The Madness of Margery
Picture for the Margery Kempe Feature
MEDIEVAL King’s Lynn was home to one of the strangest characters in British history.
The teenage bride of a wealthy merchant, Margery Kempe appeared to be a young woman with prospects. However, she became an increasing embarrassment to her father, John Burnham, who served as Lynn’s mayor in the early 15th Century.
She had started her adult life with some sort of guilty secret. She confessed its existence but was never able to say what it was.
This, and post-natal depression, led to a bout of madness from which she never completely recovered. Failure in business as a brewer and miller added to her woes, and she threw herself on God with a zeal that amounted to religious mania.
She became a focus of controversy. Her screams and tears of ecstasy disrupted religious services and divided
congregations and clergy.
She was arrested on charges of blasphemy but always acquitted.
After prevailing on her husband to give up the physical side of their marriage, she dressed as a nun.
Abstinence, though she managed it, proved to be a difficult challenge, and frustration led to unhealthy visions and fantasies.
However, she also had religious visions which were unsurpassed for their sublimity and telling detail. In one, she is midwife at Jesus’ birth and then makes his mother “a nice warm drink.”
In another, she stands at the foot of the cross as a “long, rough nail” is driven into one of Jesus’ hands and his other hand is hauled into place with ropes “because his sinews and veins had shrunk so much with agony that it wouldn’t reach where the nail was to go.”
Not content with these visions, she trekked across Europe to the Holy Land to be physically present in the place where these wonders had first occurred.
She continued to visit foreign shrines into ripe old age, limping hundreds of miles on a damaged foot and sometimes crossing battle-zones.
Everything – the good and the bad in equal measure – she describes with amazing detail in The Book of Margery Kempe. Unable to read and write, she dictated it towards the end of her life, and the manuscript copy, lost for over 500 years, was found in 1934. Published in modern English, it revives the argument that raged in Kempe’s lifetime: Was she a saint – or simply a sanctimonious pest?
Tony Triggs has written a stage play For the Love of God, which brings Kempe and some of her visions alive.
“I want the audience laughing but also tingling with awe,” he says. “The final act casts them as jury at one
of Kempe’s trials – but I’m sure they wouldn’t agree on their verdict.”
Mr Triggs says he believes King’s Lynn would be the ideal place for the play’s premiere and he says local groups are welcome to consider putting it on.
To see the script please contact Tony Triggs on email top.note@yahoo.co.uk
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Weather for King's Lynn
Saturday 26 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 12 C to 23 C
Wind Speed: 18 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 10 C to 24 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: East
