ABSTRACT
Margery Kempe is best known for her rather exceptional originality: an illiterate bourgeois mystic whose participation in the tradition of affective piety ranges from the mundane to the hysterical, and whose Book is an increasingly valuable source for students of medieval history, religion, and, especially, the experiences and feelings of medieval women. The implications of Kempe’s identification with her hometown have been largely ignored by critics, who focus instead on the nature of her affective piety or the peculiarly domestic expression of her mysticism. For Kempe’s society the idea of home acted “as a unifying concept in social, family and cultural life”. The fight over Emma de Beston illustrates the at least formal interaction between public and private that informs so much of Lynn life and would have been so firmly rooted in the burgess Kempe. Kempe’s powers must always be perceived as operating within a very small compass.
