Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich — Religious Mystics with Victoria MacKenzie

Religious mystics Margery of Kempe and Julian of Norwich lived in close proximity to one another in time and place, yet the lives of these two medieval women couldn’t have been more different. One traveled the world in relentless pursuit of spiritual validation, while the other withdrew into a walled cell. One boldly proclaimed her visions of Christ while the other recorded quiet revelations. One authored the first autobiography in English while the other penned the first known book in English by a woman. But here’s where it gets truly fascinating: these two women actually met—a fateful encounter depicted in guest Victoria MacKenzie’s award-winning debut novel, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain. Join us as we discuss these two incredible women whose accounts of divine encounters were destined for rediscovery centuries after being lost to time.

Mentioned in this episode

The British Library’s exhibit: Medieval Women: In Their Own Words

Highgate Cemetery

For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on My Little Pain by Victoria MacKenzie

The Book of Margery Kempe

Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich

Bridget of Sweden

Lost Ladies of Lit podcast Episode No. 164 on Christine de Pizan

Lost Ladies of Lit podcast Episode No. 34 on Anna Komnene

Lost Ladies of Lit podcast Episode No. 70 on Julian Berners

Transcript

This transcript is auto-generated; please pardon typographical errors.

KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew here with my co host, Amy Helmes. 

AMY HELMES: Hey there! Kim, I think you know this, but earlier this year I did a special podcast for our subscribers on my recent adventures in Highgate Cemetery in London. I met a few lost ladies of lit there.

KIM: Yeah, I am so jealous. I wish I had been there for that whole trip and especially the Highgate Cemetery piece. 

AMY: I know. And it was a perfect day. The weather was beautiful. And then to top it all off, after I went to the cemetery, I made my way over to the British Library to see this special exhibit called Medieval Women: In Their Own Words. It was incredible. I saw Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies. I saw Anna Komnene's The Alexiad. The Book of St. Albans by Julian Berners. 

KIM: Oh my gosh, yeah, these are all books we've mentioned in previous episodes. That's so amazing that you got to see them. 

AMY: I was pinching myself the whole time. And it was also a really fun exhibit. too, because it was interactive. So they had different smelling stations along the way where you could experience these different scents in medieval women's lives, like what their shampoo would have smelled like, you could even smell the scents, both good and bad, that were described by Julian of Norwich in her Revelations of Divine Love.

KIM: Okay, I can totally imagine smelling the earthy tang of medieval shampoo or getting a whiff of the pungent brimstone in Julian of Norwich's divine visions. Wow. 

AMY: Yeah, and I should also add that The Book of Margery Kempe was among those on display too. So, I mean, it was just over the top incredible. 

KIM: So I first encountered Julian and Margery, you know, we're on a first name basis, um, in an undergrad course on female mysticism. And let me tell you, I was captivated from the get go. These women were both deeply radical and surprisingly relatable. 

AMY: Completely. And I was so thankful to be able to see, you know, all this stuff on display at the museum. Unfortunately, I think it just wrapped up earlier this month, but it did inspire me so much and it led me directly to today's special guest. I cannot wait to talk to her. 

KIM: Okay, so let's raid the medieval stacks and get started.

[intro music plays]

AMY: I first encountered today's guest, Victoria MacKenzie, at this British Library exhibit that I just mentioned. I was browsing the gift shop and I came across her book there. It's called For Thy Great Pain, Have Mercy on My Little Pain. And it jumped out at me. And when I read the back cover description, I was so tempted to buy it. It's a fictional account of the real life encounter between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, of which very little is actually known. And unfortunately I was traveling for two weeks with only a small carry-on suitcase. So I knew I couldn't buy it at that moment, but I snapped a picture so that I would remember and I bought it as soon as I returned to LA. Then I dashed off an email to Victoria, we're going to call her Vicky in this podcast, and I asked her, hey, please join us for a conversation. We need to talk about these women. So Vicky, welcome. We are so glad to have you on the show. 

VICKY: Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm absolutely thrilled to be here.

KIM: So Vicky, you're originally from Sussex, but you've lived in Scotland for the past 18 years. We're wondering, did you by any chance make it down to see this exhibit Amy is raving about at the British Library? 

VICKY: Yeah, I did. I went down at the start of February and I was also absolutely blown away by it. There's something about actually seeing those physical objects that is so special. It really sort of brings the women closer to you. And it was actually the first time I'd ever seen either Margery Kempe or Julian of Norwich's manuscripts. So that was really special. I was actually quite moved. 

AMY: Yeah, it's so wonderful that they've been preserved and that they're there to see.

KIM: Yeah. So, Vicky, let's talk about the genesis of this latest novel of yours. What made you want to write about this encounter between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe? 

VICKY: So, initially, I thought I wanted to write a novel about Julian of Norwich. I just knew that she had been an anchoress, that she'd lived in this room for 30 years by herself, and I was curious about why she wanted to do that with her life. So I started reading about her, and I very quickly came across the figure of Margery Kempe because they are contemporaries and they lived in a similar part of the world. So you can't really research Julian without coming across Margery. And as soon as I read Margery, I just couldn't let her go. There's something about her voice in her book, which I'm sure we will talk about that plenty, that really touched me. And I just thought as a novelist, wouldn't it be really interesting and fun to juxtapose these two incredibly different voices, these two fascinating women in a novel and just kind of put them together and explore them. And then as I was doing a bit more research, I just couldn't believe it. I realized that they had actually met, which just seemed like a kind of novelist's dream. 

AMY: Isn't that a great feeling when the universe is telling you, like, “Yes, you are right on track. That's what you should write about!” Yeah. 

VICKY: Yes, it felt meant to be.

AMY: So like Kim, I also read excerpts of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe when I was in college, but it does take a bit of effort, I think, to read their work, given the difference in the language. What they wrote is all there in your book. You're able to incorporate it in different ways and it makes it so much more accessible to a modern reader. I think really it's a perfect introduction to these women, especially for people who aren't necessarily wanting to pick up a 15th century text and try to pick through, you know, the difference in language. 

VICKY: Yeah, totally. So, I mean, I was thinking to myself, okay, you're writing a novel about 15th century medieval women. This isn't necessarily kind of the most obvious hot topic for a novel that you've ever thought of, Vicky. Um, so I was sort of thinking, how can I balance the fact that maybe the subject matter is a bit niche? So it was important to me that I made the voices quite accessible, I suppose, to kind of balance out the weirdness, if you like. So it's an experimental novel in some ways, in terms of the structure and in terms of the subject matter, but I wanted it to feel like they were talking directly to you, like they were kind of confiding their life story to you over a cup of tea or something. So I wanted that immediacy. 

KIM: It completely feels like that. It feels very immediate and present. So before we go any further, I think we need to explain who these two women were. They both had extremely different lives and very different countenances, but they also actually had a lot in common too. So let's start with Julian of Norwich. Who was she, Vicky? Can you talk about her a little bit?

VICKY: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, Julian of Norwich lived in Norfolk in the east of England in the late-14th, early-15th centuries. She had a series of visions of Christ and God when she was really ill when she was about 30. And then we know that at some point in her life, maybe when she was around 40, she became an anchoress, which is like being a nun, but you're confined to a single room. And that she spent the rest of her life in there. And we know that she wrote a book, Revelations of Divine Love, which is the first known book in English by a woman. But apart from that, we know very, very little about her. She put almost no autobiographical detail in her book. As a novelist, that was quite interesting for me. I had a kind of blank canvas to invent a life. Margery, although she has a lot in common with Julian, couldn't be more different in some way. So she lived at roughly the same time as Julian. She's about 30 years younger. She also lived in Norfolk, what's now Kings Lynn, about 40 miles away from Norwich where Julian was. But she most certainly was not an anchoress. She was very much a woman in the world, of the world. So she was married to a merchant. Her father had been an MP and the mayor, and she had 14 children that we know of, that she mentions in her book. And she was someone who was very much part of her community. She wrote a book, The Book of Margery Kempe. And so we know a lot about her life from that, really kind of day to day details and, you know, things about her family, things about her community. She also claimed to have a series of visions. Unlike Julian's, which all seem to come within just a few days, Margery's visions started after the birth of her first child, John, when she was in her early twenties. And then they go on for many, many years, these sort of conversations, almost, that she has with Christ. So it's quite a different kind of mystical experience from Julian. Um, the other thing that's astonishing about Margery is she inherited money from her father and this gave her rockable freedom. She persuaded her husband to give her permission to go off on a whole load of pilgrimages around the world. So here she is, just an ordinary woman from Norfolk in the medieval period, going off to Rome, to Santiago de Compostela, to Jerusalem. So she had an absolutely extraordinary life. Very, very different from a woman like Julian who lived in one room. 

KIM: Yeah. I mean, wow. It couldn't be more different, and especially given that time for, like you said, a woman to be traveling like that. That's amazing. The Book of Margery Kempe is considered the first autobiography in the English language by a man or a woman, which is pretty incredible, but she didn't technically write this book. Do you want to explain that a little bit more, Vicky? 

VICKY: Yeah, so she was probably fairly illiterate, which was not untypical of a woman at her time and her class. And we know that she dictated her life story to a series of scribes. Um, it's not completely clear who they were. It's probable that the first scribe was her son, John. Um, he had actually lived in Danzig, which is now Gdansk in Poland, for many years as a merchant. And it's possible that his English actually wasn't all that great by the time he came to write this book. And Margery complained that his, you know, letters are ill formed and she decides to give it to a priest and ask a priest to be her scribe instead. And the priest can't actually read what the first scribe has written. So the book's quite a botched job, if you like. It doesn't have a kind of like a solid chronology. It starts and stops and then it starts again. You can imagine what it's like as a writer, just dictating a book, this kind of one-off. There's no possibility for Margery to redraft, to edit. She doesn't know what, you know, what she's already said. So she kind of goes around in circles. It's quite a chaotic book, but it's also got this amazing energy to it. And even though there's this kind of layer of. You know, who were these scribes and did they really write what Margery told them to write? I think you still get this amazing sense of the woman behind these words. It really feels like this bold, boastful, lonely, strange, oversharing woman talking about her life. Um, so just the kind of vividness really struck me when I read it. 

AMY: Yeah, and that's why I think we can say, yes, she wrote it, because her personality is there. I mean, she dictated it, yes, but her voice is so saturated throughout this book, and it reminds me of … I kept getting “Wife of Bath” personality. You know, she's got that very bold, say-whatever-is-on-her-mind feeling about her. So both Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe suffered traumas in their lives. Help us explain how that ties into their mystical episodes. 

VICKY: Yeah, so, um, Julian does tell us that she has her sixteen visions that come over a few days. She calls them “showings,” which is a word I just really liked. They come at a time when she is really sick with a fever. She's so sick that her priest has come to her bed and given her the last rites. So we know that she was expected to die at this point. She then starts to have these visions. She sees Christ dying on the cross. All these different things happen to her, and they're so visceral and sensory. You know, she sees the devil and she smells him. She sees Jesus, and he actually invites her to take a look in his wound. I mean, it's just so gory. Um. I just found it astonishing. So she looks in the wound and there she sees the kingdom of heaven. So it really, it gets quite trippy. And I think for a modern reader, there's that temptation to say, well, she had these mystical visions because she was ill and kind of explain them with that medical background. And I think that's fine. But for me, because I was wanting to tell my story in first person, and I was really, you know, doing my best within limits to inhabit that kind of medieval worldview. I didn't want to just dismiss those visions as if they were hallucinations just brought on by the fever. I really wanted to allow Julian, you know, because she thought she'd had these visions. So I really wanted to allow the possibility that they were real, basically. And then with Margery, we know from her book that she has her first vision fairly soon after the birth of her first child. And she tells us in quite visceral detail that she had a difficult pregnancy. She had a difficult birth. She basically she loses her mind. Her keys are taken away from her by her husband, which seems at that time to be quite a symbolic thing of taking away her power, her responsibility, and saying like, “No, you are a sick woman.” And then there's this astonishing scene where she describes where Jesus actually comes and sits on her bed by her and talks to her, and then he kind of disappears up to heaven and she sees him floating up. And at that point she says that all her senses are returned to her and she's well again, and her husband gives her back her keys. And of course, as modern readers, again, we're thinking, okay, you know, postpartum psychosis, all of these things. That may well be the case. But as with Julian, I just wanted to put those things out there for the reader and then let the reader make up their own mind about Margery's visions. And Margery's visions, you know, as I say, they keep coming back to her throughout her life, very different from Julian's. They're almost conversational. She's having chats with Christ, basically. They're really quite domestic. You know, she walks with him. She confides in him. He's almost like her best friend. It was really astonishing and just so bold of Margery to have these visions and then to share them with the world, basically. It's incredibly brave. 

KIM: Yeah, I agree. So you write so eloquently about their personal tragedies in your novel, and I think it would be great to have you read a few excerpts so our listeners can hear.

VICKY: Yeah, I'd be really happy to. So I'll begin with a little section from Margery Kempe. So this is from quite near the start of the novel and I hope you'll get a sense of the voice of Margery from this because she's quite direct, she's quite bold and it's quite different from Julian's more contemplative, calm voice.

Margery — Christ first visited me some months after the birth of my eldest child, when I labored for more hours than a single day can hold. I suffered much when I was with child, with vomiting and aches, and I was afraid it was punishment for my sins. I also desire to eat strange things. Clods of mud and leather soles from boots. My husband wasn't pleased and told me not to eat these things. He said that if I didn't stop, he would have me imprisoned in my chamber and he would put shackles on my arms. At that, I quite lost my reason. I ranted and screamed and tore at my clothes and hair, and I was indeed restrained as my husband had threatened, and he took away my keys. Then my labour pains began, and they were shackles themselves, pinning me down and causing me to roar. My neighbour Agnes was at my side, to aid me through the berth, but she tutted at my cries. I spent more time gossiping outside my room than rubbing my belly with rose oil. When the child emerged, I thought he was the devil come to split me in two and toss my entrails to the dogs. I prayed to Saint Margaret to relieve me of the terror and let me die quickly. But she did not hear my pleas. When Agnes pulled the devil from between my damp thighs, he brought other demons, who pawed at me and hauled me about the bed all night and day. 

AMY: Such a haunting description of childbirth. And it also reminds me of the exhibit that we saw, there was a whole section on what childbirth was like in the medieval era for women. And I love that your language is accessible as we talked about, but you really do feel like you're transported in time, right Kim? 

KIM: Yes, absolutely. I mean, it perfectly feels like you are there in that moment in that room with her. Yeah. 

VICKY: I think in her book, a genuine sense of suffering really comes across. It's so moving. When I was writing the voices, accessibility was important, but I did also want to give that kind of oddness. To let the reader know or to remind them this is 600 years ago. So sort of slightly odd grammar at times and obviously like vocabulary as well. So that was, yeah, that was important to me to get that kind of blend of the here and now and the long ago.

KIM: It almost has a poetic feel to it, the way the words flow, which makes it really beautiful. Yeah, I love it.

VICKY: So Julian's voice is so different, you know, in her book. She's profound and wise and calm and contemplative. And I just really enjoy playing with that and the juxtaposition with Margery. As I said about Julian, we don't know much about her life, so I've kind of invented a whole tragic backstory for her, if you like, to think about why she became an anchoress. And the other thing I should say is that Julian and Margery lived at a time of successive waves of the plague of Black Death. And so I really wanted to incorporate that and to make that part of my novel as well. You'll hear that in this section I'm going to read.

Julian — Soon after the wedding, I was with child, and when she was born, we called her Elizabeth after my dead sister. She was a fine black curled creature with her father's blue eyes and my own long limbs. Like all new parents, we thought our child the most splendid ever to be born. The pestilence that came then was swifter than the first. A person hardly knew they were ill before they were dead. Simon left me first. One morning he could not get out of bed. I rushed out to buy a pinch of saffron, which had been much discussed lately as a cure. I brewed the yellow orange threads with warm water, letting them steep for half an hour, and made him drink it down. But then he developed a headache and his throat was sore. Soon the fever took over and he was too weak to sit up. He sweated and complained of chills. I made another saffron brew and cradled his head in my lap, dripping the bright liquid onto his tongue. But I knew by then, and sent for Master Walter. He did not come in time. Simon died in my arms, clawing at the air, without the priest's oil or the chance to confess. His last words were, “Love God,” or were they, “For the love of God?” My heart grew as icy as his brow. I thought that nothing worse could ever befall me. 

KIM: Beautiful, and two completely different voices, but yet it works together. 

AMY: It's a good explanation, whether it's the right one or not, because she was older when she decided to become an anchoress, which is such an extreme decision, right?

VICKY: Yeah, totally. There are little hints in the images that she uses in her book, Revelations, that she was familiar with a domestic life. So I think it felt to me plausible that she had been a wife and mother, even though we don't know. Some people wonder if she had been a nun before she became an anchoress, but nuns were amazing at paperwork. And there's no record that Julian, “the nun” subsequently became the famous anchoress Julian of Norwich. So we don't know, but it's much debated, but obviously as a fiction writer, you come down one way or the other and to invent, which is very fun. 

AMY: One of my favorite parts of your book, too, is the ceremony that she goes through to enter into the cell. Is that based on research? Or did you just imagine? 

VICKY: Yeah, yeah. So the idea of becoming an anchoress was really that, as I said, it was that initial impulse to write the book. So I did lots of research on the anchoress life. And that ceremony, it was just so full of theater and I really enjoyed writing it. So I love the contrast. If you're a nun, you become this bride of Christ. You wear white. It's almost like a wedding ceremony, but with an anchoress, you die to life and you lie on the stone floor of the church with a black cloth over you and monks sing an actual Requiem mass for you as if you're dead. I just seemed so kind of goth and extreme. It was such fun to write. And then the bishop leads you around to your little room that's adjoined to the church where you're going to spend the rest of your life. And there's more ceremony where he sort of says, you know, let her enter if she wants to enter type thing and you step in and then you're bricked up and that's it.

AMY: The bricking up is, I mean, that is like permanent! It's not like there's a door there. 

KIM: No. I know. I was holding my breath through that whole part. I just, uh, yeah, it's kind of thrilling. 

VICKY: Yeah. I should say that with anchoresses, there are kind of different levels of extremity, if you like. So some anchoresses were just locked in bad enough. Some could actually walk in the grounds of the churchyard, so they sort of had a bit of outdoor space, but I opted for kind of “max anchoress” with my novel, so I went for the extreme, and also I just was fascinated by the fact that when you died as an anchoress, you might be buried in your cell, so your kind of predecessors, the bones were under you, and you're basically walking on your own grave.

AMY: She did have a servant. 

VICKY: It’s not all bad. 

AMY: There was a little window where meals could be passed through and a servant girl came and went in your book, at least in the telling. So I was starting to think, okay, if I had internet and TV, could I do this? Maybe. 

VICKY: Yeah, I was starting to think, is this just a really extreme writing residency?

KIM: Oh, I love that as a writing residency theme! But she does go through this period where you kind of describe what it would be like to sort of come to terms with the decision she made to be an anchoress, she's locked away in what that really does with her mind and that was fascinating. 

VICKY: Yeah, I didn't want to give her an easy ride. I wanted to humanize these women. I wanted to inhabit them. And I guess, you know, as a writer, you're sort of channeling a bit of yourself. So I was thinking, how would I respond to being locked in this room? And just using Julian's voice from her book as well, you know, she seemed like someone who would be quite observant. So I had things like her observations of the natural world out the window or the little creatures that come into her cell, she'd be someone who would pay attention to that kind of thing. Whereas with Margery, no, Margery never observes the natural world. She is not interested. So that was really fun. But you're, you're right as well, what you say about she had a maid. One of the things that I found so interesting researching the anchoress is that you couldn't just be anyone. You actually had to be quite well off because you had to pay your way to be an anchoress. So you had to be able to pay for a maid and what an extraordinary life story of those maids. They're kind of, you know, pseudo-anchoresses themselves, but without any of the kudos, if you like, of the anchoress life. Because Julian was actually quite famous as an anchoress and, you know, pilgrims would come to her window and to pray with her and to ask her wise counsel and so on. Actually for a medieval woman, career options aren't great. Being an anchoress is something that brings you some status and some safety. 

AMY: Yeah. 

VICKY: So I found that really, really interesting and started to think of it in actually quite a more positive light by the end of my book. 

AMY: We talked a little bit about the visions, so I didn't know if you had more to say on that front…?

VICKY: I think one of the things to say is that people are skeptical of Margery's visions in a way that they are less so of Julian. And I think that comes across in her own book, too, with people accusing her of making them up, of saying things for attention. I found that really sad. You know, she really seemed like someone who was quite lonely and vulnerable in her own community. With Julian, what really struck me is the visceralness of them. I wasn't prepared for that, you know, the really physical, up close descriptions of Jesus's face as he's dying, like his nose turning blue, this cold wind drying his skin. She doesn't hold back at all. It was just, you know, you think of mystics … for me, I just think of something a bit ethereal, a little bit misty, you know, kind of golden light. Whereas actually these visions were kind of earthy and graphic, um, not what I expected at all. So I really, when writing those visions, I really kind of enjoyed being a bit gross, basically, with them!

AMY: It lends credence to what she's saying, that it's not just like a glowy light, that she can be that descriptive. You're like, “Well, wait a second.” I will say I'm a skeptic, but I've been thinking about this a lot because, especially with Margery, she kind of frames it as Christ is her lover, you know, so it's a little bit shocking there, um, but God really gives her a position of power. If she can say, “God told me to do this,” you know, I had 14 children. I feel like I'm done. So I'm going to go to my husband and say, “God told me I should no longer be your lover. I should be his lover.” Maybe she was employing this in a way, you know, 

VICKY: It does feel like it. 

AMY: “God told me I should travel the world and see all these amazing sites. God told me to do it!” She's working it.

VICKY: She is, totally. And it's amazing how convenient some of the things are that God or Christ tells her at certain points in her life. And the other thing is that Margery would have been aware of other lives of mystical women and saints at that time through preachers and so on. And there was one woman in particular, Bridget of Sweden, and it really feels like she's mapping her life onto Bridget's life and Bridget was canonized. Margery really, really wanted to be made a saint and sadly wasn't. But yeah, Bridget asked her husband for a chaste marriage. Bridget dressed in white. You know, Margery starts dressing in white and her neighbors just laugh at her. They say, you know, “You've got 14 kids, Margery! We know you're not a virgin! What are you playing at?” Um, but she'll just say, “God told me to,” and that's the end of it as far as she's concerned. 

AMY: Yeah, and it kind of has to at least, if not stop the clergy in their tracks, at least give them pause. Because their instinct is to sort of come down hard on her, punish her. But what if she's right? They kind of have to walk a fine line. And I think even more radical or shocking than saying that Christ is her lover, which is shocking, but I think even more so than that was sort of how she interacted with clergy members, right? Can you talk about that? 

VICKY: Yeah, it's so satisfying and it's absolutely wild. So she's claiming visions and for a woman in the Catholic Church in the medieval period, that's a big no-no. You cannot have direct contact with God. It has to be through your priest. The other thing she's doing that really annoys the church is she's telling people about it. For a woman to preach is also against all rules in the Catholic Church. She's risking being burnt at the stake for heresy, essentially. So she is hauled in front of these really important men of the clergy, you know, bishops and so on, and they grill her about her visions, about her faith, they kind of want to burn Margery. They want to shut her up, she's threatened and arrested all the time. And yet she always wriggles out of it. She answers back to these men in a way that is so satisfying. At one point, the Bishop of York says to her, “I've heard you've been a very wicked woman.” And she just says to him, “And I've heard you've been a very wicked man!” And it's just astonishing. 

KIM: I love her. 

VICKY: You can't believe she says it. And what's so touching is that at times she says how much her hands are shaking with fear because the stakes are so high for Margery at this point. You know, she is risking being burnt at the stake. And so she hides her hands in her cloak. And she tells us this, even while she's answering back to these men and, you know, absolutely able to answer all their questions about faith perfectly. They can never get her, you know, they can never say that she's a heretic as much as they want to. So she's frightened, but she still does it. She answers them back and she gets away with it all. And the Bishop of York is so annoyed with her at one point, he gives a man five shillings just to get her out of his sight.

KIM: It's so amazing because they're both doing things to navigate in the world. in a way. We've talked about her maybe using it to be able to travel and to do all these things. It's really brave. She's standing up, taking the risk, like you said. And then Julian is ostensibly making a choice to have some sort of control over her life in a way, in this cell, it feels like to me.

VICKY: Well, there's just so little control, I think, for a woman over her own life. So, that was one of the things that struck me about being an anchoress, is that it meant you were protected from the dangers of childbirth, for example. She was probably protected from disease as well, because as far as we know, Julian lived on into her seventies, which is a pretty decent age at that time. And Julian wrote a book and that was pretty radical and brave. As far as we know, Julian only told a very small number of people about her visions at the time because it was so dangerous. You know, she wasn't like Margery talking about it on the street, but she wrote this book and her theology is quite radical in some ways. She has these visions and she feels that God's given them to her for a reason and she doesn't understand them. She wants to spend time thinking about them, unpacking them. And some of the conclusions she comes up with are pretty risky. She talks about God's love being quite maternal as well as paternal, which is really interesting. Um, she also has this interesting idea about sin. She talks about sort of going to the kingdom of heaven and worrying about sin, because as you can imagine, being a medieval person, sin was a big deal. You know, you got hectored about it every Sunday, et cetera. And it was such an important means of controlling people to say, if you do this, you're going to burn in hell. But she says, she goes to the kingdom of heaven and sin isn't there. It's nothing. It doesn't matter. And she says, all that matters is that you live as if you love God. And I think that's something that feels now quite shocking. It's got this kind of incredibly inclusive, loving theology, essentially. It's not about punishment. It's just about love. And I think for that time, that feels pretty out there. 

KIM: So One of these women lived in a walled cell, one traveled the world. One recorded quiet revelations, and the other is proclaiming her visions loudly to the world. And yet, they may have met. So what do we actually know, if anything, about that meeting, and can you talk about how you imagined this moment?

VICKY: Yes, so we know that they met because in Margery Kempe's book, she says that she travels to Norwich to meet Julian, the anchoress, and ask her about her visions, essentially, because she's being plagued by fears that these visions are not holy, that they're from the devil, or people are saying that they're, you know, they're made up. So she goes specifically to Julian to ask her advice. What's interesting is she probably didn't know that Julian had also had visions herself, because that just wasn't that well known at the time. What's so frustrating is that then she doesn't say anything else about the meeting. She doesn't say what they talked about. She just says she spends a few days with the anchoress and gets her wise counsel. And so it was brilliant as a novelist to think, okay, I'm going to make up this entire conversation myself and think about what they might have said to each other. And one thing that was really important to me is Julian's perception of Margery when she comes to visit her. So she can't look at people who come to visit her. She has a special window where people come, but she draws a black curtain. So it's just this voice. And I decided to write this section almost like a script, like a play. It's just voice dialogue. nothing else, no narrative, no descriptions, because I felt that's all these two women had. They just had each other's voices through the curtain. So that's what I wanted to give the reader. And Margery is sometimes portrayed as a figure of ridicule, a figure of fun. You know, she's almost Jesus's girlfriend or mistress. She has this kind of sexual, physical relationship with him. I think there's even some toe-sucking. Her neighbors laugh at her. They don't take them seriously. They throw mud at her in the streets. You know, she's not someone who's got people's respect. She's not a, you know, a wise preacher or a theologian. But when she goes to Julian, I didn't want Julian to see her as a figure of ridicule. I wanted Julian to pick up on things that I felt were in Margery's book, but between the lines.

And as I said, I think that Margery was fragile, was lonely, was worried. Um, and yeah, I think she was kind of playing these visions to bolster her sense of self, her place in society. And so I have Julian hear her voice and say that Margery Kempe was the loneliest woman she had ever heard. And it was really important to me to do that because I wanted the reader to feel empathy for Margery, not just to be laughing at her. And so yes, so then they have this conversation and Margery talks about her visions. I decided to have Julian hold back because we do have a sense that Julian probably didn't tell many people about her visions. She was in a cell in the center of the city of Norwich. And heretics were burnt there at the time that Julian was in her cell, just in fact, a street away. And so in my novel, I mentioned that Julian could probably smell the smoke on the burning days because that was entirely plausible. And I thought, how, how do you live with that kind of fear? Of course, you'd keep it to yourself that you had these visions. So they have this conversation and we don't know how Julian's book, which she probably was working on as an anchoress, we don't know how it got out into the wider world. So I fictionalized a way in which she passes it through her window to Margery, because I thought it would just be such a profound symbol of one woman passing on her written word to another woman. And the thing about Margery, so she dictates her life story towards the end of her life. What on earth possessed her? What gave her the idea to do that? You know, if this is the first autobiography in English by a man or a woman… Why? Why would an ordinary woman like Margery decide that her life is worth recording? And I thought if Julian had given her this book, perhaps that would give her the idea that books were powerful. Books were a way of, you know, saying something about who you were, something that mattered to you, a way of recording things for posterity and leaving a mark. So I thought that would be quite a fun way of both suggesting how Julian's book gets out into the world, which I completely made up, and suggesting what might have inspired Margery to think, actually, perhaps the written word matters, perhaps I could do something similar.

KIM: I love that. 

AMY: I know, that kind of gives me chills when you said that, that's amazing. And like you said, people laughed at Margery then, and I think people laugh at Margery now a little bit, like, wow, this is crazy. I mean, when you read some of what's in her book, you're like, this is nuts. But, um, I had seen an earlier interview you did where you kind of talked about, like, is she unwell? You know, what's really going on? What are your thoughts on that? 

VICKY: I think it's so hard to know, and we're coming at it from 600 years later with a completely different set of understandings of the human mind, of selfhood, so it's really difficult to know. I mean, yes, perhaps Margery was unwell, and, you know, I'm not someone who actually has any religious faith myself, so in terms of thinking, were these visions true? It's very difficult for me to say yes, I think they were because, you know, that doesn't fit with my own worldview. Um, but I think that Margery just has such a remarkable strength of personality, that why would you make this up if what you were risking was your own life? I don't know, I suppose it's a way of her shaping her own narrative of, um, asserting who she is and pushing back a bit against the patriarchy. You know, I mean, she stands on the street in her town and talks about her visions and people gather around to listen. And clergy say to her, you know, you're not allowed to preach Margery, you're a woman. And she says, I'm not preaching. I'm just standing here talking. And if people gather around me, well, that's not my fault. She's just smart, she's really smart, she's always got an answer for everything and she's constantly crossing these figures of authority and standing up to them and asserting herself, which is just completely fantastic. And I wanted to get that across through her relationship with her husband as well. I mean, I don't feel that he's like a terrible, evil man, but he says things to her, you know, about, you talk too much. She says about writing her book to him, he says, don't be ridiculous, women can't read, their brains are too soft. And that was a genuine medieval belief. I didn't just make that up. Um, that was the kind of thing women were putting up with at that time. And I didn't want it to be a book that kind of, you know, was shouting its lessons of feminism at you. But just by putting those things in, just letting them sit there, I hoped that the reader will be, um, you know, suitably annoyed on Margery's behalf. 

AMY: So for as interesting as these women's lives were, um, so too are the fates of their actual books after their death. They kind of take on their own journeys. It's pretty remarkable. Can you tell us about how both of their books were lost and found over time? 

VICKY: Yeah, so Julian's is shrouded in a lot of mystery. We don't know how her book came out of her cell, came to be in the world. We do know that some English nuns who lived in France had it and made copies of it. This was during the French Revolution. So somehow it had got out and reached women and women had thought that it was sufficiently valuable to protect it and to make copies of it. These nuns were persecuted during the French Revolution. They were arrested and put in prison and they managed to escape the day before they were due to be executed and they escaped back to England and they had on them a copy of Julian of Norwich's manuscript. So it's so fluke-y that we have it at all, but it's down to women, to women valuing these words. We have them to thank. And then it made its way into a British Library collection, and at the start of the 20th century, it was translated into modern English from Middle English. And since then, it's been very highly regarded as a literary and theological work, and much more so than Margery's book. So Margery, again, some kind of mystery about exactly where it was immediately after Margery died and so on. But excerpts of it were collected in anthologies. A wonderful scribe called Wynkyn de Worde (which is just such a perfect name for a scribe) he had a few pages of Margery's words. It was very, um, bowlderized. There's so little of it that he actually thought Margery might have been an anchoress, which just goes to show how much “Margery” was taken out. So it's just a few sort of bits of vision and so on. Then it just goes dead. We don't know what happened at all to Margery's book until the 1930s. So we're talking centuries later. Picture, if you will, a country house in Derbyshire in England. Some people are playing a game of ping pong and a guest inadvertently steps on the ping pong ball, putting it out of action, and they open a cupboard to try to find a replacement ping pong ball. The cupboard is crammed with stuff, all of these old papers come flying out, and the owner is very annoyed with all this rubbish he's got, he says, Oh, I'm going to make a bonfire of it tomorrow. And luckily, luckily, luckily, one of the guests has a friend who's a manuscript expert at the British Library and says, Oh, well, why don't I take some of them and, you know, in case there's anything important here. And it turns out that the lost manuscript of Margery Kempe's book is among those papers. So again, very nearly burnt on a bonfire, and we don't know what it had been doing for 500 years, but the fact that a ping pong ball got squashed meant that we now have the book of Margery Kempe. It's a very “Margery” story, I feel, that kind of ridiculous detail of the ping pong ball. 

AMY: Maybe God does have something to do with this, because that's crazy, you know what I mean? That is divine intervention, if ever there was some. 

VICKY: Absolutely. Also, what it makes me think, though, is just how much has been lost.

KIM: Yes, I thought the same thing. Yeah.

VICKY: Yeah, I mean, in the Reformation, so many religious texts were burnt. And then I don't know, if you look at the history of manuscripts, there's always a fire somewhere. So much just gets lost. So I feel that it's amazing that we have these two women's books, but I'm sure that there are other books, maybe one day we'll find them even, that we don't have now. There must just have been more out there, I'm sure, that we don't have at the moment. 

KIM: Yeah, going to be discovered in some room in a cupboard somewhere. Yeah. 

VICKY: Yeah. I hope so.

KIM: Yeah. Me too. Me too. So there's such a chasm in time, culture, and belief between these two women and our present day, more secular as we talked about realities. What do you think Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe have to offer modern readers? We're in an era where women's voices are still being silenced. So what can they teach us? 

VICKY: It was ever thus. Yeah, it's true. I mean, when I was writing, I was conscious that there's 600 years between me and these women. And yet at the same time reading their books, they felt like real people. They felt like people I could empathize with and understand women that were experiencing many of the same oppressions and pressures that women are still experiencing today. These were just two people trying to find their place in society, trying to shape their own stories, trying to find a voice for themselves, um, a society, you know, for many of us has changed to some extent, but I feel like nonetheless, as you say, you know, women are still being silenced or their voices like Margery's are not being taken seriously even when they do get to speak. I mean, Margery's writing is, you know, been dismissed as in the style of a hysterical woman. And I feel that that is something that women still are kind of coping with today. So, yeah, it's, it's very frustrating. But I think having that sense of historical perspective can be really helpful. And it's just unusual, I suppose, to be able to listen to the words of two middle class women from 600 years ago in the historical record, we don't have much in the way of that kind of record, the everyday lives of ordinary women, especially with Margery. So they're really very remarkable historical tech. 

AMY: Listeners, we should also mention that Vicky has won numerous prizes for this novel. It's her first novel. She's gotten the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the Saltire First Book Award, which is another national prize. I know that we've already had listeners in advance of this episode reach out and let us know that they purchased this book. So, um, I think there's a lot of excitement surrounding it and it's so good. We highly recommend it. Wondering what's next for you now? What are you working on? 

VICKY: So my second novel is going to be out in 2026 with Bloomsbury. It's about the Victorian art critic, John Ruskin. Um, very different kind of voice, but like Julian and Margery, in some ways he was a kind of visionary. So my interest in Ruskin is in his kind of proto-environmentalism. He was one of the first people to really think about and document environmental pollution. And he really valued paying attention, observation of the natural world, um, kind of slowing down and really looking at what's around us. And I think that a lot of the things that Ruskin wrote about and thought about actually have enormous resonance for us today in those ways. So I'm hoping to kind of bring a new angle on John Ruskin. 

AMY: Yeah, that's another person who I kind of like just dipped my baby toe in in college, you know, you just have to read one little smattering and then you move on. So I am interested in finding out more. Looking forward to that. So Vicky, thanks so much for dropping by today to talk about these two remarkable women. It's been fun. 

VICKY: Thank you for having me. I absolutely love talking about Julian and Margery, so it's been brilliant. 

KIM: That's it for today's deep dive into two trailblazing medieval women. So whether you're an anchoress at heart or more of a wandering mystic like Margery, we hope this conversation leaves you inspired to uncover more lost voices from history.

AMY: I'll be back next week for our subscribers to talk about the woman who penned a beloved patriotic tune in this country, “America the Beautiful.” I had no idea a woman actually wrote the lyrics, Kim. Were you aware? 

KIM: I think you can tell from my facial expressions, no! 

AMY: Yeah, I mean, I feel like we're having a hard time feeling patriotic these days, so maybe this'll help. But anyway, our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone, and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helms and Kim Askew.