Among the many little books—scarcely more than pamphlets—printed by Wynkyn de Worde in his efforts to provide reading matter for the growing literate public of his day, was a small eight-page quarto pamphlet— ‘A short treatise of contemplation taught by Our Lord, Jesu Christ, taken out of the book of Margery Kempe of Lynn’. Wynkyn de Worde may have printed some five hundred copies of this work, but in the course of centuries all of these save one seem to have perished, and from a study of the only known copy in the University Library, Cambridge, it was long thought that the work was a condensed version of a book of devotions, similar to that of other religious writers of the time, such as Hilton's Scale of Perfection, or the Revelations of Dame Juliana of Norwich. In 193 4, however, Miss Hope Emily Allen, well known for her work on Robert Rolle and other mystics, announced her identification of a manuscript in the library of Colonel Butler-Bowdon of Pleasington Old Hall, Lancashire, as the autobiography of Margery Kempe, from which Wynkyn de Worde had extracted a mere handful of sentences.

Here then we have what Professor R. W. Chambers called ‘our first biography in English'—a work in which the life, thoughts and experiences of a religious enthusiast are set out in detail. A generation earlier Geoffrey Chaucer had set down the thoughts and experiences of a sensual woman of the bourgeoisie in his portrait of the Wife of Bath. In her autobiography Margery Kempe, with a similar bourgeois background, unfolds for us the anxieties and experiences of a religious woman whose life was dedicated to the service of God. No English writer, hitherto, had committed to writing so intimate, revealing and human an account of his life and thoughts.

It would, of course, be easy to make a figure of fun out of Margery, who so frankly reveals herself. Even so sympathetic a writer as Father Herbert Thurston speaks of her ‘terrible hysteria’, while Miss Hope Allen says: ‘she was petty, neurotic, vain, illiterate, physically and nervously overstrained.’ These things often betrayed her into outrageous and undignified behaviour, unworthy of herself or of her dedicated aims. The self-portrait of a minor mystic remains, however, the more credible for its merciless honesty and its fidelity to life.