Margery Kempe: a medieval voice | Anthony Bale

The story of a 15th century bourgeois woman opens an absolutely unique window onto the medieval past, onto details of everyday life – domesticity, embarrassment, caring for one's husband, food – these really important parts of being alive.

About Anthony Bale "I am Professor of Medieval & Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. I research later medieval English literature and culture. Throughout my work I've been concerned with the relationship between margins and peripheries in medieval culture, and with recovering neglected sources and voices from the medieval past. I am a 2011 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. My early work focussed on Christian-Jewish relations, popular religion, and the history of antisemitism, followed by studies of the poetry of John Lydgate, the cult of St Edmund of East Anglia, and medieval histories of emotion. This then led me into pilgrimage studies, the history of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and editing and translating The Book of Marvels and Travels (Oxford UP, 2012) by John Mandeville and The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford UP, 2016). In 2023 I published A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: the World through Medieval Eyes (Penguin, 2023; Norton 2024). From 2023-26 I hold a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to support my research on the Ottoman Siege of Rhodes (1480) and the development of late medieval news media."

Key Points • The Book of Margery Kempe is among the earliest named English life narratives and offers a rare female voice on domestic life, spirituality and pilgrimage. • The sole surviving manuscript vanished for centuries. It was rediscovered in the 1930s in a Derbyshire country house during a ping pong game, which sparked modern study and the recovery of women's voices from the Middle Ages. • Kempe carefully shared her visions within church limits during fierce anti-heresy campaigns, facing real threats of being burnt yet presenting her work as divinely ordained. • Her candid descriptions of mental distress, erotic devotion and caregiving make the book pivotal for the history of emotions and relatable today.