Gone Medieval - The First English Autobiographer: Margery Kempe

Episode Date: May 10, 2022

Margery Kempe was an English Christian mystic, known for writing "The Book of Margery Kempe", a work considered by some to be the first autobiography in the English language. She's also thought to be the first case of schizophrenia.In honour of Mental Health Awareness week, Dr Cat Jarman is joined by Dr Alison Torn from Leeds Trinity University to explore Margery's complicated legacy and whether it's appropriate to view Kempe’s 15th century life through a 21st century understanding of mental health.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hits. My name is Dr. Kat Jarman and I'm your host for today's episode. Now this week, the second week of May 2022 is Mental Health Awareness Week. Across our history hit podcasts and platforms we're featuring a range of content exploring issues relating to mental health in the past. So we wanted to do the same here on Gone medieval too. And what better to talk about than what is considered to be our first ever autobiography

written in the English language, belonging to a woman who lived in the 14th and 15th centuries and who has been described as mad or psychotic by some, but as mystic or spiritual and religious by others. I'm talking about Marjorie Kemp and her autobiography. And to find out what we can learn about the mind of a medieval woman from her writing and especially whether or not she was suffering from psychosis, I have invited a specialist in psychology to the podcast today. Dr. Alison Torn is a senior teaching fellow in the School of Psychology and Therapeutic study at Leeds Trinity University who has researched Marjorie Kemp and the narratives of her as either a mystic or a madwoman or maybe a little bit of both. Alison, thank you so much

and welcome to the podcast today. Thank you for inviting me. So this is really, really interesting actually, because this isn't what you normally do. You're not a medieval historian and a medievalist. I'm not historian at all, no. No, but you've spent some time researching this account and this narrative and actually considering it from a sort of 21st century perspective, I suppose. What made you interested in doing that in the first place? Well, before I kind of became an academic in psychology, I worked as a psychiatric nurse for many years. So I worked with people who had unusual experiences, psychosis, who were diagnosed with schizophrenia, and when I came to do my PhD, I was interested in why people got framed within a medical model.

So how some experiences got judged to be kind of schizophrenic and got pathologized, whereas other unusual experiences didn't. And this kind of really kind of took me back in time to how we construed people's mad. Let's use the word mad. mad experiences right from kind of, you know, Socrates, for example, and the voices of demons that he heard kind of right up until the modern day. So, you know, I did a lot of reading, so people like Foucault and the history of madness. And I stumbled across the story of Marjorie Kemp as one of the very first, allegedly, first narratives of schizophrenia. That's how I stumbled across her.

So I was intrigued. Who was she? Where did she live? What were her experiences? And why have we kind of conceptualised them as schizophrenia or psychosis from a modernist perspective? Fantastic. So I wonder if we can start at the beginning. And actually, if you could tell me a little bit about Marjorie Kemp, you know, what do we know about her and her background? So we know quite a bit from this kind of autobiography, which was discovered kind of in the 1940s in the UK. And it was dictated to a scribe. It was written in around about the early kind of 1400s. But she was born in Norfolk in Kingslyn in 1373, the daughter of a prestigious kind of mayor of Lynn at the time. She was the wife of a very kind of prominent suburbist or kind

of local politician, local councillor, with whom she had no less than 14 children. So she had a very interesting nomadic life as she kind of, you know, traveled across both the UK and Europe and wider as well on various kind of pilgrimages, leaving her husband and a children. In fact, she says very little about her husband and children throughout her book. Her book is really about a detailed kind of description of her very spiritual and mystical experiences as she travelled. So she goes on then to write very much about this, but actually we get these insights as well into her sort of health and well-being, I suppose.

Yeah. Slightly sort of partly that isn't necessarily what she's writing about all of the time. But she starts with an initial episode, shall we say, that happens after she gives birth to her first child. So what is it exactly that happens in her life at that point? She has this kind of, and she herself kind of confesses, if you like, that she had this period of madness after the birth of her first child. She was kind of pretty much kind of tormented by physical illness, by the voice of the devil, demonic visions, and she goes into

kind of quite great detail about this. And this resulted in her being kind of isolated from the community and physically restrained as well at times, kind of by her husband and family. And like I say, she confesses that she was kind of completely, she puts it out of her mind at that particular point in time. And she's really kind of saved by the vision and voice of Jesus during this time. So it's a very detailed description about how she was attacked by flame-tongued devils. It was all very kind of, you know, as we perhaps might expect those very medieval descriptions of madness or kind of supernatural. You know, they cried upon her with great threats. They said that she should forsake Christ and her religion and her spirituality and her God, her mother, her father.

her friends. And so she kind of became, you know, almost completely kind of out of her senses. She was kind of physically very volatile. She attacked people. She attacked her husband physically. She tried to kill herself. And in fact, she bit herself so hard that she had this scar that remained in her throughout her life. So she was really tormented. But, you know, like I say, she really kind of saw herself as just being besieged by the devil and a point of madness. We'd kind of see that now as maybe something like post-proposicosis. That's a way that maybe if we saw that kind of nowadays, we'd kind of say, well, yeah, she was having a psychotic episode following the birth of her first child.

And yeah, it was a very kind of unique experience for her and one that was never repeated or she never said was repeated kind of throughout the subsequent births that she had. Yeah, and she actually goes on to have quite a lot of children. Yeah, she does. But it's quite an interesting one that was that something that's ever described in sources from this time, this idea that after childbirth, you know, it could have an impact on women's health, mental health? Is that something we come across or was that not recognized at all? It's something that I've not come across, but I'm not saying that it's not out there.

But certainly when she kind of talks about them, you know, it's a very visceral thing that she talks about in relation to kind of these devils and demons that kind of attack her, you know, says that devils have open mouths, they're inflamed with burning flames of fire as if they should have swallowed her in. So she kind of feels a really severe threat from this. You know, it's an actual kind of physical thing that she can see, these kind of visions, the voices, everything is very, very real to her. And quite common at the time, you know, kind of in medieval times, it was dealt with within the family. So she was restrained within the family. She was separated out from the community. She was tied down to a chair. It was all kept very kind of closed down within the family.

So she wasn't kind of sent anywhere. as maybe somebody would have been kind of centuries later because there was nowhere to send her to. There were kind of very few asylums at the time. I think bedlam maybe had a few beds, but that was about it. So yeah, there wasn't anywhere to send them to. So it was contained within the family. At this point on, her life sort of changes a bit, doesn't it? Because after that, she starts to pursue this holy life, which you already mentioned.

She goes on travel stores, she goes to pilgrimages to places like Jerusalem and various holy sites. And in the description of that very spiritual part of a life, that's where we start to hear about things like conversations with various religious figures, visitations, hearing sounds and smells and so on. Are those sort of behaviours then that are being diagnosed as sort of the madness part, essentially? I think both are really. When you look at people who have written about Marjorie Kemp from a psychological perspective or from a psychiatric perspective, So within a medical or psychological framework, they look at kind of both that very early experience that she had. You know, she confesses herself that she was mad at that particular point in time. But from then on, all of her other experiences, she is very clear that these are spiritual experiences, that these are not madness.

They're spiritual experiences. So the conversations that she has with God, the visions that she has of Christ, you know, the fact that Christ comes to her and asks her to marry him. Again, very visceral, you know, so she smells these kind of sweet heavenly smells. She hear things. She has a burning flame inside her. Now, within kind of psychiatry and psychology in the 20th and 21st century, people say, well, actually these are strong evidence of, you know, auditory, tactile, visual hallucinations. Now, she isn't describing them like that. You know, she sees them very much as a mystical, spiritual experience. And when you look at the,

way in which people respond to her as well, there's this real dichotomy between people who really kind of dismiss her as not necessarily mad, but a heretic and somebody who's perhaps a little bit kind of, you know, has maybe a little bit of a screw loose, or people who actually do kind of confirm her spirituality, including people like, for example, the Archbishop Canterbury, Dame Julian of Norwich, who said, yeah, you know, this woman is a strong kind of mystical figure. So she really kind of polarised opinion as well, both, you know, within the clergy and within spiritual and religious domains, but also kind of, you know, within her peers and the commoners. So that's really interesting, isn't it, that even back then was so divided, that there

wasn't a clear way of dealing with these experiences in that medieval society. Yeah, and I think that was partly because of the way that she behaved. I think, you know, when you read her book, you get this strong sense that she really, really just annoyed people. She was really kind of like, you know, on the pilgrimages that she was like this big nuisance. So they would do things like cut her gowns really short to show off her legs, which was really humiliating for her and put at kind of the furthest end of the table. They used to make jokes about her. They used to give her the scraps of the food.

So they were kind of quite mean to her, but they found her, you know, hugely annoying. There's a great quote actually from the Archbishop of York and basically he saves it from heresy and three trials in East Yorkshire and he says I believe there was never a woman in England so treated as she is and has been so he acknowledges that yeah people just treat it very very badly

and then he said to the creature Marjorie I know not what I shall do with you I love that he's completely like despairing offer it's like you've been hugely badly mistreated but you know what I can understand why and I've no idea what to do with you. So yeah she was a very very divisive figure she used to do things for example like she would

kind of you know weep and wail for hours on end and kind of thrash around in front of altars you know as she was kind of experiencing these kind of very kind of spiritual and intense and embodied experiences. And yeah, it just used to annoy her fellow pilgrims. I can sort of imagine that. And do you think something I thought of when you were just saying that, the fact that she was a woman as opposed to a man, if a man had done these same sort of thing, do you think, you know, a man would have been treated differently? Do you think her gender had much to do with that? I think, yeah, I think there was a very much gendered response to this and I did write about it when I did my thesis, it was very gendered. And, you know, she was there, I guess, as not a unique role model

for women and how to live a mystical life, but kind of for a married woman, she was very unique. You know, she did leave her husband and her 14 children. We hear very little about those at all, beyond that first chapter where she had her first kind of mad experience post-pregnancy. So she went off by herself. you know, she was kind of condemned and looked down upon by the people with which she lived kind of in King's Lim. People kind of say, I wonder why she wrote this book or why she dictated it to be written down. And I think partly it was a bid for sainthood, you know, a bid to kind of have her experiences kind of validated and confirmed. And I think partly it was set down as well as a model of how married women could live a mystical and spiritual life. Yeah, because presumably for most women in that sort of circumstance,

the vast amount of travel there she did would be quite unusual. So that's presumably that you could only really do under that guise of religion and that involvement, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the moon without the bra? You can expect answers to all these questions and more in the brand new podcast from History Hit,

patented History of Inventions. Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas. Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians, and even a few real-life inventors. Subscribe to Patented History of Inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. So just going back to this idea of her sort of issues that she had and this idea of whether she was psychotic or not. So various people that you've already talked a little bit about have said that this is a clear example of psychosis. What's your opinion on that and what conclusion did you come to on that particular side of it? So coming from a background of psychiatry and psychology, it was something that I struggled with because, you know, I could read her words and I can see why people would say that she was suffering from hallucinations.

Just read a little bit of what she says here. She saw with her bodily eye many white things flying all about her on every side, thick in a manner as moats in the sun. You know, she saw them in many different times, many different places. And then she goes on, say, the Lord gave her another token which endured about 16 years and increased ever more, this flame of fire, wonderfully hot and delectable and right comfortable. So she clearly has some very unusual experiences. Would you say that they were unusual for the time?

You know, when she talks about those kind of very unusual mystical experiences and that kind of feeling the flame of the heat and seeing things and hearing things, that kind of embodied way of experiencing religiosity wasn't uncommon. And so although she couldn't read and write, she will have heard the works of kind of contemporary people in the past, like Richard Roll, for example. And the way that she describes,

experiences are very much in line with the very common spiritual writings of the time. So it wasn't unusual to express yourself in that embodied way at the time. We see it's unusual now, but at the time it wasn't. And nobody really described her as being mad. It was either that she was annoying or she was this fantastic kind of mystic. I could say lots of people have reinterpreted these as the very first or very early evidence of psychosis or schizophrenia. Some have perhaps interpreted as being evidence of hysteria as well. And my interpretation of it is kind of different really because I think it's very difficult to approach a narrative like Marjorie Kemp's and to actually look at it through 20th or 21st century lenses. I think to do that, you're absolutely stripping all of the

cultural, social and cultural meaning away from it in which her experiences kind of took place. And I think that's a really important consideration because the spirituality that she had, the religious framework within which she understood things, absolutely grounded her experiences and gave them meaning to her. And she very clearly kind of throughout her narrative differentiates between that first episode of madness and the spiritual experiences. And you can see that kind of through the linguistic stuff that she does as she writes. So she'll say things like she saw Jesus through her ghostly eye. So I kind of look at that.

She's seen it through a spiritual lens. So she knows that she's not actually seen him. She recognises that. And she'll use other linguistic devices, such as the words, you know, as she thought she saw Jesus. You know, so again, she's almost saying to the reader, look, I know I didn't actually see him, but it's as if I did.

And I just get to something actually that I did want to point out. So she's talking about one of her kind of intense spiritual experiences where it was so intense, she didn't almost know what to do with herself kind of physically. And she says, I ran all about the place. Well, she talks about herself in the third person. So she said she ran all about the place as if she had been a mad woman crying and roaring. And I think that's a really kind of significant phrase, you know, to say as if she had been a mad woman roaring. and crying. So she makes this kind of very clear distinction between spiritual passion and madness.

She's very clear that spiritual ecstasy and madness are not the same things. And she uses those things as if she was mad. Yeah. She sees that kind of view, that very clear distinction. And she's almost saying to us as a reader, you know, I am saying, I'm not mad. And I know that I'm not mad because I acted as if I were mad. So she's kind of got that distance. She's got that kind of objective lens on herself. So she knows the difference between religious fervor and madness. And I think she knows that because she experienced madness after the birth of her first child. So she's got a framework. She's got a comparison. Exactly. And presumably that sort of self-awareness, is that something that you look for if you were to diagnose somebody with psychosis? If they had no idea, they were just saying, no, no, no,

certainly some person is talking to me and I can hear these voices or whatever. Is that sort of self-awareness something that you would use to distinguish between sort of real psychosis of that kind and not? I think it's interesting, isn't it? You know, what we can potentially kind of diagnose the psychosis or look at us psychosis or not. And that distinction between kind of, let's call it spiritual psychosis and pathological psychosis is really, really fine and not necessarily linked to self-awareness. Because I think if you look at kind of more recent examples of people who've had very, very unusual experiences, but haven't been kind of either diagnosed with schizophrenia or sectioned or anything like that. So David Ike is a good example. I don't know whether you're aware of David Dyke?

I'm not only thinking I am actually. Could he give me a bit of background? Yeah. So David Dyke was a sports presenter, a snooker presenter, kind of, you know, world of sporting kind of the eight years. And he kind of came out, I think it was maybe on a Terry Wogan chat show, something like that with some very, very kind of bizarre beliefs about A. aliens, about the fact that he was kind of a reincarnation of Christ, all these kind of, you know, fantastical stuff, that if you worked within the psychiatric system, you would say, you know, that he had delusions of grandeur, you'd kind of, you know, wrap it up with a diagnostic label like that.

And he's somebody who has never been, to my knowledge, kind of, you know, formally diagnosed sectioned anything like that and still has his website and put stuff out there, you know, with these kind of very, very kind of unusual beliefs. I think one of his beliefs was that the royal family are basically kind of aliens. Right. Yes. Okay. And lizards. Yeah. And so you kind of get to the question of, you know, how does some people kind of function in society and I kind of left alone to kind of get on with their lives? And whereas other people are not. I think part of it does come down to functionality, you know, how able are you to kind of carry out the functions of your daily life?

How much does it kind of impact upon other people? And for me, for me, you know, how much? And for me, Marjorie Kemp, she never lost that ability to plan her own activities, to travel, to talk with people, to defend herself on heresy trials. And she defended herself very, very cleverly. This was an intelligent woman, you know, to gather support, to go about a daily business. She never lost any of those functions, as far as we can tell. So I think kind of functionality is how people may be diagnosed nowadays. But I think it also comes down to, there's a lot of research that's gone down to the kind of phenomenon of the unusual experiences. And mystical experiences tend to be, not always,

but tend to be more positive and benign, whereas psychotic experiences are more overwhelmingly negative and malign. And I think there's that distinction there as well. And I think that the framework within which people have, and I think nowadays they have maybe fewer religious frameworks, within which they can place their experiences. And I think having that kind of validation within a religious community can be really important. So you perhaps see that in spiritual church, for example.

Yeah. You know, people who will converse and hear the voices of the dead. For some people in psychiatry and psychology is not acceptable. Whereas there is this kind of growing movement nowadays, which kind of stem from some research that happened in the Netherlands, in the late 80s, early 1990s, by a psychiatrist called Marius Rom. Really interesting piece of research.

So he was a psychiatrist, went on a talk show in the Netherlands and said, you know, I want to hear from people who have had unusual experiences, who've heard voices. And he got a very positive response from this. And what was interesting

was half of the respondents had never ever had any contact with psychiatric services in any way whatsoever. He thought, well, this is interesting. Why have half of the people had contact with psychiatric services and these other half haven't? And what he found was that

the people who hadn't had contact with psychiatric services, their voices were, like I said, predominantly positive, benign, they had control over them. And importantly, they engaged with them. So they gave them space within the day. They were holding down jobs and relationships and families and all of that stuff, living in inverted commas and normal life. But they made space and they had control and they engaged with their voices. And this is something that was very unusual in psychiatry. So when I was training to be a psychiatric nurse, always told to not reinforce voices, not to engage with them, to close them down, you know, it was all about shutting those voices down. Whereas now there is much more of a movement through, for example, the Hearing Voices Network in the UK,

which encourages people to talk about their voices, to engage with them because actually the voices have meaning. So going back to Marjorie Kemp, her voices had meaning for her. Yeah. Maybe part of that meaning was around her identity. as a spiritual woman and a religious woman. So, yeah, it's nicely connected. Yeah, but that makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Because even those responses like that of the Archbishop of York that you mentioned earlier, the fact that he's, you know, he's just saying, what do we do with you?

He's not saying that this is a really wrong thing. So this is clearly within a framework where this sort of thing makes some sense, I suppose, with that sort of spiritual and religious side. Yeah. So that has a nice parallel, definitely, to what you were just saying. Yeah. And like I said, she had a lot of. of endorsement from the Bishop of Lincoln, from the Archbishop of Canterbury, like I said,

from Dame Julian of Norwich. And in fact, she sought out Dame Julian of Norwich to say, this is real. I'm not crazy. And Dame Julian of Norris said, yeah, you're fine. That is such an interesting assertion of what certain aspects, at least, of that society thought of her. So there's just one thing as we finish off. So I very often look at evidence in my own work for illness in the past, but usually physical illness. So I work out with skeletons. So we look at evidence from the body and evidence of disease. And obviously, mental health is not something that we would be able to find it in skeletal

example. So unless we've got written evidence, there's very little way into that. But do you think, based on the sort of work that you've done on Marjorie Camp, that we are able to sort of understand and diagnose and detect mental illness or sort of any sort of psychiatric conditions in the past? or is it quite rare for us to be able to do that? There are a number of different narratives throughout the ages. One of them is Christoph Haysman's diary,

who was a Bavarian painter, has been written about, and it's called Schizophrenia 1677, again, another example of something that's been reinterpreted from the past. And that's another kind of really interesting example. And what you've got there are his paintings as well of his visions and his besiegment by the devil.

he was very much tormented, perhaps much more so, as we might view as schizophrenia nowadays, very much tormented by these visions of devils, you know, horribly so, making paths in blood with them so that they would disappear. And again, it's interesting the way that he was responded to through prayers, not through exorcism, kind of as much, but through prayers, through chanting, through the sprinkling of holy water, which kind of made them disappear, which abated his symptoms. But it was almost by responding to it

within that kind of frame of reference was kind of really helpful for him. You know, we have another example of a woman in the 1600s Hannah Allum who describes having a very deep depression. And yeah, she describes her, again, kind of besiegment by the devil, attempts at suicide by smoking spiders.

Smoking spiders? Smoking spiders, yeah. which was a notable way to try and commit suicide. I think it was always unsuccessful. I'm not sure how long it kind of was around for. Yeah, I've got to have to think about that one, I think. She physically buried herself under floorboards as well as an attempt to end her life and eventually kind of crawled out after three days

and none of her family had missed it. I'm disgust. Nobody had even known that she was missing. So there are these kind of very early narratives. But again, I think I would always caution, you know, as human beings we have a range of experience. And, you know, I don't like to look at things in terms of kind of normality. You know, there is a range of human experience. And we all drift up and down this range of human experience. And I don't think it's necessarily kind of helpful, even nowadays,

to label people and diagnose people. It's not always helpful. It sometimes is, but not always. And I think we have to be quite cautious about the way that we look at people through the lens of the present because we can't strip their experiences out of the social and cultural and political and religious contexts in which they occurred. You know, you have to approach them as much as you can as close to their own world as possible. I think that's a really great way of ending this actually in thinking about how those sort of human experiences fit into it and what we can and cannot say about the past. Alison, thank you so much for talking about it. That's been really brilliant to hear your perspective on Marjorie Kemp. Thank you for inviting me. So that was Dr Alison Torn,

who's a Senior Teaching Fellow at Leeds Trinity University. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. Thank you so much for listening everyone. And don't forget your usual reminder that you can subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. And also to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just look in the episode notes and it'll tell you exactly how to do that. I hope you'll Join us again soon. We've got a new episode coming out on Saturday with my co-host Matt Lewis, and I'm back again next Tuesday. Have a great week.