AILSA CHANG, HOST:
What if you could pick up the phone and call the past? Well, our next story does just that. It's the first in a new weekly segment of short-form audio documentaries. We begin with a piece from Berlin-based producer Sara Zarreh Hoshyari Khah - "This Is Margery."
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SARA ZARREH HOSHYARI KHAH: Recently, I've been thinking about what it would be like to call Margery Kempe.
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KHAH: How would I talk to someone who lived over 500 years ago?
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KHAH: Hey, Marge (ph).
Hello, Mrs Kemp.
Hi, this is Sara.
(Singing) Margery.
Hi, Margery.
(Singing) Margery.
We haven't met.
Also, you're dead.
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KHAH: I would like to tell her about this monk.
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KHAH: His name was Wynkyn de Worde.
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KHAH: And after her death, he took the liberty to republish a few pages of her book, and he called it "A Short Treatise Of Contemplation." We don't know what else she wrote about in her book, but he references it, and so we know that it existed at some point. And in his "Treatise Of Contemplation," he describes her - Margery Kempe. And he describes her as a very quiet person, a good Christian woman who worships Jesus on her own terms, a good wife, a good mother, a calm listener. And that's about all that we knew about Margery Kempe. She was a devout, quiet Christian who had 14 kids and lived in a small village in England called King's Lynn.
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KHAH: And then I would like to tell her about this pingpong match that happened in the 1930s, also in England. But I guess, first, I would have to explain what pingpong is.
So it's a game that's usually played by two different people.
And you need a table with a net that goes from one side to the other.
And each player holds a paddle in their hand.
And then you play the ball back and forth.
And you try to play so that the other person can't get to the ball in time.
And you get points if they miss the ball, and they get points if you miss the ball.
And I guess that's all that she would need to know for now.
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KHAH: Anyway, the crazy part about this pingpong match was that one of the players stepped onto the ball and broke it and then went back into his country house to get a new one. And as he was looking through the cupboard to find a ball, he found something else, a book. It looked old, like, really, really old, and it was full of notes. He took it to the library to have it checked out by someone professional, and it turns out that this was Margery's book, the book that the monk had read and chosen a few parts from to republish.
So now there are these two documents. One written by a monk, about a quiet, inward-turned Margery Kempe, whom he uses as an example of how to be a good, calm, Christian woman. And then, newly discovered, there's another one - the original book, Margery Kempe's own version, the entire thing written by herself. Well, actually, she couldn't read or write, so she had to hire scribes but, either way, a book by her own account. In the Middle Ages, there were a few women who had books written about their lives, but normally, the procedure was that someone was a holy woman because they had performed a miracle or two and then gathered a following because of that. And then when they died, someone else would write a book about their life.
But Margery, she hasn't performed a miracle - not that I know of, anyway. And she also didn't gather a following, not in her lifetime. So I guess at some point, she must have just decided to write a book about herself so that she would be remembered in the way that she wanted. A few medievalists started reading her book, expecting kind of a long-form version of the monk's treatise, but soon they found out that her version of herself was wildly different to what the monk published. She was very Christian, but she wasn't calm, and she definitely wasn't quiet.
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KHAH: And she was a mother of 14 kids, but she doesn't really talk about them. Instead, she talks about anything and everything else and in so much detail. She writes about food and what she likes and doesn't like and how she tries to become a vegetarian at some point, but people are being very difficult about it. She writes about what is arguably the first English account of postpartum depression - hers was cured by Jesus - about her travels. She traveled to Christian sites of worship all over Europe, sometimes with company but often alone.
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KHAH: She writes about how she decides to wear all white in her 40s. Wearing white was a sign of virginity, and Margery had already had 14 kids at that time so definitely not a virgin. And people in her village did not take this lightly. She writes about her sexual desires not just towards her husband, but also towards other people and towards Jesus. And she writes about what kind of became her signature move - crying. She cries at every occasion, which gets her excluded from all kinds of social gatherings, and in some cases, even banned from church services. She cries every time she thinks about Jesus or Mary or both. When she traveled to Jerusalem, she was so overwhelmed by everything and cried so hard that she fell off her donkey.
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KHAH: Overall, she's just this badass who does all of these things that the monk definitely left out on purpose because they don't fit the image that he wanted to create. He totally monk-washed (ph) her and took away all of the sexiness and the directness and the dirtiness and the realness of her story.
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KHAH: (Impersonating automated voice) The person you're trying to reach has been unavailable for over 500 years. Please leave a message after the tone.
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KHAH: Hey, Margery, this is Sara calling from the future. I just wanted to leave a quick note and tell you that your book has survived more than 500 years and has made it to the 21st century. And it's actually now considered to be the first autobiography in English that is written by a woman, so that's really cool. Congrats. Your book means a lot to me. I think it's really cool and is superbrave that you decided to write everything down in so much detail. Thank you, and - OK, that's it. Thanks, and bye.
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KHAH: To me, the book of Margery Kempe is like a little reminder that, for a lot of history that we know, we only have the monk version, the edit, not just because someone chose the parts that they wanted to remember, but because people couldn't write their stories down, or they thought they were too normal or even too dangerous to be remembered or because the stories were simply lost.
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KHAH: History isn't this thing that we get to document if we only look close enough. It's always just a selection. The book of Margery Kempe honestly fills me with joy, not because I like her so much or because I find it particularly easy to relate to her or her lifestyle, but because it makes it easier for me to imagine the existence of the other stories, the ones that no one wrote down, the ones that didn't make it to the 21st century.
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CHANG: That was Berlin-based producer Sara Zarreh Hoshyari Khah with her piece called "Margery," the first in our new weekly segment of short-form audio documentaries.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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