June 9, 2018 • 43 mins
We're traveling back to a 2013 episode about Margery Kempe. 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 (00:02):
Happy Saturday everybody. For today's classic, we are going back
to the medieval period with our story of Christian mystic
Marjorie Kemp. Marjorie Kemp also wrote one of the first
autobiographies in English, which details not only her religious life,
but also what everyday life was like for middle class
people during the Middle Ages. Also in this podcast, I
(00:23):
make an embarrassing error. I say that Santiago to Campo
Stella is the home of the tomb of St. Peter.
It is not. It is the reported burial place of St. James.
I just misspoke the absolutely wrong name. So other than that,
enjoy Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from
(00:46):
how Stuff Works dot Com. Hi, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry And
today we're talking about one of those cool elements of
history that I think if you had never been interested
in history before and you heard the story, you would
(01:07):
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 it's 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 today about a woman who lived in the Middle Ages,
so the late fourteenth and early into the mid fifteenth century.
(01:27):
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 the latter part of her life,
(01:47):
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 had these very deeply
spiritual lives and would talk about having visions and uh
(02:11):
and having really intense religious experiences. Most of them were
reclusives also, um. They were called anchor rights or anchoresses
who lived either within the church or sometimes literally within
a wall of the church, so they would have a tiny,
tiny cell tinier than the room that we record podcasts
(02:32):
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 Camp was a very spiritual person, but she traveled
with her husband and it was not an anchor, right,
(02:53):
not at all. She went on h pilgrimage and traveled
all over Um for a period 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 to the visions
(03:16):
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
(03:37):
so that got confusing, right. Some 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 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
(03:59):
often credit it. It is, uh, the creator of the
first autobiography in 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. And it isn't a
full account of her life. She leaves out big chunks
(04:23):
and she really just focuses on her spiritual journey. Uh.
And she focused on it in sort of in the
order that she remembered things, right, 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 in her
(04:45):
autobiography like I was born here and she's kind of
all over the place. 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. Uh,
But to start at the beginning. Yes, So she was
born around seventy three to her father, who was John Brunham.
(05:08):
It may also have been Burnham. We're 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,
(05:30):
so there was a lot of 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
(05:51):
was very proud of that fact. She was a very
proud person, which is a theme that will come up
in her life later. Yeah, I mean she was a
child of a wealthy pillar of the community. Yes, um,
not not a mystery why she would be proud of that.
(06:11):
She did get married roughly twenty, which is pretty late
in life for most girls at that time, to John Kemp,
who was also the son of a successful merchant. Yes,
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
(06:32):
a lot of it, and then after the baby was born,
she had a period of more than a year of
what she herself describes as madness, you know, things that
we would recognize 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
(06:52):
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. 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.
(07:15):
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 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
(07:35):
herself as pretty proud and stubborn. Um. She went into
some of the more mundane jobs that women had in
in the Middle Ages. She worked for 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 a good
(08:00):
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 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
(08:21):
still though, was a period of years before before she
started on a just very deeply 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
(08:42):
out how to get to Heaven faster. Um. She started
spending more and more time in church. Um. She gave
up meat and alcohol and eventually sex as penance for
previous sins uh. And she also did a thing that
was kind of a common pract us during the Middle Ages,
which was the mortification of the flesh. And she did
(09:03):
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
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.
(09:26):
It does sound horrible. I mean, I've never had a child,
but knowing from the descriptions of other people what being
pregnant is, like, yeah, that can be very uncomfortable and
it's exhausting already and sometimes you already feel like prickly
and rashi anyway, so to add a hair shirt on
top of that it's horrible. Yes. And then she had
a couple of years that were kind of the easy
(09:48):
part of her right where she was fasting, she was
you know, acts of contrition. They weren't terribly difficult. But
then she had three years of temptations, yes, including when
a man tried to sit do was 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
(10:10):
was going really well. It's easy for her to fast,
it was easy for her to do these things. Then
all these temptations started, 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 gal sin. She could mentally sin, and
(10:33):
she felt that that was just as bad. Um. And
so it was after that that she really recommitted herself too,
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
(10:58):
she 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 when where she was
(11:18):
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
(11:41):
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 the whole narrative. We only really hear
(12:01):
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
were president in the Bible and having relationships with them,
(12:23):
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 rather than physically wearing a
(12:44):
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. Yeah,
lots of hatred and derision people. Um. And then in
(13:05):
the same series of conversations, 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 years after
(13:29):
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 with their
(13:50):
inordinate love. Yeah, they had a very active physical life together,
clearly because they had kids. Um. But yeah, the way
she described that, 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,
(14:12):
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 as kind of a
divine intervention, like he would he would want to have sex,
(14:32):
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 one day 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
(14:53):
to have sex right now or I'm going to murder you,
could we have sex? And she was like, no, I
would either 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
(15:14):
my debts. Yeah. It was a bit of a negotiations,
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 words she got back was Okay,
if if this is cool, you can stop having your
(15:35):
fast on Friday and and stop your relationship. With your
husband and then that will all work out, even out,
It will even out. And so on June 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
(15:56):
think when when you're retelling it or even hearing it
or reading 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 marry for quite a while.
At that point they had UM and uh, you know,
(16:16):
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
(16:38):
seemed to have a very close relationship that that was
based on 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
(17:00):
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.
(17:22):
So it wasn't just her kind of dragging him along
with her down this path of of pilgrimage and abstinence.
And this was again kind of early on in the
pilgrimage phase. Uh. Yes, that was in fourteen thirteen, and
that winter they stayed inn in Venice as sort of
a stopping point before going to the Holy Land. I
(17:46):
think it's interesting that a little before that, at the
very beginning, she um visited holy sites closer to home.
Over that point, No, Rich and Canterbury, um, and she
met with a lot of other religious figures yes of
the day, both official and unofficial religious figures. She before
they left England, she met the Bishop of Lincoln and
(18:06):
the Archbishop of Canterbury, 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
(18:29):
has I think we think of anybody that is claiming
to have all these visions, it's very easy to go
say 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.
(18:50):
And Julian 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
(19:13):
while she was having 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 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.
(19:34):
And they would find 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 shirt probably making her cry. Yes,
So lots of travels around England to religious sites there.
(19:56):
In fourteen thirteen a stop in Venice, and then that
spring they sailed from Venice to Jerusalem and she spent
about a year visiting holy sites in Jerusalem before returning
home again via Rome. H And while in Rome one
of the most sort of notable and interesting events of
(20:17):
her religious life happened, which is that she got married
to God. Yeah. Um in a vision. Uh. She 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
(20:39):
a wedding ring that was her wedding ring to Jesus
that she would wear uh. And so this became sort
of this multidimensional like marriage to multiple aspects of the Godhead. Yes,
while simultaneously still married to an actual human right, even
though their relationship was non sexual and kind of more
one of French up at that point. Yes, so yes,
(21:02):
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 sites in Assisi uh.
And they departed from Rome in at Easter time of
fourteen fifteen and they got back to Norwich in May. Um.
(21:23):
She had one more sort of leg of her pilgrimage
after that, and that was from July ish around July seven,
fourteen seventeen, she took a seven day voyage oversea um
to Santiago to Compostella in Spain, and that is where
the tomb of St. Peter is and that's also a
(21:44):
pilgrimage that people continue to make Overland today, Like that's
a thing that people 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 August
of fourteen seventeen, and that was sort of the period
of her religious wandering, right, those were her her travels.
(22:10):
It was the 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
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
(22:32):
this marriage to God and Jesus. She you know, there
were just a lot of things that conflicted with society's norms.
Even very religious elements of society were like, you're doing
this not the right way, This isn't this isn't how
you worship. She was threatening to sort of the religious
orthodoxy of ways. Yeah, she was definitely outside the normal
(22:57):
realm of what you did if you had dedicated your
life to your devotion. So you know, people can perceive
that 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 city. She spent some time in prison, either
in the actual jail or in the home of one
(23:20):
of the jailers. UM. So she was imprisoned at various times.
Um she was not ever found guilty, which 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 to say, like, no,
people actually believe this was just part of her dedication.
(23:41):
You know, she proved to them that that's what it was.
She wasn't just trying to be rebellious or you know,
she wasn't 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 basically, and and and
not in the end to be ruled to be someone
(24:03):
who was making it up or was doing something that
was going to be contradictory to what the church was teaching.
So 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
(24:24):
and and physical vision experiences. She continued to try to
teach people and try to talk to people. Um. She
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
(24:45):
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.
But her husband passed away in four um and it
was after that that she took the last journey that
she went on. Yeah. Uh, and her son also died
(25:06):
that year, the only the only child of hers that
we did we really hear anything about in her tails.
We didn't have no idea about the other thirteen. And
her husband, she said, 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
(25:27):
four four and she was traveling to Prussia by ship
to escort her widow daughter in law home, and then
they also toured religious 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 activities,
(25:49):
and not quite a spry because she used sixties quite
old at that time that point. Yet especially to have
you know, it's the physical toil of of fourteen children
is a lot and there were a lot of women
in that age you and their later pregnancies things got
harder and harder and often didn't survive childbirth. So we
(26:10):
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. A lot of records to
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 that's basically
(26:34):
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 happened. It's a very
important figure in the landscape of religion. Yeah, 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
(26:58):
gospel to other people. And she was also really beloved
and reviled depending on who you talked to. Uh. 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
(27:19):
her faith and devotion constantly. Yes, Um, so yeah, she she,
depending on who you spoke to, was either just an
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
(27:39):
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.
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 focus on the
(28:00):
things that seemed spiritually important. Um. And the rest of
it is just not even really acknowledged. Yeah, it's all,
like I said earlier, secondary and tertiary at best. It's
just 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. The kid said it had
(28:21):
right out. Um. 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 tradition of
medieval mysticism. Um. And one of the mystics that she
had the most in common with is St. Bridget of Sweden,
(28:42):
and St. Bridget of Sweden is somebody who she knew about.
She had had St. Bridget's book read to her. She
talked about how couple times times yes, she had had
She talked a lot about sermons that she heard read
and hearing people read books to her, because she was
not literate herself, but she had her a lot and
had described to her a lot about St. Bridget's life.
(29:03):
They were both married to men before they took on
a spiritual wedding valve to the Godhead. Um. They both
lived chasely for some part of their married life. They
both wore hair shirts 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,
(29:25):
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 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
(29:46):
wasn't the only person. No, she was definitely not like
a lone alone mystic by any means. I mean, her
tail bears a lot of resemblance, not just to Bridget,
but to other mystics 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
(30:09):
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 about you know, the
power of their positions and and that was all a
big factor. Where as the women it really was almost
a more visceral. They were very connected, like they had
(30:30):
physical visions where their body would be affected in different
ways by their um there moments that they shared in
these visions, uh with God. So it's a 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. Why
(30:53):
there were several some of them we may talk about.
It's some very future because I would not want to
cluster but to women mystics together and the podcast. 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,
(31:19):
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
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
(31:39):
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
psychological explanations for the things that she wrote about in
her life. I sort of feel like, regardless of your
(32:00):
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 as much
as she was and become as notable as she did,
that is remarkable. Like, even apart from any feeling that
(32:20):
you may have about church or religion or any of that,
just 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 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
(32:42):
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 two different books, thest time around
in fourteen thirty six and then the second time in
(33:03):
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 of a vein of and and then something
lucky happened that made it actually become a real thing. Um.
(33:27):
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 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.
(33:49):
That's not super strong evidence. But there are people who
think the first person she told the book too was
her son. I don't. I don't know that, but that's
a theory. It is circumstantial. 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,
(34:13):
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 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
(34:35):
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 did not do a
good job. And so she she was not dictating to
a scholar, No, no, it was it was she whoever
(34:56):
whoever she was talking to had more to receive 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't. Yeah, he gave it back to her. Uh.
He felt bad about that later changed his mind. Um
had trouble reading it because of failing vision, and she
(35:20):
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 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
(35:42):
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 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
(36:04):
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 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
(36:24):
what had been influenced by who. Um. For example, she
you know, likely did not um need help making 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
(36:45):
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,
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
(37:06):
and a lot of you know, people who have the
luxury of making the list of things take to the
store because they know how to read them, right. Um.
She did not know how to read and right so
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
(37:30):
the parts that are about when she was on trial.
She probably had some help not not running the risk
of further accusations of heresy by 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
(37:52):
told from her point of view. It's just told in
the third person. That's more more of a narrative technique.
Though then, uh, then cause is for a question? Um,
here's 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 nine thirty four, let's
(38:15):
just let's back up a step. People knew that this
book existed because there was a guy named winkind Word,
which I just want to say all the time. Winkin
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
knew about. So people knew that that that this was
(38:36):
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 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
(38:58):
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.
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
(39:20):
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 media medieval
scholar there named Miss Hope Emily Allen. Men. Miss Hope
Emily Allen was familiar with winkin to words Hamplet and
(39:40):
she's the one who identified it Kemp. She 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 one and only copy that we
have of this medieval work. Um. It was written in
one person handwriting. Uh, and probably in about fourteen fifty,
(40:03):
so it was not the first one. No, 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 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
(40:25):
a society. Yeah, you can read medieval women, woman mystics,
entire work on the internet for free. Yeah. Yeah, we've
come a long way. We've come a really long way.
Really fascinating story to me is I love her story
because it is so just mind blowing. She was, you know,
(40:46):
so outside the realm of of what was ever expected.
I mean, as you said, even scholars that discovered the book,
it was like what they thought that happened in her
life and then she her husband went with her and
he said it was okay that they weren't going to
have sech. Wow, it's a fascinating tale. It is outside
the realm of regularity for her time, for sure. Yeah,
(41:06):
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 was a
remarkable woman. Yeah. There you 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
(41:27):
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.
I means there are 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
(41:49):
is a very simple language. Um, if you're reading the
one that is more in more of a Middle English
style that can take a while used to it. Yeah,
if you're not used to it, it it can take a
lot uh to to get used to the way things
are spelled and all of that. But either way you
can get a hugely interesting glimpse into a medieval woman's
(42:10):
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 just sort of what
life was like in medieval England. U. So it's significant
not just from her religious story, in her societal sort
(42:31):
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. Uh, So many reasons that it's
worth taking a look at. So that's Marjorie Camp. Thank
(42:52):
you so much for joining us for this Saturday Classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a faceboo U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete. Now, so here's our current contact information. We
are at history Podcasts at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History all over
(43:13):
social media. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
and Instagram. Thanks again for listening for more on this
and thousands of other topics because at how Stuff Works
dot com
Happy Saturday everybody. For today's classic, we are going back
to the medieval period with our story of Christian mystic
Marjorie Kemp. Marjorie Kemp also wrote one of the first
autobiographies in English, which details not only her religious life,
but also what everyday life was like for middle class
people during the Middle Ages. Also in this podcast, I
(00:23):
make an embarrassing error. I say that Santiago to Campo
Stella is the home of the tomb of St. Peter.
It is not. It is the reported burial place of St. James.
I just misspoke the absolutely wrong name. So other than that,
enjoy Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from
(00:46):
how Stuff Works dot Com. Hi, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry And
today we're talking about one of those cool elements of
history that I think if you had never been interested
in history before and you heard the story, you would
(01:07):
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 it's 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 today about a woman who lived in the Middle Ages,
so the late fourteenth and early into the mid fifteenth century.
(01:27):
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 the latter part of her life,
(01:47):
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 had these very deeply
spiritual lives and would talk about having visions and uh
(02:11):
and having really intense religious experiences. Most of them were
reclusives also, um. They were called anchor rights or anchoresses
who lived either within the church or sometimes literally within
a wall of the church, so they would have a tiny,
tiny cell tinier than the room that we record podcasts
(02:32):
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 Camp was a very spiritual person, but she traveled
with her husband and it was not an anchor, right,
(02:53):
not at all. She went on h pilgrimage and traveled
all over Um for a period 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 to the visions
(03:16):
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
(03:37):
so that got confusing, right. Some 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 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
(03:59):
often credit it. It is, uh, the creator of the
first autobiography in 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. And it isn't a
full account of her life. She leaves out big chunks
(04:23):
and she really just focuses on her spiritual journey. Uh.
And she focused on it in sort of in the
order that she remembered things, right, 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 in her
(04:45):
autobiography like I was born here and she's kind of
all over the place. 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. Uh,
But to start at the beginning. Yes, So she was
born around seventy three to her father, who was John Brunham.
(05:08):
It may also have been Burnham. We're 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,
(05:30):
so there was a lot of 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
(05:51):
was very proud of that fact. She was a very
proud person, which is a theme that will come up
in her life later. Yeah, I mean she was a
child of a wealthy pillar of the community. Yes, um,
not not a mystery why she would be proud of that.
(06:11):
She did get married roughly twenty, which is pretty late
in life for most girls at that time, to John Kemp,
who was also the son of a successful merchant. Yes,
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
(06:32):
a lot of it, and then after the baby was born,
she had a period of more than a year of
what she herself describes as madness, you know, things that
we would recognize 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
(06:52):
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. 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.
(07:15):
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 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
(07:35):
herself as pretty proud and stubborn. Um. She went into
some of the more mundane jobs that women had in
in the Middle Ages. She worked for 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 a good
(08:00):
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 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
(08:21):
still though, was a period of years before before she
started on a just very deeply 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
(08:42):
out how to get to Heaven faster. Um. She started
spending more and more time in church. Um. She gave
up meat and alcohol and eventually sex as penance for
previous sins uh. And she also did a thing that
was kind of a common pract us during the Middle Ages,
which was the mortification of the flesh. And she did
(09:03):
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
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.
(09:26):
It does sound horrible. I mean, I've never had a child,
but knowing from the descriptions of other people what being
pregnant is, like, yeah, that can be very uncomfortable and
it's exhausting already and sometimes you already feel like prickly
and rashi anyway, so to add a hair shirt on
top of that it's horrible. Yes. And then she had
a couple of years that were kind of the easy
(09:48):
part of her right where she was fasting, she was
you know, acts of contrition. They weren't terribly difficult. But
then she had three years of temptations, yes, including when
a man tried to sit do was 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
(10:10):
was going really well. It's easy for her to fast,
it was easy for her to do these things. Then
all these temptations started, 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 gal sin. She could mentally sin, and
(10:33):
she felt that that was just as bad. Um. And
so it was after that that she really recommitted herself too,
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
(10:58):
she 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 when where she was
(11:18):
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
(11:41):
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 the whole narrative. We only really hear
(12:01):
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
were president in the Bible and having relationships with them,
(12:23):
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 rather than physically wearing a
(12:44):
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. Yeah,
lots of hatred and derision people. Um. And then in
(13:05):
the same series of conversations, 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 years after
(13:29):
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 with their
(13:50):
inordinate love. Yeah, they had a very active physical life together,
clearly because they had kids. Um. But yeah, the way
she described that, 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,
(14:12):
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 as kind of a
divine intervention, like he would he would want to have sex,
(14:32):
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 one day 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
(14:53):
to have sex right now or I'm going to murder you,
could we have sex? And she was like, no, I
would either 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
(15:14):
my debts. Yeah. It was a bit of a negotiations,
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 words she got back was Okay,
if if this is cool, you can stop having your
(15:35):
fast on Friday and and stop your relationship. With your
husband and then that will all work out, even out,
It will even out. And so on June 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
(15:56):
think when when you're retelling it or even hearing it
or reading 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 marry for quite a while.
At that point they had UM and uh, you know,
(16:16):
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
(16:38):
seemed to have a very close relationship that that was
based on 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
(17:00):
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.
(17:22):
So it wasn't just her kind of dragging him along
with her down this path of of pilgrimage and abstinence.
And this was again kind of early on in the
pilgrimage phase. Uh. Yes, that was in fourteen thirteen, and
that winter they stayed inn in Venice as sort of
a stopping point before going to the Holy Land. I
(17:46):
think it's interesting that a little before that, at the
very beginning, she um visited holy sites closer to home.
Over that point, No, Rich and Canterbury, um, and she
met with a lot of other religious figures yes of
the day, both official and unofficial religious figures. She before
they left England, she met the Bishop of Lincoln and
(18:06):
the Archbishop of Canterbury, 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
(18:29):
has I think we think of anybody that is claiming
to have all these visions, it's very easy to go
say 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.
(18:50):
And Julian 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
(19:13):
while she was having 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 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.
(19:34):
And they would find 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 shirt probably making her cry. Yes,
So lots of travels around England to religious sites there.
(19:56):
In fourteen thirteen a stop in Venice, and then that
spring they sailed from Venice to Jerusalem and she spent
about a year visiting holy sites in Jerusalem before returning
home again via Rome. H And while in Rome one
of the most sort of notable and interesting events of
(20:17):
her religious life happened, which is that she got married
to God. Yeah. Um in a vision. Uh. She 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
(20:39):
a wedding ring that was her wedding ring to Jesus
that she would wear uh. And so this became sort
of this multidimensional like marriage to multiple aspects of the Godhead. Yes,
while simultaneously still married to an actual human right, even
though their relationship was non sexual and kind of more
one of French up at that point. Yes, so yes,
(21:02):
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 sites in Assisi uh.
And they departed from Rome in at Easter time of
fourteen fifteen and they got back to Norwich in May. Um.
(21:23):
She had one more sort of leg of her pilgrimage
after that, and that was from July ish around July seven,
fourteen seventeen, she took a seven day voyage oversea um
to Santiago to Compostella in Spain, and that is where
the tomb of St. Peter is and that's also a
(21:44):
pilgrimage that people continue to make Overland today, Like that's
a thing that people 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 August
of fourteen seventeen, and that was sort of the period
of her religious wandering, right, those were her her travels.
(22:10):
It was the 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
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
(22:32):
this marriage to God and Jesus. She you know, there
were just a lot of things that conflicted with society's norms.
Even very religious elements of society were like, you're doing
this not the right way, This isn't this isn't how
you worship. She was threatening to sort of the religious
orthodoxy of ways. Yeah, she was definitely outside the normal
(22:57):
realm of what you did if you had dedicated your
life to your devotion. So you know, people can perceive
that 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 city. She spent some time in prison, either
in the actual jail or in the home of one
(23:20):
of the jailers. UM. So she was imprisoned at various times.
Um she was not ever found guilty, which 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 to say, like, no,
people actually believe this was just part of her dedication.
(23:41):
You know, she proved to them that that's what it was.
She wasn't just trying to be rebellious or you know,
she wasn't 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 basically, and and and
not in the end to be ruled to be someone
(24:03):
who was making it up or was doing something that
was going to be contradictory to what the church was teaching.
So 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
(24:24):
and and physical vision experiences. She continued to try to
teach people and try to talk to people. Um. She
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
(24:45):
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.
But her husband passed away in four um and it
was after that that she took the last journey that
she went on. Yeah. Uh, and her son also died
(25:06):
that year, the only the only child of hers that
we did we really hear anything about in her tails.
We didn't have no idea about the other thirteen. And
her husband, she said, 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
(25:27):
four four and she was traveling to Prussia by ship
to escort her widow daughter in law home, and then
they also toured religious 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 activities,
(25:49):
and not quite a spry because she used sixties quite
old at that time that point. Yet especially to have
you know, it's the physical toil of of fourteen children
is a lot and there were a lot of women
in that age you and their later pregnancies things got
harder and harder and often didn't survive childbirth. So we
(26:10):
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. A lot of records to
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 that's basically
(26:34):
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 happened. It's a very
important figure in the landscape of religion. Yeah, 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
(26:58):
gospel to other people. And she was also really beloved
and reviled depending on who you talked to. Uh. 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
(27:19):
her faith and devotion constantly. Yes, Um, so yeah, she she,
depending on who you spoke to, was either just an
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
(27:39):
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.
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 focus on the
(28:00):
things that seemed spiritually important. Um. And the rest of
it is just not even really acknowledged. Yeah, it's all,
like I said earlier, secondary and tertiary at best. It's
just 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. The kid said it had
(28:21):
right out. Um. 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 tradition of
medieval mysticism. Um. And one of the mystics that she
had the most in common with is St. Bridget of Sweden,
(28:42):
and St. Bridget of Sweden is somebody who she knew about.
She had had St. Bridget's book read to her. She
talked about how couple times times yes, she had had
She talked a lot about sermons that she heard read
and hearing people read books to her, because she was
not literate herself, but she had her a lot and
had described to her a lot about St. Bridget's life.
(29:03):
They were both married to men before they took on
a spiritual wedding valve to the Godhead. Um. They both
lived chasely for some part of their married life. They
both wore hair shirts 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,
(29:25):
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 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
(29:46):
wasn't the only person. No, she was definitely not like
a lone alone mystic by any means. I mean, her
tail bears a lot of resemblance, not just to Bridget,
but to other mystics 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
(30:09):
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 about you know, the
power of their positions and and that was all a
big factor. Where as the women it really was almost
a more visceral. They were very connected, like they had
(30:30):
physical visions where their body would be affected in different
ways by their um there moments that they shared in
these visions, uh with God. So it's a 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. Why
(30:53):
there were several some of them we may talk about.
It's some very future because I would not want to
cluster but to women mystics together and the podcast. 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,
(31:19):
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
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
(31:39):
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
psychological explanations for the things that she wrote about in
her life. I sort of feel like, regardless of your
(32:00):
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 as much
as she was and become as notable as she did,
that is remarkable. Like, even apart from any feeling that
(32:20):
you may have about church or religion or any of that,
just 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 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
(32:42):
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 two different books, thest time around
in fourteen thirty six and then the second time in
(33:03):
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 of a vein of and and then something
lucky happened that made it actually become a real thing. Um.
(33:27):
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 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.
(33:49):
That's not super strong evidence. But there are people who
think the first person she told the book too was
her son. I don't. I don't know that, but that's
a theory. It is circumstantial. 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,
(34:13):
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 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
(34:35):
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 did not do a
good job. And so she she was not dictating to
a scholar, No, no, it was it was she whoever
(34:56):
whoever she was talking to had more to receive 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't. Yeah, he gave it back to her. Uh.
He felt bad about that later changed his mind. Um
had trouble reading it because of failing vision, and she
(35:20):
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 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
(35:42):
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 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
(36:04):
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 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
(36:24):
what had been influenced by who. Um. For example, she
you know, likely did not um need help making 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
(36:45):
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,
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
(37:06):
and a lot of you know, people who have the
luxury of making the list of things take to the
store because they know how to read them, right. Um.
She did not know how to read and right so
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
(37:30):
the parts that are about when she was on trial.
She probably had some help not not running the risk
of further accusations of heresy by 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
(37:52):
told from her point of view. It's just told in
the third person. That's more more of a narrative technique.
Though then, uh, then cause is for a question? Um,
here's 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 nine thirty four, let's
(38:15):
just let's back up a step. People knew that this
book existed because there was a guy named winkind Word,
which I just want to say all the time. Winkin
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
knew about. So people knew that that that this was
(38:36):
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 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
(38:58):
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.
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
(39:20):
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 media medieval
scholar there named Miss Hope Emily Allen. Men. Miss Hope
Emily Allen was familiar with winkin to words Hamplet and
(39:40):
she's the one who identified it Kemp. She 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 one and only copy that we
have of this medieval work. Um. It was written in
one person handwriting. Uh, and probably in about fourteen fifty,
(40:03):
so it was not the first one. No, 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 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
(40:25):
a society. Yeah, you can read medieval women, woman mystics,
entire work on the internet for free. Yeah. Yeah, we've
come a long way. We've come a really long way.
Really fascinating story to me is I love her story
because it is so just mind blowing. She was, you know,
(40:46):
so outside the realm of of what was ever expected.
I mean, as you said, even scholars that discovered the book,
it was like what they thought that happened in her
life and then she her husband went with her and
he said it was okay that they weren't going to
have sech. Wow, it's a fascinating tale. It is outside
the realm of regularity for her time, for sure. Yeah,
(41:06):
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 was a
remarkable woman. Yeah. There you 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
(41:27):
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.
I means there are 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
(41:49):
is a very simple language. Um, if you're reading the
one that is more in more of a Middle English
style that can take a while used to it. Yeah,
if you're not used to it, it it can take a
lot uh to to get used to the way things
are spelled and all of that. But either way you
can get a hugely interesting glimpse into a medieval woman's
(42:10):
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 just sort of what
life was like in medieval England. U. So it's significant
not just from her religious story, in her societal sort
(42:31):
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. Uh, So many reasons that it's
worth taking a look at. So that's Marjorie Camp. Thank
(42:52):
you so much for joining us for this Saturday Classic.
Since this is out of the archive, if you heard
an email address or a faceboo U r L or
something similar during the course of the show, that may
be obsolete. Now, so here's our current contact information. We
are at history Podcasts at how stuff works dot com,
and then we're at Missed in the History all over
(43:13):
social media. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest,
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