![]() ![]() It charts Margery's transformation from housewife to celebrated mystic, and gives an amazing insight into medieval Britain. ![]() In two parts totaling 99 chapters, the work is even today of substantial length. Thus her life story was dictated to a scribe in the only tongue she had ever known - vernacular English. But away from London, where Margery lived, many people even of the middle class had not bothered to be schooled in either official language, and in the author's case she had not learned to read or write at all. As RW Chambers has noted in an introduction to the work, nearly every document at the time of its writing was in Latin or French, Latin because it was the tongue of medieval officialdom, and French at the insistence of Britain's Normal rulers after the conquest of 1066. ![]() The Book is considered the first autobiography in the English language. ![]() Then in 1934, a full copy of the original book came to light in a private English library*. Until the twentieth century, all the world knew of The Book of Margery Kempe were brief extracts taken from the original manuscript, which had been lost. ![]()
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