Victoria Mackenzie, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain. Bloomsbury hb 2023. 164 pp. Loaned by a friend, CB.

This is the story of two extraordinary medieval women. This was a period when we ‘usually hear nothing in the annals of history’ about such women, as the author says in her epilogue. Their stories are told here in alternating short sections in what is a very short novel. Considering it deals with the mostly inner lives of two medieval mystics, it’s a highly engaging read. Although they both experienced mystical visions, they were very different in character and life circumstances, and award-winning Scots author Victoria Mackenzie skilfully brings out these similarities and differences in the use of their indirect narrative voices.

Margery Kempe was the wife of a Norfolk merchant, mother of at least 12 children. Soon after the birth of one of her babies she starts having visions of Jesus. She feels impelled to go out into the town to tell people of these mystical experiences. It was a time when claiming to have direct communication with God resulted in the person being burnt at the stake as a heretic. Everyone warns her to keep quiet (‘stop your nonsense’, snaps her neighbour Agnes, who on a later occasion suggests her visions are just what Margery wishes them to be), but she persists with this dangerous course of action. She starts to weep a lot in public, which doesn’t help her image.

Julian of Norwich lost numerous family members to ‘the pestilence’ (usually known nowadays as plague or Black Death), including her husband and new baby. After an illness she had the first of her many ‘shewings’ or visions of Jesus. She too is warned by her priest to hold her tongue. She obeys, but writes them down in secret. This silence causes her to fear she’s a coward. When her mother died she became an anchoress (‘an anchor for God…anchored to God’), walled up for 23 years in a cell next to a church dedicated to St Julian, whose name she took. She can have no direct contact with anyone, and speaks to visitors through a curtained window. Her maid provides her with physical necessities through another window.

There is a ceremony to become an anchoress. A nun is a bride of Christ and so has a nuptial mass, but becoming an anchorite is a death.

I had to die to the world.

At first she’s unsettled, unsure of her vocation, but learns to accept the contemplative life, the cycle of services and prayer. She follows the contemporary rule for anchoresses, Ancrene Wisse. ‘The life of an anchoress should be one of quiet reflection, not pain or self-denial’ (Julian’s voice, p. 12) She’s smells the smoke from the flames of executions of heretics in the town, and sympathises with the victims, for she also believes that God’s love saves sinners without the need for a priest’s intercession. This also, of course, reinforces her awareness of the perils of speaking out about her visions.

Both women have doubts about their visions: ‘What if my vision was from the devil? How could I be sure that my vision was something good and holy, and not something evil to make me look a fool?’ (Margery’s voice, p. 9). She is robustly examined and accused several times by church representatives, who suspect her of heresy and of being a Lollard (a contemporary reforming movement associated with Wycliffe, which challenged or questioned many of the Catholic church’s principles and practices).

Julian is allowed to keep a cat; over the years she has several. In one bitter winter a squirrel moves under her bed for shelter: ‘My cat did not approve and slept in Sara’s [her maid’s] room.’

In 1431, many years after her first vision, Margery resolves to visit Julian, of whom she’d heard many good things. With a legacy from her deceased father she’d been able to pay off her feckless husband’s debts, so he felt unable to forbid it. The meeting of the two mystics forms a heart-warming climax to this unusual, beautifully modulated novel. They instinctively understand each other. Julian is impressed by Margery’s courage in speaking out when she had refrained from doing so, and endorses the validity of her visions. She asks her visitor to take her secret book of shewings out into the world. She was to die soon after this meeting. Margery went on to use her father’s legacy to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Compostela and elsewhere.

Soon after returning home to [King’s] Lynn after speaking with Julian, Margery, who was illiterate, wonders, as she considers the anchoress’s pages, what their power could be. In another vision Jesus urges her to write her own book. Her husband is sceptical, saying nobody would be interested in such a thing: ‘”A woman knows little of life,”’ he scoffs. ‘”Other women may be interested,”’ she insists. ‘”Women cannot read,” he said. “Their brains are too soft.”’ Undaunted, she later dictates her story to a series of scribes.

This book came down to us as The Book of Margery Kempe. Mackenzie acknowledges the modern English translation by B.A. Windeatt as a source for her novel. It is credited as being the first autobiography in the English language.

Her other main source is Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, translated by Elizabeth Spearing. It is probably the first surviving book in English by a woman. In a note Mackenzie describes her novel as ‘a creative engagement with both texts as well as a work of imagination.’ As such it’s a remarkable and inspiring achievement, even for a reader like me with no particular religious convictions.

I suppose what makes it work so well is that the author avoids adopting a faux archaic style. Instead she writes in clear, largely unadorned prose, with a sensitive ear for the nuances of the two women’s doubts, fears and ecstasies. As I said at the start of this post, it might seem an unpromising subject for a modern novel, this tale of two almost anonymous medieval mystics, but Mackenzie has produced a work aptly described on the cover blurb as ‘writing [that] is sometimes raw, at other times very beautiful’.