SOURCE: “From Utterance to Text: Authorizing the Mystical Word,” in Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, pp. 97-134.

[In the essay that follows, Lochrie asserts that medieval mystical texts, such as The Book of Margery Kempe,strive to “authorize the oral text within their written text.” Lochrie examines the way Kempe attempts to legitimize her oral text in The Book of Margery Kempe, and argues that this task is particularly difficult for Kempe due to her illiteracy.]

This book is not written in order, everything after the other just as it was done, but as the matter came to this creature's mind when it was written down, for it was so long before it was written that she had forgotten the time and the order in which things befell.

The Book of Margery Kempe

And with the same traversing, dispersing gesture …, she breaks with explanation, interpretation, and all the authorities pinpointing localization. She forgets. She proceeds by lapses and bounds. She flies/steals.

Hélène Cixous, The Newly Born Woman

The search for authority is a common practice among medieval texts, although the authorizing procedures of medieval texts vary across genres. Fourteenth-century literary texts, for example, often imitated the Aristotelian prologues of scriptural commentary by ascribing the authority of their works to the primary author, God, and to human auctores.¹ Nevertheless, their reference to authority differed from the authorizing idioms of exegetical texts in that their self-conscious manipulation of auctores drew attention to their own creativity. The art of preaching, by contrast, drew its authority not from any personal creativity or from ancient authors, but from the office of preacher itself. Artes praedicandi, in fact, disavowed personal responsibility for auctoritas, using instead the model of scriptural authors and deferring to divine authority.²

The difference in authorizing procedures among medieval texts calls attention to the importance of authorization itself to medieval discourse. No matter what method is used, the validity of the medieval text depends on its inscribed authorizing gesture, even if that gesture is purely rhetorical. Medieval literary practice, like medieval exegetical practice, consists in this authorizing gesture which founds the text as well as establishes the author as an auctor for the authorizing of future texts. A medieval text thus practices intertextuality to authorize itself at the same time that it sets itself up as “intertext” to some future work.

Medieval mystic texts … depart from this tradition of authorization. The chief difference is that, while literary and theological texts appeal to a written tradition in order to authorize their own writing, mystic texts seek to authorize the oral text within their written texts. Utterance is central to mystical discourse. It is the sign of God's grace and the signal of His authorization. The mystic is required to verify the source of this utterance—that it comes from God rather than the devil. More importantly, she must verify that the place from which God speaks in her text is separate from that of the magisterium language. Her locus of utterance already threatens the Church's role as author of God's utterance. The mystic must authorize this utterance as the same as, and yet distinct from, the utterance proclaimed by the Church and her ministers.

Such authorization can be tricky, since the position of utterance is ex cathedra. The mystic text does not vie with the magisterium language of the Church for its position; rather, it defines and asserts an alternative location for divine speech altogether: the mystic's desire. The oral text is neither accurately rendered nor explicitly authorized by the written text. It lies beyond the capacity of the written text to apprehend except through various signa of the mystic's desire. The goal of mystical desire, as the Monk of Farne laments, is to imprint itself upon the hearts of readers even as written characters are presented to their eyes. Because this desire remains hidden in the mystic utterance, the mystic text must find other means of authorizing itself than the written text or the archive of authors available to other kinds of texts.

The task of authorizing the oral text is particularly problematic in the The Book of Margery Kempe. Kempe's illiteracy raises the question of the relationship of author to book and of author to the mystical tradition. Modern scholarship tends to privilege the written text, often ignoring the oral text of Kempe's Book. Furthermore, her very authorship is often called into question where evidence of familiarity with Latin or English mystical works may be found in her narrative. Scholars prefer to attribute the scriptural and mystical subtexts of Kempe's Book not to herself but to her scribe.³

Those scholars who do ascribe the book to Kempe's authorship often do so by way of criticism. Its lack of order, narrative repetitions, digressions, and general lack of spiritual depth are faults that some readers might attribute to Kempe's illiteracy and the oral production of her book.⁴ Yet the problem of Kempe's illiteracy has never been directly addressed in connection with her writing and the authorization of her book. While scholars are aware of Kempe's quest for authority in her own life—through her visits to Julian of Norwich in 1413 and to various respected religious men—few have examined how that search works at the level of the text itself.⁵

Before looking at how Kempe's illiteracy functions in her narrative, we can observe an authorizing strategy in the story of how her book came to be written in the first place. Ironically, this story calls attention to her notoriety at the same time that it comments upon the relationship of oral to written text and her own role as author. In the proem to her Book, Kempe recounts in brief the story of her conversion and her subsequent efforts to substantiate her visions by “showing” them to clerics, including archbishops, bishops, doctors, bachelors of divinity, anchorites, and anchoresses. In spite of their urging her to write her revelations down, she waited more than twenty years until she was commanded by God to have her visions recorded. Her attempt to carry out His command turns into an ordeal lasting more than four years. She is at first unable to find anyone willing to transcribe or even “give credence” to her revelations. Finally, an Englishman who has been living in Germany agrees to move back to England to write her treatise.

When this scribe dies suddenly, Kempe takes her book to a friend, a priest, who offers to finish the book for her. To the surprise of both, he finds the writing incomprehensible:

Þe booke was so euel wretyn þat he cowd lytyl skyll þeron, for it was neiþyr good Englysch ne Dewch, ne þe lettyr was not schapyn ne formyd as oþer letters ben. Þerfor þe prest leued fully þer schuld neuyr man redyn it, but it wer special grace.⁶

(The book was so evilly written that he could make little sense of it, for it was neither good English nor German, nor were the letters shaped or formed as other letters are. Therefore the priest believed fully that man should never be able to read it, unless it was by means of a special grace.)

This muddled text of Kempe's revelations has raised much speculation about whether the first scribe knew English at all.⁷ Whatever the first scribe's language problems might have been, Kempe's text blames the second scribe's inability to read the strange text rather than the “evil writing” itself: he simply fails to achieve the “special grace” needed to read it. In the meantime he also becomes intimidated by the “evil speaking” about Kempe and abandons the project out of cowardice. He does not wish, he tells Kempe, to put himself in peril.

Four years later, the priest finally agrees to try to read the strange book again because he has become “vexyd in his consciens” for not having fulfilled his promise to write it. This time, he has less difficulty in deciphering the words. Instead, he is afflicted by another problem: his eyesight is troubled whenever he tries to write, even though he can see everything else well enough. After trying spectacles without success, he complains to Kempe of his “dysese.” She explains that the devil is afflicting his eyesight to prevent him from writing, but that he should persevere to the extent that God will give him grace to do so. The results are miraculous: “When he came again to his book, he might see as well, it seemed to him, as ever he did before by daylight and by candlelight both” (5). He is cured of his reading malady, and can finally read the text without any interference from the idiosyncratic script of the first text.

This ordeal is both wondrous and humorous at the same time—a feat which Kempe accomplishes throughout her narrative. … Beyond this, however, the story serves a a parable of the relation between the oral and written texts. The first written text was a disaster. Not only did it suffer from a mutilated syntax and grammar, but it was incomprehensible at the level of the letters. The “evilly” written letters with their queer shapes must have wreaked havoc with the most basic level of language, that is, the literal meaning.⁸ While scholars question the first scribe's grasp of English, Kempe does not blame or doubt the first scribe's literacy. The distortion of the letters is not, in fact, a writing problem at all, but the fault of reading.

The second scribe's dyslexia becomes apparent after he agrees to try to read the text for a second time and finds that “hys eyes missed so that he might not see to make his letters nor could he see to mend his pen.” His vexation is caused by his own doubts about Kempe, which prevented him from reading in the first place and which invite the devil's interference. It is only through Kempe's intercession and his reliance on God's grace that his eyesight is repaired. More importantly, his ability to read, and hence to write, has been brought about through Kempe's interdiction, that is, her insertion of her own voice between text and reader.⁹ This interdiction becomes her authorizing practice, which not only inaugurates the book but resurfaces in the text whenever the scribe (or reader) loses faith in her authority. Our own ability as readers to read, like the scribe's, is thus contingent both on belief and on Kempe's interdiction.

The radical contingency of the mystic text is exposed in the introduction to her treatise. She claims to offer this treatise as a comfort to sinners and as a witness to Christ's mercy. The reader should profit from the stories of Christ's works, but only if “lack of charity be not our hindrance” (1). Charity enables the profitable reading of mystical texts, just as lack of charity leads to misreading, perhaps even incomprehension, such as the scribe's. Doubt, fear, and cowardice all condition the priest's inability to read as much as any physical disability does. In view of this notion of the act of reading, interdiction serves the very important function of guiding the charitable reader. It does not, however, insure the text against misreading by uncharitable readers.

There is an analogy to be made between this authorizing practice of interdiction and the origins of mystic speech itself. Mystical desire creates the place for mystic speech, enabling God's interdiction in the mystic's soul. In Kempe's own conversion, this speech interrupts first her madness and then her sleep in the form of melody. Christ's interdiction is the source of the mystic text and continues to engender it in a series of locutions with Kempe. Thus, Kempe's own interdiction in the writing process imitates the practice of mystic speech. It interjects itself into the writing and reading processes to authorize itself at the same time that it instructs the reader's desire. In contrast to the Monk of Farne, who seeks a way to analogize mystic speech to writing, Kempe defers the written text to her speech.

This practice of interdiction in the written text needs to be considered in the context of Kempe's illiteracy. Specifically, we need to consider Kempe's illiteracy in the context of medieval notions of literacy and its consequences for the writing of her book. Her knowledge of other mystical texts and her role in the production of her narrative are at stake in our assessment of her literacy.

As we have known for some time, illiteracy in the Middle Ages is not the same as illiteracy today. The chief difference is that medieval literacy described the ability to read, but not necessarily to write, Latin. Although the term litteratus had been used before 1300 to include the abilities to read, understand, compose, and express oneself in Latin, after 1300, it meant simply “a person with a minimal ability to read” Latin.¹⁰ By the fifteenth century a London tradesman with this minimum ability could be included among the ranks of the churchmen and scholars, according to M. T. Clanchy.¹¹ Whether or not one achieved the status of clerk, many among the laity dealt in Latin documents or, at the very least, were able to recite some Latin, such as the Pater Noster and the Credo.¹²

Thus literacy was not a fixed or homogeneous category in the Middle Ages. “The literacy and latinity of an individual are in part elusive because the definition of both is necessarily a matter of degree,” according to Franz H. Bäuml. Neither are these categories of literate and illiterate necessarily allied with particular classes. Rather, a new category somewhere in between these two arises for the exercising of social functions, that is, a quasi-literacy defined by its access to the written word, including Latin.¹³ The increase of written documentation in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries required that different classes of people learn as much Latin as necessary to conduct business and legal transactions. This meant that those among these classes who had access to the written word were minimally literate.

However, it is also important to remember that although documents might have been written, the medieval recipient of the document often received it orally. A public document, a financial report, and even a legal charter would be read aloud for their “readers.”¹⁴ Not only were business and political documents read aloud, but spiritual works were commonly read during meals in late medieval households.¹⁵ Thus reading and speaking were not mutually exclusive language practices. Reading was more often linked with hearing or listening than it was with seeing. The written word was viewed as an extension of the spoken word. John of Salisbury's comment on the relationship between voice and written text interestingly conveys this notion of reading:

Littere autem, id est figure, primo vocum indices sunt; deinde rerum, quas anime per oculorum fenestras opponunt, et frequenter absentium dicta sine voce loquuntur.

(Fundamentally, letters are shapes indicating voices. Hence they represent things which they bring to mind through the windows of the eyes. Frequently they speak voicelessly the utterances of the absent.)¹⁶

The power of letters to speak the utterances of those who are absent suggests the fundamentally vocal experience of the written text. For the mystical text this notion of the written word is especially appropriate, since it is precisely absent speech that the written text seeks to capture.

At the same time, medieval culture reserved for the written text the power of letters to conceal the sacred. As Margaret Aston reminds us in Lollards and Reformers, in spite of the increasingly “everydayness” of reading and writing, “we must not forget the ability of letters to be arcane: that is to conceal rather than to reveal: to be symbols that enclosed a mystery rather than transmitting a message.”¹⁷ While this very reverence for the written word was viewed as idolatrous by the Lollards, it continued to persist in the culture alongside Lollard attempts to demystify it by making it more accessible.

So far, this discussion of reading and Latinity has been focused on the laity, but it has not distinguished between lay men and lay women. Were lay women, such as Margery Kempe, also able to participate in literate culture through business transactions and religious instruction? Clanchy makes no distinction between laica and laicus. Among the nobility laywomen were often schooled in Latin so that they might teach their children. However, among other social classes, the mother's capacity for such instruction was doubtful. As Susan Groag Bell has pointed out, “Medieval laywomen's knowledge of Latin was even rarer than that of laymen.”¹⁸ Medieval laywomen's access to the written documents, such as those available to the reeve, the bailiff, or the juror, would have been rare. Although they participated in some of the business and commercial ventures that men did, they were excluded from positions of social, political, and legal power.¹⁹ Margery Kempe's brief ventures into brewing and milling, even had they been successful, would probably not have provided her access to written documents or to positions of social or economic significance.²⁰ Furthermore, religious instruction probably did not provide the access they needed to be considered minimally literate. The Latin “Instructions” for an English layman, for example, advise him, “Expound something in the vernacular which may edify your wife and others.”²¹ Thus women did not have the same access to written culture that men did except through Church sermons.

Kempe's dictation of her Book may thus be viewed in the context of this general exclusion of women from the written culture of commerce and public transactions. It is true that women were increasingly literate in the vernacular, as the numerous commissions for vernacular translations of Latin texts and wills of books to daughters attest.²² Yet this does not necessarily mean that women could write. While our modern notion of literacy tends to pair the ability to write with the ability to read, the same is not true in the Middle Ages, for men or for women.

As Clanchy has pointed out, reading was more often associated with dictating than with writing in the Middle Ages. This was because writing was viewed as a separate skill in itself and one which required a good deal of sheer physical labor.²³ The act of composition was equated not with the physical act of writing, as it is today, but with dictation.²⁴ The branch of rhetoric which included the writing of letters was called ars dictaminis, “the art of dictation.” This prevalence of dictating as a means of composition further links the oral word (and reading aloud) to the written text. At the same time, neither the reader nor the author needs to be intimately familiar with the written text itself.²⁵ Except in the case of monks, then, an author and a reader might both maintain a primarily oral/auditory relationship to the written text.

A vivid representation of the relationship of dictator to written text appears in the prologue to Peter of Poitiers's Compendium. In a roundel on the upper left corner of the page, Peter holds open a blank, ruled book with his right hand and points to the roundel on the opposite side of the page with his left. In the roundel on the right, a scribe with his back to Peter twists around to hear him, a knife poised in his left hand over a blank parchment while his right hand dips his quill in his inkhorn behind him. In between the two are the words of the prologue presumably being dictated.²⁶ The written text is created in the midst of the act of dictation. The blank parchments are associated with the oral texts themselves, both the oral text dictated by Peter and the aural text received by the scribe. John of Salisbury's notion of writing as speech which voicelessly proclaims the utterances of the absent is rendered quite literally in this illustration of the dictation of Peter of Poitiers's book.

It is not only for Margery Kempe, then, that the written text was both the creation and the expression of an oral text; it is true for manuscript culture as a whole. While the book in a print culture is dissociated from oral production and identified by its appearance, the book of manuscript culture is more an utterance, or a “proclamation.” As Walter J. Ong reminds us, “What gave a work its identity consisted very little in what it looked like. The work was what it said when someone was reading it, converting it into sound in the imagination or, more likely, aloud.”²⁷ For those who cannot read, such a conversionary understanding of the written text was not only fundamental: it constituted the very basis for differentiating the contents of books. Bridget of Sweden's vision of the book speaking from the pulpit provides a useful trope for the orality of written texts. As she tells it in her Revelations, the book in the pulpit shone as brightly as gold:

Which boke, and the scriptur þer-of, was not write with ynke, bot ych worde in the boke was qwhik and spak it-self, as yf a man shuld say, doo thys or that, and anone it wer do with spekyng of the word. No man redde the scriptur of that boke, bot what euer that scriptur contened, all was see in the pulpyte, …²⁸

(This book, and the scripture thereof, was not written with ink, but each word in the book was alive and spoke itself, as if a man were to say, do this or that, and immediately it were done with the speaking of the word. No man read the writing of that book, but whatever was contained in the writing, all of it was seen in the pulpit, …)

The written word here proclaims and bodies forth before the gaze of the reader/listener. Each word is alive and “speaks itself,” thereby producing action in the world. Reading is akin to attending to speech-acts.

In the context of this notion of the speaking text and the medieval equation of dictation and composition, Margery Kempe's authorship is hardly anomalous. Why, then, her opening defense of her own interdictive powers over the written text? Apparently, Kempe feels it necessary to justify her own dictation of the book as much as modern scholars insist upon questioning her authorship. One of the reasons for Kempe's insecurity has already been suggested: that is, her own exclusion from written culture demanded that she justify her intrusion. A second reason is that, in spite of the fundamentally oral modes of composing and reading the written text, modes of authorizing a text draw upon a written tradition. While the methods of inscribing auctores into a text differ among literary, theological, and exegetical works, the sources (even if they are fictional) are written. The written tradition of auctoritas was conceived of as both continuous and hierarchically arranged, with the Scripture at the top and the works of pagan philosophers and poets at the bottom.²⁹

Kempe's anxiety about the oral text of her treatise is rooted in the subtext of the medieval written text, the auctoritas. This subtext gives cause for further anxiety because it is a patently male one. Any medieval woman author would have had to contend with this gendered, authorizing tradition from which she was excluded. This subtext, in turn, practices what Robert Hanning has termed “textual harassment” in the sense that the woman author is by definition excluded from the very operation of textual authority.³⁰ This subtextual authorization is not only unavailable to Kempe: it is positively hostile to women. The medieval antifeminist tradition, consisting of scriptural, exegetical, and literary works, explicitly forbids women from teaching or preaching, as we shall see. Kempe is forced to seek an alternative authorization for her mystical treatise at the same time that she must justify her own voice. Because woman's voice is censured from public discourse, particularly the discourses of preaching and instruction, Kempe needs to create a place for her own voice in the text and in the world. …

[T]he mystic always endeavors to verify the speech-acts in her soul, seeking signs that they come from God and that they produce acts of contrition, devotion, and compassion. Kempe's Book places marked emphasis on these speech-acts and hearing through what she calls “dalliance” and “colloquies” with Christ.³¹ Her preface cites the “wonderful speeches and dalliance which our Lord spake and dallied to her soul” which should cause such wonder and doubt among her fellow townspeople (2-3). These same holy speeches constitute her secretys which she shows to clerics. Her self-authorization proceeds from divine locution in the soul to showing her secretys to clerics and holy men, and ultimately, to her readers. Her method of authorizing her own voice, then, might be construed as a series of showings of the speech-acts in her soul. These showings, in turn, occur in the form of further locutions, even dalliances, with clerics.³²

Christ instructs Kempe to “speak boldly in my name in the name of Jesus, for they [his speeches] are no lies” (26). His authorization of Kempe's speech, however, is continually contested by the clerks and doctors of divinity who oppose her. Her ability to speak boldly and well about holy subjects nevertheless astounds some of the holy men she encounters. When Kempe visits Richard of Caister, the Vicar of St. Stephens in Norwich, in order to speak with him, he responds with skepticism:

Benedicite. What cowd a woman ocupyn on owyr er tweyn owyrs in þe lofe of owyr Lord? I xal neuyr ete mete tyl I wete what ie kan sey of owyr Lord God þe tyme of an owyr (38).

(Bless us. How could a woman occupy an hour or two in the love of our Lord? I shall never eat meat until I know what you can say of our Lord God during the space of one hour.)

Kempe then “showed him all the words which God had revealed to her in her soul.” Not only does Kempe occupy an hour or two with her speech, but she convinces the vicar that she is learned in the law of God and visited by the grace of the Holy Ghost (40).

Even more impressed with Kempe's speech is Thomas Marchale who invited Kempe to meals “to hear her dalliance.” He is so drawn to her “good words” that he becomes a new man, weeping with tears of contrition and compunction (108). Earlier in the book, Kempe visits William Southfield, a White Friar of Norwich, to “show him the grace that God wrought in her” and to determine whether visions were illusions or not (41). Her showing elicits the friar's assurance that her mystical experience is the working of the Holy Ghost in her soul. In both cases dalliance serves as Kempe's way of converting bold speech into action at the same time that it converts divine speech into showing. In this sense, her showing functions as oral proof of the veracity of divine speech in her soul.

The most significant endorsement of Kempe's visions comes from Julian of Norwich. Kempe shows Julian “very many holy speeches and dalliance that our Lord spoke to her soul” to determine whether there is any deceit in these spiritual locutions. Julian instructs Kempe to measure these experiences according to the worship they accrue to God and the profit to her fellow Christians. She also justifies Kempe's tears as tokens of the Holy Spirit in her soul. Finally, Julian encourages Kempe, “Set all your trust in God and fear not the language of the world” (43). Kempe's “holy dalyawns” and “comownyng” in the love of God with Julian last several days, providing a kind of oral testimony to the dalliance of God in Kempe's soul. Julian's advice that Kempe not fear the language of the world is a significant one, for it advocates the divine locutions in the soul—dalliance—over and against all those speeches and writings which threaten to silence her.

Kempe's assertion of her own right to speak and teach directly challenges the “language of the world,” including the writing of the Church Fathers and the clerical prerogative of speech. This challenge is complicated by the fact that it runs dangerously close to the boundaries of the Lollard heresy in fifteenth-century England. The prescriptions against woman's speech in scriptural and patristic writing are invoked to protect the clerical prerogative to preach.

The most famous scriptural text used to support women's silence is that of St. Paul: “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to use authority over the man: but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed; then Eve. And Adam was not seduced, but woman being seduced, was in the transgression” (I Tim. 2:12-14). Various treatises on preaching further reinforce Paul's prohibition of women's assuming the pulpit, signifying as it does, a reversal in the natural hierarchy which leads to the downfall of humanity. In a later elaboration of St. Paul's doctrine by the Dominican Humbert de Romans (d. 1277), Eve herself becomes a sort of false priest who, being corrupted in her own soul, provokes immorality in the souls of others. “‘She spoke but once,’” he quotes Bernard, “‘and threw the whole world into disorder.’”³³

Lollard activity in England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries circulated the antifeminist fears of woman's speech. One English preacher in Kempe's time, outraged over the growing number of laymen and -women who were usurping the clerical prerogative to read, interpret, and spread the Gospel, exclaimed: “Behold now we see so great a scattering of the Gospel, that simple men & women and those accounted ignorant laymen [laici ydiote] in the reputation of men, write and study the Gospel, as far as they can & know how, teach and scatter the Word of God.”³⁴ Not only were these laywomen and men reading and scattering the gospel, but they were being so presumptuous as to dispute clerks in public.³⁵

Records from the diocese of Norwich indicate that women Lollards were in fact “scattering the Gospel” in English translation.³⁶ While Lollards did not explicitly advocate that women should become preachers, they believed that any lay person could preach and teach the gospel and that all good people, even the laici ydiote, were priests.³⁷ In the words of one woman Lollard, Hawisia Moone, “every man and every woman beyng in good lyf oute of synne is as good prest and hath [as] muche poar of God in al thynges as ony prest ordred, be he pope or bisshop.” The publicity of the Lollard belief in lay preaching can be inferred from Archbishop Courtenay's alarm at the Leicester Lollards, who argued that “any layman can preach and teach the gospel anywhere.”³⁸ While Lollards were being tried and sometimes burnt at the stake at Smithfield, Parliament tried to curb the activities of unlicensed preachers by issuing the statute, De heretico comburendo, which called for their punishment.³⁹

Kempe's own preaching and teaching raise the specter of Lollardy, causing townspeople to curse her and clerics to accuse her of Lollard beliefs.⁴⁰ After Kempe criticizes some clerics at Lambeth for swearing, she is confronted with an angry townswoman who says, “I wish you were in Smithfield, and I would carry a fagot to burn you with; it is a pity that you live” (36). In another encounter with a group of Canterbury monks, she is followed out of the monastery by the same monks who taunt her, “You shall be burned, false Lollard. Here is a cartful of thorns to burn you with” (28). They are prepared to make good their threat to the encouragement of the Canterbury townspeople until she is rescued by two young men. Her own trembling, quaking, and standing stock still indicate that she, at least, believes their threats and is very much afraid of them.

Kempe's efforts to authorize her own voice are thus very politicized and dangerous. She must assert her own orthodoxy as a Christian at the same time that she argues for her right to speak. Obviously, this is a contradiction which continually threatens to brand her as a Lollard. She has few auctores whose writings she can bring to her own defense. If she tries to quote Scriptures, she again incriminates herself, for Lollards were said to have been able to read English translations of the Bible.⁴¹ In fact, when Kempe does quote Luke to justify her speech to the Archbishop of York and his ministers, the clerics respond in unison: “Ah, sir, … we know well that she has a devil within her, for she speaks of the Gospel” (126). Access to vernacular translations of the gospels was tantamount to possession by the devil. Clearly, Kempe's access to the written word, like her bold speech, is both controversial and dangerous.

At issue in Kempe's first arraignment before Henry Bowet, Archbishop of York, is her publicity and her speech. The clerics declare their fears quite openly:

We knowyn wel þat sche can þe Articles of þe Feith, but we wil not suffyr hir to dwellyn a-mong vs, for þe pepil hath gret feyth in hir dalyawnce, and perauentur sche myth peruertyn summe of hem (125).

(We know well that she knows the Articles of Faith, but we will not suffer her to dwell among us, for the people have great faith in her dalliance, and she might by chance pervert some of them.)

Her knowledge and belief in the Articles of Faith seem to be a ruse for her “dalyawnce” by which she perverts her listeners. The choice of words here—“dalyawnce”—is crucial, since dalliance is the source of her mystical and authorial credibility, as we have seen. The charges of the clerics echo the fears of Humbert de Romans and St. Bernard for the consequences of woman's speech. The archbishop attempts to assuage their fears by demanding that Kempe swear she will neither teach nor challenge the people of his diocese.

Kempe not only refuses to swear: she makes a case for her right to speak which is key to her authorization of herself as a mystic and her book as a whole. She defends her speech by citing a passage from Luke 9:27-28:

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 iaf þe sowkyn.’ Þan owr Lord seyd a-ien to hir, ‘Forsoþe so ar þei blissed þat heryn þe word of God and kepyn it.’ And þerfor, sir, me thynkyth þat þe Gospel ieuyth me leue to spekyn of God (126).

(And also the Gospel makes mention that, when the woman had heard our Lord preach, she came before him with a loud voice and said, ‘Blessed be the womb which bore you and the teats which gave you suck.’ Then our Lord responded to her, ‘In truth so are they blessed who hear the word of God and keep it.’ And therefore, sir, it seems to me that the Gospel gives me leave to speak of God.)

What is curious is that the Gospel passage does not explicitly endorse woman's speech, but rather her “hearing and keeping” of the word of God. Kempe's gloss of Luke seems rather forced and self-serving. However, there is an interesting precedent for Kempe's interpretation of Luke from a contemporary of hers. The self-confessed Lollard William Brute cites precisely the same passage in his argument for women's right to preach. His extensive gloss of the passage provides us with evidence of the Lollard argument for women preachers, and perhaps, of the subtext of Kempe's gloss. While acknowledging Paul's virtual command that women be silent listeners rather than teachers of the Word, Brute nevertheless makes a clever argument for women preachers:

Docere et predicare verbum Dei competit sacerdotibus et ad hoc tam a Cristo quam ab apostolis sunt in ecclesia ordinati, et Paulus docet mulieres in silencio discere cum omni subieccione et docere mulieri non permittit neque dominari in virum. Quod tamen non possunt docere neque in virum dominari non dicit Paulus, nec ego audeo affirmare, cum mulieres, sancte virgines, constanter predicarunt verbum Dei et multos ad fidem converterunt sacerdotibus tunc non audentibus loqui verbum, et an predicare verbum Dei sit maius vel minus vel equale cum ministracione corporis Cristi Deus novit qui respondit mulieri dicenti: ‘Beatus venter qui te portavit et ubera que suxisti dicendo quin ymmo beati qui audiunt verbum Dei et custodiunt illud,’ si beati qui audiunt et custodiunt, magis beati qui predicant et custodiunt verbum Dei, quoniam beacius est magis dare quam accipere.⁴²

(Teaching and preaching the Word of God belongs to the priests and moreover, they are ordained in the Church as much by Christ as by his apostles. Paul teaches that women learn in silence with all subjection and that it is not permitted to woman to teach nor to have mastery over a man. Because, nevertheless, Paul does not say they are not able to teach nor to dominate a man, neither do I venture to affirm it, since women, holy virgins, have constantly preached the word of God and converted many to the faith at times when priests were too faint-hearted to speak the word. God considered the question of whether preaching the word is superior, inferior, or equal to the administration of the body of Christ, when he responded to the woman who said, ‘Blessed be the womb that bore you and the breasts which gave you suck,’ saying, ‘Rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.’ If they are blessed who hear and keep the word of God, they are even more blessed who preach and keep it, because it is more blessed to give than to receive.)

A two-fold strategy emerges from Brute's defense of women's preaching. Brute negotiates the Pauline prohibition of women's speech by distinguishing between what women are capable of and what they are permitted, between what Paul explicitly forbids and what he fails to affirm. The example of teaching virgins contradicts Paul's prohibition, allowing Brute to insert exceptions to Paul's rule. His second strategy is to conflate the teaching that “it is more blessed to give than to receive” with the Christ's answer to the woman, rendering preaching the word more blessed than hearing and keeping it. In this way, Brute circumvents Paul's prohibition of women preachers.

Brute's defense helps to elucidate Kempe's own argument for her right to speak. Her “reading” of Luke and her assertion of her own teachings could be labeled Lollard. They are, in fact, Lollard arguments. She further threatens to speak of God “until the Pope and Holy Church ordain that no man shall be so bold as to speak of God.” However, she does make a distinction between teaching and preaching which Lollards do not make. When a cleric produces the inevitable passage from St. Paul that “no woman should preach,” she answers, “I preach not, sir, I come into no pulpit. I use but communication and good words, and that will I do while I live” (126). Kempe may seem to be quibbling here between preaching—coming into the pulpit—and teaching in order to rescue herself from the damning Pauline edict. Her distinction is not entirely original, though. In the beginning of the popular fifteenth-century treatise, Speculum Christiani, the author marks similar boundaries between preaching and teaching:

A Grete differens es be-twene prechynge and techynge. Prechynge es in a place where es clepynge to-gedyr or foluynge of pepyl in holy dayes in churches or othe[r] certeyn places and tymes ordened ther-to. And it longeth to hem that been ordeynede ther-to, the whych haue iurediccion and auctorite, and to noon othyr. Techynge is that eche body may enforme and teche hys brothyr in euery place and in conable tyme, os he seeth that it be spedful. For this es a gostly almesdede, to whych euery man es bounde that hath cunnynge.⁴³

(There is a great difference between preaching and teaching. Preaching occurs in a place where there is a summoning together or following of people on holy days in churches or other special places and times ordained thereto. And it belongs to them who are thereto ordained, who have jurisdiction and authority, and to no one else. Teaching means that each body may inform and teach his brother in every place and at a suitable time, as he sees it necessary. For this is a spiritual almsdeed, to which every man who possesses cunning is bound.)

Whether or not the author meant to include women among those bound to the spiritual almsdeed of teaching, his argument is very similar to Kempe's. The basic difference between teaching and preaching is the institutionalization of the words by means of specified places, times, and circumstances. The authority and jurisdiction of preaching belongs, the Speculum Christiani author is quick to remark, only to ordained priests. Teaching confers no such authority or jurisdiction on its speaker, yet it occupies the dangerously vast position of any place which is outside the pulpit. Kempe's appeal to this argument allows her to claim that crucial positionality of the mystic voice as separate from the magisterium one, and as legitimate in the eyes of God. It is also, then, a marginal, straying position which threatens to blur the boundaries between authorized and heretical speech.

Obviously, such a distinction does not diminish the threat which her speech poses for the clerics who oppose her and the archbishop, who merely wishes his diocese to be left in peace. In fact, it renders her speech immune from their authority and jurisdiction. We can observe clerical frustration when one monk curses her, saying that he wished she were closed up in a house of stone so that no man could speak with her (27), or when some men of Beverley gently suggest that she return to spinning and carding (129). Attempts to silence Kempe, however, are not always so innocuous. The Steward of Leicester tries to intimidate Kempe by speaking to her in Latin, and when that fails, by threatening to rape her (112-13).

Kempe's argument for woman's speech makes use of a popular debate of her time. But she is not the last to use the Lucan passage to authorize her own speech. In her Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan in the fifteenth century searches likewise for an argument for woman's speech which would refute the cultural idioms identifying it as “blameworthy and of such small authority.” The allegorical figure of Reason, who appears to the despairing Christine, points to Christ's favoring of woman's speech by having his resurrection announced by a woman, Mary Magdalene, as well as to other examples from the Gospels. She concludes her testimony to woman's blessed speech with the same passage from Luke cited by Kempe. Interestingly, Christine does not include Christ's response, which is so crucial to Brute's exegesis of the passage. Instead she considers the woman's speech itself as a model of wisdom, boldness, and “great force of will.” From this and her other examples she infers, “Thus you can understand, fair sweet friend, God has demonstrated that He has truly placed language in women's mouths so that He might be thereby served.”⁴⁴

This, too, is the lesson of Kempe's disputation with the clerics of York. Christ confers authority on women's speech when he blesses those “who hear the word and keep it.” This authority, in turn, privileges the spoken word over the written word. Her defense of her own “bold speech” provides Kempe a means of interdicting the written tradition of auctoritas which prohibits that speech. Both in her exchanges with Church authorities and in her mystical locutions, Kempe's voice “speaks between” the written antifeminist tradition and the written text of her own life, locating divine locution, and hence, true authority, in the place where she—and not the written text—is. True authority is always displaced elsewhere than the written text or textual tradition. Dalliance replaces auctoritas as the foundation of authorship and textual authority.

Dalliance also intercedes in the written traditions in Kempe's Book, as is the case with Kempe's vision of St. Paul, the primary scriptural auctoritas against woman's speech. In one of Christ's colloquies of reassurance, He thanks Kempe for her suffering and particularly for her weeping. As consolation for the hostility she endures, Christ reminds her, he once sent St. Paul to her:

Dowtyr, I sent onys Seynt Powyl vn-to þe for to strengthyn þe & comfortyn þe þat þu schuldist boldly spekyn in my name fro þat day forward. And Seynt Powle seyd vn-to þe þat þu haddyst suffyrd mech tribulacyon for cawse of hys wrytyng, & he behyte þe þat þu xuldist han as meche grace þer-a-iens for hys lofe as euyr þu haddist schame er reprefe for hys lofe (160).

(Daughter, I once sent Saint Paul to you to strengthen you and comfort you in order that you should boldly speak in my name from that day forward. And Saint Paul said to you that you had suffered much tribulation because of his writing, and he promised you that you should have as much grace in return for his love as ever you had shame or reproof for his love.)

We do not learn which writings of St. Paul's have caused Kempe so much tribulation, but his encouragement of Kempe to “boldly speak in my name from that day forward” points to the passage from I Timothy quoted earlier. Paul's endorsement of Kempe's bold speech undermines those very writings which have caused her suffering. In effect, he interdicts his own writings in order to authorize Kempe's speech. Ironically, the same Pauline texts so often cited as authorities against woman's speech become for Kempe the source of her grace. She places the textual harassment experienced by all women writers at her own disposal as evidence of her grace, and hence her authority. While Julian had urged her not to fear the language of this world, Paul assures her that she need not heed the writings of this world that would silence her bold speech.

Interdiction is the practice by which Kempe establishes and justifies her own voice within the text. Her locutions with St. Paul and Christ occur in between the written texts of her life and the experience, just as her own dictation intercedes between the acts of reading and writing. Interdiction performs that “dispersing gesture” which Cixous attributes to women's writing—one which “breaks with explanation, interpretation, and all the authorities pinpointing localization.” Kempe dislocates herself as author by breaking with written authority. In the place of textual authority she substitutes the volo of mystical desire which gives habitation to her speech.

This does not mean, however, that Kempe makes no reference to textual authorities; in fact, her Book does draw upon spiritual texts, and, oddly enough, she clearly views it in the context of a Latin tradition. On two separate occasions in her Book, a collection of texts is cited in connection with Kempe's own spiritual practices, including the Scala Perfectionis by Walter Hilton, the Liber Revelationum Celestium S. Birgitta of St. Bridget, Rolle's Incendium Amoris and the Pseudo-Bonaventure text, Stimulus Amoris.⁴⁵ As we have seen, some scholars would simply attribute these Latin sources to Kempe's scribe.⁴⁶ Meech and Allen note that Kempe could have known these Latin works only through “extemporaneous translations” by the priest who read to her over a period of seven or eight years or through actual English translations.⁴⁷

These references are further complicated by Kempe's own testimonies. She asks the Steward of Leicester to direct his questions to her in English instead of Latin because she cannot understand it (113). Yet when another clerk asks her what the biblical command, “Crescite & multiplicamini,” means in order to see whether she advocates the heretical interpretation of this passage to justify free love, she responds without difficulty (121). In Book II, when she is chided for her weeping, she quotes the Latin Psalm 126:5 and 6: “‘Qui seminant in lacrimis’ & cetera ‘euntes ibant & flebant’ & cetera, and swech oþer” (235). She clearly understands some Latin phrases and scriptural texts even if she cannot speak or hear in Latin. Nevertheless, it is remarkable in her book that Latin seems to comprehend her whether she comprehends it or not. A German priest who becomes Kempe's confessor in Rome understands no English, yet he is able to translate Kempe's stories into Latin to the astonishment of a group of her fellow pilgrims (97).

Though we cannot know how much Latin Kempe knew, neither can we ignore the Latinity of her book. We need to be aware of the fact that the priest who read to her probably read from Latin texts of Hilton, Rolle, and Bridget even if he then translated or paraphrased his readings. Kempe's own spirituality seems to be most markedly influenced by the writings of Richard Rolle, particularly the Incendium Amoris. This is one of the works which Kempe had read to her before the Latin text was translated into Middle English by Richard Misyn in 1434-35.⁴⁸ In fact, traces of Rolle's Latin work survive in Kempe's book, not only in her images and mystical concepts but in her mystical idioms.

Kempe's text frequently makes reference to the “fire of love,” a very common mystical idea attributed to Rolle in the Incendium Amoris.⁴⁹ Early in her book, she describes how her heart was consumed by the “ardowr of lofe.” Since most other references are made to the fire, rather than the ardor, of love, Hope Emily Allen speculates that maybe Kempe is making a distinction between two types of fires (271n). Yet a reading of the Latin text of Rolle's treatise reveals that the Latin ardor was often used as a synonym for ignis (fire) and amor (love). Rolle explains in his prologue that he uses ignis metaphorically to describe ardor, the flame or heat of love.⁵⁰ It is interesting to note that Misyn translates the ardor of the Latin text as “hete,” “lufe,” and “flaume,” but not the English derivative, “ardor.” Clearly, more than one translation of the Latin text is possible in Middle English. Kempe's use of the word “ardowr” follows the Latin more closely than Misyn's does, even though the word in Middle English does not have the same meaning as the Latin word. This could be the result of a literal translation of the Latin, either the priest's or her own. Whichever is the case, this is just one example of the Latin residues in Kempe's text.

Other borrowings from Rolle likewise recall the Latin text of the Incendium Amoris. Kempe's description of the first visitation of the fire of love, for example, is very close to Rolle's description of the same in his prologue. Kempe experiences the fire she feels in her breast and heart as truly “as a man would feel the material fire if he put his hand or his finger in it” (88). This material analogy is provided by Rolle as well in his prologue and in his English work, The Form of Living.⁵¹ In this case, Kempe's use of Rolle could have come from either his Latin or his English writings.

She also renders the Rollean experience of the fire of love in her use of the verb “languryn.” Rolle's fullest explication of the mystical lover's languor appears again in the Incendium Amoris. His explication of languishing comes from the declaration from the Song of Songs 5:8: “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, that you tell him that I languish for love.” Rolle attributes this languishing to the lover's abundant love, which lacks the object of his love. More importantly, this languishing accompanies the fire of love, according to Rolle:

Amoris ergo diuini incendii est mentem quam capit uulnerare: ut dicat, ‘Uulnerata sum ego caritate,’ et eciam languidam facere pro amore, (unde dicitur Amore langueo,) et inebriare: ut sic tendat ad dilectum, quod sui ipsius et omnium rerum obliuiscatur preter Christum.⁵²

(Therefore it is the mind which is wounded by the fire of divine love that is meant by, “I am wounded with love.” Also when one is made languid and intoxicated for love, it is said, “I languish for love.” For this is how one strives towards the beloved to the extent that he forgets himself and all things apart from Christ.)

Elsewhere in his Latin works, Rolle likewise attributes this “languor” to the wounding of the heart and the unsatisfied longing of the lover for his beloved.⁵³ Kempe's understanding of mystical languor closely approaches Rolle's, for she reserves the English verb languren only for her experience of the terrible lack of the object of her love. When she desires to be rid of the world, Christ instructs her that she must remain and “languren in lofe” (20). Her “languor” is often triggered by the “gret sowndys & gret melodijs” reminding her of Heaven and her own impatience for it (185). She needs only to hear the words uttered in a sermon, “Owr Lord Ihesu langurith for lofe” to be reduced to boisterous weeping (185). Her choice of words again invokes the Latin works of Rolle to her text. It is interesting to note that Kempe uses the verb “languryn” where the Middle English translation of the Incendium Amoris consistently translates langueo into “longyn.”⁵⁴ Her choice of the English cognate for the Latin words languor and ardor echoes Rolle more directly than does the Middle English translation by Misyn.

Kempe's clearest echoes of Rolle occur in her metaphorical renderings of mystical union in terms of song or melody and smell. Rolle's three-fold distinction among the stages of mystical ascent—calor, dulcor, and canor, fire, sweetness, and song—is made in his Incendium Amoris, although it appears in his Middle English works as well.⁵⁵ Kempe experiences the heavenly melody described by Rolle in his Latin work when she awakens in the middle of the night to “a sound of melody so sweet and delectable, she thought, as though she were in Paradise” (11). She later speaks of the “sowndys & melodijs” which she heard over a period of twenty-five years and which were so loud as to interfere with her conversations with people (87-88). These mystical references compare with Rolle's account of his own experience while he is reading the Psalms of a “suavitatem inuisibilis melodie” (sweet invisible melody) which overwhelms him. Not only does the divine voice become transformed into this invisible music, but the human response is also converted into song.⁵⁶

More significant is Kempe's reference to the heavenly smells, because she could have been familiar with this mystical sensation in Rolle only through his Latin works.⁵⁷ The mystical comfort Kempe receives comes in the form of “sweet smells” which exceed all earthly odors and the power of speech to describe (87). Christ also offers Kempe the comfort of knowing that at her death he will remove body from soul “with great mirth and melody, with sweet smells and good odors” (51). The mysterious odors of divine visitation infuse Rolle's Melos Amoris as they do few of his other Latin or English works.⁵⁸ While these heavenly scents may be found in continental mysticism, in England they are almost exclusively characteristic of Rolle and Kempe.

This brief overview suggests that Kempe draws upon the Latin writings of Richard Rolle to characterize her mystical experiences. Her references to divine fragrances, heavenly melodies, and the “ardor” and “languor” of love are only a few examples of the Latinity of her Book. Other examples from Hilton, Pseudo-Bonaventure, Bridget's Liber Revelationum Celestium, and the Stimulus Amoris need to be explored more seriously in Kempe's text than they have been previously. Although the Book's Latinity rarely surfaces, we can observe the process in the scribe's own authorization of Kempe's tears. After suffering from doubt about Kempe's tears because of a friar's preaching against her, the scribe reads several works which restore his faith in her, including the biography of Marie d’Oignies and the Stimulus Amoris. The scribe refers to the Pseudo-Bonaventure text, Stimulus Amoris, by its English title, “Þe Prykke of Lofe.” Walter Hilton translated this Latin work into English using the same title, but the scribe's quotation in Middle English actually corresponds more closely to the Latin than it does to the English text. Compare the Middle English version with the Latin:

A, Lord, what xal I mor noysen er cryen? Þu lettyst & þu comyst not, & I, wery & ouyrcome thorw desyr, begynne for to maddyn, for lofe gouernyth me & not reson. I renne wyth hasty cowrs wher-þat-euyr þu wylte. I bowe, Lord, þei þat se me irkyn and rewyn, not knowyng me drunkyn wyth þi lofe. Lord, þei seyn ‘Lo, ien wood man cryeth in þe stretys,’ but how meche is þe desyr of myn hert þei parceyue not (154).

(Sed quid vociferabor amplius? Tardas, et non venis, et jam lassatus desiderio incipio insanire. Amor regit, et non ratio, et curro cum impetu, quocumque me volueris inclinare. Nam qui me vident, derident, et quod tuo amore sim ebrius, non cognoscunt. Dicunt enim: Quid iste insanus vociferatur in plateis? Et quantum sit desiderium non advertunt.)⁵⁹

The scribe seems to be translating from the Latin rather than quoting from Hilton's Middle English translation, for there are some distinct differences in Hilton. Instead of the clause, “I run with a hasty course wherever you wish,” Hilton's text has “I run with great noise witherso my love inclines.” Further, Hilton inserts a phrase found in none of the Latin texts, substituting for “desire” “desire of Jesus burneth in my heart.”⁶⁰ Although the Latin text cannot be established conclusively as a source for the scribe's quotation, it can be seriously considered. It is possible that he translates from a text at hand as he writes this portion of the narrative. Since Kempe mentions the Latin title elsewhere, there is a good chance she was familiar with both.⁶¹

We have evidence that the scribe's memory of another Latin text fails him even though there is a clear resemblance between the Middle English and its source. The story of Marie d’Oignies, like the Pseudo-Bonaventure text, restores the scribe's faith in Kempe's tears. He quotes the incipit of chapter 18 and paraphrases the contents of chapter 19 of Jacques de Vitry's Vita Maria Oigniacensis. A comparison of the Latin source and the scribe's recollection again reveals a correlation:

Of þe plentyuows grace of hir teerys he tretyth specyaly … in þe xix capitulo wher he tellyth how sche, at þe request of a preyste þat he xulde not be turbelyd ne distrawt in hys Messe wyth hir wepyng & hir sobbyng, went owt at þe chirche-dor, wyth lowde voyse crying þat sche myth not restreyn hir þerfro. & owr Lord also visityd þe preyste beyng at Messe wyth swech grace & wyth sweche deuocyon whan he xulde redyn þe Holy Gospel þat he wept wondirly so þat he wett hys vestiment & ornamentys of þe awter & myth not mesuryn hys wepyng ne hys sobbyng, it was so habundawnt, ne he myth not restreyn it ne wel stande þerwyth at þe awter (153).

(Quadam autem die ante Parasceven, cum jam imminente Christi Passione majori lacrymarum imbre, cum suspiriis et singultibus, se cum Domino mactare inchoasset; quidam de Sacerdotibus ecclesiae eam ut oraret cum silentio, et lacrymas cohiberet, quasi blande increpando hortabatur. Illa … impossibilitatis [sic] suae conscia, egressa clam ab ecclesia in loco secreto et ab omnibus remoto se abscondit, impetravitque a Domino cum lacrymis, ut praedicto Sacerdoti ostenderet, quia non est in homine lacrymarum impetum retinere, quando flante spiritu vehementi fluunt aquae.)⁶²

The basic elements of de Vitry's story survive in Kempe's version, including the priest's prohibition against Marie's weeping, her inability to restrain her tears which forces her to leave the church, and, finally, the priest's own experience of uncontrollable tears. Yet the Middle English here does not follow the Latin syntax and wording the way the previous passage did. Is this an example of the scribe's faulty memory, or is he reading from a different text of Marie's life?

Kempe offers a parenthetical explanation which, because it is so uncharacteristic, should alert us to an important distinction between texts alluded to by memory, which need justification, and texts more directly available, which need no justification:

Than þe preste whech wrot þis tretys … had seyn & red þe mater befornwretyn [the story of Marie d’Oignies] meche mor seryowslech & expressiowslech þan it is wretyn in þis tretys (for her is but a lityl of þe effect þerof, for he had not ryth cler mende of þe sayd mater whan he wrot þis tretys, & þerfor he wrote þe lesse þerof) (153).

(Then the priest who wrote this treatise … had seen and read the matter before written [the story of Marie d’Oignies] much more seriously and in more detail than is written in this treatise [for here is but a little of the story's meaning, because he did not have a very clear memory of the said matter when he wrote this treatise, and therefore he wrote less about it.])

Kempe points out two important things in this passage, both of which are instructive as exceptions to the rule of her dictation. First, the story of Marie d’Oignies is the scribe's and not her own; and second, the written account is but a trace of the Latin story because the scribe's recollection was “not ryth cler.” The clear attribution of the Latin texts to the scribe's reading (and not Kempe's), along with her apology for his faulty memory, suggests by way of exception her own relationship as author to her text and to her Latin sources. The Latin traces of Rolle's works are not the result of scribal mediation, nor do they reflect the efforts of Kempe to authorize her own discourse. Rather, they represent Kempe's own inscription of the Latin culture which excludes her into her text by way of translation. At the same time that her own text echoes Rolle, it rejects Latinity and authorization of written discourse altogether.

The story of Marie d’Oignies and the translation from the Stimulus Amoris are used specifically to authorize Kempe for the scribe's sake. He has doubts about her weeping and her credibility, and therefore it is he who needs the comfort of these Latin texts to restore his faith in her. In a curious way these authorities serve not as signs of textual or authorial validity but as guides for reading Kempe's text. Kempe's own scribe is both her scriptor and her reader. In order to carry out his function as scriptor, he must learn to be a good reader. When he loses faith in Kempe, he also loses his ability to read, and hence to write, as we saw in the dictation scenario described in the Book's prologue. In this case, his faith and his ability to read are restored through the application of Latin texts—Marie's Vita and the Stimulus Amoris—as glosses to Kempe's life. Jacques de Vitry's life of Marie allows the scribe to accept Kempe's tears by means of comparison:

Þan he leuyd wel þat þe good woman, whech he had be-forn lityl affeccyon to, myth not restreyn hir wepyng, hir sobbyng, ne hir cryyng, whech felt meche mor plente of grace þan euyr dede he wyth-owtyn any comparison” (153).

(Then he believed well that the good woman, whom he had had little affection for earlier, was not able to restrain her weeping, her sobbing, nor her crying, that she felt much more fullness of grace than he ever had, without comparison.)

Likewise, the passage quoted from the Stimulus Amoris moved him to believe in Kempe (154). These Latin references are aimed at resolving the reader's doubt and restoring his/her credence in the author.

The Latinity of Kempe's text functions to direct her readers by resolving their doubts as she did the scribe's. While she never privileges this Latinity, she nevertheless inscribes it in her text in order to guide and direct readers, to jar their lapsed faith and renew their reading. Even where these Latin texts are not explicitly translated by the scribe, as they are in the passages described above, they “speak” to a readership that is literate in Latin and that relies on Latinity as a hermeneutic.

Interlinear and marginal annotations in Kempe's Book suggest that it was read (as well as dictated) in the context of a Latin archive of mystical texts. Four different sets of late medieval notations appear in the text of The Book of Margery Kempe. Three of these in brown ink are thought to be earlier than the fourth set, which appear in red ink in the manuscript. The three sets of brown annotations are chiefly emendatory, with a few merely calling attention to passages with the symbol n for nota.⁶³ The red annotations, by contrast, consist of commentary, summary, and emphasis of specific passages of the text. Written in a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century hand probably at the Carthusian monastery of Mount Grace where this manuscript was housed, these annotations may be construed as one late medieval reading of the text.

Among the marginal annotations are several Latin references to the fire of love and to Richard Rolle specifically. Textual allusions to the “flawme of fyer” and the “fyer of loue brennyng in her brest” are attributed by the reader to “R. hampall” and labeled ignis divini amoris. The reader's identification of Kempe's mystical experience with the experiences of the Latin works and concepts of Rolle is significant, since he does not always use Latin labels or commentary.⁶⁴

Next to another passage where Kempe describes herself as weeping uncontrollably and turning as blue as lead, the reader has written langor amoris. This concept, as we saw earlier, comes from Rolle and entails the lover's longing for his or her beloved, who is absent. Both the Latin marginalia construct a sixteenth-century reading of Kempe in terms of the Latin works of Richard Rolle. Here the marginal comment does not bear an obvious relationship to Kempe's text. What does weeping have to do with Rolle's concept of langor amoris? The answer may lie in Kempe's cries, which accompany her weeping, “I die, I die,” for Rolle often juxtaposes his languishing love with the mystic's desire for death.⁶⁵ In this case the reader's invocation to Rolle helps to place Kempe's roaring exclamations into a context we might not otherwise have considered.

Another marginal comment is more puzzling, although it appears two times in similar contexts. Amor impaciens appears in conjunction with two separate incidents of Kempe's roaring. In the second case, the Latin seems to comment upon the fact that she is unable to restrain her tears. Impaciens seems to be used here in the sense of “ungovernable,” because at issue in the passage is Kempe's controlling her tears during a Grey Friar's sermon. The reader's note is placed next to the Grey Friar's complaint that “she [Kempe] annoys the people,” and his request that she be removed from the church. The reader's comment, from whatever source it derives, seems to contradict the Grey Friar's assumption that Kempe can and should govern her boisterous cries. The reader is clearly familiar with a tradition of ungovernable love which he finds expressed in Kempe's clamor.

One of the fifteenth-century annotations in brown ink likewise “reads” Kempe's more extraordinary behavior in terms of Rolle, producing what Allen considers to be a “misunderstanding” of Rolle. Where the scribe mentions that Richard Rolle's Incendium Amoris helped him to regain faith in Kempe's loud cries, this reader adds the word clamor out to the side. While the scribe does not cite any specific aspect of Rolle's work, the reader interprets one, giving us a glimpse of late medieval receptions of both Rolle and Kempe. As Allen notes, the reader is probably linking Kempe's loud cries with Rolle's description of mystical song as a kind of cry: “clamor iste canor est” (the shout is the song).⁶⁶ Even though we might understand Rolle to mean something quite different from Kempe's boisterous cries, the late medieval reader clearly did not. This reading, in turn, raises the question of whether Kempe regards her own cries as the mystical clamores of which Rolle speaks.

Finally, at least four marginal comments appear to be quotations from Latin texts that the reader thinks Kempe's own English text invokes. In other words, he seems to be supplying the Latin source for Kempe's text. The closeness of the Latin annotation with Kempe's own words causes one to speculate whether even more of her text is Latin-based than I have been discussing thus far. After a period of temptation in which Kempe apologizes to Christ for doubting him, she vows to become “buxom” to his will, and she adds: “I pray thee, Lord, speak in me whatever is most pleasant to thee” (146). The reader interjects the following: “Loquere, Domine, quia audit seruus tuus. Audiam quid loquatur in me, Dominus Deus” (146) (“Speak, Lord, because your servant hears. I will hear that which is spoken in me, Lord God”). This annotation could hardly be mistaken for a simple translation of Kempe's text into Latin. Instead, it clearly invokes another text entirely, possibly the biblical text of 1 Sam. 3:9 and 10.

Similarly, next to the passage described above in which Kempe is reprimanded for not controlling her tears, the reader remarks: “Non est in hominis potestate prohibere spiritum s[anctum]” (It is not in the power of men to prohibit the holy spirit) (149). This comment differs from the previous one in that it does not attempt to draw a connection between Kempe's text and another one; rather, it comments upon the words and actions of the Grey Friar. Instead of reinforcing the Latinity of Kempe's text, it suggests a sympathetic reading of Kempe's controversial behavior—a reading that situates Kempe's text within a Latin medieval mystical tradition, not on the fringes. In chapter 6, this reading will be explored further to see how her text was read in terms of the late fifteenth-century contemporary, Richard Methley, as well as of Kempe's precursors.

The Latinity of Kempe's text, like that of the sixteenth-century reader's reading of it, serves to authorize it in contradiction to her claims not to know Latin. Her authorization is underhanded, perhaps even sleight-of-handed, since she everywhere insists on her own ignorance and Christ's coaching. She allows only that her scribe resorted to Latin works in order to restore his own faith in her. Kempe thus links Latin mystical texts and saints' vitae with the scribe's need for authority rather than her own. She does not acknowledge the debt of her own text to the Latin tradition so reassuring to her scribe. In fact, her text endeavors to deny its own Latinity. It has been largely successful, if contemporary scholarship's neglect of it is any indication.

What is the relationship of this authorizing Latinity to her privileging of the mystic utterance, of voice? In chapter 2, we saw how the mystic text is always unstable because it situates itself both within the authorized institution of the Church and outside it. Instead of drawing upon that “objective organization of statements” which are the foundation of theological, doctrinal, devotional, and homiletic texts, the mystic text affirms the place from which the other speaks. That is, it insists upon the “dialogic spaces” created by the mystic's desire and consequent voiding of self.⁶⁷ It is important to recognize that Kempe does not create this space within the Latinity of her text. The Latinity serves to restore the scribe's faith, but it is not the source of her own utterance. Instead, her locutions with Christ take place at the site of her interdiction in the written text.

Such interdiction is what Kempe seems to be describing in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter. This book, she tells us, is not written according to any order but according to her recollection of the events recounted: “And therefore she had nothing written until she knew it for the very truth” (5). Kempe is careful to situate the truth of her text not in the written testimony but in the oral one, which relies upon memory and pays little heed to the linear demands of written narrative. It is the utterance itself that intercedes on behalf of the written text, rather than the written inscription of Latin authorities authorizing the mystic text. Interestingly, Kempe's apologia is itself an interdiction, interrupting her account of the second scribe's difficulties in reading the first scribe's text.

It remains to be seen how this interdiction is established in the written text. The opening scenario of the scribe's ordeal in reading the first version of the book provides us with one example of how the written text, reader, and scribe rely upon Kempe's dictation for comprehension. Interdiction, too, plays an important role in Kempe's own conversion. Following the birth of her first child, Kempe despairs for her life and wishes to confess a sin she had previously kept hidden. She is interrupted on the point of revealing her sin by her confessor's sharp rebukes, and she goes mad, fearing at the same time her confessor's disapproval and damnation. The confessor's interdiction in the process of confession silences Kempe and ultimately forces her to go mad. It is repaired only by Christ's interdiction in her madness after more than six months to restore her to her mind. This sequence of events constitutes the violent process by which the mystic's soul is made the site of divine utterance. Kempe's wits are restored when she is able to listen to Christ. Divine locution, then, occurs at the rupture of the mystic's will and speech.

The temptations which are visited on Kempe also serve to condition her receptivity to divine interdiction. The first occurs soon after Kempe's conversion. She falls victim to the sin of vainglory when she desires Christ to come down from the cross to embrace her. As the text makes clear, Kempe's presumption lies in relying too much on herself and her desires (16). Three years of temptation prepare her, as Christ tells her, to “think such thoughts as I will put in your mind.” He concludes, “Then you shall lie still and speak to me in thought, and I shall give to you high meditation and true contemplation” (17). In fact, Christ here gives her permission to abandon her vocal prayers for this divine dialogue in her soul. This is a crucial step in the establishment of interdiction as a principle of the mystic text and utterance.

In a second incidence of Kempe's willfulness, she doubts God's interdiction, attributing a painful vision of the damned to the devil's deceit rather than to God's revelation. After a twelve-day period of suffering in which her holy thoughts and sweet meditations are withdrawn from her, she is restored to that proper desire which awaits divine utterance in the soul. She prays Christ to “speak what is most pleasant to him” in her soul, signifying her own submission to his will. The presence of divine speech in the mystic's soul depends on the mystic's desiring and creating an empty place for it—empty of will, speech, and human affections.

The self-abandonment which precedes mystic locution in the soul may be observed in other places in the text. Kempe seeks out divine interdiction to guide and direct her meditation, for example, when she begins her meditation on the life of Christ by asking, “Ihesu, what schal I thynke?” (18) This does not mean that Kempe acts as a passive vessel for divine utterance, because this request for interdiction already begins in the mystic's desire.

From the interdiction of divine speech in the soul, the mystic proceeds to interdiction in the discourses of the world and the text. Kempe does this explicitly by disregarding a discursive order in her book in favor of what she calls the “very trewth schewyd in experiens” (220). Her apology that her book “is not wryten in ordyr” is no humble pose, for indeed her book does proceed by “lapses and bounds,” as Cixous puts it, repeating, backtracking, rearranging, and qualifying itself.⁶⁸

“To fly/steal is woman's gesture, to steal into language to make it fly,” claims Cixous, explaining the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter. She plays upon the two meanings of the French verb voler meaning “to fly” and “to steal.” To these may be added the mystic's volo, that contractual statement of desire that permits the flying and stealing. It is this desire which enables utterance and which produces that corpus verborum—the text—out of abundance. Kempe's flying will be explored more fully in chapters 4 and 5, where we shall see how Kempe finds entry into the mystical text through laughter and tears. The “woman's gesture” of stealing offers us a way of understanding the relationship of the Latinity of Kempe's Book to the privileging of voice. … [W]omen are excluded from culture in the Middle Ages because they are denied access to Latin and the institutions it circumscribes. In spite of the fact that many people might have been quasi-literate in the language as their business transactions required, women still remained largely excluded from the magisterium language. Kempe somehow steals into the charmed circle, robbing the Latin works of Richard Rolle, and the Stimulus Amoris. This stealing is partly what makes the writing of her book possible at all, since her scribe shores up his own belief in her through these texts. It is also what enables his reading. Her scribe needs the authorization of the Latin texts of Marie d’Oignies and the Stimulus Amoris in order to read Kempe's. The text's sixteenth-century reader likewise read Kempe's book in the context of a Latin tradition of devotional writings.

Yet, though Kempe steals into culture by means of inscribing Latin works and concepts into her text, she never remains there. She always crosses the boundaries through her interdiction and by privileging the voice in the text over the written text. Dalliance, colloquy, and bold speech fissure the Latin text of her Book in order to provide passage to that “elsewhere” where mystical experience takes place.⁶⁹ Her speech begins in what the sixteenth-century reader called amor impatiens, “impatient, ungovernable love” and passes beyond the clamor of her cries and her text. This is her “dispersing gesture.”

Mystical utterance which attempts the impossible—to utter God—is always blasphemous. Kempe is aware of her own failure to utter (much less to dictate) “the unspeakable love that burned so fervently in the soul” (69-70). Although she views herself as God's secretary, she always acknowledges the insufficiency of her speech:

Ne hyr-self cowd neuyr telle þe grace þat sche felt, it was so heuenly, so hy a-bouen hyr reson & hyr bodyly wyttys, and hyr body so febyl in tym of þe presens of grace þat sche myth neuyr expressyn it wyth her word lych as sche felt it in hyr sowle(3).

(Nor could she herself express the grace that she felt, it was so heavenly, so high above her reason and her bodily wits, and her body so feeble during the presence of grace that she might never convey it with her words as she felt it in her soul.)

Her speech is already undermined by the inadequacy of language; it blasphemes in its presumption and in the tainted nature of all human utterance.

Yet her voice is not silenced or intimidated by its own presumption or failure. The failed human utterance is, in fact, what mystic texts practice as a rule. However, the location of this failure is what is important to the politics of mystical utterance.⁷⁰ In fact, her own speech points to the breakdown of the Latin discourse. Kempe situates her own failed speech in a Latin mystical tradition, at the same time drawing upon it and leaving it behind. Hers is not an enterprise of instruction, but one of desire. This desire, in turn, seeks out the hearts of her readers where it longs to make an impression like that of written characters upon the sight. Her voice charges the boundaries of uncharitable hearts and textual traditions. Like her clamor, which disrupts all human activity, her utterance tears at the fabric of the written text, instilling disorder, impatience, lapses, and verbal insurgency at its core. These are the effects of mystical desire.

This privileging of voice is not without its sleight-of-hand. Kempe plays the innocent with the Latinity of her text. She claims to be ignorant of Latin and clerical wit. Considering the evidence of her own use of Rolle and the sixteenth-century reader's reading, we must finally wonder whether she is as ignorant as she claims. We might explain The Book of Margery Kempe as the work of her more learned scribe. Or we might speculate that his simultaneous translations of these Latin works might have introduced Kempe to the words and concepts. Or perhaps it is time we read Kempe a bit more closely and seriously to consider her own acquaintance with Latin texts. If we do, we will find a curious and surprising comment by Christ made in passing. Near the end of Book 1, Christ assures Kempe that he is pleased with her meditations and holy thoughts, her prayers and her suffering. In the course of his assurance, Christ makes a startling revelation:

… I haue often seyd on-to þe þat wheþyr þu preyist wyth þi mowth er thynkist wyth thyn hert, wheþyr þu redist er herist redyng, I wil be plesyd wyth þe. (218).

(… I have often said unto you that whether you pray with your mouth or think with your heart, whether you read or hear reading, I will be pleased with you.)

Christ here recognizes both her reading and her hearing works read. The distinction itself points to her ability to read, although neither her editors nor modern scholars have commented on this puzzling evidence. It is interesting that her scribe does not dispute it either. Perhaps this is the ultimate sleight-of-hand: the literate author has slipped through her own text. If so, we are left with a gap which is as much a creation of modern scholarship as it is of Kempe herself. She pretended to be ignorant, perhaps, to steal; we have no such excuse. We have the precedent of Christina the Astonishing (1150-1224), who claimed also to be illiterate, yet she knew Latin and the Holy Scriptures.⁷¹ If Kempe could read after all, it is time her late twentieth-century readers realized it. Yet Kempe's reading must not be forgotten or subsumed by her “loud voice,” for it represents the very means by which she steals and finally enables her own voice.

Notes

1. See the discussion of literary theory and practice by A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (London: Scolar Press, 1984; 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 160-217.

2. See Minnis on artes praedicandi, Medieval Theory of Authorship, particularly 136-38 and 174-77.

3. See for example, Anthony E. Goodman, “The Piety of John Brunham's Daughter, of Lynn,” in Medieval Women, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), who argues that the scribe was responsible for the argument of the Book, 348-49; John C. Hirsh attributes all that is worthwhile in the Book to the second scribe's authorship, “Author and Scribe in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Medium Aevum 44 (1975): 145-50.

4. For a summary of the criticism, see Maureen Fries, “Margery Kempe,” in An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe, ed. Paul E. Szarmach (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 227-29.

5. One exception is an excellent paper presented at the 1988 MLA Convention in New Orleans, David Lawton, “The Voice of Margery Kempe's Book.” Lawton makes the only case I know of for Kempe's privileging of voice and the clear signs of Latinity in that voice. Some of my own ideas presented here are indebted to Lawton's paper.

6. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford B. Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS, o.s. 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), 4. All quotations from this text will hereafter be cited in the text. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted. For a modern English translation, see Barry A. Windeatt, The Book of Margery Kempe (New York: Penguin, 1985).

7. Ute Stargardt has suggested that the anonymous scribe was Kempe's daughter-in-law, her son's Prussian wife, since she was likely to have been inexperienced in writing, “The Influence of Dorothea von Montau on the Mysticism of Margery Kempe” (Dissertation, University of Tennessee, 1981), 8n.

8. Walter J. Ong reveals the illusory connection in written language between the segmented letters and words on the page and a fixed and neatly separable literal meaning. He cautions that “a complex and polysemous utterance is no clearer when it is written down, nor is its meaning any simpler. We are surer that we can recover it word for word. That is all. But word for word, it may convey only a very obscure sense.” The Presence of the Word, 47-48.

9. I am using the term “interdiction” here to describe the interference of the dictating author in the written text, as well as in the writing process. My use differs from Lawton's notion of the “writing interdiction,” in which the written text refers its authority to the spoken one, “The Voice of Margery Kempe's Book,” 7. Lawton borrows the notion of “writing interdiction” from Domna C. Stanton, “Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?” in The Female Autograph, ed. Domna Stanton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 13.

10. M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 181-87. Clanchy points out that the terms for laity (laicus) and illiterate (illiteratus) were synonymous and analogous to another synonymous pair, clericus and literatus. According to these pairs of synonyms, lay and clerical were equivalent to illiterate and literate. Thus, a knight who possessed a knowledge of Latin might be called a cleric for his learning, while presumably, a monk or priest who was not “lettered” could be called a laicus, 175-81.

11. From Memory to Written Record, 185.

12. From Memory to Written Record, 189. Clanchy notes that knowledge of Latin extended from the central government to the manors and villages, where stewards, bailiffs, beadles, and reeves possessed a “pragmatic literacy” by 1200 (187).

13. Franz H. Bäuml, “Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Speculum 55 (1980): 239. Bäuml makes a case for quasi-literacy in terms of access to the written language, 246-49. Clanchy confirms the existence of a “pragmatic literacy” among the English after 1200, including peasants, From Memory to Written Record, 187.

14. See Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 202-26.

15. Of course, the lectio of monastic tradition also called for reading aloud: Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 216-17. This practice was also encouraged along with edifying conversation among the laity in the late Middle Ages, William Abel Pantin, “Instructions for a Devout and Literate Layman,” in Medieval Learning and Literature: Essays presented to Richard William Hunt, ed. J. J. G. Alexander and M. T. Gibson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 408-9.

16. Metalogicon, 1, 13. Quoted and translated in Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 202. For the relationship between speaking and reading, see 218-19.

17. Aston attributes this everydayness to the Lollard practice of posting bills to air their complaints, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), 108. I will be discussing some connections between Lollardy and literacy later in this chapter. Lollardy was an heretical religious movement associated with the teachings of John Wyclif. It lasted through the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and it represented a variety of heretical beliefs, such as that lay people could read and interpret scriptures and preach and administer the sacraments, that images and pilgrimages fostered idolatry, and that the sacrament of the altar remained bread after being consecrated. See Claire Cross, “‘Great Reasoners in Scripture’: Women Lollards, 1380-1530,” in Medieval Women, 359-80.

18. Clanchy mentions that noblewomen took an active role in the education of their children. How far this extended to the other social classes is not clear from his assertion that “by 1300 conscientious or ambitious parents of all social classes had strong motives for seeing that their children were clerici and litterati in the new minimal sense of being capable of reading a verse from the Bible” (196). Susan Groag Bell reminds us that women were excluded from Latin culture, and that this was a factor in their instigation of vernacular translations for the purposes of education, “Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture,” in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 165. Joan M. Ferrante argues that we know little about women's education, but she notes that after the thirteenth century the education of women suffered a decline because of their exclusion from the universities, “The Education of Women in the Middle Ages in Theory, Fact, and Fantasy,” in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme (New York and London: New York University Press, 1980), 9, 17.

19. See Judith M. Bennett, “Public Power and Authority in the Medieval English Countryside,” in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, 18-36.

20. Women were excluded from all “basic political, legal, and economic rights, according to Judith M. Bennett, “The Village Ale-Wife: Women and Brewing in Fourteenth-Century England,” in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 28. Even though they might be commercially successful as ale-wives, they were still viewed by the manorial courts as wives. In fact, it is often difficult to determine how many ale-wives there were because local court records list ale fines under the names of the heads of household, i.e., the husbands. See Maryanne Kowaleski, “Women's Work in a Market Town: Exeter in the Late Fourteenth Century,” in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, 151.

21. Pantin, “Instructions for a Devout and Literate Layman,” 400. It is interesting that the text also instructs him at dinner to “let there be reading, now by one, now by another, and by your children as soon as they can read ” (399). Whether the wife was one of the readers here is not clear; however, the writer seems to be making a distinction between the Latin readings and the vernacular speeches of edification, as well as between their recipients. If the wife is one of the readers, the devotional guide seems to be advocating some additional vernacular instruction.

22. See Bell, “Medieval Women Book Owners,” 135-61.

23. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 97; for the perception of writing as labor, see 41 and 90.

24. Suzanne Fleischman has recently investigated how an understanding of the orality of medieval culture enhances our knowledge of “medieval textual language,” “Philology, Linguistics, and the Discourse of the Medieval Text,” Speculum 65 (1990): 19-37.

25. Clanchy makes this point, particularly as it is important to the illiterate person's access to written documents, From Memory to Written Record, 219. Only when reading and writing become silent activities do illiterate people become fully excluded from written texts.

26. See Plate XII of Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record.

27. Ong, “Orality, Literacy, and Medieval Textualization,” New Literary History 16 (1984): 2.

28. Bridget, The Revelations of Saint Birgitta, ed. William Patterson Cumming, EETS, o.s. 178 (London, 1929; rpts. 1971), 68.

29. See Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 10-12, 158-59.

30. Robert W. Hanning uses this term to describe the late fourteenth-century view of the medieval practice of glossing as a kind of violence done to a text for the purpose of self-aggrandizement. He further links this to the situation of women in Chaucer's texts—Criseyde in particular—who are “harassed” in effect by the antifeminist texts, “‘I Shal Finde It in a Maner Glose’: Versions of Textual Harassment in Medieval Literature,” in Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers, ed. Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 27-50.

31. Lawton notes the numerous verbs for speech to be found in Kempe's book, including spak, dalyid, and others, “The Voice of Margery Kempe's Book,” 8.

32. References to speech and speaking run throughout The Book of Margery Kempe, making them difficult to list in their entirety. A partial list of these instances includes 11, 26, 28, 29, 36, 38-39, 42, 47, 90, 93, and 230.

33. Humbert of Romans, Treatise on Preaching, ed. Walter M. Conlon, trans. The Dominican Students, Province of St. Joseph (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1951), 48. G. R. Owst discusses Humbert's remark in the context of the medieval sermon, Preaching in Medieval England (New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 5.

34. Quoted in Owst, Preaching in Medieval England, 136. He notes that Robert Rypon, sub-prior of the monastery of Durham and prior of Finchale, also comments on the activities of Lollard lay preachers, 135n. Claire Cross documents the participation of women in the Lollard movement, “‘Great Reasoners in Scripture’: The Activities of Women Lollards 1380-1530,” in Medieval Women, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 359-80.

35. Aston, Lollards and Reformers, 130. Reginald Pecock, bishop of Chicester, complained especially of the arrogance of women Lollards who “make themselves so wise by the Bible, that they “are most haughty of speech regarding clerks” (quoted in Aston, Lollards and Reformers, 51).

36. See Norman C. Tanner, ed., Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 1428-31 (London, 1977).

37. See Archbishop Courtney's examination of the Lollards of Leicester, including women, in Cross, “‘Great Reasoners in Scripture,’” 362. As Cross points out, Lollard activity in East Anglia where Kempe lived has been especially well documented.

38. For the testimony of Hawisia Moone, see Tanner, Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich, 142. For Archbishop Courtenay's comment, see Margaret Aston, “Lollardy and Sedition, 1381-1431,” Past and Present 17 (1960): 12.

39. Aston, “Lollardy and Sedition,” 31.

40. For more on Kempe in the context of the Lollard movement, see Clarissa W. Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and World of Margery Kempe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 103-12; 151-54. David Aers also sees Kempe's resistance to authority as identifying her with the Lollard movement; see Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360-1430 (London: Routledge, 1988), 84.

41. Women Lollards often knew Scriptures from having them read to them. In addition, however, they seem to have taught others including their own children passages from the Bible. See Cross, “‘Great Reasoners in Scripture,’” 370. Some of these Lollard women boasted of their learning. Margery Baxter claimed to have deceived a Carmelite, while another woman Lollard publicly declared that “she was as well learned as was the parish priest, in all things, except only in saying mass.” See Meech and Allen's commentary in The Book of Margery Kempe, 315n, and Cross, 371.

42. William W. Capes, The Register of John Trefnant, Bishop of Hereford (Hereford, 1914), 345. The translation is my own. Meech and Allen cite Brute's feminism in connection with Lollard advocacy of women preachers, but they do not mention the parallel between Kempe's argument and Brute's, 315n. Margaret Aston summarizes Brute's defense of women's preaching, Lollards and Reformers, 52.

43. G. Holmstedt, ed., Speculum Christiani, EETS, o.s. 182 (London: Oxford University Press, 1933; rpt. 1971), 2.

44. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea Books, 1982), 30. I have discussed this passage in connection with Kempe's search for authority elsewhere, “The Book of Margery Kempe: A Marginal Woman's Quest for Literary Authority,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 (1986): 33-56.

45. Hilton's text is not mentioned by title in either place, but the Incendium Amoris is twice referred to by its Latin title, as is the Stimulo Amoris, 39 and 154. As I will show, Kempe's use of these references differs in these two passages in important ways.

46. Lawton is the only one to point to the “signs of Latinity” in Kempe's text, particularly to her use of the Meditationes Vitae Christi. Lawton argues that this Latinity needs to be explored in more detail and that it signifies “a certain far from naive intertextuality in the work of Margery Kempe,” “The Voice of Margery Kempe's Book,” 4.

47. Meech and Allen, 276n. H. E. Allen also speculates that local copies of English translations might have existed at one time and have since vanished.

48. She mentions having this book read to her after she returns from her visit to the Holy Land, which was at least fifteen years before Misyn's translation (153).

49. While this work is the main source for the “fire of love,” other Latin and English writings by Rolle elaborate on this mystical experience, including the Melos Amoris, Emendatio Vitae, The Form of Living, The Commandment, and the lyrics.

50. The Incendium Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. Margaret Deanesly, Publications of the University of Manchester, Historical Series, 26 (London, 1915): “Necessitas quoque corporalis atque affecciones humanitus impresse, erumpuosique exilii anguscie ardorem ipsum interpolant, et flammam quam sub metaphora ignem appellaui, eo quod urit et lucet, mitigant et molestant” (146). Rolle also calls this warmth or love a “spiritual ardor” (147).

51. English Writings of Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole, ed. Hope Emily Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 105.

52. Incendium Amoris, 195. The subject of languishing also comes up in the English work, The Form of Living, but it is more fully elaborated in the Latin works, see English Writings, ed. H. E. Allen, 103-4.

53. See Rolle, Emendatio Vitae in The Fire of Love and the Mending of Life, trans. M. L. Del Mastro (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1981); and Melos Amoris, ch. 55, in The Melos Amoris of Richard Rolle of Hampole, ed. E. J. F. Arnould (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957).

54. For a comparison with the Latin passage quoted, see ch. 18, 40, where even Amore langueo is translated “for lufe I longe.” For another example, compare Deanesly's edition of Incendium Amoris, 216-19, with Richard Misyn's Middle English translation, The Fire of Love and the Mending of Life, or the Rule of Living, ed. Ralph Harvey, EETS, o.s. 106 (London, 1896; rpt. 1973), 56-58.

55. See Rolle, Incendium Amoris, 182-91; also The Form of Living in Richard Rolle, trans. R. S. Allen, 170-180.

56. See Wolfgang Riehle's discussion of Rolle's musical imagery, The Middle English Mystics, trans. Bernard Standring (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 119-22. The Melos Amoris as well as the Incendium Amoris uses the related notions of song and melody to convey mystical dalliance; see Arnould, Melos Amoris, 20, 138-40.

57. In fact, Riehle claims that this particular mystical sensation is limited in English mysticism to the Latin works of Rolle, except for the negative experience of the devil's stench in Julian of Norwich's Showings: Middle English Mystics, 115-16.

58. Melos Amoris, ed. Arnould, 49, 83, 99, 119. Riehle also finds reference to smells in conjunction with the fire of love in Emendatio Vitae: Middle English Mystics, 116. The Misyn translation of this work describes the mystic's love as “swete smelland” and a “plesand odur,” The Mending of Life, 125, 126.

59. The Middle English reads: “Ah, Lord, what shall I more make noise or cry out? You delay and you come not, and I, weary and overcome through desire, begin to go mad, for love governs me and not reason. I run with hasty course wherever you wish. I bow, Lord, and they who see me are irked and pity me, not knowing that I am drunk with your love. Lord, they say, ‘Lo, yonder crazy man cries in the streets,’ but how great my heart's desire is, they perceive not.” The Latin text appears in Meech and Allen, 323n. Although Hilton's text has not been edited, it has been translated by Clare Kirchberger, The Goad of Love (London, 1952): “But whereto shall I cry more thus? Thou tarriest and comest not and I as man weary in yearning begin for to fonne. For love stirreth me and no reason and I run with great noise whitherso my love holdeth. And they see me, scorn me, for they know not that I am made as I were drunken, for longing in love. They say thus: ‘Why crieth this wood man thus in the streets?’ but they take no heed how that “desire of Jesus burneth in my heart” (59).

60. The additions to the Middle English versions seem to be present in all of the ten surviving manuscripts, according to Kirchberger, The Goad of Love, 20. This makes the added phrase in this modern English translation particularly important for distinguishing between the scribe's Latin and English sources.

61. As Kirchberger points out, the Latin and Middle English texts are quite different, for Hilton tempered much of the excessive affectivity of the Latin texts, The Goad of Love, 28-44. Clearly, Kempe would have found more affinities with her own spirituality in the Latin texts than she would have in Hilton's.

62. The Middle English passage reads: “Of the plenteous grace of her tears he treats especially … in the 19th chapter where he tells how she, at the request of a priest so that he would not be troubled nor distraught in his Mass with her weeping and her sobbing, went out at the church door, with loud voice crying because she could not restrain herself. And our Lord also visited the priest at Mass with such grace and with such devotion when he would read the Holy Gospel that he wept wondrously so that he wet his vestment and the ornaments of the altar and he could not measure his weeping nor his sobbing, it was so abundant, nor might he restrain it nor well stand therewith at the altar.” The Latin is quoted in H. E. Allen's notes to The Book of Margery Kempe, 323n. The corresponding passage in the Middle English version of Marie's life may be found in C. Horstmann, Prosalegenden: Die Legenden des MS Douce 114. Anglia 8 (1885): 135-36.

63. See Meech's summary of these emendations and annotations in Meech and Allen, xxxvii and xliii-xliv.

64. Examples of English labels and commentary include: “nota A sotel & a sore temptacion. In siche a case we shold be more strange & bold a-ga[n]ste our gostly enmy,” 177/n.2; “manheyd of cryst,” 183/n.4; “trew it is blyssyd lord,” 191/n.1; and others. I should note here that the reader sometimes alternates English translations of the Latin, such as “langyng loue” for langor amoris, 176/n.3, 197/n.2, and 140/n.1. The reader does not seem to be making any distinction when he uses the English instead of the Latin in this case.

65. See Rosamund Allen's discussion of the desire for death in Rolle, including passages from Emendatio Vitae and Melos Amoris, Richard Rolle, 31-32.

66. Incendium Amoris, ed. Deanesly, 243.

67. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 92 and 91; see also chapter 2 above.

68. Robert Karl Stone considers the repetition in Kempe's narrative monotonous, Middle English Prose Style: Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 111. One example of the rearrangement occurs at the end of chapter 16, where the reader is instructed to read chapter 21 before reading any further (38). An example of qualification occurs where the scribe's story of Marie d’Oignies is said to be only a rough approximation of the real story, which he couldn’t quite recall, as I have discussed above.

69. See my discussion of this fissuring of the mystical text, chapter 2.

70. I agree with de Certeau: “Mystics are engaged in a politics of utterance.” The essence of the politics lies in the mystic's reconstruction of a language which has broken down. In de Certeau's words, “This kind of ‘politics,’ like contemporary rhetoric, sets forth operational rules determining the relational usage of a language that has become uncertain of the real. It reconstructs, where the ontological relation between words and things has come undone, loci of social communication,” Heterologies, 91.

71. See the Middle English translation of her life in C. Horstmann, Prosalegenden: “She vndirstood sooþly alle latyn and knewe plenirly alle the menynge in scripture, þof sche neuer knewe lettir syþen she was born; and whan she was asked moost dyuyne questyons of holy wrytte, she wolde declare hem moost openly to summe of hir spritual freendes” (129).