I’ve called it a breakdown Margery called it a “great bodily sickness, through which she lost her reason for a long time,” and commented later, more precisely, that “this creature went out of her mind and was amazingly disturbed and tormented with spirits for half a year, eight weeks and odd days.” She always referred to herself as “this creature” – that is, part of the Creation. She called it “a short and comforting treatise for sinful wretches,” and her intention was to display divine activity in her life after she met God in person during a breakdown following the birth of her first child. It was the first autobiography in the English language, although Margery didn’t think of it that way. Margery Kempe was an English woman of the late 14 th, early 15 th centuries who “wrote” a kind of memoir – dictated it, really, as she couldn’t read or write. Frontispiece to my book: Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe (Cornell University Press, 1983)
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