Margery Kempe (ca. 1373 - ca. 1439) is best known for writing The Book of Margery Kempe, a work considered to be the first autobiography in the English language.
She was born Margery Brunham in King's Lynn, Norfolk, England and married at the age of 20 to a local man named John Kempe, with whom she had 14 children. At around the age of 35, Margery claims to have had a vision that called her to leave aside the "vanities" of this world. From that point forward, Kempe avoided sexual intercourse with her husband, and began to make pilgrimages around Europe to sites that were holy to her, if not to others. The stories surrounding these travels are what eventually composed her book. From 1413-1420, Margery went to the Bishop of Lincoln, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Julian of Norwich, Santiago de Compostela in Spain, Rome, and Jerusalem. Her thoughts concerning these trips and her revelatory experiences make up most of her book. The last section of her book deals with a journey in the 1430s to Norway and Germany. Two different scribes did the writing for Margery, under her strict supervision.
Margery Kempe's significance lies in the autobiographical nature of her book: it is the best insight available that points to the middle class experience in the Middle Ages. Kempe is admittedly unusual (and therefore not a perfect mirror of the times), but were it not for her oddities, we would never have heard her story.
The last record of her is in the city of Lynn in 1439, and it is not positively known when and where she died. Her book remained essentially lost until a manuscript was found in a private library in Lancashire in 1934.
