Postpartum Psychosis In The Book Of Margery Kempe Summary

Distinction between Real or Fake: Symptoms of Postpartum Psychosis in The Book of Margery Kempe In her autobiography The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery Kempe tells the story of her spiritual journey in Medieval England over a twenty five year period. It recounts her quest to establish spiritual authority as a result in personal visions and conversations with Jesus and God that she has. It begins around 1393, with Margery’s self-acknowledged onset of psychosis that she calls as her spiritual crisis. In the work The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery shows symptoms of postpartum psychosis that causes her to directly communicate with numerous aspects of the divine. Today postpartum psychosis is known to be a serious psychiatric crisis that affects one to two women per thousand in the first few weeks following childbirth. Women tend to experience visual, aural, and olfactory delusions and hallucinations that enables a risk of self-harm,

And in this time she saw, as she thought, devils open their mouths, all inflamed with burning flames of fire as if they should have swallowed her in, sometimes menacing her, sometimes threatening her, sometimes pulling and hailing her both night and day during the foresaid time” (Kempe 7).
Craun, in her piece Personal Accounts: The Story of Margery Kempe , argues that the postpartum psychosis did not completely resolve and Margery continued to have psychotic behavior and symptoms for the rest of her life as she states, “Kempe continued to have psychotic symptoms throughout the remainder of her life, although she sometimes viewed them as spiritual gifts” (Craun). This seems to be the start of Margery’s postpartum psychosis episode and it only gradually continues to get worse from her