Book Review: Elizabeth MacDonald's "Skirting Heresy"

In a New York media elite known for tilting left, Fox Business Channel reporter Elizabeth MacDonald is a rarity. Plainly unsatisfied with the accepted wisdom as applied to just about everything, MacDonald rarely swims with a mainstream current that almost invariably moves in the direction of giving the governmental elite excess power to dictate how we live our lives, how we do business, and control over how we spend our earnings.

I'm privileged to read her frequent op-eds, and also to commentate alongside MacDonald each week on Fox News Channel's Forbes on Fox television show. In this capacity I've come to know her thinking very well. No conformist is she.

That's why it's no surprise that MacDonald would migrate toward the story of Margery Kempe in her engrossing new book, Skirting Heresy: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe. Kempe wrote what is known to be the first autobiography, The Book of Margery Kempe, and MacDonald's book is an important revival of what is a timeless life story.

Like her biographer in MacDonald, Kempe refused to toe the line of what was accepted thinking or behavior. To some that might seem tame, but back in 15th century England a woman known for revealing eccentricities in thought or action did so at risk of vicious ridicule, arrest, constant trials, or even death at the stake. The latter was Kempe's life for regularly swimming against the prevailing current, so it's easy to see why MacDonald found her life story worthy of a retell.

To understand the importance of Kempe's life, it's essential to understand the times in which she lived. As MacDonald wrote about Kempe's marriage to her husband John, "John owned his wife, just the same as if he owned domestic animals like cows or horses." Women then didn't generally have opinions, or if they had them, they didn't much express them.

Worse in what was a very ignorant time, MacDonald writes that in 1401 England "enacted a death penalty for heresy" which legalized the burning of citizens "for differences of religious opinion." For good or bad, religion dominated medieval life. Perhaps because it did, a woman known to have strong opinions about religion was going to attract the wrong kind of attention -- the kind that could be life-limiting.

Even more perilous for an outspoken religionist was the broadly accepted view from Bible St. Paul that "No woman should preach." So while Kempe protested that she didn't preach, arguing that she only used "conversation and words," her many enemies felt her freely expressed opinions (one critic said she "is one of the most evil deceivers who ever lived") rated prison, or even death.

Most confusing and interesting to this reader all at once was the hatred Kempe engendered (even from priests) for her seemingly extreme religiosity. MacDonald writes that Kempe "fought to keep her passionate love for God bottled up," frequently sobbed in expression of her intense faith, and was prone to gasp "Jesus, I die for you. I love you." When in Rome on one of her pilgrimages, and upon sight of women carrying babies, Kempe would ask "Is he male", and if so "would sob as if she had seen the infant Jesus."

Kempe's actions as mentioned won her great scorn all the way up to those high in the church. The aforementioned confusion concerns whether her critics were all bad people, or if Kempe was simply annoying. It was hard to tell what MacDonald felt here, and it would be an interesting conversation topic. Kempe's faith seemed overdone, but maybe not to modern religionists? To this reviewer who is not religious, Kempe's constant sobbing and preaching was the sporting equivalent of the 12th man in basketball who never gets on the court, but who always has the most to say and cheers the loudest. It seems many of Kempe's less ardent critics felt the same way?

Throughout the book MacDonald references actual conversations between Kempe and Jesus. This too would be an interesting topic of discussion simply because it's hard to know if those who are religious believe these talks actually took place. This is all written without a hint of bemusement or haughtiness.

Kempe was also known "to think she could even predict the salvation and damnation of people in her parish, at times with an utter lack of tact." As mentioned, Kempe's story is in many ways timeless. We know these people in our modern lives who presume to judge us in all walks of life, and often they annoy us. What would be interesting to know is how MacDonald perceives Kempe's arguably righteous ways. To disdain them wouldn't be to disdain an obviously courageous woman.

Very interesting to this reader was the underlying love story that defined Kempe's life. Mentioned earlier was her husband John, and while he "owned" her in the medieval sense, he didn't own her. Instead, he worshipped her in ways that will be uplifting to readers. As John put it in a letter never sent to Kempe, "I miss you even when you're here." John loved her despite the fact that she'd in many ways deserted him emotionally in favor of Jesus, and in the romantically physical sense, she'd left him explicitly. Yet he yearned, and his yearnings perhaps speak to marital ties in the face of major stress that would arguably not hold in our modern world.

Of greatest interest to this reader was what Kempe was ultimately about. What makes her heroic, and this is arguably what drew MacDonald to her in the first place, is that Kempe was the deliverer "of heresy, anarchy, and sedition to the enemies of the crown around the country." MacDonald, like her subject, is a truth teller in the modern sense, ever eager to shine a light on what needs to be known, but that many would prefer be kept quiet. I look forward to talking about Kempe with MacDonald, and similarly hope those with a religious bent will read her book to help me understand what sometimes confused me in a very good way.