The Book of Margery Kempe

Written in the 1430s and dictated to scribes, this is the spiritual autobiography of a Lynn merchant's wife. Kempe records her conversion after illness, her vow of chastity within marriage, pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago, and repeated conflicts with priests, mayors, and fellow travellers who distrust her weeping and her claims of conversation with Christ. Domestic life, business failure, and heresy examinations sit beside visions. The book is a first-person account of a laywoman's vocation, not a saint's official life and not a treatise on mysticism.

Bound in cream vegetable parchment with colour pictorial boards in illuminated style. Pale blue slipcase. Mottled cream endpapers. 23x.616.9cm.