Margery Kempe

Margery Kempe (born c. 1373—died c. 1440) was an English religious mystic whose autobiography is one of the earliest in English literature. The daughter of a mayor of Lynn, she married John Kempe in 1393 and bore 14 children before beginning a series of pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, Germany, and Spain in 1414. Her descriptions of her travels and her religious ecstasies, which often included “boystous” crying spells, are narrated in an unaffected prose style...