For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy on my Little Pain - Victoria Mackenzie

A fictionalised account of a meeting between two of the fourteenth century's most famous women, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe

Strange as it may seem for an agnostic, I'm very interested in some aspects of medieval religious history. One of my favourite discoveries in college was a book called Holy Anorexia, which featured stories of fasting women through the ages (mostly in the Renaissance and late medieval periods) and their manifold, creative, troubling ways of mortifying the flesh. I also studied passages from Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, and Marjorie Kempe's memoir. So this book, based on the lives of Julian and Marjorie, was right up my street.

“That's all well and good,” you may be thinking, “but who on earth were these people?” Well, for those of you who don't share my strange, nerdish interest, Julian of Norwich was a famed anchoress, a woman who chose to 'die' to the world and live the remainder of her life in a cell attached to a church. Anchoresses were expected to live lives of renunciation and sensory deprivation. Following a ceremony that in many respects resembled a funeral rite, the anchoress and priests processed from the church to the cell, where the anchoress would sometimes lie in a grave as a wall was built in the entrance and she was bricked in. However, anchoresses weren't totally isolated. There were three windows in the cell, one giving out onto the church so that the anchoress could follow sermons, one looking into a servant's quarters, where the servant could bring food and take away waste, and one facing the churchyard. Anchoresses often became known for their piety and people would come to this churchyard window to seek spiritual succour.

We know of Julian of Norwich because she experienced a series of spiritual visions and wrote a book about them, later titled Revelations of Divine Love. It's the earliest surviving book that we know was written by a women in English. You've probably heard of some of the book without being aware of it – she's the woman who wrote, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”.

Margery Kempe wasn't an anchoress – and in terms of her personality, she was probably the antithesis of one. Born to a wealthy merchant in the thriving town of King's Lynn, she was married to a merchant's son and seemed destined for a life of child-rearing and wifely duty. And while she did have fourteen children, she certainly wasn't a subservient wife. Instead, she made her own path, travelling all over the place on pilgrimage – she even travelled as far as Jerusalem. We're lucky to have her autobiography. Although it was known to exist from references in other texts, it was thought to have perished, but a copy was discovered in a country house in the nineteen-thirties while its inhabitants were searching for a shuttlecock (I've always loved that discovery story). The Book of Margery Kempe is the earliest surviving autobiography written in English.

Julian is probably the easier woman to like and admire. As Victoria Mackenzie puts in her notes at the end of the book, Margery's voice in her memoir is “boastful, troubled, scorned and lonely”. She was much given to noisy, copious displays of public weeping that generated much derision, as did her declaration - after giving birth to fourteen children - that she was a born-again virgin. I did read in a review of a book about the middle ages that there was a separation between physical and spiritual virginity, but I think you can still see how the average person in the street might have been sceptical of Marjorie's claim. On some of the pilgrimages she went on, she annoyed the other pilgrims so much that they wouldn't speak to her, made her eat by herself, or even abandoned her en route. Unlike Julian, Marjorie shared her visions openly and vociferously, which led church leaders to question her for heresy.

As you can see, the story of the two women is fertile territory for fiction and Victoria Mackenzie does it justice. She sticks fairly closely to the facts of their lives as we know them, while fleshing out the text with their possible thoughts and feelings. In keeping with their different characters, the two women have very distinctive voices that bring out the contrasts between the modest, cautious, serene Julian and the hyper- emotional, dissatisfied, anxious Marjorie. Here's a typically reflective passage from Julian on one of her visions:

'There are two kinds of judgment: God judges our natural essence, our soul, which is always preserved unchanged in him, whole and safe for ever; whereas men judge us in terms of our changeable, sensory body, which seems now one thing, now another, according to various influences and its outward appearance.'

and here's Marjorie on her troubles:

'Jesus said that I would have no other purgatory other than the slanderous talk I endured in this world. So many evil things were said about me, that Jesus said it was a miracle I still had my wits, considering the vexation I suffered.'

And this:

'Christ says one day that the few of my neighbours that are permitted into heaven will see my sitting besides God as the most beloved of all the saints.'

The two women differ in terms of their freedom, their ideas on love, their experiences of sex, and their feelings towards others. But when they meet, they're united by their visions of Christ and they see the best in each other, with Julian admiring Marjorie for her bravery in telling everyone about her visions, and Marjorie giving Julian someone to confide in.

I enjoyed this book greatly and thought it was well written. Despite the long title, it's only about 170 pages, and I felt that the author did such a great job of creating full lives in a short text. However, the story builds up to their one meeting, and I felt that the end of the book (which follows soon after) felt like a bit of an anti-climax. I would have liked to hear more of Marjory's life post-meeting, and certainly about her attempts to write her autobiography (which had a long and troubled genesis). If it sounds interesting to you, it's definitely worth picking up.

What I've been reading this week

I read lots! My phone's weekly usage report told me that I spent 13hrs 30 reading this week, during which time I managed to finish three ebooks: Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry, Steeple Chasing by Peter Ross, and A Marvellous Light by Freya Maske. All three were great in their own ways, so I'll definitely be writing about them either on Substack or Instagram.

Hannah Coulter was a read for a book group. It's the life story of a farmer's wife, Hannah, who experiences the many changes that took place between her birth in the twenties, and the end of the story in the new millennium. It's perhaps too conservative to be a favourite of mine, but it was interesting to read a viewpoint that's so different to my own, and there's a lot that can be learned from the protagonist's life philosophy too. My book group also discussed how it's such a great example of a man writing a convincing female narrator. Another member of the group said that she'd recently DNF'd a book because the protagonist was so unrealistic (she would walk around the house naked, for example – and how many women really do that?) With Hannah Coulter, her voice is completely convincing, and I forgot I was reading a book written by a man.

Steeple Chasing is the story of Britain seen through its churches. It's a thoroughly engaging work that moves from the splendour of St Paul's to rural churches that are at risk of falling into disrepair, covering the tales of everyone from the wonderfully-named cat at Southwark Cathedral (Doorkins Magnificat) to the volunteers in the Friends of Friendless Churches (who try to stop all those rural churches from falling into dereliction). I loved it, possibly my favourite non-fiction read of the year so far.

A Marvellous Light is a romantic, historical fantasy, set in the Edwardian period. Robin Blythe finds himself inadvertently appointed to a post in the civil service liaising with the magical community of Great Britain, a post for which he's completely unqualified as he knows nothing about magic. He meets his contact, the prickly and repressed Edwin Courcey, who tells him that his predecessor went missing two weeks ago. Before Robin knows what is happening, he's become embroiled in a mystery and magically cursed into the bargain. I also loved this book – a real page-turner, compelling characters who you find yourself rooting for, and an inventive use of magic. It's the first part of a trilogy and I'm going to read the second part in a few weeks.

Next up on the agenda is Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell. I'm also starting a listen-along of Ulysses.

Have a lovely week! I'll be back on Sunday with another historical romance, Lex Croucher's Reputation.