Recovery, Revelation, and Revival

Abstract

When Col. William Erdeswick Ignatius Butler-Bowdon of Pleasington Hall, Lancashire, and Southgate House, Derbyshire, sent the found manuscript to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Hope Emily Allen would be the scholar finally secured to identify it there.¹ Allen saw this manuscript as an incomparable record of “medieval pilgrim-routes [and] medieval social history [which] brings to life not only famous persons of the early fifteenth century, but also humble ones, at home and abroad.” She also asserted its importance as a “remarkable Middle-English autobiography” of a medieval woman’s life as daughter, wife, mother, businesswoman, penitent sinner, visionary, pilgrim, and mystic (not a term ever used in the manuscript itself).² This manuscript had provided exempla and spiritual revelations inspiring the devout Carthusians at Mount Grace in Yorkshire and elsewhere to read, gloss, and edit the manuscript. The reappearance of the fifteenth-century manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe in 1934 initiated a flurry of responses, not the least of which would be the modern, scholarly study of Kempe and her Book.³