ABSTRACT
This is a chapter about two people who felt despair—or, at least, said that they did—and how their despair was transmitted to posterity. The first person, Margery Kempe, lived in the early fifteenth century. She dictated her despair and its accompanying thoughts, actions, and feelings to two amanuenses; the result survives in a single manuscript. The other, a mid-seventeenth-century nonconformist Protestant known only by the abbreviation A. O., had his or her despair recorded in a publication that was printed in two editions, the second of which survives today in a number of library copies. This chapter will compare the despairing aspects of the emotional lives of Margery and A. O. As we shall see, in both instances weeping was intimately connected to despair, but in very different ways. Although the age of print helped give despair great prominence, it did not guarantee that an individual’s feelings would be better transmitted.
