Margery Kempe Mysticism

Its reliability remains a central concern of historians and biographers with her Book, since she began recording her divine encounters almost twenty years after they began. Also, since Margery was illiterate, she dictated her work to a priest, who may have altered her words and doctrines to make them more acceptable and in tune with the religious beliefs of the time.

Margery Kempe: mother, mystic, mentally ill? Throughout The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery is burdened with the gift of tears. To onlookers, her behaviour seems erratic and threatening; strangers and acquaintances often wonder if devils possessing her cause her passionate wailing. Margery is often questioned about her tears, and isolated from people who fail to understand that she is one of Christ’s “chosen souls” (24). Margery sees these social difficulties as trials of her faith, and says, “For ever the more slander and reproof that she suffered, the more she increased in grace and in devotion of holy meditation” (Kempe 4). Even when her community berates her, she maintains that her tears are a gift and a form of penance, that her

Guibert of Nogent was a French monk, who had been born in 1055 and died circa 1125. There had been complications during his birth, which made his family fear for both his life and his mother’s. Desperate, his family rushed to their chapel where they, vowed to the Virgin Mary that, as Guibert puts it, “if the child were male, it would be consecrated a cleric in God’s service and hers.” Naturally, this vow dictated much of Guibert’s life and molded him into a genuinely religious man. Guibert wrote his autobiography at the monastery of Nogent in 1115, when he was sixty years old, under the title of Monodiae, meaning “Solitary Songs.” The autobiography genre was practically nonexistent at this time, so Guibert modeled his text after the most

Additionally, the book explores detailed information regarding the shift of many people at the time from Catholicism to Protestantism, which is extremely important to the development of what is occurring. Form Davis’s prospective, Bertrande really knows the truth that imposter (fake Martin) is not her true husband, but for some reasons she conceals the truth. Perhaps, she has needs needed to be stratified by one means or another since the religious system of church regarded her as an abandoned wife rather than widow because there was no evidence that proofs the husband’s death. Thus, marriage laws prevent Bertrande from receiving a divorce so that she couldn’t marry again. She was under unknown destiny because she was in between wife title

Travelling across the ocean to New England, Anne Bradstreet looked to America as a safe place to practice her puritan religion (Eberwein 4). She wrote many poems about her family and experiences, incorporating her faith and personal struggles into her works. A hundred years later, Phillis Wheatley was kidnapped from her homeland in Africa and brought to America, where she became a devout Christian and a renowned poet (James). Both women received an education above other women of their time leading to their literary accomplishments. The purpose of this paper is to determine the similarities and differences between Anne Bradstreet’s and Phillis Wheatley’s poems’ content, in terms of their themes and language by answering the following questions.

Prior to and throughout the late middle ages, women have been portrayed in literature as vile and corrupt. During this time, Christine de Pizan became a well educated woman and counteracted the previous notions of men’s slander against women. With her literary works, Pizan illustrated to her readers and women that though education they can aspire to be something greater than what is written in history. Through the use of real historical examples, Christine de Pizan’s, The Book of the City of Ladies, acts as a defense against the commonly perceived notions of women as immoral.

What was the predominant image of women and women’s place in medieval society? Actual historical events, such as the scandal and subsequent litigation revolving around Anna Buschler which Steven Ozment detail’s in the Burgermeisters Daughter, suggests something off a compromise between these two literary extremes. It is easy to say that life in the sixteenth century was surely no utopia for women but at least they had some rights.

What Bynum demonstrates is that late medieval piety had become heavily idiosyncratic: the emphasis of spirituality was increasingly placed on the primacy of experience: on seeing, meeting, and most importantly for women, on eating and tasting God. Section II lays out ‘The Evidence’ supporting Bynum’s theory that fasting and food related symbolism played such a central role to women’s spirituality that it ultimately became a literary trope in the vitae of female saints and mystics. From the very outset of the chapter, the author proves her argument from a purely quantitative analysis of 864 saints from 1000-1700: although only 17.5% of those canonized as saints were women, women accounted for almost 29% of saints who practiced rigorous austerities which include extreme fasting. The lives of these women and their relationship with food are then laid out in detail. Hunger, thirst, desire, nourishment and satiety developed into quintessential symbols describing women’s relationships to God. Finally, in order to demonstrate comparatively how the role of Eucharistic devotion and extreme fasting was not nearly as prominent a theme among men as it was with women, Bynum also explores the presence (or lack thereof) of food-related motifs in the vitae of male saints.

Dorothy L. Sayers was a very distinguished British Christian scholarly of the twentieth era. She was a revolutionary gumshoe writer and clandestine logician, a path-breaking author, a zesty interpreter of and commentator on Dante, an insightful defender, an under appreciated poet, and a derisive mythical and societal critic, she Sayers mysticism lies inside the lucid custom of catholic sacramental mysticism and usual law morals.

In this document commentary I will be analysing and commentating on an extract from Henry Goodcole’s pamphlet, The Wonderful Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer, a Witch, late of Edmonton. Her Conviction and Condemation and Death. (London, 1621). I will be seeing how if the contemporary public felt the same way and how this relates to the history of witchcraft.

An unlikely candidate to dispute the unfair, misogynistic treatment of women by men and society, Christine de Pizan successfully challenged the accepted negative views that were being expressed about women by the all-male literary world of her era. Part of Christine’s uniqueness stems from the time in which she lived, the middle to late 1300’s. The lack of a positive female role model to pattern herself after made Christine a true visionary in the fight for the equal rights of women. Her original ideas and insight provided a new and more intelligent way to view females. Pizan’s work, The Book of the City of Ladies, provided women much needed guidance in how to survive without the support of a man.

Thus, we see that in a sense, Catholicism acted as a catalyst in the development of female education. Paradoxically enough though, at the same time, it limited the possible level of knowledge they could attain. The thought of the supposedly foolish, sinful female sex breaking the bonds of ignorance made many people fear the possibility of women reading “forbidden” books. Dante’s “La vita nuova”, the Petrarchan sonnets and the “Decameron” are a few examples of books that were considered lasciviously dangerous and kept off-limits (Grendler, 1989). Indeed, women could be educated, yet within a certain framework. Their level of knowledge only went up to a point, in order to make sure they grew up to be exemplary, pious, Christian housewives.

Religion in the Middle Ages takes on a character all of its own as it is lived out differently in the lives of medieval men and women spanning from ordinary laity to vehement devotees. Though it is difficult to identify what the average faith consists of in the Middle Ages, the life told of a radical devotee in The Book of Margery Kempe provides insight to the highly intense version of medieval paths of approaching Christ. Another medieval religious text, The Cloud of Unknowing, provides a record of approaching the same Christ. I will explore the consistencies and inconsistencies of both ways to approach Christ and religious fulfillment during the Middle Ages combined with the motivations to do so on the basis of both texts.

Margery Kempe, the main topic of this essay, was in fact a controversial person. During her lifetime peoples' opinions about her were quite polarized. She was a conspicuous person and was in many conflicts with mostly clerical authorities. Some contemporaries looked up to her, while many others did not really know how to deal with her and her extraordinary behaviour. It is pretty much the same thing today. While some credit her as a mystic, others just condemn her as crazy. During the course of this essay, I will try to answer the question if she was a mystic or not. One approach could be made by looking at definitions of the terms "mystic" and "mysticism":

“I was treading where academics cannot go because of the rigour of their discipline” (p. 10, l. 260-262). This combination of two such different ways to write allows her to bring back the voices of those who were left out of the historical texts.