{"id":527,"date":"2022-02-17T00:13:09","date_gmt":"2022-02-17T05:13:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/?p=527"},"modified":"2022-02-17T00:13:09","modified_gmt":"2022-02-17T05:13:09","slug":"emily-caspersen-blog-post-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/2022\/02\/17\/emily-caspersen-blog-post-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Emily Caspersen Blog Post 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Emily Caspersen<\/span>
\n February 16, 2022<\/span>
\n The Book of Margery Kempe: Compostella, Bologna, and Venice<\/span>
\n\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Kempe recorded her time travelling through Compostella, Bologna, and Venice as a period in her life that was mostly hellish and lonely (Kempe, 99-102). She was more concerned with the measures\u00a0the pilgrims in her group took against her, such as stealing a huge percentage of her money,\u00a0than with the local populations (Kempe, 100, 99-102) However, she described the locales as doing the best they could for her in terms of comfort\u00a0(Kempe, 101).\u00a0Kempe\u00a0does not provide the dates she was in Compostella, Bologna, or Venice, but she does note that she stayed in Venice for thirteen weeks (Kempe 101, 99-102). She was\u00a0frustrated with the language barrier keeping her from communicating with the local people, which is very understandable (Kempe, 101). Something that seems odd to me in 2022 but likely would not be surprising to travelers in the Medieval era is that her hostesses often gave up their beds for her (Kempe, 101). Another part of this account that sticks out to me is Kempe\u2019s emphasis on how difficult this pilgrimage was\u00a0for her mental health, yet she agrees to continue travelling with those who made the journey harder for her than it had to be (Kempe, 101, 99-102).<\/span> \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Kempe\u2019s expression of her annoyance\u00a0at the woman she brought along as her maid suggests that women of her culture expected each other to have their backs. Kempe states, \u201cAnd all the time her maidservant left her alone and prepared the company\u2019s food and washed their clothes, and to her mistress, whom she had promised to serve, she would in no way attend.\u201d (Kempe, 102) In this short quote, Kempe makes two references to what she perceived to be abandonment and states her needs were ignored. This shows that the way her maid treated her is something that greatly affected her emotionally despite having described her maid\u2019s service to her already once having been terminated by their group (Kempe 100). Regardless of how\u00a0the maid views Kempe, the other pilgrims likely influenced her actions (Kempe 100-102). Kempe must realize this as well, showing that she expects the maid to voluntarily suffer any consequences that serving her would bring. (Kempe, 99-102) The punishments inflicted on Kempe demonstrate\u00a0a large emphasis on her culture\u2019s value in\u00a0blending in with people you spend your time with; this is shown because she is punished due to what the group views as inappropriate behavior (Kempe 100,101-102) Hopefully, today she would not have been so mistreated, but her companions would not to travel with her if she was making no\u00a0effort\u00a0fit in (Kempe 100-102). \u00a0I believe that Kempe wrote Chapter 27 for readers who want something raw and honest to help them deal with\u00a0their own emotions. This is because of her use of the word \u201ccreature\u201d (Kempe 99) to describe herself and the detailed account of all the unfortunate things that happened to her, paints her in a very vulnerable light (Kempe 99-102) Kempe also casts the majority of her companions in a bad light, so maybe she is\u00a0trying to process her own anger by acknowledging what happened to her. (Kempe 99-102) \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Kempe, Margery c.1373-c.1439, and B. A. Windeatt. <\/span>The Book of Margery Kempe<\/span><\/i>, Chapters 26-27, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1987, https:\/\/lms.dickinson.edu\/pluginfile.php\/1699754\/mod_resource\/content\/0\/MargeryKempeJerusalem.pdf<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Emily Caspersen February 16, 2022 The Book of Margery Kempe: Compostella, Bologna, and Venice \u00a0 Kempe recorded her time travelling through Compostella, Bologna, and Venice as a period in her life that was mostly hellish and lonely (Kempe, 99-102). She was more concerned with the measures\u00a0the pilgrims in her group took against her, such as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4738,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[143613],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-margery-kempe","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4738"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-the-middle-ages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}