SOURCE: “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, Syracuse University Press, 1986, pp. 155-68.

[In the following essay, Mueller maintains that The Book of Margery Kempe has been overlooked as an autobiography and has instead been examined primarily as an example of late medieval literature and spirituality. Focusing on the Book's narrative and thematic design, Mueller analyzes the work as an autobiography exploring the issues of female spirituality and selfhood.]

Since its discovery in manuscript in 1934, The Book of Margery Kempe has variously engaged the interest of students of late medieval literature and spirituality. But this interest has tended, until recently, to obscure the narrative and thematic coherence of the Book's autobiographical design. It is remarkable enough that the work is the first autobiography in English, and the autobiography of a woman. But it emerges as a still more remarkable creation from the sidelights afforded on Margery's authorial struggles. In the preface and in the reflections linking Book 1 with Book 2, we learn that Margery, an illiterate lay woman of over sixty, had nearly completed an account of twenty-five years or so of her experience when, in 1436, the man who had been writing at her dictation and reading back to her for checking suddenly died. After this scribe's handwriting proved undecipherable to others, Margery obtained another man's help. He made a new, somewhat fuller transcript for her in 1438; this is the version of her Book that survives.¹

More secular currents of interest in Margery have mainly run in two channels. In that of social history, her robust self-esteem and broad travel experience invite comparison with a literary antecedent, Chaucer's Wife of Bath. In the channel of language history her Book contributes to documenting the widespread resumption of English as a written medium in the fifteenth century.² For their part, students of late medieval spirituality have worked at identifying affinities between The Book of Margery Kempe and other mystical works, especially those of two close female contemporaries: Julian of Norwich's Showings of Divine Love and St. Birgitta's Revelations. Margery herself indicates that possible female affinities are not exhaustive, for she refers to works by St. Bonaventure, Richard Rolle, and Walter Hilton which a priest read aloud to her.³ Nonetheless, Margery's firsthand experience gives special pertinence and strength to the links with Julian and Birgitta. Margery's spirituality, like that of Julian whom she tells of having visited to obtain spiritual counsel (Book 1, chapter 18), centered on the Sacred Manhood and the Passion of Christ—a dominant strain in popular devotion of the period. Also, like Birgitta, whose canonization was confirmed in ceremonies at Rome which she witnessed (1. 39), Margery was called to become a bride of God—even though she, unlike Birgitta, was no widow at the time and did not proceed to formal religious vows.

Margery parts company with others, men and women, in the controlling and apparently distinctive feature of her spiritual life: her calling to a mystical spousal while remaining in the world and, indeed, remaining bound to a living husband in certain evolving ways. These, we shall see, are vital to the autobiographical design of her Book. But before we examine the peculiar nature and implications of Margery's calling, we must take some notice of the difficulty experienced by her first amanuensis with regard to another aspect of her spirituality. In a rare obtrusion of his own voice (1.62), he interrupts a series of anecdotes illustrating the hostility and ostracism to which Margery was subjected because of her violent “wepyng & sobbyng” in public places. He confesses that he at first had “fled & enchewyd” her under the influence of a censorious friar and that he had begun writing down Margery's story for her before he had a “ryth cler mende of the sayd mater” of her tears. “Therfor he wrot the lesse therof” and “les seryowslech & expressiowslech” then he eventually came to do.⁴ This scribe explains that he sought to understand Margery better by reading in Bonaventure's Stimulus amoris and in Rolle's Incendium amoris how these two mystics report themselves to have run in the streets, crying out and calling upon the Lord. But he remained disturbed about the lack of fit he found between Margery's weeping and Bonaventure's and Rolle's crying—a lack we can partially ascribe to the influence of a potent (and male) Scriptural precedent, David the king and psalmist, upon the behavior of the latter (Psalms 17:1, 5; 22:2, 6-7; 27:6-11; cf. 2 Samuel 6:14-16). In further searching, the scribe tells us, he could find only one relevant analogue for “terys of pyte & compassyon” as a whole “maner of levyng” in “plentyuows grace.” This was the biography of the saintly Marie d’Oignies (1177-1213) written by her spiritual director, the Augustinian canon Jacques de Vitry. Through reflecting on Marie's Life, Margery's first amanuensis came to bona fide acceptance of the two women's shared mystical “gift of tears” and thence to willing cooperation with Margery in setting down an account of her life and spirituality in her own words.⁵

It would be hard to overrate the importance of Margery's “gift of tears”—a trait manifested copiously every day for ten years, and at less frequent intervals over an additional fifteen (1.27, 82, 85). The prominence of her devout fits of weeping as a compositional element in her Book stems directly from their indispensability to her: they validate her personal witness to God's unfailingly tenderhearted love for the whole of humankind. Thus any examination of the autobiographical design of Margery's Book must begin with the vital equivalence between her tears, on the one hand, and the truth of feeling and being a “creatur” of God, on the other, which she everywhere reaffirms. As the associative, loosely sequential progression of her story establishes itself, no fewer than three early chapters rehearse assurances from Jesus, Our Lady, and Julian of Norwich that Margery's tears mark her as a special recipient of divine love and favor. First Jesus tells Margery “in hir mende” that “terys of compunccyon, devocyon, & compassyon arn the heyest & sekerest iyftys that I ieve in erde” (1.14). Almost immediately thereafter, Julian urges upon Margery this view of her tears: “Whan God visyteth a creatur wyth terys of contrisyon, devosyon, er compassyon, he may & owth to levyn that the Holy Gost is in hys sowle” (1.18; BMK, [The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford B. Meech (London: Humphrey Milford, 1940)] pp. 31, 42-43; B-B, [The Book of Margery Kempe: A Modern Version, W. Butler Bowdon (New York: The Devin-Adair Co., 1944)] pp. 23, 34). Next, after Our Lady assures Margery that her tears attest the flowings of Jesus' grace, to make the world wonder at her and love the Son for Margery's sake (1.29), the Book attains a level of confidence which never recedes, despite intermittent doubts and challenges. Margery identifies her very life and selfhood with what she calls her “welle of teerys” (1.32, 41, 57; II, concluding prayers). So complete is this identification that when she finds herself “bareyn fro teerys,” her consciousness goes numb with anguish. She cannot function religiously or socially (1.82) until her capacity to weep is restored (BMK, pp. 81, 99, 141, 199, 249; B-B, pp. 70, 86, 129, 182, 227). In alleging a singular spiritual counterpart for the weeping Margery in Marie d’Oignies, the Book's first scribe points to an external of social behavior as the sign of a characteristic sensibility—a mode of expression and a way of life—which appears to be female; his search turned up no male analogues. However, this scribe's preoccupation with the likenesses between Marie and Margery keeps him from remarking what to us is an equally essentialy difference. Margery's female spirituality impelled her, as it did not impel Marie, to the joint self-awareness and self-realization demonstrated in compiling an autobiography. Not only did the interworkings of female spirituality, selfhood, and authorship issue in the transmissible record known as The Book of Margery Kempe; they also etched that record with its unique autobiographical design.⁶

One major aspect in which female spirituality, selfhood, and authorship come together is in the formation of blocks or sequences of narrative that address the question of giving credence to Margery, to what she says and does. The authorial imperative she faces at the outset of her Book—in rhetorical terms, the necessity to use ethos effectively in self-presentation—is exactly the challenge Margery represents herself as having to face in life. Certainly it was anomalous, not to say scandalous, that she experienced her calling to become a bride of God when she had a living husband and had recently borne a child. The precedent of the virginal Marie d’Oignies could in no way cover the latter circumstance. St. Birgitta, too, had received her calling to mystical spousal only after she was widowed. The utter incongruity of Margery's situation with her newly announced calling causes the otherwise well-disposed Richard Caister, vicar of St. Stephen's, Norwich, to exclaim in sheer bemusement: “What cowd a woman ocupyn an owyr er tweyn owyrs in the lofe of owyr Lord?” (1.17; BMK, p. 38; B-B, p. 30).

Inevitably, the first steps in the spiritual reorientation that Margery seeks for her life entail breaking with various settled conceptions and demands to which she as a woman is subject—those of her husband most immediately, later those of religious and civil authorities as well as society at large. Having to strain toward her new identity against these settled conceptions and demands creates the constitutive narrative tension of several important sequences of chapters set in England, where Margery is a known entity, and also commands her native tongue for use in self-definition and self-defense. In the first such sequence, chapters 9 through 25 of Book 1, Margery's prime objective is to secure her husband's consent to her newly spiritualized understanding of her wifehood in the form of a mutual vow of sexual continence.⁷ After almost three years she wins his cooperation and support, demonstrated in his accompanying her on a less successful quest—a quest for permission from ecclesiastical superiors in York, Canterbury, Lincoln, and Norwich that Margery be allowed to wear the white garments of a bride of God. The long withholding of this permission figures prominently in the design of her Book. In the second relevant sequence, chapters 43 through 55 of Book 1, the narrative tension rises as Margery, now attempting to negotiate official recognition of her special spiritual identity without her husband's help, is arraigned for questioning at Worcester and then actually prosecuted for heresy (Lollardy) at Leicester, York, and Beverley.

As author, Margery works deftly to shape and sustain these blocks of narrative which convey the notion that she had no selfhood, no existence worthy of naming, before her protracted struggle to clarify and confirm her religious calling both to herself and others. Thus she introduces herself in the most minimal terms at the opening of her Book by leaving anonymous the two male figures, father and then husband, whose dependent she successively was. Her husband is cited only as “a worschepful burgeys” and her father as “sum-tyme meyr of the town N. and sythyn … alderman of the hey Gylde of the Trinyte in N.” (1.1, 2; BMK, pp. 6, 9; B-B, pp. 1, 3), while she consistently styles herself, here and throughout, as “this creatur”—a locution which encapsulates her sense of radical dependency on God for her ongoing creation. In the ensuing blocks of narrative which detail society's grudging acknowledgement of the claims of Margery's spirituality, the calculated unspecificity of the style raises one question—namely, Who is this woman?—and the tension of social dealings transmutes it into another question: What possible place or meaning can her life have? The purposiveness of autobiographical design in The Book of Margery Kempe emerges in the answers it offers to these questions.

Although Margery's first steps toward reorienting herself and her sexual and social roles under the imperative of divine love take disjunctive form—the new as a break with the old—she is soon instructed that true female spirituality proceeds otherwise. Its nature consists in an embrace of non-exclusive, co-existing relations and functions which may well strike us readers as cognate with the most enduring historical role of females as characterized by Elise Boulding.⁸ To Margery, however, the lesson in the comprehensiveness which her spirituality must attain comes as the will of her Lord, and her initial advance in such consciousness provides the crux of the first sequence of chapters in her Book. Near its end (1.21, 22), Margery voices perplexity and abashment at being singled out as a special recipient of her Lord's love, since she does not belong to either privileged category—maiden or widow. Her Lord reassures her that he finds her “a synguler lover” and beloved in a range of roles; he calls her “a mayden in thi sowle,” “dowtyr,” “myn owyn derworthy derlyng,” “myn owyn blyssed spowse” (BMK, pp. 52-53; B-B, p. 42). The initial insight to be gained by the spiritually instructed Margery and communicated to her husband is this: there is no inherent incompatibility between becoming a bride of God and being acknowledged as the wife of John Kempe, burgess of Lynn, and the mother of his fourteen children (cf. 1. 15).

Society at large, however, clings to either/or thinking with respect to Margery, especially in England where, if anywhere, she has her place. The crux of the second extended narrative sequence is Margery's pertinacity in seeking the public confirmation of her special spiritual status which would come with permission to wear white wool clothing and a gold ring engraved Jesu est amor meus; in this regard she must persuade males other than her husband who have authority over her. Hence the issue of her clothing is more complicated in the sense of being more social than the vow of continence was. Margery is also as intensely concerned with her clothes as she is with her tears; she treats both as an extension of herself, a measure of the recognition accorded her in the public domain. Perhaps her concern with her clothes indicates an emergent feature of female authorial consciousness.⁹ Yet it is well to be cautious about any such inferences, for Rolle had set a famous precedent in English mysticism by devising a new dress for his religious calling from his sister's garments; and, nearer in time to Margery, a general mindfulness of sumptuary considerations marks other, quite disparate vernacular works in fifteenth-century England.¹⁰ At any rate, it is indicative of the strength of her difficulties at home that Margery first reports wearing her white clothes and gold ring in a discontinuous group of chapters on her travels to Zurich, Constance, Bologna, Venice, Jerusalem, and Rome which intervenes between the first and the second narrative sequences dealing with England.

When Margery is abroad, her weeping creates as much disturbance and antipathy as it does at home. But otherwise, when she is abroad, she emerges in her text as a far more tenuous and peripheral presence—a woman remarked at best in passing, for the most part slighted and disregarded, isolated too by her inability to speak any language but English. It is against this desultory and disorienting backdrop that Margery strikes a bargain with her Lord: if she is brought safely to Rome, she will fulfill His longstanding injunction that she wear white clothes (1.30). She keeps her bargain (1.31) and has the self-possession to defy an English priest in Rome who commands her to shed her hypocritical holiness (1.33). Next, however, she obeys a German priest who tells her to resume wearing her black clothes (1.34). Yet what looks like vacillation proves to be the last shedding of Margery's diffidence regarding the rightness of a mystical spousal for one in her marital state. In direct succession follows one of the most arresting chapters in the Book (1.35): Margery's account of her wedding to the Godhead in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Rome on the feastday of St. John Lateran. This experience, in which God the Father plights to Margery's soul the bridegroom's “for richer or for poorer” troth before the other Persons of the Trinity and a large company of saints and angels, reconfirms dramatically the lesson of non-exclusivity in her roles and relations which she had earlier been taught as a precept. This experience also climaxes the pilgrimage of nearly two years on which Margery had embarked just after she and John had together vowed sexual continence. Quite simply, it makes her able to return home.

A rapid narrative transition signals that any further development of the ramifications of Margery's status, selfhood, and spirituality, as externalized in the issue of her clothing, must await her arrival in England. The development begins as soon as she disembarks in Norwich and regains the use of her tongue in her native speech community (1.43). To a monk who confronts her with the rumor that she had borne an illegitimate child abroad, she declares “how it was owr Lordys wyl that sche xulde be clad in white clothyng.” This declaration seems to be vindicated forthwith; “a worshepful man in Norwich” makes her a present of a white gown, kirtle, hood, and cloak, and John, her husband, arrives to conduct her back to Lynn (1.44; BMK, pp. 103, 104; B-B, pp. 90, 91). Before she can go her way, however, Margery has to answer to the bishop of Worcester for calling some of his retainers “the Develys men” because they wore slashed and pointed clothes (1.45; BMK, p. 109; B-B, p. 96) much like those she describes herself as having worn in her unregenerate youth (cf. 1.2). To her surprise, the bishop receives Margery hospitably, white clothes and all, insisting that she dine with him because he recognizes her as John of Brunham's daughter, from Lynn. In this solitary instance social identification promotes rather than hinders acceptance of Margery's singular spirituality.

Much more typical and much more highlighted in the narrative design of the Book are the negative reactions to her spirituality and selfhood which Margery proceeds to encounter at Leicester, York, and Beverley. In the next sequence of chapters, every interrogation ends by pitting the power of society against Margery's dual spousal, the operative assumption of the authorities being that once they determine who she is, they will know what she cannot be. Thus the mayor of Leicester reviles Margery as “a fals strumpet, a fals loller, & a fals deceyver of the pepyl” when she lays claim to the identity of a bride of God. Indeed, she makes matters worse and seems more outrageous when she offers on behalf of her claim the credentials of her present male connections:

“Syr,” sche seyd, “I am of Lynne in Norfolke, a good mannys dowtyr of the same Lynne, whech hath ben meyr fyve tymes of that worshepful burwgh and aldyrman also many ierys, & I have a good man, also a burgeys of the seyd town, Lynne, to myn husbond” (1.46; BMK, pp. 111-12; B-B, p. 98).

By contrast, the steward of Leicester refuses to believe Margery's protestations that she is “a mannys wife” because she is unaccompanied. When she resists his sexual advances by laying claim to the protection of divine love, the steward's bafflement erupts in this disjunction: “Eythyr thu art a ryth good woman er ellys a ryth wikked woman” (1.47; BMK, p. 113; B-B, p. 100). Later, as events in Leicester build to a hearing on heresy charges before the abbot and dean, Margery struggles to articulate her understanding of the embracing consciousness enjoined on her as her proper spirituality. Confessing herself, on the one hand, “bowndyn” to the husband by whom she has “born xiiij childeryn,” she asserts, on the other, that “there is no man in this worlde that I lofe so meche as God, for I lofe hym a-bovyn al thynge.” She then phrases the inclusiveness of her feeling in her state of dual spousal in this way: “Ser, I telle iow trewly I lofe al men in God & for God.” The only response she records from Leicester officialdom to all this comes from a man who frankly sees her example as a threat to the social order: “I wil wetyn why thow gost in white clothys, for I trowe thow art comyn hedyr to han a-way owr wyvys fro us & ledyn hem wyth the” (1.48; BMK, pp.115, 116; B-B, pp. 102, 103).

The pattern of incomprehension and recoil which unfolds in such detail at Leicester continues at York. There Margery, clad in white, circulates like a preaching friar among the people, reprehending vice in folk fables—for example, that of the bear and the flowering pear tree—which she herself devises (1.50, 52). Although she is branded a “wolf” in her white wool clothing and warned by the archbishop not to “techyn ne chalengyn the pepil in my diocyse” any longer, she refuses to swear an oath to this effect; for, she says, Christ in the Gospel gave women warrant to witness of Him (BMK, pp. 120, 125-26; B-B, pp. 107,113). At Beverley, questions about Margery's identity predominate. First she is accused of being Lord Cobham's daughter and a member of an outlawed communications ring (1. 53); later she is taken for the woman who counseled Lady Greystoke, John of Gaunt's granddaughter, to forsake her husband (1.54). Finally, the disruptive force which she is perceived as being finds recognition even in the friendly advice given to Margery by countrymen of the Beverley region: “Forsake this lyfe that thu hast, & go spynne & carde as other women don, & suffyr not so meche schame & so meche wo” (BMK, p. 129; B-B, p. 117).

Throughout the narrative of her experiences at Leicester, York, and Beverley, Margery's mounting confidence regarding her spirituality, selfhood, and authorship takes shape in a distinct, if complex design. To some extent the sequence reads typologically, for it utilizes the familiar conventions of female and male saints' lives: it develops Margery's identity through identification with her Lord, a prophet without honor in his own country (Matthew 13:57; Mark 6:4; John 4:44) who was repeatedly called to account by the civil and religious authorities of his time. Nevertheless, the dominant overlay in the design of the narrative sequences of Margery's Book remains circumstantial, experiential, autobiographical. We are repeatedly reminded that the selfhood and the spirituality in question are a woman's, and that it is she, rather than a third party, who stands to vouch to the authorities for what she has learned about divine love: its embrace transcends all human compartmentalizations. Thus a deep thematic resonance emits from the narrative resolution (1.55) in which Margery finally obtains permission to dress in public as a bride of God after her husband has accompanied her to Lambeth palace and made appeal with her to the archbishop of Canterbury.

Just how constitutive this autobiographical design is in the composition of The Book of Margery Kempe can be traced likewise in the shaping of the materials of its second book, a comparatively brief addition made in 1436, at a four-year remove from the original account. Margery may have been motivated to resume her life story by a revelation from her Lord that her authorial efforts pleased Him (1.89). In the second book the aging Margery continues to learn how she is to accommodate her human involvements as a mother and mother-in-law to her Lord's spiritual imperatives. Since the issue of her selfhood is cast once again as a quest fraught with opposition and misgivings, it is a noteworthy advance that “this creatur” is able, for the first and only time in her Book, to make a full reference to herself as “Mar. Kempe of Lynne” (2.9) in a context where she is being maligned and misreported. From start to finish, we find her tirelessly absorbed in what she conceives as setting the record straight about herself.¹¹

Beyond its function as a catalyst in the narrative, Margery's apprehension of specific imperatives of divine love for her as a female contributes vitally to the emotional and thematic substance of her story. This apprehension has a continuing referent in the mode of behavior enjoined upon Margery when she acts the role of Our Lady's maidservant in her revelations; the mode is summed up in the set phraseology of the wordpairs mekenes & pacyens, mekely & paciently.¹² Although these wordpairs are reserved for the characterization of Margery's role as maidservant, they obviously have no exclusive bearing on female comportment. Another phrase, however, develops more and more exclusively female associations as Margery learns through conversations with her Lord that divine love must manifest itself in her life by familiarity, intimacy, openness of the self to another, especially in acts of tendance and nurture. The locution for such love in Margery's Book is one shared with Julian's Showings: “to be homly.”¹³ But in Margery's Book, unlike Julian's Showings, the homeliness of divine love becomes a direct function of mystical spousal. Her Lord tells Margery: “For it is convenyent the wyf to be homly wyth hir husbond. … Ryght so mot it be twyx the & me, for I take non hed what thu hast be but what thu woldist be. … Therfore most I nedys be homly wyth the.” In turn, the homeliness of divine love, ranging through the reaches of the husband-wife relationship, is to activate simultaneously in Margery the entire spectrum of female responses and roles. Thus her Lord exhorts her:

“Take me to the as for thi weddyd husbond, as thy derworthy derlyng, & as for thy swete sone, for I wyl be lovyd as a sone schuld be lovyd wyth the modyr & wil that thu love me, dowtyr, as a good wife owyth to love hir husbonde” (1.36; BMK, p. 90; B-B, p. 77).

Such exhortations embolden Margery, in a remarkable continuation of this passage, to invite the reader's reflection on all the reasons a woman might have to open her arms or to share her bed with another in the course of her experience. By these homely images of her own, she evokes the manifold responsiveness which divine love demands of her soul.

As Margery progresses on the contemplative plane, she finds herself able to empathize equally with the love felt for Jesus by his mother Mary, by the passionately devoted Mary Magdalene, and by the bereaved disciples—all personages with whom she has vivid and prolonged visionary contact. What is more, she learns to integrate her visions with her experiences in the world, at first simply as an observer who has as ready a devotional response to mothers with their boy babies, or to seemly youths, or to a beating in the street as she has to a consecrated Host, images of Our Lady and Christ, or the sacred places of Jerusalem.¹⁴ But a still more significant stage in Margery's maturing sense of self as loving and beloved of God involves putting her tenderheartedness to the test in day-to-day conduct. A priest in Rome inducts her in this vein by assigning her, as a penance, the care of a destitute old woman for six weeks (1.34); immediately thereafter, she is brought to recognize her creaturehood as wedded to the Godhead of the Father, and His will and purposes, not simply engrossed in love and affection for the Manhood of Christ (1.35). The consequent redirecting of Margery's energies into difficult and even repellent tasks becomes a measure of her growth in understanding and responding to the absoluteness of divine love. The measure is at its fullest late in Book 1, where a series of chapters carry the ramifications of spirituality and selfhood to the greatest experiential extremities and autobiographical insights in Margery's Book.

Margery describes her ministrations to various sick persons in Lynn, particularly the affectionate care which she—like Marie d’Oignies—gave to street lepers whom others reviled and refused to touch, as she, too, formerly had done (1.72, 74, 75). Then, by one of the associative, loosely temporal transitions so characteristic of her Book,¹⁵ Margery proceeds to relate the most taxing but finally illuminating imperative laid upon her by divine love: her six years spent in nursing her senile, incontinent husband after a near-fatal fall (1.76). With extraordinary candor she rehearses her Lord's injunction—“I bydde the take hym hom & kepe hym for my lofe”—and her objection to doing what she considered a severe hindrance to her mystical spousal. “Nay, good Lord,” Margery rejoins, “for I xal than not tendyn to the as I do now.” But her Lord insists that she fix her thoughts on the all-embracingness of spirituality which is her peculiar lesson and the overarching theme of her Book:

“iys, dowtyr,” seyd owr Lord, “thu xalt have as meche mede for to kepyn hym & helpyn hym in hys nede at hom as iyf thu wer in chirche to makyn thi preyerys. And thu hast seyd many tymys that thu woldist fawyn kepyn me. I prey the now kepe hym for the lofe of me, for he hath sumtyme fulfillyd thi wil & my wil bothe, and he hath mad thi body fre to me that thu xuldist servyn me & levyn chast & clene, and therfor I wil that thu be fre to helpyn hym at hys nede in my name” (BMK, p. 180; B-B, p. 165).

In the event, as she describes it, Margery draws heavily upon the range of female roles she has acted in life to persevere in caring for her husband. Her candor and authorial self-consciousness come to the fore again in her remarkable admission that, only by making herself remember the “many delectabyl thowtys, fleschly lustys, & inordinat lovys to hys persone” that she had entertained “in hir iong age,” could she steel herself to the endless washing and wringing entailed when John “in hys last days … turnyd childisch a-ien” and “as a childe voydyd his natural digestyon in hys lynyn clothys ther he sat be the fyre er at the tabil, whethyr it wer, he wolde sparyn no place” (BMK, p. 181; B-B, pp. 165-66). Clearly, the implicit typology of this episode derives from the parable in Matthew 25:31-46; its moral is that any ministering done to the least of one's fellow human beings is done to Christ. And yet this moral translates literally in Margery's life as a resumption of earlier diapering and laundering to keep pace with John's lapse into second childhood. But the both enjoined and voluntary character of the resumption makes all the difference: Margery undertakes it on her Lord's assurance that such service will not separate her from her devotion to Him; rather, it will confirm her devotion all the more.

The third from last chapter (1.86) in the original ending of Margery's Book is particularly conclusive for understanding the meaning and purpose of her life as she represents them. Here her Lord emphasizes that she did not repudiate her earlier sexual and social roles through mystical spousal, but, instead, was granted a means to their more encompassing exercise. He interprets the pattern of her marital experience for her as follows:

Dowtyr, iyf thu knew how many wifys ther arn in this worlde that wolde lovyn me & servyn me ryth wel & dewly, iyf thei myght be as frely fro her husbondys as thu art fro thyn, thu woldist seyn that thu wer ryght meche beheldyn on-to me. … And for the gret homlynes that I schewe to the … thu art mekyl the boldar to askyn me grace for thi-selfe, for thin husbond, & for thi childryn & thu makyst every Cristen man & woman thi childe in thi sowle for the tyme & woldist han as meche grace for hem as for thin owyn childeryn (BMK, p. 212; B-B, p. 192).

In reporting her Lord's words thus, Margery signals the fulfillment of her spirituality and selfhood through an expansion of her wifely and maternal concerns to encompass all the souls of Christendom in homely love. Such a transvaluation of the sexual and social roles into which she was born made an autobiographer of her as well, for she resolved that the implications she perceived in her experience should be preserved in the Book that keeps alive for us her name and her story.

Notes

1. Margery's reflections on her authorial role, both on her inward sense (shared with Julian of Norwich) that she should await understanding before recording her experience and on the time and effort that authorship took away from her life of devotion, are to be found in the latter part of the preface and in Book 1, chapters 87 and 88. See The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford B. Meech, with annotation by Hope Emily Allen, EETS orig. ser. 212 (London: Humphrey Milford, 1940), pp. 3-6, 214-16, 219-20; cited hereafter as BMK. For discussion of aspects of the cooperative process by which Margery's Book came into being, see M. C. Seymour, “A Fifteenth-Century East Anglian Scribe,” Medium Aevum 37 (1968): 166-73; and John C. Hirsh, “Author and Scribe in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Medium Aevum 44 (1975): 145-50.

2. See, in the former connection, H. S. Bennett's essay on Margery in his Six Medieval Men and Women (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 124-50; and Joseph Crawford, “Independent Women in a Medieval World,” Spiritual Life 20 (1973): 199-203. In the latter connection, see especially Shozoo Shibath, “Notes on the Vocabulary of The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Studies in English Grammar and Linguistics: A Miscellany in Honor of Takanobu Otsuka, ed. Kazuo Araki (Tokyo: Kenkyusha, 1958), pp. 209-220; Alfred Reszkiewicz, Main Sentence Elements in ‘The Book of Margery Kempe’: A Study in Major Syntax (Wroclaw: Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1962); and Robert Karl Stone, Middle English Prose Style: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich (The Hague: Mouton, 1970). For listings of other studies, see the “Margery Kempe” section in A Bibliographical Index of Five English Mystics, comp. and ann. by Michael E. Sawyer (Pittsburgh: The Clifford E. Barbour Library of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, 1978), pp. 97-103.

3. See BMK, 1, chaps. 17, 58, 62. For discussions of Margery's spirituality, see W. A. Pantin, The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1955), pp. 256-63; Edmund Colledge, “Margery Kempe,” in Pre-Reformation English Spirituality, ed. James Walsh (New York: Fordham University Press, 1965), pp. 210-23; Wolfgang Riehle, The Middle English Mystics, trans. B. Standring (London: Routledge, 1981); and Hope Phyllis Weissman, “Margery Kempe in Jerusalem: Hysterica Compassio in the Late Middle Ages,” in Acts of Interpretation: The Text in Its Contexts, ed. Mary J. Carruthers and Elizabeth D. Kirk (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982), pp. 201-17. On the emergence of the affective tradition of devotion to the Sacred Manhood and Passion of Christ, see André Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots du moyen âge latin: Etudes d’histoire littéraire (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1932; rpt. Etudes augustiniennes, 1971), pp. 62-63, 126-37, 476-82; Simone Roisin, L’Hagiographie cistercienne dans le diocèse de Liège au XIII^e siècle, Université de Louvain: Recueil de travaux d’histoire et de philologie, series 3, no. 27 (Louvain: Bibliothèque de l’Université, 1947); Michael Goodich, “The Contours of Female Piety in Later Medieval Hagiography,” Church History 50 (1981): 20-32, esp. 23-25; Brant Pelphrey, Love Was His Meaning: The Theology and Mysticism of Julian of Norwich, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, no. 92 (Salzburg, 1982); and Caroline W. Bynum, “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century,” in Medieval Women, ed. Hope Phyllis Weissman (forthcoming).

4. BMK, p. 153. In quoting, I have substituted th for the ‘thorn’ letter and v and j for consonantal u and i, respectively. For the convenience of those wishing to consult the modernized transcript made by the owner of the unique manuscript, I include correlated page references to W. Butler-Bowdon, The Book of Margery Kempe: A Modern Version (New York: The Devin-Adair Co., 1944), p. 140; hereafter cited as B-B.

5. To date, the most precise attempt to delineate the singularities and the common features in Margery's spirituality as viewed against a continental and then a specifically English backdrop has been made by Susan Dickman, “Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition of the Pious Woman,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge, Eng.: Boydell and Brewer, Ltd., 1984), pp. 150-68. Dickman's account of the new socioreligious developments which Jacques de Vitry recognized in emergent mulieres sanctae like Marie d’Oignies and her followers (pp. 155-57) highlights two apparently distinctive features of Margery's spirituality: (1) her eschewal of community in favor of a strongly individualistic life style and (2) her public, social enactment of her mystical marriage which pits her understanding against male authority, clerical as well as lay (pp. 161-66). For other discussions of the increased activity and self-assertion of women in late medieval religious life, see Ernest W. McDonnell, The Beguines and Beghards in Medieval Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1954), pp. 219-319; Richard William Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 318-31; Brenda M. Bolton, “Mulieres Sanctae,” in Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World, ed. Derek Baker, Studies in Church History, no. 10 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), pp. 77-95; Bolton, “Vitae Matrum: A Further Aspect of the Frauenfrage,” in Medieval Women: Essays Presented to Professor Rosalind M. T. Hill, ed. Derek Baker, Studies in Church History, Subsidia no. 1 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), pp. 253-73; and Caroline W. Bynum, Jesus as Mother (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 170-262.

6. The identifiably female cast of The Book of Margery Kempe has been discussed generally but very suggestively in a four-way comparative study by Mary G. Mason, “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 207-35; esp. pp. 211, 217-21, 231. Mason's other texts are Julian of Norwich's A Shewing of God's Love (ca. 1373); A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding and Life (1656) by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle; and Anne Bradstreet's “To My Dear Children” (1657).

7. Dickman, “Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition of the Pious Woman,” pp. 159-60, remarks sensitively on the tension between sexuality and spirituality which Margery handles in a gentler fashion than do other medieval women mystics. For a less sympathetic view of Margery's spirituality as a means of resisting and evading the conditions of marriage, see Anthony Goodman, “The Piety of John Brunham's Daughter, of Lynn,” in Medieval Women, ed. Baker, pp. 347-58.

8. See Elise Boulding, The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1976), pp. 132-33, 146-47, 170, on the persistence of “women's tendency not to specialize” but, instead, to play a wide gamut of roles in culture.

9. Valuable sidelights on clothing as an adjunct of sexual identity are offered in Sandra M. Gilbert's “Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature,” Critical Inquiry 7 (Winter 1980): 391-417.

10. See, for example, the specifications regarding apparel in A Booke of Precedence of all estates and playcinge to ther degrees, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS ext. ser. 8 (London: N. Trübner and Co., 1869). Relevant period studies include Frances E. Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1926), esp. pp. 73-95 on Lancastrian England; and Françoise Piponnier, Costume et vie sociale: la cour d’Anjou (XIV^e-XV^e siècle) (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1970), esp. pp. 261-88 on the class nuances of female dress.

11. As an appreciable body of theory and criticism dealing with first-person writing continues to make clear, there is never an equation to be drawn between an author as an actual historical person and the “I” of that author's text, even—or especially—when the text insists on just such an equation. Hence Jean Starobinski, in “The Style of Autobiography,” Literary Style: A Symposium, ed. Seymour Chatman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 285-96, distinguishes the historical and discursive subjects in first-person narrations, extending a distinction between “énunciation historique” and “discours” made by Emile Benveniste, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 1:242. With interesting implications for texts like The Book of Margery Kempe Starobinski observes that the tension between being and self-knowing is usually resolved by some radical change which the autobiographer experiences, most frequently in the form of conversion to a new life. Other suggestive leads in interpreting texts like Margery's Book can be found in Joan Webber's The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968) and in the essays in Olney's collection, cited n. 6 above.

12. For example, 1:68, 69, 74 (BMK, pp. 166, 167, 177; B-B, pp. 152, 153, 162). For other listings of wordpairs and discussion of this stylistic staple, see Stone, Middle English Prose Style, pp. 121-33.

13. See 1.31, 36, 86 (BMK, pp.79, 90-91, 210; B-B, pp. 67, 77, 192). Cf. Dickman (p. 37): “Where Julian means the phrase to describe a kind of physical intimacy equally manifest in Christ's assumption of humanity in the Incarnation, in the suffering of the Passion, and in his willing to ‘show’ himself to a ‘creature living in sinful flesh,’ in Margery's Book the homeliness of divine love is most often manifest in a kind of domestic intimacy.”

14. See, in this connection, 1.29, 30, 35, 39, 57, 60, 72, 78, 82, and 83.

15. See, in this regard, the beginnings of chaps. 21 and 25 in Book 1 and the endings of chaps. 36, 67, and 85 in Book 1. Mason, “The Other Voice,” pp. 210-12, notes that a flexible, highly psychologized handling of temporal sequence recurs in female autobiography.