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The Case Of Margery Kempe, Mary Marshall Taylor
The Case Of Margery Kempe, Mary Marshall Taylor
Honors Theses
There are few today who would consider Margery Kempe as an individual displaying characteristics of a normal, well-adjusted person. As a woman and representative of her era, Margery is atypical. In W. A. Pantin's words: "Margery was of course abnormal in several ways, but she was an abnormal specimen of what was a large and familiar class of devout lay people...," one whose spiritual experiences were realized in the fifteenth century, but who is a fourteenth-century product. As a mystic, David Knowles evaluates her as the "less highly respectable Margery Kempe." Among her townsmen her identity is not especially clear, …