Margery Kempe visited Venice before making her way to Jerusalem. She stayed in Venice for 13 weeks. She had traveled there with a group that had re-accepted her after exiling her from the group for being too difficult to travel with. She went to receive communion everyday at a chapel with a group of nuns. One day, she returned to her traveling companions and told them of a Gospel she had heard. Her group gets upset and tells her that she broke her promise not to speak of God and she retreats to her room for 6 weeks, eating alone. She gets extremely sick, so sick that she thinks she may die. However, she makes a full recovery. Unfortunately for her, her hand maiden who swore to attend to her does not help her at all, instead, the hand maiden attends to Margery’s travel companions by cooking for them and washing their clothes and linens.
Margery’s devotion to God is paramount to her, as we can see throughout this book. Even when she gets deathly ill, she says, “our Lord made her so ill that she thought she would die, and then he suddenly made her well again” (Kempe 102). Every event, positive or negative, is attributed to God. There is also a sense of everything being okay because if it happening then it is God’s will. She credits everything to God, saying a little later on before they leave Venice that the Lord told her to take a different ship than the one they were supposed to take. Margery rarely indicates that she is upset about how she is being treated because she thinks so is doing God’s will and that they are all wrong for treating her this way. However, in this section, Margery does appear to be a little upset about her hand maiden not helping her. She includes that detail that the hand maiden had, “promised to serve” Margery, indicating a sadness or disappointment when no service was provided, particularly when Margery was deathly ill. Though she appears to be upset, she still believes that she must speak the Word of God, even when, “the world had forbidden [her]” (Kempe 102). If anything, this sentiment proves that the most important thing to Margery is her devotion to God. She is willing, though it may upset her, to sacrifice every human relationship she has for the glory of God. She left her husband to become chaste and has already been abandoned multiple times by her traveling party, yet she still turns to God and says that she will be okay because of Him. This is interesting because it shows her extreme devotion in the face of mockery and abandonment. It indicates a sureness in Margery that her ways are correct and that she is right despite more popular beliefs. Even if people she is with are also Christians, they find her annoying and there is not a lot of mention about anyone admiring her for her actions of devotion, other than some by other religions figures like friars and legates. Margery’s sureness of her faith in God remains strong, despite how other people treat her.