In Our Time

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, five well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Author and columnist Caitlin Moran has picked the episode on the English medieval mystic Margery Kempe and recorded an introduction to it. Margery Kempe (1373-1438) produced an account of her extraordinary life in a book she dictated, "The Book of Margery Kempe." She went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, to Rome and Santiago de Compostela, purchasing indulgences on her way, met with the anchoress Julian of Norwich and is honoured by the Church of England each 9th November. She sometimes doubted the authenticity of her mystical conversations with God, as did the authorities who saw her devotional sobbing, wailing and convulsions as a sign of insanity and dissoluteness. Her Book was lost for centuries, before emerging in a private library in 1934.This In Our Time episode was first broadcast in June 2016. The image (above), of an unknown woman, comes from a pew at Margery Kempe's pa