Introduction

In the first quarter of the fifteenth century, an otherwise unremarkable Englishwoman undertook a remarkable series of journeys, the most remarkable of which took her from her home town of Bishop’s (now King’s) Lynn in Norfolk through Germany to Venice, and thence by sea to the Holy Land and a tour of the sites associated with the life and death of Christ. She returned via Italy, spending time at Rome and Assisi. All in all, it took her just under two years to complete this epic series of travels, probably from autumn 1413 to late spring in 1415. Other journeys and voyages took her across England, over the Bay of Biscay to Compostela, and by sea to Danzig and thence by land back through Germany to England. These heroic pilgrimages – for such they were – were written up with an often frustrating lack of detail in the text now known as The Book of Margery Kempe, essentially a ghostwritten autobiography that has provided the foundation for a veritable industry of modern medieval scholarship.¹