“The Book of Margery Kempe,” a work…

“The Book of Margery Kempe,” a work considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language, had been dictated by its apparently illiterate author to two clerks from about 1432 and produced in relatively large numbers in 1436, indicating people’s increasing interest in themselves and their relationship to the world.

The book chronicles, to some extent, the author’s extensive pilgrimages to various holy sites in Europe and Asia.

A religious mystic and the daughter of a mayor of Lynn, she had married John Kempe in 1393 and bore fourteen children before beginning in 1414 a series of pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, Germany, and Spain.

Her descriptions of her travels and her religious ecstasies, which often included “boystous” crying spells, are narrated in an unaffected prose style that uses such contemporary expressions as “thou wost no more what thou blaberest than Balamis asse.”