The Cell of Self-Knowledge: Seven Early English Mystical Treatises | Page 6

1022, and 2373. It has been published from the Harl. MS. 1022 by Professor C. Horstman, who observes that "it is very old, and certainly prior to Walter Hilton."[9] It is evidently by one of the followers of Richard Rolle, dating from about the middle of the fourteenth century. External and internal evidence seems to point to its being the work of the anonymous author of the Divine Cloud of Unknowing.
This is not the place to tell again the wonderful story of St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), one of the noblest and most truly heroic women that the world has ever seen. Her life and manifold activities only touched England indirectly. The famous English captain of mercenaries, Sir John Hawkwood, was among the men of the world who, at least for a while, were won to nobler ideals by her letters and exhortations. Two of her principal disciples, Giovanni Tantucci and William Flete, both Augustinian hermits, were graduates of Cambridge; the latter, an Englishman by birth, was appointed by her on her deathbed to preside over the continuance of her work in her native city, and a vision of his, concerning the legitimacy of the claims of Urban the Sixth to the papal throne, was brought forward as one of the arguments that induced England, on the outbreak of the Great Schism in the Church (1378), to adhere to the Roman obedience for which Catherine was battling to the death. A letter which she herself addressed on the same subject to King Richard the Second has not been preserved.
About 1493, Wynkyn de Worde printed The Lyf of saint Katherin of Senis the blessid virgin, edited by Caxton; which is a free translation, by an anonymous Dominican, with many omissions and the addition of certain reflections, of the Legenda, the great Latin biography of St. Catherine by her third confessor, Friar Raymond of Capua, the famous master-general and reformer of the order of St. Dominic (d. 1399). He followed this up, in 1519, by an English rendering by Brother Dane James of the Saint's mystical treatise the Dialogo: "Here begynneth the Orcharde of Syon; in the whiche is conteyned the reuelacyons of seynt Katheryne of Sene, with ghostly fruytes and precyous plantes for the helthe of mannes soule."[10] This was not translated from St. Catherine's own vernacular, but from Friar Raymond's Latin version of the latter, first printed at Brescia in 1496. From the first of these two works, the Lyf, are selected the passages--the Divers Doctrines devout and fruitful--which Pepwell here presents to us; but it seems probable that he was not borrowing directly from Caxton, as an almost verbally identical selection, with an identical title, is found in the British Museum, MS. Reg. 17 D.V., where it follows the Divine Cloud of Unknowing.
Margery Kempe is a much more mysterious personage. She has come down to us only in a tiny quarto of eight pages printed by Wynkyn de Worde:--
"Here begynneth a shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Jhesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margerie kempe of Lynn."
And at the end:--
"Here endeth a shorte treatyse called Margerie kempe de Lynn. Enprynted in Fletestrete by Wynkyn de worde."
The only known copy is preserved in the University of Cambridge. It is undated, but appears to have been printed in 1501.[11] With a few insignificant variations, it is the same as was printed twenty years later by Pepwell, who merely inserts a few words like "Our Lord Jesus said unto her," or "she said," and adds that she was a devout ancress. Tanner, not very accurately, writes: "This book contains various discourses of Christ (as it is pretended) to certain holy women; and, written in the style of modern Quietists and Quakers, speaks of the inner love of God, of perfection, et cetera."[12] No manuscript of the work is known to exist, and absolutely no traces can be discovered of the "Book of Margery Kempe," out of which it is implied by the Printer that these beautiful thoughts and sayings are taken.
There is nothing in the treatise itself to enable us to fix its date. It is, perhaps, possible that the writer or recipient of these revelations is the "Margeria filia Johannis Kempe," who, between 1284 and 1298, gave up to the prior and convent of Christ Church, Canterbury, all her rights in a piece of land with buildings and appurtenances, "which falls to me after the decease of my brother John, and lies in the parish of Blessed Mary of Northgate outside the walls of the city of Canterbury."[13] The revelations show that she was (or had been) a woman of some wealth and social position, who had abandoned the world to become an ancress, following the life prescribed in that gem of early English devotional literature,