Episode
Margery Kempe and English Mysticism (Archive Episode)
- Published
- Dec 25, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 2953
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://iono.fm/e/1630870
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Summary
To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Author and columnist Caitlin Moran has picked the episode on the English medieval mystic Margery Kempe and recorded an introduction to it. Margery Kempe (1373-1438) produced an account of her extraordinary life in a book she dictated, "The Book of Margery Kempe." She went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to Rome and Santiago de Compostela, purchasing indulgences on her way, met with the anchoress Julian of Norwich and is honoured by the Church of England each 9th November. She sometimes doubted the authenticity of her mystical conversations with God, as did the authorities who saw her devotional sobbing, wailing and convulsions as a sign of insanity and dissoluteness. Her Book was lost for centuries, before emerging in a private library in 1934. This In Our Time episode was first broadcast in June 2016. The image (above), of an unknown woman, comes from a pew at Margery Kempe's parish church, St Margaret’s, Kings Lynn and dates from c1375. With Miri Rubin Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London Katherine Lewis Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Huddersfield And Anthony Bale Professor of Medieval Studies at Birkbeck University of London Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (eds.), A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe, (D. S. Brewer, 2010) Anthony Bale (trans.), The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford University Press, 2015) Santha Bhattacharji, God is an Earthquake: The Spirituality of Margery Kempe (Darton, Longman and Todd, 1997) Anthony Goodman, Margery Kempe and her World (Longman, 2002) Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and the Translations of the…