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Cover of Memoirs of a Medieval Woman

How long does it take to read Memoirs of a Medieval Woman?

The Life and Times of Margery Kempe

Louise Collis

Memoirs of a Medieval Woman by Louise Collis takes about 4 hours 56 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 56 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1964. 269 pages, about 73,975 words.

10 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 8 hours 13 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 56 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 3 hours 5 minutes

The page count is the median across 8 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

From back cover: This unique biography tells the story of an extraordinary fifteenth-century woman who journeyed all over Europe from England to the Holy Land. A vigorous and passionate woman, Margery Kempe was married and had fourteen children when she deserted her family to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to expiate a "secret sin" in her early life. Along the way she meets many famous prelates and dignitaries, gets into all sorts of scrapes, and survives a feverish voyage in the stinking galleys of a Venetian boat. Drawing on the chronicles of her contemporaries and on her own clear-eyed autobiography -- dictated to a priest near the end of her life and said to be the first written in English -- these memoirs reveal a woman who has strange ideas about such things as sin and sainthood, dress, diet, and sex, and provides a colorful and detailed picture of everyday medieval life in England and around the rim of the Mediterranean. Part-time historian Louise Collis brings a novelist's flair to this fascinating, well-researched story.

Subjects: History, Authors, English, Biography, Christian literature, English (Middle), History and criticism, Mysticism

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