The Book of Margery Kempe An Abridged Translation

by Angela Carter

Carter shares Kempe's fascination with how the female body becomes a site of spiritual and political meaning, but she approaches it through surrealist fiction rather than autobiography. Where Kempe's excessive weeping and bodily experiences authenticate her mystical claims, Carter interrogates how women's bodies are constructed and reconstructed as vessels for meaning—making this a provocative literary companion that challenges the very premises of Kempe's authority.

by Saint Teresa (of Avila)

Here's a contemporary (16th-century) spiritual autobiography that gives you another medieval/early modern holy woman's voice—but Teresa writes with a directness and theological sophistication that creates an interesting dialogue with Kempe's more chaotic piety. Both women claim authority through their bodies and visions, but Teresa's intellectual rigor and her willingness to defend her experiences to the Inquisition offers a different model of female mystical agency.

by Carl Plasa

This is my surprise pick, but stay with me: Morrison, like Kempe, uses a woman's maternal body as the absolute center of spiritual and historical reckoning. The excessive emotion, the haunting, the way motherhood becomes both trauma and transcendence—it echoes Kempe's affective intensity but grounds it in a completely different historical and racial context. You'll find the same refusal to separate the sacred from the bodily, the same insistence that a woman's interior life matters cosmically.

by Fernando Pessoa

A radical shift in form and era, but Pessoa's fragmented, obsessive meditation on interiority and identity shares Kempe's compulsive need to document an idiosyncratic inner life. Where Kempe's text sprawls across pilgrimage and vision, Pessoa's sprawls across philosophical fragments and contradictions—both authors refuse conventional narrative shape in order to capture something truer about consciousness and spiritual seeking.

by Plato

I'm reaching back to ancient philosophy here, but Plato's dialogue about love and desire creates an unexpected mirror to Kempe's obsessive, embodied relationship with the divine. Both texts treat desire—whether erotic or spiritual—as a legitimate path to truth and transcendence, and both insist that the body and its experiences are philosophically serious. Reading them together reveals how Kempe participates in a much longer Western conversation about how we know and love.