The Book of Margery Kempe (38 page)

1
.   Margery is in accord with St Bridget's revelations on the date of the Virgin's death; the Blessed Elisabeth of Schönau's revelations put the date a year after the crucifixion.

2
.   It is appropriate for Margery to identify herself with the tearful Magdalene.

3
.   After his conversion, St Francis of Assisi similarly wished to kiss lepers, although he had previously found them repellent, and St Catherine of Siena also cared for lepers. Mary of Oignies and her husband turned their home into a hospital for lepers, whom they personally nursed.

4
.   Margery had herself endured sexual temptations; cf. chapter 59.

1
.   This recalls Margery's own troubles in chapter 1.

1
.   i.e. to drain the wound.

1
.   cf. Song of Songs ii, 16, vi, 3.

2
.   Matthew v, 44; Luke vi, 27, 35.

1
.   This chapter touches on such Palm Sunday observances as the procession into the churchyard, the priest's entering the church with the sacrament while followed by the people, and the pulling away of the Lenten curtain.

1
.   In the celebrated late-fourteenth-century retable in Norwich Cathedral the flagellation scene shows Christ with arms tied above his head to a pillar, and torturers with three-branched scourges.

2
.   The maximum under Mosaic Law (cf. Deuteronomy xxv, 3). Sixteen men each giving forty lashes with an eight-tipped scourge might result in 5,120 wounds to Christ's body. In various late-medieval devotions and revelations the numbering of Christ's wounds varied between 4,732, 5,475, even 6,666.

3
.   Margery had visited the scene of this incident in Jerusalem (chapter 29).

4
.   In the Wakefield Mystery Play of the Scourging, Mary offers to carry the cross; see
English Mystery Plays,
ed. P. Happé (Penguin, 1975), P. 519.

5
.   cf. the York Crucifixion Play. ‘It failis a foote and more, /The senous [sinews] are so gone ynne' (Happé, p. 529).

6
.   The cross is similarly raised and dropped into a mortise in the York Crucifixion Play (Happé, p. 533).

7
.   Margery had seen this stone for herself in Jerusalem (chapter 29).

1
.    cf.
Meditationes Vitae Christi:
‘If you will use your powers, you too will know how to obey, serve, console, and comfort [Our Lady] so that she may eat a little …' (chapter 83).

2
.   cf.
Meditationes Vitae Christi:
‘But then there was a knock at the door … John went to the door, and looking out recognized Peter, and said, “It is Peter.” And Our Lady said, “Let him in.” Thereupon Peter entered shamefacedly, with great sobbing and weeping' (chapter 84).

3
.   Perhaps the Chapel of the Apparition, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which Margery herself had visited (chapter 30). The risen Christ's appearing first to his mother (in contradiction of Mark xvi, 9, where he appears first to Mary Magdalene) was a widespread medieval tradition.

4
.   ‘Hail, holy parent'

1
.   i.e. 2 February. Margery's experience here recalls that of Mary of Oignies, who at Candlemas had a vision of our Lady offering her son in the Temple and of Simeon receiving him in his arms. cf. the English Ltfe of Mary; ed. by C. Horstmann, ‘Prosalegenden: Die Legenden des MS Douce 114',
Anglia
8 (1885), p. 173.

1
.   Evidently St Michael's Church at Mintlyn, just east of Lynn, now in ruins.

1
.   Denny Abbey, a house of Franciscan nuns, near Waterbeach, northeast of Cambridge. The mid-fourteenth-century refectory survives; fragments of the church are incorporated into an eighteenth-century house.

1
.   Probably alluding to Margery's meditations on the infancy of Christ

1
.   See chapter 8.

1
.   Extant records suggest a Margery Kempe became a member of the Trinity Guild at Lynn before Easter 1438.

2
.   i.e. 28 April 1438.

1
.   The Priory of Our Lady at Walsingham, one of the most celebrated places of pilgrimage in medieval England with its image of the Virgin and shrine of the Holy House.

2
.   Romans viii, 31.

1
.   Probably 2 April 1433.

2
.   In England the Host and the cross were usually raised from the Easter Sepulchre early on Easter morning.

1
.   Probably referring to hostilities in 1433 between Poland and the Teutonic Order, to which Danzig belonged.

2
.   When the church at Wilsnack in Brandenburg was burned down in 1383, three Hosts were reputedly found in the ruins, miraculously unscathed and sprinkled with blood. The site became the object of pilgrimage; see J. Sumption,
Pilgrimage
(London, 1975), pp. 282-4.

3
.   By 1433 there were serious disagreements over trading privileges and payment of dues between England and the Teutonic Order.

4
.   Margery's amanuensis spells it ‘Strawissownd', i.e. Stralsund in Pomerania, a Hansa town.

1
.   Margery's giving of her age here suggests that she was born c. 1373.

2
.   Probably 10 June 1433.

1
.   i.e. the period of eight days beginning with the day of the festival; 11-18 June in 1433.

2
.   i.e. Psalm cxxvi, 5-6: ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.'

3
.   They call her an English ‘sterte', which means ‘tail', referring to a very old jibe on the continent that English people had tails.

1
.   St Bridget of Sweden and Blessed Dorothea of Montau were among those who went on pilgrimage to Aachen, a place of pilgrimage for its four great relics: the smock the Virgin wore at Christ's birth, the swaddling clothes of Jesus, the cloth which received St John the Baptist's head, and the loin cloth that Christ wore on the cross. By St Margaret's Day Margery probably means 20 July here.

1
.   The only appearance of Margery's surname in her book.

2
.   i.e. declining a humble fish but eating a better one.

3
.   i.e. Cardinal Beaufort; see chapter 71.

1
.   Allowing for Margery's travels from Aachen, this is perhaps 1 August 1434-

2
.   Margery here mistakes Sheen for Syon Abbey. Henry V founded a
Carthusian monastery at Sheen, Surrey, and also, on the other side of the Thames from Sheen, a Brigettine house of Mount Syon, which in 1431 was moved further downriver to Isleworth (now the site of the Duke of Northumberland's Syon House). The Carthusians of Sheen and the Brigettines of Syon formed a great centre of contemplative piety in fifteenth-century England. The ‘Pardon of Syon' was an indulgence for pilgrims to the abbey; it was available at Lammastide.

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