Boke of Margerie Kempe. . . . by Margery Kemp
This month’s featured text is Here Begynneth a Shorte Treatyse of Contemplacyon Taught by her Lorde Jhesu Cryste, or Taken out of the Boke of Margerie Kempe of Lyn[n] by Margery Kempe. It is believed that Kempe was born sometime around 1373, but little of her life is known besides what is in her autobiography. She married John Kempe at age twenty and had fourteen children with him . After her first child was born she became depressed and suffered a bout of insanity. In her autobiography she says that a revelation from Christ restored her to sanity, and from then on she was extremely concerned with spiritual matters. She eventually convinced her husband that she should live a chaste life and began traveling to sacred sites in Jerusalem, Spain, and Italy, among others. Because of her illiteracy, Margery’s autobiography was recorded by a scribe. It is thought that Margery died around 1439.

Margery Kempe is believed to have written the first English autobiography of sorts. Her work had survived in small excerpts, and until 1934 the autobiography as a whole work had not been discovered. The 1501 pamphlet Here Begynneth a Shorte Treatyse… is an excerpt printed by Wynkyn de Worde. A Shorte Treatyse focuses on some of Margery’s meditations about her unworthiness and the words she believed Christ spoke to her in response to her lamentations. The fact that only meditative portions of the autobiography were published is perhaps an illumination of the thoughts of the readers in the era following that of Margery Kempe, as suggested by Anthony Goodman. In Margery Kempe and Her World, Goodman suggests that de Worde printed only meditative portions because of the negative light in which the reader at the time may have seen Margery’s narratives of her problems (2).

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