One of the most influential records of voices and visions within the Christian tradition is The Book of Margery Kempe. Margery, who was mother to fourteen children, a beer-maker and owner of a failed domestic grain mill, chose a life of prayer, chastity, fasting and pilgrimage after a series of mystical experiences. Like most women of her time, she was illiterate. Dictated to scribes in the early fifteenth century, the Book is widely regarded to be the first autobiography in the English language.

Margery’s visions often involve more than one of the senses, and voices play a prominent role. The Book opens with an account of her suicidal despair after the birth of her first child, in which she experiences devils mauling her and shouting threats. She is consoled by a vision of Christ as a handsome young man sitting by her bedside, talking with her and addressing her as His daughter. Later, she describes an experience of hearing music so sweet that she leaps out of bed, thinking herself in paradise.

The Book is shaped by Margery’s conversations with the Lord, often described as visitations while she is praying or contemplating, and by experiences in which she sees not only with her ‘ghostly’ but also her ‘bodily’ eye. In her visions, Margery enters into a dramatic spiritual world where she takes part in Biblical history – assisting at Christ’s birth, or making Mary ‘a hot drink of gruel and spiced wine’ to comfort her after His death. She is sometimes terrified by demonic visions, often grotesquely sexual. She repeatedly describes her mysterious ‘cryings’, the physical mark of her divine inspiration. Her weeping, often evoked by images of holy things, is compulsive, public and extreme: ‘krying and rorying’ breaking out however much she tries to contain it.

Margery’s extreme emotional responses and displays of loud wailing, writhing and weeping were often treated with scepticism by both lay people and clergy in the communities in which she lived. She was tried for heresy multiple times in her life but never convicted. Exactly why she was accused is unclear, but possible reasons include preaching (which was forbidden to women), wearing all white even though she was married, and the challenges she posed to conventional versions of worship. One of the most interesting aspects of her life is her relationship with her husband, who she eventually managed to convince to live chastely with her.

Part of Margery Kempe’s significance today lies in the richly autobiographical nature of her book. She provides us not just with a spiritual and social commentary, but also with one of the most powerful insights we have into the experience of ordinary women in the Middle Ages.