Thoughts on The Book of Margery Kempe

I found The Book of Margery Kempe to be an interesting read. Throughout the story I was left wondering, Is this woman looney? or is she really receiving some kind of visions/instruction from God. It seems that when she is possessed by demons and has to be locked away, that she could very easily be insane. However, I do believe that there can be demonic powers that can possess persons, so who knows, she really could have been possessed for a while. After she recovers from being possessed however, she doesn't seem to normalize any. Her personality and ideas seem to be literally all over the place. She wears extravagant clothes to be recognized and esteemed by the people living in her town, yet she becomes upset when others are just as respected as she is. She also randomly decides to have her own brewery and grain mill, which seems odd today, but think about how much more odd it would have been in that time for a woman! Im sure women of the day didn't go about starting their own businesses in order to make money, i feel like most men of that time would not have wanted their wives out trying to make money for the family. It was the man's job to bring in money for the family, not the woman's. Another part I found interesting was the withholding sex from her husband, which if God really did appear to her and tell her that she should refrain from having sex with her, it would seem to be contradicting what God says about sex in the Bible...Whether Margery really did have these visions or not is totally up to the reader to determine, however, the loyalty and determination to follow her beliefs is respectable regardless.