Margery Kempe’s Germany: Contours of Pilgrimage, Prayer, and Politics

Daniel Franke University of Rochester November 16th, 2007

Introduction In the seventy-odd years since the “discovery” (or perhaps “rediscovery”) of The Book of

Margery Kempe in 1934, scholars such as Deborah Ellis and Kate Parker have delivered timely and

cogent analyses of the English mystic’s social and cultural context in England and the town of Lynn. Yet

as far as can be determined, a similar treatment of Margery’s German pilgrimage in 1433 has yet to be

attempted. Where she went, what she saw, and how she would have interacted with German social,

cultural, and spiritual institutions have, as subjects, been covered in but a very cursory fashion. Not

much has been said beyond the observation that over the course of her life she displayed an “ease with

and even some fondness for Germany.”1 Alternately, in the words of Lynn Staley, the narrative seems

“at times to transform Margery into a sort of vagabond whose encounters with others…are finally the

point of the narrative.”2 The rather spare style of the second book (where this narrative is located)

encourages such an assessment: there we see tropes without the structure and narrative detail we

rather expect from Margery. There are no particularly grand visions, or memorable occasions outside of

the dishonest cleric or two. Doubtless it would be possible to dwell on these aspects, but instead I will

focus on the historical context of Margery’s journey.

In the next few minutes I want to explore the two aspects of her passage to Prussia and Aachen

in 1433, and suggest certain avenues of research which might help us better understand this

1 Kate Parker, “Lynn and the Making of a Mystic,” from A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. John H.

Arnond and Katherine J. Lewis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 55-73; p. 67.

2 Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press,

1994), 192.

comparatively neglected part of her life. I hope to demonstrate that the Book’s account of her journey

is, in the situation of its main character, a far more reliable narrative source than has been previously

thought. We will first examine the political situation in Germany, and then the condition of German

pilgrimage and how these items influenced Margery’s experiences. For clarity’s sake, we will first

briefly summarize the salient points of both her pilgrimage and the manner of its narration. The rest

follows in what I hope to is a logical progression, from the north German political scene with which

Margery was faced upon her arrival in Danzig, to the practice of pilgrimage in fifteenth-century

Hanseatic Germany, to some Finally, I will offer some suggestions on re-evaluating this part of the Book

as a source.

The Last Pilgrimage: Germany, 1433

As with so many of Margery’s experiences, the voyage to Germany began on impulse and with

the best of intentions, only in this case to unravel somewhat more precariously than usual. As most of

you doubtless know, her son, who had enjoyed a successful commercial career in Danzig as a merchant

of Lynn, had died while visiting Lynn with his German wife. The young woman eventually grew desirous

of returning to her own country, and requested permission to leave England—at which Margery,

doubtless remembering so many of her early experiences as a stranger in strange lands, was moved by

religious impulse and declared she would accompany her daughter to her ship at Ipswich. Before long,

however, she felt “mevyd in my spiryt” to travel all the way to Danzig with her daughter, despite the

young woman’s wish not to be accompanied so far (II.2). Her confessor, after listening to Margery’s

misgivings and hesitation, encouraged her to “obey the will of God, for I believe it is the Holy Ghost that

speaks in you, and therefore follow the moving of your spirit in the name of Jesus.”

This Margery did, and, departing England in the spring of 1433, she suffered storm and near

shipwreck, until putting into Danzig after Easter. According to the scribe, she remained in Danzig “about

five or six weeks” (II.4), and would have stayed longer except that “Our Lord…admonished her to go out

of the country.” The terrors of the sea voyage, however, made a return journey by ship unthinkable,

and Margery was faced with the prospect of returning to England by the overland route—that is, west

through Pomerania, Brandenburg, Brunswick, Westphalia, and the Low Countries to the Channel. This

plan was complicated by hostilities between the Teutonic Order and Poland, necessitating a brief

journey by ship to Straslund, and from there proceeding to the shrine at Wilsnack in Brandenburg (II.4).

Her companions were an extraordinarily varied and occasionally suspect lot, and caused Margery

ceaseless worry, traveling as she was alone and without any type of fellowship. After Wilsnack the

scribe is extremely vague, and basically picks up the journey at Aachen, from thence to Calais, and

further on to London. Her entire sojourn in the German lands had lasted hardly four months.

Margery and German Politics: Danzig and the Teutonic Order

One of the most notable features of the German journey is its almost complete lack of feature.

Even granting various scholarly contentions that the Book is meant as a hagiographic account, a didactic

exemplar of the interior spiritual life, a subversive critique of medieval views on gender relations, or

simply a set of personal reminiscences of an intensely devout woman—even granting all these points of

view, the lack of detail for the Germany travels is remarkable. Even the normal associative visits to

Brigittine sites are completely absent, leaving scholars to speculate that she must have visited these

sites, but lacking any concrete evidence that she did so.3 The first task in establishing the context for

3 Footnote here—Staley, Holloway.

Margery’s trip, therefore, must be to outline the political, social, and economic framework in which she

was moving, but regarding which the Book gives virtually no detail.

Two details are mentioned, however, each of which is a clue to, a) what must have dominated

Margery’s conversations with her new acquaintances in Danzig, and b) what turned a compassionate

visit into a “pilgrimage”. These details are the war of Poland with the Teutonic Order and the quasi-

warfare developing between the Hanseatic towns and England.

It is only a slight exaggeration to describe the timing of Margery’s arrival in Danzig as “bad.” The

Baltic basin was at this time in a nearly constant state of political ferment and turmoil. The Teutonic

Order had been heavily defeated by Poland twenty-three years earlier at Tannenburg, and the order’s

subsequent survival had been little short of a miracle.4 The demands which the Teutonic Knights placed

on the towns and secular lords for men and money led, however, to a swell of discontent in urban

centers such as Danzig, at precisely the moment Margery arrived to experience German hospitality and

Christian fellowship. Indeed, in the years immediately subsequent to Margery’s visit, Danzig became the

leading entity in the Prussian League, a loose confederation of towns and secular lords dedicated to

returning West Prussia to Polish suzerainty, and ending the dominance of the Teutonic Order.

Margery’s difficulty, therefore, in obtaining Order permission to leave Danzig was not simply an example

of difficulties overcome through divine intervention, nor necessarily an invention of Margery or her

scribe, but rather was symptomatic of the Order’s sense of treachery within and hostility without its

borders.

Granted, the Book exaggerates when it claims that England and Prussia were “at war,” it is true

that England, and in particular Lynn, had long had a rocky relationship with the Hanseatic towns, and

increasingly so with the Prussian towns. Much of the conflict over trading rights, restitution of stolen

goods, and immunity from arrest dated from the reign of Edward II, when the Hanseatic towns managed

4 See William Urban, The Teutonic Knights: A Military History (London/Pennsylvania: Greenhill/Stackpole Books,

2003), chapters 10 and 11 for a general overview of the campaigns of the fifteenth century.

to wring both monopolistic privileges and judicial immunity from the crown and parliament.5 Such

special treatment naturally did not survive prolonged baronial and urban English opposition, and by the

end of the fourteenth century the shoe was on the other foot: surviving records indicate that merchants

from Margery’s home town of Lynn controlled over eighty percent of the Danzig trade.6 Naturally, the

Prussian towns and the Teutonic Order resented this state of affairs in their turn. However, with the

Polish war always imminent, the Baltic towns were not in a position to push matters. Within a decade of

Margery’s visit, the League was engaged in desperate warfare with the Order, and trade became even

more vital to its ability to recruit and field mercenary armies.7

The second great point of contact between Germany and England at this time was imperial and

papal efforts to stamp out the Hussites. While Margery’s (and her scribe’s) ignorance of north German

affairs might be surprising, given the strong Hanseatic presence in Lynn, it is not unlikely that Margery’s

most recent frame of reference to Germany was the context of the Hussite wars and the efforts at an

anti-Hussite crusade which agitated most of western Europe from 1427 to 1430. The Lancastrian noble

Cardinal Beaufort, in charge of coordinating the crusade in France, England, and the Empire, had

summoned a Reichstag to Frankfurt and managed to push through the first-ever general imperial tax: in

England, meanwhile Beaufort’s attempts to organize the crusade drew national attention. For someone

such as Margery, accused multiple times of Lollardry (and it was no secret in Germany that the Hussites

were influenced by Wyclif’s teachings), the great publicity of these crusading efforts could not have

failed to make an impression.

5 This would have included the Prussian towns as well, given the imprecise nature of the term “German

merchants.”

6 Parker, 60-61.

7 See Urban, chapter 11.

Emperor-elect Sigismund gave comparatively little thought to the Teutonic Order’s troubles in

the northeast. He concentrated his efforts instead on the Hussite threat and his coronation campaign to

Italy. His subsequent diplomacy focused on securing English aid and political clout to defeat his

enemies, notably the Hussites. Northern Germany, in addition to dealing with the Hanseatic League’s

woes, also experienced the arrival of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Brandenburg, and the nearly constant

warfare that entailed after 1410. Concern about the Hussite threat spread even to Brandenburg where,

already burdened with local campaigning, the Elector Frederick had to worry as well about the Hussites’

alliance with Poland. Thus, Margery, as a foreigner, a woman, and a suspected Lollard, was entering a

realm under attack from without, rent by suspicion of heresy within, and experiencing new bursts of

urban and princely independence. It should come as no surprise that the Book records some difficulty in

Margery’s travels about Germany.

Margery on the Move: Pilgrimage in Northern Germany

Margery’s difficulties in this last journey were compounded by the nature of pilgrimage in

northern Germany during this time. It is important to emphasize that, regardless of how modern

scholars describe her journey, there is little indication that Margery initially thought of her voyage as a

pilgrimage. Only after she was prevented from returning home by sea did pilgrimage enter her

horizon—and then it seems purely as a matter of happenstance. A random acquaintance tells her of a

popular shrine in northwest Brandenburg, and asks her if she would not like to accompany him there.

Once the shrine, at Wilnick, is reached, the narrative focuses entirely on Margery’s difficulties in

securing reliable traveling companions to the next major pilgrimage site on her route: the imperial city

of Aachen.

Now, at first it might seem strange an individual as well-traveled as Margery should have such

trouble negotiating the rigors of a pilgrimage to what was by this time one of the premier pilgrimage

sites in northern Europe—and indeed, some scholars believe that these difficulties are purely a literary

trope in order to convey a larger lesson regarding human society. At a certain level, that may well be an

accurate description. Fundamentally, however, Margery’s difficulties stemmed from two circumstances:

her own haphazard planning, and the comparatively undeveloped pilgrimage network in northern

Germany.

The bulk of German pilgrimage studies seems to focus, interestingly enough, on the Santiago

pilgrimage, and of these studies, by scholars such as Karl Borchardt, Robert Plötz, and Hermann

Kellenbenz, the majority focus on southern Germany, where a dense and sophisticated network of

confraternities, hospices, and guidebooks assisted pilgrims on their various ways. As early as the 1140s,

the pilgrimage route from Cologne to Basel, and from thence either to Vezelay or Rome, was well-

established. The most famous late-German pilgrim handbook, by Hermann Kunich von Vach, basically

updates the even more famous Codex Calixstinus—but German though Hermann’s book may be, it

focuses primarily on western and southern Germany. There has even been speculation that the

Hospitaller Order’s commanderies in Swabia and Baden might have been tasked with assisting pilgrims.

Northern Germany, so far as can be told, possessed none of this infrastructure. Denizens of the

Hanseatic towns certainly engaged in pilgrimage, but records of any existing confraternities have not

survived, and many towns simply did not possess pilgrimage confraternities. For example, the first

known confraternities in Bremen, Hamburg, and Lübeck date from nearly forty years after Margery’s

journey. This is not to say that there was no organization for pilgrimage: pilgrim hostels certainly existed

in the north, especially for the inland towns such as Braunschweig, Hildesheim, and Soest, and as soon

as the trade corridors met the Aachen roads, such facilities multiplied. Various northern towns would

ostensibly defray the costs of the journey for their citizens, but such conditions of course could not apply

to Margery, who as an Englishwoman was already a suspicious character.

She was even doubly so by reason of being a woman. Of the few pilgrimage records that have

survived, there are more than enough to establish that the northern towns actively restricted women’s

freedom to go on pilgrimage. Lübeck is a prime example of these types of restrictions, both of women

in religious orders and married women. So firmly was this established that, to quote Favreau-Lilie’s

assessment, “that a married woman should go on pilgrimage alone and without the permission of her

husband was…unthinkable in the Hanseatic region. Once this context is established, Margery’s

difficulties in traveling become somewhat clearer. As a woman traveling alone in a region without a

well-developed pilgrimage infrastructure, through territories wracked by civil disorder and warfare (as

discussed previously), she had every reason to worry for her safety.

At the same time, it should not be imagined that she was traveling through a barren landscape.

The old (but still serviceable) estimate of C. T. Smith is that in this era a traveler would come upon towns

“of the second rank” every four to five hours in the south and west, and every seven to eight hours in

the north and east—easily within a day’s journey, even for someone slowed by age and injury, as the

narrative claims that Margery was. Further, her route from Straslund to Aachen would have taken her

through some of the most dynamic towns in north-central Germany: Braunschweig, Hildesheim,

Paderborn, and Cologne for certain, and possibly Magdeburg and Hannover as well, though that is

perhaps presuming swift rate of march. Each of these cities possessed notable relics, and, in keeping

with the trends of late medieval shrines, attracted a devoted local following. Of these towns and

churches there is no trace in the Book, but it is safe to say Margery would have found it impossible to

ignore them and their spiritual connections.

Conclusion: Margery’s mysticism and the German experience in context

Contextualizing Margery Kempe’s travels in Germany in 1433 allows us to re-evaluate this rather

neglected part of the Book. Her constant difficulties in finding traveling companions can be partially

explained by the more informal nature of pilgrimage from the Hanse towns: her impulsive changes of

plan and itinerary were more likely to lead to anxiety in the north, than on the pilgrimage routes with

which she was already familiar. Her fears of assault and mishap, while perhaps tropes deliberately

repeated from her earlier adventures, accurately reflect the uncertain nature of travel through Germany

in the early fourteenth century—and also the position of a woman traveling the high roads alone,

something which was simply not done. Her itinerary, even if by necessity rather than choice, was for

once strikingly original and richly varied in place and event. And finally, for someone accused on several

occasions of Lollardry, she could hardly have timed her journey better, what with Danzig rapidly turning

against the Order, Prussia turning against England, and the Hussite wars moving rapidly to their climax

All of Germany astir with the after-effects of Henry Beaufort’s crusade preaching—even Brandenburg,

where the object of her first pilgrimage was, was a hotbed of unrest and one could almost say paranoia

over both the Hussites and the Hussites’ ally Poland.

There remains one great paradox in this contextualization, however: aside from a couple

scattered references in the second book, the scribe gives next to no information regarding these things.

If Margery’s journey, when set against its historical, cultural, and religious background, was as rich as I

have just described, should we then cautiously re-evaluate the validity of the second book as a historical

source? It would seem that, as the scribe confessed at the beginning of the book, he set about

arranging Margery’s notes (or perhaps oral memories) after her death, and without her presence to

amplify and codify the material in a didactic manner, all he was able to accomplish was the creation of a

structure. The point of the narrative, then, contra Staley, is not “at times to transform Margery into a

sort of vagabond whose encounters with others…are finally the point of the narrative.”8 Rather,

Margery’s piety and religious impulses survived intact, and thus remain as one with the Book as a whole;

but the scribe probably lacked the data to do more than simply create the skeleton of an instructive tale.

Second, and following the first point closely, the scribe’s own disclaimer of ignorance—“he that wrot

[the namys of the placys] had nevyr seyn hem, and therefore have hym excusyd.”—effectively

establishes his complete unfamiliarity with north German geography, and his attempt to create a

narrative over unfamiliar terrain. All that remains of this journey is Margery’s complete trust that her

way would be directed from on high, and that she would be kept in safety as she strove to return home.

Only when we fill in the German context to her journey we can see that, cut off from all her normal

supports and familiar surroundings, Margery’s last pilgrimage was also perhaps the greatest test of her

faith and fortitude.

Bibliography

8 Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press,

1994), 192.

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