The Book of Margery Kempe is the story of a boisterous worldly mystic that will appeal to modern women. Margery, the mother of fourteen, wife of a debt-ridden and lusty husband, and a hoarder of "secret" sin, brings the world of medieval women alive to contemporary readers. Her earthly and emotional autobiography, dictated to a priest near the end of her life and known as the first written in English, reveals a woman whose passions and vanities were turned from self-absorption to the service of her Lord. It records a brand of mysticism marked by pilgrimages, secret penances, near hangings as a heretic, uncontrollable tears inspired by the Holy Spirit, and a love of God so intense that the passion of Jesus reeled before Margery in much the same way as a film does for us today. The Book of Margery Kempe paints a vivid portrait of a unique medieval mystic-a woman more vibrantly and emotionally attached to God than to pious mortifications carried out in isolation.