Reaume, G., (2025) “Holy Heritage: A Methodology for Learning about Religious Mad People’s History  ”, Disability Studies Quarterly 44(5). doi: https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.6867

Introduction

In our secular age when someone says they have been receiving messages from God, they are likely to be dismissed, at least among people for whom religious faith is not an important part of their life. Such influences impact how non-religious people in the twenty-first century interpret the historical memoirs of mad people who wrote of religious imagery and messages that occurred during their periods of madness. This article is an attempt to underline why people who read and teach this history should not dismiss or ignore writers who have claimed heavenly influence in their experiences of madness. In particular, the goal is to propose a methodology to teach and learn from religiously inspired writings in mad people’s history that will assist people who have little or no background on this topic and who find such texts difficult to understand due to writing style and religious concepts with which they are not familiar. In doing so, this article reiterates the following, written by Robert Menzies, et. al.: “Mad Studies is an exercise in critical pedagogy – in the radical co-production, circulation, and consumption of knowledge.”¹

Teaching this history from religious writers in a secular world is a way of expanding our learning and worldviews to include people who were the first to record what madness meant to those who lived it. To ignore such writing because it does not accord with one’s worldview, or is difficult to understand, is to ignore our own heritage long before most people could read or write. A secular presumption that such writings are too obscure and irrelevant for modern day audiences should instead take account of the important inheritance these writings have left for later generations. As will be argued in the following pages, far from being irrelevant, such writings have a resonance beyond one’s adherence to a particular set of beliefs, religious or secular. Indeed, there may be surprises in store when religiously inspired writings are reflected upon and discussed today, not the least of which is recognizing their relevance to people in our own times. This article focuses only on madness in Christianity while also acknowledging that this is only one of many faiths where religiously inspired expressions by mad people have found a holy home.

In 2005, while teaching a graduate course on methodology, one of the readings happened to be about religion and disability from an edited collection that included some of the earliest writers on this topic from a critical disability studies perspective.² Several students expressed surprise that there was even a source, let alone a book of articles, on this topic on the course outline. Their reason: They said that in their experiences, the field was generally secular in orientation and religion was seldom discussed beyond criticisms of the negative impact other-worldly beliefs had on disabled people, such as disability being a curse from God. While it would be exaggerating to make it sound as if the students in this class leapt with joy at the inclusion of a religiously-oriented disability studies source in the course, several students said in our class discussion when the readings came up that they were glad to read a source that expressed a spiritual or religious context to disability studies that was not exclusively negative.

In a Mad People’s History course I have taught since 2000, religion and madness have always been included on the reading list since it is such a major part of our history that needs to be discussed. Curiously, though there have always been students who have been keenly interested in religion and madness in class discussions and in their own research essays, students have not made a point at any time that I can remember of saying that they were surprised such articles were included in a course on Mad People’s History unlike in the methodology course. Perhaps this is because it would be more expected that such readings would be included in a course on history than in a course which focuses on contemporary methodological issues where religion is seen as less of an all-dominating presence now than in the past? Related to this point, some years ago a student told me about a teacher they knew who said they did not understand historical religious texts authored by historical mad people, specifically Margery Kempe, so they did not teach such first-person accounts. Given this context, it is worth reflecting upon why religious explanations by mad people about what they were experiencing should be included when we teach and learn about this topic.

This article also addresses how explaining such ideas in a secular environment is necessary where supernatural experiences can be so easily dismissed as both hard to understand, given different ways of thinking and writing across the centuries, and as having little or no meaning beyond expressing oneself through imaginary allusions. To better explain what is meant by ‘a methodology for learning about religious mad people’s history,’ one historical mad person whose writing is infused with religious meaning will be the focus of this article: Margery Kempe, who lived in England during the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries. Her writing is especially relevant to this topic as she was the first person to have their experiences recorded in English about madness by one who lived it. Given the six hundred years since her account was written, her thoughts will be discussed as a leading example of how such writing, whatever its difficulties to modern readers, is a mine of rich history that deserves our time and effort to understand concepts which were engrained in the religious traditions of this era. The purpose here is to underline how employing a religious madness methodology can help mad studies researchers understand and take seriously such supernatural perspectives from long ago. These accounts continue to speak to us in a secular world, no matter what one believes, or does not believe, regarding madness and religion in our own lifetime.

Before engaging this topic further, it is important to keep in mind that a basic principle of mad religious methodology when thinking about the earliest first-person accounts of madness is to try to remove whatever secular biases we have in understanding past religious expressions as being unintelligible to our contemporary way of thinking. This assumes that most people who read and teach on this topic today do not have a strong background in interpreting Christian biblical references or metaphors that appear in historical mad peoples’ religious expressions. Instead, we need to recognize that religious belief, as expressed in the following accounts, was the central way people living in the past understood their world, just as secular understandings of the world today are central to large numbers of people in the 2020s. If a fuller history of mad people’s experiences is to be appreciated, a humble admission on the part of anyone seeking to understand this past needs to be based on the realization that religious, supernatural expressions were fundamental to much of the history of mad people’s views up to the 19th century and are by no means absent since then, even if less prominent. To ignore this writing, because it does not suit our contemporary secular worldview or is difficult to grasp, is to miss out on an extraordinarily rich and influential part of our history that underlines early first-hand evidence of what it meant to be mad in distant times.

Madness and Christianity

“Are Christians mad?” So inquired M.A. Screech in his article on “Good madness in Christendom” published in 1985; he notes how the ancient Romans certainly believed early Christians were in a state of madness for believing that Christ rose from the dead and the possibility that devoted believers would be resurrected after death. Such concepts “flew in the face of mature philosophical and religious thinking in the wider world of the Roman Empire.”³ Thus the history of madness in Christianity is as old as is this religion. Jesus, after all, was described by his family members as “out of his mind” in Mark 3:21 who thought of physically restraining him as he authorized his disciples to expel devils among people deemed possessed. Only when Jesus refuted the idea that he was instilled with the devil did his family back off and leave him be. As Screech notes, this episode, as interpreted by Erasmus, was a sign to later Christians that “anyone who truly tries to follow Christ's example must be prepared to be thought mad by his own family.”⁴ Yet while madness as a negative trait is being imparted here, there were other forms of madness that were deemed good – divine madness as heaven-sent to preach God’s word and warn the masses of sinful error – for example.

This and other examples of divine madness abound in ancient and medieval Christianity, particularly in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths in which holy figures were seen as mad mystics or prophets. Saint Paul, in the first century CE, is undoubtedly the most famous holy Christian figure whose declaration about “the foolishness of God” refers to “an act of divine 'madness'” to save humanity through “the crucifixion of his only Son.”⁵ There were also holy fools who spoke truth to power, one of the most famous being Saint Andrew the Fool, who was supposedly alive in fifth century Constantinople, a former slave who denounced materialism in Byzantium, but whom historians state was “a purely literary creation” written about in the tenth century; he has attained folklore status for the moral lessons his story imparts to the devoted in the Eastern Orthodox Church.⁶ Saint Dymphna, who lived in seventh century Ireland, was martyred near what is now modern day Geel, Belgium while trying to escape the incestuous depravity of her father who eventually pursued her to the continent. Though she was not recorded as mad, as were many holy fools, Dymphna was credited with founding a hospice in Geel for mad people, before she was murdered, which has been in operation since medieval times at the shrine to this Catholic “patron saint of the mentally ill.”⁷

While it was not until the second millennium of Christianity that first-person accounts of religious madness can be found, historians have examined “miracle narratives” kept by monks who took care of monastic shrines where mad people were brought to be prayed over, and where, it was believed, miraculous cures took place; these narratives were duly recorded by monks about the lives of otherwise ordinary people who left no accounts of their own.⁸ As in centuries past, madness as being ascribed to evil spirits and sinful ways, such as pride and immodesty, was a prevalent belief in places like twelfth and thirteenth century England. This was such that family members brought their loved ones to shrines where saints were believed capable of healing them. Behaviour deemed immoral, such as shouting during church services, was seen as part of mad conduct which, when treated successfully through prayerful intercession, was believed to be evident through the formerly mad person becoming “pious, faithful, charitable and discrete, illustrating their mental and spiritual recovery.”⁹ What is notable about this list of signs of mental healing is how they reflect the writings of some of the earliest first-person accounts of madness.

It may be something of a misnomer to claim that such accounts were “religious madness” any more than we would today say someone has had “secular madness” – expressions that had no connection with a supernatural, religious or spiritual belief. Nevertheless, “religious madness” is a helpful descriptive term to refer to the mad thoughts of those for whom religious interpretations were essential to their beliefs. It is commonly understood in early twenty-first century North America and Western Europe that most people have absorbed the secular world around us without reference to religious explanations for their lived experiences; this does not mean religious belief is absent, as clearly various faiths continue to be practiced. Rather than all-encompassing explanations for worldly events and personal experiences wrapped up in a cosmic interpretation based on religious beliefs, in contemporary times, Christianity does not have absolute rule over the thought processes of the majority of people now as it did during the medieval period. It is also important to distinguish between religious beliefs from hundreds of years ago with religious fundamentalists in our own times. While extremist religious fundamentalists do have significant influence in some modern-day countries, notably in places like South Korea and the United States of America, their views developed in response to a secular world where one religious view – Christianity – no longer dominates to the extent that it did in the past. Modern day Christian religious fundamentalism is therefore part of a reactionary, regressive response to widespread pluralism of religious and secular beliefs.¹⁰ It is also important to note that secularism was not a clear-cut process in which religious influence declined in the western world and non-religious views became the norm. The break between a religious and secular worldview was not so distinct during this or any other period including recent times such that it can be said that a social belief system was all one way or all the other way. Charles Taylor has criticized “subtraction stories” in which people claim that “secularity in particular” led to people “having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.”¹¹ He argues that this is an overly simplistic explanation for understanding changing views within and towards religion in the western world as there continues to be extensive belief in religion from various perspectives.

Religious ideas continued to influence views of madness in early modern Europe (ca. 1500s to 1700s) in which conflicts within a tormented soul could be linked with unbalanced humours like too much phlegm or bile “making possible a mixed physic which combined physical and religious interventions,” as Rhodri Hayward has written.¹² Thus, the persistence of Christian religious views were so commonplace, including among secular-influenced members of the elite, as to be universally expected well past the late medieval period in which Margery Kempe lived. This placed some persecuted minorities, such as Jews, in particularly dangerous situations as some were forced to “convert” under threat of death at different times in medieval and early modern Europe and many were murdered during the Catholic church-led Inquisition.¹³ When referring to medieval holy fools like the legendary Saint Andrew of Constantinople, Byzantine historian George Calofonos observes “in a world where the Christian faith was a given and not a matter of choice, the boundaries between faith and gullibility, piety and superstition, prayer and magical incantation, miracle and magic, were not always strictly defined.”¹⁴ As Colofonos’ quote indicates, it is essential always to keep in mind the worldview of religious Christian mad people during medieval periods in particular as based on a lack of choices for how to express such views to their contemporaries. Historical religious mad people prior to the seventeenth and early eighteenth century did not live in a world where pluralism existed about whether to adhere to an other-worldly faith. They struggled to express themselves as religiously mad in ways that, whatever our beliefs today, has contemporary resonance for understanding how to communicate one’s experiences while also appreciating this period of mad people’s history within its own context.

This absence of choice is reflected in some of the historiography about religious madness which includes focus on treatments provided by clergy and how these influences sought to address “spiritual afflictions” as described by David Lederer in his study using documents describing the experiences of people in Bavaria during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁵ Given the absence of first-person accounts from this period, it is understandable that the sources for these accounts rely on second-hand observations about people grappling with heavenly and hellish spirits, whether due to earthly sin, devilish temptations and a testing of one’s faith. As far as historiographical accounts of madness are concerned, publications by Dale Peterson and Roy Porter are among the earliest to discuss religious mad people’s history.¹⁶ Overall, however, religious madness from the perspectives of people who lived in pre-modern times has not been a major focus of a great deal of historical research, though work by Katharine Hodgkin is a notable exception.¹⁷ This likely reflects the greater number of sources left by people since the latter nineteenth century where religion is not as primary a theme in accounts that were influenced by an increasingly secular world. This is not to say that religion does not come up at all in writings from the modern period. Other-worldly faith beliefs continue to be expressed by asylum inmates long after the period considered here, as Darby Penney and Peter Stastny document about the account of Sister Marie Ursuline/Theresa who was an inmate at a New York state asylum during the first half of the twentieth century.¹⁸ As the co-authors note, a secular psychiatric system did everything it could to erase the religious identity of Sister Marie Ursuline/Theresa right up until her death, denying even a religious burial. Thus, this history is not only about mad peoples’ religious expressions but also deals with the denial of a person’s most deeply held faith. This too is part of our inheritance. It is very much part of the field of mad studies given that it “works to validate the experiences of all Mad people” as Lucy Costa and Lori Ross have noted.¹⁹

Most of the early texts on mad studies produced in the twenty-first century do not have much to say about other-worldly accounts of madness, however, this is starting to change as the field continues to develop. Lauren J. Tenney’s essay in a recent collection describes the need for more understanding to be devoted to spirituality given psychiatry’s long history of undermining the role of spiritual beliefs by linking such views to unscientific ideas, which are therefore deemed as having no validity. Her conclusion is similar to this article’s argument when she writes of the need for mad studies “to respect a person’s ideas, to take seriously their experiences, to approach what they bring forward from the position of that individual or the collective” related to spiritual and religious beliefs.²⁰ A particularly evocative article which incorporates religious thoughts and a mad studies perspective is by Elisabeth Punzi and Gunnel Bergstrand.²¹ Reflecting on her experiences at the age of twenty-one in a Swedish psychiatric institution in 1956, Gunnel Bergstrand describes in this co-authored article how important religion has been for her during her lifetime. She also expressed concerns about anyone finding out until this article was published that she saw Jesus while confined in Restad asylum; the one person she confided in previously about this experience was her mother whom she knew would not judge her. In contrast, doctors, nurses and fellow church members were so prejudiced against Gunnel for having been in an institution that she was not able to become a nurse or a missionary, both of which she had wanted to do. This article shows the continuing relevance of religion to people who identity as psychiatric survivors or mad and the ways in which mad studies can provide a supportive analysis for people who have been discriminated against both due to psychiatric diagnosis and religious thoughts. Similarly, a mad studies analysis is employed by Glenn McCullough when examining the religious thought of Anton Boisen (1876-1965) who worked in the field of pastoral education and psychology in the USA.²² Boisen also related accounts of holy visions which doctors told him to forget; academics in this field have since discriminated against his legacy due to his psychiatric history. As these examples illustrate, mad studies perspectives and accounts of our history are significantly expanded upon by other-worldly views beyond a strictly secular approach, even if one is not religious or spiritually inclined.

It is also essential to underline how religiously influenced people and ideas have oppressed so many people throughout history, including mad and disabled people and communities marginalized due to prejudices related to race, class, gender, sexuality and “othered” belief systems. This heritage is undoubtedly part of the aversion to including a religiously oriented approach among some people who have been traumatized by devotees of a particular faith, such as the impact of some Christians who have imposed their worldview on countless colonized and subjugated people who do not share the same beliefs, as well as in countless church-run institutions around the globe. Thus, the negative as well as the positive aspects of religion are a central part of this heritage no matter what time or place is considered. As part of coming to terms with such a contentious past, we need to understand where religion has provided an explanatory basis for so many before our times in a way that helped people explain what was happening to them, and which will help later generations to understand their experiences outside of a strictly secular lens. Religion and mad people’s expressions are part of our inheritance which should be addressed from the perspectives of those who believed in other-worldly beliefs no matter what we might think of such ideas. Just as is already being done in the related field of critical disability studies, including religious perspectives will enrich mad teaching methodology in ways that can be both respectful and redeeming for those who have identified as religiously mad in the past, present, and future.²³

Context to The Book of Margery Kempe, 1436

Let us now reflect on the religiously inspired words of the original author in English of mad writings, dating back six hundred years. When doing so, modern day readers need to develop a mad religious learning methodology which places our mental space in the world of those whose world is as different from our times as the planet earth is different from Mars. It is appropriate to reflect on this learning process with some examples of how writing then is different from now, but which can nevertheless speak to us still with some effort on our part as modern-day readers, regardless of what we think about religion. The thoughts of Margery Kempe (ca. 1373 – ca. 1438) were transcribed in 1436 England by two male recorders, one of whom is believed to have been her son, another was a priest. Lost for hundreds of years, since this manuscript was rediscovered in the 1930s her words have become famous as the first autobiography in English. That these words are from a woman who was the mother of fourteen children living in a male-dominated world makes the recording and survival of her thoughts from six hundred years ago all the more remarkable.²⁴

Margery Kempe was herself from a well-to-do background. While there exists no information about her mother, it is known that her father had been mayor of Bishop’s Lynn (now King’s Lynn), a market town in Norfolk County, England; he was also well-connected in other local offices, including as a member of parliament.²⁵ Thus Margery’s family was part of the early English middle class. Still, as a woman, she lived in a world ruled by men and her absence of literacy skills reflects her gendered status as lacking formal education, even if from a relatively privileged class compared to the mass of peasantry. Nevertheless, Margery would have had her own experiential learning which is reflected in her transcribed recollections where she watches out for herself in a dangerous world.

It is important to note that her book does not follow a clear chronology. Then again, why should it? Margery Kempe had her thoughts transcribed by two different people at a time when such a concept as “autobiography” did not exist, let alone in a format that followed a certain structure.²⁶ There was a literary tradition in Christianized Europe that existed for several hundred years before Margery Kempe’s time in the early 1400s by or about religiously inspired women, though the extent to which these works influenced her book is debatable.²⁷ Given this context, a central part of mad religious methodology should be to humbly set aside our modern notions of what life-writing is supposed to look like when reading such an account for periods that are so very far removed from our own well established literary forms. An essential point to appreciate is how the “inner turbulence” of mad accounts from Margery Kempe onwards was a central influence in setting down such thoughts, as Katharine Hodgkin observes; such mental turmoil, in turn, lead to questions about whether such accounts can be clearly understood by those who did not live it.²⁸ After all, every memoir, no matter what the circumstances, leaves things out. We will never know for certain how well we can grasp Margery’s experiences of madness from her book, other than that it is a fragmentary depiction. Related to this, Anthony Goodman notes that Margery would have been influenced by a desire to present thoughts in ways that were acceptable and compelling to her contemporaries. Thus, her book “cannot be assumed to be a series of snapshots accurately and fully depicting the development of a devout personality.”²⁹ Forgetfulness and uncertainty about the past can cloud anyone’s memories and she would have been no exception. Like all memoirists after her, Margery’s work is selective about what is recounted and how it is framed in reference to the world in which she lived.

Particularly important as far as the theme of this article is concerned is to note that her references to experiences of madness take up a very small part of The Book of Margery Kempe. She was therefore not writing a memoir about madness per se, but rather about a life in which religious devotion is sorely tried and re-asserted through heavenly guidance and mystical inspiration, of which madness is but one crucial part of her overall story. Ultimately, a complete depiction of her experience is not possible, though her life story is more accessible than most of her medieval contemporaries. This is why her book is so widely recognized, including as part of Mad People’s History: the original account of madness in English by a person who had lived it. To comprehend this text, a basic part of mad methods is to research how it developed out of the religious and gendered culture in which she lived. This context included years of religious devotional instruction by local clerics who may have been taken aback by her, at times, enthusiastic displays of religious faith.³⁰ As Goodman notes, this instruction and the wider culture of devotional prayer that was expected of all classes, meant that her expressions fit within the religious traditions of the period. This tradition included images, people and objects, which “were regarded as having a physical actuality which was an important manifestation of divine beneficence…reassuring evidence about the soul’s true experiences.”³¹ When Margery wrote about God and other sacred figures communicating with her, this was meant to show that they talked to her “as clearly and plainly as one friend spoke to another.”³² It is therefore ironic that Kempe’s work is viewed as difficult to read now, given that her account was written in a way that could be widely understood in the 1430s. While it is not known how her work was received by contemporaries, Goodman writes that, given her attention to popularly understood religious meanings and imagery, “The Book could surely have been understood and enjoyed if read out to even the most ill-informed and poverty-stricken inhabitants of the borough.”³³ The religious messages she was relating in her book were conventional for her time, even if the publicly enthusiastic way she expressed such thoughts during bouts of madness in earlier years would have been seen, at times, as unconventional, as is discussed below.

Mad Thoughts in The Book of Margery Kempe, 1436

Reflecting on her experiences some four decades later when she would have been in her sixties, about life in the 1390s as a young new mother, Margery is recorded in the third person as describing the onset of her mental despair:

And when she was at any time sick or dis-eased, the devil said in her mind that she should be damned because she was not shriven of that default. Wherefore after her child was born, she, not trusting to live, sent for her ghostly father, as is said before, in full will to be shriven of all her lifetime, as near as she could. And when she came to the point for to say that thing which she had so long concealed, her confessor was a little too hasty and began sharply to reprove her, before she had fully said her intent, and so she would no more say for aught he might do. Anon, for the dread she had of damnation on the one side, and his sharp reproving of her on the other side, this creature went out of her mind and was wondrously vexed and laboured with spirits for half a year, eight weeks and odd days.³⁴

Today, when reading this passage, a contemporary reader would likely understand most of this language except perhaps for the word “shriven” which in this context means to acquit or forgive. This forgiveness was being sought by Margery by speaking to a priest – “her confessor” – who was not willing to hear all that she had to say. This led to intensified fear of “damnation” and being perplexed by a cleric dismissing her prayerful reflections, precipitating a prolonged period of madness. In these and other passages Margery records self-blame for her torments accompanied by self-hatred, along with callous treatment at the hands of an unsupportive male authority figure – a priest – who refused to hear her full confession. Margery then proceeds to recall that she “slandered” her husband, friends, and her own person and spoke “many a wicked word” while she also harmed herself with biting and scratching after which the following took place: “…she was bound and kept with strength day and night so that she might not have her will. And when she had long been laboured in these and many other temptations, so that men weened she should never have escaped or lived, then on a time as she lay alone and her keepers were from her, Our Merciful Lord Jesus Christ, ever to be trusted, worshipped be His Name, never forsaking His servant in time of need, appeared to His creature who had forsaken Him…”³⁵

In addition to being a “rare example,” as Dale Peterson describes it, of the physical restraining of a person deemed mad around the turn of the fifteenth century from their own perspective, these above-cited words also reveal how Margery’s religious worldview influenced her thoughts while also indicating both her subordinate position and rebellious conduct as a woman in late medieval England.³⁶ At the same time, Laura Jose has pointed out that when trying to understand The Book of Margery Kempe it behooves readers to avoid making “an association between women and madness which is simply not applicable to the Middle Ages” by using concepts borrowed from later centuries, such as the assumption that female self-harm has the same meaning in late medieval times as it does in the modern era.³⁷ As Dave Postles has documented, physical harm decreed by church officials inflicted on a person deemed to have grievously sinned was “part of the medieval spectacle of public penance: the marked body represented the crime and the politics of the individual and the ‘community.’”³⁸ Margery’s thoughts could therefore be viewed in this light as reflective of a contemporary culture of public penance. Even if she engaged in this form of hurting herself on her own initiative it may have been done as a way of expiating what Margery believed to be sinful behaviour that needed to be redeemed by God and the community in which she lived; perhaps this is why she mentioned that the bite mark on her hand “was seen all her life after.”³⁹ While it is possible to read modern critical analysis into writing like this, deferring to the social context of the period in which it was written is crucial to trying to understand what a mad author was conveying in her own lifetime, rather than ours. Margery’s comments elsewhere about being accused by monks of being a “false Lollard” while also expressing fear of the “Godhead” are the sort of thoughts that a modern-day reader may puzzle over as has been made clear by some of my students over the years.⁴⁰ Yet, given the ubiquity of often inaccessible academic prose in modern day theoretical writing, getting past unfamiliar terms like this should not pose an insurmountable problem for newcomers to this writing, if we are serious about understanding the thoughts of mad people from the distant past. In this age of easy searches on the internet, this is especially true. Thus, terms like “false Lollard” (heretic) and “Godhead” (the Divine Trinity in Christianity – God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost/Spirit) are easy terms to find on any computer. A basic methodology when reading terms like this is a Google search, at least, or, if a reader has access to a good library system, looking up secondary sources which explain such concepts.⁴¹ This point is so simple that it can understandably be dismissed as “basic” as a peer reviewer for this article quite rightly noted. The purpose in pointing out this ease of access to words or concepts which may, at first glance, be hard to understand to many modern readers is that in an age when academic work is filled with obscure jargon which students (and teachers) are expected to grapple with there is no reason for anyone who wishes to learn mad people’s rich history to avoid locating the meaning of centuries-old words and ideas that are no longer in common use today but which help to explain what people like Margery Kempe were describing in the distant past.

An important example of understanding this wider context is noted by historian Leigh Ann Craig. Craig has shown how, during the time Margery Kempe experienced her madness, her contemporaries would have had difficulty sorting out what was going on with her since “demoniacs, the imbalanced, and the divinely inspired all spoke nonsense or ‘clamored’, saw and heard things that others did not see or hear, became agitated, displayed immoderate anger and sadness, became assaultive, engaged in self-harm, or became intermittently ‘useless’ and ‘helpless’.”⁴² Thus even though Margery Kempe’s experiences recounted in part of her autobiography are acknowledged now as expressions of madness, at the time her contemporaries found her behaviour difficult to interpret on the spot, other than considering her conduct way out of line for a woman in a patriarchal society. Her conduct may have also been a way of expressing agency through unruly behaviour for, as Stephen Harper notes, “Margery’s insanity must be understood in the context of her search for a degree of autonomy in the face of considerable domestic demands, public obloquy and…clerical opposition.”⁴³ At the same time, while Harper refers to Kempe’s madness as having been expressed in “alternating bouts of mania and melancholia” he criticizes as “inaccurate” some interpretations, such as by Michel Foucault and Roy Porter, that mad peoples’ religious rapture was as widely accepted among devout medieval contemporaries as some later writers have claimed.⁴⁴ A basic part of religious mad methodology is therefore to take into account the contentious nature of this topic in which debates over meaning and context are part of the discussion and cannot be simply reduced to interpretations based on our modern day experiences and ideas.

The type of sources used when teaching or learning from mad authors are also important to how these writings are understood. A university course which uses writings by mad memoirists will, at times, include short excerpts from original, much longer writings, as is the case here with The Book of Margery Kempe. After the editors’ introduction for each of the two sources cited here, the complete manuscript for this book is around two-hundred and fifty pages in a published modern version, while an excerpted source which includes her relatively brief discussion of madness, is only ten pages.⁴⁵ For conciseness and focused discussion, the shorter version is more practical to use to teach this history, but the longer publication should be mentioned to refer to the author’s broader literary and historical context. It is also important to note that the translation into relatively accessible English prose for modern audiences is easier to read compared to the original manuscript composition from the fifteenth century, making claims that it is not possible to comprehend these more recently available versions all the more doubtful, particularly with so many additional learning tools available.

One way of reflecting upon this point about how some twenty-first century readers may find older English writing styles difficult, especially if one does not read English texts written before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is that this “old” style was not old to those who spoke or wrote it, any more than our way of speaking or writing today is considered “old” to contemporaries. Yet, unless one likes to read pre-modern and early modern English texts, the way in which some early mad writings are composed can come across as jarring to some modern-day readers.⁴⁶ This is perhaps the most common complaint when it comes to comprehension that I have heard from students about Margery Kempe’s thoughts over the years, with religious references being a close second. For example, when Margery wrote of “Our Lord” providing her with loving protection from sin and devilish temptation she goes on to state that Jesus told her: “For daughter this life pleaseth Me more than the wearing of the haburion or the hair-cloth, or fasting on bread and water; for if thou saidst every day a thousand Pater Nosters, though wouldst not please Me so well as thou dost when thou art in silence and sufferest Me to speak in thy soul.”⁴⁷ Translation: Jesus is telling Margery that her suffering in silence is a greater sign of her religious piety than outward signs of going through public penance; her madness thus has a point as Margery retreats to offer meditative prayers directly to her Heavenly Father rather than what we would in the early twenty-first century call the “performativity” of religious belief for all around her to see and take note of. In effect, Margery is being rewarded for being humble in her prayers known only to God.

Whatever difficulties some readers may have at first glance when reading aspects of her account, there is plenty of accessible text that clearly underlines Margery’s expressions as reflecting the religious devotion she had during a time of great mental despair. This is evident when she described what happened during a pilgrimage: “She had so much affection for the manhood of Christ, that when she saw women in Rome bearing children in their arms, if she could ascertain that any were men-children, she would then cry, roar, and weep as if she had seen Christ in His childhood. And if she might have had her will, oftentimes she would have taken the children out of their mothers' arms and have kissed them in the stead of Christ.”⁴⁸ This particular passage has often resonated with students over the years who have discussed it in class or in written work. The above quote shows how Margery connected the figure of Christ in her thoughts to being enraptured by the presence of what she thinks is Jesus in the flesh when seeing male babies while on pilgrimage. Such thoughts also relate to her own self-identity as a female mystic who was also a mother, in which she equated “the female body more like Christ’s” through women’s suffering and bleeding.⁴⁹ Understanding how Margery Kempe expressed her religious views beyond her own experiences of madness in relation to others like herself makes her story especially relatable to contemporary audiences, while also being careful to preserve historical context.

Perhaps the most poignant reflection on madness in The Book of Margery Kempe, which is not included in the short excerpt in Peterson’s edited collection of mad writers is when the now mentally “restored” woman meets another woman who is mad.⁵⁰ When asked by a distraught husband to see his wife who was “out of her mind” after having a baby, Margery agreed to visit.⁵¹ The distraught woman said she was “greatly comforted by her [Margery’s] presence. ‘For you are,’ she said, ‘A very good woman, and I behold many fair angels round about you, and therefore, I pray you don’t leave me, for I am greatly comforted by you.’”⁵² In contrast, when other people visited her, the distraught woman refused to have anything to do with them, “roared and cried” and was sent to the outskirts of town where she was “bound hand and foot with chains of iron so that she should not strike anybody.”⁵³ Margery recounts that she went to visit the restrained woman every day during which this individual became “meek enough” in her presence; they talked and prayed together so as to “restore her to her wits again” which eventually happened, “a very great miracle.”⁵⁴ In analysing the gendered nature of Margery Kempe’s experiences, Laura Jose observes that she “moves from inhabiting the chained, wounded body of the madwoman, to assuming the same authority given to the closed, pure body of a holy man. It is her experience and subsequent interpretation of madness which allows her to make this transformation.”⁵⁵ Related to this, it is also important to note the points raised by Stephen Harper who, when analysing this above-cited episode, describes it as a way for Margery to be accepted back into the gendered and theological conventions of her time. Her independent spirit was viewed as “corrupting” whereas after she helped another woman recover from mental despair, Margery “helps restore her reputation as a woman of probity. By bringing an unruly madwoman to order, she effectively acquits herself of the charge that she is a disruptive influence on others.”⁵⁶ Thus, Margery returns to conventional gendered relations that existed in late medieval English Christianity.

Perhaps an additional interpretation of this poignant episode can be offered from a mad studies perspective. Investigating the religious meanings of her account allows a modern reader to place Margery Kempe within the context of the period in which she lived while also reflecting upon how her gendered experience of madness and religious devotion led her to a place where she was able to offer personal support to another woman who experienced madness after childbirth. This account reveals Margery as perhaps the first mad person in history who is recorded as offering direct help to another mad person. Could one go so far as to describe Margery Kempe as a medieval forerunner of the twenty-first century mental health peer support worker?⁵⁷ Undoubtedly, more than a few historians would laugh at such a comparison due to vast differences in time, culture, and worldviews. Nevertheless, seriously considering such a comparison is worth reflecting upon, if only to underline the long history of such supportive relationships in Mad People’s History centuries before the modern era. In other words, mad people expressing support for one another in direct ways is at least as old as is the first known mad person’s memoir, composed six hundred years ago. Margery Kempe has clearly shown this in her book if we take the time to read and reflect upon her thoughts through a mad religious methodology.

The Religious Inheritance of Mad Studies

Twenty-first century readers coming across the writings of Margery Kempe, and other religiously inspired mad people from the distant past, would do well to maintain our own humbleness by respecting the visions and voice-hearing that was recorded about their thoughts. These experiences deserve to be taken seriously on their own terms for what it can reveal about the life and times of a particular mad person and those around them. It is also worth pointing out that mad people’s historical religious thoughts continue to be pathologized in the early 2000s, centuries after first being recorded.⁵⁸ Taking such thoughts seriously is first and foremost respectful of mad people on their own terms. It is also a way of ensuring our mad holy heritage is not overtaken by medical modelists seeking to impose anachronistic labels which explain nothing about the lives of people who lived long ago before such diagnostic terms existed. Margery Kempe acknowledged that she “went out of her mind and was amazingly disturbed and tormented with spirits” for the better part of a year.⁵⁹ She deserves to be taken at her word. We do not need to put a psychiatric label on her thoughts to provide them with a modern-day secular interpretation. While Margery Kempe was not expressing an early form of what we would today call “mad pride,” she was also not ashamed of her mental state since she states it boldly on the first page of Chapter 1. Given the prejudices mad people endured, then as now, one could understand if she did try to hide this personal history, which, in any case, would have been known about in the community in which she lived. That Margery did record her thoughts is all the more amazing given the context related in this article and many more detailed studies, including those cited here. Her mental despair was real, and she sought to understand and tell others what was happening through the religious ideas of her time. So too should later generations take the time to understand historical mad religious writers. Such accounts need to be placed in the contexts of the time periods in which they occurred to grasp the essential importance of why mad people sought to express themselves in this way at a given time. Mad studies researchers need to take such supernatural expressions seriously in our contemporary secular world when reading the thoughts of past mad people in order to understand what they were trying to convey, even if our understanding will always be fragmentary and tentative. One does not have to believe in other-worldly faiths to appreciate that people like Margery Kempe have provided an invaluable religious inheritance to mad studies when it comes to learning about our past.

Dedication

This article is dedicated to the memory of my father, Nelson Reaume (1927-2012) and his daughter, my sister, Carole Delisle (1957-2013).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Efrat Gold and Michael Rembis, as well as an anonymous peer reviewer, for their helpful criticisms of earlier versions of this article.