Records and diaries of individuals, especially of such as this creature’ Margery, reveal both highlights and shadows, black chaos on either side of the mountains of youth. In this long-forgotten book of Margery Kempe the slightest innuendo, the merest agitation, the unbalanced phrase, the flicker of surprise each in its own allusive manner betrays some chosen subject for human enquiry and scholarship above all others and sweeter in the discovery than the gums and vineyards of Engaddi. Like Christina Mirabilis—the surprising character who lived two centuries before Margery—this burgher’s wife has been called the ‘Astounding’. The Philosopher’s happy phrase admiratio est delectationis causa may then be our invitation to share the medieval experiences of one whose delights were found in the homesteads, and on the pilgrim paths of the crumbling later Middle Ages when the youthful bloom of the thirteenth century was wellnigh a memory and the modern decay already growing.