For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain

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If you’re new to these figures, you might be captivated by their bizarre life stories and religious obsession, but I thought the bare telling was somewhat lacking in literary interest. Sì, perché essere anacorete o profete in quel periodo storico significava rischiare l'accusa di eresia e la condanna al rogo. Julian, an anchoress, has not left Norwich, nor the cell to which she has been confined, for twenty-three years.

Maybe this is it – the Canterbury Tales trope of a very human attitude to religion, where Friars are openly lewd and everyone laughs about the corruption and hypocrisy of the nevertheless ubiquitous Church.In the early sections, I struggled to tell Julian and Margery’s voices apart, but as the novel unfolds, Mackenzie establishes their distinctive characters and their very different attitudes to their holy visions.

Holy Scripture states that the soul of a righteous person is the seat of God, and the anchorite trusted that the woman was such. The painting is of the ‘shewings’ or revelatory visions experienced by the mystic Julian of Norwich. The differences between the women are portrayed so gracefully; Julian dignified and composed, Margery manic and arrogant and the suggestion as to how their real-life manuscripts end up in the public domain a skilful work of art. She shared numerous holy speeches and dialogues that our Lord spoke to her soul, as well as many wonderful revelations. If MacKenzie distills Margery’s adventures to their essence, here she does the opposite, entering a body narrowly confined so that the soul and mind can play across a cosmic landscape, and opening up for us Julian’s giant intellect.There was a time, until relatively recently, when pre-Reformation mystics, who were predominantly female, were dismissed as anomalies, eccentrics, curiosities or just plain bonkers.

Written in alternating POVs between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempf, the author does a great job of differentiating their voices. MacKenzie's sumptuous debut For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain is a beautiful novel, both epic and intimate, about grief, trauma, revelation, hidden lives and the genesis of women’s writing.

Mych was the holy dalyawns that the ankres and this creatur haddyn be comownyng in the lofe of owyr Lord Jhesu Crist many days that thei were togedyr. Four stars, probably because I’ve read other books recently that do alternate chapters for characters and I’m not sure I like this style. Her visions of Christ have alienated her from her family and neighbours, and incurred her husband’s abuse – and placed her in danger with the men of the Church, who have begun to hound her as a heretic. I must admit that religious fervour or even fanaticism are somewhat alien concepts to me, so I am probably not this author’s ideal reader. A novel that brings back to life two extraordinary medieval women, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kemp.

Little is known of the real Julian’s early life, but MacKenzie suggests here that she may have lost her family to an outbreak of plague and that this, along with an illness during which she experienced visions or ‘shewings’ of Christ, influenced her decision to become an anchoress, secluded in a cell for twenty-three years. Born in 1373, one-time brewer Margery Kempe had visions of Christ which set her off on a series of rambunctious, incident-packed pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Santiago de Compostela and Prussia.This slim novel is a pocket epic; you will read it in no time but be thinking about it for ages after . Despite the theological subject-matter, this book flowed so naturally that I found it difficult to put down, and even if I was sometimes inclined to skim the Margery sections to get back to Julian, I admired Mackenzie’s intentions in telling both of these stories. My second novel, about the Victorian art critic and social reformer John Ruskin, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2025. Taking the real-life medieval figures of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich as a springboard for a compelling meditation on faith, femininity and the abuses of the church, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain is a uniquely powerful reading experience.