Category: Margery Kempe (Page 6 of 6)

Margery and her company travel to Venice from Bologna, and her account does not detail how long this journey took. Assuming they went by foot, this journey would have taken approximately 32 hours, or a couple days if one accounts for breaks, meals, and sleeping (estimated time courtesy of Google Maps). Kempe is only allowed to travel with the company to Venice (as the company had previously abandoned her) if she promises to not speak of the Gospel at mealtime but instead make a concerted effort to sit and make merry  like everyone else in the company when they are dining. Margery stresses that the company stayed in Venice for thirteen weeks (101). While she is there she again focuses primarily on herself and the religious services she partakes in. In Venice, Margery details that she “received communion every Sunday in a great house of nuns– and was very warmly welcomed amongst them” and she goes on to say she was visited by Jesus Christ, and out of her devotion she wept so much that the nuns were amazed by it (102). Sickness also overtakes Kempe in the latter half of her stay in Venice, where she claims the Lord “made her so ill that she thought she should die” but was made well by Him again (102). As she did in Zierikzee, Margery also preoccupies her narrative with accounts of how poorly her company is treating her. After speaking about the Gospel at a meal as she had promised not to, her company called her out on her broken promise. Margery then claims it is unjust for her to keep her promise because she must speak of her Lord Jesus Christ. She details that after this incident she ate alone for six weeks. Kempe also speaks with distaste for her maidservant, whom she claims “prepared the company’s food and washed their clothes” while failing to attend to Margery, whom the maidservant had made an oath to serve (102).

It appears that in her travels to Venice, and throughout the text in general, Margery’s purpose in recording the information that she does serves to align herself more with God and holy servants of the church (like the nuns) and separate herself as being morally better than the company of pilgrims she is traveling with. When detailing the “great house” of nuns, she describes them as being “good ladies,” but especially stresses that she was “very warmly welcomed” by them and that the nuns were “amazed” by Margery’s devotion to Christ and her tears (102). On the flip-side, when discussing the average pilgrims she is traveling with, she highlights how her maidservant neglects her, and sees her promise to not speak of the Gospel at meals as being unfair and ungodly, stating that she simply “must speak of [her] Lord Jesus Christ, though all this world had forbidden [her]” (102). Claiming the world is forbidding Margery to speak about the Gospel acts as an insult to her company, by framing them as a group of so-called “religious” pilgrims who do not want to hear the Word of God. This insult functions to make them look like hypocrites that do not truly care about Jesus Christ or the Christian religion and religious reasons behind their travels as much as Margery does. By Margery noting that she is welcomed with open arms by the nuns and that they were amazed by her tears, Margery sides herself with women who devote their lives to Christ, and contrasts herself from the anti-Gospel sentiments of her company. It is altogether ironic that Margery is so well received by a nunnery considering she is a woman in the Middle Ages who walks around with no escort wearing white and has over ten children, but nonetheless her description of the nuns accepting her with joy and amazement serves to make her appear very holy. While Margery dictated her text, it was in vernacular language and thus her audience aimed at the lay people. Her descriptions of her travels, such as in Venice, that seek to align her with God and against other pilgrims, help establish her own authority as a female author. Through seeking alignment with God, being accepted by nuns, being compelled to share the Gospel at dinner, claiming to be visited by Jesus Christ and moved to tears, and more, Margery  establishes herself as a woman of God. By establishing herself explicitly as a woman of God, Margery makes her opinions and descriptions of visions and locations in the text seem more accurate and “biblical” in and of themselves. In framing herself as beloved by God, she also frames her company of fellow pilgrims as being rather averse to Jesus Christ and the Gospel, making Kempe appear morally superior. Pilgrims were often regarded as insincere and not wholly invested in their religious pilgrimages, and in a way Margery seems to corroborate those stereotypes while also asserting that she is a true pilgrim undertaking her journeys to gain new experiences with Christ. This move of framing herself above her company urges her lay-audience readership to take her words and musings on Christ as being the truth– so she is ultimately providing a religious manifesto of sorts, although it is mainly focused on her personal day-to-day feelings.

Towards the beginning of her pilgrimage, Margery Kempe passes through a city she refers to as Constance (most likely Konstanz, Germany) with her unfriendly companions. This city lies on the route between Norwich, England, where Kempe began, and Bologna, Italy, where she travels next. Her brief stay in Constance reveals how Kempe interacts with the cities that she passes through on the way to pilgrimage sites.

When Kempe and her companions arrive in Constance, Kempe mentions that she hears an English friar who is also a legate of the Pope is staying in the city. She does not describe her arrival to the city, the city’s physical characteristics, or the people she encounters in the city. Instead she jumps directly to her meeting with the Pope’s legate, who she seeks out because of his wisdom. She confesses to him, and tells him her entire life’s story, as well as her current troubles with her traveling companions, who dislike her and try to stop her from praying, crying, and maintaining a vegetarian diet. She also tells him “what grace God gave her of contrition and compunction, of sweetness and devotion” and the visions He had given her (Kempe 99). This is as immodest as Kempe’s constant assertion of her superiority over her companions. Kempe then tells of how her traveling companions invite the legate to dinner. The legate, who has taken Kempe’s side, tells her to behave as submissively at dinner as she always does. Then, when her traveling companions ridicule her, the legate stands up for her, and refuses to tell her to cease her unorthodox habits. This prompts her companions to abandon her, but the legate makes arrangements for her. Kempe tells of how, despite her dire conditions, God provides for her. He sends her a kindly traveling companion to accompany her to Bologna, where she arrives before her old traveling companions.

It is clear that Kempe believes that the most noteworthy aspects of her visit in Constance are her acquaintanceship with an important religious figure, her suffering at the hands of her traveling companions, her eventual vindication, and the divine intervention on her behalf. She reveals very little about the city of Constance. She gives no identifying features, meaning the city might not even be Konstanz, Germany. However, she reveals some aspects of the place pilgrims occupied when they passed through the city, and raises questions about the travels of religious authorities. What brought an English friar, who was a legate of the Pope, to Constance? Was he on official Church business? Was he living there? Was he on pilgrimage himself? Was he there to interact with pilgrims passing through? This in turn raises the question of Constance’s role in pilgrimages. Was it a common place for pilgrims to stop?

Whatever the case, it is shown that the pilgrims’ status is high enough to be able to invite an important religious authority to dine with them. They also complain to this authority, and grow angry when he takes Kempe’s side. They seem to interact with some level of informality. However, it is clear that legate has a higher status. He sits down first at dinner, and the company asks him to regulate Kempe’s behavior, showing that they understand him to have some control over at least the religious life of pilgrims (and, probably, Christians in general).

Kempe’s account of Constance reveals that pilgrims were able to find people who spoke their language in various cities, dine with them, and consult with them. More established English speakers in non-English-speaking cities could help English pilgrims exchange their currency and make travel arrangements, as the legate helps Kempe. This shows both that there were English people, at least religious authorities and pilgrims, abroad, and that they helped each other when they encountered each other in foreign places. This could even hint at a formal or informal support network for pilgrims that could potentially exist in the cities en route to important pilgrimage sites like Jerusalem.

After departing Norwich and Yarmouth, England, Margery Kempe travels with her confessor and a group of companions and arrives in Zierikzee. Out of personal interest, I looked into Zierikzee and discovered that today it is a small city in southwest Netherlands, near Rotterdam. Margery mentions briefly that they traveled by boat and that it took one day for them to get to Zierikzee from the port in Yarmouth, England. Kempe describes Zierikzee as a “large town” but otherwise does not focus much on the architecture or inhabitants of the city (96). Instead, Margery puts intense focus on the religious practices she performs while in Zierikzee and places immense focus on the way her fellow travelers treat her. For example, she speaks at length about how the Lord visited her in Zierikzee and gave her “tears of contrition for her own sins” and other people’s sins as well (96). She claims to have attended communion every Sunday when it was possible, “with weeping and violent sobbing” so that people marveled at her (97). Kempe then details how in England she had not eaten meat or drunk wine for four years, but that in Zierikzee her confessor asked her to begin doing so. Margery did for a while, but then stopped, and prayed to “her confessor to excuse her if she ate no meat” (97). Her eventual refusal to eat meat annoyed her confessor as well as many of the company she was traveling with. Margery spends most of her time discussing Zierikzee by talking about how cruel her company was to her, stating that they were annoyed by how much she wept and spoke of the Lord’s goodness. Once Margery expresses how hurt and ashamed her company has made her feel, they tell her they hope she dies “the devil’s death” (97).  Her closest friends desert her and even her maidservant is taken from her, and the entire company (save one person) abandons her in the night. One of the company invites her to travel with fellow pilgrims to Constance, Germany but she laments over how this company treats her as well, as they cut her skirts short and made her wear a type of sack so she’d look like a fool. She does remark that the man of the house wherever they would stay after leaving Zierikzee treated her kindly and with high esteem, leaving the impression that the people of this area were very kind towards women, moreso than her original English company. It is never stated what time of the year they arrived, or how long Margery Kempe stayed. However, it can be assumed it was a couple weeks, as she describes going to communion on multiple Sundays.

Margery Kempe as a traveler is evidently consumed with the culture of Christianity, but focuses on a reverence between her personal relationship with God, claiming that God visits her and forgives her for disobeying her confessor when she speaks to God directly. She frequently has visions of the passion of Christ, which move her to tears, as they did in Zierikzee. She describes her tears as though they are a hairshirt, a gift from God proving her superior love for him. Her way of gaining auctoritee (authority) through writing her travel narrative appears to be a way to reaffirm that her role as a pilgrim is about her pure and true devotion and connection with God, and that her devotion and loyalty is stronger than those she is traveling with to see a variety of Holy sites. The main thing I found interesting in Zierikzee was Margery’s description that she had not eaten meat or drank wine for four years in England, prior to her travels to Zierikzee and beyond. Her confessor asking her to eat meat and drink wine out of obedience and her pleading with God to forgive her for not listening, thus causing animosity between Margery, her confessor, and her company, was a topic I wished to delve into. The role of eating meat and drinking wine in Christianity of the Middle Ages seems as varied then as it is today. Dominican Friar Thomas Aquinas stated that moderation in wine is sufficient for salvation, but that for certain persons absolute abstinence is necessary to reach perfection (Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 149). On the other hand, the medieval church did still celebrate saints related to wine like St. Amand and St. Martin. When it comes to meat, Christian vegetarianism is still widely debated today, but the practice of Christian vegetarianism has scriptural and historical support. For example, before the fall of man, the Bible is commonly interpreted to describe a setting where all humans and animals with a soul are vegan and that “it was good,” with raw veganism being the diet prescribed by God to Adam and Eve (Genesis 1:29-31). While abstinence from meat is most common during periods of fast like Lent, the reasons given by the Church for why it was abstained from were due to the fact that things that are flesh or come from flesh (eggs, etc.) are “unclean” due to their creation from coitus. When considering Margery and her cultural religious background, she may have adopted this lifestyle of abstaining from meat and wine in order to become closer to God and become more God-like herself, by mimicking the diet of man before the Fall. She could have viewed this diet as a way to strengthen her relationship with God, which is why she chooses to disobey her confessor, as his wishes may have been seen as trying to tear her farther from God. In this way her refusal to obey her confessor and the chagrins of her company can almost be viewed as “going against God”. Her company and her confessor may have become frustrated with her diet due to the logistics of travel. Perhaps meat and wine were some of the most readily available meals to the group in Zierikzee, and her denial of these became a burden when trying to dine on the road.

When Margery Kempe sees Jerusalem from above, she prays for God to reveal to her the heavenly as well as the earthly city of Jerusalem, and feels that she gazes on heaven. Overwhelmed with grace, she almost falls off the ass she is riding, and mentions that two German pilgrims and a priest assist her.

She describes her movements through Jerusalem as something like a religious city tour. Beginning at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the pilgrims follow friars through the city. The friars carry a cross, and the pilgrims carry candles. During the tour, over the course of three weeks, they visit Mt. Calvary, “the grave where the Lord was buried,” the place of Christ’s crucifixion, a marble stone where his body lay, Mt. Zion, the location of the last supper, the place where the disciples received the Holy Spirit, and the burial place of the Virgin Mary. At many of these sites, Kempe is able to receive mass and plenary remissions (or indulgences). Kempe experiences strong religious emotions, and cries, screams, and prays. She also describes seeing visions and hearing voices. At Mt. Calvary, she describes a vision of Christ’s crucified body. The only features of the landscape that Kempe describes are mountains (specifically Mts. Zion and Calvary) and hills. Descriptions of Kempe’s journey to Jerusalem reveal that she travelled with a group of other pilgrims (all men), although she frequently argued with them and at one point travelled alone with an old man she met along the way. She and her companions stayed in the houses of wealthy people in each city, and travelled by foot, ass, and boat.

It is clear from these facts that Kempe saw almost everything from a religious perspective. She doesn’t describe the people or buildings of Jerusalem, but rather focuses on each location’s association to Christ. Rather than describing the physical aspect of pilgrimage sites, she describes her own reaction to them, what Christ did there, and any visions or voices she experiences in prayer. Kempe’s focus is not ethnographic in any sense. She began her pilgrimage in order to increase her worth in the eyes of God, and she is only interested in the religious significance of the places that she visits. This can also potentially reveal something about the Jerusalem that Kempe visited. It appears from her descriptions that the city had a complex infrastructure in place for accommodating religious pilgrims. Upon her arrival to the city, she immediately interacts with two pilgrims from Germany, revealing that pilgrims are common enough for her to happen to find them in her time of need, and that they come from various locations. In addition, there are friars ready to escort the pilgrims through the city, taking them primarily to religious sites. Masses and plenary remissions are offered at these sites, which seem to be set up to accommodate (and perhaps attract) pilgrims. This implies that the city receives enough pilgrims to necessitate such infrastructure, and that the city encourages the influx of pilgrims. Kempe’s account shows how religious pilgrimages were able to function within a prearranged infrastructure without interacting too much with the non-religious life of a city— although this may also reflect Kempe’s singular devotion to her task.