While you've probably heard of most of the medieval period's heaviest-hitting texts, like The Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, chances are you haven't heard of Margery Kempe. If you have, then kudos to you for being ahead of the game.

If not, that's a shame. Margery Kempe is one of the few known women writers from this era. In fact, it's generally accepted that Margery Kempe's work is the first example of autobiography in English.

And even though this autobiography is the only work we have of Kempe's, it's still quite an accomplishment. The vast majority of authors during this time (as far as we know) were male. Plus, anti-feminism ran rampant in the streets. So, score one for Team XX Chromosome.

Kempe was writing during a time of transition in medieval England, when life was becoming more urbanized and a middle class was just starting to develop. We get some vivid examples of this by looking at Kempe's life as she portrays it in her autobiography.

She's really proud of the gentrified—read: wealthy—family she comes from. She tries to stay within that social class by trying her hand at some different professions. First, she has a go at being a brewer of beer. Then she tries grinding grain. Neither of these jobs work out very well for her.

Probably because she's a woman, said pretty much every medieval man ever. Sigh.

In the end, though, Kempe decides that she doesn't really care for the wordly life of regular old humans. She wants to live a spiritual life. Which is kind of awesome for us, because that means that her writing also gives us a view into popular medieval religious practices.

Can you say, two'fer the price of one?

Oh, and just so you don't dismiss Kempe because she was on the whole Church bandwagon of the Middle Ages, we're here to set you straight. Her work is far from boring. Trust us. Actually, it's quite lively and sometimes even laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Like, the arguments she has with her husband about sex are super funny… although certainly unintentionally so. And several times she schools arrogant Church higher-ups in the finer points of Christian doctrine and behavior in order to highlight how they're a bunch of big old hypocrites.

If you can get past all the crying she does, Margery truly is one of the more interesting characters of the Medieval Period.

The Book of Margery Kempe

Margery Kempe's only (awesome) work is a spiritual autobiography. It falls within the genre of visionary literature. Oh, and check this fun tidbit: Kempe was actually illiterate. How did she write a book then, you ask?

Well, she dictated her story to several clerics around 1436, years after these major life events actually occurred. Then there's this other fun backstory to the book: Margery was prompted to tell her tale because of a series of religious visions she had. First, she saw herself being tortured in Hell. Later, she saw Jesus.

These visions galvanized Margery into a life of pilgrimage and piety. She soon became known for wandering around cities, weeping conspicuously, and preaching. People got really tired of the whole weeping bit pretty quickly.

The preaching part was also big no-no during that time. First of all, she's a woman, and people still don't take kindly to women preachers in many religious denominations. Secondly, only official Church authorities were allowed to preach in that period.

So Margery is brought before Church courts several times for her questionable activities. She faced the ever-present threat of being accused of Lollardy, a popular heresy of the time that critiqued the Catholic Church on a number of issues. And the penalty for that heresy? Death.

Scary stuff. All in all then, we think Margery was a bold lady, and her book is downright entertaining. Check it out, okay?

Chew on This

Margery certainly does have a kind of Wife of Bath vibe going on. She's sassy and self-actualized, and she totally lords those facts over her husband. She even makes a bargain with him that she'll pay off his debts if he'll let her go on all the pilgrimages she wants… and stop having sex with her. Okay, so the sex part is one big difference between her and the Wife of Bath, since the Wife of Bath takes the exact opposite stance on sex. What other similarities and differences do you see between these two "characters"?

A big chunk of The Book of Margery Kempe is devoted to Margery's pilgrimages. We recommend you take at gander at this interesting site, which gives you a glimpse into what Margery might have encountered on her journeys. Then, compare that account with the description of Chaucer's pilgrims. How does "fiction" measure up to "fact" in these two accounts? Why might it be dangerous for women like Margery to be traveling on their own during that time?