The Book of Margery Kempe is a spiritual autobiography dictated by the titular Margery Kempe. To this day, there is still much scholarly debate as to whether Margery should be considered a genuine spiritual mystic, a madwoman, or simply a fraud. Throughout her life, Margery had visions in which she talked to Jesus, Mary, and various saints. In many of these visions, Jesus very directly gives Margery advice regarding how she should live her life. Interestingly enough, Margery was and illiterate laywoman and so her slow evolution into a religious enthusiast garnered much suspicion from her contemporaries (and from modern readers as well!). The fact that Margery most often expressed her religious fervor through fits of crying, weeping, screaming, …show more content…
She physically expresses the extreme emotions she feels because she is unable to contain her spiritual fervor. One of the key examples of this physical outpouring is Margery’s weeping which is her most common form of religious expression. As previously mentioned she also experiences vivid visions that sometimes involve hearing heavenly music, feelings of warmth and pleasure, and smelling divine scents. One such vision is when Margery experiences embracing and marrying Jesus. The physicality of all of this serves to make Margery’s more abstract experiences very concrete and to also justify how her physical experiences are therefore also …show more content…
She behaved the way she felt was right according to her very devout faith and tries to live her life as God instructed her as best she could. She faced scorn from not only her husband, but also her fellow Christians and peers and yet she never backed down. She stood up against great suffering in order to do what she felt was right, much like Christ himself. Margery Kempe was anything but the stereotypical medieval woman; she was a faithful woman of God who was far more concerned with her heavenly pursuits that her earthly life. While she may have annoyed many of her fellow Christians and peers, and may seems fraudulent or insane to a modern reader, Margery Kempe was a genuine mystic who lived as devout a life as she
H. Talbot, she states, “Her visions and prophecies show a strong yet imaginative mind, which expressed in this way her moral convictions and her insight into events and character and which gave her the support and comfort she needed to maintain a chosen course of action” (484). It is clear that although Christina of Markyate was in fact a woman, that she was strong minded and that the patriarchal roles in her life were afraid of what she could do. Because she was strong in her convictions, her father trusted her and the Bishop forced her to marry Burthead. Through this, the reader can see that she conquered the patriarchy by making them fear her and what she was capable of, but also did so by respecting her and believing in her character, even though she was a woman. She fully represents a rebel to the social norm in her actions and through her visions. A rebellious medieval woman first and foremost would not marry; they would decide to become a part of the church themselves, rather than being forced to in order to please their Heavenly Father. Through the readings of Christina of Markyate and Hrosvit of Gandersheim’s Mary, the reader can see that a rebellious medieval woman, like Christina of Markyate, would leave her marriage and refuse to consummate it, or like the character of Mary, would become sexually curious and
Medieval England was considered to be a Patriarchy, due to the serious gender roles which cast men as superior to women. Margery Kempe attempted time and time again to break the boundaries of the gender roles put in place by society. The men in her life tried to stop her, and bring her back to the social norms of what it meant to be a women living in the time period: John Kempe, her priest, Christ etc. To analyze Kempe, it is first important to note what was expected of medieval women; “the classical females are portrayed as vessels of chastity, purity, and goodness” (O’Pry-Reynolds, 37). She was not your typical female; she wanted to break free from the strict expectations of women; “Men and women of the medieval period and medieval literature
the ultimate Puritan. Was the glory to God or to herself? She also relates here
Edmund Emil Kemper III was born on December 13, 1948 in Burbank, CA. He was born to the union of Edmund E. Kemper Jr. and Clarnell Strandberg. After his parents divorced, Clarnell took Kemper along with his two sisters to live by her very high standards and abusive ways. She berated Kemper mentally by having him sleep in a windowless basement because she feared of the harm he may cause to his sisters. In turn, this caused the hatred that he had for her to fester and turn into hatred against all women. On many occasions Kemper would break off the heads and hands of his sister’s dolls and also have them play the game he called “The gas chamber” in which he was the victim to be executed (Fisher, 2003a).
...mily is in reference to the disciples. No matter what it the acions were, they followed grandmother, the Christ-like figure. They also were oppressed, but by death, in a way as the disciples were for following Christ.
Baron Richard Von Krafft-Ebing, a 19th century German psychiatrist, was quoted as having said, "We find that the sexual instinct, when disappointed and unappeased, frequently seeks and finds a substitute in religion." This may have been the condition of Margery Kempe when she desired to cease all sexual activity with her spouse because of her devotion to God. Instead of performing her duties as a wife, she chose instead to spread her knowledge of God to her community and did so not only in speech, but also in literature. Whatever her motivation for creating such descriptive language, it is evident that her faith in God conquered both her fear of public opinion and the constraints placed upon all women during the period. Living in the 1400s, she steps out of a woman's role and into the territory of a man by living her life publicly, abandoning her position of mother and wife, and recording her life in writing. Fortunately, because she was writing for religious reasons, her work was both permitted and accepted. In The Book of Margery Kempe, she describes her experiences with brilliant imagery, some of which is sexual, all of which is sensual. By using her own senses to portray her spiritual...
...Christian values in her own way in order to justify her character’s actions, in addition to using religion as a way of explaining what she thinks of herself. On the other hand, Margery Kempe was a woman who took religion to a new level as a result of “supposedly” having very intense visions and experiences with Jesus Christ. The result was a woman who believed that she had more religious authority than an archbishop of the church and who possessed the strength to continue on her path, despite allegations of being psychotic.
Another tendency of those practicing religion in the Middle Ages is to take Jesus' words from the Bible to a new literal level affecting medieval lifestyles across the board. Where monks and nuns had typically been the only observers of chastity, fasting, and poverty, laity began to observe these life practices as well. In Margery Kempe's life, this apodictic understanding of Jesus' biblically recorded or spoken words is evident among her commitment to make vows of chastity, her desire to embark on long pilgrimages, and her steps of unquestionable obedience as she advances on her spiritual journey. The absolute submission of Margery and the dedication to perfect contemplation in The Cloud of Unknowing which warns, “…y...
Catherine of Siena. The Dialogue of the Divine Providence . Trans. Algar Thorold. 1907. 25 Feb. 2004 .
“The moment I saw her I say in all truth that the vital spirit, which dwells in the inmost depths of the heart, began to tremble so violently that I felt the vibration alarmingly in all my pulses, even the weakest of them. As it trembled, it uttered these words: (behold a god more powerful than I who comes to rule over me).” (4)
Teresa the Avila is the last of the most accomplished women of the Middle Age. She was a Spanish nun, like Hildegard, who had mystic visions. She viewed Jesus as a spouse. After a while in her convent she decided to go all through Spain sharing her religious faith. On this quest she was able to create 25 more monasteries throughout Spain. She suffered considerably because of her visions because her confessor told her to ignore them since they came from the devil. She did not challenge this in a direct confrontation, but instead decided to choose a different priest to be her confessor. Her vision, were finally given authority by the church when she got help from Peter de Alcantara.
The Book of Margery Kempe is an autobiography of Margery Kempe, a women from King 's Lynn during medieval times. Kempe 's autobiography talks about the struggles she encountered on her journey for a holy life. Margery gave birth to her first child when she was about twenty years old, and after giving birth she had a nervous breakdown. She saw visions of the devil all around her, and her actions proved her to be anything but holy. It wasn 't until she recovered due to a vision of Jesus Christ that she was determined to devote her life to religiousness and to studying God. This vision led her on her journey to a union with God to fulfill her life purpose. Throughout her journey she received personal visions from Christ and the Virgin Mary which
With the lady, and demands of the court, the future of knights was shifted in a different direction; she demanded that a knight act with strength on one hand, and courtesy and respect on the other. A knight should respect women; he should defend them in their hour of need, shunning the magnetic gravity of mere lust. Love could be a powerful influence over a knight, a force that could propel him to greatness beyond his own abilities; the church declared that only the spiritual love of Christ was superior to the love of a woman, the important aspect here is love was added as a chivalric element.
Since the dawn of time, the desire for immortality and eternal beauty has all but governed humans as a species. A fallacy that such a thing could be procured as the proverbial fountain of youth has consumed, destroyed, and even sent some into a spiraling descent of madness. From the destitute to the affluent and everyone between, no one has ever fully escaped the hypnotic lure of the notion of being forever young and beautiful. The journey to acquire such an unattainable object has even motivated some to implement unspeakable and deplorable acts against their own kind. One individual in particular, a late Hungarian Countess by the name of Elizabeth Bathory, is a perfect example of lust for perfection and beauty taken too far.