She many times met with men of that district who said to her, "Woman, give up this life that you lead and go and spin, and card wool, as other women do, and do not suffer so much shame and so much unhappiness. We would not suffer so much for any money on earth."

Then she said to them, "I do not suffer as much sorrow as I would do for our Lord's love, for I only suffer cutting words, and our merciful Lord Christ Jesus...suffered hard strokes, bitter scourgings, and shameful death at the last, for me and for all mankind, blessed may he be."

On a night, as this creature lay in her bed with her husband, she heard a sound of melody so sweet and delectable, that she thought she had been in Paradise, and therewith she started out of her bed and said: 'Alas, that ever I did sin! It is full merry in Heaven.'

Patience is more worthy than miracle-working.

Then the lady's priest came to her, saying, "Woman, Jesus is long since dead." When her crying ceased, she said to the priest, "Sir, his death is as fresh to me as if he had died this same day, and so, I think, it ought to be to you and to all Christian people."

She came before the Archbishop and fell down on her knees, the Archbishop saying full boisterously unto her: "Why weepest thou, woman?" She, answering, said: "Sir, ye shall wish some day that ye had wept as sore as I."

She greeted the Vicar, asking him if she could - in the afternoon, when he had eaten�speak with him for an hour or two of the love of God. He, lifting up his hands and blessing himself, said, "Bless us! How could a woman occupy one or two hours with the love of our Lord? I shan't eat a thing till I find out what you can say of our Lord God in the space of an hour."

As an intimate record of personal religious experience it has few equals. The marks of accuracy, sincerity, and reality are stamped on every page.

What Kempe describes to us is a truly embodied spiritual experience. Kempe has no doubt about this, and it is this unshakeable belief that communicates itself down the centuries through the text...the question remains as to how Kempe manages to convey the phenomenological intensity of Margery's experience twenty or more years after the event? First, Kempe is an expert storyteller, and it is likely that she retold such narratives as discussed here on many occasions to many people, clergy and fellow pilgrims, through oral testimony and public performance. Second, central to the orthodox liturgy, is the conception that devotional words uttered are expressed through the senses. Extreme emotion which, in modern times, is viewed as a sign of mental instability, was a fundamental feature of spirituality, conveying both the seriousness and truth of the religious experience... With this knowledge, when we return to Kempe's text, we can listen to Margery's voice within a framework more akin to medieval England than the twentieth century West. Margery's sensory experiences are not without cultural and historical provenance, rather she draws upon a range of mystical sources grounded in religious and cultural traditions known throughout medieval Europe. Kempe's embodied descriptions cease to be tactile or olfactory hallucinations or grandiose ideas (marriage to God), but become experiences that result from spiritual passion.... As argued earlier, religiosity was sanity, whereas madness amounted to a refusal to accept the truth that was God. Furthermore, Margery's experiences are intelligible not only in terms of religious traditions, but also in her terms of her career; Kempe construes Margery as a holy mystic

Margery was more of a religious hysteric than a mystic. But she gives a vibrant account of her life as a woman to whom religion and weeping were as attractive as sex was to the Wife of Bath

Margery Kempe was a merchant's wife in early 15th-century Norfolk who was halfway through a comfortable life when she decided to give up her smart clothes and good table and marry Christ instead. Briskly informing her husband, with whom she had 14 children, that she would rather see him beheaded than have sex with him again, she set off on a series of highly idiosyncratic pilgrimages which took her as far as Jerusalem. The jury is out on whether she was experiencing post-partum psychosis or spiritual ecstasy (she claimed that all 12 Apostles had turned up for her nuptials with Jesus) but there is no doubting the outrageous originality of her voice.