Letter Reveals New Details about Margery Kempe
Well the past few days have been pretty depressing so sorry for the lack of posts. Anyway the Guardian have a good piece about the discovery of a new letter giving details of the medieval mystic Margery Kempe.
A 15th-century letter found in an archive in Gdansk and believed to have been prepared for the son of Margery Kempe, who dictated the earliest surviving autobiography written in English, may shed fresh light on the medieval mystic’s remarkable account of her visions and pilgrimages 600 years ago.
Professor Sebastian Sobecki at the University of Groningen has discovered a short Latin letter prepared on 12 June 1431 for a John Kempe, whom he has identified as Margery Kempe’s son. He believes the finding both anchors the narrative in reality, and adds strength to the argument that Kempe was a reliable author.
Sobecki, trawling through Gdansk’s archives in search of references to Margery or her son, says he “couldn’t believe [his] eyes” when he found the Kempe reference. The letter gives Kempe’s first name as John, the same as his father and grandfather, “a Kempe family tradition”, said the academic.
Written in medieval Latin, so that Lincolnshire and East Anglian authorities could understand it, the letter “permits [Kempe] to recover a substantial security he had paid to a merchant from Boston”, said Sobecki, whose colleague Lena Wahlgren-Smith from the University of Southampton translated the text.
It provides, he says, the first external piece of evidence for her son’s existence, and for Kempe’s claim that he visited Lynn at that time.
Read the rest here!
A 15th-century letter found in an archive in Gdansk and believed to have been prepared for the son of Margery Kempe, who dictated the earliest surviving autobiography written in English, may shed fresh light on the medieval mystic’s remarkable account of her visions and pilgrimages 600 years ago.
Professor Sebastian Sobecki at the University of Groningen has discovered a short Latin letter prepared on 12 June 1431 for a John Kempe, whom he has identified as Margery Kempe’s son. He believes the finding both anchors the narrative in reality, and adds strength to the argument that Kempe was a reliable author.
Sobecki, trawling through Gdansk’s archives in search of references to Margery or her son, says he “couldn’t believe [his] eyes” when he found the Kempe reference. The letter gives Kempe’s first name as John, the same as his father and grandfather, “a Kempe family tradition”, said the academic.
Written in medieval Latin, so that Lincolnshire and East Anglian authorities could understand it, the letter “permits [Kempe] to recover a substantial security he had paid to a merchant from Boston”, said Sobecki, whose colleague Lena Wahlgren-Smith from the University of Southampton translated the text.
It provides, he says, the first external piece of evidence for her son’s existence, and for Kempe’s claim that he visited Lynn at that time.
Read the rest here!