Victoria MacKenzie

Two female medieval mystics, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe tell their stories in alternating short chapters. Julian is the better known figure, for her 'Revelations of Divine Love', written when she was an anchoress, enclosed in a tiny windowed cell abutting a Norwich church. Both she and the other figure in the book, Marjorie Kent, had visions. Whereas Julian chooses to see little, but see it intensely, Marjorie is very different. Illiterate and rambunctious, with little time for her husband and children, she loudly proclaims her visions of Christ to anyone who will listen, and indeed these who do not wish to listen. Both took risks. To go against current Christian orthodoxy, especially as a woman, risked excommunication and a painful death. In the book, and we cannot know if this happened, the two meet, and this unlikely pair make a genuine connection. Beautifully written, and quickly read, this is a book that will stay with me for a long time.… (plus d'informations)

Pedestrian. At its best, historical fiction can open up a window on the past, breathing life into those who are long gone while reminding us of how different their world is from our own. It can introduce us to people and places we've never met before, if dealing with little-known events from the past, or give us some new way of seeing a famous figure or momentous occurrence. Victoria MacKenzie's For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain is not historical fiction at its best.

While MacKenzie draws on the lives and writings of two actual women—Julian of Norwich and her Revelations of Divine Love and Margery Kempe and her eponymous memoirs—what she conjured up from those sources reads like a student's attempt at producing a paraphrased summary of a primary source. I got no sharper glimpse of either woman here than I ever did from reading their own words. Where MacKenzie does innovate in her re-telling, her instincts for narrative and structure aren't strong. True, her prose is clean and spare but it's not particularly pleasurable.

Moreover, I had little sense from this novel that MacKenzie has ever read much from or about the Middle Ages outside of the works of Julian and Margery. She assumes much about medieval people and asks herself little about their world. There are anachronisms (she has people "taking tea" with an archbishop (in the 1410s?)) and implausibilities (why would Julian draft her work on expensive parchment rather than on a wax tablet as most people did at this time? if Julian has to scrabble in secret to get off-cuts of parchment on which to write, why would she cross out her words or burn draft pieces, thus wasting, again, expensive parchment, rather than using her penknife (yes, that's where the term comes from) to scrape off what she'd written and use the parchment again). We don't get a window onto the past here, but one onto a pantomime stage.

Here you might be saying to yourself well, here's the medievalist being grouchy and nitpicky, and on a certain level you're not wrong. It's possible that this For Thy Great Pain will work better for people who've never heard of Margery or Julian before, and that how it presents their lives might encourage some to read even further about them. If so, great! But I'm just so frustrated by this continued trend of heavy-handed "feminist" reimaginings of the past which use dummies of medieval women to ventriloquize fantasies of a Handsmaid's Tale-esque past which flatten out women's actual historical experiences and fail to truly listen to their voices.… (plus d'informations)

Julian of Norwich once had a husband and a child but the plague took them and she has dedicated her life to prayer and contemplation. Living as an anchoress, walled up in a church, she has not touched another for twenty-three years. Margery Kempe is the mother of over a dozen children, a woman of substance from Bishop's Lynn. However when she starts telling others of her visions, she is called a heretic. In 1413 these two women meet...
This is a slim volume but is beautifully formed. The separate tales of the two women are brought together in the meeting and it feels like a meeting of two minds. The writing is spare but tells the tale of each woman and the travails they have faced in order to demonstrate their faith.… (plus d'informations)