Bishop's Lynn, England, 1413. Forty-year-old Margery Kempe has barely survived giving birth to her fourteenth child. Fearing that another pregnancy might kill her, she makes a vow of celibacy, but she can't trust her husband to keep his end of the bargain. Desperate for counsel, she visits the famous anchoress Dame Julian of Norwich. Margery confesses that she has been haunted by visceral, sensual images of the divine which send her into helpless fits of weeping. Julian then shares a confession of her own: she has written a secret book about her mystical visions, Revelations of Divine Love. This dangerous text describes an unconditionally loving God and threatens the established Church’s insistence on eternal damnation. Nearing the end of her life, Julian entrusts the book to Margery, who sets off the adventure of a lifetime to spread Julian’s radical, female vision of the divine. As Margery blazes her pilgrim's trail across Europe and the Near East, she must use all her wits to ward off accusations of heresy—and being burned at the stake. Grappling with self-doubt, she nevertheless finds a unique spiritual path for a woman of her time, not in a cloistered cell like Julian, but in the worldly bustle of life as laywoman, wife, and mother with all of its peril and wonder.-- Back cover.