Falling Flat
A fourteenth-century pilgrim’s failures provide solace for those living in her footsteps today.
Retroview by Moriah Speciale
Frenetic, eager, aspirational, and all-too-human, Margery Kempe was always working at something. She opened businesses (a brewery and a flour mill). She prayed over many hours that her husband would acquiesce to the sexless marriage she desired. She traveled to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago with tears in her eyes, hoping to achieve sainthood in Christ’s church. Most of these endeavors, however, fell irrevocably flat. Kempe’s life was studded with failures, and yet I have been drawn to her again and again since I first happened upon her autobiography, The Book of Margery Kempe. In a success I am almost certain she did not intend, the Book is actually the first autobiography written in the English language. In it, she writes of her desires and her failures, leaving behind not the record of an obvious candidate for sainthood, but one of a relatable and thoroughly human life.
Much of Kempe’s text is focused on her desire to become a Christian mystic, which is the reason she spent so much time pleading for release from her husband’s carnality. Mystics of course are meant to spend the bulk of life in prayer and solitude, focused not on the things of earth but on things above. Kempe tried very hard to rid herself of her inherent eroticism. From what she writes in her book, she and her husband quite enjoyed each other’s company. Even beyond the conjugal act, Margery often dreamt of naked men and once dreamed that a man happened to expose himself to her while out in public. What to all of my friends and me would have been a grievous misfortune was apparently a real thrill to Margery.
If this story does not strike you as the sort of thing pious and God-fearing monks would faithfully pass down throughout the centuries, you would be right. In fact the only reason we know it is because the Book’s manuscript was accidentally uncovered in the 1930s by a few revelers at a house party in northern England.
On the morning of December 27, 1934, readers of the London Times were among the first to hear about the discovery of The Book of Margery Kempe via a short letter to the editor. It took almost two years for the Book to receive full coverage via a glowing editorial in the Times, but the editor then said of it, “The whole book is rich in particular and homely detail of common life; but it is the whole-hearted candour of her self-revelation—set down with the same vigour that sent her tramping in old age through enemy country—which gives her self-portrait its power, and will make of Margery Kempe a well-known medieval character.”
We now know that this was not exactly the case. Failure, yet again. Kempe has remained relatively unknown, especially considered alongside medieval literary giants such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Hildegard von Bingen, Giovanni Boccaccio, and even her fellow mystic and countrywoman Julian of Norwich.
What Margery ultimately lacked in saintliness she makes up for in relatability.
Even if Margery’s tales of mortifying lust and wreaking havoc along the pilgrim’s way have not proven impressive or important to modern folk, Kempe’s contemporaries were at least occasionally in awe of her. She often spent time in prayer at St. Margaret’s Church, her home parish in Norfolk. Once, just as she fell deep into conversation with God, part of the gothic structure’s roof collapsed on top of her, or more specifically, “a stone weighing three pounds fell down onto her head and her back, and a short end of a wooden beam weighing six pounds, so she thought her back was broken into pieces, and it seemed to her that she would be dead in a little while.” And yet, by crying out, “Jesus, mercy,” Margery walked away from the incident unscathed. Onlookers stood amazed, many convinced that this miracle was evidence of the Lord’s favor upon her.
Much later in life, when she landed in England after her pilgrimages, and was arrested on the spot for heresy, Kempe managed to evade conviction by “telling good tales” from her prison window to passersby. Her audience (the very people who had fought for her arrest at the start) wept, regretted her imprisonment, and ganged up against the authorities to free her.
Of course, surrounding these brief moments of glory were missteps aplenty. Take her brewery, for example. Brewing was a common occupation and pastime for women in the fourteenth century. Kempe’s family had been in the business before: Her husband, John Kempe, is listed in Norfolk records as a brewer, and her family, the Burnhams, were importers of wine. Yet one brew after another turned out to be under-carbonated and unpalatable. It was perhaps to be expected, then, that with her wealth of experience, knowledge, and family support, the failure of her brewery would be attributed by the townspeople as a curse of the devil and not a mere failure of business acumen or a lack of skill. These were medievals, after all. She didn’t buy the cursed-by-the-devil explanation, but Margery did admit that she had some work to do. She had good reason for thinking herself overly prideful: It was “out of pure covetousness and in order to maintain her pride” that she had opened the brewery in the first place.
But what Margery ultimately lacked in saintliness she makes up for in relatability. Messy, not very good with people, a failure at everything she wanted to accomplish both piddly and profound, she reminds us with candor that the journey through this human life is all at once embarrassing, fallible, unfortunate, and yet glorious.
Homebrewing involves a hot and chaotic few hours in the kitchen, followed by weeks and, in some cases, months of waiting.
This past fall, I purchased a homebrewing kit, complete with buckets, hose, airlocks, bottles, and plenty of hops. Never one to miss an opportunity to humor me (and also to compare me to Margery Kempe), my boyfriend suggested we name our brewery “Falling Rafters” in homage to the dear pilgrim and failed saint’s encounter with the rafters of St. Margaret’s Church.
We decided on an IPA for our first attempt. One evening late in October, we spread our equipment and the components of our recipe across my dining room table and got to work. In the days leading up to the event, we had prepared for our endeavor by devouring homebrewing videos and forums. All of our sources placed great emphasis on sanitization, so we were vigilant about this, dunking our hands and our tools into restaurant-grade sanitizing solution every few minutes. We both stood careful watch over a massive pot as water, grain, and sugar combined to create wort, or unfermented beer.
Homebrewing involves a hot and chaotic few hours in the kitchen, followed by weeks and, in some cases, months of waiting as the beer ferments, and still longer once the beer has been bottled but is not yet fully carbonated. I don’t know what Margery’s brewing setup looked like. I doubt it was as majestic as the twenty-first century breweries I’ve toured, and I suspect that it was closer to our in-house operation. And so we thought of her as we modulated temperatures and sprinkled yeast, and I contemplated her failure, thinking to myself that it must have been down to her lack of a proper sanitation regime. Otherwise, the process is still rather archaic: boil water and steep grains, add sugar and hops, cool the mixture, add yeast, wait.
Our first brew, the basic IPA, took a little over a month to prepare. To our delight, the first sip and all those thereafter were perfect. The beer only got better as time wore on. I chalked it up to our modern sanitation practices and, honestly, inborn talent, that those first fifty bottles were so smooth, honey-colored, and bereft of anything close to failure. Pride, is that you? I was also relieved. I suppose I had worried subconsciously that when you name a brewery in honor of someone so familiar with failure, you are setting yourself up for the same. Superstition: not only for medievals.
The second brew, however, was over-carbonated. Each bottle we’ve opened has spewed foam. The foam cap, when we manage to decant any of the liquid into a glass, is inches thick and takes minutes to settle. The third brew, a double IPA, has a great flavor. To our chagrin, and just like the ales that put Margery out of business, it is completely flat.
Moriah Speciale is Managing Editor of Fare Forward. A version of this essay was first presented at The Dead Ladies Show in New York City.
The Book of Margery Kempe was first published by Oxford University Press in 1940. You can still purchase a copy on their website here.
