Personal Accounts: The Story of Margery Kempe

Craun, Marlys J.

doi:10.1176/appi.ps.56.6.655

Cited by 6 publications

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“…In similar vein, Marlys Craun (2005), writing in the journal Psychiatric Services, argues simply and succinctly (but, one might add, rather uncritically) that 'Kempe was psychotic for much of her adult life' (p. 655). Freeman et al (1990) find both hysteria and postpartum psychosis to be inadequate diagnoses and identify evidence in Margery's text for distinct periods of illness in which episodes of mania and melancholia alternate with each other or are mixed, followed by a mystical experience wherein Jesus reorders her world.…”

Section: Margery's Illnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hearing Spiritual Voices

Cook

2023

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This open access book explores unusual perceptual, or perception-like, experiences. These are often meaningful to those who have them and may be sympathetically or unsympathetically interpreted by others. One interpretation, especially when voices are associated with unusual behaviour, is that they are evidence of mental disorder. Ostensibly such interpretations are sympathetic (showing concern for someone who is ill) but in practice they are used to deny the meaning and value of the experiences for those concerned, thus depriving them (and others) of creative and innovative ways of understanding the human condition. The question is thus one of the meaning. Are such experiences meaningful only as indicators of a diagnosis, or are they meaningful in other ways, shedding light on human self-understanding and perhaps even a wider spiritual reality? Psychiatry has tended to see such phenomena as diagnostically meaningful but not as sources of deeper insight into the human condition. This book takes three 14th century examples of women who heard spiritually significant voices: Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and Joan of Arc. Each of these women, in different ways, has left an enduring legacy in literature and history. Modern psychiatric commentary on the voices that they reported has generally focussed on diagnosis rather than on wider questions of meaning. These commentaries will be used as a lens through which to consider how contemporary psychiatric practice might be enriched by the humanities and enabled to find a more spiritually empathetic, if not also sympathetic, enriching and meaning enhancing perspective on unusual mental phenomena. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded byThe Wellcome Trust.

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Section: Margery's Illnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hearing Spiritual Voices

Cook

2023

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“…She interpreted these as coming from God and in 1438, since she was not literate, sought out a priest who wrote down her story as The Book of Margery Kempe. This manuscript was rediscovered in 1934 and subsequently has been widely cited as the first English-language autobiography of a person with psychosis [38].…”

Section: Madness In the Renaissancementioning

confidence: 99%

The Rise of Cats and Madness: I. The Renaissance

Torrey

2021

Parasites, Pussycats and Psychosis

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“…She wrote (or, more accurately, dictated) a book of her experiences that has been much studied by recent historians from a range of different perspectives (e.g., Atkinson, 1983; McEntire, 1992). One recent writer, Craun (2005), has suggested that, by present-day standards, she was mentally disordered.…”

Section: Spirits Psychology and Mental Disordermentioning

confidence: 99%

Mental disorder and mysticism in the late medieval world.

Kemp

2019

History of Psychology

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During the later Middle Ages, a number of religiously oriented people behaved in ways that we would consider unusual, yet it was unusual for them to be regarded as mentally disordered. This article reviews late medieval thinking and practice with regard to mental disorder and also with regard to the discernment of spirits, that is, how it could be decided whether an experience or impulse to do something was the consequence of God or a good spirit, an evil spirit, or some purely human cause. Many of the criteria for discerning a good spirit were behavioral, for example, consistently showing humility and discretion, and were clearly distinct from those displayed in mental disorder. A comparison of the criteria for mental disorder with those used to discern spirits shows how the distinction between mental disorder and religious experience could have been made and why confusion of the two seems to have been rare.

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Personal Accounts: The Story of Margery Kempe

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Hearing Spiritual Voices

Hearing Spiritual Voices

The Rise of Cats and Madness: I. The Renaissance

Mental disorder and mysticism in the late medieval world.

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