Purpose of the Book: Reputation and Holiness

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Author and columnist Caitlin Moran has picked the episode on the English medieval mystic Margery Kempe and recorded an introduction to it. Margery Kempe (1373-1438) produced an account of her extraordinary life in a book she dictated, "The Book of Margery Kempe." She went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to Rome and Santiago de Compostela, purchasing indulgences on her way, met with the anchoress Julian of Norwich and is honoured by the Church of England each 9th November. She sometimes doubted the authenticity of her mystical conversations with God, as did the authorities who saw her devotional sobbing, wailing and convulsions as a sign of insanity and dissoluteness. Her Book was lost for centuries, before emerging in a private library in 1934.

This In Our Time episode was first broadcast in June 2016. The image (above), of an unknown woman, comes from a pew at Margery Kempe's parish church, St Margaret’s, Kings Lynn and dates from c1375.

With

Miri Rubin Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London

Katherine Lewis Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield

And

Anthony Bale Professor of Medieval Studies at Birkbeck University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (eds.), A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe, (D. S. Brewer, 2010)

Anthony Bale (trans.), The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford University Press, 2015)

Santha Bhattacharji, God is an Earthquake: The Spirituality of Margery Kempe (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997)

Anthony Goodman, Margery Kempe and her World (Longman, 2002)

Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and the Translations of the Flesh (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991)

Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press, 1989)

Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994)

Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: An Image of Mediaeval Religion (Faber & Faber, 2002)

Brett Whalen, Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages: A Reader (University of Toronto Press, 2011)

Barry Windeatt (ed.), The Book of Margery Kempe: Annotated Edition (D. S. Brewer, 2006)

Barry Windeatt (ed.), The Book of Margery Kempe (Penguin Classics, 2000)

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the people, ideas, events and discoveries that have shaped our world

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production