The works of Margery Kempe (The Book of Margery Kempe) & Julian of Norwich (Revelations of Divine Love) are not obscure. It hits a sweet spot for me between the literary and the irresistibly readable the kind of book that sucks you right in and delivers you back to the world with fresh perspective. This debut from Victoria MacKenzie is beautiful, insightful, moving, wry & inspiring. Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
If you’re new to these figures, you might be captivated by their bizarre life stories and religious obsession, but I thought the bare telling was somewhat lacking in literary interest. But nowadays, we would doubtless question her mental health – likewise for Julian when you learn that her shewings arose from a time of fevered hallucination.
She was a bold and passionate woman, and the accusations of heresy were no doubt motivated by a wish to see her humiliated for claiming spiritual authority. Again and again, she was told to know her place and not dare to speak on behalf of God or question the clergy. A married mother of 14, she earned scorn for preaching, prophesying and weeping in public. I didn’t know Margery’s story, so found her sections a little more interesting. She allows each to tell her life story through alternating first-person strands that only braid together very late on when she posits that Margery visited Julian in her cell and took into safekeeping the manuscript of her “shewings.” I finished reading Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love earlier this year and, apart from a couple of biographical details (she lost her husband and baby daughter to an outbreak of plague, and didn’t leave her cell in Norwich for 23 years), this added little to my experience of her work. Two female medieval mystics, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, are the twin protagonists of Mackenzie’s debut. Sensual, vivid and humane, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain cracks history open to reveal the lives of two extraordinary women Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief revelations more the powerful than the world is ready to hear. The two women have stories to tell one another. She has told no one of her own visions - and knows that time is running out for her to do so.
Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty-three years. Her visions of Christ - which have long alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband's abuse - have placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic. Margery has left her fourteen children and husband behind to make her journey.
In the year of 1413, two women meet for the first time in the city of Norwich. An astounding debut, both epic and intimate, about grief, trauma, revelation, and the hidden lives of women - by a major new talent
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