Interview with Mary Sharratt, author of REVELATIONS

I was delighted to talk to Mary about her gorgeous book, Revelations, a biographical historical novel about the 15th century English mystic, Margery Kempe. I was captivated from page 1—following Margery's brushes with religious persecution and her adventures on pilgrimage. It's out on April 27th!

And Mary has lots of events coming up. See the all at her website: https://marysharratt.com/main/upcoming-events/

Transcript

Susanne 0:28

I'm here today with Mary Sherratt award-winning author of eight novels. And her latest is revelations, which I absolutely devoured. I've loved all of Mary's novels and I think maybe I've read them all. I'm not absolutely certain, but anyway, Mary's joining me from Portugal where she lives now. Hi, Mary.

Mary 0:51

Hi, thank you for having me on your program.

Susanne 0:54

It's absolutely my pleasure. This is one of the great things about doing a podcast is I get to talk to writers about things that writers like to talk about. So it's a whole lot of fun now. revelations is sort of a follow-up. Two illuminations in its way, which was a book about Hildegard of Bingen, which of course I absolutely loved. this one is about Marjorie Kemp who was a an English, mystic, and an amazing character. so my first question is how did you stumble on her as a subject for your book?

Mary 1:30

Well, I was doing a a course at the university of Lancaster in England. That's back when I lived in England and I was researching daughters of the witching Hill, my book about the Pendle witches, which was published in 2010. And so the title of this course that I was taking was late medieval belief in superstition and all about kind of the beliefs of the late middle ages, how faith was the pivotal key on in everyone's life. Then the way that we can barely begin to imagine in our secular age, And even if people weren't particularly Reverend it all flowed around faith and so forth. And also the position of women was surprisingly fluid. We have this kind of stereotype about women in history, but Minnieville women were. Far more empowered than Victorian women. They could have their own businesses. They were in the Guild. There were all these different things they were doing that often takes us by surprise. There were women's positions and so on. anyway, I learned about Marjorie Kemp and it was just fascinating because she she started out conventionally enough. She was the mayor's daughter in a town called Bishop's Lynn, which is now King's Lynn in Norfolk, England on the East. Coasts. And she, as a young woman, she loved beautiful clothing. She said she was very vain and so forth thought very highly of herself. She married at 22, a brewer and Burgess named John cam. And she had her first child and then she experienced what we would clearly recognize as a severe case of postpartum depression. We joke about we don't joke, but we. Speak euphemistically about depression as like the demon of depression. And she literally saw demons everywhere. So she was informed by the belief system of her time and just was like, felt that, these demons were plaguing her and she was losing her mind. And this only resolved itself by this very visceral religious vision. She had this like almost complete wrap around stereo cinematic vision. She had Christ appearing and. Spelling all the evil around her and saying, it's all right, you're going to be okay. And she recovered from that and she was back in her normal wits again, and could resume her duties and everything. even though everyone in her household by them thought she was a little bit crazy. She could carry on as normal. She went on to have 13 more children, less her. Yeah, that would have driven me mad, but anyway, and she kept having these very visceral sensual religious visions and her marriage to her husband eventually soured. 14 kids is a lot. And she said can we stop now? But she wasn't allowed to the Canon law gave her husband control over her body and she wasn't, she didn't even legally have the right to refuse. So she was in a very difficult, frustrating position. In addition to this, she was also a business woman. She ran a mill drawn by a flour mill drawn by a horse. Versus, and she also ran a brewery for a while, but at the age of 40, she came to a crossroads in her life and she just couldn't go on because 14 children imagine what that does to your body. And a 15th could have killed her. And her both her businesses had failed. And her husband was just completely tone deaf to what she was going through. The only way she could resolve her issues was by taking an oath of celibacy, which she could not quite convince her husband to respect and She decided the only respectable way she could leave pre-marriage it wasn't even that respectable because she got a lot of grief for, it was to go on pilgrimage. So her father died and left her a bequest and she took the money paid off her husband's debts and set off on a pilgrimage that would eventually take her to Jerusalem. And Rome and but before she did it, she needed some spiritual counsel from another woman. So she went to the nearby city of Northridge to meet the famous Ankara's Julian of Norwich. So Julian of Norwich is this very iconic figure. I think everyone knows her. She chose of her own freewill at the age of 30 to become an anchor risk. That is to be completely bricked into a cell built on the back of the church St. Julian's church in Norridge. She even named herself after the church, we don't know what her real name was or what her life was like before she took this radical vocation. My novel illuminations about Hildegard. I talk about how Hildegard was enclosed in an Anchorage against her will as a child and how that was horrible for her. And she fought tooth and nail against it. But Julian clearly. Chose this path as a us. I'm an adult woman mess a 30 year old woman. So we don't know very much about her life before she became an anchor. But we do know that the plague came to Norridge three times before she turned 30. So we think we live in an age of pandemic, Marjorie, and Julian lived through the worst pandemic on record and. We don't know very much about Julian's early life, but it's perfectly plausible that she was married and had a whole brood of children and lost her entire family to the plague. So she was in a very deep grieving state. So she actually prayed to be brought to the edge of death so she could look beyond the veil and see what lady on the scale of death. And her prayer was answered. So she had this near death experience and then a series of visions that were just completely transfixed, seen visions of divine love. And she spent the rest of her life to unpacking those visions and writing them down in a book called revelations of divine love, which was the first book. In English written by a woman. And it's amazing. And she took the fairly radical step and not to write in Latin, which would have been still controversial, but she was, but she wrote it in her own colloquial, Norridge, English. A whole book of theology in English in an age when you could be arrested for reading the Bible in English, where you needed the permission of the archdiocese to own a single verse of the Bible translated into English. So she took a really radical step. And Marjorie shows up asking for spiritual counsel and these two women have this encounter. So this encounter really happened in history. Marjorie mentions it in her book. And it's one of the key turning points of my novel.

Susanne 9:43

Yeah. yeah, that, all of that sort of strange history of what we can't even imagine, how religion permeated their lives, everything was controlled by religion. And what was really interesting was when you were talking about Hildegard and everything is that I've done some research because I'm doing this non-fiction book, but lately. science or medical professionals have decided that possibly what she, her visions were actually migraines. Yeah. I've heard that theory. Yeah. I wonder if it's really, and the whole idea of Marjorie camp having postpartum depression and reinterpreting all that, the stuff that goes with that, into this, these religious visions is really fascinating. Yeah. Yeah. Context is so important.

Mary 10:36

There's also been a lot of research in narrow science about these kinds of experiences. I think that the, this neuroscience is more recent than the migrant grain theory for Hildegard. And I need to track down the book. I read it as part of a background for course I was I was training us like a meditation teacher and that was part of our background reading. And these researchers, if I can track down the book. Yeah. Okay. The people, but they were like PhDs, like serious neuroscientists so that people who have a regular spiritual practice, whether they're Catholic nuns or Buddhist monks or ordinary lay people. And practice it every day. They have different neural pathways and people that don't have a spiritual practice of any kind. So it's also possible that they saw the world differently because their brains were literally wired differently than ours and the secure secular world, where we look at screens all day and watch cat videos and

Susanne 11:43

stuff. Yeah, it's so interesting because I mentioned your book too. I have a book coaching practice now, and one of my clients is we finished working together, but she's doing a book of stories taken from reinterpreted from the pause while I think of the name. Can Tega sta Santa Maria, the Spanish, the, medieval, Spanish, this their 13th century, I think rather than 15th. But she has a, had a writing group and they would say, Oh, there's too much religion. And he said, it's fine. And I said to her, ignore them, just ignore them because that's okay. That's historically what happened. That was how I were. And anyway, this was all the whole tome was a celebration of the Marriott culture. So anyway, but that's really funny. I thought it was pretty funny, but I said you have people who like to read medieval. Historical fiction will totally accept it.

Mary 12:44

Yeah. Yeah. If you don't want to read about religion then medieval historical fiction is not a good deal.

Susanne 12:51

Not a good thing. No, but What about your sources? I think isn't there. Didn't she write out an automatic? Exactly.

Mary 12:58

I'll tell the story. Okay. We wouldn't even know Marjorie Kemp existed. Had she not written her book down? So she hired a priest and she basically dictated her book to him and he wrote it down in English, not in Latin. And it became the first autobiography in the English language. but the, but it was nearly lost to history. It's all these, like my I'm on a mission to write women back into history. That's my motto. And both Julian and Marjorie were nearly written out of history. So both of their books were like lost obscure. They were just. Marjorie's book was just like completely lost to history. And then there are these really weird events happened at a country house party in Darbyshire England in 1934, it was a house called South gate house, a Georgian mansion, which is apparently now a hotel on by the Butler. Bowden's this aristocratic family. And they had a bunch of people over to play. Ping pong. And so they were playing ping pong, but someone tread on the only ping pong ball. And then they were looking through the cupboards trying to find another ping pong ball. And instead they ended up with all these, like finding all these really old books of great antiquity. And one of them was Marjorie's books. someone at the party worked at the Victoria and Albert museum. So they took these books. There. And then the Marjorie's book came to the attention of the medievalist and feminist hope, Emily Allen, who said, cool, this is the last book of Marjorie Kemp because there was she was quoted in some other books. So she, she knew that she existed, but nobody had discovered the book yet. So she ran with it. Translated it into modern English. And it was an overnight literary sensation. Because Marjorie was quite eccentric and weeping fits to read her religious visions. All these 20th century psychoanalysts were trying to figure out what was. Wrong with her. One of the theories is that she was just having a really bad menopause, which as a menopausal woman, myself, I think it's hilarious. But anyway

Susanne 15:22

but yeah, she just didn't come visit. I didn't get visions during menopause

Mary 15:29

anyway yeah. So she was a, she's definitely a character. So she had lots of adventures. And, but you can read about in the book of Marjorie camp it's it's episodic, it's non chronological, but it's turns both very pious and hilarious. She was accused of heresy and on trial for her life. And she turns around and tells the Archbishop of York, this amusing parable about a desiccating bear and a priest. And this, if she's found guilty, they're going to burn her at the stake. And she said this priest woke up in the woods and there was this bear defecating right in front of him.

Susanne 16:14

Oh my yes. and how she lived on after that? How old was she when she died?

Mary 16:20

that is unknown. she went on pilgrimage. And lived she wrote her book between I have it written down. I have it written down 1430, six and 1438. That was when her book was written and she lived some years beyond that, at least that she became a member of the Holy Trinity Guild in. Bishops Lynn, which was the foremost mercantile Guild, the elite Guild of the city. So she, and then she went on to travel some more. She, her first pilgrimage was to Rome and Jerusalem. And then later she went to Santiago de Compostela and she went all over England and got accused of heresy and arrested all over the place. And later she went to Germany. She had a son who was, or, it's now Poland done sick. which is now good dunks in Poland, but then it was one of the Hanseatic merchant ports, and that's where her son lived. And yeah, she went all over the place. She was all over the map. So Julian was an enclosed anchor, Russ and Marjorie was all over the map. So they're completely different personalities, but they supported each other in so w when Marjorie wanted her spiritual constantly for she set off, she poured out her whole heart and soul to Julian who said, and this is on record in the book of Marjorie Kemp, just. Trust to trust the voice of God in your heart. And don't worry too much about what other people think of you. If some people dislike you, maybe you're doing something right.

Susanne 18:02

Go Julia. Yeah, I know. I love it. I love it. Yeah. again, something came into my head and flew out just as quickly. That just happens at my age sometimes, oh, I know. I know exactly. Sorry. I can start here. When I recently interviewed Erica Roebuck about her book, the invisible woman, and she wrote it in, it was fabulous and she wrote it in the third person and present tense. And I, we talked about that a bit and yours is in the first person and her reason for. Not writing in the first person, even though it was a very close point of view, was that there just wasn't all the references she had were not through her main characters voice. So she had no writings of hers. So you chose to write in the first person, was that okay? Because you had this rich resource that was in her own voice or was there something else at play? what's

Mary 19:00

interesting about the book of Marjorie camp, although it's an autobiography, I'm dictated to someone who wrote it down for her, it's told in the third person. So she is, she's not an I voice. This creature she's not even referred to by her name. It's like this I will show how humble I am and dah, dah, dah. So this creature did the, and this creature did this, so it's totally third person, but I think modern readers want to hear Marjorie's voice. And that's one of my missions, writing women back into history is to give women their voice back if it was taken from them. There's what's really interesting. there's a book by Carolyn Heilbrun called writing a woman's life.

Susanne 19:50

Right. Very, very well. I have from graduate school in music history, she had, she was amazing. It was, yeah, I was doing feminist interpretations of fairies. Musical things. Yeah.

Mary 20:03

So she, she mentions Marjorie the book of Marjorie campus case in point. So for S for time out of mine, both women's biographies and autobiographies have been censored and altered because women are afraid to talk about their actual lived experience. They want to present a version of their lives. That's acceptable. Where they're socially acceptable and I can't just let it all hang out. And,

Susanne 20:35

yeah, that's an issue that the whole issue of autobiography at all is an You can't always trust an autobiography because it is they're presenting the vision of themselves that they want to present, that they want to preserve. So it's not necessarily going to be all the dirty laundry and case in point in my forthcoming book, the portraitist about Adelaide I started out doing Elizabeth VJ Labon because she has a three volume autobiography that exists. And then, I, when I was doing the research, I thought I've always loved both of them, but I've searched in her autobiography for. Her rivals name. They were there at the same time. They were just dogging each other steps all through pre-revolutionary Paris. And she never mentioned it once. She never mentioned or anything in her autobiography, not once. And, she's only obliquely referred to in one, one sort of point. So that to me was intriguing because it means there's something going on here. So anyway so the point being that you have to read between the lines of an autobiography, Interweave it with the actual, the history, the recorded history. Did you find that with Marjorie's book or was it more directly factual in its way?

Mary 22:02

it was it's. It goes all over the place. It's it can be very funny and very earthy. Like she and her husband are walking back from seeing the mystery plays at York and they're walking back and they're sharing a bottle of beer, walking and sharing a bottle of beer as they go. And he has this cake tucked into his tunic and it's this really homely image. And then he turns around and says, if a man with this. So with a sword came by and threatened to chop off my head. If you didn't have sex with me, would you have sex with me? And she said, no, I wouldn't. And he said, Oh, you're a bad wife. And then she's afraid that he's going to impregnate her with it. 15 with the child and she takes off running and he chases her. And then, because they're no longer young, they both collapse in a heap, huffing and puffing. And he says if you pay off my debt, so you can go on your pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and then it's hard to imagine someone making that up. It's just

Susanne 23:10

so earthy. Yes, I thoroughly, I devoured the book beginning to end it's you know, as usual you do a really good job of. Building suspense making it go. So too. So you have to read to the end, it sets up the question in the beginning and you're just reading, reading, reading. Yeah. When's he coming? What happens when does that happen? so it's a really excellent book out for anybody who loves historical fiction, but especially if you're interested in the medieval world So anyway, is there anything about the book or the writing or whatever that, that you want to talk about that I haven't asked you about?

Mary 23:46

I'll just say that my big plot point that comes after the famous encounter between Marjorie and Julian is fiction, but I think it's a fun fiction. Julian is nearing the end of her life. And she's in this Anchorage and she has, is highly controversial manuscript and isn't sure what's going to happen after she dies. So in my novel, she interests for manuscript, revelations of divine love with Marjorie. Who hides it hidden scrolled inside her Pilgrim staff. And Carrie said all over Europe and the near East, where she connects to various people who are sympathetic to Julian's message and she meets all kinds. You see the whole. The sweep of all the different kind of people you would meet on pilgrimage that the middle ages were so diverse and the different groups of people that existed. There were the big deans, which were like more secularized nuns, except they didn't belong to a religious story.

Susanne 24:52

I'll ask you a question about that. What are the only other time I've really heard? The word begin is in the Cole Porter song. Begin the beginning. It's a dance. Do you have any idea where that connected, where, why that is called? Is there any connection between the order and the dance?

Mary 25:11

To my knowledge, it was a women's spirituality movement that began in the middle ages. These women would live together and what were like feminist communes, but they didn't take any religious vows. They didn't have any. Like religious order controlling them and they could come and go as they pleased and leave whenever they wanted, they weren't there for life. And they were self supporting, they did various industries like linen weaving and so forth to support themselves.

Susanne 25:42

It's like a modern commune almost. yeah. Yeah. I can totally understand in those days wanting to say, okay, enough, man, that's just hanging out together for awhile. Yeah.

Mary 25:55

No 14 children

Susanne 25:57

for me, please. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. that was really great because of course the rolled up manuscript and our staff was always a point of tension that, is it going to be discovered what's going to happen and all that kind of thing. So it was a. But it was really fabulous. And you're still, are you still doing off author events and such.

Mary 26:19

Yeah, I have a whole list of updates coming author events on my website on my publication day of April 27th. I have a virtual event at majors and Quinn in Minneapolis, and I'll be in conversation with Marianne Grossman of the St. Paul pioneer press. And then I have further virtual events and also a mini retreat on the 13th of May. With Abby of the arts and Christine falters, painter, who is a lovely retreat leader. So that's going to be a really fun event.

Susanne 26:56

Really nice. That sounds fabulous. of course I'll put links and all that in the in the notes for the show and everything like that. yeah, I'm. Really can recommend this book enough. it's really, you just sink into a totally different time, which is one of the reasons we all love historical fiction. It's just taking us out of the present. I really want to thank you for talking to me and I will put this up soon and let you know when it's there and you can share it with everybody. You want to share it with.

Mary 27:26

Thank you so much. It was a joy to be on your podcast. Yes.