At around the age of thirty-six or thirty-seven Margery Kempe, whilst lying in bed with her husband John, hears ‘a sownd of melodye so swet & delectable, hir þowt, as sche had ben in Paradyse’ (11). So sublime is the music that upon hearing any subsequent melody or auditory ‘myrth’ she crumbles to plenteous weeping and sighing since she is now conscious of the meaning of heaven, perceiving its sensory truth. As she begins to share this revelation with her acquaintances, disclosing how ‘It is ful mery in Hevyn’, she is met with wrath, as the people challenge the audacity of a woman who claims to know about a place to which she has not been: ‘Why speke ȝe so of þe myrth þat is in Heuyn; ȝe haue not be þer no mor þan we’ (11). In attempting to articulate, in the earthly world, her knowledge and experience of the divine, Kempe reveals both her experiential polarisation from the parishioners in Lynn, and her mystical receptivity: a receptivity which bridges the divide between heaven and earth, which dissolves the borders of body and soul, and which evidences the fluid porousness of her ‘gostly’ and ‘bodyly’ vision, as we saw in Chapter 1. This new understanding of the cosmos gives Kempe claim to a metaphysical wisdom that will mark the transference of all her desires to a heavenly trajectory: ‘sche desyryd no-thyng so mech as Heuyn’ (13). In her cognition, therefore, she has ‘be þer’.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Kempe juxtaposes this moment of ecstatic, heavenly discernment with the concomitant revulsion that ensues when she is faced with the prospect of a sexual encounter with John: it is ‘aftyr þis tyme’ that she cannot bear the prospect of ‘fleschly comownyng’ with him (11–12).