ABSTRACT
Margery Kempe, the fifteenth-century English mystic and gadfly, had a habit of elevating the conversational tone at dinner by announcing, ‘It is full merry in heaven!’ Her companions, when they could take no more of this, would respond, ‘Why do you talk so of the joy that is in heaven? You don’t know it, and you haven’t been there any more than we have.’1 Not for the last time, Margery had confronted the difficulty of speaking the unspeakable, in this case to an audience that would have preferred it to remain unspoken. Unlike Kempe’s table companions, however, many medieval readers were so eager to hear about the bliss of heaven that they were prepared to believe anyone who did claim to have been there, or at least to have caught a glimpse from afar.
