A fifteenth-century Eat, Pray, Love, REVELATIONS illuminates the intersecting lives of two female mystics who changed history — Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich
“Stunning . . . . a fascinating and important story.” ~Minneapolis Star Tribune
Mary Sharratt, who “has built a career writing meticulously researched, fascinating historical novels about strong women forgotten by time” (Minneapolis Star Tribune), creates her most riveting portrait yet with the story of two medieval mystics who changed history.
Bishop’s Lynn, England, 1413. Forty-year-old Margery Kempe has barely survived giving birth to her fourteenth child. Fearing that another pregnancy might kill her, she makes a vow of celibacy, but she can’t trust her husband to keep his end of the bargain. Desperate for counsel, she visits the famous anchoress Dame Julian of Norwich.
Margery confesses that she has been haunted by visceral, sensual images of the divine which send her into helpless fits of weeping. Julian then shares a confession of her own: she has written a secret book about her mystical visions, Revelations of Divine Love. This dangerous text describes an unconditionally loving God and threatens the established Church’s insistence on eternal damnation. Nearing the end of her life, Julian entrusts the book to Margery, who sets off the adventure of a lifetime to spread Julian’s radical, female vision of the divine.
As Margery blazes her pilgrim’s trail across Europe and the Near East, she must use all her wits to ward off accusations of heresy—and being burned at the stake. Grappling with self-doubt, she nevertheless finds a unique spiritual path for a woman of her time, not in a cloistered cell like Julian, but in the worldly bustle of life as laywoman, wife, and mother with all of its peril and wonder.
Available wherever books and ebooks are sold!
HARDCOVER & EBOOK: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop | Books a Million | Indiebound | Hudson | Powell’s | Target | Walmart
PAPERBACK: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop | Books a Million | Indiebound | Hudson | Powell’s |
AUDIOBOOK: Amazon / Audible | Kobo
Press Release and Author Q & A
Mary Sharratt in conversation with Mary Ann Grossmann of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press
Mary Sharratt discusses Margery Kempe on What’s Her Name Podcast
Mary Sharratt on It’s Just Historical Podcast
Mary Sharratt on Wine, Women, and Words
AUDIOBOOK PREVIEW:
Praise for REVELATIONS
A richly atmospheric historical novel about a female mystic in medieval times.
Fourteen years before Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy and for “violating divine law” by dressing as a man, another woman was forced to defend herself to a roomful of men. In 1417, Margery Kempe faced a gallery of brocaded clerics and pasty politicians at her heresy trial, but unlike Joan, she was not martyred, which may be one reason I hadn’t heard of her until I picked up Mary Sharratt’s stunning novel Revelations.
In a note at the end of the novel, Sharratt explains another reason maybe less known: Kempe’s autobiography (dictated in 1436 and considered the first autobiography in the English language) was lost to history until 1934, when a group of young people playing pingpong at an old Catholic estate found the book while searching for a ball.
Since translated and published, “The Book of Margery Kempe” is rambling and pious, but still, according to Sharratt, “a veritable treasure trove for medievalists that explodes our every stereotype of medieval women.”
With this early autobiography as a springboard, Sharratt — a former Minnesotan and the author of a number of novels about notable and forgotten women in ancient history — dives into a fascinating and important story.
Margery Kempe was born to a prosperous family in Bishop’s Lynn, England, in 1373. Intelligent and inquisitive, she questioned everything. Contemplative by nature, she visited holy anchorites who would read to her from sacred texts. But if women were inclined to scholarship back then, their only option was cloistered life, which didn’t appeal to the sensuous Kempe, so she chose the only other respectable route — marriage and family.
Sharratt portrays this stage of Kempe’s life with an unrest that Kempe herself must have felt. She bears 14 children, endures postpartum depression, marital rape, poverty and fatigue, but also — despite her local priest’s dark theology of demons and damnation — moments of intense love for and from God.
Compelled by this loving vision of God and commissioned by Julian of Norwich to spread that female mystic’s “Revelations of Divine Love” to the world, Kempe leaves her family and goes on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and across Europe with Julian’s manuscript hidden in her staff.
Against a backdrop of heresies and threats to the crown, Kempe experiences religious ecstasies that draw attention. She is a woman traveling alone. She wears white. She is independent, wails loudly, and preaches about love. For these crimes she suffers insult, attempted rape, slander and suspicion. Worst of all, she is pilloried by her own Church.
“I understood why these men feared and hated me,” she realizes while at trial. “If I could live in union with my Beloved and seek his grace and goodness in my heart, what need had I for any of them?”
It can’t be easy to depict religious ecstasies without their seeming nutty, but Sharratt — by turns lofty and gritty in her prose — pulls it off, letting us choose for ourselves whether Margery Kempe was the real deal. Knowing what we know now about the human psyche, curated history and Church politics, I’m inclined to think — thanks to Sharratt’s thorough research and compelling narrative — that she was.
~Christine Brunkhorst, Minneapolis Star Tribune
In her new novel Revelations, Mary Sharratt — a stalwart of historical fiction who has penned books about Alma Mahler, Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, and the 12th-century Benedictine polymath Hildegard von Bingen — tackles Margery’s adventures with a lively earnestness, recounting them in the first person. (In a neat reversal of the source text, Kempe’s characteristic “this creature” appears often enough, but only in dialogue, placed inside the mouths of hostile clerics.) Unlike her counterpart in the original, Sharratt’s Margery is compelled to travel not just by her bridegroom’s urgings and the stirrings of her soul — she’s also doing a favor for a fellow lover of God. The anchoress Julian of Norwich, who in Kempe’s Book offers only “holy conversation,” here hands over her own manuscript, the Revelations of Divine Love, which recounts her visions of God. “I am enclosed within a house of stone,” Julian points out. “But you, my sister, wander free.” She solicits Margery’s help to spread the text across Europe. It’s a call to adventure that Margery is touched enough to accept:
All my longings, all my prayers, all my visions had led me to this place, this eternal moment with the sun pouring through the stained glass to wash our clasped hands as red as the blood of the passion. My lonely path converged with hers. “Yes,” I whispered fiercely. “I will carry your book.”
I felt as though I were Ruth pledging my troth to Naomi. […] I knew I would find the strength to endure whatever happened to me from that moment onward. For now I knew that my life mattered.
~Lucia Tang, Los Angeles Times Review of Books
Compelling . . . . Margery was a groundbreaking woman . . . . Sharratt captures Margery’s mysticism beautifully, even for this skeptical reader. Margery’s own doubt in her visions serves to make them all the more convincing, and her yearning for the sublime in a world that otherwise diminishes her is utterly understandable.
~Carrie Callaghan, Washington Independent Review of Books
“Revelations” is at the heart of Mary Sharratt’s masterful new historical fiction. . . . Margery’s voice is, by turns, strong, confused, vulnerable. Besides bringing to life the sounds, smells and colors of medieval times, as seen through Margery’s eyes, Sharratt is at her best when she’s imagining the vivid visions of Dame Julian and Margery, both of whom see God as much a mother as a father.
~Mary Ann Grossmann, Saint Paul Pioneer Press
This book gives the reader inspiration to realize all she accomplished in her society. If Kempe was able to travel the world, write a book, and forge her own path, we should be able to do the same. Ms. Sharratt’s website has the tag line “Writing Women Back into History.” She has brought Margery Kempe back to life and made her an inspiration for us all.
“Masterful.”
~Richmond Times
With this novel about Margery Kempe, mother of 14–turned–pilgrim and preacher, Sharratt’s obsession with medieval women mystics continues.
Margery, like most middle-class young women in 14th-century England, is not allowed to choose her own husband, and her true love is lost at sea. At first, she’s resigned to her parents’ choice for her, John Kempe, a brewer in the provincial town of Bishop’s Lynn, but after the birth of their first child, she suffers what now might be diagnosed as postpartum psychosis: She is hounded by hellish visions of demons, but one day, an unforgettable vision of Christ restores her to sanity. Her contentment with domesticity sours over years of nonstop childbearing—the effects of 14 pregnancies are recounted in chilling detail. In desperation, Margery insists that John join her in a mutual vow of chastity, and he acquiesces, letting Margery embark on longed-for pilgrimages, first to Jerusalem and later to Spain, to follow the path of Santiago de Compostela. Before leaving England, she meets Julian of Norwich, a mystic and “anchoress” voluntarily confined in a cell attached to a church. (Readers will recall Hildegard von Bingen’s ordeal as an anchoress’ companion in Sharratt’s 2012 Illuminations.) Julian validates, by example, Margery’s belief in a personal relationship with God, free of clerical mediation. Julian also entrusts her own manuscript—doubly transgressive because it’s in English and a woman wrote it—to Margery. In the Holy Land, Margery’s religious ecstasies, marked by loud weeping, are offensive, as Sharratt wryly notes, only to English Catholics; Eastern Christians are fine with it. Drawn from Kempe’s actual autobiography, the novel is enhanced by Sharratt’s storytelling ability. The pilgrimage sections are rescued from tedium by Margery’s heedlessness of social opprobrium and her resulting clashes with fellow pilgrims. Readers will root for Margery as she wins friends among a minority of kindred spirits, who, like her, dare to imagine such heresies as Scriptures in English and women writing books.
Sharratt’s gift for grounding larger issues in everyday lives makes for historical fiction at its best.
~Kirkus, STARRED REVIEW
If you’re the kind of historical fiction reader that likes to interrupt their reading to scroll through Wikipedia, Revelations by Mary Sharratt will be a dream read. It’s based on a manuscript that was discovered in an English country house in the 1930s (supposedly while looking for an extra ping pong ball) but is now recognized as the first autobiography in the English language. Margery Kempe is a total enigma; she has the soul of a modern woman but is trapped in an unhappy marriage in Medieval England. After bearing 14 children, she fulfills her dream of going on spiritual pilgrimage, encountering many challenges and dangers along the way. Her story reminds us that global travel, though possible, was not quite as safe and easy as it is now, and that religious freedom was not guaranteed either. Her fascinating story will give you an unparalleled glimpse into what it was like to be a woman—and an independent and adventurous one at that—in the Middle Ages.
–Lucy Stoltzfus, The Bookshelf
Sharratt evokes the sights and smells of medieval England as viscerally as she does Margery’s divine ecstasy, immersing readers in both her inner and outer journeys. . . . Revelations will appeal to any reader interested in tales driven by a flawed woman with a certain purpose.
~Booklist
Intense . . . . Margery’s faith and emotions are rich on the page.
~Publishers Weekly
Mystic or madwoman? Mary Sharratt makes this controversial woman a sympathetic character, defined and defied by the time in which she lived. Revelations is filled with fascinating details about the perils of the 15th-century pilgrim road, especially for a woman daring enough to travel it alone.
~Donna Woolfolk Cross, internationally bestselling author of Pope Joan
Set during a time of fervid religious persecution, Mary Sharratt’s carefully researched, capaciously imagined Revelations brings to vivid life 15th century Christian mystic Margery Kempe. A transporting novel that captures both the harsh reality of medieval womanhood and the mystery of the divine.
~Cathy Marie Buchanan, New York Times bestselling author of The Painted Girls and Daughter of Black Lake
Mary Sharratt’s Revelations is a book worthy of its fascinating subject. A deeply imaginative and empathetic novel, full of surprises and delights.
~Bruce Holsinger, USA Today-bestselling author of The Gifted School and A Burnable Book
Considered through the female gaze, Margery Kempe’s travels and travails take on new significance as she undertakes a dangerous mission for Julian of Norwich in a time of Lollard persecution and a misogynist Church patriarchy. Thriller, domestic tragedy, medieval travelogue, meditation on a woman’s spiritual awakening, Revelations pulses with life. A gem of a book. Highly recommended!
~Candace Robb, author of the bestselling Owen Archer mysteries
Revelations by Mary Sharratt brings to vivid life Margery Kempe and her world with all its riotous color, conflicting religious beliefs, deadly perils, saints and sinners. Revelations is a fascinating journey into both the medieval world and the medieval mind.
~Patricia Bracewell, author of The Steel Beneath the Silk
In this beautifully rendered tale, Mary Sharratt has managed to capture the ecstatic and vulnerable wisdom of the holy madwoman, Margery Kempe, and distill the quintessence of feminine wisdom. I love the way she weaves the radically optimistic teachings of Julian of Norwich into Margery’s journey. Revelations brings these two medieval luminaries to life with startling relevance for our times.
~Mirabai Starr, translator of The Showings of Julian of Norwich and author of Wild Mercy
Mary Sharratt expertly brings the hidden history of women to light. In her newest work, fifteenth century holy woman Margery Kempe is the focus. Well researched, and richly detailed, REVELATIONS truly reveals the life, travels, and visions of this mystic and her relationship to the cloistered Julian of Norwich. In a time when most people were illiterate, these woman used literature to spread the divine word. Kempe may not have attained sainthood, but Sharratt’s remarkable novel will ensure that she is not forgotten.
~Pamela Klinger-Horn, Valley Bookseller, Minnesota
A chef-d’oeuvre. In this lush historical novel, Mary Sharratt illumines the life of Margery Kempe, a spirited mystic and her singular friendship with Julian of Norwich, her mentor, the revered mystic, thirty years her senior. The chosen paths of these two indomitable women might seem antipodes—Julian an enclosed anchorite, Margery a roving pilgrim—but Sharratt reveals their identity: the will to serve but one master, their Lord.
Weaving together the uncommon threads of Margery’s tempestuous life, from giving birth to fourteen children, scaling the Alps on her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, standing trial as a heretic before the Duke of Bedford, Sharratt has created a stunning tapestry of the early fifteenth century. Through brilliant, sensual writing, the story compels the reader to experience their own pilgrimage into the smells, sounds, sights of the Middle Ages.
The title Revelations not only invokes the precious writing of Julian which she confided to Margery, and the multiple visions finely depicted of both mystics, but most importantly it invokes the simple teachings of the God whose name is love.
~Susan M. Tiberghien, author of Circling to the Center: Invitation to Silent Prayer and Writing Toward Wholeness: Lessons Inspired by C.G. Jung.