The Book of Margery Kempe is a miraculous survivor. Known as ‘the first autobiography written in English’, there were countless times it could have been lost or destroyed. During Margery’s life she was accused of and arrested on charges of heresy, so her mystical and at times bizarre book would have been high on Reformers’ ‘burn’ lists. The book is not a hagiography of a revered saint, but an anomaly; a record of the life of an ordinary married woman, mother to fourteen children.
