Although Alison Torn, the author of this statement, ultimately qualifies and contextualises her impressions, such remarks are symptomatic of many contemporary readers’ unprompted reactions when studying late medieval mystical writings such as The Book of Margery Kempe, which Torn mentions here. In an age influenced by psychiatry and Freudian psychoanalysis, and when any writing, especially an autobiographical text, is automatically construed as cathartic and as revealing the author's mental pathology, there is indeed a strong compulsion to interpret and diagnose late medieval mystical accounts in order to understand them in terms and categories familiar to us. In the past twenty years, literary critics, psychologists and psychiatrists, working mostly in the field of the history of psychiatry, have attempted to pathologise visionary experience, especially in the case of the late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century visionaries, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, who will be the focus of this essay. Whilst such approaches provide an original point of entry into the works of these late medieval female mystics, this essay aims to identify and analyse the problems inherent to these pursuits. It will contend that scholars have often erred in their diagnostic undertakings by failing to take into consideration the important interconnectedness of the types of literary, religious and medical discourses which this essay collection places to the fore.

In their interpretations, psychiatrists and psychologists have often lacked the contextual knowledge of medieval medical understandings of madness, while medievalists have tended to misuse psychiatric diagnostics manuals. Further, critics have failed to take into account the socially constructed nature of most disorders that have no proven aetiology in the body, as well as the literary, religious and mystical traditions that constituted the basis for these women's re-interpretation of their visions as they dictated them or wrote them down. Julian of Norwich's and Margery Kempe's re-inscription of their visionary experiences within a conventional and culturally acceptable framework – experiences which they first interpret as madness – permitted them to conceive their altered states of consciousness as, paradoxically, an utterly sane ‘divine insanity’.