Margery Kempe

A Visionary History of Women: Part 2

You can read my essay: A Visionary History of Women: Part 1 here.

I’m on a mission to write women back into history, because, to a large extent, women have been written out of history. Their lives and deeds have become lost to us. To uncover their buried stories, we must act as detectives, studying the sparse clues that have been handed down to us. We must learn to read between the lines and fill in the blanks. My writer’s journey is about reclaiming the lost heroines of history and giving voice to that lost motherline.

Many of my novels address spiritual themes. As a spiritual person, I’m very interested in women’s experience of the sacred. As well as being written out of history, we women, for the past five-thousand years of patriarchy, have been side-lined and marginalized by every established religion in the world. Even in alternative spiritual movements, male teachers and leaders have abused their authority over their female students and followers.

But in every age, there have been women who have heroically rebelled against this patriarchal stranglehold to claim their authentic spiritual experience. Often it has involved looking within rather than without for spiritual guidance. Many of these women have been mystics.

What is a mystic?

The American Dictionary states that mysticism is the belief that it is possible to directly receive truth or achieve communication with the divine through prayer and contemplation. In other words, according to my personal definition, you don’t need a priest or other authority figure. The divine mysteries are within your own heart.

Some of the most famous mystics of the Western spiritual tradition have been women who plunged deep within their souls for spiritual guidance and emerged with ecstatic, prophetic, and radical insights.

Many of us imagine female mystics as cloistered women, like Hildegard of Bingen, but what would it be like to be a married woman with children and experience divine visions when you’re in the middle of making dinner or doing the laundry?

One of the most eccentric mystics of the late Middle Ages was a desperate housewife and failed businesswoman from Norfolk, England, named Margery Kempe (c. 1373 – after 1438). She is the heroine of my novel Revelations.

She ran a brewery and then a horse mill to grind grain, but both businesses failed. Around the age of 40, Margery had reached her breaking point. She was done. The mother of fourteen children, she feared that another pregnancy might kill her, but she couldn’t trust her husband to leave her alone, because canon law upheld his right to sexual congress without her consent. More than anything, Margery wanted to literally walk away from her marriage and go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

Since divorce wasn’t an option, she traveled to nearby Norwich to seek spiritual counsel from the anchoress Julian of Norwich, one of the greatest mystics of all time. Margery confessed to Julian that she had been haunted by visceral, body-seizing spiritual visions for the past twenty years. In my novel, Julian, recognizing Margery as a fellow mystic, made a confession of her own. She had written a secret book of her mystical visions, entitled Revelations of Divine Love, the first book in English written by a woman. In an age where heretics were burned at the stake, this was a dangerous text, describing an unconditionally loving God who appeared as Mother and threatened the established Church’s insistence on eternal damnation. Nearing the end of her life, Julian entrusted the book to Margery, who hid the manuscript in a secret compartment in her pilgrim’s staff.

With Julian’s blessing, Margery set off on the adventure of a lifetime to spread Julian’s radical, female vision of the Divine. Her travels took her to Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela. When she returned to England, she was arrested and tried for heresy several times and came close to being burned at the stake. The authorities couldn’t seem to handle this independent woman who traveled on her own and who dared to preach to other women in public. She preserved her story for posterity in The Book of Margery Kempe, the first autobiography written in English.

Margery offers inspiration for those of us who seek to live as mystics and contemplatives in the full stream of worldly life.

Mary Sharratt is committed to telling women’s stories. Please check out her acclaimed novel Illuminations, drawn from the dramatic life of Hildegard von Bingen, and her new novel Revelations, about the mystical pilgrim Margery Kempe and her friendship with Julian of Norwich. Visit her website .

All Shall Be Well: Hope in Hopeless Times

My novel Revelations, based on the intertwined lives of female mystics Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, will be released in paperback on April 19. You can order **HERE.**

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

These words of Julian of Norwich, taken from her masterpiece of visionary theology, Revelations of Divine Love, seem almost tone deaf against our current backdrop of war and the ongoing pandemic. In a world like ours, with war criminals like Putin calling the shots, it’s so tempting to fall into either hardened cynicism or hopeless despair.

But Julian of Norwich was no naïve simpleton. Although an anchoress who had taken vows as a fully cognizant adult to wall herself into a cell built on to the back of Saint Julian’s Church in Norwich, England, she wasn’t living in some airy-fairy cloistered bubble. Her own age was riven by plague, war, and religious intolerance, which saw the burning of many perceived witches and heretics. Saint Julian’s Church (she took the name of the church, not the other way around) was located in a rough part of town near the river and the stinking tannery district where prostituted women and girls plied their trade.

Far from walling herself off from the world’s woes, Dame Julian had a window in her anchorage wall facing out into the street. Anyone might seek her counsel. She was famous throughout Britain for her sage advice. One of the many who poured her soul out to Julian was a desperate housewife and mother of fourteen children, who had finally plucked up the courage to walk away from an abusive marriage. This woman was none other than Margery Kempe, the heroine of my novel.

Margery had been experiencing sensual, visceral images of the divine for over twenty years. Now she had reached a crossroads in her life. She wanted to walk the mystic’s path and travel as a pilgrim to Jerusalem and Rome. But her choice to leave her family and travel the world as a solo woman was even more controversial and downright dangerous in her age than in ours.

It would have been so easy for a spiritual counselor to parrot the voice of conventional wisdom and tell Margery that her dream of pilgrimage was a self-indulgent folly and that her true calling was to serve her children as a conventional wife and mother.

Instead, Julian did something unheard of. She empowered Margery to trust herself, to trust the voice of spiritual wisdom within her own heart. She told Margery to set all her trust in the divine and not to worry too much what the world thought of her choice–if some people disliked Margery, perhaps that meant Margery was doing something right.

Julian didn’t promise Margery–or us, the readers of Revelations of Divine Love–an easy ride. In one of her searing visions, Julian received the message, “You shall not be overcome.” She wrote in her book, “Our Lord did not say, ‘You shall not be tormented, or troubled, or grieved’ but ‘You shall not be overcome.'”

Julian received her divine revelations around the age of thirty when she was deathly ill and thought she was going to die. Instead, she survived and dedicated the rest of her life to being a living witness to the exquisite divine love she had experienced.

We don’t have to be anchoresses or travel to Jerusalem to experience this deep love and wisdom. The deepest pilgrimage of all is the journey into the depths of our own hearts where divine love dwells eternally, in each one of us, regardless of our faith or spirituality. The sacred inside us can never taken from us.

The heart will always be there for us and it is only from the heart that we can bring peace and justice to our fractured world. By bringing our information-overloaded brains inline with the deep wisdom of the heart. By bringing our speech inline with the heart. By bringing all our deeds inline with the heart.

May we all be witnesses to the Divine Love within us.

“All shall be well and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Julian of Norwich (left in her Benedictine habit) counsels Margery Kempe, who dressed all in white to mark her vocation as a mystic and pilgrim.

Beyond Act One: Why We Need More Stories about Older Women

We are hard-wired to frame our experience in stories. Almost anything we endure, no matter how painful, can take on a deeper meaning if we see it as one chapter in an overarching narrative. Stories give coherence and meaning to our often fragmented and chaotic lives.

Georgia O’Keeffe lived way beyond Act One!

We live in a youth-obsessed culture. The cosmetic industry pushes wrinkle creams and hair dye on us while celebrities resort to fillers and surgery to preserve an illusion of eternal girlhood. Advancing age, once a mark of honour, has become a source of shame. Popular fiction, literary classics, television, and movies celebrate young heroines, from Elizabeth Bennett to Katniss Everdeen. But where are the stories about older women and why do we all need to hear them?

We live longer than ever before. Women’s lives don’t play out in one act, even though our culture programs us to think that way. It almost seems a travesty to imagine an older Elizabeth Bennett grown bored of Darcy and yearning to reinvent herself and embrace some new adventure.

Old-school male authors were really big on killing off their young heroines so they couldn’t even dream about maturing into women with agency. Shakespeare merrily committed femicide on Juliet, Ophelia, and Desdemona, to name just a few of his hapless heroines.

Ophelia drowning. Don’t try this at home.

Why have so many authors, past and present, refused to let their heroines age? Why this reluctance to write about seasoned female protagonists who have been around the block more than once? Perhaps because too many people, even today, consider experienced women threatening. Since the time of witch burnings and scold’s bridles, male-dominated culture has been petrified of older woman who seize their power. That’s why stories about young women with a certain cut-off date are much cosier and less threatening.

But coming-of-age stories can only take us so far. We need to imagine lives beyond Act One, beyond a vague glimmering on the horizon. We need signposts to help us navigate our long and unavoidably complicated modern lives. We live in an age of divorce, blended families, and many of us pursue several careers and many paths of discovery over the course of a single lifetime. Contrary to cultural expectations, women do have exciting, juicy lives after forty and beyond. Contemporary fiction should explore and celebrate this.

Yes, there have been break-out books about older women—Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, and even literary classics, such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway—but these are the exceptions that prove the rule. In the publishing marketplace, stories about older women remain a hard sell. Which is bitterly ironic, considering that most fiction is purchased by women over the age of forty.

Yet it’s not just an older audience that needs to read about older heroines. I would argue that girls and young women are in even greater need of literary role models to guide them way beyond a self-limiting Act One.

As a teenager, I was hungry for such stories. Some proof that I had something to look forward to beyond the awfulness of high school (not the best years of my life). Like Holden Caulfield, I was caught in a web of angsty adolescent nihilism which cast everyone from the cheerleaders to the teachers as a chorus of fakes and phonies. I needed a gutsy female role model to pull me out of this miasma.

Eventually I found my heroine, not in the pages of a novel, but in Blackberry Winter, Margaret Mead’s memoir. I was electrified by this strong woman who didn’t give a fuck about preening for the male gaze and yet still had an amazing love life. Born in 1901, in an era when women were programmed for domesticity, she became a pioneering anthropologist and feminist icon. Her memoir, subtitled “My Earlier Years,” is not cut off at Act One, but only ends when she becomes a grandmother. Well into old age, Mead remained a mesmerizing and magnetic presence for being authentically herself.

Mead’s memoir is a rare jewel of female self-confidence in an ocean of women’s self-censorship and self-effacement. In Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn G. Heilbrun observes how both biographers and autobiographers have suppressed the truth about lived female experience to force it to conform to society’s script of how a woman’s life should be.

Heilbrun then discusses the Mother of All Female Memoirs, the first to appear in the English language. The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1436–38) reveals the escapades of a woman mystic who wasn’t enclosed in a cell, but was literally all over the map. Kempe’s call to adventure unfolded amid the bitter disillusionment of midlife. She was forty, a desperate housewife, a failed business woman, a mother of fourteen children, and trapped in an abusive marriage. Marital rape was her lived reality—a fifteenth child might have killed her.

Her story completely exploded my every stereotype of medieval womanhood. Her life choices seem absolutely radical by the standards of our time as well as hers.

Since divorce was not an option, she seized back control by setting off on the perilous pilgrim’s path to Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela. She literally walked away from her unhappy marriage and blazed her trail across Europe and the Near East in an age when very few women traveled, even in the company of their husbands.

Alas, Kempe’s independence and eccentricities drew suspicion. When she returned to England, she found herself on trial for heresy. A guilty verdict would have seen her burned at the stake, yet she kept her spirits high by regaling the Archbishop of York with a parable of a defecating bear and a priest.

Most significantly, the spiritual mentor who stood by Kempe as she made her unorthodox choices was a woman in her seventies, the anchoress Julian of Norwich. Before leaving on her monumental pilgrimage, Kempe sought Julian’s counsel. This was an exceedingly vulnerable time in Kempe’s life. In leaving her husband and children, she had broken all the rules and was filled with self-doubt and uncertainty. Julian’s advice to trust her inner calling and not worry too much about what other people thought seemed to have a profoundly empowering impact on her. While Julian had chosen to wall herself into a cell and live as a religious recluse, she gave Kempe her blessing to wander the wide world.

Kempe’s story would have been lost to history if she hadn’t recorded it in her autobiography, a tremendous act of foresight and courage that made her a literary pioneer. She dictated her story to a priest, who copied it down for her and whose ecclesiastical authority gave gravitas to her narrative.

Margery Kempe’s story proves that even in the Middle Ages, women had the power to re-invent themselves in midlife and beyond. If Act One disappoints, time to dive feet first into Act Two. We can continually re-vision our own narrative.

Our culture likes to pit women against each other. Divide and conquer. Popular tropes cast young women and older women as rivals or even enemies. In fairy tales a young maiden’s coming of age involves going out into the wild forest to encounter the scary old witch who acts as a foil to the maiden’s youth and innocence.

But if we look past the patriarchal smokescreen, we see that youth and aging are mirrors reflecting one another. The maiden and the witch are not enemies. The true coming of age unfolds when the maiden seeks out the witch who ultimately empowers her. Who teaches her to be fierce and not suffer fools.

As we mature, we are gifted with the superpower of seeing through the false scripts that consumer society hands us. We can see just how absurd it is to kill ourselves to emulate airbrushed fashion models. We understand that the greatest lover in the world can’t fulfill us until we are at peace with ourselves. And so we can let ourselves go, whatever our age. Paint the pictures we’ve always longed to paint. Learn French and travel the world. Dance under the stars and see visions. Offer our own song to the vast symphony of life.

We need stories that honor the entire sweep of womanhood, not just Act One. What would our literary canon and popular culture look like if it truly reflected the depths and breadth of our authentic, lived experience as women and girls today?

This essay was originally published in Literary Hub.

Mary Sharratt is on a mission to write women back into history. Her acclaimed novel Illuminations, drawn from the dramatic life of Hildegard von Bingen, is published by Mariner. Her new novel Revelations, about the mystical pilgrim Margery Kempe and her friendship with Julian of Norwich, is now available and will be released in paperback in April. Visit her website .

REVELATIONS: The Mysticism of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe

My new novel REVELATIONS is drawn from the lives of two medieval mystics who changed history—Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, two very different women whose paths converged and who, I believe, have much to teach us today.

Women’s spiritual experience is a theme that keeps coming up in my novels. Perhaps some of you have read my novel ILLUMINATIONS, about the visionary abbess, composer and polymath, Hildegard von Bingen.

As a spiritual person myself, I’ve always found it frustrating how women have been side-lined and marginalized in every established religion in the world. Yet from time out of mind, mystic and visionary women of all faith traditions have offered radical resistance. They have subverted institutional patriarchal religion from within and found their own direct path to the divine by plunging into the deep mysteries of the soul on a path of inner revelation. Julian of Norwich called God Mother and devoted her life to writing about the Motherhood of God. Similarly, Hildegard of Bingen wrote about her visions of the Feminine Divine. This isn’t a modern feminist interpretation. It’s right there in the original texts.

Like us today, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe lived in a time of pandemic and social upheaval, yet both women bore witness to the divine promise that ultimately all shall be well.

The Way of the Mystic

Those of us in the Northern Hemisphere are coming out of a long pandemic winter and entering a new season of waxing light, hope, and growth. Yet these continue to be turbulent times. Even with the progress of the Covid vaccine, none of us truly knows when life will ever return to “normal.”

Like us today, the medieval mystics Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, the heroines of my new novel REVELATIONS, which will be published on April 27, lived in a time of pandemic and social upheaval, yet both women bore witness to the divine promise that ultimately all shall be well.

During a near-death experience, Julian received a series of divine visions and spent the next forty years unpacking them in her luminous theology of an unconditionally loving God who is both Mother and Father. Julian offered radical counsel to Margery Kempe, a failed businesswoman and mother of fourteen, who was haunted by her own visceral mystic experience. With Julian’s blessing, Margery walked away from a soul-destroying marriage and became a globe-trotting pilgrim-preacher and rabble rouser. Though these two women might seem like polar opposites—Julian, the enclosed anchoress, and free-roving Margery experiencing her visions in the full stream of worldly life—they complement each other. Together their lives and work form a Via Feminina, a distinctly female path to the divine.

The women mystics have always fascinated me. I identify very powerfully with Hildegard of Bingen, the heroine of my previous novel ILLUMINATIONS, as well as with Margery and Julian as spiritual women facing the roadblock of an institutional, male-dominated religion that side-lined them precisely because they were women. But instead of letting this beat them down, they found within their own hearts a vision of the divine that mirrored their female experience. I believe it’s no mere coincidence that both Hildegard and Julian dared to create a theology of the Feminine Divine, of God the Mother. All three women seized their power and their voice to write about their encounters with the sacred, preserving their revelations to inspire us today.

In our modern world, when many traditional religious institutions are crumbling, we can follow in these women’s footsteps and seek the divine—however we perceive the divine—within the sanctuary of our own hearts. This is the birthright no one can take from us, our eternal refuge. This is the Way of the Mystic.

Learn more about Margery and Julian as I discuss these mystics in a series of free virtual events.

My virtual tour kicks off with a very special Literature Lover’s event, sponsored by Valley Bookseller and Excelsior Bay Books in Minnesota. You can watch the video above. I am in conversation with acclaimed author, Elissa Elliot .

For a deep dive into Julian of Norwich’s spirituality, I am teaming up with Christine Valters Paintner of Abbey of the Arts to offer a Virtual Mini-Retreat on May 13, Julian’s Feast Day. You can learn more and register here.

To stretch body and mind in a creative virtual retreat that combines Yoga, women’s spirituality, and writing women back into history, please join me and Stephanie Renee dos Santos for SHEStories + Saraswati Flow on May 15 – 16.

REVELATIONS may be pre-ordered through any of the links below. As a midlist author, I am profoundly grateful for every single purchase.

PRE-ORDER AUDIOBOOK: Amazon / Audible | Kobo

Read an EXCERPT.

Mary Sharratt is on a mission to write women back into history. Her acclaimed novel Illuminations, drawn from the dramatic life of Hildegard von Bingen, is published by Mariner. Her new novel Revelations, about the globe-trotting mystic and rabble-rouser, Margery Kempe, will be published on April 27. Visit her website .

The Via Feminina: Revisioning the Heroine’s Journey by Mary Sharratt

Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the Hero’s Journey, is outlined in his 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Drawn from his studies of comparative mythology and Jungian psychology, the Hero’s Journey has become a foundation myth of modern culture. The hero, generally young and vigorous, sets off into the unknown to battle antagonistic forces and returns transformed, a hero and guide to his people.

As Campbell writes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

The Hero’s Journey has served as the go-to template for Hollywood screenwriters and bestselling novelists. We see this mythic pattern of the conquering male hero played over and over again in popular culture. Think Luke Skywalker in the original 1977 Star Wars—or any protagonist in a George Lucas or Steven Spielberg movie. Creative writing teachers encourage their students to pattern their story arcs on the Hero’s Journey to give a sense of archetypal depth and resonance. But this technique has been overused to the point of becoming a cliché. A deeply sexist cliché. Continue reading “The Via Feminina: Revisioning the Heroine’s Journey by Mary Sharratt”

Margery Kempe: The Self-Made Mystic

*In the 15th century, as now, independent female travelers faced harassment and suspicion.*

I’ve always been fascinated with the women mystics, such as 12th century powerfrau and visionary Hildegard von Bingen, the heroine of my 2012 novel, ILLUMINATIONS. Likewise my new novel, REVELATIONS, which will be published in April 2021, is centered on two 15th century English mystics, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Like Hildegard, they were women of faith facing the roadblock of institutional, male-dominated religion that sidelined them. But instead of letting this beat them down, they found within their own hearts a vision of the divine that mirrored their female experience. I believe it’s no mere coincidence that both Hildegard and Julian dared to create a theology of the Feminine Divine, of God the Mother. All three women seized their power and their voice to write about their encounters with the sacred, preserving their revelations to inspire us today.

While Hildegard and Julian are iconic, Margery Kempe is a more marginal figure–well-known among medievalists but much less known to a general audience. I first encountered Margery in a post-grad course entitled Late Medieval Belief and Superstition. I was blown away by the story of this enterprising woman who survived postnatal depression and a soul-destroying marriage to become an intrepid world traveler and literary pioneer. The Book of Margery Kempe (c. 1436–38) is the first autobiography in the English language.

Margery’s story explodes our every stereotype about medieval women.

She was not just a desperate housewife and mother of fourteen. She rebelled against the straightjacket of an abusive marriage by becoming an entrepreneurial businesswoman. First she ran a brewery, then a grain mill. When both businesses failed and she’d had enough, she left her husband behind and took to the road as a pilgrim, traveling to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela. This in an age when very few women traveled even in the company of their husbands, Margery blazed her own trail across Europe and the Near East.

Alas, like strong women throughout history, her independence and eccentricities drew suspicion. Before long she found herself on trial for heresy. A guilty verdict would have seen her burned at the stake, yet she kept her spirits high by regaling the Archbishop of York with a parable of a defecating bear and a priest.

Before leaving on her monumental pilgrimage, Margery sought the counsel of her sister mystic, Julian of Norwich. This was an exceedingly vulnerable time in Margery’s life. In leaving her husband and children behind, she had broken all the rules, and she was filled with self-doubt and uncertainty. Julian’s advice to trust her inner calling and not worry too much about what other people thought seemed to have a profound and empowering impact on Margery. While Julian had chosen to wall herself into a cell and live as an anchoress, she gave Margery her blessing to wander the wide world.

Sadly, some historians and theologians try to pit Julian and Margery against each other. Julian is held up as the real saint, the real deal, while Margery is dismissed as a hysterical wanna-be. Because she had the habit of copious weeping when in the throes of mystical experience, many people, both in her time and ours, have refused to take her seriously.

Yet a number of fascinating synchronicities connect Margery and Julian. In so many ways, their stories intertwine and complement each other.

Margery was born in 1373, the same year that thirty-year-old Julian received her “showings”—the divine visions that would inspire her landmark book Revelations of Divine Love, the first book written in English by a woman. Both women lived in Norfolk, in cities less than 45 miles away from each other. Both women were literary pioneers whose lifework was lost to obscurity, only to resurface in the twentieth century.

Immersing myself in Julian’s radical theology of the primacy of divine love was a profound experience. Like Margery, I often found myself moved to tears by the beauty of Julian’s visions, by her absolute assurance that no matter how dire things may seem, all will be well.

But what took me by surprise was how revelatory Margery’s dance with self-doubt was for me. In writing this book and delving into medieval mystical texts, I discovered that our doubts, as painful and wrenching as they are, aren’t a flaw or hindrance. In fact, they lead us deeper into the divine mystery, the vast “Cloud of Unknowing” where God dwells. Only when we set aside our preconceived notions of what we think we believe the divine to be, can we enter this numinous place.

As a mystic, Margery’s especially fascinating to me, because she found her spiritual bliss not in the cloister, but as a laywoman, in the full stream of worldly life with all its wonders and perils. May we all have the power to reinvent ourselves as courageously as Margery did.

Mary Sharratt is on a mission to write women back into history. Her acclaimed novel Illuminations, drawn from the dramatic life of Hildegard von Bingen, is published by Mariner. Her new novel Revelations, about the globe-trotting mystic and rabble-rouser, Margery Kempe, will be published in April 2021. Visit her website .

Mysticism as a Female Path by Mary Sharratt

Women have been sidelined and marginalized in every established institutional religion in the world. Even in alternative spiritual movements, male teachers and leaders abuse their authority toward their female students and followers. This is why women’s circles and spiritual groups are as relevant and necessary in 2020 as they ever were. Those women who can’t find spiritual community often chose to go it alone on a solitary path. But they are not entirely alone–they follow in the footsteps of a long ancestral line of female seekers and mystics, who rejected a life of slavish obedience to male authority figures in order to contemplate the deep mysteries of the soul on a path of inner revelation.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines mysticism as the belief that there is hidden meaning in our existence, that every human being can unite with the divine. The American Dictionary states that mysticism is the belief that it is possible to directly receive truth or achieve communication with the divine through prayer and contemplation. Continue reading “Mysticism as a Female Path by Mary Sharratt”