Rebecca Barnhouse

Margery Kempe's memoir has become a standard syllabus inclusion for feminist literature courses. Well-off but not noble, Margery bore 14 children before claiming to have had a vision of Christ telling her to become abstinent. She got her husband to comply by paying off his debts. As her visions increased, so did her hysterical crying when she experienced them. Some claim this was a ploy for public attention, but others believe that she was a true visionary. Although she was illiterate, she dictated her quite fascinating memoir The Book of Margery Kempe, to a scribe.

[The Book of the Maidservant] is just that: the story of the maid who accompanied Kempe on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Kempe had been warned that her maid would cause her trouble, and perhaps, from her point of view, she did. But according to Barnhouse's novel, the maidservant (here named Joanna) suffered considerable trials of her own along the way, including harsh treatment by Kempe, continuing harassment from a would-be rapist, being taken advantage of other pilgrims who loaded her with more and more work, and getting lost and separated from her mistress in Rome. Kempe does not come off well here: Barnhouse obviously adheres to the opinion that Margery was an ambitious, indulged woman who broke the rules of medieval English society and used religion as a way to exalt her status and to get her own way. Nevertheless, her novel is an engaging look into the customs and class structure of the times, and Joanna is a very likable, if somewhat hapless, character. She creates a solid picture of what these pilgrimages must have been like, especially for those who, like Joanna, had no choice but to make them.… (mer)