The late fourteenth-century religious handbook The Pore Caitif encapsulates the deep connection between the blackness of mourning and the green regeneration of flourishing by advising the pious to wear an entwined garland on the head of their souls: ‘And so beringe bifore crist ʒoure garlond, þat corown bitokeneþ: with knottis of mournyng for synne as of blak silk & with grene wouun togidir. This symbolic image, redolent with notions of the black bile of melancholia, mysticism, generation and fecundity that are central to this study, epitomises the symbiosis of Margery Kempe's pain with Christ’s. The visions of the crucifixion that are recalled in the Book are more than temporal moments of excruciating rapture, however, since they are relived, reanimated, and reintegrated in her soul time and again as opportunities for Christic union. As she is told by revelation, ‘I haue oftyn-tymes seyd to þe þat I schuld be newe crucified in þe’ (85) – a divine promise that Christ's body will be perpetually crucified and situated within her own in a timeless ecstasy of pain and desire.

The Passion visions function in the Book as ultimate exemplars of suffering, developing the pain-surrogacy hermeneutic to its logical conclusion – that is – Kempe's willingness to become a death surrogate for Christ. Indeed, her envisioning of the Virgin Mary offering her own life for Christ's (‘I wolde, Sone, þat I myth suffir deth for þe so þat þu xuldist not deyin’ [187]) gestures towards the spiritual currency of such a sacrifice, a willingness to suffir annihilation in order to retain God incarnate. Such ascetic profit becomes more explicit when, early in the Book, it is recounted that Christ mystically conceives Kempe as a fleshly sacrifice to be consumed and martyred in an example of quasi-Eucharistic substitution: ‘Þow xalt ben etyn & knawyn of þe pepul of þe world as any raton knawyth þe stokfysch’ (17). Kempe therefore reveals her conceptualisation as a willing sacrificial lamb early in her recollections, deliberately foregrounding her embodiment in vulnerable human flesh at the same time as insisting on the amalgamation of Christ's painful torture with her own, and thereby both humanising and transcending her spiritual trajectory.