Part of Kempe's significance lies in the autobiographical nature of her book; it is the best insight available of a female middle-class experience in the Middle Ages. Kempe is unusual compared to contemporaneous holy women, such as Julian of Norwich, because she was not a nun. Although Kempe has sometimes been depicted as an "oddity" or a "madwoman", recent scholarship on vernacular theologies and popular practices of piety suggests she was not as odd as she might appear.[23] Her Book is revealed as a carefully constructed spiritual and social commentary. Some have suggested that it was written as fiction to explore the aspects of the society in which she lived in a believable way. The suggestion that Kempe wrote her book as a work of fiction is said to be supported by the fact that she speaks of herself as "this creature" throughout the text, dissociating her from her work.[24]
Her autobiography begins with "the onset of her spiritual quest, her recovery from the ghostly aftermath of her first child-bearing".[25] There is no firm evidence that Kempe could read or write, but Leyser notes that her religious culture was certainly informed by texts. She had such works read to her, including the Incendium Amoris by Richard Rolle; Walter Hilton has been cited as another possible influence on Kempe. Among other books that Kempe had read to her were, repeatedly, the Revelations of Bridget of Sweden. Her own pilgrimages were related to those of that married saint, who had had eight children.
Kempe and her Book are significant because they express the tension in late medieval England between institutional orthodoxy and increasingly public modes of religious dissent, especially those of the Lollards.[26] Throughout her spiritual career, Kempe was challenged by both church and civil authorities on her adherence to the teachings of the institutional Church. The Bishop of Lincoln and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, were involved in trials of her allegedly teaching and preaching on scripture and faith in public, and wearing white clothes (interpreted as hypocrisy on the part of a married woman). In his efforts to suppress heresy, Arundel had enacted laws that forbade allowing women to preach, since the very fact of a woman preaching was seen as anti-canonical.
In the 15th century, a pamphlet was published that represented Kempe as an anchoress and stripped from her "Book" any potential heterodoxical thought or dissenting behaviour. That made some later scholars believe that she was a vowed religious holy woman like Julian of Norwich, and they were surprised to encounter the psychologically and spiritually complex woman revealed in the original text of the "Book".[27]
