and made into a separate appendix, and in another, the more mystical chapters were set in a smaller typeface in order to preserve the primacy of the narrative portion of theBook. Scholarly commentary has followed suit, with some critics interpreting the Book as a work of mysticism in the vein of other medieval mystical writings, and others as an autobiography. Kempe's earliest modern critics found her mysticism overwhelming, categorizing her as neurotic, self-deluded, even psychopathic. Others doubted the validity of her claim to authorship, suggesting that the scribe was truly the author of the book; in fact, the mix of oral and textual discourse in the Book has remained a central part of critical debate. Kempe's reliability as a narrator has also consistently been questioned: passionate in the extreme yet not possessed of the ability to pen her own story, Kempe has appeared to some critics as less an author than a character. Among these, Lynn Staley has gone so far as to approach the Book as a work of fiction, referring to "Margery" as the protagonist and "Kempe" as the author. Yet if scholars have doubted the veracity of her spiritual experiences as well as her self-presentation, many have nonetheless embraced The Book of Margery Kempe as a valuable social history, particularly as it documents the daily life of women in medieval England. Kempe's recent biographer Anthony Goodman (see Further Reading) has suggested that while the Book offers only highly selective evidence about the life of medieval women (and women of a particular social class at that), it gives some insight into what was considered acceptable and what was beyond the norm for women at that time, particularly within marriage relationships. Goodman assesses the Book as "one of our most valuable documents for English social history." The Book of Margery Kempe also reveals a slice of a particular moment in English religious history, and many critics have maintained that Kempe's writing is at its most powerful in this regard. Critics including Staley and Kathy Lavezzo have seen in Kempe's mysticism the potential for subverting patriarchal order, within the male-dominated ecclesiastical hierarchy, within private relationships between men and women, and in the public sphere in general. These scholars have reevaluated Kempe's apparent failings—irregular structures, confusing language, and intense emotionalism—as part of an effective strategy for expressing the disenfranchisement of women and the potential for a feminine subjectivity.

SOURCE: Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe, translated by B. A. Windeatt, pp. 161-67. London: Penguin, 1985.

In the following excerpt from The Book of Margery Kempe, written c. 1436, Kempe relates her examination by the archbishop. Kempe addresses the charge that she should refrain from sharing her revelations with others because she is a woman; she also upbraids the clerics who attack her for speaking out, causing many of them to change their minds about her.

There was a monk who was going to preach in York, and who had heard much slander and much evil talk about the said creature. And when he was going to preach, there was a great crowd of people to hear him, and she present with them. And so when he was launched into his sermon, he repeated many matters so openly that people saw perfectly well it was on account of her, at which her friends who loved her were very sorry and upset because of it, and she was much the merrier, because she had something to try her patience and her charity, through which she trusted to please our Lord Christ Jesus.

When the sermon was over, a doctor of divinity who had great love for her, together with many other people as well, came to her and said, 'Margery, how have you got on today?'

'Sir,' she said, 'very well indeed, God be blessed. I have reason to be very happy and glad in my soul that I may suffer anything for his love, for he suffered much more for me.'

Shortly afterwards, a man who was also devoted to her came with his wife and other people, and escorted her seven miles from there to the Archbishop of York, and brought her into a fair chamber, where there came a good cleric, saying to the good man who had brought her there, 'Sir, why have you and your wife brought this woman here? She will steal away from you, and then she will have brought shame upon you.'

The good man said, 'I dare well say she will remain and answer for herself very willingly.'

On the next day she was brought into the Archbishop's chapel, and many of the Archbishop's household came there scorning her, calling her 'Lollard' and 'heretic', and swore many a horrible oath that she should be burned. And she, through the strength of Jesus, replied to them, 'Sirs, I fear you will be burned in hell without end, unless you correct yourselves of your swearing of oaths, for you do not keep the commandments of God. I would not swear as you do for all the money in this world.'

Then they went away, as if they were ashamed. She then, saying her prayers in her mind, asked for grace to behave that day as was most pleasure to God, and profit to her own soul, and good example to her fellow Christians. Our Lord, answering her, said that everything would go well.

At last the said Archbishop came into the chapel with his clerics, and he said to her abruptly, 'Why do you go about in white clothes? Are you a virgin?'

She, kneeling before him, said, 'No, sir, I am no virgin; I am a married woman.'

He ordered his household to fetch a pair of fetters and said she should be fettered, for she was a false heretic, and then she said, 'I am no heretic, nor shall you prove me one.'

The Archbishop went away and left her standing alone. Then for a long while she said her prayers to our Lord God Almighty to help her and succour her against all her enemies both spiritual and bodily, and her flesh trembled and quaked amazingly, so that she was glad to put her hands under her clothes so that it should not be noticed.

Afterwards the Archbishop came back into the chapel with many worthy clerics, amongst whom was the same doctor who had examined her before, and the monk who had preached against her a little while before in York. Some of the people asked whether she were a Christian woman or a Jew; some said she was a good woman, and some said not.

Then the Archbishop took his seat, and his clerics too, each according to his degree, many people being present. And during the time that people were gathering together and the Archbishop was taking his seat, the said creature stood at the back, saying her prayers for help and succour against her enemies with high devotion, and for so long that she melted all into tears. And at last she cried out loudly, so that the Archbishop, and his clerics, and many people, were all astonished at her, for they had not heard such crying before.

When her crying was passed, she came before the Archbishop and fell down on her knees, the Archbishop saying very roughly to her, 'Why do you weep so, woman?'

She answering said, 'Sir, you shall wish some day that you had wept as sorely as I.'

And then, after the Archbishop had put to her the Articles of our Faith—to which God gave her grace to answer well, truly and readily, without much having to stop and think, so that he could not criticize her—he said to the clerics, 'She knows her faith well enough. What shall I do with her?'

The clerics said, 'We know very well that she knows the Articles of the Faith, but we will not allow her to dwell among us, because the people have great faith in her talk, and perhaps she might lead some of them astray.' Then the Archbishop said to her: 'I am told very bad things about you. I hear it said that you are a very wicked woman.'

And she replied, 'Sir, I also hear it said that you are a wicked man. And if you are as wicked as people say, you will never get to heaven, unless you amend while you are here.'

Then he said very roughly, 'Why you!… What do people say about me?'

She answered, 'Other people, sir, can tell you well enough.'

Then a great cleric with a furred hood said, 'Quiet! You speak about yourself, and let him be.'

Afterwards the Archbishop said to her, 'Lay your hand on the book here before me, and swear that you will go out of my diocese as soon as you can.'

'No, sir,' she said, 'I pray you, give me permission to go back into York to take leave of my friends.'

Then he gave her permission for one or two days. She thought it was too short a time, and so she replied, 'Sir, I may not go out of this diocese so hastily, for I must stay and speak with good men before I go; and I must, sir, with your leave, go to Bridlington and speak with my confessor, a good man, who was the good Prior's confessor, who is now canonized.'

Then the Archbishop said to her, 'You shall swear that you will not teach people or call them to account in my diocese.'

'No, sir, I will not swear,' she said, 'for I shall speak of God and rebuke those who swear great oaths wherever I go, until such time that the Pope and Holy Church have ordained that nobody shall be so bold as to speak of God, for God Almighty does not forbid, sir, that we should speak of him. And also the Gospel mentions that, when the woman had heard our Lord preach, she came before him and said in a loud voice, "Blessed be the womb that bore you, and the teats that gave you suck." Then our Lord replied to her, "In truth, so are they blessed who hear the word of God and keep it." And therefore, sir, I think that the Gospel gives me leave to speak of God.'

'Ah, sir,' said the clerics, 'here we know that she has a devil in her, for she speaks of the Gospel.'

A great cleric quickly produced a book and quoted St Paul for his part against her, that no woman should preach. She, answering to this, said, 'I do not preach, sir; I do not go into any pulpit. I use only conversation and good words, and that I will do while I live.'

Then a doctor who had examined her before said, 'Sir, she told me the worst tale about priests that I ever heard.'

The Archbishop commanded her to tell that tale.

'Sir, by your reverence, I only spoke of one priest, by way of example, who, as I have learned it, went astray in a wood—through the sufferance of God, for the profit of his soul—until night came upon him. Lacking any shelter, he found a fair arbour in which he rested that night, which had a beautiful pear-tree in the middle, all covered in blossom, which he delighted to look at. To that place came a great rough bear, ugly to behold, that shook the pear-tree and caused the blossoms to fall. Greedily this horrible beast ate and devoured those fair flowers. And when he had eaten them, turning his tail towards the priest, he discharged them out again at his rear end.

'The priest, greatly revolted at that disgusting sight and becoming very depressed for fear of what it might mean, wandered off on his way all gloomy and pensive. He happened to meet a good-looking, aged man like a pilgrim, who asked the priest the reason for his sadness. The priest, repeating the matter written before, said he felt great fear and heaviness of heart when he beheld that revolting beast soil and devour such lovely flowers and blossoms, and afterwards discharge them so horribly at his rear end in the priest's presence—he did not understand what this might mean.

'Then the pilgrim, showing himself to be the messenger of God, thus addressed him, "Priest, you are yourself the pear-tree, somewhat flourishing and flowering through your saying of services and administering of sacraments, although you act without devotion, for you take very little heed how you say your matins and your service, so long as it is babbled to an end. Then you go to your mass without devotion, and you have very little contrition for your sin. You receive there the fruit of everlasting life, the sacrament of the altar, in a very feeble frame of mind. All day long afterwards, you spend your time amiss: you give yourself over to buying and selling, bartering and exchanging, just like a man of the world. You sit over your beer, giving yourself up to gluttony and excess, to the lust of your body, through lechery and impurity. You break the commandments of God through swearing, lying, detraction and backbiting gossip, and the practice of other such sins. Thus, through your misconduct, just like the loathsome bear, you devour and destroy the flowers and blossoms of virtuous living, to your own endless damnation and to the hindrance of many other people, unless you have grace for repentance and amending."'

Then the Archbishop liked the tale a lot and commended it, saying it was a good tale. And the cleric who had examined her before in the absence of the Archbishop, said, 'Sir, this tale cuts me to the heart.'

The said creature said to the cleric, 'Ah, worthy doctor, sir, in the place where I mostly live is a worthy cleric, a good preacher, who boldly speaks out against the misconduct of people and will flatter no one. He says many times in the pulpit: "If anyone is displeased by my preaching, note him well, for he is guilty." And just so, sir,' she said to the clerk, 'do you behave with me, God forgive you for it.'

The cleric did not know what he could say to her, and afterwards the same cleric came to her and begged her for forgiveness that he had been so against her. He also asked her specially to pray for him.

And then afterwards the Archbishop said, 'Where shall I get a man who could escort this woman from me?'

Many young men quickly jumped up, and everyone of them said, 'My lord, I will go with her.'

The Archbishop answered, 'You are too young: I will not have you.'

Then a good, sober man of the Archbishop's household asked his lord what he would give him if he would escort her. The Archbishop offered him five shillings, and the man asked for a noble. The Archbishop answering said, 'I will not spend so much on her body.'

'Yes, good sir,' said this creature, 'Our Lord shall reward you very well for it.'

Then the Archbishop said to the man, 'See, here is five shillings, and now escort her fast out of this area.'

She, kneeling down on her knees, asked his blessing. He, asking her to pray for him, blessed her and let her go.

Then she, going back again to York, was received by many people, and by very worthy clerics, who rejoiced in our Lord, who had given her—uneducated as she was—the wit and wisdom to answer so many learned men without shame or blame, thanks be to God.

SOURCE: Kempe, Margery. "Margery Kempe's visit to Julian of Norwich." In The Shewings of Julian of Norwich, edited by Georgia Ronan Crampton, pp. 211. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Publishing Institute, 1994.

In the following excerpt from her Book Kempe describes her visit to fellow female mystic Julian of Norwich.

And then she was bade by our Lord to go in the same city to an anchoress who is called Lady Julian. And so she did, and showed her the grace of compunction, contrition, sweetness and devotion, compassion with holy meditation and high contemplation that God had instilled in her soul, and many holy speeches and conversations that our Lord spoke to her soul; and she showed the anchoress many wonderful revelations in order to know if there were any deceit in them, for the anchoress was expert in such things and could give good counsel. The anchoress, hearing this marvelous goodness of our Lord, thanked God highly with all her heart for his visitation, counseling this creature to be obedient to the will of our Lord God and with all her might fulfill whatever he put in her soul, if it were not against the worship of God and welfare of her fellow Christians; for, if it were, then it would not be the moving of a good spirit but rather of an evil spirit. The Holy Ghost never moves anything against charity, and if he did, he would be contrary to his very being, for he is all charity. Also, he moves the soul to perfect chastity, for those living chastely are called the temple of the Holy Ghost. And the Holy Ghost makes a soul stable and steadfast in true faith and right belief. And a man double in soul is always unstable and unsteadfast in all his ways; he that is continually doubting is like the flood of the sea, which is moved and borne about by the wind, and that man is not likely to receive the gifts of God. That creature that has these tokens must steadfastly believe that the Holy Ghost dwells in his soul. And much more, when God visits a creature with tears of contrition, devotion, or compassion, he may and ought to believe that the Holy Ghost is in his soul. Saint Paul says that the Holy Ghost asks for us with mourning and weepings unspeakable, that is to say, he makes us to ask and pray with mournings and weepings so plenteously that the tears cannot be numbered. No evil spirit may give these tokens, for Jerome says that tears torment the devil more than do the pains of hell. God and the devil are forever contraries, and they shall never dwell together in one place. And the devil has no power in a man's soul. Holy Writ says that the soul of a righteous man is the seat of God. And so, I trust, sister, that you are. I pray that God grant you perseverance. Put all your trust in God and do not fear the language of the world, for the more spite, shame, and reproof that you have in the world, the more is your merit in the sight of God. Patience is necessary to you, for in that you shall keep your soul. Much was the holy talk that the anchoress and this creature had in the mutuality of their love of our Lord Jesus Christ the many days that they were together.

KATHARINE CHOLMELEY (ESSAY DATE 1947)

SOURCE: Cholmeley, Katharine. “The Character of Margery’s Book.” In Margery Kempe, Genius and Mystic, pp. 1-14. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1947.
In the following essay, Cholmeley considers Kempe’s Book both as it represents the era in which Kempe lived and as it reflects the spiritual life of a devout mystic.

Thirty years ago the name of Margery Kempe was known only to a few who were acquainted with the extracts from her Book that had been printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1501. Now, by means of the discovery of the original narrative, she has become to many an intimate. So sincere is she, so frank in her self-revelation, that there can be little about her that we do not know. It is not easy for anyone to describe himself. He is so apt to conceal; to excuse; to seek subterfuge; to judge too hardly or too lightly; but this Norfolk woman, unself-conscious, simple and sincere, tells all she considers ought to be told, however unpalatable it may be.

For some four centuries the manuscript, once the property of the Carthusian Priory of Mount-grace, was in the hands of the Butler Bowden family. This, the only surviving copy of her Book, remained unread for generations. The small, crabbed script baffled the ordinary reader. Unknown it lay, with all its wealth of detail of everyday medieval life; unread was all it had to tell of the character of English anchorites, monks and friars; undreamed of, all it had to show of the meaning of the Church to the ordinary man and woman of Plantagenet days.

Now, suddenly, by means of it, a gate is opened; and we can walk the roads of Lancastrian England. So vivid, so keen, was Margery’s experience of life that she makes us see the things that she saw, to hear the voices that she heard, and to breathe the air that she breathed.

Her narrative is the more remarkable because she herself could neither read nor write. Her Book was dictated. She could not read it over: ponder, check, and consider its effect; yet she is an unconscious stylist. She has much of the craft of the storyteller. She can in a few vivid words show us a character, give a life-like record of a conversation; or paint a scene. She has an unerring instinct for the thing that matters. She knows what to tell, and how to tell it. We are given a homely vignette such as that in which she describes herself and her husband coming from York, “in right hot weather,” she with a bottle of beer in her hand, and he, with a cake in his bosom. We can see the glare, the dusty road, and the heated couple upon it. Her key phrase gives to us the feel of the sun, and the brilliance of the summer sky. She knows the art of description by implication; and her own memory quickens our imagination.

With the lightest touch and the greatest economy of language she can bring before us man, woman or child as a living individual.

A priest, at York, who took exception to the white clothing which she wore, pulled her by the collar of her gown, exclaiming:

“Thou wolf! What is this cloth that thou hast on?”

She stood silent, but some little boys from the monastery school, who overheard, piped up: “Sir, it is wool.”

Across the centuries comes the sound of their high, half-laughing voices; we can see their roguish mouths and eyes.

It is difficult to condense or paraphrase her narrative, so excellent is her choice of words. The most moving, the most picturesque, the most telling phrases came to her apparently without effort, and instantaneously, moreover. She could not correct or revise her sentences like a deliberate writer. Who can better her description of the torrid Jordan valley when she tells us that she thought her feet would have burnt for the heat that she felt; who can make anything more pregnant than her statement: “She stood in the same place where Mary Magdalene stood, when Christ said to her, ‘Woman, why weepest thou?’” Who, again, can write more poignant a passage than this incident of her sojourn in Rome:

“Another time, as she came to a poor woman’s house, the poor woman called her into her house, and made her sit by her little fire, giving her wine to drink in a cup of stone. And she had a little man-child, which sucked a while on the mother’s breast; another while, it ran to this creature, the mother sitting full of sorrow and sadness. Then this creature burst all into weeping, as if she had seen Our Lady and her Son at the time of His Passion, and had so many holy thoughts that she could never tell the half, but ever sat and wept plenteously a long time, so that the poor woman, having compassion on her weeping, prayed her to cease, not knowing why she wept.

“Then Our Lord Jesus Christ said to this creature: “‘This place is holy.’”

Some singular gift was hers: a gift linked up with her vivid exactness of memory and her intensity of feeling. She who gathers into herself the tender medieval sorrow for the Passion is an invaluable exponent of the outward life of her time. Not everyone who is intent upon the inward is alive to the outer world also; but Margery’s eyes were wide open upon them both.

She gives us the freedom of her world. We see the pilgrims setting forth for the Holy Land: sailing from Yarmouth to the Netherlands, journeying overland to Constance, and from thence to Venice, where they prudently bought each their own bedding, and brought the bales on board the great galley, all crisscrossed with rope, as was the way with medieval baggage. We hear the regrettable dispute between herself and a priest, when each laid claim to the self same sheet. We see the company arriving at Jerusalem, Margery riding on an ass, and praying God for His mercy that “as He had brought her to see His earthly city of Jerusalem He would grant her grace to see the blissful city of Jerusalem above, the city of Heaven.” We see them following their guides, the Franciscans, the cross-bearer going before, each man and woman carrying a lighted candle, and listening to what the Friars related of Our Lord’s suffering in each place.

The pulse of the age is in Margery’s Book. We see old Bristol, with its fair churches and gabled houses; and the cobbled streets through which the Corpus Christi Procession wends its way with flickering candles borne in honour of That at Whose passing the people fall upon their knees. We see the Palm Sunday ceremonies of the time when the Host was carried into the churchyard for priest and people to bow down in adoration; and when the acolyte had knocked at the door with the cross-staff, all would follow in after Him who was hidden in form of bread. We see the unveiling of the crucifix which took place on that day. We gain, though in a heightened form, some notion of the effect of the ceremonial of the Church upon the unlettered, to whom she, in her wisdom, speaks thereby as eloquently as in her liturgy. When the cross-bearer “smote upon the door,” and it opened to admit the priest bearing the Blessed Sacrament, Margery saw before her Christ at the gates of Limbo, denouncing the Devil, freeing from bondage the patient longing souls of the righteous.

Likely enough she had seen one of the Miracle Plays of the time, for much was always made of the intensely dramatic and appealing pageant of “The Harrowing of Hell.” Satan, scurrilous, blasphemous, seething with hatred, was set over the serenity and majesty of the Redeemer. After a venomous speech to the fellow-devils from his throne, he was alarmed by a cry at the doors of Hell.

“Attolite portas principes vestras. . . .”
“Say, what is he, that King of Bliss?”

Swift come the answer:

“The lord the which almighty is . . .
For, man that sometime did amiss,
To his bliss he will bring.”

Christ, as Deliverer, then took Adam by the hand, calling him His darling. He blessed him and all the righteous with peace, and bid the Archangel Michael lead them all forth “to joy that lasteth ever.”

The Miracle Plays must have had a profound effect upon all who saw them. The scenes of the Faith played out in their own streets must have been as keen and affecting as the experiences of life. The Gospel was not far away, and foreign. Everywhere it was portrayed in carving, painting, and sculpture. With the exception of such plays as Robin Hood, its drama was the only drama that the people knew. Margery Kempe, with her great power of love, was more profoundly stirred than most; but her mind is simply a mirror of the devout imagination of the time. The personal knowledge; the intimacy; the adoring sympathetic love of Jesus that show themselves in medieval art and literature, that belonged to the common man and woman, seep in a flood through her.

Margery tells us more of her time than do either Chaucer or Langland. That is to say, her picture is more complete than either of theirs. There is nothing in her Book equal to the character painting of the Introduction to the Canterbury Tales. She seldom gives any detail of dress; she does not call up before us an entire ugly countenance like that of the Miller, whose

“beard as any sow or fox was red,
and thereto broad as though it were a spade.
Upon the cop right of his nose he had
A wart, and thereon stood a tuft of hairs
Red as the bristles of a sow’s ears.
His nostrils black were and wide”

and

“His mouth as wide as was a furnace.”

Nevertheless, she has a far wider range than that of Chaucer. We meet with a crowd of personages in her Book, both ecclesiastical and lay; and each one of the throng, by some deft stroke, by some unerring quality of right observation, stands forth as real as anyone of our acquaintance.

Chaucer, when all is said, is out chiefly to amuse and entertain. He writes chiefly for the folk of Court and manor whose pleasure lay much in somewhat artificial romance: in a dream world of woodland and garden. He is the child of the French poets; and the Roman de la Rose inspired much of his work. His English pilgrims are for the most part figures of comedy. They do not show us England. Chaucer is not giving us the spirit of his age; whereas Margery may with truth be said to do that.

Chaucer pokes fun at the Friar who is out to wheedle alms: the limitour who worked a district, whose “tippet was ay farsed full of knives, and pins, for to given fair wives”

Of double worsted was his semi-cope,
That round was as a bell out of the press
Somewhat he lisped for his wantonness
To make his English sweet upon his tongue.

That is inimitable in its cleverness, and its soft irony; but it need not be taken as proof that this Franciscan represents the sum total of the Minorites in England. Doubtless there were a fair number of Friars over-anxious to collect money. We can read of them elsewhere. Still, the curious fact remains that Margery, downright and outspoken as she is, does not concern herself with the avarice of the Friars. She tells us what good preachers they were, and how holy.

Again, she has a far wider range than Lang-land. The hammer of denunciation does not beat through her pages as it beats through those of Piers Plowman; certainly she could denounce when she deemed it necessary. With the bravery that was constantly characteristic of her, she rebuked even the Archbishop of Canterbury for the manner in which the servants of his house-hold swore lightly by holy things. Yet to gaze upon evil; to rebuke evil, was but part of her task. She dwells upon the whole of her experiences, so that we see not only the sinfulness, but also the good, of the society of her day. We see what is perhaps the most important element of all: the ordinary folk: the good-hearted, kindly, wholesome-minded folk who are apt to be taken for granted, whom chronicle and document are apt to ignore because they do nothing extraordinary; who make life sound and sweet wherever they live.

She is chiefly acquainted with the townsfolk, rich and poor, with the middle class most of all. We know well what sort of neighbours were hers at Lynn; what kind of fellow-pilgrims; what manner of acquaintance she encountered on the road. Despite his homespun realism; despite his famous word-picture of the disreputable company at the Tavern, Langland has not Margery’s gift for drawing us into the very place described. Despite all his passionate sympathy for the poor and oppressed, he is a little remote. But let Margery speak; and we are by her side in church, or house, or roadway. We do not merely see her world; we enter into it. Every detail that she gives is fascinating in its interest. We know that there can be no possibility of idealisation, of exaggeration or romancing. She tells of life as she knew it. Her outlook is matter-of-fact. The general effect of her narrative is to give to the early fifteenth century a character of soundness, of sanity, and cheerfulness.

There are some writers on the Middle Ages whose commentary makes one feel as though on a journey through a land of rayless gloom; but Margery, who lived at that period, takes one into a sunlit realm. We meet the unworthy priest and religious, it is true; but we are not filled with hopelessness at the sight thereof. There is the lecherous monk whom Margery reproved; who asked her prayers; and who later repented, becoming a worthy sub-prior of his monastery. There are careless clerics like those in the train of the Bishop of Worcester, who aped the silly extravagant dress of the Court dandies; but who, like many others, listened to Margery’s reproaches with meekness. Beside the evil-living, the blasphemers, and the worldly, we meet the good and pious in plenty. Of these, some dwell in the cells of anchorites; some wear the religious habit; some are priests; many are simple, open-hearted lay folk.

Though Margery’s fellow pilgrims took exception to her, and dubbed her a hypocrite; though she was frequently misunderstood and misjudged, nevertheless, they were not a few, who treated her with the greatest respect, because they held her holy. The society in which she moved was faulty; but it was not diseased. It was, on the whole, a civilised society. It was a Catholic society, one unmistakable mark of which, is the reverence for sanctity. It is not the politician, the money-maker, or even the King, who ranks highest in Catholic lands, but the man whose heart is set on God.

She has not much to say of farm labourers and bondsmen. She makes no reference to the Peasants’ Revolt, though many of the aggrieved and embittered men had tramped out from Norfolk towards London. Except for one or two almost casual references, we would hardly know that there was a King in England. She says nothing of the murder of Richard II or of the bruit of Agin-court. We know nothing of her opinion of these things; or even if she deemed them of importance. Wars and politics apparently did not touch her. We hear nothing from her of trouble with the Scots, or of disturbances on the border of Wales. She does not even tell of the bridal journey of Henry IV’s little daughter who was to wed the King of Denmark, though the ship set sail from Lynn; and the outfaring of the little Princess must have been a fireside tale for many a day.

She says nothing of the Council of Constance, though she was in that city in 1414; she seems not to be in the least concerned with the conflict between Pope and anti-Pope. To her, there is but the Pope for whom she prays. All else is ignored or held irrelevant.

She is like Langland, in so far, as she is primarily concerned with the relation between God and man. Man has sinned, and God is wronged; but even so, He is ready to pour out an abundance of mercy. This is exemplified in her own personal history. She thirsts after perfection; thirsts for sinners to repent; thirsts that God may be loved.

The specific object of her Book is to show the mercy of God: “the high and unspeakable mercy of our Sovereign Saviour Christ Jesus” who had drawn her careless irresolute soul to love Him, and had bestowed on her high graces of prayer. All that is written is to be to His honour. To her, her work is a spiritual treatise: a love-story. She had wronged her Love; and that she would make clear: she desires only to draw men to a realisation of His love-worthiness. Her realisation of the Passion was so intense that she saw it as clearly as any scene that came before her bodily eyes. The sorrow of it possessed her more than any sorrow of her own. Bitterly she wept for the pain and sorrow that were endured for unheeding Man’s redemption.

The medieval mind, as we find it in the lyrics of Catholic England, had always gazed at the Passion as a thing present, known it as a personal grief. The poet will see the Rood amid the trees of the woodland; and while he looks upon the “wounds five,” sing a song “of love-longing”; but in Margery this vision and this grief were intensified to an extraordinary degree.

She was as dominated by the love of Jesus as most of us are by the love of self. She hungered for the conversion of pagans, Jews and Saracens; for the conversion of sinners even unto the end of the world. In days when the doctrine of the mystical Body of Christ was not taught with the clarity of today, she saw Him continually in those about her. In children; in the poor; in the sick; in the wounded, and in the leprous. The Passion was in her very heart; the divine thirst for souls was in her soul.

In make-up, her Book is somewhat haphazard. There is nothing much by way of a climax. Part I ends somewhat abruptly. Another chapter might well be added. Part II is an account of the pilgrimage made in her old age to the Baltic States. It is even more sudden in its ending. She did not know how to round off her tale. There is little in the way of construction. She recounts incidents as they come into her mind: they are out of order, as she herself explains. It is impossible, at times, to perceive or guess what the right sequence should be. Nevertheless, the Book is an achievement. There is nothing like it before in English literature. She had no tradition upon which to draw. She has made a new thing.

By means of her own sincerity; her own shrewdness; her own clear-sightedness; she does what no one taught her to do. She makes a self-characterisation as vivid as any portrait by Titian or Rembrandt.

Despite a certain lack of plan, her story is masterly in its direct, straightforward narrative; its clear-cut pictures; its sureness of touch. It rings true in all that is told. She sees with sanity; she remembers with clarity; she describes with shrewd candour and homeliness. She judges without bitterness those who have done her wrong. As literature, it is remarkable for its balance; for its lack of verbiage; for its observation; for the sure eye; the sure speech; the steady judgement. As a spiritual work, it must rank among the highest. There is no strained or artificial language. It shows a soul utterly possessed by the love of Jesus: held by a close intimate love that is so strong that she is ready to suffer for Him the hardest of pain, which is humiliation.

LYNN STALEY (ESSAY DATE 1994)

SOURCE: Staley, Lynn. "The Image of Ecclesia." In Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions, pp. 83-126. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

In the following excerpt, Staley focuses on Kempe's representations of women, authority, and church hierarchy, examining instances of Kempe superceding or transcending church authority and observing her emphasis on the inherent importance of women in Christian communities.

Kempe's account of Margery's experience in Rome suggests her appraisal of a Church that cannot recognize an embodiment of its own ideals. Margery is cast out of the congregation of the Hospital of Saint Thomas of Canterbury in Rome by the slander of an English priest "þat was holdyn an holy man in þe Hospital & also in oþer placys of Rome" (80). As Kempe implies, what passes for holy in Rome has less to do with spiritual insight than with worldly pomp. Though his malice deprives her of both a confessor and the eucharist, Kempe provides for Margery a new and compensatory series of relationships that are based upon spiritual understanding. Her account of the first of these relationships is especially curious. Upon being informed of her plight, the priest of a nearby congregation invites Margery to confess to him though he says he does not understand English. Kempe does not say whether or not Margery accepts the invitation; instead, she describes another sort of confession:

Than owyr Lord sent Seynt Iohn þe Evangelyst to heryn hir confessyon, & sche seyd 'Benedicite.' & he seyd 'Dominus' verily in hir sowle þat sche saw hym & herd hym in hire gostly vndirstondyng as sche xuld a do an-oþer preste be hir bodily wittys. Than sche teld hym alle hir synnes & al hir heuynes wyth many swemful teerys, & he herd hir ful mekely & benyngly. & sythyn he enioyned hir penawns þat sche xuld do for hir trespas & asoyled hir of hir synnes wyth swet wordys & meke wordys, hyly strengthyng hir to trostyn in þe mercy of owyr Lord Ihesu Crist, & bad hir þat sche xulde receyuen þe Sacrament of þe Awter in þe name of Ihesu. & sithyn he passyd awey fro hir.

(81)

Though the preceding description of the non-English-speaking priest implies that Margery is confessing to another human being, what Kempe, in fact, describes here is "priuy shrifte." Margery confesses to herself, or to her private vision of Saint John, is absolved by that same vision, and directed to the sacrament. Kempe's wording insists on the reality of what is a new, spiritual relationship. Margery sees and hears Saint John in her spiritual understanding as she would actually see and hear another priest. Kempe's nomination of Saint John as Margery's confessor may owe a debt to the Revelations of St. Elizabeth of Hungary where the Virgin presents the Evangelist to Elizabeth as a witness to the private charter between them. Signifying his obedience to the Virgin's spiritual authority as well as his own episcopal and literary authority, Saint John then writes the charter. The scene, however, is devoid of any social commentary or even of any social context. Kempe's use of Saint John links Margery to Elizabeth of Hungary, but it also suggests her ability to exploit incidents she found in the literature of the holy that served her complicated and intentionally ambiguous purposes.¹

That Kempe is interested in the nature of the confessional relationship is clear from another incident that occurs during Margery's stay in Rome. Seeing a priest celebrate at the church of Saint John Lateran, she believes him to be a good and devout man. She wishes to speak with him, but he is German, and they cannot understand one another. However, they pray for thirteen days, and they are granted a sort of Pentecostal gift: they can understand one another though neither can actually speak the other's language. Bound by their love of Christ, they contract a new society. He forsakes his office to support her, taking her for his mother and his sister, and enduring a good deal of ill-will for Margery's sake. In exchange, Margery grants him her obedience, at his behest changing back into black clothing and serving an old woman for six weeks (see 82-86, 97). Where Margery directly challenges another English priest, who turns against her because she will not obey him, she meekly obeys the German priest because he is good (see 84-85). The relationship between penitent and confessor that Kempe describes is not described in the patriarchal language that defines a hierarchal unit. Instead, Margery is mother and sister to her priest; she is daughter only to Christ.

The subtle way in which Kempe substitutes God for male figures of spiritual authority reveals her awareness that, in describing Margery's life as a type of sexual revolution, she also provides a sharp look at the fundamental weaknesses of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. When Margery first feels the "fire of love" burning in her, God informs her that her private apprehension of him is more important than rituals signifying her conformity to accepted spiritual norms, such as fasting, wearing a hairshirt, saying many paternosters, or telling beads. By assuring her that "thynkyng, wepyng, & hy contemplacyon is þe best lyfe in erthe" (89) and by promising her that she will have more "merit" in heaven from "o Зer of thynkyng in þi mende þan for an hundryd Зer of preyng wyth þi mowth" (90), God (or Kempe) gives Margery the freedom of her feelings. God, both here and elsewhere, sounds suspiciously Wycliffite; compare the sentiments of the author of the important sermon "Of Mynstris in þe Chirche," which proclaims:

For Crist nedude not hise apostlis to risen euermore at mydnyЗt, ne to faste as men don now, ne to be cloþud as þes newe ordris; but al þis is broЗt in by þe feend and fredom of Cristus ordre is left. For Crist wolde þat suche cerymonyes weron takon of hym by mennys fre wille aftur þat þei weron disposude to t[a]ke hem oþur more or lasse. But kepyng of Godus lawe, Crist wolde þat were grownd in his ordre. And Crist wolde teche as nede were chaunghyng of oure cerymonyes; for as God tolde Adam and Ioseph by luytul and luytul what þei schulden do, so Crist wolde telle men of his ordre how þei schulden worche and seruon hym.²

Just as the author of this sermon presents Christ as founding an order owing allegiance to no earthly figure, Kempe substitutes God for more conventional figures of spiritual authority. When one anchor bids Margery "be gouernyd" by him, she evades him, saying "sche xulde wete first Зyf it wer þe wil of God er not" (103). Later, she sends the anchor word that God does not wish her to be so "governed." When Margery is despised by all for her weeping, God himself places the unsympathetic priest under heavenly interdict, "Dowtyr, Зyf he be a preyste þat despisith the, knowyng wel wher-for þu wepist & cryist, he is a-cursyd" (155). When one such priest is won over to her, Kempe notes, "þus God sent hir good maystyrschep of þis worthy doctowr" (166). By using a term—maysterschep—that connotes sexual hierarchy (a term also beloved of the Wife of Bath), to describe the priest's change of heart, Kempe makes it clear that what is at issue here is the very nature of, or foundation of, spiritual authority. She therefore describes God as complicit in Margery's efforts to compensate for ecclesiastical strictures against her. He tells her "þer is no clerk in al þis world þat can, dowtyr, leryn þe bettyr þan I can do" (158). When the church limits her access to knowledge by forbidding Master Aleyn ("by vertu of obedience") to instruct her or to speak with her, God tells her that he is more worthy to her soul than the anchor and, since she now lacks spiritual conversation, he will speak more often with her (168-69). By offering her spiritual love and companionship, God provides Margery with a way around the strictly hierarchical relationship offered by the Church.

What Margery moves toward is a reliance on Christ that finally obviates the need for obedience to any representative of the earthly priesthood. This is nowhere more apparent than in the second part of the Book. Structurally, the second part seems designed to mirror the first: both parts open with scribal testimonials, recount conflicts rooted in gender roles and conventions, and finally outline the process by which Margery achieves a spiritual enfranchisement that liberates her from the constrictions society imposes on women. Thus, the first part of the Book ends with a picture of Margery as a fully empowered visionary and writer, a person whose power comes solely from her relationship to Christ. The image offers a sharp contrast to the initial portrait of Margery as a weak, maddened wife, dependent upon an inadequate priest as mediator between herself and God. Kempe begins the second part by pulling us back into the realm of the family and the community, describing Margery's concern for her son's lax living. Through her prayers, he is converted to a more regular life, marries a German woman, and settles down on the Continent. Later, when visiting England in the company of his wife, the son dies and a month later Margery's husband dies. A year and a half later, the son's wife wishes to return to her native Germany, and Margery begins to sense that she should accompany her. What might take another writer many pages to narrate, Kempe accomplishes in one and a half brief chapters. The point of these events is obviously not their effect on Margery, since Kempe never mentions grief and never describes any process of mourning. Kempe, for example, spends far more time describing Margery's fears for her son's spiritual condition than she does describing his death. Instead, the deaths of both son and husband provide the occasion for another type of story, whereby Margery as a sort of holy pícaro achieves a final and breathtaking dissociation from her community that places her beyond the reach of male authority.

Kempe begins her account of this last pilgrimage in Margery's church, specifically with a conflict between Christ and Margery's confessor. When Margery wonders whether she should take leave of her confessor and accompany her daughter-in-law home to Germany, Christ answers, "Dowtyr, I wote wel, yf I bode þe gon, þu woldist gon al redy. þerfor I wyl þat þu speke no word to hym of þis mater" (225-26). Though Margery takes this to mean she will not have to contemplate another sea voyage at her age, she does ask for and receive permission from her confessor to take her daughter to Ipswich. When they are in route to Ipswich, Margery feels commanded to take her daughter all the way home to Germany. What Kempe then goes on to describe is the conflict Margery feels between Christ's command and her confessor's paternal care, "Lord, þu wost wel I haue no leue of my gostly fadyr, & I am bowndyn to obediens. þerfor I may not do thus wyth-owtyn hys wil & hys consentyng" (227). Christ answers these objections by asserting the primacy of Margery's private feelings, "I bydde þe gon in my name, Ihesu, for I am a-bouyn thy gostly fadyr & I xal excusyn þe & ledyn þe & bryngyn þe a-geyn in safte" (227). That Kempe was aware of the force of these words is clear from the next incident, in which Margery recounts her feelings to a Franciscan she meets in Norwich. This "doctowr of diuinyte" has heard of her holy living and is well disposed to her; he counsels her to obey the voice of God, saying that he believes it is the Holy Spirit working in her. By having this man verify Margery's feelings as the stirrings of the Holy Spirit, Kempe maintains the fiction that Margery is an obedient daughter of Holy Church. But the incident nonetheless points up the difficulties of obeying someone if you do not believe he is right, and Kempe presents Margery as docile only when a priest's reading of a situation agrees with her own. With Christ and a doctor of divinity supporting the trip and only her confessor opposing it, Margery takes ship.

If Margery's final pilgrimage begins with hints of her disengagement from ecclesiastical authority, her return is even more potentially explosive. Kempe first describes Margery as enjoying a triumph in London. Not only does Margery face down her detractors; she also speaks out boldly against the worldly lifestyles of Londoners. Since her devotions make her an unwelcome communicant in the churches of London, she becomes a peripatetic worshiper and a figure of special holiness to the common people:

… sche suffyrd ful mech slawndyr & repref, specyaly of þe curatys & preistys of þe chirchis in London. þei wold not suffyr hir to abydyn in her chirchys, & þerfor sche went fro on chirch to anoþer þat sche xulde not ben tediows on-to hem.

Mech of þe comown pepil magnifijd God in hir, hauyng good trost þat it was þe goodnes of God whech wrowt þat hy grace in hir sowle.

(245)

Kempe follows up her account of Margery as a quasi-populist preacher, a potentially radical identity, by describing her as proceeding next to the Carthusian abbey of Shene, which had been founded by Henry V in 1415.³ Not only was Shene a royal foundation; along with its sisterhouse, the Bridgettine abbey of Syon, Shene was a center for mystical piety during the later Middle Ages and was responsible for the dissemination of devotional texts like those Kempe evokes throughout her own Book. By locating Margery at Shene during Lammastide (see 245-46), Kempe appears to realign her with the Church and consequently with the spirit of obedience. First, as Kempe twice repeats, Margery goes to Shene to purchase her pardon on the day that was the "principal day of pardon." On Lammas Day, August 1, which was also one of the quarter days for rent-paying, loaves made from the new wheat were consecrated in English churches as signs of the congregation's thankfulness for harvest. On that day, which commemorated the settling of secular and spiritual debts, Margery goes as a devout daughter of the Church to purchase her own pardon. Kempe, however, neglects to detail this particular act of exchange, instead describing two events that focus our attention upon Margery's own assumption of authority: Margery's spiritual direction of a young man who observes her devotions in the church at Shene, and her successful negotiation of the final obstacle standing in her way back to Lynn. While she is in church to "purchase" this pardon, she sees the hermit who had led her and her daughter-in-law out of Lynn to Ipswich. She approaches him about leading her home and learns that her confessor has "forsaken" her because she went to Germany without telling him of her plans. Margery, the renegade penitent, nonetheless manages not only to persuade the hermit to accompany her back to Lynn but also to make peace again with her confessor. The end of the Book is worthy of Chaucer:

Whan sche was come hom to Lynne, sche obeyd hir to hir confessowr. He Зaf hir ful scharp wordys, for sche was hys obediencer & had tekyn vp-on hir swech a jurne wyth-owtyn hys wetyng. þerfor he was meuyd þe mor a-geyn hir, but owr Lord halpe hir so þat sche had as good loue of hym & of oþer frendys aftyr as sche had be-forn, worschepyd be God. Amen.

(247)

What Kempe describes is a female victory. Though she twice refers to obedience, even calling Margery her confessor's obediencer, denoting someone who has vowed obedience to a rule, such as a novice, the nature of that obedience is ambiguous.⁴ Now that Margery has returned from her journey, every step of which she determined herself, and from a life as a sort of holy vagabond, preacher, and mystic, she obeys her confessor. Furthermore, as the passage suggests, her confessor is most annoyed because she went without his permission; in other words, because Margery contravened the terms of a relationship based upon hierarchy. Margery, like many an Eve before her, endures his wrath and soothes his ruffled pride. As Chaucer's Merchant gives May Persephone's help when old Januarie confronts her with marital infidelity, so Kempe gives Margery, who has broken her vows, the Lord's help, "so þat sche had as good loue of hym & oþer frendys as sche had be-forn." The "amen," repeated in red at the end of the chapter, helps to muffle the resonating irony of a scene that only appears to validate the authority vested in priests by women who feel compelled to go well beyond the boundaries those men have established for them.

The intercessory prayers with which the Book ends likewise image Margery as an obedient daughter of Holy Church, but they also suggest that her special relationship with Christ somehow allows her to transcend gender categories. Thus, along with sentences attesting to her charity and piety, there are those that hint at a new understanding of the nature of spiritual authority. Requests like "Lord, make my gostly fadirs for to dredyn þe in me" (249) or "for alle þo þat feithyn & trustyn er xul feithyn & trustyn in my prayerys in-to þe worldys ende, sweche grace as þei desiryn" (253-54) hint that Margery's power extends well beyond that of the churchmen who presume to direct her. What Kempe achieves through the conventional language of intercessory prayer is that same delicately poised ambiguity that characterizes her entire text. For Margery is at once a textbook exemplar of late medieval female piety and a reminder of the essential unruliness of the subjective, the feminine, and its fundamental urge to master those authorities who seek to contain what is, finally, uncontainable.

The comic irony inherent in the reversal of gender roles is, of course, designed to point up the folly of seeking to control the "feminine" with instruments inadequate to the task. If Jankyn will not, then his "book of wicked wives" cannot make order out of hierarchy, particularly when that hierarchy rests on foundations as shaky as the marriage of Jankyn and Alisoun. Through Margery and her comic insurrection, Kempe provides an image of the Church that underscores its inadequacies. Her point, however, is hardly satiric: through Margery she projects a community where harmony is a manifestation of true spiritual authority. Such authority rests on a literal and personal interpretation of the Gospel story, which Kempe presents to us through Margery whose visions and conversations with God mediate the central doctrines and events of Christianity.

What can be described as Kempe's "Passion sequence" (187-99) owes, as Gibson has pointed out, a genuine debt to Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ.⁵ Both sequences heighten the pathos of the Gospel accounts of the Passion by dramatizing scenes of primarily human interest. Thus, the intricate courtroom scenes on which the medieval dramatists expended so much care are not included. Instead of depicting the ironies of law and empire that undergird such public scenes in the mystery plays, both Kempe and the Mirror describe extratextual scenes like Jesus' parting from his mother, Mary's terrible grief, the exhaustion and bewilderment of Holy Saturday, and Jesus' appearance to his mother very early on Easter morning. By concluding Margery's experience of the Passion with her apprehension of the Purification, Kempe suggests her awareness that, in privileging the affective piety of Mary and the early followers of Christ in her treatment of the Passion, she foregrounds the feminine. The feast of the Purification, or Candlemas, is, of course, a woman's feast, for it celebrates Mary's offering in the Temple as her thanksgiving for the safe delivery of a male child (see Luke 2:22-35).⁶ Rather than the pair of doves required by the law and that Luke recounts Mary and Joseph as offering, Kempe describes Mary as offering only her son, thereby suggesting Mary's awareness that the baby in her arms needs no symbolic pair of doves; he himself will satisfy the law of sacrifice. Kempe then describes Margery as responding to a moment of female ritual: "Sche thowt in hir sowle þat sche saw owr Lady ben purifijd & had hy contemplacyon in þe beheldyng of þe women wheche comyn to offeryn wyth þe women þat weryn purifijd" (198; emphasis added). Margery weeps because the Passion sequence she has just seen is the denouement of that joyful presentation. Like Mary, she understands the significance of the one act in the light of the other.⁷

However, though Kempe appears at times simply to imitate the affective emphasis of works like the Mirror, she, like Julian of Norwich before her, subtly alters a reader's response to these scenes by locating authority in the female beholder.⁸ The reader of the Mirror is directed by an authoritative male voice to imagine or "behold" these scenes, and is implicitly urged to use the Virgin as her point of reference. In empathizing and identifying with Mary, she participates in the Passion. In contrast to such a prescriptive narrative technique, Julian of Norwich presents herself as the visionary, telling the reader what she saw—how, for example, Christ's body appeared dried out after much time on the Cross in the "dry sharp wynd, wonder colde," of the day of the Crucifixion.⁹ Julian thereby focuses our attention on the sight itself, on the pictures she passes on to us, that then demand the sort of highly intellectual analysis she provides for each of her visions. Thus, the picture she evokes of Christ's dried-up flesh is used as a means of understanding his words from the Cross, "I thirst," which as she comes to understand signify both a physical and a spiritual thirst. Julian offers the reader not only the images and scenes she has been privileged to behold, but also the picture of a mind thinking and guiding our understanding of those visions upon which she has spent so many years' efforts. In her presentation of the same scene of sacrifice, Kempe betrays her awareness that she who directs the reader's line of sight governs the reader's response to the act of viewing. The "scribe" describes for us what Margery "sees," using Margery herself as a key participant in the drama of the Passion. Instead of Mary, Margery becomes our focal point. Mary is Margery's point of reference; she empathizes with the Virgin's grief and love in the way the Mirror directs its female reader to respond to the pictures the narrator composes for her. But for the reader, the viewer, Margery is the active participant, our spiritual directress. Kempe uses the voice of the scribe in a particularly sophisticated way in such scenes: it appears to function as the narrator of the Mirror functions. In fact, however, that voice focuses the reader on Margery herself, whose authority is verified by the reality of vision.

Kempe also suggests the nature of Margery's authority by dramatizing her literal application of the Gospel to her own life. She seeks to imitate Christ's poverty, meekness, self-sacrifice, and charity. Moreover, when the Archbishop of York tries to order her not to "teach" or "challenge" (reprove) people in his diocese, she firmly replies,

And also þe Gospel makyth mencyon þat, whan þe woman had herd owr Lord prechyd, sche cam be-forn hym wyth a lowde voys & seyd, "Blyssed be þe wombe þat þe bar & þe tetys þat Зaf þe sowkyn." þan owr Lord seyd a-Зen to hir, "Forsoþe so ar þei blissed þat heryn þe word of God and kepyn it." "And þerfor, sir, me thynkyth þat þe Gospel Зeuyth me leue to spekyn of God."

(126)

Though Margery goes on to defend herself against the charge that she preaches, her use of the Gospel as precedent for her actions underlines her increasing reliance on her own, in opposition to ecclesiastical, authority. In fact, her "translation" of the passage (Luke 11:27-28) suggests her presumption of authority, for she does not translate word for word, but "sense for sense." First, she heightens the effect of verse 27 ("sum womman of the cumpany reysinge hir vois") by saying the woman who had heard Jesus preach spoke with a loud voice. Second, she recounts Jesus as agreeing with, rather than differing from, the woman's words. Where Luke reads, "Rathere blessid ben thei, that heeren Goddis word, and kepen it," Margery uses forsoþe so, which implies agreement and not distinction.¹⁰ Since Margery, like the Wife of Bath, seems to have no qualms about validating her own actions by quoting and (mis)translating Scripture, it seems fitting that one good wife should reply to one of Margery's prognostications by saying, "Now Gospel mote it ben in Зowr mowth" (202).¹¹ Kempe's characterization of Margery as basing her actions upon a literalist reading of the Gospel would also have had Wycliffite associations for any astute fifteenth-century reader. She thus follows up Margery's audacious use of Scripture with the tale of the bear and the pear tree, a fable that it is unlikely any Lollard preacher would have used. Rather than tell tales, the Lollards, who described themselves as "Bible men," focused on Scripture; mendicants and other popular preachers were more likely to weave stories into their sermons. By inserting the fable into the scene with the Archbishop of York, Kempe contains the effect that Margery's words might well produce by focusing our attention on her faintly scatological tale about the bear whose defilement of a fair pear tree is intended to suggest the need for clerical purity. That the fable, as I have suggested, may have more than a surface relevance adds one more layer of irony to an already dense episode. Kempe could wish for no finer advocate for Margery than Henry Bowet, archbishop of York, whose zeal against the Lollards was well known; she therefore notes his liking of the tale as well as his judicious support for such a Bible-quoting woman. Kempe's strategy here follows a familiar pattern; she at once suggests Margery's own assumption of authority and her assimilation into the patriarchal hierarchy of the contemporary Church. Archbishop Bowet serves Kempe as an official stamp of approval for a protagonist whose words and actions actually indicate her break with all earthly fathers.

It is clear moreover that Margery's "Gospel" is not the Church's, that what Margery is, the Church is not. Margery, with her private visions of the life of Christ (which serve as a type of unauthorized translation), with her certainty that the Gospel provides a precedent for her own provocative life, and with her growing espousal of a literalist interpretation of that Gospel, presents a challenge to a Church whose authority rested on privilege, hierarchy, and the tradition of biblical exegesis and allegory that had defined patristic culture for a thousand years. Kempe characterizes the nature of that challenge by dramatizing the negative effect Margery's strictly regulated behavior has on contemporary churchmen. In particular, Margery's espousal of a doctrine of apostolic poverty would have been seen as a direct threat to a Church that, since the days of Richard II, had sought to defend its secular wealth and privilege from those who wished to see the Church divest itself of temporal goods that compromised its ability to function as a spiritual power.¹² The subject of poverty was also linked to the ongoing controversy about (and within) the mendicant orders, which had long since abandoned a literalist interpretation of Christ's injunction to genuine poverty.¹³ It is therefore appropriate that Christ's command to become poor for his sake comes to Margery in Rome, the center of Christian power. Margery, now poor, must, like the original followers of Francis, depend upon the charity of others for her food, clothing, and shelter. As she discovers, not every churchman meets her poverty with goodwill. In losing the safety net her money gives her, Margery loses the nominal respect she is granted by virtue of her social status.

In exchange, however, Margery gains a new community, organized according to a system of relations defined in familial language. Kempe not only suggests the ineffectuality and the harshness of a male priesthood and, in Margery's visions, the male violence visited upon the body of Christ; she also presents Margery as a figure who nurtures her converts in ways the male-dominated church does not. She therefore describes Margery's male converts as her sons, even when many of these supporters are priests and supposedly have care for her soul. An English priest she meets in Rome who offers to relieve her physical want displays filial piety toward Margery, "mekely he cleped hir modyr, preying hir for charite to receyuen hym as hir sone" (96). When Margery suddenly decides to accompany her daughter-in-law to Germany and is therefore without provisions, the master of her ship provides for her needs and "was as tendyr to hir as sche had ben hys modyr" (231). The young man she encounters in the church at Shene asks her to counsel him in the Christ-like life, saying, "Schewith modirly & goodly Зowr conceit vn-to me" (246).¹⁴

Kempe also offers a rather startling picture of the way in which that new community is constituted in a series of phrases intended to preface another incident. Kempe writes, "On þe Fryday aftyr, as þis creatur went to sportyn hir in þe felde & men of hir owyn nacyon wyth hir, þe whech sche informyd in þe lawys of God as wel as sche cowde—& scharply sche spak a-gayns hem for þei sworyn gret othys & brokyn þe comawndment of owr Lord God" (101). Kempe here images Margery as a Lollard preacher, poor for Christ's sake, speaking in the open air against swearing and the taking of oaths, as well as against breaking the laws of God. Thus one Wycliffite sermon notes that it is better to hear God's word and pray than to be encumbered by a wealthy and corrupt Church, going on "and þis is comunly beture doon in þe eyr vndur heuene; but often tyme, in reyny weder, chirchis don good on holy day."¹⁵ As it turns out, rainy weather chases Margery and her group home to shelter, but Kempe nonetheless provides a glimpse of a fellowship that has formed around Margery, a community that is not circumscribed by parochial boundaries. The authority Margery claims for herself and is granted by her listeners derives from her private relationship with God. But the very terms of that private relationship inevitably point up the inadequacies of a Church whose buildings, ecclesiastical households, worldly power and wealth, and frequently self-interested interpretation of Christ's literal commands suggest the need for a new understanding of the nature of spiritual authority.

By using Margery as such a radical figure for charity and devotion, Kempe suggests the ways in which the Church might function as a transcendent (or transnational) community. Despite the fact that she speaks only English, Margery is able to communicate very well with a wide variety of people. Whereas her fellow English scorn her for her tears, the Saracens Margery encounters in the Holy Land make much of Margery and lead her where she wants to go (75). In Rome, a Dame Margaret Florentyn communicates with Margery by "syngnys er tokenys & in fewe comown wordys" (93). She is invited into a poor woman's house where the sight of a little boy reminds Margery of the love Mary had for her son. Although Kempe records no actual conversation on this visit, Margery nonetheless leaves with Jesus' words in her ear, "Thys place is holy" (94). This gift of tongues is likewise verified in her relations with those foreign priests and confessors she meets in Rome, whose virtue, meekness, and holiness render them capable of communicating with Margery. Finally, Margery herself serves as a figure for translation; she translates into contemporary terms the Christ-like life, just as her private visions translate "her gospel" for the reader. Furthermore, in her handling of the Passion, where the women of Jerusalem step forward to offer Mary their sympathy and to acknowledge that "owr pepil han don hym so meche despite" (195), Kempe implicitly draws a distinction between the "cruel Iewys" (192) who crucify Christ and the women who align themselves with those who follow him, mourn him, and take care of him. Similarly, it is frequently women who come to Margery's aid, offering her food (79), wine in a stone cup (94), compassion for her spiritual sorrow (99), aid in prison (130), or safety when she is on the road. By linking gender to such works of mercy, Kempe adumbrates the character of a new Church that ministers to those in need. Just as Margery is drawn to devotion of the Christ child when she sees the women of Rome carrying male children, so many of the women in the Book remind us of the ways in which the Church might minister to a world increasingly ruled by economic relationships.

As the bride of Christ, Margery emerges as a figure for a new ecclesia, where love, vision, and purity of life are the criteria for authority. The multiplicity of roles that Kempe describes Christ as assigning to the private relations between himself and Margery early in her spiritual career, she elaborates on throughout the Book:

þerfor I preue þat þow art a very dowtyr to me & a modyr also, a syster, a wyfe, and a spowse, wytnessyng þe Gospel wher owyr Lord seyth to hys dyscyples, "He þat doth þe wyl of my Fadyr in Heuyn he is bothyn modyr, broþyr, & syster vn-to me." Whan þow stodyst to plese me, þan art þu a very dowtyr; whan þu wepyst & mornyst for my peyn & for my Passyon, þan art þow a very modyr to haue compassyon of hyr chyld; whan þow wepyst for oþer mennys synnes and for aduersytes, þan art þow a very syster; and, whan thow sorwyst for þow art so long fro þe blysse of Heuyn, þan art þu a very spowse & a wyfe, for it longyth to þe wyfe to be wyth hir husbond & no very joy to han tyl sche come to hys presens.

(31)

Kempe here glosses Christ's words about spiritual kinship (mother, brother, and sister) solely in terms of female roles—daughter, sister, mother, and wife—each of which she describes as directed by a special type of love. She goes even farther than some Lollard preachers, who made a point of underlining the centrality of women to the Gospel community. As one sermon notes in reference to this same scriptural passage, "And þus tellep Crist a sutylte þat is of gostly breþren in God: for be it man, or be it womman, þat seruep God trewly, he is on þes þre maners knyt to Crist in sybrede," going on to explain that we are Christ's brothers by soul, sisters by flesh, and mothers by both. The explanation ends with, "And þis is betture cosynage and more sotyl þan is of kynde."¹⁶

By describing Margery as substituting a network of spiritual kinship for a natural or fundamentally literal network, Kempe emphasizes the genuine freedom to be found in a fellowship of "gostly breþren." Where the kinship of "kynde" restricts Margery to roles and activities sanctioned by social hierarchies and expectations, her new and divinely ordained spiritual identity releases her into a new realm of meaning where those roles used to define the limits of womankind become signifiers of a different order. Thus the "mulier fortis" of Proverbs 31, whom the Wycliffite translator(s) renders as "strong woman," was conventionally identified with the Church.¹⁷ Her activities are those writ large of womankind: she is a figure of fruitfulness and nurture, upholding her husband's honor, providing food, clothing, and livelihood for her family, and charity for the poor, blessed, in turn, by her many children. As Theresa Coletti has suggested, the mulier fortis may well underlie Chaucer's portrait of the Wife of Bath, whose real and metaphoric barrenness, rampant sexuality, and selfish mercantilism set her in opposition to the common good.¹⁸ When translated, however, out of the realm of the actual, those very activities that delimit woman's sphere of activities in earthly relationships can be used to define the mission and thus the authority of the Church by reference to the feminine. The Wycliffite glosses upon the passage in Proverbs are especially illuminating:

Cristen doctours expownen comynly this lettre, til to the ende, of hooly chirche, which bi figuratif speche is seid a strong womman; hir hosebonde is Crist, hir sones and douЗtris ben Cristen men and wymmen; and this is the literal vndurstonding, as thei seyen; and this exposicioun is resonable and set opinly in the comyn glos. But Rabi Salomon seith, that bi a strong womman is vndurstondun hooli Scripture; the hosebonde of this womman, is a studiouse techere in hooly Scripture, bothe men and wymmen; for in Jeroms tyme summe wymmen weren ful studiouse in hooly Scripture.¹⁹

The first part of this gloss echoes the conventional explanation for the passage that can be found in the Glossa Ordinaria.²⁰ The second part, which compares the woman to the sacred text, whose "housband" is its student and exegete subtly points up the Wycliffite challenge to conventional authority by stressing that this student may be either a man or a woman. For readers of Chaucer and Kempe, the passage resonates with additional ironies. Chaucer's Wife—the antitype of the mulier fortis—who defines herself as the physical text well and carnally "glossed" by Jankyn the clerk, or student, who is her fifth husband, situates herself in opposition to authorities like Saint Jerome, whom she sees as merely constricting the feminine. Kempe, perhaps echoing Chaucer and/or the gloss on Proverbs, likewise defines Margery as the text displayed for confessors and fellow townspeople, ultimately for the reader of her Book.²¹ Kempe presents Margery as her own best exegete, even slyly using Saint Jerome, whose reputation for antifeminism was notorious in the Middle Ages, to authorize Margery's assumption of spiritual authority (see 99).

Throughout the Book, Kempe further extends the meaning and the range of female roles and thereby defines Ecclesia's role in contemporary life. Whereas Margery is constricted by her physical role as wife and mother, Kempe's emphasis upon her espousal to Christ and "mothering" of others is meant to underline Margery's translation into the freedom of the metaphoric. Her freedom of movement, her powers of communication and intercession, and her refusal to accept the limits of a hierarchical and conformist society proclaim the message of a radical gospel, a message the women who followed and ministered to Christ indeed bore to their skeptical and temporarily immobile brothers, who took the witness of women as madness (see Mark 16, Luke 24, John 20). As one Wycliffite exegete noted of John's account of the Resurrection, "While men gon awey, stronger loue haþ set þe womman in þe same place." He goes on to use a female figure, Mary Magdalene, as an example of the true preacher, "so must they that han office of preching, that if any sign of heuene is schewed to þem, bisily þey telle it to her neiЗboris."²² Through the transforming power of the Resurrection, female garrulity, or gossip, has become "busy telling," or the Gospel itself. Like other contemporary gospellers, Kempe develops a revolutionary rhetoric, imaging through Margery what she could, perhaps, only image through a woman. The challenge to existing hierarchies she dramatizes in Margery's life is based on cultural assumptions about gender categories, but gender is, finally, the means of expressing what are radical ideas about spiritual dominion.

Notes

1. Bokenham, like Kempe an East Anglian, includes Saint Elizabeth in his Legendys of Hooly Wummen; see lines 9607-24 for her devotion to Saint John.
2. English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. Hudson and Gradon, 3:362.
3. For a detailed account of the history of this abbey, see F. R. Johnson, "Syon Abbey," in Cockburn et al., A History of the County of Middlesex, 182-91; Meech, The Book of Margery Kempe, 348-49.
4. According to the Middle English Dictionary, Obediencer is a late medieval word.
5. Gibson, Theater of Devotion, 49.
6. In a paper delivered at the 1992 meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, Gail McMurray Gibson elaborated upon the communal ritual of Candlemas. For a "fictional" account of Mary's Purification that became canonical, see The Golden Legend.
7. The N-Town Purification pageant depicts Mary as first laying her son on the altar as a sign of her recognition of his role in human salvation history. It is a more literal-minded figure, the Chaplain, who reminds her that she still must make an offering, the pair of doves required by the Law. For a cogent discussion of the ways in which depictions of the experience of the Virgin are designed to link maternal joy with sorrow, see Gibson, Theater of Devotion, 155-66.
8. For work on the "gender-implications" of the gaze, see Stanbury, "Feminist Film Theory: Seeing Chrétien's Enide "; idem, "The Virgin's Gaze."
9. See Colledge and Walsh, eds., The Showings, the Long Text, chapter 8, 357-59. The quoted passage is on 358.
10. I quote from the Wycliffite Bible, ed. Forshall and Madden. Carruthers (The Book of Memory, 61) has suggested that such "mistranslations" reflect the medieval way of memorizing sense for sense and that what appear to us as lapses may, instead, suggest the techniques of "memoria ad res." If this is the case in the above passage, it highlights Kempe's internalization of the text as well as the close connection between translation and interpretation. For a discussion of this issue, see pages 133-35; Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages, 91-95.
11. The prologue to the Wycliffite glossed gospel known as "Short Mark" (London B.L. Additional MS. 41175) defines "gospel" as "good telling." For a discussion of these manuscripts, see Hargreaves, "Popularizing Biblical Scholarship."
12. For a study of apostolic poverty as it relates to English ecclesiastical and political trends, see Aston, "Caim's Castles"; Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 114-15, 338-40. See also "The Clergy May Not Hold Property" in Matthews, ed., The English Works of Wyclif; "Of Mynystris in þe Chirche," in English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. Hudson and Gradon, 2:329-65.
13. See Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, chapter 7; Little, Religious Poverty, 177-78.
14. We can find a similar emphasis upon a differently configured "kinship" group in Wycliffite treatises, such as the sermon on Matthew 12 ("here is my mother and my brother") collected in English Wycliffite Sermons, ed. Hudson and Gradon, 2:280-81.
15. Ibid., 2:101. Oath-taking was, of course, inimical to the Lollards; see pages 147-50.
16. Ibid., 2:280-81. Atkinson (Mystic and Pilgrim, 133-34) also remarks on Kempe's wording, noting Saint Anselm's use of bisexual and multifunctional language.
17. The mulier fortis deserves a special note, for she has been translated in ways that adumbrate a history of the feminine. Thus, while the heirs to Wyclif, with a certain stake in privileging the feminine, offer her as a "strong" woman, the Renaissance translators who prepared the Geneva Bible present her as a "virtuous" woman, focusing our attention upon her womanly activities and underlining her obedience rather than her strength or her force as an allegorical figure. The translators of the Douai Old Testament equivocate and use "valiant."
18. Coletti, "Biblical Wisdom: Chaucer's Shipman's Tale and the Mulier Fortis," 180-81.
19. Forshall and Madden, The Wycliffite Bible, v. Proverbs 31, p. 51.
20. See PL 113:1114-16.
21. For the fullest exposition of textual metaphors in relation to the Book, see Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, especially chapter 3.
22. This passage is taken from the Wycliffite glossed gospel, known as "Short John," MS. Bodley 243.

Works Cited

Primary Texts

Bokenham, Osbern. Legendys of Hooly Wummen. Ed. Mary S. Serjeantson. EETS 206. London: Oxford University Press, 1938.

Colledge, Edmund, and James Walsh, eds. A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978.

Forshall, Josiah, and Sir Frederic Madden, eds. The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, with the Apocryphal Books in the Earliest English Versions made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his Followers. 4 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850; repr., AMS Press, 1982.

Hudson, Anne, and Pamela Gradon, eds. English Wycliffite Sermons. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988-90.

Matthews, F. D., ed. The English Works of Wyclif hitherto unprinted. EETS 74. London: Oxford University Press, 1880.

Meech, Sanford Brown, ed. The Book of Margery Kempe. EETS 212. London: Oxford University Press, 1940; repr., 1961.

Secondary Studies

Aston, Margaret. "'Caim's Castles': Poverty, Politics, and Disendowment." In The Church, Politics, and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century, ed. Barrie Dobson. New York: St. Martin's, 1984. 45-81.

Atkinson, Clarissa. Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.

Cockburn, J. S., H. P. F. King, and K. G. T. McDonnell. A History of the County of Middlesex. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Coletti, Theresa. "Biblical Wisdom: Chaucer's Shipman's Tale and the Mulier Fortis. "In Chaucer and Scriptural Tradition, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1984. 171-82.

Copeland, Rita. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Gibson, Gail McMurray. The Theater of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Hargreaves, Henry. "Popularizing Biblical Scholarship: The Role of the Wycliffite Glossed Gospels. "In The Bible and Medieval Culture, ed. W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst. Louvain: Louvain University Press, 1979. 171-89.

Hudson, Anne. The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

Leff, Gordon. Heresy in the Later Middle Ages. 2 vols. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1967.

Little, Lester K. Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978.

Lochrie, Karma. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

Stanbury, Sarah. "Feminist Film Theory: Seeing Chrétien's Enide." Literature and Psychology 36 (1990): 47-66.

——. "The Virgin's Gaze: Spectacle and Transgression in Middle English Lyrics of the Passion." PMLA 106 (1991): 1083-93.

KATHY LAVEZZO (ESSAY DATE 1996)

SOURCE: Lavezzo, Kathy. “Sobs and Sighs Between Women: The Homoerotics of Compassion in The Book of Margery Kempe.” In Premodern Sexualities, edited by Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, pp. 175-98. New York: Routledge, 1996.
In the following essay, Lavezzo draws on the insights of Freud, French feminist theorist Julia Kristeva, and feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey to explore Kempe’s sexuality as depicted in her Book. Lavezzo considers the tone of Kempe’s narrative as a homoerotic and subversive expression of feminine authority, particularly as Kempe envisions predominantly female communities.
“Don’t be ashamed to weep for Jesus . . . Mary Magdalene wasn’t ashamed.” Mary said this in a breathy whisper and wavered in mild pervasive distortion when Margery visited her grave; she cupped Margery’s breasts in her hands. She viewed Margery’s nipples as an opportunity to multiply flavor, skin tasting like honey or sugar. . . . Mary was naked beneath the thin chemise of a bath-house attendant. . . .

—(Gluck, 1994, 62)

After her arrest by the Mayor of Leicester as “a fals strumpet, a fals loller, & a fals deceyuer of þe pepyl” (“a false strumpet, a false Lollard, and a false deceiver of the people”; Kempe 1940, 112), Margery Kempe receives the kind of interrogation one might expect of such a suspect—an inquiry into both her religious and her marital propriety (115-16). But then, unexpectedly, Kempe’s heretofore predictable examination takes a remarkable turn, as the mayor tells her “I trowe yow art comyn hedyr to han a-wey owr wyuys fro us & ledyn hem wyth ye” (“I believe you have come here to take our wives away from us and lead them with you”; 116). From querying her fidelity to God and husband, the mayor asserts an attraction between Margery and Leicester’s wives. And the mayor is not the only man in The Book of Margery Kempe to express anxiety over Margery’s capacity to draw women from their husbands. Later in the Book the suffragen to York’s Archbishop claims that Margery—yet again apprehended as a heretic—“cownseledyst my Lady Greystokke to forsakyn hir husbonde” (“advised my Lady Greystoke to forsake her husband”; 133). ¹ Both Leicester’s mayor and York’s suffragen bespeak a masculine anxiety over female desire: the likelihood, on the one hand, that behind this mystic’s overt claim to love God “a-bouyn al thynge” (“above all things”; 115) lies a covert attachment to women and, on the other, that women find this female mystic appealing—more appealing, according to the Mayor’s charge, than their own husbands (115).²

The concern these men display over Margery’s relation to other women is well founded; behind this medieval woman’s “proper” devotion to Christ stands the desire for a far-from-proper reward. The reward Margery seeks—and, indeed, attains—constitutes a powerful and disruptive form of female homoerotic bonding. This bonding emerges in the context of Margery’s primary religious practice: her affective mourning for “owyr Lordys Passyon” (“our Lord’s Passion”; 39). During her weeping—an activity triggered by any image, such as a crucifix, which recalls Christ’s Passion—Margery registers not only her devotion to the suffering Christ, but also her mystical figuration of the most powerful woman in Christianity, the Virgin Mary; as Christ tells Margery in a vision, “I 3eve þe gret cryis and roryngys for to makyn . . . þat my Modrys sorwe be knowyn by þe” (“I give you great cries and roarings in order that . . . my mother’s sorrow may be known through you”; 183). Margery performs her Mary-identified lamentation in an extravagantly emotional fashion: through the “plentyows terys & boystows sobbyngys, wyth lowde cryingys and schille schrykyngys” (“plenteous tears and boisterous sobbings, with loud cryings and shrill shriekings”; 107) that distinguish her piety. Often such extremes provoke the censure of masculine authorities (Lochrie 1991, 186-87); indeed, it is Margery’s very compulsion (after seeing a crucifix) to mourn that prompts her arrest by Leicester’s mayor (111).

In itself, this medieval woman’s compassion is unsurprising, given mourning’s long-standing designation in Western culture as “woman’s work” (Schiesari 1993, 210). As Louise Fradenburg (1990) and Juliana Schiesari (1993) have demonstrated, women’s mourning has typically served patriarchal ends, where the female lamenter “piously” consents to death for the sake of a compensatory masculinist “good,” such as a dead soldier’s eternal fame, or the sake of the nation (cf. Marcuse 1959, 74-75). For premodern Christianity, such significations often hinged upon a stoic mourning style; for example, church fathers imagined the Virgin possessing a modest grief, bolstered by her faith in the Resurrection. Margery’s excessive lamentation diverges from such devotional decorum. The always-emotional Margery challenges patristic theology by portraying Mary as an inconsolable witness to the Passion. But the transgressions that obtain through Margery’s mourning consist of more than her failure to signify calmly the “principle of resurrection” (Kristeva 1987, 251); they display one way in which women may have refigured mourning as an erotic and potentially empowering form of female same-sex bonding in late medieval Europe.³

Margery was not alone in her somatic piety, as Christian devotion underwent a markedly emotional turn in the late Middle Ages—a transformation rooted significantly in the Franciscan meditative tradition, with its Marian affective piety and literal imagining of the crucified Christ (Gibson 1989, 1-18; Kieckhefer 1984, 106; see also Duffy 1992, 260; Bennett 1982, 59). Neither was Margery unique in provoking ecclesiastical censure, which criticized compassionate excess in art as well as life: “We . . . do not excuse those who portray in pictures or writings how the mother of God fainted upon the earth at the cross, overwhelmed and senseless from pain, similar to those women who, caught up in their sorrow . . . proclaim loudly their misery. . . .” (Hamburgh 1981, 47). As this sixteenth-century condemnation displays, anxiety over depictions of excessive compassion directed themselves not only at literature, but also at the visual arts, a medium epitomizing the late medieval devotional tendency toward vivid images. In speculating that the female homoeroticism represented in Margery’s Book suggests a more general European phenomenon of the late Middle Ages, I will refer to visual representations of the Passion and Lamentation that complement the scenes of female-female bonding in Margery’s text. Censure of depictions of an inconsolable Virgin and of actual female mourning practices may have been motivated by precisely the same anxiety over desire between women that lay behind the Mayor of Leicester’s condemnation of Margery.⁴ As Lochrie observes in her commentary on such attacks, the church criticized representations of an emotional Mary insofar as they “threatened to valorize not only female mourning practices but female mystical practices as well” (187). Even further, these depictions made available an emotional and even erotic vision of a woman, Mary, for consumption by the many women who made up a major component of the audience for Christian artifacts.

While Margery’s compassion threatens to supplant the figure of Christ with that of a woman performing her figurative relation to an ever-powerful Virgin Mary, thus displaying a feminine version of the masculinist pleasures of historical identification discussed by Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero in this volume, this scenario is made doubly problematic by the extent to which these boisterous tears signify Margery’s identification with not only Mary, but also all other Virgin-identified women. Margery’s comparison with Bridget of Sweden, whose glorification of Mary bordered on the heretical (Graef 1963, 309), throughout the Book —in which Margery even makes a pilgrimage to the Brigittine convent at Syon—offers just one instance of how Margery’s attachment to Mary also implies her identification with other holy women.⁵ A metonymic relation between the suffering Virgin Mother and a community of religious women may even have figured as a trope in medieval passion discourses; in a Harley lyric from the Sequence Stabat iuxta Christi crucem, Mary constructs a triangulated relation between herself, her son, and “all þo þat to [her] grede, maiden, wif, ant fol wymmon” (“all who call to [her], maidens, wives and foolish women”; Brook 1956; 57, lines 47-48; Stanbury 1991, 1088).

Just as Margery—like the Harley lyric’s Virgin—may include a broadly defined female community in the circuitry of suffering between herself and Christ, her boisterous sobbings (40) render Margery herself an object of both female same-sex identification and homoerotic desire. In locating the operations of both identification and desire in the scenes of female affective mourning staged within the Book, I follow Diana Fuss in arguing for the “the collusion and collapsibility” of these two terms (Fuss 1993, 12). Dismantling the fundamental psychoanalytic law of their independence, Fuss argues for an imbricated relation between same-sex identifications and desires—where, for example, a woman’s desire to be like another woman may slip into the desire to have that woman, or where desire may even underwrite an identification, and vice versa. Thus, by aligning Margery’s affective piety with her longing to be Christ’s mother, I am pointing to Margery’s identification with, and also her desire for, Mary and all other women who share in the Virgin’s sorrows. Margery renders herself, through this display of woman-identified sorrow, an object of identification and desire in her own right, available for consumption by other Christian women.

As the triangulated organization of Passion devotion displays, the circulation of identifications and desires between women in the Book depends on the presence (and frequently the exchange) of a masculine icon—Christ. The imago Christi serves in this structure of relations as the medium through which Margery enables both her imaginative and her actual bonding with the Virgin Mother and other Christian women. This “traffic in Christ”—to appropriate Gayle Rubin’s phrase (1975)—suggests how an inverted version of the homosocial bonding so powerfully discussed by Eve Sedgwick (1985) may have been produced in the context of medieval compassion devotion. It displays how, as Terry Castle has argued, the linkage of two female terms around a single male term effects an “alternate structure” to that of the male-female-male erotic triad—“a female-male-female triangle” that redistributes power to the two female figures, while relegating the male to the passive position of mediator (1993, 72).⁶

It is in arguing for the representation of female homoeroticism in Margery’s Book that I most clearly depart from the Book ’s other readings since its discovery in 1934. While some of the most sensitive readers of gender and the construction of the female subject in the Book discuss Margery’s affective identification with Mary, these critics locate only heterosexual desires at work in this text.⁷ Neglecting to trace the homoerotic valences of female-female identifications in such artifacts is by no means unusual in medieval scholarship. With a few notable exceptions, scholars have left unexamined the question of desire between women, especially in the context of female affective spirituality, in the Middle Ages.⁸ The lack of analyses sensitive to female same-sex desire results, in part, from the fact that the concept of a “lesbian” identity was not articulated in medieval textual culture, and even on those rare occasions when the question of sex between women was addressed, its discussion was at best obscure (Brown 1986, 17; Traub 1992; 1993). The extreme difficulty of exploring female same-sex relations is, in part, an effect of the patriarchal bias of late medieval signifying practices, which aimed explicitly at pushing the female subject outside their discursive boundaries.⁹ For example, Jean Gerson’s fifteenth-century reference to female sodomy as a sin that “should not be named or written” displays his intention to hide “lesbian” desires from both the eyes and ears of his culture (Brown 1986, 19).

Because medieval heterosexist cultural authorities occluded manifestations of desire between women, my essay engages with a number of modern theories of sexuality—all of which are indebted to and revise psychoanalysis—in an effort to delineate late medieval structures of female same-sex desire. While my methodology risks charges of anachronism, I contend its necessity for a politically engaged feminist inquiry;¹⁰ and I claim that applying modern theories of the sex/ gender system to premodern cultural productions does not in fact constitute the strange imposition it may seem to be.¹¹ If we look to late medieval devotional practices, we find that, notwithstanding attempts by ecclesiastical authorities to deny a voice to same-sex desires, imbedded within medieval religious practices is a tendency for medieval “writers and artists to fuse or interchange . . . genders” that lends itself remarkably well to recent theories of sexuality (Bynum 1991, 114). The fluidity with which ostensibly male and female religious figures were imagined (where Christ could be likened to a mother and Mary to a priest), together with the prominent position crossdressing and cross-identification played in devotion, suggest how, in the words of Caroline Walker Bynum, “the late Middle Ages found gender reversal at the heart of Christian art and Christian worship” (1991, 92).¹² The medieval Christian perception of gender as not an essential and fixed category but an ever-changing and contingent role appropriable through identificatory performance, not only stands in uneasy relation to disciplinary discourses such as Gerson’s; it also bears considerable similarities to contemporary revisionary gender analyses.¹³ If, as Bynum argues, religious thinkers “used gender imagery . . . fluidly” and “put men and women on a continuum,” what, we might ask, is there to prevent “queer” identifications and desires from emerging in the context of Christian devotional practices such as Margery’s?

While the gender fluidity that generally characterized medieval Christian piety offers us an identificatory field in which a number of “queer” positions could arise in any devotional context during the Middle Ages, the particular trends produced within Margery’s East Anglian culture may have especially enabled female-female identifications and desires. Christian women had received an extraordinary amount of prestige in this region of England.¹⁴ East Anglian Osborn Bokenham, for instance, wrote the first all-female hagio-graphic anthology, whose lives included those of popular local saints such as Margaret, Anne, and Katherine.¹⁵ But above all other Christian holy women, East Anglians revered the Virgin Mary. While England’s identification as “the dower of the Virgin” suggests Mary’s prominence in the national imaginary, in East Anglia Mariology verged upon a Mariolatry in which Christ’s mother may have figured more greatly than Christ himself (Gibson 1989, 138). From the local (and international) renown accorded the Marian shrine at Walsingham, to the preponderance of Marian guilds and confraternities in towns such as Norwich, to the Marian preoccupations of the “N-town” cycle, abundant evidence points to Mary’s prominence in Norfolk and Suffolk cultures. The prestige East Anglians allotted Mary would have rendered her an easily accessible object for identification by the region’s women,¹⁶ who could identify with Mary not only as Christ’s mother, but as an active subject of Christian history in her own right—as, for example, the N-town “Assumption” play attests (Gibson 1989, 168).

At the same time that Mary and other women saints may have served as attractive objects for identification by East Anglian women, the very potential for identification between Christian women was imaginatively accomplished by the female groupings portrayed in East Anglian Christian art and literature—such as the “whole galaxy” of virgin martyrs depicted with such frequency upon rood screens that they outnumber all other saintly groupings on these liturgical “stage sets” (Duffy 1992, 171).¹⁷ The predominance of Mary, together with such portrayals of religious female groups, may very well have reflected as well as produced female-female identification in East Anglia. Figuring in homologous relation to these representations of powerful women and female groups in East Anglian discourses are the two alternative communities of lay women who lived together in fifteenth-century Norwich. While we know little about these “sorores castitate dedicate” (“sisters dedicated to chastity”; Tanner 1984, 65) their status as the only groups of their kind known in England suggests that the climate for women gathering together in nontraditional circumstances was especially evident in Margery Kempe’s native region.¹⁸ Perhaps, indeed, it was the fear that Margery would “han a-wey” their wives for the purpose of forming such a community that lay behind the Mayor of Leicester’s accusation. We can only speculate on what the women in such a community did with each other; perhaps they took their cue from the four allegorical daughters of God represented in the N-town Mary play, whose heavenly parliament, mediating the narrative movement from Mary’s Betrothal to her Annunciation, culminates in an exchange of kisses between these women, in which “osculabunt pariter omnes” (“all kiss each other”; Merideth 1987, 72).

The rich cultural context I have sketched out, a religious environment particularly conducive to the imagining and production of female communities, suggests how the bonds between women at stake in Margery’s devotional practices may have developed out of her native region’s spiritual preoccupations. Of course, however prominently women figured in East Anglia, this society was finally patriarchal in character; within this world, as Hope Weissman observes, “Margery’s encounters with women authorities . . . occur as decided exceptions” (1982, 202). Yet despite the marginalized position her engagements with powerful women occupy in the Book with respect to her many encounters with male authorities, Margery’s feminine interactions—homoerotic or otherwise— occur more frequently than many readings of the Book indicate. Moreover, the tearful means by which Margery attains both her visionary and actual female homoerotic attachments constitute, in fact, the dominant refrain in the text. In an otherwise uneven, nonchronological, and loosely organized “lytyl tretys” (“little treatise”; 1), the spectacular sobs and sighs woven throughout Margery’s Book hold together the text’s often confusing mix of worldly adventures, domestic duties, and mystical revelations. Thus Margery’s affective mourning exerts a unifying effect that is twofold, binding together both the Book itself and, at times, the women represented in it. The frequency of her tears suggests, moreover, that while Margery may not consistently succeed in bonding with women in her Book, she is always—consciously or unconsciously—trying to.

Visual Pleasure and Liturgical Spectacle

As Margery herself puts it, her lamentations take place “specialy on Sundays” (84)—that is, during the Mass, the event in which most late medieval devotional practices occurred (Duffy 1992, 91-130). On the analogous occasion of the “sermownys [which] Duchemen & oþer men” (“sermons [which] German and other men”; 98) preach in Italy during Margery’s pilgrimage to Rome and Jerusalem, a tearful outburst results from Margery’s failure to comprehend these foreign men’s words.¹⁹ With a “mornyng cher for lak of vndirstondyng” (“a sorrowful expression at her lack of understanding”; 98), Margery complains to Christ, who agrees to “preche” and “teche” her personally. Not surprisingly, Christ’s preaching constitutes a vision of his Passion, which leaves Margery inebriated with weeping:

. . . sche turnyd hir fyrst on þe o syde & sithyn on þe oþer wyth gret sobbyng, vn-mythy to kepyn hir-selfe in stabilnes for þe vnqwenchabyl fyer of lofe whech brent ful sor in hir sowle. þan meche pepyl wonderyd up-on hir, askyng hir what sche eyled, to whom sche as a creatur al wowndyd wyth lofe & as reson had fayled, cryed wyth lowde voys, “þe passyon of Crist sleth me.”

. . . she turned herself first on one side and then on the other, with great sobbing, unable to keep herself stable because of the unquenchable fire of love burning in her soul. Then many people wondered at her, asking her what ailed her, to whom she, as a creature all wounded with love and as one whose reason had failed her, cried with a loud voice, “The Passion of Christ slays me”.

(98-99)

Significantly, while Margery may tell the onlookers that Christ’s Passion lies behind her tearful gesticulations, her bodily gestures—as represented in Margery’s Book —seem to “say” something else. For while the Passion may stir the “ fire of love” in Margery, the spectacle of her pleasure deflects attention away from, not only the “Duchemen” and other male preachers, but also away from Jesus himself to the writhing figure of Margery.

Margery’s sobs recall the Virgin Mary’s compassion. The affective logic of this moment in the Book also follows that of late medieval visual representations of the Virgin during the Crucifixion—where, despite Christ’s central positioning, the display of a grieving Virgin Mother vies with that of her dead son for attention (figs. 1-3).²⁰ Just as these distracting images of Mary’s sorrow threaten to upstage Christ’s Passion narrative, when Margery’s copious tears and sensuous tossings and turnings arise, they break the flow of the Mass (and here, the public sermons), calling the service to a halt, and replacing the Christ-centered drama with the spectacle of a woman overcome by the “fire of love.”²¹ Confronted by Margery’s disruptive tears, men in the Book, such as the Mayor of Leicester, seek to punish Margery; alternately, others seek to rescue her, while still others fetishize her into a reassuring mother figure (see Mulvey 1992, 64). The particular passage cited above, however, specifies no masculine reaction to Margery, only a feminine response. And what this feminine reaction reveals is the attraction— indeed the love—that Margery’s rhythmic and autoerotic wellings stir within women: “þe good women, hauyng compassyon of hir sorwe & gretly meruelyng of hir wepyn & hir crying, meche þe mor þei louyd hir” (“The good women, having compassion for her sorrow and greatly marveling at her weeping and crying, loved her much more”; 98). Indeed, the women love Margery so much that “þei, desiryng to make hir solas & comfort . . . preyid hir and in a maner compellyd hir to comyn hom to hem, willyng þat sche xulde not gon fro hem” (“they, desiring to console and comfort her . . . prayed her and in a way compelled her to come home with them, desiring that she should not go from them”; 99).

Just as Margery’s affective mourning attracts feminine devotion in this episode, Mary—in the works of Van Ghent and Di Tommi—likewise draws the grieving, loving and even erotic attention of many, if not all, of the women represented in the visual works, each of which depicts the collapsed Virgin supported by two other women,²² of whom one is grasping the Virgin’s breast. The feminine display that so threatens to disrupt the ostensible Christic focus of these visual scenes thus involves not merely Mary’s grief, but also the compassionate and potentially erotic attentions of the women about her. In these representations of individual women fondling Mary’s breast, we might locate an emphasis on Mary’s body and her sexuality akin to that which Leo Steinberg claims was placed upon Christ (1983). Of course, Mary’s breasts here possess multiple iconographic significations—among them, her intercessory role, which Mary assumed by virtue of her breasts, which nursed Jesus (Lane 1984, 7). But alongside such theological meanings, I would argue, the representation of one woman caressing another’s breast in these artifacts also carries with it a sexual referent—as representations of the body always at least potentially do—especially given the erotically charged source of much Marian breast iconography, the Song of Songs (Mundy 1981-1982).²³

In the same way that her son’s suffering presumably produced Mary’s compassion in the Passion representations, Margery’s mystical experience begins with a visionary communication with Christ. But the product of this mystical dalliance signifies a feminine self-reflexive pleasure or jouissance which triggers a narrative of “primary intensity”—a melodrama of sorts—between Margery and the women around her, a scene of feminine bonding akin to that which the Passion depictions dramatically visualize (Rich 1983, 192). These pleasurable sobs draw attention from the German preachers and even from Christ—the ostensible object of Margery’s contemplation—to the homoerotic desires circulating between Margery herself and the women who love her.

Holy Babies, Phallic Mothers

While the Mass, with its emphasis upon the Passion, most frequently leads to Margery’s tearful outbursts, another common stimulus for Margery’s excessive weeping—any image of the baby Jesus—results from the connection medieval culture drew between Christ’s passion and his infancy (Kieckhefer 1984, 106-107; Sinanoglou 1973). In the same way that the birth and death of Christ were linked, for example, by diptychs juxtaposing the Madonna with the Man of Sorrows and by spiritual writers such as St. Bridget of Sweden (Blunt 1973, 245), Margery swathes Jesus “wyth byttyr teerys of compassyon, hauyng mend of þe scharp deth þat he schuld suffer” (“with bitter tears of compassion, mindful of the painful death that he would suffer”; 19) during a vision in which she serves as both Mary’s and her baby’s handmaiden (Keickhefer 1984, 106-107; Kempe 1940, 265-66). To move Margery, the baby need not be Jesus himself: while witnessing a poor woman with “a lytel manchylde sowkyng on hir brest” (“a little baby boy sucking on her breast”; 94) Margery bursts “al in-to wepyng, as þei sche had seyn owr Lady and hir sone in tyme of hys Passyon” (“into weeping, as though she had seen our Lady and her son during the time of his Passion”; 94). Just as Margery’s tears during the Mass episode described above evoke the loving attention of her female witnesses, her sobs before the impoverished nursing mother lead to “þe powr woman hauyng compassyon of hir wepyng” (“the poor woman having compassion over her weeping”; 94). A similar trajectory obtains in the extraordinary passage below, in which Margery encounters a number of women with a “child,” who share her devotion to the baby Jesus. The suggestive moment occurs during Margery’s travels from Jerusalem to Rome, via Venice and Assisi, with a fellow pilgrim, a woman possessing a curious devotional doll modeled “aftyr our Lord”:

þer came too Grey Frerys & a woman þat cam wyth hem fro Ierusalem, & sche had wyth hir an asse þe whech bar a chyst & an ymage þerin mad aftyr our Lord. . . . And þe woman the which had þe ymage in þe chist, whan þei comyn in good cityes, sche toke owt þe ymage owt of hir chist & sett it in worshepful wyfys lappys. & þei wold puttyn schirtys þerup-on & kyssyn it as þei it had ben God hym-selfe. &, whan þe creature sey þe worshep & þe reverens þat þei dedyn to þe ymage, sche was takyn wyth swet deuocyon & swet meditacyons þat sche wept wyth gret sobbyng & lowde crying.

there came two Grey Friars and a woman that came with them from Jerusalem, and she had with her an ass which bore a chest and an image therein fashioned in the image of our Lord. . . . And the woman who had the image in the chest, when they arrived in great cities, took the image out of her chest and set it upon distinguished wives’ laps. And the women would put shirts upon it and kiss it as though it were God himself. And, when the creature saw the worship and the reverence that they gave to the image, she was seized with such sweet devotion and sweet meditations that she wept with great sobbing and loud crying.

(77-78)

As Bynum observes, practices such as these women’s attentions to the Christ-child were not uncommon among both the medieval female laity and religious, who “acted out maternal . . . roles in the liturgy, decorating life-sized statues of the Christ child for the Christmas creche” (1991, 198; Schlegel 1970). According to Bynum, such behavior signifies one way medieval women “simply” took “ordinary nurturing roles over into their most profound religious experiences” (1991, 197). If we apply Bynum’s understanding of these practices to the “worshepful wyfys” in Margery’s Book, we might call them precisely what she calls the fifteenth-century “nuns and beguines” who engaged in decorating a cradle for the liturgy: “just little girls, playing with dolls!” (198).²⁴

If the wives are in fact regressing to the role of girls “playing with dolls,” what is it that little girls do when they play with dolls? According to what Margaret Homans has called “the social imperative to measure all women’s activities by their suitability to motherhood” (1986, 27), the “proper” cultural interpretation of this activity presumably would be that, through their doll-playing, girls playfully foreshadow what their sexual identity as women inevitably will demand of them: marriage and child-rearing.²⁵ The women would then be using the Christ doll for the same reason that they supposedly have a baby—as a “penis substitute,” the fantastic fulfillment of their desire “to appropriate for (themselves) the genital organ that has a cultural monopoly on value” (Irigaray 1985, 87). However, Freud himself stresses an important difference between little girls playing with dolls and women having babies. In his essays on femininity and feminine sexuality, Freud contends that, while playing with dolls is often viewed as an indication of the first stirrings of femininity within a child, this activity in fact has little to do with the “proper” passive role which distinguishes the female subject from her masculine counterpart (1963, 205). According to Freud, the very active attention little girls give their dolls—much like the caressings and dressings which the wives lavish on the Christ doll—is not directed toward any masculine object, but to the original feminine object of their affection: their mothers. That is, when little girls play with their dolls, they play with their mothers, albeit indirectly. On the question of a daughter’s sexual aims regarding her original maternal object, Freud argues that, although part of a girl’s libido passively enjoys being suckled, fed, and cleansed by her mother, another part of the child’s energies actively mimics, in play, her sexually charged passive experiences (1963, 205). Thus, identification with and desire for the mother merge in the girl’s doll-play, as the girl routes through the doll (in Freud’s words) “the exclusiveness of her attachment to her mother, accompanied by a total neglect of her father-object” (1963, 206; see also Freud 1973, 128; Fuss 1993).

Applied to the episode from the Book, Freud’s scenario shows how what may seem to be a locale for “worshep & . . . reverens” aimed at Christ makes a space for the representation of an attachment to a woman. The women are recalling a pre-Oedipal phallic sexuality, directing through the doll the original maternal object of their affection. But the doll here functions not solely as a conduit for the ladies’ original maternal desires; it enables the condensation of a number of female same-sex fantasies. As the doll is not just any doll, but an image “mad after owyr Lord,” it figures also as a means by which the wives, taking such good care of baby Jesus, perform their identification with and desire for his holy mother, the Virgin Mary.²⁶ Moreover, even as the doll enables the wives to perform their individual attachments to both their mothers and “owyr Lady,” its fondling and passage from wifely lap to wifely lap additionally renders it a medium through which these women homosocially bond. In sharing the doll, the women perform a kind of traffic in Christ; endowing this Christic commodity with a symbolic exchange value through their feminine labor, their “worshep & . . . reverens,” the wives refigure Christ as the bearer of feminine needs and desires.²⁷

While the doll’s function in the Book suggests how a passivized Christ could enable female homoeroticism, Margery herself speaks of no such possibility, telling the reader only that the women kiss the doll “as though it had been God himself.” Registering only her identification with the ladies, she explains that:

sche was meuyd in so mych þe mor as, while sche was in Inglond, sche had hy meditacyons in þe byrth & þe childhode of Crist, & sche thankyd God for-as-mech as sche saw þes creaturys han so gret feth in þat sche sey wyth hir bodily eye lych as sche had be-forn wyth hir gostly eye.

she was moved so much the more since, while she was in England she had high meditations on the birth and the childhood of Christ, and she thanked God forasmuch as she saw these creatures had as much faith in what she saw with her bodily eye as she had before with her spiritual eye.

(78)

Yet Margery’s own somatic response to the women tells us something else—that she not only identifies with the ladies’ maternal devotion to Christ, but may indeed also imagine herself as the object of the wives’ attentions. Of course, the affectionate “worshep & . . . reverens” which the ladies lavish upon the Christ doll can effect no “response” from that inanimate object. But the wives’ attentions do cause a proliferation of sweet tears in Margery, so that it seems that it is not the fetishized doll but the body of Margery herself that receives their caresses. Moreover, by means of her sobs, this fantasy is realized, literally, by Margery:

Whan þes women seyn þis creatur wepyn, sobbyn & cryen so wondirfully & mythyly þat sche was nerhand ouyrcomyn þerwyth, þan þei ordeyned a good soft bed & leyd hir þerup-on & comfortyd hir as mech as þei myth for owyr Lordys lofe, blyssed mot he ben.

When these good women saw this creature weeping, sobbing and crying so wonderfully and mightily that she was nearly overcome by it, they prepared a good soft bed and laid her upon it and comforted her as much as they could for our Lord’s love, blessed may he be.

(78)

Here Margery not only turns from spectator into spectacle, but also shifts from her position as an imagined recipient of feminine attention to its outright object. Through her sobs, Margery compels the women to abandon the doll, turn to her, put her to bed, and provocatively “[comfort] hir as mech as þei myth.” We cannot know exactly how the ladies comfort Margery; yet the playful and affectionate prelude to this moment, as well as its bedroom setting, may suggest that the woman assuming the doll’s position may have received from the wives kisses like those originally directed at the Christ-child.

While the Christ doll passage in Margery’s Book illustrates one site in medieval culture for the playful production of roles both pious and proper, it also illustrates the capacity for the displacement, at that very same site, of these roles. Just as the Christ-child’s presence legitimates the women’s gathering, conferring a pious and proper motivation upon their congregation, its position as passive and commodified object for exchange allows for a homosocial relation among the women.²⁸ And the intrusion of Margery’s tears adds a provocative twist to this situation, whereby attending to the image of the Christ-child ends in attending to another woman.²⁹

Envisioned Compassions

Invariably, Margery’s mystical revelations prompt her affective piety: it is earlier visions of Christ’s infancy that amplify Margery’s somatic response to the ladies’ behavior in the Christ-child episode (78), and, similarly, it is Christ’s voice “sownding in her sowle” (“sounding in her soul”; 98) that produces Margery’s spectacular sobs during the Mass. While Margery’s contemplations always constitute the hidden spiritual referent for the visible tears and cries that enable bonds between women, the Passion-centered world of Margery’s visionary experience itself also serves as a mystical locale for feminine bonding. Margery offers the most extensive account of her visions of the Passion in chapters 78 to 81 of her Book, where she describes the “gostly syghtys” (“spiritual visions”; 190-91) that occur primarily during Lent. Margery’s visions offer a detailed and often gory imagining of Christ’s suffering that departs significantly from the Gospels, and instead realizes popular medieval meditations on the Passion, such as Nicholas Love’s Myrror of the Blessyd Lyf of Christ, a translation of pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditationes Vitae Christi now ascribed to Giovanni de Caulibus (Sticca 1988, 196 n.13). Love’s vernacular text, authorized by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, constituted part of the church’s attempt to at once produce and control private devotion during a time of rising lay literacy. As Sarah Beckwith and Elizabeth Salter note, the “ideological function” of such vernacular works lay precisely in their capacity to mitigate the effects of Lollard heresies by textually “stagemanag[ing]” the reader to identify compassionately with a suffering Christ (Beckwith 1986, 45). To a certain extent, Margery’s text seems to realize the aims of church authorities: for example, after having envisioned Christ’s “betyng . . . & bofetyng” (“beating and buffeting”), Margery imagines him telling her “Dowtyr, þes sorwys & many mo suffyrd I for þi lofe, & diuers peynys . . . þu has great cawse to luyn me ryght wel” (“Daughter, these sorrows and many more I suffered for your love, and diverse pains . . . you have good reason to love me very much”; 190-91).

Yet, just as Margery’s vision seems influenced by the Myrror in much the way authorities such as Arundel might have hoped, it also reflects and elaborates upon aspects of Love’s text (and works like it) in ways that the church may not have desired. For Love “stage-manages” the spectator to identify not only with Christ, but also with other “characters in the drama” he outlines (Bennet 1982, 54). The dramatic direction which especially affects Margery is the appeal Love makes to his reader on the Sabbath following Christ’s death: “And thou also by deuoute ymaginacioun, as thou were there bodily present, comfort our lady and that other felauschippe, prayenge hem to ete som-what, for Зit they ben fastinge” (“And also by devout imagination, as if you were physically present there, comfort our Lady and that other fellowship, imploring them to eat something, for they are still fasting”; Love 1992, 256; cf. Kempe, 335 n. 195/7). In addition to carrying out literally Love’s entreaty, making “for owr Lady a good cawdel” (“for our Lady a good hot drink of gruel and spiced wine”; Kempe 1940, 195), Margery extends Love’s notion of comforting and identifying with Mary throughout her vision, in which Margery serves as the Virgin’s handmaiden (190). Moreover, it is Mary with whom Margery most closely identifies in her Passion visions, which consistently balance images of Christ’s suffering with the exchange of tears between the Virgin and Margery.

As we have seen, Margery’s desire to be with Mary, to serve and to share sorrows with her, is not confined to this passage, but surfaces throughout the Book. And when this desire arises in Margery’s visions, it almost always coincides with Christ’s legitimating presence—as it does in the Book ’s eighty-sixth chapter, where Christ, enumerating the many things Margery has done to merit his gratitude, lists Margery’s practice of keeping both him and his mother as bedfellows: “And also, dowtyr, I thank þe for all þe tymys þat þu hast herberwyd me & my blissyd Modyr in þi bed” (“And also, daughter, I thank you for all the times that you have harbored me and my blessed Mother in your bed”; 214).³⁰ Apparently, this line was a bit too provocative for one (presumably) Carthusian annotator of Margery’s Book, who wrote beside it in the Butler Bowdon manuscript’s margin the word “gostly” or spiritual (Kempe 1940, xxxvi). Significantly, Christ consistently figures in his triadic relation with Margery and Mary as a passive presence: as a helpless baby, a grown man suffering the Passion, or a lifeless body deposed from the Cross.³¹ In Margery’s vision of the Passion, for example, while she and the Virgin actively exchange sorrows, both women are repeatedly beholding a Christ who is both passivized and infantilized:

& [he] went forth ful mekely a-forn hem al modyrnakyd as he was born to a peler of ston & spak no worde a-geyn hem but leet hem do & sey what þei wolde . . . & than hyr thowt owr Lady wept wondir sor. And þerfor þe sayd creatur must nedys wepyn & cryin whan sche sey swech gostly syЗtys in hir sowle as freschly & as verily as Зyf it had ben don in dede in hir bodily syght, and hir thowt þat owr Lady & sche wer al-wey to-gedyr to se owr Lordys peynys.

And he went forth very meekly before them all mother-naked as he was born to a pillar of stone and spoke no words against them but allowed them to do and say what they wished . . . and then she thought our Lady wept wondrously sorely. And therefore the said creature had to necessarily weep and cry when she saw such spiritual sights in her soul as freshly and as truly as if they had actually happened before her physical sight, and she thought that our Lady and she were always together to see our Lord’s sufferings.

(190)

Unrestrainedly weeping, the Mary depicted in Margery’s vision conflicts with the stoic Virgin, unique to her sex, often emphasized by Marian scholarship (see Coletti 1993); rather, Mary signifies here as a woman with whom Margery identifies and homosocially shares sorrows over a suffering Christ. The women’s inability to help Jesus gives rise to the exchange of grief between them: as Mary tells Margery, she “must nedys suffyr it for (her) Sonys lofe” (“must needs suffer it for [her] Son’s love”; 189). Yet while the Passion ostensibly must be endured for the love of Jesus, it also— with the passivization and infantilization that accompany it in the Book —becomes something that “must nedys” be so that Margery and Mary can get together, sighing and sobbing over the helpless body of Jesus.

Just as the Passion of an infantilized Christ, “al modyr-naked as he was born,” enables Margery to mourn with the Virgin Mother, the Lamentation of Christ’s lifeless body similarly occasions the embrace of loss among women. This emotionally charged scene focuses initially upon Mary, and then broadens to the women around her, whom the Virgin gives leave to fondle Christ’s limp limbs, lavish them with kisses, wash them with tears:

. . . And þan owr blisful Lady bowyd down to hir Sonys body & kyssyd hys mowth & wept so plentyuowsly ouyr hys blissyd face þat sche wesch a-wey þe blod of hys face wyth þe terys of hir eyne. An þan þe creatur thowt sche herd Mary Mawdelyn says to our Lady, “I pray Зow, Lady, Зyf me leue to handelyn & kissyn his feet, for at þes get I grace.” Anon owr Lady Зaf leue to hir & all þo þat wer þer-abowte to do what worschip & reverns þei wold to þat precyows body. And a-non Mary Mawdelyn toke owr Lordys feet & owr Ladijs sisterys toke hys handys, þe on syster on hand & þe oþer sister an-oþer hand, & wept ful sor in kissyng of þo handys & of þo precyows feet.

. . . And then our blissful Lady bowed down to her Son’s body and kissed his mouth and wept so plentifully over his blessed face that she washed away the blood upon his face with the tears from her eyes. And then the creature thought that she heard Mary Magdalene say to our Lady, “I pray you, Lady, give me leave to handle and kiss his feet, for I get grace from them.” At once our Lady gave leave to her and all those who were there thereabout to perform what worship and reverence they desired to that precious body. And at once Mary Magdalene took our Lord’s feet and our Lady’s sisters took his hands, the one sister one hand and the other sister another hand, and wept very sorely in kissing those hands and those precious feet.

(193-94)

Margery’s vision of the Lamentation reflects the influence of the Meditationes, as it describes both Mary supporting Christ’s head in her lap and Mary Magdalen holding “the feet at which she had formerly found so much grace” (1961, 342); a striking realization and extension of this dramatic scene occurs in Giotto’s famous Lamentation (1305-1306; fig. 4). Depicting four women surrounding, handling and grieving over Christ’s body, this visual piece, like Margery’s Book, portrays women assuming an active mourning role.³²

Like the Christ doll, the body of Christ in the Lamentation is passivized, constituted less by anything Christ actually does than by what is done to him. That is, the power the Christic object represents is not intrinsic to itself, but is, rather, conferred upon it by the women, whose tears, caresses, and kisses invest the Christ-doll as well as the dead Christ’s body with meaning. Through this investment in a passivized Christ, the women resignify his body as object for their own desiring ends, crucially resisting, at least for the duration of their performance, subordination to masculine power structures.³³ Instead of demonstrating the exalted acceptance of Christ’s sacrifice prescribed by patristic theology, the women around the dead Christ spectacularly and sensuously sob, exploiting the lack embodied by Christ as well as their own gendered relation to the dead (Kempe 1940, 74-75). In opposition to a serene consent to death, which would presumably generate symbolic capital in a patriarchal economy, the feminine erotic exhibition of tears in Margery’s vision produces an alternate form of symbolic capital (or, to use Kathryn Bond Stockton’s term, “anti-capital”) in an alternate economy of feminine desire (Stockton 1992, 348). Now appropriated as a fetishized commodity exchanged among women, the Lord’s lifeless body is passed to Mary, then offered by Mary to the Magdalen, and finally extended to Mary’s two sisters, uniting all four women around their communal object of desire.

As I have argued in this essay, The Book of Margery Kempe suggests how we might rethink Christian women’s mourning, as an active and empowering practice. Whether mediated by the figure of a passivized Christ, or dispensing with that third Christic term entirely, the female homoeroticism produced at the site of female lamentation constitutes a disruptive act in which the proper turns improper, and the pious strays into the perverse. Moreover, as a cultural artifact, Margery’s Book offers us compelling grounds for resisting the kinds of theological hermeneutics which often dictate that medieval texts such as The Book of Margery Kempe must be interpreted only in terms of the extent to which the spiritual subjects they produce are heretical or holy.³⁴ We need instead a more flexible definition of medieval spirituality, where devout ends mingle with and possibly serve as a legitimizing cover for other, less decorous and patriarchal ends; where, to turn to one final example from The Book of Margery Kempe, a woman’s imagining of heaven, as described by Christ, suggests a version of the afterlife that is predominantly female: “I xal take þe be þe on Hand in Hevyn & my modyr be þe oþer hand & so xalt þu dawnsyn in Hevyn wyth oþer holy maydens & virgynes. . . .” (“I shall take you by the one hand in Heaven and my mother by the other hand, and so shall you dance in Heaven with other holy maidens and virgins. . . .”; 53). Picturing the afterlife as a kind of alternate female community—as a group of women dancing, united through the medium of Christ—Margery suggests, yet again, that behind her Christic devotions lies the longing for a very feminine, and very pleasurable, reward.

Notes

1. Elizabeth, wife of John of Greystoke, was in the process of divorcing her husband (Kempe 1940, 317 n. 133).

2. Following Valerie Traub’s use of the word in her analysis of early modern “lesbian” desires, I will refer to the female same-sex desires represented in The Book of Margery Kempe as “homoerotic,” a term which usefully falls between the modern category of the lesbian and premodern masculinist interpellations of the sodomite (Traub 1993, 69).

Although no women in the Book express the desire to renounce their spouses for Margery, some wish that Margery “not gon fro hem” (99). Other women, moreover, want Margery to perform as their children’s godmother (94).

3. A contemporary parallel to this enabling form of mourning may be found in Douglas Crimp’s work on AIDS (1988), which promotes an “active alternative to the personal, elegiac expressions that appeared to dominate the art-world response to AIDS” (15). For a summary of readers who reject Margery’s mystical practices as empowering, see Harding (1993), who argues for the subversiveness of Margery’s mysticism.

4. Cf. Sedgwick (1990, 136-41); Rambuss (1994); and Stockton (1992). We may also note here the Dresden Madonna’s pivotal role in Freud’s famous Dora case, before which Dora “remained two hours . . . rapt in silent admiration” (Freud 1974, 116; see Fuss 1993), as well as the possession of “two photographs of the Sistine Madonna” by Olive Chancellor and Verena Tar-rant in Henry James’s The Bostonians (1945, 301). My thanks go to Harry Stecopoulos for giving me this latter citation.

5. See Kempe (47 and lxi); on Syon, Gibson (1989, 20-21).

6. Christ’s “commodification” as a medium for feminine homosocial bonding displays yet another way that, as Sheila Delany (1975) first noted, the precapitalist market organization of late medieval England—in which “small scale commodity production for exchange” predominated—informs Margery’s structures of feeling (Aers 1988a, 14). Here we might consider how Margery’s Passion devotion fantastically resolves the problems the market posed for her (a woman whose precapitalist ventures—as a brewess and miller—always failed). For readings after Delaney on the market’s influence on Margery’s spiritual and secular endeavors, see Atkinson (1983); Beckwith (1986); Aers (1988a); and Ellis (1990).

7. In her fine study, Lochrie, while acknowledging that Margery “makes known the Virgin’s sorrow,” subordinates this Marian referent to “the text of (Mary’s) sorrow”—Christ (1991, 193), and thus neglects to consider how such a reading may indeed rewrite the Passion drama in the way that I suggest. Two readers who do foreground Margery’s Marian identifications in their important studies of the Book, David Aers and Hope Weissman, nevertheless interpret this association in terms of Margery’s fantasy of at once regaining her virginal purity and playing the role of mother (Aers 1988a, 104-106; Weissman 1982, 211). While not specifically discussing identification with the Virgin in popular devotional literature, Sarah Beckwith notes that such texts encourage female readers such as Margery to play various domestic roles, including that of mother, in relation to Jesus (1986).

8. The exceptions include scholars such as Judith Brown (1986), E. Ann Matter (1986; 1989), and Bruce Holsinger (1993).

9. Just as androcentric culture forbids woman access to its figurative language, this very discourse is grounded upon her identification with that which is not figurative, that is, the literal; see Homans (1986, 1-39).

10. The endeavor to understand the late medieval period the way its authorities intended it to be understood, risks, as Fradenburg puts it, “confusing ‘the Middle Ages’ with the ways in which the Middle Ages (mis)represented itself to itself” (1989, 75).

11. Traub has played a groundbreaking role in displaying how “historically distant representations of female desire can be correlated, though not in any simple or linear fashion, to modern systems of intelligibility and political efficacy” (1993, 62; 1992).

12. My use of Bynum here is ironic, as her assertion forms part of an overall argument about how medieval and modern readers differ: “For all their application of male/female contrasts to organize life symbolically, medieval thinkers used gender imagery more fluidly and less literally than we do” (1991, 108). On Bynum and sexuality see Rambuss (1994) and Biddick (1993).

13. I am thinking here of the work of Butler, Sedgwick, and Fuss. See also Goldberg, who claims a similar gender/sexual fluidity in the Renaissance (1994a, 227).

14. See Hope Emily Allen’s introduction to the Butler-Bodown manuscript (Kempe 1940).

15. “The Holy Matriarch” St. Anne enjoyed a strong cult following in Norfolk (Gibson 1989, 82-84; Duffy 1992, 181-83). On Bokenham see Delany (forthcoming).

16. I refer to women such as Anne Harling, who commissioned a series of stained-glass windows depicting Mary’s Joys and Sorrows for an East Harling church in the 1460s. Harling’s gift asserts both her identification with Mary as well as Harling’s own power in determining the devotional imagery within her parish. As Gibson suggests, many of the windows’ details suggest their intended consumption by a female audience (1989, 101).

17. The virgin martyrs depicted on the screens are enlisted for their powers by Margery herself (52; cf. Duffy 1992, 176).

18. Both communities were in Norwich: an unknown number of sisters lived for roughly fifteen years in St. Swithin’s parish, while another group of two or three lived from 1442 to 1472 in St. Laurence’s parish (Tanner 1984, 65). As the tenement in which the latter community dwelled was owned by a Low Countries’ native—the center of Beguine movement—these East Anglian communities may have been affiliated with beguinages (Tanner 1984, 65).

19. On Margery’s foreign influence, see Allen’s preface to the Book (Kempe 1940, liii-lxii).

20. Among the details that draw the viewer’s eye to Mary are her eye-level placement near the bottom of each work, as well as the inclination of Christ’s head, directing the viewer’s gaze down and to the left of the picture, where Mary is situated. See also the Crucifixions of Master Hans in Vienna and the Venetian School (Meiss 1951, Plate 92; Sticca 1988).

21. My reading of Margery here reflects and revises Mulvey’s analysis of woman’s visual presence in Hollywood narrative film (1992). I assume a broad and flexible understanding of the terms “drama” and “performance.” In referring to the Mass as a “Christ-centered drama,” I recall Hardison (1965, 78). The imbrication of liturgical drama with explicitly dramatic forms—such as Corpus Christi plays—that were themselves performed within or near the very churches in which the Mass took place suggests how a late medieval Christian such as Margery may well have viewed her church as a stagelike site for spectacular impersonation. See also Honorius of Autun, quoted in Hardison (1965, 39-40), and Duffy (1992, 19-22).

22. This arrangement presumably follows the Virgin and her sisters’ (the two Mary’s) traditional positioning to the left of the cross.

23. Commenting on this feminine version of the emphasis on Christ’s sexual organ, which Steinberg himself notes (1983, 127-30; quoted in Bynum 1991, 330), Bynum writes, contra Steinberg: “[t]here is reason to think that medieval viewers saw bared breasts (at least in painting and sculpture) not primarily as sexual but as the food with which they were iconographically associated” (1991, 86). But in response to such claims I would ask, with Richard Rambuss, “why should we turn away from regarding the body as always at least potentially sexualized, as a truly polysemous surface where various significances and expressions—including a variety of erotic ones—compete and collude with each other in making the body meaningful?” (1994, 268).

24. Bynum is here describing what she thinks “anyone who has stood before the lovely beguine cradle on display in the Metropolitan Museum in New York . . . and realized that it is a liturgical object must have thought, at least for a moment” (1991, 198).

25. For example, Bynum writes that “devotional objects . . . came increasingly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to reflect and sanctify women’s domestic and biological experience” (1991, 198).

26. The devotion of the fourteenth-century Dominican nuns of Toess, who constructed during Advent a “kind of a doll house . . . [which] contained a bath tub in which to bathe a figure of the infant,” similarly displays female identification with a woman (Mary) as mother (Berliner 1946, 268).

27. A visual analogue to the Christ child’s mediatory function in the Book can be found in the Master of the Passion’s Entombment (1380-1385; Barasche 1976, 85). Behind Christ’s sarcophagus, one woman (presumably Mary) puts her face near Christ’s own visage while another places one hand upon his crotch. But even more suggestive for my purposes are the two women crouching before his sarcophagus: as one woman holds Christ’s arm, another, huddled beside her, half covers her eyes as she looks intently over Christ’s limp limb into the eyes of the smiling woman near her. The dead Christ’s arm’s placement between the women’s heads vividly demonstrates his body’s positioning as a medium for female bonding. One thousand years before the Entombment, in a letter from Church Father Saint Augustine to his sister, there appears an ironic gloss for the structure of desire represented in the painting: “It is not by touch alone, but also by feeling and sight, that a woman desires and is desired. Do not claim to have chaste minds if you have unchaste eyes, because the unchaste eye is the messenger of the unchaste heart; and when unchaste hearts reveal themselves to each other by a mutual glance, even though the tongue is silent, . . . chastity flees from the character though the body remain untouched. . . .” (1956, 5: 45). If looking can express the lust between a man and a woman, what prevents the exchange of looks between two women from being interpreted similarly? Later in the letter, Augustine implicitly refers to “lesbian” love when he warns his sister, a nun, that “the love between you [nuns], however, ought not to be earthly but spiritual,” at once opening the field of desire beyond the realm of genital contact and acknowledging the possibility that an “earthly” love between women could occur there (although, of course, he frames his acknowledgment of desires between women in prohibitive terms).

28. The role of censorship as that which both leads to and is outwitted in condensation, is displayed by the simultaneously enabling and legitimizing presence of Christ in the doll scene, as well as the other moments in the Book analyzed in this essay (cf. Freud 1960, 170-73).

29. Both episodes from the Book analyzed thus far take place in Italy during Margery’s pilgrimage there and in Jerusalem. Other scenes of female-female bonding in the Book take place in England (where Margery is accused of luring wives from their husbands). See especially ch. 53, 130-31. But as the two moments analyzed here are perhaps the most provocative, I would like to offer two reasons why this might be the case. Firstly, much of what contributed to Margery’s devotional practice came from Italy—above all the enormously influential piety of the Franciscans. Secondly, pilgrimage’s figuration in medieval Christianity could also explain why versions of the female homoerotics that occur in Margery’s mystical visionary life are realized in the space of pilgrimage. Perceived as a center of devotion, where both miracles and a strengthening of faith occur, pilgrimage constitutes an exteriorized version of the interior journey of the mystic. Cf. Turner (1978, 6-7). Margery indicates this parallel relation herself in the Christ doll scene, where she links her meditations on the Infancy “in Inglond” with the Italian wives’ actual attentions to the image of the baby Jesus (78). As Turner also argues, pilgrimage is “the mode of liminality for the laity,” offering lay Christians such as Margery a place where normal social strictures are relaxed and social order-ings—such as the male homosocial triad—are inverted. Could this perhaps be the reason why so many women engaged in pilgrimage—to the condemnation of authorities such as Boniface (Ep. XLVIII 169, cited in Sumption 1975, 347)?

30. As Allen notes (Kempe 1940), Christ is probably recalling here Margery’s role as Mary’s handmaiden and Jesus’s nurse, mentioned earlier in the Book.

31. David Aers, noting the infantilization and passivization of Christ, speculates that “It enabled Margery to identify with the ‘good’ mother in a way that her experience in the earthly family denied,” and that it “offers an image of one sphere in which the woman obviously controls males” (1988a, 104-107). See also Beckwith (1986, 48).

32. As she spent thirteen weeks in Venice, Margery may have seen Giotto’s piece in Padua’s Arena Chapel (Kempe 1940, 65). Like Giotto’s painting, Niccoló di Tommaso’s Lamentation in the Congregazione de la Caritá, Parma, depicts the dead Christ surrounded solely by female mourners (Meiss, plate 123).

33. Cf. Butler, who asserts that the essentially historical and thus contingent nature of patriarchal cultural signifiers allows for their disfiguration into unauthorized forms (see, for example, 1992, 162).

34. Readers who assess the Book in theological terms include Lochrie (1991), who describes the status of Margery’s tears as signifiers of Margery’s devout love for Jesus (see especially 167-202), Gibson 1989, who argues for Margery’s successful assertion of “her own spiritual health” (65; see also 47-49); Hirsh (1989, 9); Dickman (1980); McEntire (1987). Alternately, Weissman provocatively argues that Margery “formally accept[s] conventional (theological) images while actually coopting them” (1982, 203).

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Tanner, Norman P. 1984. The Church in Late Medieval Norwich 1370-1532. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.

Traub, Valerie. 1992. Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama. London and New York: Routledge.

_____. 1993. “The (In)Significance of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Early Modern England,” in Goldberg, Queering. 62-83.

Turner, Victor and Edith Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press.

Weissman, Hope Phyllis. 1982. “Margery Kempe in Jerusalem: Hysterica Compassio in the Late Middle Ages,” in Acts of Interpretation: The Text in its Contexts 700-1600, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk. Norman, OK: Pilgrim. 201-217.

Woolf, Rosemary. 1968. The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages. Oxford: Clarendon.

FURTHER READING

Biographies

Collis, Louise. Memoirs of a Medieval Woman: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe. New York: Crowell, 1964, 270 p.

Offers a novelistic and sometimes inaccurate biography provides about her life as a medieval Englishwoman.

Goodman, Anthony. “Margery and Urban Gender Roles.” In Margery Kempe and Her World. New York: Longman,2002, 274 p.

Provides a biography emphasizing the details Kempe provides about her life as a medieval Englishwoman.

Criticism

Allen, Hope Emily. Preface to The Book of Margery Kempe, Vol. 1, edited by Sanford Brown Meech, pp. i-v. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1940.

Discusses various influences on Kempe’s Book, particularly the work of other medieval mystic writers.

Atkinson, Clarissa W. Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983, 241 p.

Examines Kempe’s book as an autobiography with an emphasis on her role in the tradition of women in Christian history.

Beckwith, Sarah. “A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe.” In Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, edited by Jane Chance, pp. 195-212. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

Studies the issue of Kempe’s female mysticism from the perspective of developing a feminine subjectivity.

Delaney, Sheila. “Sexual Economics, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, and The Book of Margery Kempe.” Minnesota Review, n.s., no. 1 (fall 1975): 104-15.

Characterizes Kempe’s life as an attempt to escape from the social and sexual oppressions of her day.

Dickman, Susan. “Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition of the Pious Woman.” In The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1984, edited by Marion Glascoe, pp. 150-68.Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984.

Biographies

Collis, Louise. Memoirs of a Medieval Woman: The Life and Times of Margery Kempe. New York: Crowell, 1964, 270 p.

Offers a novelistic and sometimes inaccurate biography of Kempe, though highly accessible.

Goodman, Anthony. "Margery and Urban Gender Roles." In Margery Kempe and Her World. New York: Longman, 2002, 274 p.

Provides a biography emphasizing the details Kempe provides about her life as a medieval Englishwoman.

Criticism

Allen, Hope Emily. Preface to The Book of Margery Kempe, Vol. 1, edited by Sanford Brown Meech, pp. i-v. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940.

Discusses various influences on Kempe's Book, particularly the work of other medieval mystic writers.

Atkinson, Clarissa W. Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983, 241 p.

Examines Kempe's book as an autobiography with an emphasis on her role in the tradition of women in Christian history.

Beckwith, Sarah. "A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe." In Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, edited by Jane Chance, pp. 195-212. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.

Studies the issue of Kempe's female mysticism from the perspective of developing a feminine subjectivity.

Delaney, Sheila. "Sexual Economics, Chaucer's Wife of Bath, and The Book of Margery Kempe." Minnesota Review, n.s., no. 1 (fall 1975): 104-15.

Characterizes Kempe's life as an attempt to escape from the social and sexual oppressions of her day.

Dickman, Susan. "Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition of the Pious Woman." In The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England: Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1984, edited by Marion Glascoe, pp. 150-68. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984.

Views Kempe's life as "an identifiably medieval, bourgeois, English adaptation" of the role of a pious woman.

Harding, Wendy. "Body Into Text: The Book of Margery Kempe. "In Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, edited by Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, pp. 168-85. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

Contends that The Book of Margery Kempe is a dialogue between Kempe's scribe as a representative of the literate, celibate, male clerical segment of society, and Kempe, as a representative of illiterate, married women who were not attached to a religious order; maintains that the Book disrupts these hierarchical oppositions.

Holbrook, Sue Ellen. "'About Her': Margery Kempe's Book of Feeling and Working." In The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard, edited by James M. Dean and Christian K. Zacher, pp. 265-84. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.

Analyzes Kempe as a female writer, rather than as simply a storyteller or hysteric; emphasizes the significance to Kempe of creating a book of spiritual revelations, instead of receiving the revelations and sharing them with a select group.

Howes, Laura L. "On the Birth of Margery Kempe's Last Child." Modern Philology 90, no. 2 (November 1992): 220-25.

Discusses Kempe's pregnancy during a portion of her pilgrimage; suggests that the congruence of these events emphasizes the commingling of Kempe's physical and spiritual lives.

Knowles, David. "Margery Kempe." In The English Mystical Tradition, pp. 138-50. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961.

Concludes that Kempe was not a mystic on the level of Richard Rolle or Julian of Norwich while acknowledging that her Book is a valuable document for religious history.

Lochrie, Karma. "The Book of Margery Kempe: The Marginal Woman's Quest for Literary Authority." Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 (spring 1986): 33-55.

Observes strategies that Kempe used as a medieval woman author to legitimize her text.

——. "From Utterance to Text: Authorizing the Mystical Word." In Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, pp. 97-134. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

Asserts that medieval mystical texts strive to "authorize the oral text within their written text"; examines Kempe's efforts to do so and the challenge presented by her illiteracy.

McAvoy, Liz Herbert. "'Aftyr Hyr Owyn Tunge': Body, Voice and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe." Women's Writing 9, no. 2 (2002): 159-76.

Connects the physical body to the authority of the female narrator in Kempe's Book.

Medcalf, Stephen. "Inner and Outer." In The Later Middle Ages, edited by Stephen Medcalf, pp. 108-71. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981.

Discusses Kempe's religion in comparing the Roman Catholic emphasis on outer signs and realities with the Protestant emphasis on inner attitudes and faith.

Mueller, Janel M. "Autobiography of a New 'Createur': Female Spirituality, Selfhood, and Authorship in The Book of Margery Kempe. "In Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, edited by Mary Beth Rose, pp. 155-68. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986.

Analyzes Kempe's Book as an autobiography exploring the issues of female spirituality and selfhood, focusing on narrative and thematic design.

Shklar, Ruth. "Cobham's Daughter: The Book of Margery Kempe and the Power of Heterodox Thinking." Modern Language Quarterly 56, no. 3 (September 1995): 277-304.

Suggests that the Lollards—a sect of religious reformers under the leadership of John Wycliffe—offered a framework of discourse from which Kempe developed her own methods of dissent and sense of vernacular spirituality.

Stevenson, Barbara. "Autobiographical Firsts: The Book of Margery Kempe and The Sarashina Diary." Medieval Perspectives 15, no. 2 (fall 2000): 81-93.

Compares early women's autobiographies across cultures, from England to Japan.

Thornton, Martin. Margery Kempe: An Example in the English Pastoral Tradition. London: S.P.C.K., 1960, 120 p.

Examines Kempe's work from a theological perspective, emphasizing her English outlook and considers her role in the history of English spirituality.

Weissman, Hope Phyllis. "Margery Kempe in Jerusalem: Hysterica Compassio in the Late Middle Ages." In Acts of Interpretation: The Text in its Contexts, 700-1600, edited by Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk, pp. 201-17. Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982.

Presents Kempe's Book as an expression of the motivating forces in her "life journey"; interprets Kempe as trapped within the patriarchal and ecclesiastical system, yet triumphant in flouting that authority.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Kempe's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 146; Literature Criticism from 1400-1800, Vols. 6, 56; Literature Resource Center; Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. 2.