Margery kempe biography of christopher

I’ve always been fascinated with the women mystics, such as 12th century powerfrau and visionary Hildegard von Bingen, the heroine of my 2012 novel, ILLUMINATIONS. Likewise my new novel, REVELATIONS, which will be published in April 2021, is centered on two 15th century English mystics, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Like Hildegard, they were women of faith facing the roadblock of institutional, male-dominated religion that sidelined them. But instead of letting this beat them down, they found within their own hearts a vision of the divine that mirrored their female experience. I believe it’s no mere coincidence that both Hildegard and Julian dared to create a theology of the Feminine Divine, of God the Mother. All three women seized their power and their voice to write about their encounters with the sacred, preserving their revelations to inspire us today.

While Hildegard and Julian are iconic, Margery Kempe is a more marginal figure–well-known among medievalists

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Margery Kempe

English mystic (c. 1373 – after 1438)

Margery Kempe (c. 1373 – after 1438) was an English Catholic mystic, known for writing through dictation The Book of Margery Kempe, a work considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language. Her book chronicles her domestic tribulations, her extensive pilgrimages to holy sites in Europe and the Holy Land, as well as her mystical conversations with God. She is honoured in the Anglican Communion, but has not been canonised as a Catholic saint.

Early life and family

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She was born Margery Burnham or Brunham around 1373 in Bishop's Lynn (now King's Lynn), Norfolk, England. Her father, John Brunham, was a merchant in Lynn, mayor of the town and Member of Parliament. The first record of her Brunham family is a mention of her grandfather, Ralph de Brunham, in 1320 in the Red Register of Lynn. By 1340, he had joined the Parliament of Lynn.^[1] Kempe's kinsman Robert Brunham, possibly

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What Are You Wondering About Today?

Margery Kempe fryst vatten, without a doubt, medieval England’s most colorful mystic.

Opinions on Margery have varied widely. In Karen Armstrong’s anthology of English mystics, Visions of God, Kempe is conspicuous in her absence. On the other hand, Martin Thornton, a popular twentieth-century Anglo-Catholic writer, considered Kempe’s book to be more useful to the ordinary Christian than either Julian of Norwich or The Cloud of Unknowing. Many scholars would stop short of calling Kempe a great mystic, yet it is evident in The Book of Margery Kempe, her colorful and at times hilarious autobiography, that Kempe had, in her own indomitable way, a profound relationship with God. The gods of the five mystics during England’s golden age, she essentially belonged to the generation after Julian, having been born probably in the 1370s and living well into the fifteenth century. Kempe’s book was probably written around 1430, al