Poor Margery

It is tempting to put Margery Kempe down as a simple nutcase, but there’s a danger in that assessment—because it unintentionally leads to dismissing and trivializing her life story as one of outrageous delusion, and therefore false. Regardless of the source of Kempe’s behavior—madness, psychosis, depression, divine torment—be it psychiatric or spiritual, she lived it real and she lived it hard.

Sparing neither herself nor the people around her, she drove herself to the utmost extremes of human tolerance. Just consider how far that drive took her: personally, in building (and sometimes losing) her businesses and successfully (if painfully) deconstructing her marriage; religiously, in her unsparing drive to win her place as a Christian holy woman; physically, for she was truly pitiless toward her own comforts (and when the weeping came upon her, that was literally draining as well!); even geographically, given how difficult travel just to France could be in that time—much less a journey to Jerusalem—and the fact that she undertook that journey essentially alone, as an unpleasant, unaccommodating, often embarrassing companion shunned by her fellow travelers. The diagnosis of madness, even if true, doesn't leave much room to acknowledge the gritty, desperate richness and sacrifice of her hard-fought life. 

As for the fascinating discussion on witchcraft (11/5) on the blog: If Margery had been born a century later, she might have been lucky that her madness (if indeed that's what religious intoxication is, as many would assuredly disagree) took the form it did, because her fixation on Christ instead of some other focus might have made it riskier for people to challenge her, having no way to know whether she was genuine or not. (Margery herself seems to worry about her legitimacy at one point, which takes her to visit Julian of Norwich, another and far more respected and accepted Christian mystic.)

But in the 14th century, my understanding is that most of the witch paranoia was focused on men, not women—warlocks, not witches. Women don't come under dark suspicion until the late 15th century, when things start to get really ugly for them; by the 16th century (17th in America), the “pogrom” is in full swing. (I await correction on my witch chronology, if someone knows it in better detail…)

Now, what post is complete without a soundtrack? Back in the day, I used to perform with some friends, and one of the tunes we played was about a witch, Susannah Martin. The words are taken from a newspaper account of her trial...