Memoirs of a Medieval Woman

Rating:
Summary: You Are There
Review: Ms. Collis has brought The Book of Margery Kempe to life by her fine renditions of the times in which the mystic lived. My interest was on the state of Christianity -- clerical and lay -- in those times, and I have in this book an instructive and enjoyable accounting, played out against the memoirs of Margery Kempe. It is well worth your attention, followed up by a visit to Britannica.com for other source material on Kempe. The footnotes and bibliography of Collis' book are also of great value.

Rating:
Summary: A pleasant peek into those days
Review: Rather than historical fiction, this is a peek into the reality of those times through the eyes of one woman who sought sainthood. I wish we had more books of people who had written about their own lives at that time. From the perspective of the present time Margery Kempe was kind of a nut - although she didn't realize it - but then maybe her kind was so prevalent in those days, that she wasn't considered to be that weird. At any rate I found it fun to read and be transported back to that time. Louise Collis' explanations render the book easy to follow.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Book...
Review: This really was an excellent book. It was a wonderful understanding of the Medieval world from a person who lived through it. Margery Kempe was not much into politics which is fine. We already have dates and figures from our history books. She was into daily life.

The only bad part of the book was Margery. If I had been one of the Pilgrims she had traveled with, I probably would have been the one to finally throw her overboard. Even though I would never want to meet someone like Margery and would go nuts if I did, she was truly an amazing person. Amazing from the perspective that people actually believed in her and she let herself believe in all of her delusions. It was amazing that she could get all those priests to believe she really talked to God. It shows how truly superstitious the Middle Ages were. It was also amazing to see how divided the Catholic Church was. You had Fransiscan monks against her and undermining an Archbishop. It was also amazing how little she seemed to care about her husband and children that they were hardly ever mentioned. The only real use she had for her husband was for the occasional logistics. This was truly a wonderful book for the inside look it gave to a Medieval woman's mind and her times.