The only known copy is preserved in the University of Cambridge. It
is undated, but appears to have been printed in 1501.[11] With a few
insignificant variations, it is the same as was printed twenty years
later by Pepwell, who merely inserts a few words like "Our Lord
Jesus said unto her," or "she said," and adds that she was a devout
ancress. Tanner, not very accurately, writes: "This book contains
various discourses of Christ (as it is pretended) to certain holy
women; and, written in the style of modern Quietists and Quakers,
speaks of the inner love of God, of perfection, et cetera."[12] No
manuscript of the work is known to exist, and absolutely no traces
can be discovered of the "Book of Margery Kempe," out of which it is
implied by the Printer that these beautiful thoughts and sayings are
taken.

There is nothing in the treatise itself to enable us to fix its
date. It is, perhaps, possible that the writer or recipient of these
revelations is the "Margeria filia Johannis Kempe," who, between
1284 and 1298, gave up to the prior and convent of Christ Church,
Canterbury, all her rights in a piece of land with buildings and
appurtenances, "which falls to me after the decease of my brother
John, and lies in the parish of Blessed Mary of Northgate outside
the walls of the city of Canterbury."[13] The revelations show that
she was (or had been) a woman of some wealth and social position,
who had abandoned the world to become an ancress, following the life
prescribed in that gem of early English devotional literature, the
Ancren Riwle.14 It is clearly only a fragment of her complete book
(whatever that may have been); but it is enough to show that she was
a worthy precursor of that other great woman mystic of East Anglia:
Juliana of Norwich. For Margery, as for Juliana, Love is the
interpretation of revelation, and the key to the universal