Discerning Voices in the Trial of Joan of Arc and The Book of Margery Kempe

Summary

Among the many documented examples of female visionaries in medieval Europe, the celebrated and contemporaneous cases of Margery Kempe (c. 1373–1438) and Joan of Arc (c. 1412–1431) clearly differ in important respects. Margery was a middle-class English woman whose life is documented in a book — a putative “autobiography” (to use a plainly anachronistic term) with an apparently hagiographic purpose. Joan was a French woman of much lower social standing whose life is largely documented through the transcript (written by her political enemies) of her trial for heresy and through the eyewitness reports gathered together at her posthumous “retrial.” Though apparently examined on suspicion of heresy on a number of occasions, Margery was never actually convicted, whilst Joan was convicted and burned. Margery gave birth to 14 children and was an elderly woman of around 60 when her book was written in 1436; Joan, a virgin-martyr, was probably still in her teens when she was executed in 1431.

Nonetheless, there are also leading similarities, as Beverley Boyd and Nancy Bradley Warren, among others, have noted. Both women might be described as “failed saints”: visionaries who failed — in their own day at least — to win sufficient ecclesiastical endorsement for their claims to spiritual authority. Joan and Margery each eschewed the anchor-hold and might be well described as “prophets abroad”: women whose extreme spiritual aspirations did not preclude, but instead prompted, earthly peregrinations.