March 1, 2021
In Illuminations (2012), Sharratt imagined the inner life of Hildegard von Bingen; here she gives the same attention to Margery Kempe, a fourteenth-century pilgrim whose memoir is thought to be the first written in English. As the vain and privileged daughter of the mayor of Bishop's Lynn, England, Margery has few options since most are stifled by societal constraints and a cruel husband. After the birth of her first child, she suffers from postpartum depression that is broken by an ecstatic vision of her Beloved that gives her renewed religious purpose. Fourteen pregnancies later, she leaves her family to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. En route, she encounters Dame Julian of Norwich, an anchoress who entrusts Margery with her manuscript, Revelations of Divine Love. Sharratt evokes the sights and smells of medieval England as viscerally as she does Margery's divine ecstasy, immersing readers in both her inner and outer journeys. Though much of the danger is driven by the upheaval in the Catholic Church, Revelations will appeal to any reader interested in tales driven by a flawed woman with a certain purpose.
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Starred review from January 15, 2021
With this novel about Margery Kempe, mother of 14-turned-pilgrim and preacher, Sharratt's obsession with medieval women mystics continues. Margery, like most middle-class young women in 14th-century England, is not allowed to choose her own husband, and her true love is lost at sea. At first, she's resigned to her parents' choice for her, John Kempe, a brewer in the provincial town of Bishop's Lynn, but after the birth of their first child, she suffers what now might be diagnosed as postpartum psychosis: She is hounded by hellish visions of demons, but one day, an unforgettable vision of Christ restores her to sanity. Her contentment with domesticity sours over years of nonstop childbearing--the effects of 14 pregnancies are recounted in chilling detail. In desperation, Margery insists that John join her in a mutual vow of chastity, and he acquiesces, letting Margery embark on longed-for pilgrimages, first to Jerusalem and later to Spain, to follow the path of Santiago de Compostela. Before leaving England, she meets Julian of Norwich, a mystic and "anchoress" voluntarily confined in a cell attached to a church. (Readers will recall Hildegard von Bingen's ordeal as an anchoress's companion in Sharratt's 2012 Illuminations.) Julian validates, by example, Margery's belief in a personal relationship with God, free of clerical mediation. Julian also entrusts her own manuscript--doubly transgressive because it's in English and a woman wrote it--to Margery. In the Holy Land, Margery's religious ecstasies, marked by loud weeping, are offensive, as Sharratt wryly notes, only to English Catholics; Eastern Christians are fine with it. Drawn from Kempe's actual autobiography, the novel is enhanced by Sharratt's storytelling ability. The pilgrimage sections are rescued from tedium by Margery's heedlessness of social opprobrium and her resulting clashes with fellow pilgrims. Readers will root for Margery as she wins friends among a minority of kindred spirits, who, like her, dare to imagine such heresies as Scriptures in English and women writing books. Sharratt's gift for grounding larger issues in everyday lives makes for historical fiction at its best.
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