Author: Taylor Morrow

After re-mapping Margery Kempe’s travels on the Bianco Map, it became evident that the major difference between Bianco’s Map and Google Maps is specificity. Bianco’s Map depicts many important locations and areas of the world, but it tends to ignore anything considered a ‘minor’ city (often cities of less religious importance, and therefore fewer visitors). Marking Kempe’s journeys on this vaguer map proved to be more difficult simply because I had to estimate the locations of places like Constance and Great Yarmouth in relation to larger bodies of water or other landmarks. Because of this lack of specificity on Bianco’s map, Kempe’s travels may be more difficult to follow, or the markers of certain locations may be entirely incorrect.

Further, Bianco’s map is an artistic rendition of the world that utilizes illustrations to mark specific cities. Borders are completely omitted, while they are something our maps today rely heavily on. One of Google Earth’s central capabilities is to show specific borders of countries, cities, and continents. The way we understand travel today is based on the idea of crossing borders – whether that means crossing borders to other states, or farther away to other countries. While Kempe was certainly aware of crossing into other countries, the awareness of a specific line or immediate transition may have been less apparent than it is to us today.

Bianco’s interest in the religious significance of major European cities is clearly evident on this map. As with most medieval maps at this time, Jerusalem is oriented in the center of the map, highlighting its significance and centrality in the world. For Bianco and Kempe, and other Christians on pilgrimage, Jerusalem’s orientation in the center of the world makes the most sense, as it is the location for Jesus’s adult life. Surrounding areas, including the Red Sea, depictions of Adam and Eve, and proverbial characters like the three wise men, show the significance of religious themes in understanding travel and location in Europe. Even beyond the landmarks and depictions of cities, Bianco’s religious expertise is evident in the outskirts of the map: the world is surrounded by the stars (heavens), and the farthest reaches of the ocean show fantastical creatures like two-tailed sirens and two-winged dragons.

In addition to this map representing common religious ideologies, it’s imagery also holds underlying racist themes. The existence of Gog and Magog as one gets closer to Africa is something that should not go unnoticed. Because of this map’s emphasis on imagery to show location, the images tend to represent common notions of what those locations hold (mostly religious importance), and having the people of Africa become more monstrous, fantastical, or dangerous shows the racist ideas European people held about African people. Bianco’s map is opinionated and based on religious and cultural beliefs, while today’s maps, especially Google Earth, lean more toward factual and scientific evidence of location and proportion. That is not to say that Bianco’s map holds no accuracy, though. In her book on the world map, Evelyn Edson says, “It is a struggle between the authority of the mighty classical past, the religious orthodoxy of the medieval mappaemundi, and the practical experience of sailors, ‘persons worthy of trust who have seen with their own eyes’ (Edson 7).” Bianco’s map was accurate, or at least as accurate as possible for the time period, but it certainly is not as accurate as modern maps.

On Bianco’s map, the distance of Kempe’s journey seems to be across over half of the length of the world. If Bianco’s map is, in fact, a map of the entire world, Kempe has seen a significant portion of it. In relation to our modern map, though, Kempe’s travels cover barely a fraction of Europe, let alone the whole world. The sheer size of the map on Google Earth is significantly larger than Bianco’s Map, even though, at their time of creation, both are believed to depict the entire (known) world. To Kempe and most of the European world at this time, her travels seemed quite extensive, and while they certainly were for the time, our understanding of travel in today’s world far surpasses what it once meant.

Overall, there are many differences between Bianco’s map, Google Earth, and what that means for those who utilize each atlas. One of the most difficult parts of mapping Kempe’s travels on Bianco’s map was the medieval map’s orientation with east at the top. To ensure my locations were marked correctly, I rotated Google Earth 90 degrees to the left to make the maps match as closely as they could. After comparing both maps, readers can see that Bianco’s map holds important cultural information on beliefs of travel, religion, and race, while today’s map values specificity, facts, and scientific proportions to ensure accuracy.

Edson, Evelyn. The World Map, 1300-1492 : The Persistence of Tradition and Transformation. Baltimore, Sante Fe, N.M., Johns Hopkins University Press ; Published in association with the Center for American Places, 2007.

In this chapter, Margery Kempe begins her travels by traveling from Norwich to Yarmouth. In these places, the reader does not get much information about the landscape or inhabitants of the towns – Kempe’s focus is her religious action, describing praying and offering at the Trinity and the Image of Our Lady, respectively. Before even beginning her journey, she prepared to leave for a significant amount of time by settling her debts and keeping in mind the advice/premonition that she received from an “anchorite,” describing events that had yet to occur.

The first location that Kempe describes in detail is Zierikzee, a city in the Netherlands. It is described as a large town, and Kempe is overcome with a deep sense of religious humility. She begins to explain, in detail, how she is wrought with “tears of compassion” at the thought of Jesus’s Resurrection. More than anything, Margery Kempe describes her emotions and near-constant tears at each place she visits on her journey towards the Holy Land. Her struggles begin to affect her, though, when her travel companions begin to reproach her for her annoying state of exultation and overt emotion. They begin to speak negatively towards her, saying things like “I pray God that the devil’s death may overtake you soon and quickly.” In addition to her religious emotion, she also ate no meat and drank no alcohol, except for a short time when one of her companions convinced her to eat meat and drink wine. After denying and asking if she could return to her vegetarian way of life, her companions grew even more annoyed at her constant state of religious superiority and piety. She would constantly speak of God and her love of the Lord, and her companions grew so annoyed that they began to act rashly towards her in addition to their previous negative statements.

At one point, they cut her dress and made her wear a sack so she “looked like a fool.” They demoted her to sitting below the table so they could be less annoyed by her religious conversation. Despite all these attempts at silencing Kempe’s religious belief, she states that she was still held in higher regard than her companions in every place they went. It is this high regard and Kempe’s conversations with the Lord that ensure she is on the right path. Kempe describes that she has conversations with God multiple times throughout her journey, and at this point (on the road to Constance from Zierikzee), He assures her that her and her companions will be safe on their journey as long as they stay together.

Kempe is stingy on her descriptors of location-specific details like terrain, length of stay, and even the culture/buildings/environment. In this section, Kempe’s focus is on the struggles she has with her travel companions, and sets up how her relationship with the Catholic God protects her and keeps her company in times of hardship. As with the other places she visits, and her descriptions of those places, we learn more about Kempe’s (and women in general) struggles with traveling, and how traveling with companions is not without its struggle, especially as someone as enthusiastically, outwardly devout. It is Kempe’s religious zeal that is the root of her distress with her companions, but it is her unwavering faith that keeps her focused on her journey and purpose: to see the Holy Land.

The author of this travel narrative – this book can certainly be called a narrative due to its form (storytelling, plot) – is extremely interested in telling the story of her travel through a religious lens. In Chapters 28 and 29, she travels to the greatest locations in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, including Jerusalem and Bethlehem. She makes a point to visit the most critical sites here: the location of Jesus Christ’s (one member of the Christian Holy Trinity) tomb, the crucifixion site, Mount Zion (where miracles and moral lessons occurred), other burial sites for major biblical people, and where Jesus was born.

She notes her own emotional responses to these locations, stating, “she wept, she sobbed, she cried out so loudly that it was amazing to hear it (107).” She continuously describes herself as this over-emotional creature, a nuisance to her traveling mates because of her excessive love for the Lord and inability to keep quiet on her devotion and religious beliefs.

The beginning of this chapter details the mode of travel Kempe uses to reach these Holy Grounds. They were to set sail for Jerusalem, but Kempe convinces the traveling party to take a different kind of boat, as God told her to avoid sailing in the other one. The party she was traveling with was full of people Kempe did not particularly like, and in addition to goading her and excluding her, would also simply act pettily towards her. On the ship, Kempe recalls that one of the members stole her bedsheet; these antics reinforce the idea that Kempe’s extreme devout demeanor was not well-received by her companions. Once they left their ship, Kempe states that she rode an ass to Jerusalem and later to Bethlehem. There is no specific timeline of Kempe’s travels in these chapters, but she seems to move from place to place quite often.

Kempe is obviously an outsider among her party. Something I find especially noteworthy is her profound episodes of devout prayer and emotion. They are obviously observed as strange, annoying, and contemptuous, and as a woman of this time period, her motives for drawing even more attention to herself are certainly interesting. She notes having visions and discussions with God, often yelling or crying during the episodes. We may be able to assume that although Christianity is a followed religion at this point, most believers are more discrete with their shows of belief, and may not follow as many of the rules as Kempe does, including eating meat.

Kempe explains that if others are weeping or crying over more common earthly griefs, such as losing a loved one, no one would tell them to stop, and, therefore, her episodes of grief and mourning over Jesus are no different. Perhaps her attention-grabbing episodes are actually an attempt at conversion or overt reminders of the horrors believed to have occurred in the Christian faith. On page 107, Kempe says that those on Earth to easily forget the sacrifices Jesus made for them – therefore, her episodes of grief and apparent conversations with God are a constant reminder to those witnessing that God is watching and listening, and that they, too, should be practicing their faith more openly and devoutly. She ends Chapter 29 with a supposed message from God, saying, “Daughter, I shall make the whole world wonder at you, and many men and women shall speak of me for love of you, and honour me in you (107).” This reinforces the idea that Margery Kempe’s attention-grabbing episodes make people remember and honor God when they have perhaps forgotten their religious duties.