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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, …