The Book of Margery Kempe, which was dictated at least in part by Kempe, who may have been illiterate or had only limited literacy, gives a detailed account of Kempe’s life experiences from the time of her first pregnancy when she was around twenty years old, until she was in her mid-sixties. Kempe was born in Norfolk in c. 1373, the daughter of a relatively prosperous and distinguished East Anglian merchant who had served as mayor and member of Parliament for the borough of Bishop’s Lynn, now King’s Lynn. Margery Kempe was a late medieval English visionary and is, arguably, the author of the first autobiography known to have been written in the English language.
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