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For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain

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Margery’s mysticism may have been born of post-partum psychosis; Julian’s of delirium during illness.

I have been interested in both these women's lives for some time and this book is a wonderful introduction. MacKenzie performs a small miracle in imagining the different lives and personalities of these two medieval women.This slim novel is a pocket epic; you will read it in no time but be thinking about it for ages after . A riveting book, a celebration of the resilience and determination of women, extraordinarily ambitious for a debut but MacKenzie carries it off beautifully. So one is cloistered and the other the subject of gossip and innuendo; one is set apart from the world and the other rubs the world’s face in the Word.

Stories about girlhood, motherhood, sickness, loss, doubt and belief; revelations more the powerful than the world is ready to hear. Sensual, vivid and humane, For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain cracks history open to reveal the lives of two extraordinary women. I wrote about Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe in my dissertation so the premise of this sounded super interesting.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.

The ankres, heryng the mervelyows goodnes of owyr Lord, hyly thankyd God wyth al hir hert for hys visitacyon, cownselyng this creatur to be obedyent to the wyl of owyr Lord God and fulfyllyn wyth al hir mygthys whatevyr he put in hir sowle yf it wer not ageyn the worshep of God and profyte of hir evyn cristen, for, yf it wer, than it wer nowt the mevyng of a good spyryte but rathyr of an evyl spyrit. 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. A. Windeatt’s translation of The Book of Margery Kempe and Elizabeth Spearing’s translation of Revelations of Divine Love, it was published earlier this year. It may be classed as fiction, but the author has worked wonders here; it's almost as if she's assisted Margery and Julian in creating a new holy book. Volevo prolungare ogni momento della mia vita per riuscire a sentire il tempo come lo sente Dio: non l’istante che si dissolve all’improvviso, ma qualcosa di più vasto e inclusivo.We can see how her ostentatious holiness serves her in a patriarchal society, allowing her to do otherwise forbidden things like neglecting her children and refusing to have sex with her husband. The devotion of Kempe and Mother Julian is intense and personal, and is in both cases under the scrutiny and criticism of male authorities. A novel like this requires exquisite balance, not to tip the hand towards one or other of the paired yet opposing characters. But nowadays, we would doubtless question her mental health – likewise for Julian when you learn that her shewings arose from a time of fevered hallucination. Interestingly, these women did meet in real life, and the latter part of the book deftly imagines their conversation.

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