THERE ARE FIFTEEN Margery Kempes—Margeries Kempe?—on Twitter. That is, there are fifteen accounts which present themselves as one Margery Kempe, fifteenth-century English mystic. She must be a big fucking deal, or at least a moderately sized deal. After all, you know you’ve really made it as a celebrity if people are pretending to be you online. At one point, there were at least 450 Will Ferrells on Twitter, even though the Emmy-Award winning comedian and actor has never actually had an account. Margery gets around a lot, that’s for sure; a lot of people know her name and the basic contours of her biography. Were she a marketizable commodity—the avatar for a fast-food franchise or a household detergent—her brand awareness score would be downright enviable. Not bad, given she died over five hundred years ago.

Picture a stereotypical medieval woman. The kind of carbon cut-out figure that features in pop culture, not to mention the public imagination. Not an aristocrat or a queen or even a muddy-faced serf, but one of the so-called “normal” (read: notionally middle-class) folk. She is likely uneducated, little travelled, maternal (she has to be, given all the babies she’s having), subordinate to her husband (and all other male authorities, including the Church). Poor thing, her life is fifty shades of beige, humdrum, and rather drab. Yeah, no. Enter Margery Kempe, stage left. She would like a word. Margery may be a “synful caytyf” (sinful wretch) but her fifteenth-century life is anything but boring.