SOURCE: “Conclusion: Fictions of Community,” in Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, pp. 171-99.

[In the following essay, Staley analyzes the episodic structure of The Book of Margery Kempe and Kempe's “sophisticated” choice of words, which works to both communicate and obfuscate meaning.]

If The Book of Margery Kempe is a fiction, which I believe it to be, it is a fiction that attempts to create a social reality and to examine that reality in relation to a single individual. By situating Margery squarely within the topography, social structures, and ideological conflicts of England during the first third of the fifteenth century, Kempe avoids both the limitations of the jeremiad and the possible penalties incurred by its author. The Book of Margery Kempe bears eloquent testimony to Kempe's ability to employ the conventions of her day in ways that allow her to assess the foundations of English Christian society through narrative prose. Social commentary is implicit in other medieval prose narratives like Mandeville's Travels, but Kempe's persistent focus upon the development of a single individual increases the number of issues she can address and thus expands the possibilities of what she can achieve. Those very conventions, or conventional modes, she uses to such good effect provide her with a language at once precise and ambiguous enough to explore some of the more important and explosive topics of her day. Though the Book certainly has affinities with more explicitly heterodox works of the early fifteenth century, it makes most sense when juxtaposed with poems like Piers Plowman or the Canterbury Tales or to later medieval works like the mystery cycles. The Book shares with those works an episodic structure, a tendency to destabilize the meanings it supposedly affirms and to hint at an overarching internal structure that is never allowed to predominate, and a sophisticated use of words to convey and confuse meaning. What I am describing, of course, is artistry, the ability to evolve a strategy that meets the complex demands that will be placed upon it.

One of the most strenuous of these demands is bound up with Kempe's ability to establish Margery in the realm of the actual. Kempe certainly displays her understanding of the conventions of sacred biography, with its corresponding emphasis upon the social context for sanctity, but she does more than sketch in a background for her depiction of the holy. The “background” is integral to her purpose in the Book, which has a specificity and wealth of detail that point to Kempe's scrutiny of social structures. The intensity of Kempe's focus upon the nature of social structures and institutions is particularly evident if we juxtapose the Book to texts like the Revelations of St. Elizabeth of Hungary or the Revelations of St. Bridget.¹ Kempe describes both of these works as among those read to Margery, thus implicitly assimilating Margery to the tradition of married sanctity expressed through the lives of these women. Her references to Saint Elizabeth's tears and to some of the details of Saint Bridget's life are intended to validate Margery's emotive piety and secular holiness. However, by underlining the antecedents for the Book, they also point up the ways in which it is fundamentally unlike those literary godmothers to whom Kempe nods. For example, echoes of Saint Elizabeth's conversations with the Virgin, with John the Evangelist, and with Jesus can certainly be found in the Book, but the short text of the Revelations of St. Elizabeth does not prepare us for the full-blown fiction with its careful attention to detail that Kempe achieves. The texts of the revelations of other female devotees are composed as transcripts of private conversations between the visionary and figures of mystic authority. In her account of Margery's experience, Kempe uses references to these texts, along with those to Margery's various scribes and spiritual fathers, as ways of placing her account of Margery in the narrative foreground. If Margery serves as a screen for Kempe's analysis of communal codes and bonds, Kempe's allusions to these texts provide a convenient, safe, and conventional disguise for the Book that defines it by ignoring most of it.

The very background that Kempe composes for Margery's experience is one with important implications for an English reader. Her attention both to time and place suggests her interest in exploring the subject of secular and spiritual authority, since she locates the action during a period of anti-Lollard activity and in places that were particular hotbeds of Lollardy. She also peppers the narrative with names of real people, figures of the English church such as Philip Repingdon, Thomas Arundel, or Henry Bowet or of key individuals like the Duke of Bedford, who were active in supporting orthodoxy as a manifestation of nationalism. In fact, Kempe's verisimilitude can prevent us from looking more closely at the outlines of her fiction. If we take the Book as a sort of oral diary, composed through a scribe and at once artless and artful, we will be most concerned with examining Margery's struggles to achieve selfhood or with verifying Kempe's account of Margery's eventful life. Here, we are more than likely to be disappointed. We can use the episodes such as Margery's interviews with Philip Repingdon, Bishop of Lincoln, and Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, about a private ceremony of clothing to establish a chronological reference point for the action she recounts, but we cannot so simply use the Book as a guide to episcopal activities during the period. Similarly, Kempe describes Margery as being brought to trial in Leicester during what Meech conjectures is the late summer of 1417. She describes the trial as a public one in which Margery was examined about her faith in the Church of All Hallows, where “þer was so meche pepyl þat þei stodyn vp-on stolys for to beheldyn hir & wonderyn vp-on hir” (114). However, neither the Records of the Borough of Leicester nor The Register of Bishop Philip Repingdon mention any such event.² Kempe's account in the final pages of the Book of Margery going from parish to parish in London and preaching against the excesses of the day, which must have “occured” in the summer of 1434, is not referred to in any contemporary source that I have seen. This, despite the fact that the Register of Henry Chichele (Chichele was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1414 to 1443) is extraordinarily rich in the details of local life, and Chichele's interest in maintaining the English church in orthodoxy and order certainly led him to inquire into anything that might have smacked of Lollardy. Though E. F. Jacob describes Chichele as a humane and beloved leader of the English church, an estimate I would not wish to challenge, reading his register leaves an overpowering impression of ecclesiastical surveillance and regulation of what to a twentieth-century American are the details of private life.³ A woman derided by the London priesthood who nonetheless to all intents and purposes preached her way through the city followed and esteemed by the common people might be expected to excite a certain amount of official concern at a time when Lollard trials were not yet a distant memory.

Although some version of the events in the Book may well have happened, we do her a disservice as a writer not to inquire into the fictional reality she creates in the Book. The picture she presents of England is neither homogeneous nor orderly. The Leicestershire that challenged Margery for her beliefs was also the location for a good deal of Lollard activity during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, as, of course, was Margery's own East Anglia, or Bristol where Margery is also arrested.⁴ By locating Margery in places associated with heterodoxy, Kempe raises the specter of dissent, and by raising it implicitly dissents from more official views of the English as bound together in a single and unified body. Kempe may or may not be portraying what happened to her; she is, however, portraying what she sees.

Her appraisal of her countrymen and -women has a good deal in common with other cultural documents that we have. The Parliament Rolls, for example, provide a fascinating glimpse into some of the tensions of the first third of the fifteenth century. First, the statement or sermon that opened Parliament not only underlined what were government concerns for any specific year but served as an expression of official views about government and, hence, about the relationship of any individual to the government, which, for the Middle Ages, was embodied in the figure of the king.⁵ These opening statements seem especially interesting when they are read in relation to the sorts of concerns that are voiced by the Commons. Thus, Henry IV is imaged as a figure of counsel, law, equity, and justice. He is praised for his ability to call upon wisdom, for his willingness to take counsel, and for his honor; England is twice described as a body that can only function well if all parts agree to function as a whole. The uneasiness of the reign of Henry IV stands in contrast to this official emphasis upon order and justice. That there was a sharpening awareness of an individual's relationship to that whole is suggested by such requests as Commons brought in 1402 that any brief for felony or treason should specify not only the name of the individual, but also the names of his or her town and county. The request was brought to clear up the confusion resulting from similar names and surnames, revealing a concern for one's own “good name,” particularly as that name might be falsely impugned by association. The request also suggests the growing awareness that written information could serve as well as gossip to destroy public images and expresses the ways in which identity was tied to locale. Kempe's description of Margery as equally careful to defend herself by saying that she is John Burnham's daughter of Lynn, implicitly not a traitor, evinces her own understanding of the need to define individual identity by reference to the group. Similarly, she describes Margery as persecuted by means of slander or “banning,” forms of vilification that were anticipated by Lollard preachers and that reflect the contemporary dread of any act that severed a person from his or her community.⁶

In other entries that concern the need for public order, the Commons signify their dissent from the more official view of England's fundamental and divinely appointed order. Though the opening statements for the reigns of Henry V and Henry VI continue to play upon the theme of good government, the antiphonal role played by Commons undercuts any sense of a univocal nation. Where the voices of the Crown and the Church unite in decrying Lollards as traitors and, in some cases, linking them to common felons as promulgators of civic unrest, the voices of Commons more usually complain of excess taxation, petition against civic violence or for equitable solutions to economic or mercantile dilemmas, or bring up civic or ecclesiastical lapses. For example, in 1425 they raise the issue of the nonresidence of parsons and vicars, saying that people die without the care of the clergy; burials are delayed; and in some parish churches there are scarcely three Masses a week. In that same year, they ask that persons arrested for treason, felony, or Lollardy not be allowed to remain in prison for up to two years before being brought to trial, saying that such persons not only cost “the king” a good deal but place their “kepers” in great peril and fear.⁷ In 1429, the chancellor chastises England for its infidelity, for error and heresy, obstinancy, and perversity, and raises the specter of the destruction of Jerusalem. Juxtaposed to what is a general moral warning linking national prosperity and stability to the obedience of subjects, are parliamentary petitions involving such issues as trespassing, protection of English sailing interests, the dangers to public order posed by fugitive felons and the burning of houses, in addition to the usual concern for trade, the Staple, and franchises. In 1433, the opening statement reiterated the model of the three estates, suggesting those duties owed by each: from prelates and magnates are expected peace, unity, and concord; from knights and the “medriocribus” are expected equity and the administration of justice; and from the vulgar and inferior orders, obedience to the will of the king and his laws are expected; they are also enjoined to avoid perjury and murmuring.⁸ Though England's growing involvement in mercantile concerns is allowed for by the term “medriocribus,” the reference hardly acknowledges what the Parliament Rolls themselves proclaim, that most of the business of Parliament centered around the need to regulate an increasingly complicated profit-oriented economy.

Kempe's treatment of her contemporaries is less an account of that world than a reading of it that dissents from more official or authoritative glosses upon the state of the body politic. The many techniques Kempe employs work against any simple understanding of the nature of that body. The episodic nature of the Book effectively fragments the experience of reading it and forces us into a process by which we establish meaning at the very moment when that meaning is likely to be qualified by or collapsed into the next episode.⁹ Hence good confessors succeed bad confessors; John Kempe seems at times to threaten Margery's vocation and at others to support it; bishops are at once accessible and intractable; and Margery seems profound in one incident, banal in the next. Strategically, this sort of technique gives Kempe a good deal of latitude; her narrative cannot be judged as an explicit critique of contemporary institutions because she continually shifts the grounds whereby we judge the meaning of events. However, the combined effect of such shifts powerfully suggests that we read as fragmentary and irresolute the very community that official documents would have us believe is unified and definitive. Furthermore, by focusing upon Margery, whom she situates in a particular historical context, Kempe can achieve a more delicately subversive image than she could if she merely offered a satiric description of Margery's world.

Her deployment of the topoi and language of gender is a case in point. By drawing upon the conventions of the holy woman, Kempe suggests the inadequacies of the contemporary Church since it too often excludes what Margery is. She also suggests its inability to control the feminine; Margery triumphs despite the powers vested in and wielded by a male hegemony. Margery's growing ability to evade those powers is, of course, rooted in the conventions of gender comedy that cultural historians have taught us to see as evidence of a broader social concern with order.¹⁰ But where the comedy of gender frequently contains riot even as it depicts it, Kempe does not so conveniently dispose of Margery.¹¹ Most of the events described in the first section of the Book occur during the reign of Henry V, who even after his death in 1422 continued to be hailed for his manly strength, forcefulness, and heroism.¹² Praise for Henry was not limited to blazoning what can be described as his virility; he was also credited with upholding the true religion against the attacks of the Lollards. The “sotellete” introducing the second course of the infant Henry VI's coronation banquet lauded precisely these activities, and the opening statement of Henry VI's first Parliament praised his father as a perfect paragon of kingly rectitude and virtue.¹³ Kempe's emphasis upon gender conflict in her accounts of episodes that most concern topics dear to the hearts of representatives of Henry's administration offers a subtle comment upon the ineffectiveness of such a power structure. Margery may be perceived as threatening the stabilities of the family, of the town, and of the country, and consequently is called to account in Leicester, in York, and in Bristol. However, she triumphs over such obstacles as the “men” of England place in her way and goes on to outlive the King himself. Kempe can thereby use one woman to do the work of several men. Just as the Book's testimonies to Margery's sanctity at once provide an image of holiness and comment upon the society that will not recognize what is in its midst, so Kempe's emphasis on the gender of her protagonist—and thus upon gender conflict—gives her the scope to glance at the foundations of both spiritual and civil authority.

Even more pointed is her refusal to reintegrate Margery into prevailing structures. The Book, as we have seen, traces Margery's growing disengagement from the control of husbands, confessors, and all other figures of authority. Moreover, both parts of the Book conclude with depictions of Margery as having attained a necessary and objective distance from her world. The first part ends with a picture of Margery who is now, by choice, physically separated from the citizens of Lynn, since she is more usually to be found in her room with her writer. Kempe thereby concludes a narrative that chronicles spiritual growth as a species of conflict with neighbors, family, churchmen, and local officials with a picture that deliberately evokes an image of dissociation or of objectification. The second part ends with Margery's return to Lynn, after she has broken her word to her confessor, traveled to Germany and back, and progressed from London to Shene. Like many a wife before her, she endures “scharp wordys” but gets “as good loue of hym & of oþer frendys aftyr as sche had be-forn” (247). Kempe is vague about Margery's means of achieving such peace, but, as she implies, Margery's meekness conceals triumph. The communal and priestly pressure to which Margery nods at the Book's end has nowhere near the force for her that it has at the beginning of her call to vocation. The Book's final section of intercessory prayers can also be read as a powerful statement of disengagement that gives Margery herself the indisputably last word.

The layout of the manuscript of the Book suggests that the scribe who copied it was alive to the formal implications of ending with a selection of prayers. The second part of the Book ends only nine lines into the first leaf of folio 120. After the final words, “worschepyd be God,” which are closed by a period, is the word “Amen.” A decorative “Amen” is repeated in red ink on the same line, suggesting that, for one late medieval reader, at least, the narrative portion of the Book has concluded. The scribe then left the remainder of the page blank and began the prayers on the verso side of folio 120, using a large capital T (“Thys creatur, of whom is tretyd be-forn”) to indicate the beginning of what is a separate section of the manuscript. Visually, the prayers appear as a section distinct from the Book itself, perhaps to be copied separately or committed to memory, and underline the scribe's awareness of the ways in which the prayers of the holy were used to feed the private devotional lives of late medieval men and women.¹⁴ The scribe thus signified his sense of the prayers as generically distinct from the narrative portion of the manuscript. For him, though Margery's life justifies or authorizes the prayers, they can be used in ways the Book cannot, since they can be internalized and transformed by anyone who takes them as models for devotion.

On the other hand, the written prayer, like the written life, begs to be read as a composed text. There is no compelling reason to think that the person who wrote the Book did not also write the prayers and did not wish them to appear where they do in the manuscript.¹⁵ They must therefore be understood within the context of the life they conclude. The prayers are further evidence of Kempe's innovative use of models that are at once spiritual and literary. The most obvious of these models is Saint Bridget of Sweden (c. 1302-73), whose example and Rule was memorialized by Henry V in the royal foundation at Syon, where Margery visits at the end of the narrative section of the Book on Lammas Day, a day the Pope had set aside for special pardon to pilgrims who honored Bridget by visiting the abbey.¹⁶ As Gibson has pointed out, Saint Bridget seems to have had a special importance to the spiritual lives of East Anglians, and, at times, Kempe seems to be writing a “competitive” version of Saint Bridget's own eventful and important life.¹⁷ Bridget was a wife and mother, a counsellor to the mighty, a prophet, a social critic, an international traveler, and a powerful example of sanctity; moreover, her prayers, The Fifteen O's, on the Passion of Christ were enormously popular in England well into the sixteenth century.¹⁸ Just as the narrative of Margery's life is rooted in the literary conventions of sacred biography, Margery's prayers are designed to provide further evidence of her importance as a figure of English holiness.

The prayers image Margery as a singular figure of intercession. Here, Kempe may be deliberately recalling the powers accorded to Bridget of Sweden. For example, the 1531 edition of the Horae Beatae Virginis according to the Use of Sarum printed the Fifteen O's and promised that anyone who said them faithfully for a year could deliver fifteen of his kindred out of purgatory, convert fifteen others to good life, and help another fifteen persevere in a good life.¹⁹ After requesting mercy for herself, Margery therefore requests mercy for others—her confessors; all members of the Church; the King and all members of government; all outsiders, Jews, Saracens, and heathens; and all of her fellow human beings. The requests, like the special prayers offered during the Mass, present a hierarchical view of society, and by their very conventionality implicitly suggest that Margery herself has the means to do what her own spiritual fathers do not. Though the concept of intercessory prayer is as old as the Church itself, the effect of ending the Book with a section of prayers has the effect of highlighting Margery at the expense of more obvious figures of authority and intercession. In so doing, Kempe specifically juxtaposes Margery to a world whose need for Margery is acute. Like Thomas of Cantimpré or Jacques de Vitry or Bridget of Sweden, Kempe locates sanctity in the context of worldliness.

This final depiction of Margery is paradoxical, since the prayers suggest that Margery's detachment from the world is a manifestation of her profound attachment to it. In introducing the prayers, Kempe is careful to situate Margery within the community of the Church:

Thys creatur, of whom is tretyd be-forn, vysd many ierys to begynnyn hir preyerys on þis maner. First whan sche cam to chirche, knelyng be-forn þe Sacrament in þe worschep of þe blissyd Trinite (Fadir, Sone, & Holy Gost, oo God & iij Personys), of þat gloryows Virgine, Qwen of Mercy, owr Lady Seynt Mary, & of þe xij apostelys, sche seyd þis holy ympne “Veni creator spiritus” wyth alle þe versys longyng þerto, þat God xulde illumynyn hir sowle, as he dede hys apostelys on Pentecost Day, & induyn hir wyth þe iyftys of þe Holy Gost þat sche myth han grace to vndirstondyn hys wil & parformyn it in werkyng, & þat sche myth han grace to wythstondyn þe temptacyons of hir gostly enmijs & enchewyn al maner synne & wikkydnes. (248)

The scene Kempe describes would have been familiar to any fifteenth-century reader, for the physical experience of churchgoing was then far different from what it is now. First, the interior architecture of the church compartmentalized it into separate sections. The elaborate rood screens of the late Middle Ages were designed to screen the sacrament and the ministrations of the Mass from those who stood or kneeled on the other side. Since the Mass was also celebrated in Latin, which few persons could understand, the laity was further distanced from the mysteries being enacted at the altar. The experience of the Mass was therefore concentrated in the act of viewing the sacrament when it was elevated and in acts of private devotion. Works like the Lay Folks Mass Book, along with private missals and books of hours, bear witness to efforts to provide focus or direction for the experience of private prayer. Thus, while the priest and his attendants celebrated in Latin a sacrament of salvific sacrifice at the altar, the very placement of which defined sacred space, those on the other side of the screen watched and, perhaps, engaged in vernacular devotions that were meant to open up the meaning of that which they came to observe.²⁰

The experience was, as John Bossy has analyzed it, at once communal and private. Such practices as the distribution of holy bread (the unchanged but blessed bread) to a laity that did not normally participate in communion more than once or twice a year were meant to reinforce an idea of community as unity in the faith.²¹ As Rosamund Faith has demonstrated, such rituals could also express ideas of anticlerical unity.²² In the Gesta Abbatum Walsingham recounts a long dispute between the Abbey of Saint Albans and its local tenants over ancient rights, a dispute that culminated in an act meant both to underscore the tenants' rebellion against clerical privilege and to signify their own solidarity. The dispute concerned the peasants' assertion of their right to use their own handmills rather than the abbey's, for which they must pay. The peasants lost the dispute and their mills were confiscated and set into the floor of the abbey parlor; but they later rebelled and on Corpus Christi Day, 1381, reclaimed their own: “They took the stones outside and handed them over to the commons, breaking them into little pieces and giving a piece to each person, just as the consecrated bread is customarily broken and distributed in the parish churches on Sundays, so that the people, seeing these pieces, would know themselves to be avenged against the abbey in that cause.”²³ Walsingham's simile (“ut panis benedictus Dominicis diebus partiri et conferri in ecclesiis parochialibus consuivit”) communicates his sense of outrage, which, in turn, reflects his own firm belief in hierarchical ordering. His language also emphasizes his feeling that ritual itself had been violated by this act of ritualized antiritual, which mimicked the community founded upon faith and ordered by estates. Not only is the unsanctified distributed among the rebels, but they serve one another in the priestly act of parting and distributing (partiri et conferri). In the act of composing a community, they have, to use a later reformist term, become their own advocates.

Kempe's description of Margery positions her at the focal point of the community of the Body of Christ. She describes Margery as kneeling before the sacrament, obediently assuming the place and the space assigned to her, where she prays as one of Christ's disciples for pentecostal power. The “prayers of thys creatur” follow her repetition of the verses of the Pentecostal hymn, “Veni creator.” Implicitly, the prayers are the embodiment of the Holy Spirit's power in Margery, who, like the Church of the faithful, is quickened by the gift of the spirit. Whereas earlier in the Book Kempe describes Margery as a figure like Ecclesia, whose gift of tongues allows her to communicate with those who do not speak English but who love Christ, now she presents Margery as the medium through which the word comes to us and is returned to God. Present in this Church is no figure of priestly advocacy, but only Margery, whose prayer can be read as a “reading” of her world and thus of her relationship to it. Most obviously, the prayer evinces her detachment from that world; the ability to pray for, like the ability to write about, testifies to a process of objectification, an assertion of control over what is thereby constituted.

Margery thus describes herself as the means through which her world can apprehend God. In a startling sentence she asks, “And I prey þe, Soueryn Lord Crist Ihesu, þat as many men mote be turnyd be my crying & my wepyng as me han scornyd þerfor er xal scornyn in-to þe werdys ende & many mo yf it be iowr wille” (249). What Kempe signals here is her sense that the Book is as open to misinterpretation as the life it recounts, since those who may scorn Margery “in-to þe werdys ende” can only be those who read the text of her life. Kempe thereby implies that Margery functions as a sort of cipher for the meaning of Ecclesia, going on to emphasize her importance as a figure of mediation, whose powers transcend even those of the priesthood: “Lord, make my gostly fadirs for to dredyn þe in me & for to louyn þe in me” (249). Implicitly, “gostly fadirs,” like mayors, fellow townspeople, and future readers need special help in recognizing the outlines of sanctity; recognition must then be a mark of grace.

If Kempe uses the prayer to establish Margery's singular position, she also uses it to compose a world. That world is not described in the conventional language of estates theory but rather in the language of the spirit, where the concept of sin has far more currency than the claims of wealth or status. Her presentation of society begins innocently enough, with prayers for the Pope and other ministers of the church, for the King of England, and the “lordys & ladijs þat arn in þis world” (250). However, Margery goes on to ask for such “gouernawnce” for these so that they may be lords and ladies in heaven and to pray that all rich men may learn the proper use of goods. She follows her prayer for rich men with one for “Iewys, & Saraiinys, & alle hethen pepil,” for heretics, “mysbeleuarys,” false tithers, thieves, adulterers, prostitutes, and “mischievous” livers. She moves from these to all her friends and her enemies and, finally, to the community of the dead, the souls in purgatory.²⁴ The prayer does more than demonstrate Margery's charity toward all. By creating a catalogue whereby rich men, Jews, adulterers, heretics, false tithers, and loose livers are grouped indiscriminately together, Kempe destroys any sense of a social hierarchy based upon outward signs of status. What, finally, is the difference between a rich man who lives only for himself and a Jew, or between an adulterer and a prostitute, except that the one is an accepted part of the community and the other is excluded from it? If lords and ladies may not be lords and ladies in the court of heaven and if many a saint began as a heathen (250), how may we make social distinctions? What Kempe composes here is a community of the spirit, the true Church, whose members are bound together not by any ideology of commercial profit but by their hopes for spiritual gain, that is, in ways precluded by social hierarchies. What is imaged here is a unity achieved through Margery, the scorned and outcast member of society. In the final portion of her prayer she thus claims kinship with the holy dead who form one vast contingent of the Body of Christ.

By blurring the distinctions among various parts of society and between the secular and the sacred, Kempe, like the authors of the mystery cycles, adumbrates the process of composing a community. This is a process that goes on throughout the mystery cycles, but here I would like to touch briefly on the effect of two of the more obviously communal pageants, the Entry into Jerusalem and Pentecost, both of which are relevant to Kempe's handling of the relationship between Margery and the community. The plays are some of our most important “civic artifacts” from the late Middle Ages and are particularly valuable guides to secular and civic ideology and piety. As Lawrence Clopper has most recently emphasized, there is very little evidence that clergy of any kind were involved in the creation of secular drama; he describes them as the products of the city.²⁵ They can therefore tell us a good deal about the ways in which civic governments saw themselves as having a certain responsibility for public morality and religious education.²⁶ They also testify to a certain preoccupation with the process by which the community itself comes into existence. The plays that dramatize Christ's entry into Jerusalem are especially interesting in this regard; they embody that process as a moment when a community that is, for a brief moment, nonhierarchical is focused around that figure whose entry into the city is the first movement of the Passion. The Entry plays thus—either explicitly or implicitly—define the one community as antithetical to what is an existing civic structure. In so doing, the plays hint at a certain amount of anticlericalism, since Jerusalem is governed by the “Bishops” Caiphas and Annas and by Pilate, the representative of the Emperor, who is easily swayed by these self-serving figures of prelatical dominion.

Of the three extant cycles that have Entry plays—York, Chester, and N-Town—York is the most well-developed example of civic ceremony and celebration.²⁷ However, in the very act of celebrating the idea of community and of locating that idea in York itself, the playwright suggests the differences between the community that coalesces around Christ and that in which his actors and audience lived.²⁸ The York Entry uses the procession as the pretext for imaging the community. Whereas actual medieval processions were composed according to strict rules of social hierarchy and reflected the participants' acute sense of the value they vested in degree, wealth, and social power, the York procession can almost be described as a “happening.”²⁹ After the first 100 lines, which elaborate upon the biblical account of Christ sending Peter and Philip to borrow the ass, the playwright gives the play to Janitor, the porter who has loaned the beast to the disciples. Consequently, before we see Christ riding toward Jerusalem, we watch Janitor's progress toward the city where he spreads the news of Christ's coming. Around him appear citizens who bear witness to Jesus' ministry, to the prophets' description of his coming, and to their mutual love for him. What we see is a brief moment of civic harmony wherein each citizen is bound to all the others through adoration of the figure who is described as riding toward them. When Jesus actually appears, he moves through a city that at once hails him and manifests its need for him. As he goes, he heals the sick, gives sight to the blind, and cleanses the spiritual disease of men like Zaccheus, whose god has been the god of merchandizing. The play ends by encapsulating the fundamental tension between ideal and actuality. First, when Jesus sees Jerusalem, he does not salute it but mourns its coming destruction. It will “forsake” and “trespass against” its king, and its “game” and its “gle” will be taken from it.³⁰ In contrast to Jesus' lament, the citizens of York end the play with eight separate speeches hailing his entry. The eighth and final speech suggests that they unknowingly hail their own coming desolation:

Hayll domysman dreadful, þat all schall deme,
Hayll þat all quyk and dede schall lowte,
Hayll whom worschippe moste will seme,
Hayll whom all thyng schall drede and dowte.
                                                            We welcome þe.
Hayll and welcome of all abowte,
                                                                      To owre ceté.(31)

They hail Christ as conqueror and as judge, seemingly unaware that the very “ceté” into which they welcome him cannot sustain the scrutiny of that moment of judgment. That city may figuratively be Jerusalem, but literally it is York, whose civic government like that of Jerusalem was inextricably bound up with the privileges and powers accorded Ecclesia.³² The playwright thereby dramatizes a moment of epiphanal paradox at which the shout of acclamation is, ironically, also an admission of incomprehension.

Both the N-Town and Chester cycles incorporate the Entry into other plays. The Chester cycle treats it in a sequence that begins with Jesus' visit to Bethany and to the house of Simon the Leper, where Mary Magdalene anoints Jesus with the costly ointment that so offends Judas's sense of economy. From there, the play moves back to Jerusalem with the entry and closes with Christ's cleansing of the Temple and Judas's conspiracy with Caiphas and Annas.³³ In the N-Town cycle, the entry is one part of the first Passion play, which opens with a speech by Satan and a prologue by John the Baptist, and then goes on to present in a parallel fashion the events of the conspiracy and those of the entry. Both these plays underline the difference between two notions of community by their emphasis upon opposing power groups. The power imaged in Christ that binds his followers together in a community of faith is not power in an earthly sense, since it has nothing in common with the structures of communities. The power of the earthly city we can more easily comprehend. It is the power of the marketplace, of the ecclesiastical court, of reigning social groups. Furthermore, Jesus' entry directly threatens the community composed of hierarchies rooted in earthly power, as the inclusion of the Temple Cleansing at this point in the Chester play makes all too clear. The playwright's emphasis upon merchandizing, which makes it seem as if Christ is destroying a contemporary fair, locates the scene, less in the Temple than in local space: Christ does not scourge Jews from the Temple, but “merchants” from their tables. Thus, against the highly structured and self-consciously powerful members of Jerusalem's oligarchy, the playwrights image another community organized around a single figure who disdains social—and hence vertical—manifestations of power.

Within the contexts of the plays themselves, such images of spiritual community are shattered by the Crucifixion and tentatively reconstructed in the Pentecost plays. However, where the dramatizations of Christ's entry into Jerusalem present community as a manifestation of faith and consequently as far less hierarchically ordered than the city that produces and watches the pageant, treatments of Pentecost emphasize the composition of the community of the Church in terms of apostolic succession. Since the second chapter of Acts specifies that only the disciples received the gifts of the Holy Spirit, thus providing precedent for an understanding of the priesthood as sacramental and therefore distinct, medieval playwrights inevitably figure that community as organized in ways that more clearly resemble this world. For example, the treatment of Pentecost in the Chester cycle opens with the disciples choosing by lot a successor to Judas's empty “office.” When the lot falls on Matthew, Peter is the one to “name” him an apostle.³⁴ The dramatization of the descent of the Holy Spirit that follows locates power, knowledge, and faith in the twelve, each of whom has a part to say. What they testify to is a faith that is expressed in credal form.³⁵ The play thus replaces the more spontaneous acclamations of the citizens hailing Christ's Entry into Jerusalem with pictures of the apostles receiving what is a religious education; it also presents ecclesiastical hierarchy as an expression of Pentecostal power, since the apostles' newly acquired and catechistically formulated knowledge of the divine authorizes them as guides to the holy. While both the York and N-Town Pentecost plays seem to make a greater effort to capture the dizzying effervesence of the Descent, they also epitomize revelation as a sign of apostolic succession or power. The N-Town Pentecost, for all its brevity, has a special brilliance; it captures the unity of the twelve by presenting them as speaking antiphonally of what they have seen. No speaker can claim any single sentence for himself, so their responses to the divine embody that moment of reformed Babel that is Pentecost. The York Pentecost is perhaps the most concerned with capturing the rapture of the moment, taking special pains to exploit some of the onlookers' remarks that the disciples' Pentecostal fervor must be a sign of drunkenness. Both plays, however, present the world as polarized by that moment of rapture, employing a stereotypical community of Jewish elders and citizens as the scoffers at and enemies of this newly composed community. But as the Doomsday plays make all too clear, Christ will come not to divide Jew from Christian, but rather to separate Christian citizens from one another, and he will do so by judging their attitudes towards community (“As ye have done to the least of these …”).

Where the playwrights invent dramatic action that, at times, comments ironically upon the communities that enact and witness the plays, Kempe employs the strategies of narrative prose to reflect upon that same process by which communities compose and define themselves. For example, the York Entry into Jerusalem sends Christ along the same route traced by royalty in their entries into York, thus juxtaposing spiritual to earthly kingship.³⁶ Kempe employs a processional pattern for Margery's return to England in the final chapters of the Book as a way of pointing up the weaknesses of regal power or ecclesiastical authority. The Margery who comes to London on a borrowed horse is intended to provoke both a secular and a spiritual response: she comes as simply to London as Christ to Jerusalem, certainly far more simply than Henry came to London after the triumph of Agincourt, who also came in monarchical imitation of Christ. However, Margery receives few accolades to ease her progress in a city Kempe describes as composed of the scornful rich and the common people who magnify God in her (see 243-45). Kempe also uses the topoi of Pentecost to underline the worldliness of the contemporary Church; it is in describing Margery's experiences in Rome, which seems a confused Babel of persons of different nationalities, that Kempe pays greatest attention to the subject of language. Margery herself, though she speaks only English, moves among and communicates with the various and disparate persons she encounters in that city. Kempe's account of the seat of Christendom thus ignores the physical city—its many relics and splendors—to focus on Margery's personal relationships, depicting the Church as composed of persons who can only be judged in terms of their attitudes toward the holy. Whereas Julian of Norwich compares the face she sees in her second “showing” to that imprinted on one of Rome's most venerated relics, the Vernicle, Kempe, who might be expected to mention the effect of such a potent relic on the impressionable Margery during her long stay in Rome, neglects it altogether.³⁷ Significantly, in these scenes in Rome it is Margery to whom Kempe ascribes true moral authority; she alone attempts to imitate the Christ whose spiritual power has been transmogrified into earthly status.

Kempe's handling of the topic of pilgrimage is also designed to point up the ambiguities inherent in the formalization of private acts of devotion. The very subject of pilgrimage was, of course, charged with associations of Lollardy, since the Lollards discussed pilgrimage as a manifestation of image worship, or idolatry.³⁸ In his Examination, Thorpe first defines the true pilgrim as any person earnestly seeking the bliss of heaven through virtuous living and then argues against pilgrimages in terms of the fundamental hypocrisy of most pilgrims:

As their works shew, the most part of men or women that go now on pilgrimages have not these foresaid conditions. … For … examine … twenty of these pilgrims! and he shall not find three men or women that know surely of commandment of God, nor can say their Pater noster and Ave Maria! nor their Credo, readily in any manner of language. … All such pilgrims despise god and all His commandments and Saints. For the commandments of god they will neither know nor keep, nor conform them to live virtuously by example of christ and of his Saints.³⁹

Thorpe goes on to say that people go on pilgrimage more for the health of their bodies than of their souls, stressing the worldliness of most pilgrimages, which are too often accompanied by the lewd music of hired pipers. He especially mentions bagpipes. Thorpe thus draws a sharp distinction between two concepts of pilgrimage, one that is ultimately based on an Augustinian distinction between two sorts of societies. The one is composed of men and women helping one another toward heaven, the other is the various and complex society of the world that cannot but impede the progress of the soul to God. What the world calls pilgrimage is merely a replication of its own distraction and vanity.

Although it is tempting to say that Kempe's orthodoxy is confirmed by her persistent focus upon pilgrimage, her handling of the topic is not so easily categorized. It is true that much of the Book is taken up by the subject: Margery's pilgrimage to Jerusalem includes secondary trips to Rome and to Assisi; she later goes to Santiago and to Wilsnak, in addition to making other trips to shrines in her own country. … However, Kempe's description of these journeys is less an account of loci of power and sanctification than it is a story of Margery's personal relations with her fellow pilgrims. The sites themselves function less as ends than as means to elucidate the nature of the pilgrim community and Margery's status within it. Kempe's account of Jerusalem is the most detailed (there is none at all of Santiago), but what is memorable about Margery's experience in the Holy Land is Margery's experience. Each thing she sees—Mount Calvary, the Sepulcher, the stone on which Christ's body was laid, the room of the Last Supper, the place of Pentecost, and the burial place of the Virgin—Kempe describes as triggering a response in Margery. Though Kempe records the experience as underlining Margery's submission to the rule of others, she also suggests that Margery's imaginative re-creation of Jesus' passion frees her from conventional obedience. Jesus says to her, “I am wel plesyd wyth þe, dowtyr, for þu stondist vndyr obedyens of Holy Cherch & þat þu wylt obey þi confessowr & folwyn hys cownsel”; but he emphasizes, “I am aboue al Holy Cherch & I xal gon [wyth þe] & kepyn þe rygth wel” (72-73). He speaks here of pilgrimage itself, telling her that she need not go for spiritual merit, for her sins were forgiven before she came; but he nonetheless commands her to go to Rome and Santiago, presumably for the very spiritual experience that Kempe's account of Jerusalem verifies. Though Kempe describes Jesus as supporting the authority of ecclesiastical figures of authority, he also offers himself as a higher authority and implicitly suggests that pilgrimage itself is only efficacious if it produces a private spiritual response. Not only here does Kempe fix our attention upon Margery and her subjective record of Jesus' command, but she also, albeit carefully, defines pilgrimage in ways Thorpe himself might allow.

She primarily defines it as a society united by an ostensibly common goal that can be attained through sound financial management and cooperation. Margery's way to Jerusalem is paved with contractual agreements—with her husband, with her fellow pilgrims, with the Saracens who lead her around the Holy Land, and with innkeepers. Furthermore, Kempe makes it clear that Margery's path is eased by her ability to pay. In fact, references to a cash economy recur throughout the first half of this first pilgrimage of Margery's. Not only is she free to go to Jerusalem because she agrees to pay her husband's debts, but “hir gold” is the occasion for trouble with her fellow pilgrims (see 62 and 64). Margery is able to proceed to Venice without her company because she can “reward” William Weaver for guiding her. Kempe's description of the business of getting to Jerusalem from Venice emphasizes that it is a business; words denoting commercial exchange dominate a passage of only about eighteen lines. The company must “buy” wine vessels and “ordain” a ship as well as bedding. Since they have failed to do so for her, Margery must “buy” and “purvey” and “ordain” for herself. She continues to display her abilities to negotiate the world once she is in Jerusalem, putting a “grote” in the hand of the Saracen who carries her to the top of Mount Quarentine (74). That the nature of Margery's pilgrimage changes radically when in Rome Christ commands her to give away all her money says much about Kempe's appraisal of pilgrimages. Clearly, though all of the company go to Jerusalem, not all can be described as pilgrims. By defining pilgrimage as a company made up of persons with a single goal and of a relatively similar social status, Kempe at once assimilates the pilgrim community to the world and presents the world as opposed to spiritual gain. Though her depiction has its roots in the actual—ships and bedding must be purveyed and gold must be somehow carried along—it is finally a fiction meant to be understood in relation to Margery, whose journey is increasingly inward. By carefully selecting the details by which she describes Margery's world, Kempe suggests the fundamental weaknesses of communities held together by values as flimsy as the covenants that bind both guildsmen and pilgrims.

In her effort to understand the nature or foundations of community, Kempe ultimately chooses to place her greatest emphasis upon relationships. It is therefore not the places Margery visits that stand out in the Book, for they serve as stations marking her own private response to holiness, but the people she encounters and the conversations she has that claim our greatest attention. Kempe uses the reactions of Margery's fellows to her admittedly uncomfortable spirituality as the means of gauging the values of the community she composes around Margery. She also uses Margery's relations with her fellows as a way of devaluing the very pilgrimages on which Margery so earnestly embarks. What the Lollards castigate in the contemporary institution of pilgrimage Kempe transforms into dramatic narrative. Take, for example, Kempe's account of Margery's last pilgrimage, a journey to see the Blood of Wilsnak. Kempe's account epitomizes the pilgrimage world as merely a replication of the world itself, where relations between England and Germany are polarized by mercantile concerns, and spiritual devotion is scorned in favor of good company by the way (see 232-35).⁴⁰ In contrast to the rich descriptions of Margery's unfortunate adventures, Kempe's account of the object of the pilgrimage is terse; “þus what wyth wel & wyth woo thorw þe help of owr Lord sche was browt to Wilsnak & saw þat Precyows Blod whech be myracle cam owt of þe blisful Sacrament of þe Awtere” (234-35). From Wilsnak, Margery goes to Aachen where she stays for ten or eleven days until Saint Margaret's Day, when the Virgin's smock is displayed. If we didn’t know how seriously relics were taken during the late Middle Ages, we might accuse Kempe of parody: her account of Margery's final trip seems at times to transform Margery into a sort of vagabond whose encounters with others—merchants, worldly women, poor folk, pilgrims robbed of their money, thirsty friars, scornful monks—are finally the point of the narrative. In those encounters, Kempe presents an image of fifteenth-century society whose fundamental discorder is the manifestation of its factionalization.

The very society Kempe constitutes is the society she deconstructs; she presents Margery as at once the representative of that society and as its remedy. Her needs for status, for goods, and for spiritual gratification can be detected in countless human documents of the late Middle Ages.⁴¹ The social and religious rituals that helped to define individual life in relation to the community serve to bind Margery to her world even as they become her means of escape from its strictures. Thus, in describing the details of such annual celebrations as Purification Day (see 198) or Palm Sunday (see 184), Kempe locates Margery among “þe pepyl” as one who goes in procession with others or bears a candle in church, one member of a common body. But for Margery these communal rituals are catalytic in the sense that Kempe describes her as using them as means of entry into a more vividly experienced private world. Furthermore, the society that celebrates its faith in such rituals is one whose institutions implicitly do not satisfy Margery's yearnings for spiritual fulfillment and can only reject Margery for her individualistic expressions of faith.

Kempe, like Chaucer, employs pilgrimage as a means of presenting a highly selective picture of society that serves as an exploration of the inadequacies of contemporary institutions. She also uses it to suggest a new way of conceiving of community. She accomplishes this through Margery, whose liminality allows her to move freely in and around the stratifications of late medieval society. By presenting Margery's experience as a series of conversations or personal encounters with a wide variety of persons, Kempe provides the narrative with vignettes that, when taken together, begin to suggest ways in which the holy might be located in areas where we are not usually prepared to find it.⁴² I would thus like to end my own exploration of Kempe's Book by focusing on two separate but ultimately related incidents that underscore her profoundly radical investigation into the core of human social existence.

The first of these incidents, … is the account in chapter 17 of Margery's interview with Richard Caistyr, the Vicar of Saint Stephen's in Norwich, to whom Christ bids her go. Kempe's choice of Richard Caistyr is itself significant, for he had a reputation for erudition, for sanctity, and for piety. He was even praised by John Bale, who suggested Caistyr was secretly sympathetic to Lollardy, for his dislike of clerical excess and abuses.⁴³ Kempe's decision to include Caistyr in the Book as a figure Christ himself recommends to Margery was thus probably not coincidental; she thereby signifies her approbation for a certain type of clerical figure, whose authority derives from holiness rather than from administrative power. Margery's interview with Caistyr is even more significant. She enters his church on a Thursday, a little before noon, and finds him walking up and down with another priest. Margery approaches Caistyr and asks to speak with him for an hour or two about the love of God sometime in the afternoon after he had eaten. Caistyr is at once amazed (“What cowd a woman ocupyn an owyr er tweyn owyrs in þe lofe of owyr Lord?”) and receptive, for he says he will not eat until he hears such a marvel:

þan he sett hym down in þe chirche. Sche, syttyng a lytyl be-syde, schewyd hym all þe wordys whech God had reuelyd to hyr in hyr sowl[e]. Sythen sche schewyd hym al hyr maner of levyng fro hyr chyldhod as ny as it wolde come to hir mende,—how vnkynd sche had ben a-geyn owyr Lord Ihesu Crist, how prowde & veyne sche had ben in hir aport, how obstynat a-geyns þe lawes of God, & how envyows a-geyn hir euyn-cristen, sythen, whan it plesyd owyr Lord Crist Ihesu, how sche was chastysed wyth many tribulacyons & horrybyl temptacyons, & aftyrward how sche was fed and comfortyd wyth holy medytacyons & specyl in þe mende of owyr Lordys Passyon. (38-39)

This passage, taken together with Kempe's preceding description of Margery's approach to Caistyr, captures much about her sure sense of technique as well as her interest in relocating the holy in what is, finally, homely space. Here, as elsewhere throughout the Book, Kempe is specific about time and place. Thus, she is careful to indicate when Margery found Caistyr (on a Thursday, a little before noon) and where (walking up and down his church with his own confessor). She then, as few medieval authors do, provides us with a dramatization of the process of confession that underlines its status as conversation between two persons. As John Bossy puts it, “Medieval confession, we need to remember, was a face-to-face encounter between two people who would probably have known each other pretty well; we may also remember that it occurred, normally speaking, once a year, in the not-so-remote presence of a large number of neighbours, and more or less at the time (Maundy Thursday) set aside for the reconciliation to the community of public penitents in the pre-scholastic sense.”⁴⁴ Kempe's account, however, though located in the realm of the actual, uses what is conventional as a screen for a more probing interest in the subject of confession: by confessing to Caistyr—the two of them sitting there in the church of Saint Stephen's—Margery effectively introduces herself to him.

She does so by “showing” herself to him. Kempe consistently uses the verb “schew,” meaning to disclose or to make oneself known, to describe Margery's acts of confession. Since it was commonly employed in that context, Kempe's usage of schew is at once utterly conventional and pointedly reflexive. Presenting herself as a text upon which God has inscribed words, Margery first “shows” to Caistyr “all þe wordys whech God had reuelyd to hyr in hyr sowl[e].” The syntax seems to suggest that Caistyr is intended to function as the reader or interpreter. However, Margery next images herself as her own exegete, for she “shows” him the events of her life but does so by glossing them or analyzing them in terms of pride or vanity or envy. She goes on to tell him of her revelations, which she describes as a text indebted to none (“neyþyr Hyltons boke, ne [B]ridis boke, ne Stimulus Amoris, ne Incendium Amoris”). Kempe's language throughout the passage makes it clear that the act of showing involves far more than disclosure; it is also an interpretative act, one meant to validate the shower's self-awareness. Margery is both the text and its most astute translator.

Finally, Margery's act of confession focuses attention upon the complicated relationship between the individual and the community. Not only is it located in communal space with Caistyr's fellow priest, presumably, somewhere nearby, but she sits talking with a fellow human being, whom she can see and whose reactions she can gauge. In addition, Margery confesses to sins that impinge upon the well-being of the social body—pride, vanity, and envy—presenting what is individual in the analytical and communal language with which the Church describes sin.⁴⁵ Kempe also suggests something about her own process of selection in the Book, for Caistyr is privy to information we, the readers of this other text, do not have. Caistyr begins by “reading” an account of her childhood; we begin by reading an account of her marriage. Kempe thus evinces her awareness of fictional order, that the beginning of a text may help to shape its end. The text that Margery discloses and interprets to Caistyr is vaguely Augustinian; it begins in the heedlessness of childhood and proceeds to an account of a life described as displaying a classic pattern of sin. Chastisement, conversion, comfort, and revelation follow. What Kempe adumbrates here is a process of growing spiritual self-awareness; the Margery who both shows and glosses is master of her own text and apparently fully capable of constituting her public by the way she shapes her text. She therefore ends the chapter by stressing Caistyr's continual advocacy of her in the face of her later troubles with the authorities. What is private is thus brought into public view and presented as available and usable, but the process of publicizing is personal, individual, and suited to a specific circumstance (on a Thursday, a little before noon) and a particular person. Though Caistyr reads the beginning of a text we pick up a third of the way through, his encounter with Margery is incorporated into the text we read. He may know the beginning, but we know somewhat more of the end. I am not being entirely fanciful here; Kempe's account of this confession makes it clear that she, like Chaucer, thought of confession as a process of self-conscious narration at once subjective and social, as a moment when the individual locates the self in the context of community.⁴⁶ Kempe's account of Margery's experience with Richard Caistyr is but one instance among many of her ability to use a particular moment, which she describes in a highly particular way, as a means of expressing the true nature of community. In the Book the community of the spirit is not an entity but a process that is continually and mysteriously unfolding.

One of the most mysterious and evocative of these instances is the nonverbal “conversation” between Margery and a poor woman in Rome (see 94). It begins, “An-oþer tyme ryth as sche cam be a powr womanys hows, þe powr woman clepyd hir in-to hir hows & dede hir sytten be hir lytyl fyer, ieuyng hir wyn to drynke in a cuppe of ston.” What Kempe here sketches in is a moment at once rooted in time and timeless. The poor woman who welcomes the holy into her house figures in the Old Testament stories of Elijah and Elisha, in New Testament stories of Jesus and the apostles: in her loving and generous response to what she does not fully understand, she stands as a signifier of our more sophisticated and culpable lack of charity and generosity. But Kempe anchors this particular moment to a place in time by her judicious use of details—the “lytyl fyer” and the wine offered in a “cuppe of ston.” Such trappings of communion serve as the preamble to Margery's private experience of Christ's Passion: the woman's young son, who runs from the breast of his mother, who sits “ful of sorwe and sadnes,” to Margery, causes Margery to “see” the Virgin and her son in tyme of his Passyon and to have other holy thoughts, which Kempe does not divulge. The sight, then, of the toddler calls to mind, not pictures of Mary and the baby Jesus, but images of that sacrifice enacted at the altar, the body broken and yet one. Kempe ends the scene with words that any writer would be proud to own, “þan owr Lord Ihesu Crist seyd to þe creatur, ‘Thys place is holy.’ And þan sche ros up & went forth in Rome & sey meche pouerte a-mong þe pepyl.”

Kempe thus depicts a moment wherein community and communion are joined through the salvific image that Margery herself superimposes upon it.⁴⁷ She thereby hints at the very process of communal joining effected by the Mass, and though the stone cup holds no consecrated wine, it nonetheless is invested with symbolic power that derives from those very practices that were peripheral to the medieval Mass. The chalice was withdrawn from the laity during the thirteenth century, but at the annual Communion the entire population theoretically took at Easter unsanctified wine was normally offered to the communicant after he or she had received the Host. Like the blessed but unsanctified bread distributed on other Sundays among Mass-goers, the wine at once signified the distinctions of medieval society and the existence of a community of the faithful.⁴⁸ In the scene Kempe describes, Christ's words, “This place is holy,” serve as a private version of “Ite, Missa est,” providing the scene between the two women who barely speak with one another but who truly communicate with a moment of closure. The next sentence, “And þan sche ros up & went forth in Rome,” joins Margery to the great mass of the poor who await her outside the private moment of revelation and communication. Significantly, the rest of chapter 39 describes Margery's reentry into her company; those who had despised and excluded her now make “hir ryth good cher & weryn rith glad of hir comyng” (94). Though the picture of communal unity is later fragmented once again, Kempe's handling of the passage underlines that the relationship among individuals in a community reflects a more profound joining embodied in moments of extraordinary and, strictly speaking, unsanctified meaning.

I am not suggesting here that Kempe is a Protestant or a Leveler, but simply that she consistently probes the foundations of our need for or belief in community. She tends to find the strongest evidence for the possibility of unity in individual moments of charity that are truly instances, to use a term she uses to describe various and diverging situations, of comownyng. The word itself encompassed several related meanings: it was used to describe the acts of sharing or of dividing into parts, of conforming, of associating, of having sexual intercourse, of communicating or telling stories, and of receiving Communion.⁴⁹ Kempe's persistent use of the words comownyn and medelyn to describe activities associated with what are human attempts at unity (sexual, social, or spiritual) is a sign of her self-conscious and highly strategic use of language as a means of suggesting both similarity and difference. What distinguishes the true moment of joining from the false or superficial is the charity that transcends the barriers of sex, language, or age and makes of two one through love of Christ. As Kempe repeatedly makes clear, the text of Margery's life contains for more instances of missed communication than of true communion, lapses that, more often than not, occur within the confines of the sanctioned institutions of the late medieval world. Margery's life is a protracted process of “showing” that only the few are prepared to understand or affirm. The place that is holy is more likely to be the spot beside a poor woman's fire or at the dinner table of a friend or wherever two can talk as if reading a single text.

Finally, what Pentecost confers is power, the power of the word and power over the word. It is a power Kempe assigns to Margery, through whom the Christ is manifest to her world. The prayers that end the Book are thus a sign of the Descent; Margery is described as reliving that Pentecostal moment and as going on to join the concerns of the world through her intercession. In the power with which Kempe invests her protagonist, we may find her diagnosis of an ecclesiastical and secular society whose claims to power are empty because, in lacking charity, they do not join but fragment. Kempe, unlike so many medieval authors, does not allude to or mention the “body politic”; instead, she provides a picture of parts whose momentary and ephemeral joining occurs around a figure whose dissociation is at once discomfort and release.

Notes

1. For my remarks about the congruences between the Revelations of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and the Book, I am indebted to Sarah McNamer's introduction of her forthcoming edition of the Revelations from Cambridge University Library MS. Hh.1.11, which, along with her text, she was kind enough to share with me. For Saint Bridget, see Ellis, “‘Flores ad Fabricandam … Coronam’: An Investigation into the Uses of the Revelations of St. Bridget of Sweden in Fifteenth-Century England.”

2. Archer, ed., The Register of Bishop Philip Repingdon; Bateson, Records of the Borough of Leicester.

3. See Jacob, ed., The Register of Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury 1414-1443.

4. See Crompton, “Leicestershire Lollards”; Plumb, “The Social and Economic Spread of Rural Lollardy: A Reappraisal”; Tanner, ed., Heresy Trials.

5. I am here referring to the Rot. Parl. from the accession of Henry IV in 1399 through the 1430s.

6. See for example, Hudson and Gradon, eds., English Wycliffite Sermons, 2:327. In general, the Lollard sermons on the Beatitudes describe persecution as some form of communal detraction.

7. See Rot. Parl., vol. 4, III Hen. VI, nos. 38, 46, pp. 290, 292. Interestingly enough, both entries are in English.

8. See Rot. Parl., vol. 4, 8 Hen. VI, p. 335; 11 Hen. VI, p. 419.

9. For a description of episodic structure, see Middleton, “Narration and the Invention of Experience,” 121.

10. See N. Z. Davis, “Woman on Top,” in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France.

11. My remarks here owe much to Patterson's comments about the Wife of Bath. See Chaucer and the Subject of History, 281-83.

12. The Libelle of Englysche Polycye (1436), part of which recalls England's past mastery of the sea, provides an intentionally “masculine” image of Henry V as a shipbuilder, praising him for his magnificence, courage, wisdom, prudence, audacity, fortitude, justice, agility, and discretion, all traits that allowed him to dominate the sea (52).

13. Gairdner, Historical Collections of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, 148; Rot. Parl., 4:169.

14. See the notes by Allen to this section of the Book. Allen remarks that the prayers of a number of German holy women were composed for circulation. For remarks about private devotion in the late Middle Ages, see Gray, “Popular Religion and late Medieval English Literature”; Mertes, The English Noble Household, chapter 5.

15. On this subject, see Meech, ed., The Book of Margery Kempe, 349.

16. On the importance of Lammas to the cult of Saint Bridget, see the poem in her honor by John Audelay in Cumming, ed., The Revelations, introduction, xxxiii. On Saint Bridget of Sweden, see also Hollaway, ed. and trans., Saint Bride and Her Book; Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls.

17. Gibson, Theater of Devotion, 20-21, 97-98. See also Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, 76-88, for illuminating remarks about the relationship between the Book and the Revelations of Saint Bridget. There is even a curious parallel between the experiences of Margery and of Bridget in the deaths of their sons. As Cumming notes in his edition of The Revelations, 128 n. 117, when Bridget's son Charles became the lover of Joanna, queen of Naples, Bridget prayed to heaven for assistance and was “rewarded” by her son's death. Margery, of course, is similarly rewarded when her eldest son's lechery is punished by disease, which, in turn, inspires him to a holy life. Some years later, she takes comfort in his death, since he died a pious man.

18. See Cumming, ed., The Revelations of Saint Birgitta, introduction, xxxvii.

19. Cumming, ed., The Revelations of Saint Birgitta, introduction, xxxvii.

20. See Brooke, “Religious Sentiment and Church Design in the Later Middle Ages.” On private devotion in relation to the Mass, see, for example, Brilioth, Eucharistic Faith and Practice, 80-81; Driver, “Pictures in Print”; Hoskins, ed., Horae Beatae Mariae Virginis or Sarum and York Primers; Simmons, ed., Lay Folks Mass Book.

21. See Rubin, Corpus Christi, 73-74; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 29-30.

22. Faith, “‘The Great Rumour’ of 1377 and Peasant Ideology,” 63. For another discussion of this incident, see Middleton, “William Langland's ‘Kynde Name,’” 70.

23. The translation is Faith's (“‘The Great Rumour’ of 1377 and Peasant Ideology,” 63). For the original, see Walsingham, Gesta Abbatum, 3:309.

24. On the prayers for the dead as invoking a vast community made up of both the living and the dead, see Burgess, “A fond thing vainly invented.” On intercessory prayer and the metaphors of spiritual exchange, see Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise.

25. Clopper, “Lay and Clerical Impact on Civic Religious Drama and Ceremony,” 112.

26. Clopper, “Lay and Clerical Impact on Civic Religious Drama and Ceremony,” 128.

27. Martin Stevens has written eloquently on this play; see his Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, 50-87.

28. Stevens, in Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, applies a Bakhtinian approach to the York cycle, pointing out that Christ comes riding toward the city as a sort of King of Fools. That same city, or York, will crucify him as vociferously as it hailed him. See 77-87 for a discussion of the social commentary embedded in the cycle. For further discussion of the relationship between the figure of Christ and the idea of the community, see Travis, “The Social Body of the Dramatic Christ in Medieval England.”

29. On medieval civic processions much has been written. See Clopper, “Lay and Clerical Impact on Civic Religious Drama,” 125; James, “Ritual, Drama and Social Body in the Late Medieval English Town”; Mills, “Religious Drama and Civic Ceremonial”; Phythian-Adams, “Ceremony and the Citizen”; Rubin, Corpus Christi, 233, 266-68; idem, “Small Groups,” 143-45; Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, 50ff. For the text of the York Entry, see Beadle, ed., The York Plays.

30. Beadle, ed., The York Plays, “The Entry into Jerusalem,” lines 470-80.

31. Beadle, ed., The York Plays, “The Entry into Jerusalem,” lines 538-44.

32. See Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, 81-82, for an account of the ways in which the many ecclesiastical foundations in and around York affected the administration of civic justice.

33. For a searching discussion of this play that emphasizes its handling of the nature of Christ, see Travis, Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle, 163-66.

34. Lumiansky and Mills, eds., The Chester Mystery Cycle, “Pentecost,” lines 46, 59-60. The scene is described in Acts I and directly preceeds the Descent. However, where the Bible simply says that the lot fell on Matthew, and he was numbered with the twelve, the playwright emphasizes what is a line of succession validated by and through Peter.

35. On credal design in the entire cycle, see Travis, Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle, 192-217.

36. Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles, 52-62. On the implications of processional routing, see Rubin, Corpus Christi, 268.

37. On contemporary attitudes toward the city of Rome, see Nichols, ed. and trans., The Marvels of Rome. Mirabilia Urbis Romae. For Julian of Norwich, see Colledge and Walsh, eds., The Showings, the Long Text, 328; introduction, 53-57.

38. See Cronin, “The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards,” 300-301; Hudson, ed., English Wyctiffite Writings, 83-88.

39. Examination of Master William Thorpe, in Pollard, ed., Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse, 139, 140.

40. On the international situation at the time of this final journey, see Meech, ed., The Book of Margery Kempe, 344-45.

41. For a discussion of some of these documents, see Gibson, Theater of Devotion, chapters 1 and 2. As Gibson has emphasized, late medieval wills provide eloquent testimony of the needs of late medieval men and women. For discussions of these, see, for example, Driver, “Pictures in Print”; Gray, “Popular Religion and Late Medieval English Literature”; Harrod, “Extracts from Early Wills in the Norwich Registries”; Perrow, “The Last Will and Testament as a Form of Literature”; Post, “The Obsequies of John of Gaunt”; Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich; Vale, Piety, Charity, and Literacy Among the Yorkshire Gentry, 1370-1480. See also the wills recorded in the registers of Bishop Repingdon and Archbishop Chichele.

42. In her discussion of the fifteenth century's complicated use of images, Gibson applies the phrase, “incarnational esthetic” as a way of describing the insistence on the concrete.

43. See Meech, ed., The Book of Margery Kempe, 276 n. 38; 320 n. 142.

44. John Bossy, “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation,” 24. For the standard study see Lea, A History of Auricular Confession. See also Murray, “Confession as a Historical Source.”

45. See Bossy, “The Social History of Confession,” and idem, Christianity in the West, chapter 4, for the ways in which the Church focused on the social implications of sin.

46. On this subject, see also Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, chapter 8.

47. Bossy also plays with the associations between the two words; see Christianity in the West, 168.

48. See Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution,” 53-54, for a description of this practice. See Rubin, Corpus Christi, 70, for an account of the Church's decision to withdraw the chalice from the laity.

49. Ellis (“The Merchant's Wife's Tale,” 605) also mentions the various meanings of the verb comowne, seeing these as an instance of what she calls “social meanings” that in themselves indicate social confusion. In contrast, I see Kempe as consciously and meaningfully exploiting the richness of Middle English.

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