away from her husband. UM.
So she had had these years where it was sort
of like she was trying very hard to be a
very quote good religious person and that was going really well.
It was easy for her to fast, it was easy
for her to do these things. Then all these temptations started,
(09:34):
including a man who tried to seduce her, and when
she agreed to seduce him, or to to be seduced
by him. He spurned her um So she did not
actually go through with it, but the fact that in
her brain she had given in she thought was genally
since she could mentally send, and she felt that that
was just as bad um and so it was after
(09:54):
that that she really recommitted herself two, staying on the
path that she felt like was going to lead her
into heaven and to being a better person and to
getting rid of the sins of her past. Um. Once
she got to about the age of forty, she started
having some just really intense, dramatic visions that felt she
(10:16):
described them as real, like real events that were happening
that she was participating in. Um So, she had visions
where she would hear God or Jesus speaking to her.
But then she also had these visions that were like
she was physically present at events that were described in
the Bible. Um So, she had one where she was
(10:36):
present at the birth of the Virgin Mary and took
care of the Virgin Mary as a child. Um and
then the birth of Jesus so and the crucifixion, like
very notable events. She's sort of had visions that were
physically real to her in which she participated in all
of these events. And it's interesting to me just that
(10:59):
a lot of those are in a maternal way. It's
taking care of these religious figures and being part of
you know, their birth and that young developmental part of
their life cycle. When we'll talk about it a little
bit more later. But in most of her writing she
never mentions her kids. The fourteen children she actually had
are pretty tertiary, and the whole narrative, we only really
(11:19):
hear about one of them, and that is one who
she describes as being physically or spiritually troubled, and she
felt that her intervention had helped to save him. And
that's really the sort of the one story of one
of her children that we hear about. Um. So yeah,
she she talks a lot about having visions of women
who are president in the Bible and having relationships with them,
(11:41):
and then she has other visions that are more like conversations,
um with Jesus or with God. So, for example, she
had a vision of a conversation with Jesus in which
he told her to stop wearing that hair shirt because
he was going to give her sort of a spiritual
hair shirt for her her heart. Other than physically wearing
(12:01):
a hair shirt, he also commanded her to continue to
not eat meat and to only wear white, which was
the color of consecrated virgins. Um. That was actually a
huge deal at the time, the fact that she was
going around all in white but she was not actually
a virgin. Lots of hatred and derision people. Um. And
(12:23):
then in the same series of conversations, Uh, she felt
commanded by God to go on pilgrimage to Rome, Jerusalem,
and Santiago. And so after a few years she did that.
It took a while to actually get started, uh that
you know, they had various affairs to settle and other
stuff that they had to prepare for. But about two
(12:46):
years after feeling commanded by God to go on pilgrimage,
she started her pilgrimage and that was in fourteen. Yeah,
and she in the midst of all of this, she
was praying pretty constantly to end her sexual relationship with
her husband because she felt that she was displeasing God
(13:08):
with their inordinate love. Yet they had a very active
physical life together clearly because they UM. But Yeah, the
way she describes it, there's was not a relationship of
quote having sex just for procreation. Like they had a
very physical relationship. They were very attracted to each other.
It's a very passionate it's very passionate thing. And you know,
(13:30):
this whole thing happens from her point of view, but
she describes her husband as a willing participant in the
end of their sexual relationship eventually. At first it takes
it's some years of prayer, yeah, some years as what
of what she sort of describes it's kind of a
divine intervention, like he would he would want to have sex,
(13:51):
and then he would be stricken with terror, and then
they would not. And she had been praying for about
three years when they had an argument it one day
a while they were traveling by the side of the road, um,
and and an argument in which he was like, so
if if somebody came and said, like with the sword,
if somebody came with a sword and said you need
(14:12):
to have sex right now or I'm going to murder you,
could we have sex? And she was like, no, I
would rather you die. And he was like, Okay, seriously,
if if it's going to be time for this, what
I want you to do is to start stop your
fast that you're doing on Fridays and have have a
meal with me on Friday and pay off all of
(14:32):
my debts. It was a bit of a negotiation, was
a totally negotiation, and she she was kind of reluctant
to do this at first because she had been praying
really hard to stop their relationship, but she had also
felt commanded by God to fast every Friday, so she
prayed about that. The word she got back was Okay,
if if this is cool, you can stop having your
(14:53):
fast on Friday and and stop your relationship with your husband,
and then that will all work out, will even out,
It will even out, And so on Juneen, she and
her husband stopped being married and they can or they
stopped having sex, but they continued to be married until
he died. Yeah, which is interesting. I mean that is
at that point twenty years into the marriage. So I
(15:14):
think when when you're retelling it or even hearing it
or reading it in a history book, there is that
weird you know, wow, that would really stink to marry
someone and have them say they didn't want to be
intimate with you, And it seems like it's much closer
to the beginning, but they had to be married for
quite a while at that point. Um. And uh, you know,
(15:35):
we can't ever fully know everything that went down there
and like what words were truly I mean she recounted,
you know, from memory, but I do just wonder at
what that conversation must have really been like. And you know,
if there was some degree to which he wanted to
give in just to make her happy. Because they seemed
like they had genuine affinity for one another. Yeah, they
(15:56):
seem to have a very close relationship. That that was
they stun love and trust and support. Um. I had
actually because I had read her autobiography many years ago,
and I had kind of forgotten that part of it.
And in my head he had become this kind of
like reluctant participant in his wife's craziness. Um. And that
was sort of that was just me, uh, superimposing because
(16:19):
that is not how it reads at all. Uh. And
she talks about them having a very fond relationship. Um,
they did have things that they disagreed about and things
that they had to come to some kind of consensus over,
like stopping their sexual relationship. Uh, but that he did.
He also he also wanted to be a more spiritual person,
and he also wanted to live a good life, so
(16:41):
it wasn't just her kind of dragging him along with
her down this path of of pilgrimage and abstinence. UM.
And this was again kind of early on in the
pilgrimage phase. Uh. Yes, that was in fourteen thirteen, and
that winter they stayed in in Venice as sort of
a stopping point before going to the Holy Land. I
(17:04):
think it's interesting that a little before that, at the
very beginning, she um visited holy sites closer to home,
skipped over that pointrich in Canterbury, UM, and she met
with a lot of other religious figures of the day,
both official and unofficial religious figures. She before they left England,
she met the Bishop of Lincoln and the Archbishop of Canterbury,
(17:27):
and then she also met Julian of Norwich. And that's
one of the anchors is that we talked about earlier
who lived walled up in the wall of a church.
And I had read one account that suggested that she
kind of asked Julian to verify her visions a little
bit where I mean, so she has I think we
(17:49):
think of anybody that is claiming to have all these visions.
It's very easy to go, hey, you're crazy, but she
recognized that that was a possibility, and so she turned
to another religious figure that she really you know, believed
and trusted and trusted to say, am I insane? Is
this crazy? I really think this is happening? And Julian
(18:09):
was like, no, I'm pretty sure you're having the visions.
They're valid. She had similar conversations with priests sometimes and
and there were there were priests and other religious figures who, um,
she cried a lot. She was sort of visited by
religious weeping, uh, and would just have this sort of
uncontrollable crying during religious events, either while she was having
(18:33):
visions or while she was praying. And there were priests
who thought that she was doing this just to get attention, um,
and they would do things like say, okay, you need
to come come to my cloister and and do your
prayer there with nobody watching you. And then they would
just kind of secretly watch from around the corner and
find that she was still weeping, and they would find
(18:54):
that as evidence that she was being genuine and what
she was describing and not making it up. It was
the hair shirt in her heart it was the hair share,
probably making her cry. Yes, So, lots of travels around
England to religious sits. There in fourt a stop in Venice,
and then that spring they sailed from Venice to Jerusalem
(19:14):
and she spent about a year visiting holy sites in
Jerusalem before returning home again via Rome. And while in
Rome one of the most sort of notable and interesting
events of her religious life happened, which is that she
got married to god Um in a vision. Uh. She
(19:37):
got married to God and the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary.
All of the Apostles and lots of saints were all
witnesses to this. Um. She actually already before this had
had sort of a mystical marriage to Jesus and had
a wedding ring that was her wedding ring to Jesus
that she would wear uh. And so this became sort
of this multidimensional like a marriage multiple aspects of the Godhead. Yes,
(20:02):
while simultaneously still married to an actual human right, even
though their relationship was non sexual and kind of more
one of friendship at that point. Yes, so yes, she
she at that point considered herself to be married married
to god Um. Before they returned back to England. She
went to Assisi and visited holy sights in Assisi, uh
(20:26):
and they departed from Rome in at Easter time of
fourteen fifteen and they got back to Norwich in May. Um.
She had one more sort of leg of her pilgrimage
after that, and that was from July ish around July
seven of fourteen seventeen, she took a seven day voyage
oversea um to Santiago to Compostella in Spain, and that
(20:51):
is where the team of St. Peter is And that's
also a pilgrimage that people continue to make Overland today.
That's a thing that will continue to do. Um. And
that was another you know, meeting other religious figures there,
having spiritual experiences there. And they returned from Santiago in
(21:11):
August of fourteen seventeen. And that was sort of the
period of her religious wandering, right, those were her her travels.
It was her travels of devotion. Yes, it was not
at all the end of her uh, the spiritual side
of her life or the difficulties she experienced though, because
(21:31):
once she got back home to England she started to
be put on trial for heresy. Yeah, I mean she was,
as we mentioned earlier she was wearing white, which was
reserved for consecrated virgins. She was claiming that she had
this marriage yes to God and Jesus. She you know,
there were just a lot of things that conflicted with
(21:52):
society's norms. Even very religious elements of society were like,
you're doing this not the right way, where this isn't
this isn't how worship. She was threatening to sort of
the religious orthodoxy in ways. Yeah, she was definitely outside
the normal realm of what you did if you had
dedicated your life to your devotion. So, you know, people
(22:15):
can perceive to have a lot of times as heretical
was very threatening and that was definitely the case with Marjorie.
So she was put on trial more than one time,
and more than one say, she spent some time in prison,
either in the actual jail or in the home of
one of the jailers. Um, so she was imprisoned at
various times. Um she was not ever found guilty, which
(22:37):
is I think good because she would have been burned
at the stake. And yeah, and it I mean it
does sort of give her a little bit of, um
historical credibility. They say, like, no, people actually believe this
was just part of her dedication. You know, she proved
to them that that's what what it was. She wasn't
just trying to be rebellious or you know, she wasn't
(22:59):
trying to fly in the face of convention. These were
her beliefs and she really felt strongly that she was
getting these directives from God. She was able to make
a case for that recently. Uh and and and not
in the end be ruled to be someone who was
making it up or was doing something that was going
to be contradictory to what the church was teaching. So
(23:21):
she was back home in Lynn again by fourteen eighteen,
and she stayed there for years. She had spent five
years traveling, and then she just sort of she continued
to live her life in Lynn, continued to have visual
and and physical vision experiences. She continued to try to
teach people and try to talk to people. Um she
(23:43):
did not get along with one of the nearby friars
who objected to the way that she was weeping all
the time, and so that caused a fair amount of tension. Really,
a lot of the hardest criticism that she got she
got at home. She got less of it when she
was traveling and more of it at home, and she
continued to live in Lynn and her until well even after.
(24:06):
But her husband passed away in fourte um and it
was after that that she took the last journey that
she went on UH. And her son also died that year,
the only the only child of hers that we did,
we really hear anything in her tails. We didn't have
no idea about the other thirteen. And her husband, she said,
(24:28):
you know, had been ill, he had been senile, and
she had been taking care of him for quite some
time at that point. But yeah, so she had one
more journey to make UH. And she was about sixty
at this time. So it was four four and she
was traveling to Prussia by ship to escort her widow
daughter in law home, and then they also toured religious
(24:48):
sites on land on the return journey. But she was
sixty and it was a little bit rougher at that point.
She didn't quite have the zeal of youth that she
had on her previous pilgrimage. Yes, activities, and not quite
a spry because she used sixty is quite old at
that time at that point. Yet especially to have you know,
it's the physical toil of fourteen children is a lot,
(25:12):
and there were a lot of women in that age
who in their later pregnancies things got harder and harder
and often didn't survive childbirth. Right. So we don't know
when she died, but it was some point after the
age of sixty. Um, there are a few I mean,
this is so long ago now that it's really hard
to pinpoint dates. There are a lot of records to
(25:33):
refer to. No, so there are records of someone with
names similar to hers doing various things around the town.
And it's one of those where okay, maybe they're talking
about Marjorie, but we're not really sure. So so that's
basically her life. Um. But she's one of those people
who her life goes there's more to it than just
the dates of what all the things happen. It's a
(25:56):
very important figure in the landscape of religion. We we've
talked a lot about sort of the themes of her
life already. There was just there was a lot of
prayer and a lot of confession, and a lot of
teaching of gospel to other people. And she was also
really beloved and reviled depending on who you talked to. Uh,
(26:17):
there were religious leaders who would ask for her to
come visit them so that they could meet her and
talk to her. And then there were other people who
would try to prosecute her for heresy. Yeah. I mean
she was sort of just having to prove the validity
of her faith and devotion constantly. Um. So yeah, she she,
depending on who you spoke to, was either just an
(26:39):
amazing religious figure or or a heretic um. When you
look at her autobiography, and we'll talk about the autobiography
a little bit more in just a minute, but when
you look at it, she traveled a lot. That was
a lot of travel for a medieval person to do.
She did a lot of travel going and she went
a long way. She talks about that almost none. Um.
(26:59):
She when she says barely anything about her children, she
says barely anything about the the travel aspects of her travel.
Pretty much all of her autobiography is focused on the
things that seemed spiritually important. Um. And the rest of
it is just not even really acknowledged. Yeah, it's all,
like a said earlier, secondary and tertiary at best. It's
(27:22):
just right if it fills in some portion of the
recounting of the spiritual journey then it gets included and
otherwise it doesn't make the cut. And I said it
did right out. Um. Uh. There are many similarities though,
between her and some other mystics. Yes, to put her
put it in context, she was sort of happening. Her
life was happening within the greater picture of this whole
(27:45):
tradition of medieval mysticism Um. And one of the mystics
that she had the most in common with is St.
Bridget of Sweden, and St. Bridget of Sweden is somebody
who she knew about. She had had at St. Bridget's
book read to her. She talked about a couple of
times times, Yes, she had had She talked a lot
about sermons that she heard read and hearing people read
(28:05):
books to her, because she was not literate herself, but
she had heard a lot and had described to her
a lot about St. Bridget's life. They were both married
to men before they took on a spiritual wedding vow
to the Godhead Um. They both lived chasely for some
part of their married life. They both wore hair shirts
(28:26):
as an act of penance, uh fasted went on pilgrimages um.
The biggest difference in addition to being a little bit
earlier in the period, St Bridge's was St. Bridget was
a lot more well off than Marjorie. So Marjorie would
have been like solidly middle class, uh and St. Bridget
was more like the nobility. But otherwise they had a
(28:48):
lot in common, and she had a lot in common
with a lot of the other women mystics of that time. Um,
so she wasn't just she wasn't the only person. No,
it was definitely not like alone alone mystic by any means.
I mean, her tail bears a lot of resemblance, not
(29:09):
just a Bridget, but to other mistakes of the time.
There were many women, and the women are always considered
mystics because they had this sort of different relationship with
God in the eyes of the culture of the time.
You know, the male heads of church were certainly religious
and devoted, but there was an administrative element to it.
It was, you know, as Tracy mentioned earlier, it was
(29:31):
about you know, the power of their positions and and
that was all a big factor. Whereas the women it
really was almost a more visceral. They are very connected,
like they had physical visions where their body would be
affected in different ways by their um, their moments that
they shared in these visions with God. So it's a
(29:53):
little bit, it's a different thing, and it's a reason
that there were many women experiencing these same things that
they were kind of lumped in this group of women mystics.
There were several some of them we may talk about.
It's some very future because I would not want to
cluster a bunch of women mystics together in the podcast.
(30:13):
But that's why the phrase women mystics happens, that they
are kind of portioned off as having a different relationship
with God than the men that were leaders in the church. Yes,
so today because because you know, we live in a
world that likes to find explanations for things that don't
necessarily have explanations. Um, there are a lot of theories
(30:33):
today about various illnesses that she may have had that
may explain the visions that she had. And so if
you if you go digging through through journals, you will
find people who argue that she had epilepsy or postpartum psychosis,
or hysteria, or schizuo effective disorder or bipolar disorder or
Jerusalem syndrome. It's sort of a long laundry list of
(30:55):
psychological explanations for the things that she wrote about in
her life. I I sort of feel like, regardless of
what your own religious leaning is or whether you are
a member of any particular faith, the fact that she,
as a medieval woman, was able to take charge of
her life to the extent that she was and travel
(31:17):
as much as she was and become as notable as
she did, that is remarkable. Like, even apart from any
feeling that you may have about church or religion or
any of that. The incredible life, like I said at
the top of the podcast. As a historical figure, her
story is so engaging. Yeah, and when you juxtapose it
(31:37):
against sort of you know, what we know about society
that at that time and how society even works now,
it's She's incredible and she's really so noteworthy in so
many different ways. Well. And the other incredible thing is
her autobiography. Yeah. Um, we've talked about how it's the
oldest known autobiography in English. Um. She dictated it as
(32:01):
two different books. Uh, the first time around in fourteen
thirty six and then the second time in four Um,
so about twenty years after the first time she had
a vision is when she got with somebody to write
all this down. Um. There's kind of a long and
wandering story of how the writing down happened, and much
like a lot of what's in her life, there's sort
(32:22):
of a vein of and and then something lucky happened
that made it actually become a real thing. Um. It's
possible that the first person to write the book down
was her son, who we talked about, like the one
child that we talked about. This is sort of circumstantial
evidence linking her description of the person who wrote the
(32:43):
book down to what her son's life was like. They
had both gone to Germany and gotten married and come
back with a wife and then later died. Um. That's
not super strong evidence, but there are people who think
the first person she told the book to was her son.
I don't. I don't know about that, but it is circumstantial.
(33:06):
At the same time, like we mentioned before, there wasn't
that much travel on that scope happening necessarily at that time,
so it is it's circumstantial, but it's also not insignificant
that there are those matchups. So also, whoever it was
who did the first writing down did not do a
good job um, and did not write very legibly and
(33:31):
did not use grammar that was either correct English for
the time, UM, because it is kind of a Middle English.
If you if you read a non updated version, it's
very tricky to read as a modern reader. But it
was not even consistent within that spelling. It was like
not consistent English or consistent German spelling and grammar really
(33:53):
did not do a good job. And so she was
not dictating to a scholar, No, no, it was it
was you. Whoever. Whoever she was talking to had more
literacy than she did, but not enough to do a
really great job. So she gave it to a priest
who she trusted later on, and the priest was like,
I can't read this. I can, Yeah, he gave it
(34:14):
back to her. Uh. He felt bad about that later
changed his mind. Um had trouble reading it because of
failing vision, and she was like, I really have faith
that God will help you do this. And in the
end he did do the rewrite of it with her UM,
and they kind of revised as they went. They revised
(34:34):
as they went. They added some more stuff in UM.
And that leads people to to sort of ask, who
should we think of as the writer of this was
it Marjorie, Was it the first person who wrote it down?
Was it the priest who rewrote it? Um. One thing
that I think puts a lot of the answer of
that into Marjorie is that she talks about that the
(34:57):
priest read her what he had written down with her
in the room, and she okayed it. So even though
she was not physically the one holding the writing utensil,
she did sort of she approved what had been written
down after it was written down. She was like the
verbal editor at that point. There are there's also a
(35:18):
lot of scholarly work that compares various pieces of the book,
like in terms of the spelling and the style and
the tone um, to try to figure out who wrote
what and what had been influenced by who UM. For example,
she you know, likely did not um need help making
(35:38):
her narration sound like other books written at the time
that were devotional in nature, because she had been hearing
those from the time she was quite young, over and over.
I mean, we talked about St. Bridget's story that she
had read to her many many times, and several others,
so she already kind of had a sense of that
style of narration right well. And because she did not
have the luxury of being able to write things down.
(35:59):
She probably also had a very good memory, so even
though she was narrating something from memory, her memory was
probably a little sharper than a lot of hours now
and a lot of you know, people who have the
luxury of making the list of things to take to
the store because they know how to read them right. Um,
she did not know how to read and right, so
(36:20):
she had to keep all of the things that she
needed to know in her head. But it is believed
that the priest probably helped her with things like phrasing
for clarity and uh, just making sure that the story
was told in a way that made sense, and particularly
the parts that are about when she was on trial.
She probably had some help not not running the risk
(36:42):
of further accusations of heresy and making sure that her
answers in the book were correct like that probably is
something she got a little extra help with. But otherwise
people seem pretty confident that is her it's her story
told from her point of view, it is told in
the third person. That's somewhere were of a narrative technique
though then uh, then cause for a question. Um, here's
(37:06):
the interesting thing, or is it the thing that I'm
going to say? I think so? Is it that the
text of the autobiography was not discovered until ninety four? Yeah,
that amazes me, I know. So ninety four. Let's just
let's back up a step. People knew that this book
existed because there was a guy named Winkin the Word,
which I just want to say all the time. Winkin
(37:29):
de Word had published excerpts from it in an eight
page pamphlet in fifteen o one. UM. So it had
been referenced in other works that we already had a
new about. So people knew that that that this was
a book that existed. They thought that it was a
book about an anchorite, like they thought it was going
to be a book about somebody who was a recluse. Uh.
So in nineteen thirty four, UM sitting on a shelf
(37:52):
in a library at a Pleasington Old Hall, Lancashire. Uh
It was on a private library shelf basically, and people
would just pick it up and look at it and
read it like it was this ancient manuscript was not
being really super weirre well cared for in that respect, um.
But it was owned by the Lieutenant Colonel William E. I.
(38:15):
Butler Bowden, and one day he thought, maybe I should
get this thing looked at. So he took his extremely
old manuscript that had just been sitting on a library
shelf to a medieval scholar at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
which at the time was called the Museum of South Kensington. Uh.
And he showed it to an American medieval scholar there
(38:35):
named Miss Hope Emily Allen. Men. Miss Hope Emily Allen
was familiar with winkin to words hamplet and she's the
one who identified it, said, this is Marjorie Kemp's book. Um.
They were all kind of surprised that this was a
married woman who had traveled around that that was not
what they expected to happen. UM. The surviving tess the
(38:58):
one and only copy that we had of this medieval work. UM.
It was written in one person's handwriting, uh and probably
in about fourteen fifty, so it was not the first one.
Now it's not the original, but it's a pretty early copy. UM.
The first print edition of this newly rediscovered thing came
out in ninety and now, because this is a hundreds
(39:20):
of year old manuscript that's been around for a really
long time. If you want to read it, you can
on the internet for free. That is how far we've
come as a society. Yeah, you can read medieval women,
woman mystics, entire work on the internet for free. Yeah,
we've come a long way. We've come a really long way.
(39:41):
Really fascinating story today is I love her story because
it is so just mind blowing. She was, you know,
so outside the realm of of what was ever expected.
I mean, as you said, even scholars that discovered the book,
it was like, wait, thought what happened in her life?
And then she her husband and will and he said
(40:02):
it was okay that they weren't going to ask her. Wow,
it's a fascinating tale. It is outside the realm of
regularity for her time, for sure. Yeah, outside the realm
of regularity for a lot of stuff. And she's you know,
regardless of whether you feel that her visions were real
or we're psychosis, she's a remarkable woman. Yeah. There you
(40:23):
can you know, google her and see all manner of
artwork depicting her, uh, which is just It's one of
those things where I will think about her story and
I'll look at some of those and it's like my
brain tries to put them together, and I just I
wish I could know what was really going on in
her head sometimes. If you if you want to read
her book, you have two choices. It means there are
(40:46):
lots of editions of it, but two primary choices, and
one is the one with modernized language, which is a
very easy and fast read because it is very simple language. Um,
if you're reading the one that is more in more
of a Middle English style, that can and take a
while to it. Yeah, if you're not used to it,
it can take a while, uh to get used to
the way things are spelled and all of that. But
(41:07):
either way you can get a hugely interesting glimpse into
a medieval woman's just It's also significant because we mentioned
that it's the first English autobiography, but for many scholars
it's one of the really best surviving texts on to
sort of what life was like in medieval England. So
(41:30):
it's significant not just from her religious story in her
societal sort of fascinating trajectory, but also just in terms
of a historical document about what it was like to
live in a port city in England at the time
in a middle class family. Yeah, so many reasons that
it's worth they're going to look at. So that's Marjorie Camp. Yes.
(41:51):
And then we have some listener mail. We have two
pieces we do because I am a new addition to
this podcast. I'm reading I'm reading mail that's addressed to
other people, and it's it feels kind of decadent to
be reading other people's mail if you're eavesdropping on other
people's emails. Right, So this one is from Nancy and
it's addressed dear Katie, Sarah, Deblina. If you're reading this, Holly,
(42:14):
did I miss anyone? Tracy me or it? Also Jane
and Candice and many of the past from years and
years ago. These three hosts. Um, I do not mean
to make you feel bad. If I did, I'm sorry. Um.
She says she's been thinking about sending an email since
the last September, and she listens while walking the dog. Um.
She says. She says, this is very old news, but uh,
(42:38):
writing to you came came to mind again laft month
when Deblina and Sarah did a podcast on historical hoaxes,
and you referenced a podcast you did last September on
War of the World. I first heard about this radio
program when I was a young child. My mother, who
will be eighty seven in a few weeks, told me
about it. You see, she has very vivid memories of
listening to the program when she was twelve years old.
(42:59):
She lived lived just outside Philadelphia, only seventy miles from
Graver's Mill, New Jersey. She remembers that the program aired
on a Sunday night. Why did she know this because
in her time it was customary and many churches for
folks to attend services on both Sunday morning and Sunday evening.
My mom's parents had just returned church to church that
evening and left my mom home with her two older sisters,
(43:20):
being just kids and alone in the home for the evening.
When they heard the program, they were petrified. Every time
I think about that radio program, I get shivers, imagining
what it must have been like to be my mom
hearing about Martians and bathing the earth, not very far
from where she was. Yes, it all seems so silly now,
but we forget how much things have changed in the
past seventy years. I don't recall how my mom and
(43:41):
her sister's finally learned that it was a hoax. One
thing that also sit down in my mind as I
listened to the podcast. Towards the end, you discussed whether
or not you think you would be fooled and what
you might have done. Deblina said she might phone someone.
I'm wondering, but not so much that I will take
the time now to find the answer. How many homes
actually had telephones in nineteen and if they did, or
the phones party lines, my point being that it may
(44:04):
not have been that easy to just pound someone and
talk it over. I love that story. Yeah, I giggled
a little, not because I think it's funny that they
were scared, but because I can so easily project myself
to my youth when I would get similarly scared by
silly things. Yeah, I would get scared by thinking what
if there's a monster, Like if you told me that
there was a monster? Hard to being a kid. And
(44:26):
then we also got a postcard that was sort of
near and dear to my heart for a reason I
will tell you in a bit, And it is fround
listener ali uh. And it is a picture of a
crooked beef crooked matsa mask uh and she is writing
us from the Berke Museum of Natural History and Culture
in Seattle. And this is near and dear to my
heart because when I was in elementary school, I lived
(44:47):
in Pewallup, which is near Seattle, and going to that
museum is fond memories for me, so I loved it.
She is a um an assistant in the Ethnology Collection
and she's currently working on a produ of arranging three thousand,
thirty five millimeter slides from someone's travels in the Pacific
from the seventies. Sound's kind of fascinating and interesting. So
(45:09):
thank you for that ale because it was a nice
little reminder of being a kid in the Pacific Northwest.
That's awesome, So thank you very much for sending his
postcards and emails. He would like to tack to us
if you can at Facebook dot com slash history class Stuff.
We're also on Twitter at missed in History, and you
can email us at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(45:31):
If you would like to learn a little more about
the more mundane side of Marjorie Camp's life, you can
go to our website, put the word beer in the
search bar and you will find how beer works a
testament to her brief and failed time as a brewer.
You can do all of that and more at our website,
which is how stuff works dot com. For more on
(45:52):
this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff
works dot com. Aten named the lane named the lane
ut full in Je,
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hi, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry Holly,
and today we're talking about one of those cool elements
of history that I think if you had never been
(00:22):
interested in history before and you heard the story, you
would suddenly become a fan of all history, Like you
would just want to dig three books for more of
this kind of stuff. Yes, well, and if the thing
I learned about studying literature, So it's one of those
things that intersects a lot of different pieces. We're going
to talk to me about a woman who lived in
the Middle Ages, so the late fourteenth and early into
(00:43):
the mid fifteenth century. Her name was Marjorie Kemp and
seems like pretty ordinary woman. She was a wife and
a mother of fourteen children, which was a pretty normal
number of children at that period. In spite of this
apparently typical side of her, she also had, especially in
(01:03):
the latter part of her life, some pretty intense spiritual visions. Yes,
she's often cited as a mystic. Now, yes, um, During
the Middle Ages, men definitely ran the church. They were
in charge. They were the people who were the priests
and the clerics and the ones who made all of
the decisions UM. And then there were women that also
(01:24):
had these very deeply spiritual lives and would talk about
having visions and UH and having really intense religious experiences.
Most of them were reclusives also UM. They were called
anchorites or anchoresses who lived either within the church or
sometimes literally within a wall of the church, so they
(01:45):
would have a tiny, tiny cell tinier than the room
that we record podcasts in that they would spend their
entire lives in. And those were some of these women
UM had their own followers and sort of that there
would be sort of like a cult of people that
followed their teachings. UM. Marjorie Kemp was a very spiritual person,
(02:07):
but she traveled with her husband and it was not
an anchor right, not at all. She went on pilgrimage
and traveled all over UM for a period of several years,
so that kind of sets her apart from some of
the other mystics who were happening in the same era.
At that point. When she began traveling, she had kind
of established that she was dedicated to her religion and
(02:33):
to the visions that she was having and to following
um religious doctrine. And so she eventually, and we will
get to this in more depth. You know, had this
claim to chase life. But she was traveling with a
man who was her husband, which confused some people who
had fathered fourteen children. Yeah, they had a whole brood
of kids together. Um, and so that that confusing some
(02:57):
of her children she did have after she started having visions,
but before she and her husband stopped the sexual part
of their relationships. So uh, some of the visions that
she had were while she was pregnant. And and we're
of Jesus telling her it's going to be okay, I
will arrange for your child to be taken care of
while you go on pilgrimage for me. And what's really
interesting is that she's often credited as, uh, the creator
(03:19):
of the first autobiography and English for sure. Yeah uh,
and she dictated it because she was not literate herself. Um.
So yeah, it's the oldest known autobiography and in English,
and it isn't written in chronological order. Uh, it isn't
a full account of her life. She leaves out big
chunks and she really just focuses on her spiritual journey. Uh,
(03:44):
and she focused on it in sort of in the
order that she remembered things. So scholars have kind of
gone back and pieced together a timeline based on her
references to holidays and world events that we know when
they happen. So when we talk about sort of the
chronology of her life, that's been pieced together based on Yeah,
that is not her laying out her autobiography like I
was born here and she's kind of all over the place,
(04:07):
and she did dictate it sometime after most of the
events she talks about, so it is all you know,
it's subject to human recollection, but to start at the beginning.
So she was born around seventy three to her father
who was John Brunham. It may also have been Burnham,
(04:28):
it's not quite sure. We've seen both ways, Yes, we've
it's written down in more than one spelling. And he
was the mayor of King's Lynn, which was then called
Bishop's Lynn, which is on just in case anybody needs
a quick geography checkpoint, it is on the side of
England towards the Netherlands, in a little inlet. Yes, it
was a coastal town. So there was a lot of
(04:49):
money to be made in the world of merchant work,
so things that had to do with buying and selling
and shipping. It was a lot of what was going on.
Her father also served as one of the town's two
representatives to parliament six times, as well as a lot
of other positions. He was a very notable and successful
person and Marjorie was very proud of that fact. She
(05:11):
was a very proud person, which is the theme that
will come up in her life later. Yeah, I mean
she was a child of a wealthy pillar of the community. Um.
Not not a mystery why she would be proud of that.
She did get married roughly twenty which is pretty late
(05:34):
in life for most girls at that time, to John Kemp,
who was also the son of a successful merchant, and
he was a merchant to not really as successful as
his father, but they did well enough. Um. Her first
pregnancy was really hard. She was very sick for a
lot of it, and then after the baby was born,
she had a period of more than a year of
(05:56):
what she herself describes as madness. You know, things that
we would reckon nys as being signs of being mentally
ill today. So she talked about having hallucinations, being just
very verbally abusive to her family, having to be restrained
to keep from injuring herself. UM. A lot of people
today sort of say that she she must have had
some kind of postpartum psychosis going on during this period. Um.
(06:20):
And then one day she had a vision while she
was very sick, and during this period, she had a
vision of Jesus. Uh. And during this vision, Jesus asked
her why she had forsaken him when he had never
forsaken her. Uh. And she was sort of like, well,
that's a good question, and then started to recover from
this illness that she had had. Um. It was not
(06:42):
a light switch, though. That was not the thing that
led her to then become a very devoted religious person.
She continued to sort of live life as she had
been before. She described herself as pretty proud and stubborn. Um.
She went into some of the more mundane job that
women had in in the Middle Ages. She worked for
(07:03):
a brewer as a while for a while, and as
a miller um. And both of those businesses failed. Um.
It wasn't great at those things yet, well she was
really She made good beer, but she couldn't like, repeatedly
make enough good beer to sell it. Like she she'd
make a good batch and then the next one would
be terrible, and uh, the the mill had problems with
(07:26):
the horse, like one of the team of horses just
refused to turn the mill and it. So both of
those businesses failed, and that started to become a more
humbling experience. Um. It's still though, was a period of
years before before she started on a just very deeply
(07:46):
religious path. Um. She started to become more and more
preoccupied with what Heaven was like and how in her
mind Heaven was this amazing place and Earth was pretty terrible,
so let's figure out how to get to Heaven faster.
She started spending more and more time in shirt. Um.
(08:07):
She gave up meat and alcohol and eventually sex as
penance for previous sins. And she also did a thing
that was kind of a common practice during the Middle Ages,
which was the mortification of the flesh. And she did
this by wearing a hair shirt. And if you don't
know what a hairshirt is, it's a very coarse or
prickly shirt that you wear under your clothing so that
(08:29):
it physically irritates your skin all day long, constantly. Um.
And she actually that she started wearing that before she
stopped having sex with her husband, because she wore it
while she was pregnant at one point, which sounds like torture.
It does sound horrible. I I've never had a child,
but knowing from the descriptions of other people what being
pregnant is like that it can be very uncomfortable, and
(08:52):
it's exhausting already and sometimes you already feel like prickly
and rashi anyway, So to add a hairshirt on top
of that, no, it's horrible. Yes. And then she had
a couple of years that were kind of the easy
part of her right where she was fasting, she was
you know, acts of contrition, they weren't terribly difficult. But
(09:13):
then she had three years of temptations, yes, including when
a man tried to seduce her away from her husband. UM.
So she had had these years where it was sort
of like she was trying very hard to be a
very quote good religious person and that was going really well.
It was easy for her to fast, it was easy
for her to do these things. Then all these temptations started,
(09:34):
including a man who tried to seduce her, and when
she agreed to seduce him, or to to be seduced
by him. He spurned her um So she did not
actually go through with it, but the fact that in
her brain she had given in she thought was genally
since she could mentally send, and she felt that that
was just as bad um and so it was after
(09:54):
that that she really recommitted herself two, staying on the
path that she felt like was going to lead her
into heaven and to being a better person and to
getting rid of the sins of her past. Um. Once
she got to about the age of forty, she started
having some just really intense, dramatic visions that felt she
(10:16):
described them as real, like real events that were happening
that she was participating in. Um So, she had visions
where she would hear God or Jesus speaking to her.
But then she also had these visions that were like
she was physically present at events that were described in
the Bible. Um So, she had one where she was
(10:36):
present at the birth of the Virgin Mary and took
care of the Virgin Mary as a child. Um and
then the birth of Jesus so and the crucifixion, like
very notable events. She's sort of had visions that were
physically real to her in which she participated in all
of these events. And it's interesting to me just that
(10:59):
a lot of those are in a maternal way. It's
taking care of these religious figures and being part of
you know, their birth and that young developmental part of
their life cycle. When we'll talk about it a little
bit more later. But in most of her writing she
never mentions her kids. The fourteen children she actually had
are pretty tertiary, and the whole narrative, we only really
(11:19):
hear about one of them, and that is one who
she describes as being physically or spiritually troubled, and she
felt that her intervention had helped to save him. And
that's really the sort of the one story of one
of her children that we hear about. Um. So yeah,
she she talks a lot about having visions of women
who are president in the Bible and having relationships with them,
(11:41):
and then she has other visions that are more like conversations,
um with Jesus or with God. So, for example, she
had a vision of a conversation with Jesus in which
he told her to stop wearing that hair shirt because
he was going to give her sort of a spiritual
hair shirt for her her heart. Other than physically wearing
(12:01):
a hair shirt, he also commanded her to continue to
not eat meat and to only wear white, which was
the color of consecrated virgins. Um. That was actually a
huge deal at the time, the fact that she was
going around all in white but she was not actually
a virgin. Lots of hatred and derision people. Um. And
(12:23):
then in the same series of conversations, Uh, she felt
commanded by God to go on pilgrimage to Rome, Jerusalem,
and Santiago. And so after a few years she did that.
It took a while to actually get started, uh that
you know, they had various affairs to settle and other
stuff that they had to prepare for. But about two
(12:46):
years after feeling commanded by God to go on pilgrimage,
she started her pilgrimage and that was in fourteen. Yeah,
and she in the midst of all of this, she
was praying pretty constantly to end her sexual relationship with
her husband because she felt that she was displeasing God
(13:08):
with their inordinate love. Yet they had a very active
physical life together clearly because they UM. But Yeah, the
way she describes it, there's was not a relationship of
quote having sex just for procreation. Like they had a
very physical relationship. They were very attracted to each other.
It's a very passionate it's very passionate thing. And you know,
(13:30):
this whole thing happens from her point of view, but
she describes her husband as a willing participant in the
end of their sexual relationship eventually. At first it takes
it's some years of prayer, yeah, some years as what
of what she sort of describes it's kind of a
divine intervention, like he would he would want to have sex,
(13:51):
and then he would be stricken with terror, and then
they would not. And she had been praying for about
three years when they had an argument it one day
a while they were traveling by the side of the road, um,
and and an argument in which he was like, so
if if somebody came and said, like with the sword,
if somebody came with a sword and said you need
(14:12):
to have sex right now or I'm going to murder you,
could we have sex? And she was like, no, I
would rather you die. And he was like, Okay, seriously,
if if it's going to be time for this, what
I want you to do is to start stop your
fast that you're doing on Fridays and have have a
meal with me on Friday and pay off all of
(14:32):
my debts. It was a bit of a negotiation, was
a totally negotiation, and she she was kind of reluctant
to do this at first because she had been praying
really hard to stop their relationship, but she had also
felt commanded by God to fast every Friday, so she
prayed about that. The word she got back was Okay,
if if this is cool, you can stop having your
(14:53):
fast on Friday and and stop your relationship with your husband,
and then that will all work out, will even out,
It will even out, And so on Juneen, she and
her husband stopped being married and they can or they
stopped having sex, but they continued to be married until
he died. Yeah, which is interesting. I mean that is
at that point twenty years into the marriage. So I
(15:14):
think when when you're retelling it or even hearing it
or reading it in a history book, there is that
weird you know, wow, that would really stink to marry
someone and have them say they didn't want to be
intimate with you, And it seems like it's much closer
to the beginning, but they had to be married for
quite a while at that point. Um. And uh, you know,
(15:35):
we can't ever fully know everything that went down there
and like what words were truly I mean she recounted,
you know, from memory, but I do just wonder at
what that conversation must have really been like. And you know,
if there was some degree to which he wanted to
give in just to make her happy. Because they seemed
like they had genuine affinity for one another. Yeah, they
(15:56):
seem to have a very close relationship. That that was
they stun love and trust and support. Um. I had
actually because I had read her autobiography many years ago,
and I had kind of forgotten that part of it.
And in my head he had become this kind of
like reluctant participant in his wife's craziness. Um. And that
was sort of that was just me, uh, superimposing because
(16:19):
that is not how it reads at all. Uh. And
she talks about them having a very fond relationship. Um,
they did have things that they disagreed about and things
that they had to come to some kind of consensus over,
like stopping their sexual relationship. Uh, but that he did.
He also he also wanted to be a more spiritual person,
and he also wanted to live a good life, so
(16:41):
it wasn't just her kind of dragging him along with
her down this path of of pilgrimage and abstinence. UM.
And this was again kind of early on in the
pilgrimage phase. Uh. Yes, that was in fourteen thirteen, and
that winter they stayed in in Venice as sort of
a stopping point before going to the Holy Land. I
(17:04):
think it's interesting that a little before that, at the
very beginning, she um visited holy sites closer to home,
skipped over that pointrich in Canterbury, UM, and she met
with a lot of other religious figures of the day,
both official and unofficial religious figures. She before they left England,
she met the Bishop of Lincoln and the Archbishop of Canterbury,
(17:27):
and then she also met Julian of Norwich. And that's
one of the anchors is that we talked about earlier
who lived walled up in the wall of a church.
And I had read one account that suggested that she
kind of asked Julian to verify her visions a little
bit where I mean, so she has I think we
(17:49):
think of anybody that is claiming to have all these visions.
It's very easy to go, hey, you're crazy, but she
recognized that that was a possibility, and so she turned
to another religious figure that she really you know, believed
and trusted and trusted to say, am I insane? Is
this crazy? I really think this is happening? And Julian
(18:09):
was like, no, I'm pretty sure you're having the visions.
They're valid. She had similar conversations with priests sometimes and
and there were there were priests and other religious figures who, um,
she cried a lot. She was sort of visited by
religious weeping, uh, and would just have this sort of
uncontrollable crying during religious events, either while she was having
(18:33):
visions or while she was praying. And there were priests
who thought that she was doing this just to get attention, um,
and they would do things like say, okay, you need
to come come to my cloister and and do your
prayer there with nobody watching you. And then they would
just kind of secretly watch from around the corner and
find that she was still weeping, and they would find
(18:54):
that as evidence that she was being genuine and what
she was describing and not making it up. It was
the hair shirt in her heart it was the hair share,
probably making her cry. Yes, So, lots of travels around
England to religious sits. There in fourt a stop in Venice,
and then that spring they sailed from Venice to Jerusalem
(19:14):
and she spent about a year visiting holy sites in
Jerusalem before returning home again via Rome. And while in
Rome one of the most sort of notable and interesting
events of her religious life happened, which is that she
got married to god Um in a vision. Uh. She
(19:37):
got married to God and the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary.
All of the Apostles and lots of saints were all
witnesses to this. Um. She actually already before this had
had sort of a mystical marriage to Jesus and had
a wedding ring that was her wedding ring to Jesus
that she would wear uh. And so this became sort
of this multidimensional like a marriage multiple aspects of the Godhead. Yes,
(20:02):
while simultaneously still married to an actual human right, even
though their relationship was non sexual and kind of more
one of friendship at that point. Yes, so yes, she
she at that point considered herself to be married married
to god Um. Before they returned back to England. She
went to Assisi and visited holy sights in Assisi, uh
(20:26):
and they departed from Rome in at Easter time of
fourteen fifteen and they got back to Norwich in May. Um.
She had one more sort of leg of her pilgrimage
after that, and that was from July ish around July
seven of fourteen seventeen, she took a seven day voyage
oversea um to Santiago to Compostella in Spain, and that
(20:51):
is where the team of St. Peter is And that's
also a pilgrimage that people continue to make Overland today.
That's a thing that will continue to do. Um. And
that was another you know, meeting other religious figures there,
having spiritual experiences there. And they returned from Santiago in
(21:11):
August of fourteen seventeen. And that was sort of the
period of her religious wandering, right, those were her her travels.
It was her travels of devotion. Yes, it was not
at all the end of her uh, the spiritual side
of her life or the difficulties she experienced though, because
(21:31):
once she got back home to England she started to
be put on trial for heresy. Yeah, I mean she was,
as we mentioned earlier she was wearing white, which was
reserved for consecrated virgins. She was claiming that she had
this marriage yes to God and Jesus. She you know,
there were just a lot of things that conflicted with
(21:52):
society's norms. Even very religious elements of society were like,
you're doing this not the right way, where this isn't
this isn't how worship. She was threatening to sort of
the religious orthodoxy in ways. Yeah, she was definitely outside
the normal realm of what you did if you had
dedicated your life to your devotion. So, you know, people
(22:15):
can perceive to have a lot of times as heretical
was very threatening and that was definitely the case with Marjorie.
So she was put on trial more than one time,
and more than one say, she spent some time in prison,
either in the actual jail or in the home of
one of the jailers. Um, so she was imprisoned at
various times. Um she was not ever found guilty, which
(22:37):
is I think good because she would have been burned
at the stake. And yeah, and it I mean it
does sort of give her a little bit of, um
historical credibility. They say, like, no, people actually believe this
was just part of her dedication. You know, she proved
to them that that's what what it was. She wasn't
just trying to be rebellious or you know, she wasn't
(22:59):
trying to fly in the face of convention. These were
her beliefs and she really felt strongly that she was
getting these directives from God. She was able to make
a case for that recently. Uh and and and not
in the end be ruled to be someone who was
making it up or was doing something that was going
to be contradictory to what the church was teaching. So
(23:21):
she was back home in Lynn again by fourteen eighteen,
and she stayed there for years. She had spent five
years traveling, and then she just sort of she continued
to live her life in Lynn, continued to have visual
and and physical vision experiences. She continued to try to
teach people and try to talk to people. Um she
(23:43):
did not get along with one of the nearby friars
who objected to the way that she was weeping all
the time, and so that caused a fair amount of tension. Really,
a lot of the hardest criticism that she got she
got at home. She got less of it when she
was traveling and more of it at home, and she
continued to live in Lynn and her until well even after.
(24:06):
But her husband passed away in fourte um and it
was after that that she took the last journey that
she went on UH. And her son also died that year,
the only the only child of hers that we did,
we really hear anything in her tails. We didn't have
no idea about the other thirteen. And her husband, she said,
(24:28):
you know, had been ill, he had been senile, and
she had been taking care of him for quite some
time at that point. But yeah, so she had one
more journey to make UH. And she was about sixty
at this time. So it was four four and she
was traveling to Prussia by ship to escort her widow
daughter in law home, and then they also toured religious
(24:48):
sites on land on the return journey. But she was
sixty and it was a little bit rougher at that point.
She didn't quite have the zeal of youth that she
had on her previous pilgrimage. Yes, activities, and not quite
a spry because she used sixty is quite old at
that time at that point. Yet especially to have you know,
it's the physical toil of fourteen children is a lot,
(25:12):
and there were a lot of women in that age
who in their later pregnancies things got harder and harder
and often didn't survive childbirth. Right. So we don't know
when she died, but it was some point after the
age of sixty. Um, there are a few I mean,
this is so long ago now that it's really hard
to pinpoint dates. There are a lot of records to
(25:33):
refer to. No, so there are records of someone with
names similar to hers doing various things around the town.
And it's one of those where okay, maybe they're talking
about Marjorie, but we're not really sure. So so that's
basically her life. Um. But she's one of those people
who her life goes there's more to it than just
the dates of what all the things happen. It's a
(25:56):
very important figure in the landscape of religion. We we've
talked a lot about sort of the themes of her
life already. There was just there was a lot of
prayer and a lot of confession, and a lot of
teaching of gospel to other people. And she was also
really beloved and reviled depending on who you talked to. Uh,
(26:17):
there were religious leaders who would ask for her to
come visit them so that they could meet her and
talk to her. And then there were other people who
would try to prosecute her for heresy. Yeah. I mean
she was sort of just having to prove the validity
of her faith and devotion constantly. Um. So yeah, she she,
depending on who you spoke to, was either just an
(26:39):
amazing religious figure or or a heretic um. When you
look at her autobiography, and we'll talk about the autobiography
a little bit more in just a minute, but when
you look at it, she traveled a lot. That was
a lot of travel for a medieval person to do.
She did a lot of travel going and she went
a long way. She talks about that almost none. Um.
(26:59):
She when she says barely anything about her children, she
says barely anything about the the travel aspects of her travel.
Pretty much all of her autobiography is focused on the
things that seemed spiritually important. Um. And the rest of
it is just not even really acknowledged. Yeah, it's all,
like a said earlier, secondary and tertiary at best. It's
(27:22):
just right if it fills in some portion of the
recounting of the spiritual journey then it gets included and
otherwise it doesn't make the cut. And I said it
did right out. Um. Uh. There are many similarities though,
between her and some other mystics. Yes, to put her
put it in context, she was sort of happening. Her
life was happening within the greater picture of this whole
(27:45):
tradition of medieval mysticism Um. And one of the mystics
that she had the most in common with is St.
Bridget of Sweden, and St. Bridget of Sweden is somebody
who she knew about. She had had at St. Bridget's
book read to her. She talked about a couple of
times times, Yes, she had had She talked a lot
about sermons that she heard read and hearing people read
(28:05):
books to her, because she was not literate herself, but
she had heard a lot and had described to her
a lot about St. Bridget's life. They were both married
to men before they took on a spiritual wedding vow
to the Godhead Um. They both lived chasely for some
part of their married life. They both wore hair shirts
(28:26):
as an act of penance, uh fasted went on pilgrimages um.
The biggest difference in addition to being a little bit
earlier in the period, St Bridge's was St. Bridget was
a lot more well off than Marjorie. So Marjorie would
have been like solidly middle class, uh and St. Bridget
was more like the nobility. But otherwise they had a
(28:48):
lot in common, and she had a lot in common
with a lot of the other women mystics of that time. Um,
so she wasn't just she wasn't the only person. No,
it was definitely not like alone alone mystic by any means.
I mean, her tail bears a lot of resemblance, not
(29:09):
just a Bridget, but to other mistakes of the time.
There were many women, and the women are always considered
mystics because they had this sort of different relationship with
God in the eyes of the culture of the time.
You know, the male heads of church were certainly religious
and devoted, but there was an administrative element to it.
It was, you know, as Tracy mentioned earlier, it was
(29:31):
about you know, the power of their positions and and
that was all a big factor. Whereas the women it
really was almost a more visceral. They are very connected,
like they had physical visions where their body would be
affected in different ways by their um, their moments that
they shared in these visions with God. So it's a
(29:53):
little bit, it's a different thing, and it's a reason
that there were many women experiencing these same things that
they were kind of lumped in this group of women mystics.
There were several some of them we may talk about.
It's some very future because I would not want to
cluster a bunch of women mystics together in the podcast.
(30:13):
But that's why the phrase women mystics happens, that they
are kind of portioned off as having a different relationship
with God than the men that were leaders in the church. Yes,
so today because because you know, we live in a
world that likes to find explanations for things that don't
necessarily have explanations. Um, there are a lot of theories
(30:33):
today about various illnesses that she may have had that
may explain the visions that she had. And so if
you if you go digging through through journals, you will
find people who argue that she had epilepsy or postpartum psychosis,
or hysteria, or schizuo effective disorder or bipolar disorder or
Jerusalem syndrome. It's sort of a long laundry list of
(30:55):
psychological explanations for the things that she wrote about in
her life. I I sort of feel like, regardless of
what your own religious leaning is or whether you are
a member of any particular faith, the fact that she,
as a medieval woman, was able to take charge of
her life to the extent that she was and travel
(31:17):
as much as she was and become as notable as
she did, that is remarkable. Like, even apart from any
feeling that you may have about church or religion or
any of that. The incredible life, like I said at
the top of the podcast. As a historical figure, her
story is so engaging. Yeah, and when you juxtapose it
(31:37):
against sort of you know, what we know about society
that at that time and how society even works now,
it's She's incredible and she's really so noteworthy in so
many different ways. Well. And the other incredible thing is
her autobiography. Yeah. Um, we've talked about how it's the
oldest known autobiography in English. Um. She dictated it as
(32:01):
two different books. Uh, the first time around in fourteen
thirty six and then the second time in four Um,
so about twenty years after the first time she had
a vision is when she got with somebody to write
all this down. Um. There's kind of a long and
wandering story of how the writing down happened, and much
like a lot of what's in her life, there's sort
(32:22):
of a vein of and and then something lucky happened
that made it actually become a real thing. Um. It's
possible that the first person to write the book down
was her son, who we talked about, like the one
child that we talked about. This is sort of circumstantial
evidence linking her description of the person who wrote the
(32:43):
book down to what her son's life was like. They
had both gone to Germany and gotten married and come
back with a wife and then later died. Um. That's
not super strong evidence, but there are people who think
the first person she told the book to was her son.
I don't. I don't know about that, but it is circumstantial.
(33:06):
At the same time, like we mentioned before, there wasn't
that much travel on that scope happening necessarily at that time,
so it is it's circumstantial, but it's also not insignificant
that there are those matchups. So also, whoever it was
who did the first writing down did not do a
good job um, and did not write very legibly and
(33:31):
did not use grammar that was either correct English for
the time, UM, because it is kind of a Middle English.
If you if you read a non updated version, it's
very tricky to read as a modern reader. But it
was not even consistent within that spelling. It was like
not consistent English or consistent German spelling and grammar really
(33:53):
did not do a good job. And so she was
not dictating to a scholar, No, no, it was it
was you. Whoever. Whoever she was talking to had more
literacy than she did, but not enough to do a
really great job. So she gave it to a priest
who she trusted later on, and the priest was like,
I can't read this. I can, Yeah, he gave it
(34:14):
back to her. Uh. He felt bad about that later
changed his mind. Um had trouble reading it because of
failing vision, and she was like, I really have faith
that God will help you do this. And in the
end he did do the rewrite of it with her UM,
and they kind of revised as they went. They revised
(34:34):
as they went. They added some more stuff in UM.
And that leads people to to sort of ask, who
should we think of as the writer of this was
it Marjorie, Was it the first person who wrote it down?
Was it the priest who rewrote it? Um. One thing
that I think puts a lot of the answer of
that into Marjorie is that she talks about that the
(34:57):
priest read her what he had written down with her
in the room, and she okayed it. So even though
she was not physically the one holding the writing utensil,
she did sort of she approved what had been written
down after it was written down. She was like the
verbal editor at that point. There are there's also a
(35:18):
lot of scholarly work that compares various pieces of the book,
like in terms of the spelling and the style and
the tone um, to try to figure out who wrote
what and what had been influenced by who UM. For example,
she you know, likely did not um need help making
(35:38):
her narration sound like other books written at the time
that were devotional in nature, because she had been hearing
those from the time she was quite young, over and over.
I mean, we talked about St. Bridget's story that she
had read to her many many times, and several others,
so she already kind of had a sense of that
style of narration right well. And because she did not
have the luxury of being able to write things down.
(35:59):
She probably also had a very good memory, so even
though she was narrating something from memory, her memory was
probably a little sharper than a lot of hours now
and a lot of you know, people who have the
luxury of making the list of things to take to
the store because they know how to read them right. Um,
she did not know how to read and right, so
(36:20):
she had to keep all of the things that she
needed to know in her head. But it is believed
that the priest probably helped her with things like phrasing
for clarity and uh, just making sure that the story
was told in a way that made sense, and particularly
the parts that are about when she was on trial.
She probably had some help not not running the risk
(36:42):
of further accusations of heresy and making sure that her
answers in the book were correct like that probably is
something she got a little extra help with. But otherwise
people seem pretty confident that is her it's her story
told from her point of view, it is told in
the third person. That's somewhere were of a narrative technique
though then uh, then cause for a question. Um, here's
(37:06):
the interesting thing, or is it the thing that I'm
going to say? I think so? Is it that the
text of the autobiography was not discovered until ninety four? Yeah,
that amazes me, I know. So ninety four. Let's just
let's back up a step. People knew that this book
existed because there was a guy named Winkin the Word,
which I just want to say all the time. Winkin
(37:29):
de Word had published excerpts from it in an eight
page pamphlet in fifteen o one. UM. So it had
been referenced in other works that we already had a
new about. So people knew that that that this was
a book that existed. They thought that it was a
book about an anchorite, like they thought it was going
to be a book about somebody who was a recluse. Uh.
So in nineteen thirty four, UM sitting on a shelf
(37:52):
in a library at a Pleasington Old Hall, Lancashire. Uh
It was on a private library shelf basically, and people
would just pick it up and look at it and
read it like it was this ancient manuscript was not
being really super weirre well cared for in that respect, um.
But it was owned by the Lieutenant Colonel William E. I.
(38:15):
Butler Bowden, and one day he thought, maybe I should
get this thing looked at. So he took his extremely
old manuscript that had just been sitting on a library
shelf to a medieval scholar at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
which at the time was called the Museum of South Kensington. Uh.
And he showed it to an American medieval scholar there
(38:35):
named Miss Hope Emily Allen. Men. Miss Hope Emily Allen
was familiar with winkin to words hamplet and she's the
one who identified it, said, this is Marjorie Kemp's book. Um.
They were all kind of surprised that this was a
married woman who had traveled around that that was not
what they expected to happen. UM. The surviving tess the
(38:58):
one and only copy that we had of this medieval work. UM.
It was written in one person's handwriting, uh and probably
in about fourteen fifty, so it was not the first one.
Now it's not the original, but it's a pretty early copy. UM.
The first print edition of this newly rediscovered thing came
out in ninety and now, because this is a hundreds
(39:20):
of year old manuscript that's been around for a really
long time. If you want to read it, you can
on the internet for free. That is how far we've
come as a society. Yeah, you can read medieval women,
woman mystics, entire work on the internet for free. Yeah,
we've come a long way. We've come a really long way.
(39:41):
Really fascinating story today is I love her story because
it is so just mind blowing. She was, you know,
so outside the realm of of what was ever expected.
I mean, as you said, even scholars that discovered the book,
it was like, wait, thought what happened in her life?
And then she her husband and will and he said
(40:02):
it was okay that they weren't going to ask her. Wow,
it's a fascinating tale. It is outside the realm of
regularity for her time, for sure. Yeah, outside the realm
of regularity for a lot of stuff. And she's you know,
regardless of whether you feel that her visions were real
or we're psychosis, she's a remarkable woman. Yeah. There you
(40:23):
can you know, google her and see all manner of
artwork depicting her, uh, which is just It's one of
those things where I will think about her story and
I'll look at some of those and it's like my
brain tries to put them together, and I just I
wish I could know what was really going on in
her head sometimes. If you if you want to read
her book, you have two choices. It means there are
(40:46):
lots of editions of it, but two primary choices, and
one is the one with modernized language, which is a
very easy and fast read because it is very simple language. Um,
if you're reading the one that is more in more
of a Middle English style, that can and take a
while to it. Yeah, if you're not used to it,
it can take a while, uh to get used to
the way things are spelled and all of that. But
(41:07):
either way you can get a hugely interesting glimpse into
a medieval woman's just It's also significant because we mentioned
that it's the first English autobiography, but for many scholars
it's one of the really best surviving texts on to
sort of what life was like in medieval England. So
(41:30):
it's significant not just from her religious story in her
societal sort of fascinating trajectory, but also just in terms
of a historical document about what it was like to
live in a port city in England at the time
in a middle class family. Yeah, so many reasons that
it's worth they're going to look at. So that's Marjorie Camp. Yes.
(41:51):
And then we have some listener mail. We have two
pieces we do because I am a new addition to
this podcast. I'm reading I'm reading mail that's addressed to
other people, and it's it feels kind of decadent to
be reading other people's mail if you're eavesdropping on other
people's emails. Right, So this one is from Nancy and
it's addressed dear Katie, Sarah, Deblina. If you're reading this, Holly,
(42:14):
did I miss anyone? Tracy me or it? Also Jane
and Candice and many of the past from years and
years ago. These three hosts. Um, I do not mean
to make you feel bad. If I did, I'm sorry. Um.
She says she's been thinking about sending an email since
the last September, and she listens while walking the dog. Um.
She says. She says, this is very old news, but uh,
(42:38):
writing to you came came to mind again laft month
when Deblina and Sarah did a podcast on historical hoaxes,
and you referenced a podcast you did last September on
War of the World. I first heard about this radio
program when I was a young child. My mother, who
will be eighty seven in a few weeks, told me
about it. You see, she has very vivid memories of
listening to the program when she was twelve years old.
(42:59):
She lived lived just outside Philadelphia, only seventy miles from
Graver's Mill, New Jersey. She remembers that the program aired
on a Sunday night. Why did she know this because
in her time it was customary and many churches for
folks to attend services on both Sunday morning and Sunday evening.
My mom's parents had just returned church to church that
evening and left my mom home with her two older sisters,
(43:20):
being just kids and alone in the home for the evening.
When they heard the program, they were petrified. Every time
I think about that radio program, I get shivers, imagining
what it must have been like to be my mom
hearing about Martians and bathing the earth, not very far
from where she was. Yes, it all seems so silly now,
but we forget how much things have changed in the
past seventy years. I don't recall how my mom and
(43:41):
her sister's finally learned that it was a hoax. One
thing that also sit down in my mind as I
listened to the podcast. Towards the end, you discussed whether
or not you think you would be fooled and what
you might have done. Deblina said she might phone someone.
I'm wondering, but not so much that I will take
the time now to find the answer. How many homes
actually had telephones in nineteen and if they did, or
the phones party lines, my point being that it may
(44:04):
not have been that easy to just pound someone and
talk it over. I love that story. Yeah, I giggled
a little, not because I think it's funny that they
were scared, but because I can so easily project myself
to my youth when I would get similarly scared by
silly things. Yeah, I would get scared by thinking what
if there's a monster, Like if you told me that
there was a monster? Hard to being a kid. And
(44:26):
then we also got a postcard that was sort of
near and dear to my heart for a reason I
will tell you in a bit, And it is fround
listener ali uh. And it is a picture of a
crooked beef crooked matsa mask uh and she is writing
us from the Berke Museum of Natural History and Culture
in Seattle. And this is near and dear to my
heart because when I was in elementary school, I lived
(44:47):
in Pewallup, which is near Seattle, and going to that
museum is fond memories for me, so I loved it.
She is a um an assistant in the Ethnology Collection
and she's currently working on a produ of arranging three thousand,
thirty five millimeter slides from someone's travels in the Pacific
from the seventies. Sound's kind of fascinating and interesting. So
(45:09):
thank you for that ale because it was a nice
little reminder of being a kid in the Pacific Northwest.
That's awesome, So thank you very much for sending his
postcards and emails. He would like to tack to us
if you can at Facebook dot com slash history class Stuff.
We're also on Twitter at missed in History, and you
can email us at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
(45:31):
If you would like to learn a little more about
the more mundane side of Marjorie Camp's life, you can
go to our website, put the word beer in the
search bar and you will find how beer works a
testament to her brief and failed time as a brewer.
You can do all of that and more at our website,
which is how stuff works dot com. For more on
(45:52):
this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff
works dot com. Aten named the lane named the lane
ut full in Je,
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