SOURCE: “Cobham's Daughter: The Book of Margery Kempe and the Power of Heterodox Thinking,” in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 3, September, 1995, pp. 277-304.

[In the following essay, Shklar investigates the issue of Kempe's religious dissent, as it is revealed in The Book of Margery Kempe. Shklar explains that the Lollards—a sect of religious reformers under the leadership of John Wycliffe—offered a framework of discourse from which Kempe developed her own methods of dissent and sense of “vernacular spirituality.”]

For the most part, critics have approached the problem of dissent in The Book of Margery Kempe as something curiously external to its author's purpose. Either they accept Kempe's orthodoxy at face value, reading the accusations of heresy made against her as doctrinally unjustifiable, or they interpret Kempe's behavior as approaching Wycliffite ideology in certain respects, particularly her insistence on preaching publicly despite being a secular woman.¹ The critical consensus is, perhaps, best expressed in a recent article by Nancy Partner: “Margery was no heretic; the theological core of her belief was simple and orthodox but her willfulness, her self-judgment, even her knowledge of scripture and her ability to moralize about it had to seem Lollard-like at the time. Her style was Lollard.”² This description underlines how defiantly Kempe escapes orthodox and heterodox definition, blurring substance and style. Kempe's engagement with Lollardy and the larger issues of dissent and disobedience is central to and inseparable from her spirituality. She not only coincides with Lollardy but makes it work for her.

Kempe's unusual brand of political mysticism derives its rhetorical force and its interpretive difficulty from its proximity to unorthodox concerns. Her “voice,” or subjectivity—that most elusive yet noisy figure in the Book—is generated in part from the pressures of church authority attempting to circumscribe orthodox belief.³ Her text's doctrinal confusion is at the heart of its ecclesiopolitical polemic; against the steady theme of her mystical dialogue with Christ, Kempe signals both orthodoxy and heterodoxy in sometimes dizzying juxtapositions. By focusing, moreover, on the public negotiations of theological and political dissent to the degree that she does, in a series of accusations and examinations, Kempe not so much proves her own legitimacy as questions the processes of legitimation themselves.⁴ Like the Lollard writer William Thorpe, with whom David Aers generically links her, Kempe assumes the authority to record and refigure her own examinations for heresy in the vernacular (“Making of Margery Kempe,” 109). With this subversively public mode of writing, she accords herself and her scribes the power reserved by the church of documenting legal processes in official registers. In recounting her interrogations by, among others, Arundel at Canterbury and Bowet at York, neither of which shows the archbishop in an exceptionally flattering light (and neither of which is found in their registers), Kempe takes on a type of authority identified with dissent even as these figures clear her of charges of heresy.⁵ She thus subordinates her mystical vita and the conventional purposes of hagiographic narrative to a more critical and inevitably heterodox vision.

In effect, Kempe sets forth her own model of dissent and reform as a critique of the prevailing discourses that would define heresy. She approaches the problem of dissent in a roundabout but expedient fashion: never addressing Lollardy directly but only the authorities' interpretations of her affinities with heretical beliefs. Through this strategy, Kempe occupies the precarious and inherently contested space between Christ, who speaks to her directly, and his governing representatives. Her version of dissent, however, relies less on what Gordon Leff characterizes as the “historicism” of most late-medieval heretical movements, the contrast between the modern corrupt church and the apostolic church, than on the spiritual gap between the church and Kempe herself as a literal embodiment of a devotional ideal.⁶ The discrepancies her Book accentuates are between an institutional body in chaos and her own body as a site of intercession and grace.⁷

Kempe's deployment of what was by 1436, when the first part of the Book was written in its final form, a long history of Lollard controversy demonstrates her keen understanding of propaganda as a language and set of images that can be manipulated to rebuke the power that generates it. Although actual Lollards are conspicuously absent from the Book, given Kempe's travels around England in the early to mid-1400s, Lollardy as a movement and a label, the primary concern of bishops, lords, and crowds, makes continuous appearances. As dictated by the demands of censorship in the wake of Arundel's Lambeth Constitutions of 1409, Lollardy is a shadowy presence in the Book of Margery Kempe, an ideological construct that emerges largely from the condemnation of the church and the conflation of heresy with other early-fifteenth-century anti-Lancastrian rebellions, especially in the atmosphere of political paranoia following Sir John Oldcastle's revolt in 1414.⁸ It is this figure of Lollardy, its propagandistic image, more than the tenets of Wycliffe's later followers, that Kempe appropriates in her confrontations with the ecclesiastical and secular powers. In particular, Kempe responds to the complex gendering of Lollardy by both its adherents and opponents as a central aspect of her self-presentation as a female mystic and reformer, translating academic discourses filtered through a formidable and fascinatingly diverse host of clerical friends and advisers into a vernacular interpretation of her life.⁹

To this end, the 1395 Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards provides valuable insights into Kempe's intersections with the heretical movement, because it deals with images of sexuality more explicitly than most Lollard texts and because of its scandalous posting at St. Paul's and Westminster Hall during Parliament and presumably wide circulation. This outspoken statement, which reverberates through decades of subsequent anti-Lollard literature, was, moreover, immediately recorded, translated into Latin, and answered point for point by the Dominican Roger Dymmok in his Liber contra duodecim errores et hereses Lollardorum. In their vernacular manifesto, the Lollards attacked the church's temporal property and power, which was intricately connected to ideas about gender.¹⁰ According to the Lollard polemicist, the celibate priesthood and orders exist “in prejudys of wimmen” (Hudson, Selections, 25), committing sodomy; women—imperfect by nature—who take vows of celibacy end up either aborting their children or having sex with each other, animals, or “creature þat beris no lyf” (28). Having rejected the “ydolotrie” of transubstantiation (25), the Lollards hold that men and women alike should be able to celebrate the Eucharist, and in their most interesting turn of phrase, assert of church officials who hold secular office that “hermaphrodrita or ambidexter were a god name to such manere of men of duble astate” (26). The tract argues that unnatural sexuality is inseparable from a church “blynde and leprouse” from its wealth; with the disendowment of the clergy both property and desire would be returned to their proper secular and domestic places (24). The Twelve Conclusions' preemptive strategy of portraying the church as a diseased and disordered body reverses accusations and images such as sodomy and leprosy that orthodox polemicists had long directed against heresies.¹¹ Dymmok responds to the Lollards' Conclusions by appealing to the secular powers with the claim that the heretics really intend to destroy all social order, as exemplified by their denial of the church's authority on the Eucharist. Progressing from a defense of the church as a type of Aristotelian-Thomistic polity, its rule naturally supported by substantial wealth, Dymmok deflects the Lollards' sexual charges by accusing them of excesses that mirror their anarchic view of property. The Lollards, he suggests, by arguing against vows of chastity plan to keep all women in common, and the virgins whom they claim celebrate their masses are really whores, available to all. To the Lollards' twelfth conclusion, an attack on unnecessary crafts and the wasteful ornamentation of churches, Dymmok shifts the topic to the court and an equivocating discussion of patristic arguments against the ornamentation of women's bodies.¹² For both sides, promiscuity, whether of the overly well-fed religious orders or the lawless heretics, is a metaphor for and a sign of misrule and the abuse of possessions. From the early stages of the Lollard movement, therefore, questions of women and gender—both literal and figurative—are central to the debate over the heresy and its vision of clerical poverty and a reformed church.

Another more frequently discussed aspect of the gendering of heresy concerns controversies over the actual roles of women in the church. Walter Brut, tried for heresy before Bishop Trefnant of Hereford, argues from Scripture that women could both preach and perform the sacraments—including the Eucharist. By striking at the most obviously exclusive quality of the priesthood, Brut, during his comprehensive attack on papal and ecclesiastical authority, takes a shortcut to redefining the church as the devout rather than the ordained.¹³ The first of four antiheretical tracts in BL MS Harley 31 written specifically to refute Brut's ideas, a Quaestio on whether women may teach men gathered in public, makes this threat to the ecclesiastical hierarchy explicit: “To teach and strive to convince publicly in church is the work not of subjects but of prelates. A woman, because of her female sex, is by nature subject to man” (Blamires, 252).¹⁴ The anonymous theologian, following the Pauline antifeminist tradition up to a recent antecedent in Henry of Ghent's Summa, then argues against women preaching because of both their seductiveness and their susceptibility to seduction.¹⁵ The second Quaestio, on whether women can administer the sacraments, reveals even more clearly its author's concern with women acquiring a species of political power through Lollard ideas. Citing Aquinas's commentary on Aristotle's Politics, the writer concludes that if women, inferior in reason, are unfit for civil rule, then so much the more so for spiritual rule.¹⁶ The analogy of ecclesiastical with secular government, though part of a much larger scholastic theological argument, polemically succeeds in yoking a condemnation of women as not only public agents but public authorities to an overall identification of Lollardy with political challenges to both church and state.

Likewise, the Carmelite Prior Provincial Thomas Netter, writing against the Lollards in the 1420s, identifies the heresies and treasons of Oldcastle and his followers with the excessive and uncontrolled preaching and teaching of women outside the domestic realm. Netter genders his attack on two fronts by invoking antifeminist allegorical interpretations like Bede's gloss of the loud woman of Proverbs (9.13) as a figure of heresy and, in the best style of protonational propaganda, by citing numerous vague examples of active Lollard women, almost all from London, such as a “notorious teacher” who held that Mary did not remain a virgin after the birth of Christ.¹⁷ Because of their “general turpitude against the order of law and nature,” women are the most dangerous vehicles of heretical teachings, and by extension, social revolt (Netter, 1:638-9).¹⁸

The rhetoric of these Lollard and anti-Lollard polemics, in which questions of dissent, reform, and obedience are framed in terms of sexual and domestic order, provides Margery Kempe, the diligent student of her Carmelite and other advisers, with a working political vocabulary. As Karma Lochrie argues, the antifeminism of the church authorities' attacks on Lollardy—the suspicion that all women who appeared literate were heretics—proved dangerous to Kempe's validation of her vernacular authority (Lochrie, “Marginal Woman's Quest,” 43-6). Kempe, however, also makes the most of what she knows of Lollardy to question her various opponents' authority, sometimes skating close to the Lollards' own criticisms of church government.

Kempe positions her Book in relation to concepts of textual dissent.¹⁹ In the two versions of the Proem she introduces the vexing problem of obedience to the church that underlies the entire text. Through the narrative of her final scribe, Kempe emphasizes her understanding of reading and writing as political acts closely monitored by various authorities. From the scribe's opening warning in the later Proem that one can only benefit from Kempe's example of grace if, as in his case, “lak of charyte be not ower hynderaunce,” he stresses the text's dependence, if not Kempe's, on negotiations with both readers and writers.²⁰ The most obvious oddity about the introduction is, of course, its division into a short, apparently self-censored explanation of why the Book took so long to write, preceded by a longer, more self-conscious history of the scribe's deferral. In the earlier Proem Kempe provides two reasons for the Book's long genesis: the divine command that the text not be written under church control and the political snags that result from it being written by a layman working on behalf of a laywoman:

not-wythstondyng þis creatur had greet cownsel for to don wrytn her tribulacyons & her felyngs and a Whyte Frer proferyd hir to wryten frely yf she wold. And sche was warnyd in hyr spyrit þat sche xuld not wryte so sone. And many ierys aftyr sche was bodyn in hyr spiryt for to wrytyn. And þan iet it was wretyn fyrst by a man whech cowd neiþyr wel wryten Englysh ne Duch, so it was un-able to be red but only be specyal grace, for þer was so mech obloquie & slawndyr of þis creatur þat þer wold fewe men beleve þis creatur. (6)

Having rejected the friar's offer (possibly by her friend Aleyn, who later in the Book is ordered away from Kempe by the preeminent anti-Lollard, Netter), and, implicitly, a very different type of book from the one we have—Latin and impeccably orthodox—Kempe addresses the text's problematic vernacular language. In her ambiguous wording, the text hinges on the reader's grace either because it is literally unreadable or because it is politically dangerous to read—or both. By conflating these two issues, Kempe casts her book into the debate over the Lollard advocacy of biblical translation and vernacular writing (Lochrie, “Marginal Woman's Quest,” 34-5).²¹ She gestures first toward the conservative position against the use of the vernacular, upheld by various clerical opponents of English translation, with the idea that the idiom of the Book is somehow uncontrollable, its meaning confused by its writer's obscure nationality, but she then shifts to a stance closer to dissent, implying that the meaning of the text is really threatened by censorship.²²

In the later Proem Kempe makes this point more explicitly. Here she underlines the difficulty of all verbal expression: “Sche myth nevyr expressyn it wyth her word lych as sche felt it in hyr sowle” (3). To write at all entails a loss of meaning, which in Kempe's narrative becomes a fall from mystical understanding into the dangers of politically determined language. She then reiterates her division from church authorities when she is finally commanded to write. Although many clerks initially approve her revelations and offer to write “wyth her owen handys,” by the time “whan it plesyd ower Lord,” none of them comes forward, and the Book is produced in an illegible script: “The lettyr was not schapyn ne formyd as oþyr letters ben” (3-4). Kempe also reveals at much greater length the dangers surrounding the transcription of the Book from an unreadable to a readable vernacular, thereby aligning her account of her life with other unauthorized English texts. The priest excuses himself out of “cowardyse”: “At lat he seyd onto hir that he could not read it, wherfore he wold not do it. He wold not put him in perel thereof” (4). When she hires another layman to write, she asks him “never to bewreyn it as long as sche lived” (4), but he still cannot read the script. As Kempe eventually makes clear, the priest writes the Book not by ecclesiastical or political authorization but at the prodding of his individual “consciens” and her prayers for grace, abandoning his excuses of the text's difficulty and his poor eyesight. The wryly comic episode of the priest wearing spectacles that, of course, only make his vision worse serves as a thinly disguised metaphor for the real restrictions that prevent him from writing. From the outset Kempe identifies her Book's potential for dissent in its reception, even as she affirms its divine sanction.

The dilemma of Kempe's obedience to the church comes out even more strongly in the early chapters. When Christ ravishes her spirit, he bluntly defines the clergy as her adversaries: “Drede þe nowt, dowtyr, for þow shalt have victory of al þin enmys. I shal ieve the grace i-now to answer every clerke in the love of God” (17). At the beginning of Christ's intimate dialogue with Kempe, he associates grace with the position of dissent. As his mystical “daughter,” not only will her word carry more weight than the clerks', but her grace will actually be demonstrated through the church's hostile interpretations and interrogations of her orthodoxy. Christ addresses Kempe within her particular historical circumstances: her run-ins with the authorities who interpret her devotional practices as heresy will become her spectacular Imitatio Christi.²³

In a similar vein, one of Kempe's first miracles thematizes authoritative interpretation. In some detail, she describes how part of the church vault at St. Margaret's fell on her head and back; when she emerges without pain, both a layman, John of Wyreham, and the Carmelite friar Aleyn (who preserves the stone and wood as relics) read the event correctly as the “gret myracle” that the spirit of God announces, but others “rathar levyd it was a tokyn of wreth and veniawns” (22). The strikingly real physical contact between Kempe's body and the materials of the church highlights her strained relations with the church as both hierarchy and community; the ambiguity of the miracle to the people points directly to Kempe's own ambiguous approach to the significance of the visible, material church. This emblematic structure, literally falling apart at Kempe's presence at mass, signifies both the division in her community and the contemporary fragmentation of the meaning of the “church,” away from church buildings and the administrative church and toward the idea of a community of believers, associated with Lollardy.²⁴ In this episode, characteristic of much of Kempe's destabilizing strategy, she demonstrates her orthodoxy by her actions while signaling heterodox concerns and interpretations.

Kempe's first encounter with the persecutors of Lollardy occurs during her visit to Canterbury, where she quarrels with a representative of monastic worldliness, “an eld monk, whech had ben tresowrer with the Qwen whyl he was in secular clothng, a riche man, & gretly dred of much pepyl” (27). After Kempe insists that she will speak and hear of God, he reacts with a desire to put her in her place: “I wold þow wer closyd in a hows of ston þat þer schuld no man speke wyth þe” (28). When the other monks finally chase her away from the monastery after she has thanked them in a parable for their abuse, they threaten her, “Thou shalt be brent fals lollare. Her is a cartful of thornys redy for the and a tonne to bren the with,” and incite a crowd against her (28). In this showdown, Kempe appropriates Lollardy as anticlerical satire, capturing the force of Wycliffite critique while affirming her own orthodoxy. She gestures toward markedly “Lollard” criticisms of the church by exposing the monks' power as temporal, based on wealth and coercion rather than on the spiritual authority of the Gospels, as exemplified by the treasurer-monk. A former official of the court, he advocates governing by instant repression to prevent Kempe's verbal transmission of Scripture. Another monk's response to Kempe—“Eythyr þow hast the holy Ghost or ellys þow hast a devyl wyth-in the, for that thu spekyst her to us it is Holy Writte and that hast þu not of thiself”—raises the issue of Scripture itself as church property (28). While Kempe describes later in the Book how she actually learns biblical stories from her clerical advisers with vernacular texts, the monk shuts off even the possibility of this type of female lay piety by asserting that Kempe's “literacy” is divinely, or more likely demonically, inspired. Moreover, in a more specific instance of clerical abuse, the monks eagerly call for taking over the secular arm's power of burning heretics, to the point where they actually have the stake ready at hand. Instead of going on to advocate the Wycliffite solution of disendowment when faced with these corrupt monastic practices, Kempe shows how her own divinely sanctioned hints at reform are instantly condemned as heresy by clerics concerned only with holding on to their property.

As a mystical reformer, Kempe rhetorically becomes the “Lollard” woman of ecclesiastical propaganda to reveal the church's abuses of property, temporal authority, and women alike. She reiterates to the two men who rescue her from the monks that she is “neythyr eretyke ne loller”—a distinction that further emphasizes “Lollard” as a strangely flexible term—restoring her voice to a position of orthodoxy (29). But her open declaration also questions both the church and popular definitions of heresy by demonstrating just how close her own position is to dissent, even as Christ assures her that she is a sturdy if invisible “peler of Holy Church” (29).

The crisis of definition continues in her initial meetings with high church officials. Bishop Philip Repingdon of Lincoln, one of Wyclif's most notorious former Oxford disciples, subjects Kempe to a series of examinations that, even though he believes her mystical revelations, fail to persuade him to grant her wish to wear a ring and mantle of chastity. Throughout their encounter, Kempe plays on the glaring irony of Repingdon's status as a notable ex-Lollard. The disruptiveness of her sexual choice—a chaste marriage—and even more so, her desire to wear white clothes, though certainly not signs of Lollardy, nevertheless raise questions about the validity of her position as a pious and independent laywoman. Within the ideological framework of the crackdown on heresy, with its polemical stress on regulating the roles of women to maintain ecclesiastical and social order, Kempe's request challenges Repingdon to take a stand on dangerous issues of gender and obedience. She once again exposes the political pressures in the church, as the repentant dissenter insists that Kempe wait until her return from Jerusalem so that she will be “bettyr prevyd and knowyn,” then dishonestly, “feyned throw counsel of his clerkys,” passes her along to Arundel with the excuse that she is not from his diocese (35). For Repingdon, all too recently proved and known himself by the church authorities, Kempe is too hot to handle. Christ's reproach to him, delivered through Kempe, that “he dredyth more the schamys of the world than the perfyt love of God” (35), can be read as a comment not only on his unwillingness to grant Kempe's request despite his own beliefs in her favor but on his earlier politically motivated repudiation of Wycliffism in 1382 as well; in these subversive terms, Repingdon represents a church hierarchy that in obeying its own laws of orthodoxy fails to obey Christ.²⁵

Kempe's meeting with Archbishop Arundel at Lambeth reaffirms her positions both as the image of a Lollard and as a reformer. Denouncing the archbishop's household for swearing oaths, she again incurs the popular wrath against heresy: “wyth that cam forth a woman of the same town in a pylche & al for-schod this creatur, bannyd her & seyd ful cursydly to her in this maner, ‘I wold þu wer in Smithfeld & I wold beryn a fagot to bren þe wyth; it is pety that thow levyst’” (36). In this extraordinary reportage, Kempe captures the vagueness of the popular concept of Lollardy instilled by ecclesiastical propaganda and its apparent disjuncture from the views of the head of the English church himself. By juxtaposing the church hierarchy with a popular voice, Kempe reveals an image of heresy that has become divorced from its source in church authority. Whereas the woman is ready to burn Kempe, as a female critic of the clergy, for heresy, Arundel grants her “hys lettyr and hys seel” (36) and accepts her strong criticisms of his corrupt conditions, even though her language is, in fact, remarkably close to Lollard phrasing: “My Lord, owr alderes lord, al-myty God hath not ion iow iowyr benefys & gret goodys of the world to maynten wyth hys tretowrys & hem þat slen hym every day be gret othys sweryng. ie schal answer for hem les than ie correctyn hem or ellys put hem owt of yowr servyse” (37). To characterize the worldly clergy as traitors to Christ is, of course, a consistent refrain of Lollard polemic, as is the general objection to oaths, and Kempe's deployment of these terms almost immediately following her account of the woman's threat makes their identification with Lollard rhetoric unmistakable.²⁶ Although her use of this idiom doesn’t make her demands for clerical reform expressly heretical, since she voices no quarrel with Arundel's possession of wealth, her mimicry, or appropriation, encodes the problem of dissent within an overall rebuke to the church. By an implicit extension of the archbishop's household to the English clergy as a whole, Kempe clearly sides with those accusing the church hierarchy, as opposed to the Lollards, with “treason” in the sense of disobedience to the church as founded by Christ.²⁷ Her echoes of dissenting rhetoric underscore the divisions in the church as another argument for reform. Having obscured the line between reform and dissent with her enactments of both Lollard persecution and Lollard polemics, Kempe can, as we will see, present herself later in her account as a timely reformer at a truly national level.

Kempe's involvement with Lollardy is temporarily interrupted in her narrative by her pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago. While her travels demonstrate Kempe's orthodoxy, in that she doesn’t maintain the Wycliffite objections to pilgrimages and images, she launches considerable reformist invective from the road, against both her fellow pilgrims and various clerics. As Lynn Staley Johnson argues, Kempe opposes herself to “a society dominated by a mercantilist ethic” by avoiding the community of prosperous and worldly English pilgrims (“Margery Kempe: Social Critic,” 176). Her account of the pilgrims' venality and, more specifically, their attempts to prevent her from speaking about the Gospels at the table resonate as well with Wycliffite attacks on the wastefulness and sinfulness of pilgrimages.²⁸

Her dealings along the way with questions of obedience to the clergy lead her back to her second round of interrogations for heresy. It is, of course, no coincidence that these events take place in Rome after Christ has reminded her in Jerusalem, “I am above al holy Church” (73). First, Kempe takes a German priest, Wenslawe, as her confessor, although they cannot understand each other: “The priest understood non English ne wist not what she seyd & and sche cowd non other langage than English, and therefor þei spokyn be an interpretowr” (82). After they pray for thirteen days, he is miraculously given the grace to understand Kempe: “Þan he understod what sche seyd in English to hym & sche understod what þat he seyd & yet he understod English þat other men spokyn” (83). At the same time, she faces the particular enmity of an English priest: “Þe cawse of his malyce was for she wold not obeyn hym. & sche wist wel it was a-geyn þe helth of her sowle for to obeyn hym as he wold that sche xulde a done” (84). Kempe therefore not only assumes the privilege to obey or to disobey the clergy as she sees fit, without mentioning any specific reasons, but relates obedience to the knowledge of vernacular languages. When the English pilgrims accuse Kempe before another English priest of confessing to Wenslawe without comprehending him, she sets up a dinner to prove the nature of their communication:

At þe last, þe seyd creature. seying and wel understondyng that hir confessor undirstod not hir langage & it was tedious to him, than, in party to confort hym & in party er els mech to provyn the werk of God, sche telde in hir own langage in Englysh a story of Holy Writte which she had lernyd of clerkys whil she was at hom in England, for sche wolde spekyn of no vanitye ne of no fantasijs. Than þei askyd hir confessowr if he understod þat sche had seyd, & he a-non in Latyn telde hem þe same wordys þat she seyd beforn in Englisch, for he cowd neythyr speke Englysch ne understondyn Englisch save only aftyr hir tonge. (97-8)

As Sarah Beckwith points out, this translation is presented as a miracle that eliminates the actual problems of “representation, mediation and transmission” (“Problems of Authority,” 192). Yet as a mystical experience, it is also an event that ties in remarkably well with heterodox polemics about the respective uses of Latin and English (187-8). Kempe's emphasis is on how the priest can understand her vernacular because it is Scripture and not the frivolous fictions of her countrymen—the “vanityes and fantasyes” that the Lollards almost always identify with the preaching materials of friars.²⁹ The episode gestures toward the Wycliffite valorization of translation of the Bible into the vernacular, albeit without involving textual issues beyond Kempe's own vernacular project. As the Lollard author of the Tractatus de regibus sums up the dissenting position on vernacular usage: “Sythen witte stondys not in lanagage but in groudynge of treuthe, for tho same witte is in Laten þat is in Grew or Ebrew, and trouthe schuld be openly knowen to alle maneres of folke, trowthe moveþ mony men to speke sentencis in ynglische that thai hav gedirid in latyne, and herefore bene men holden heretikis.”³⁰ For Kempe, defending her choice of which priest to obey, the truth of “Holy Writte” likewise takes precedence over material language, and she, as well as the priest, is authorized to speak of it.

Upon her return to England, Kempe's troubles with Lollardy begin in earnest in Leicester, a city whose Lollard community was established early on with the help of Philip Repingdon (Hudson, Premature Reformation, 43). The new lines of questioning and “aggression” that Kempe faces reflect, as David Aers argues at length, her refusal, by traveling around England alone, to conform to the network of social ideologies that defined the role of women (“Making of Margery Kempe,” 102). Her mode of recording the male-governed proceedings and her own strategic uses of heterodox vocabularies, however, allow her to institute exactly what the opponents of Lollardy most feared from women, a public vernacular ecclesiopolitical discourse.³¹ Kempe's scathing accounts of the juridical spectacles that focus on her criticize not only institutions but also politicized images of gender.

The new idea of Lollardy that Kempe encounters at Leicester around 1417, in the wake of Oldcastle's Rebellion, loosely combines concepts of heresy and treason.³² The indeterminacy of the mayor's accusations, “thu art a fals strumpet, fals loller and fals deceiver of the pepyl” (111), after Kempe responds to his question as to whose daughter she is with the identities of both her father and husband, suggests that her “Lollardy” is in fact an all-purpose term for social and sexual transgression (Aers, “Making of Margery Kempe,” 97). Yet the way the mayor arrives at his conclusions, comparing Kempe with St. Katherine of Alexandria, a figure especially associated with women's rule and women's learning, reveals a deeper confusion of authority.³³ Having explicitly identified herself in visions with the virgin-martyrs St. Katherine and St. Margaret and affirmed her role as a reformist mystic in the active political tradition of St. Catherine of Siena and St. Bridget of Sweden on her pilgrimages, Kempe is confronted with a representative of secular authority's literal interpretation of her imitations of other holy women: “Seynt Kateryn telde what kynred sche came of & iet ar ye not lyche” (111).³⁴ In this peculiar passage Kempe satirizes the collaboration between church and state against heresy as the civic power's reduction of the official saint's life to a legalistic code all too easily violated. As a married woman, Kempe crosses over the line of acceptable female mystical spirituality and exemplarity to embody the anti-Lollard polemicists' ideas of a Lollard teacher supplanting the church with a chaotic sect that overturns gender roles along with other power structures. As in Dymmok's accusations of sexual excess in response to the Wycliffite call for all women to marry, for the mayor Kempe's marriage ironically makes her a “strumpet.” Taking up the language of gendered propaganda, the mayor reads what is actually the sign of Kempe's chastity (marriage to an absent husband) as a sign of the most radical heterodox beliefs about disendowment and redistribution of clerical property figured as unregulated sexuality.

Already identified and about to be imprisoned as a Lollard through this play of images, Kempe articulates her own position of dissent to the mayor: “I am as redy, ser, to gon to preson for Goddys lofe as ie arn redy to gon to chirche” (112). For Kempe, the prison becomes a true “church,” as opposed to the false administrative church supported by a woefully misinformed secular power. She connects false authority and sexual coercion more openly in her questioning by the Steward of Leicester, a passage that also harks back to her defense of the vernacular while she was in Rome:

The Styward anon, as he sey her, spak Latyn unto hir, many prestys stondyng a-bowtyn to here what sche xulde say & other pepyl also. Sche seyd to the Stywarde “Spekyth Englisch, yf yow lyketh, for I understond not what ie sey.” The Styward seyd un-to hir, “Þu lyest falsly in pleyn Englisch.” Than seyd sche unto him ageyn “syr asketh what question ie wyl in Englisch, & throw the grace of my Lord Jesus Christ I xal ansewr you resonably therto.” And þan askyd he many qwestyonys to the whech sche answered redily and resonably that he cowd getyn no cawse a-geyn hir. Than þe Stywarde toke hir be the hand & led hir into his chambyr & spak many fowl rebawdy wordys un-to hir, purposyng and desyring, as it semyd hir, to opresyn hir & for-lyn her. (113)

In this stark display of power, the steward himself makes the vernacular into the promiscuous language that the authorities had determined it to be; having failed publicly to entrap Kempe on matters relating to heretical activities, he privately attempts to at least prove her to be the “strumpet” of the anti-Lollard political imagination. By pointedly recording both transactions, as opposed to just the one that would be preserved in an official document, Kempe provides a rare glimpse of power caught in the act, as it were, of validating itself. As Rita Copeland has written of the efforts against “pleyn English” discourse: “The real enemy, the object of official repression, is the Lollard hermeneutic itself. This is a feminine hermeneutic: it is open and popular, vernacular and literal” (26). By exposing the formation of this construct in process, Kempe reverses its valences, drawing a sharp distinction between her own “feminine” vernacular, which derives its authority from Christ, and the steward's illegitimate and sexually driven, though “masculine,” discourse of power.

Kempe continues to subtly comment upon the theological and political dynamics of language in her examination on the articles of faith before the Abbot of Leicester. Here, she provides, under oath, the correct answers to the central questions of Lollard heresy, the nature of the Eucharist and the authority of the clergy: “Serys, I believe in the Sacrament of the Awter on this wyse, that what man hath takyn the ordyr of presthode, be he never so vicious a man in his levyng, yef he say dewly the wordys ovyr the bred that owr lorde Jesus christ seyde whan he made his Mawnde a-mong his disciplys ther he sat at the soper, I believe it is his very flesch & hys blood & no material bred ne never may be unseyd, be it onys seyd” (115). Although the statement satisfies the assembled clergy, the mayor immediately accuses her of hypocrisy, interpreting her reply in light of the Lollards' refusal to recognize oaths: “Sche menyth not wyth her hert as sche seyth with her mowth” (115). With this double bind produced by the conflicting interpretation of Lollardy by ecclesiastical and civic authorities, Kempe lambastes both a church that depends entirely on clerical procedure and a secular power that readily disregards it in its own interest. Even as she affirms the efficacy of bad priests, she demonstrates how her own orthodox words, infused by God for the occasion as always, mean nothing to the mayor, who is more concerned with her potential to disrupt political and domestic order.

At this moment in her narrative, Kempe capitalizes on her official clearance from Lollardy by the church to approach a “Lollard” critique of authority in a fascinating reworking of the sexual politics of heresy. She deploys the precise move that polemicists such as Dymmok feared from Wyclif's theory of dominion by grace—that it would undermine secular as well as ecclesiastical authority.³⁵ The mayor accuses Kempe of sexual crimes that she finds “expedient” to conceal but refutes the charges by defending her obedience to “the lawe of matrimony” (115). Kempe next denies the mayor's authority altogether, based on his sexual misreading: “Sir ie arn not worthy to ben a meyr & that schal I prevyn by Holy Writte, for owr Lord God seyd hymself er he wold take veniawnce on the citeys, ‘I xal comyn down & seen’ & yet he knew al thing. & that was not ellys, sir, but to schewe men as ie ben that ie schulde don no execucyon in ponisching but iyf ye had knowyng beforn þat it wer worthy to ben don” (116). By invoking this conventional patristic, ethical, and political gloss on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the context of the mayor's attack, Kempe implies the more obvious sexual gloss of the passage—the condemnation of sexual misconduct, or more specifically “sodomy,” in the cities.³⁶ Whereas the mayor's accusations against Kempe are apparently of a heterosexual nature, given her answer that she never sinned with “mannys body in this worlde” (115) except her husband's, Kempe leaves their exact content “expediently” open. She does, however, take the Lollard sexual rhetoric of the Twelve Conclusions and elsewhere—an argument that in its original context would include Kempe herself in its condemnation for her vow of chastity—to link the mayor's false authority and misgovernment of Leicester with the purported sodomy of the religious orders. That the mayor himself understands the sexual and political implications of Kempe's deft “exegesis” are clear from his next accusation, based on her white clothes, in which he characterizes her as literally a seducer of women: “I trowe thow art comyn hedyr to han a-wey owr wyvys fro us and ledyn hem wyth the” (116). He returns the coded charge of homosexuality to Kempe so as to transform her supposed Lollardy from a heretical reinterpretation of property and power to a domestic revolt or sexual treason—essentially an all-women's version of Oldcastle's Rebellion, an idea that appears later in Kempe's travels in a somewhat different ideological guise.

The final irony of Kempe's examination on her faith at Leicester is that later in the Book, describing her love for the sacrament, she avows that “she stedfastly beleved [the Eucharist] was very God and Man in the forme of breed” (138). This is, of course, emphatically not what she tells the Abbot in her defense but rather an orthodox vernacular formulation invoked under pressure by many Lollards—including Oldcastle himself—attempting to evade further questioning on the exact nature of the sacrament.³⁷ Margaret Aston incisively analyzes the development of “the new English vocabulary of sacramental theology” by Wyclif's Oxford followers in vernacular confessions presented during their 1382 heresy trial:

The Wycliffite clerks who defied the accepted boundaries of Latin for answering questions on the eucharist were making several points at once: that it was a fraudulent obfuscation to discuss the church's central doctrine in a language alien to lay people; all believers, clerical and lay, shared the same belief; the truths of the faith, as much as the scripture on which they rested, and in whose words they should be expressed, should be open to all alike. To talk sacramental doctrine in English was to make a direct attack on the deception and hypocrisy by which the faith of scripture had been ousted and the people led into error. (“Wyclif and the Vernacular,” 299-300)

Kempe, in what appears as a virtual aside, incorporates the Lollard critique of the church by restating her own understanding of the Eucharist, once her interrogations are over, in language that while orthodox was not precise enough to disprove heresy; like the Lollards she avoids mentioning “material bread,” the key phrase in her confession before the abbot (Aston, “Wyclif and the Vernacular,” 322-3). Without actually compromising her orthodox sacramental position, Kempe nevertheless scores a subtle but devastating shot at the whole apparatus of persecution and her obedience to it, relegating her public confession to the status of coerced, flexible language. Christ provides her with the current “right” answers for her examiners, but she makes it clear that the supposedly “heretical” answers they would have rejected are steadfastly right as well.³⁸

In her next series of examinations, in the York diocese. Kempe presents her spirituality colliding with the political fallout from Oldcastle's Rebellion. Since the “Lollardy” that she continues to be accused of encodes Wycliffite heresy, anti-Lancastrian treason, and sexual revolt, she is propelled by her mystical promptings into the dynamics of a national crisis. Although Kempe never directly voices political opinions in the Book, she presents in her record of her questioners' agendas a critique of political authority as operating not only at odds with itself but with Christ. Above all, she reveals the workings of national concerns at the domestic level—the shaping of the political imagination of gender.

Even before she is brought before Henry Bowet, the Archbishop of York, Kempe answers questions from the clergy based on a primarily sexual understanding of heresy. For example, a “gret clerke” asks her to explain the words “Crescite & multiplicamini,” taken by Dymmok and others to signal Lollard arguments against vows of continence.³⁹ She responds with the correct allegorical interpretation: “Þes wordys ben not understondyn only of begetyng children bodily, but also the purchasing of vertu, whech is frut gostly” (121). At the same time as she “pleases” the clerk with her answer, she underlines the ecclesiopolitical issues at stake in such interpretations. Putting gender first, the clerk instantly identifies her with the Lollard literal and “feminine” hermeneutic that, in this case, would ultimately threaten clerical celibacy and church endowments. With her unusual inclusion of this phrase in its official Latin, Kempe reinforces her distance as a vernacular mystic from a church that glosses Scripture mainly to support its property.

In her first trial, at the York chapterhouse, Kempe succinctly states an obedience that is nevertheless open to question: “I wil neithyr maintain errowr ne heresy, for it is my ful wil to holdyn as Holy Chirche holdith and fully to plesyn God” (122). For the rest of her stay at York, Kempe demonstrates how these tenets prove mutually exclusive—how her obedience to God precludes strict adherence to a corrupt church. Although she once again satisfies the clergy on the articles of faith, the judge leaves her to the archbishop's jurisdiction. As Aers notes, her lengthy dialogue with Bowet begins with the same rhetorical trajectory as her initial confrontation with the mayor of Leicester: when she admits that she is not a maiden but a wife in white clothes, he immediately declares her “a fals heretyke” and orders her fettered (124): “This is a clerical version of the Mayor's anger. … Her heresy lies in confounding the categories virgin (white clothes) and wife, as well as in her autonomy and mobility” (Aers, “Making of Margery Kempe,” 110). By virtue of this textual repetition itself—a broken record of sorts—the archbishop's interpretation of Kempe as a Lollard preacher becomes a ludicrous example of church politics. Like her previous accusers, Bowet decides that she is a heretic from what her marriage may imply in turn about her beliefs against church property: he imprisons her as a threat to his office even before questioning her on theological matters. Even after Kempe recites the articles of faith for the third time, Bowet and his clerks continue to accuse her. She makes the absurdity of the situation clear when they admit that they want to banish her from York because of her orthodox knowledge: “We knowyn wel that sche can þe Articles of the Feith, but we wil not suffyr hir to dwellyn a-mong us, for the pepil hath gret feyth in her dalyawnce and peradventur sche myth pervertyn summe of hem” (125). This extraordinary claim comes close to demonstrating the argument of any number of Lollard polemics that depict the church hierarchy as trying to keep people from the true faith in the vernacular through elaborate fictions, which include the church's own nonscriptural laws.⁴⁰ Kempe also draws an important distinction at this point, essential to her own staging of dissent, between the machinations of the clerical hierarchy and the ordinary people who adhere to her. As a reformer facing an intransigent opponent in Bowet, Kempe clearly locates the corruption of the church in its leaders. When she refuses to swear to the archbishop not to teach in his diocese “unto the tyme that the pope and holy Chirche hath ordeynde that no man schal be so hardy to spekyn of God,” she, like the Lollards, finds a complete break between God and his clerical representatives a distinct possibility, given the spiritual and political conditions of the contemporary church.⁴¹

During her final serious confrontation with the anti-Lollard powers. Kempe completes her identification with Lollardy by literally becoming an imaginative substitute for Sir John Oldcastle. The Duke of Bedford's men, accompanied by two Dominican friars, arrest Kempe as a prominent heretic: “Þu art holdyn the gretest loller in this al þis cuntre er a-bowte London eythyr. & we han sowt the in many a cuntre” (129). Not only does she expose the confusion over the definition of Lollardy, since she has just come from the most un-Lollard act of visiting her confessor, Sleytham—who had also been confessor to the local saint, John of Bridlington—but she also demonstrates how the political gendering of heresy and treason transforms her into a stand-in for Oldcastle, the actual greatest Lollard being sought at this time. The Duke's men, representing the highest secular powers, identify Kempe with the traitor Oldcastle as a reified image of social revolt gendered female by propagandists like Netter, a domestic subject rebelling against what Aers calls “dominion in the household,” ready to spread treason to greater levels of authority around England (“Making of Margery Kempe,” 89).⁴² At the same time, as a middle-class woman, Kempe mirrors the image of the nobleman Oldcastle feminized and declassed by his involvement with Lollardy. In contemporary instances of this imaginative dynamic in Lancastrian propaganda, Hoccleve, in his poetic remonstrance, characterizes Oldcastle's heresy and disobedience as a loss of “manhode” and knightly “dominacion,” and, later, Elmham in his Liber metricus de Henrici Quinto invents the tale of Oldcastle's final defeat at Poole by a footstool-wielding woman.⁴³

Brought back to Archbishop Bowet, Kempe is further accused of being “Combomis dowtyr … sent to beryn lettrys about the cuntre.” In this new self-recorded trial transcript, Kempe points to the association of her own vernacular spirituality as Christ's “derworthy dowtyr” (29), and by extension her Book itself, with the authorities' idea of an uncontrolled “feminine” vernacular textuality embodied in letters that circulate through England like the proliferating Lollard leaflets or handbills (schedulae) mentioned with considerable alarm by Walsingham and subsequent chroniclers.⁴⁴ Kempe effectively turns this most bizarre of her interrogations into a condemnation of both church and civil government, as the accusing friar and Bowet fall to arguing over who has jurisdiction over her unspecified crime, which even the archbishop allows is not heresy. She reveals the contemporary anxieties in the Church of York over relations with the royal government, as the archbishop admits that “I wille not … that the Duke of Bedforde be wroth wyth me for hir” (132). In light of the revolt against Henry IV by Bowet's predecessor, Archbishop Scrope, and the continuing tensions with Bedford over the popularity of the anti-Lancastrian Scrope cult at York, Kempe portrays herself as a scapegoat, a substitute traitor in the controversy over the Church of York's loyalty to Henry V.⁴⁵ Moreover, she reveals the government's hidden agenda to contain the lay piety of the Yorkshire saints' cults, one of which—St. John of Bridlington's—she has already aligned herself with, by conflating them with the treason of the Lollards.⁴⁶ Kempe suggests that the authorities' vested interests in representing her teachings as not only heretical but treasonous are apparent: the church hierarchy, concerned only with its own power, sacrifices the true church, embodied by Kempe in her mystical dialogue with Christ, to its political ambitions. The ecclesiastical and political projections of Lollardy as a feminine rebellion not only keep pious women like Kempe in their place but serve the more important social function of disguising the conflicts among the most powerful of patriarchal figures.

Not surprisingly, the final substantive charge brought against Kempe is for domestic rebellion involving the nobility. The archbishop's suffragan reveals that Kempe's transgression lay in visiting Lady Westmoreland: “My lady her own persone was wel plesyd wyth þe and lyked wel thy wordys, but þu counseledyst my Lady Greystoke to forsakyn her husbonde, that is a baronys wyfe & dowtyr to my Lady of Westmorelonde & now hast seyd i-now to be brent for” (133). The suffragan represents Kempe through contemporary chroniclers' propagandistic images of the middle-class Lollards' seduction of the nobility into treason, only recast at a domestic level. Like Oldcastle's putative Lollard teachers, blamed in some accounts for his fall, Kempe becomes the agent responsible for leading this noblewoman away from her class into a feminine revolt.⁴⁷ Again Kempe's clerical accuser transforms her into a convenient figure for explaining the spread of heresy from outside the dominant class. As in the mayor of Leicester's charge of her wife-stealing, he vaguely images her treason as homosexuality, echoing the earlier incident in language that Kempe finds “not expedient to rehersyn” (133). While Kempe tells Bowet that she will obey his “correcyon,” the suffragan, with his arsenal of political propaganda, confuses the exact nature of her crime—the heresy or treason that he wants to burn her for—to the point where it is unclear whose authority, ecclesiastical or secular, she owes obedience to beyond Christ's.⁴⁸

In one of the Book's most memorable passages, Kempe, when she disobeys God by refusing to believe in damnation, is punished with a demonic vision of obedience to the church as a sexual hell:

She sey as she thowt divers men of religyon, prestys and many other both hethyn & Cristen comyn befor hir syght that she myth not enchewyn hem ne puttyn hem owt of hir syght, schewing her bar membrys un-to hir. & þerewith the Devyl bad hir in hir mende chesyn whom sche wolde han fyrst of hem alle & sche must be comown to hem alle. & he seyd sche lyked bettyr summe on of hem than alle the other. Hir thowt that he seyd trewth; sche cowd not sey nay. (145; emphasis mine)

For Kempe, to reject obedience to God is to become powerless, subject to a corrupt clergy whom she must obey blindly. Kempe's indecent exposure of clerical power appears as a reimagining of the ideologies of gender that underlie her interrogations for heresy. Just as the clergy who misconstrue Kempe's femininity as a sign of heresy invalidate their authority, their “bar membrys,” the signs of their own sexuality, become their seals of office in this vision that inverts the arguments of antiheretical discourse to figure worldly obedience as promiscuity and dissent as chastity.⁴⁹

From her discursive encounters with heresy, Kempe establishes her own path of dissent, neither strictly orthodox nor heterodox, but rather rooted in her performance of Lollardy as critique. For Kempe, who prefaces her Book by acknowledging the resistance to her construction of a public voice, the accounts of her trials, recorded in her own English idiom, become a vehicle of political expression, a way to interrogate the authorities as they interrogate her. Lollardy, as defined by Kempe's opponents—but never very precisely—supplies the discourse that allows her to develop a vernacular spirituality and a politicized textual practice that are not, in the Book's overall plan, reducible to Wycliffite heresy. By the time she arrives in London, already a well-known figure, to preach ecclesiastical reform, Kempe is reaping the rewards of public vindication.⁵⁰ By manipulating public judicial forms to structure and impel rather than suppress a dissenting position, Kempe emerges securely by the end of the Book as a reformer in her own right.

Notes

1. On Kempe's “heterodox” preaching see, for example, Karma Lochrie, “The Book of Margery Kempe: The Marginal Woman's Quest for Literary Authority,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 (1986): 33-55; and Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 107-12. Sarah Beckwith links Kempe's challenge to clerical authority with the breakdown of “the clerical monopoly on learning” occasioned by the Lollards (“Problems of Agency and Authority in Late Medieval English Mysticism: Language, Agency, and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Exemplaria 4 [1992]: 183). Lynn Staley Johnson characterizes Kempe as a critic of ecclesiastical and secular authority, who, while occupying a “liminal” position in her community, cautiously protects herself from charges of heresy through literary strategies (“Margery Kempe: Social Critic,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 [1992]: 159-84; and Johnson, “The Trope of the Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe,” Speculum 66 [1991]: 820-38). As I was preparing this essay for press, Lynn Staley's important new book, Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions came out (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). Staley argues that Kempe positions her subject “Margery” in relation to the issues of dominion and language raised by Lollardy as a “strategy of dissent” that ultimately interrogates fifteenth-century English ideas of national community. I come to many of the same conclusions in my own pursuit of the “heterodox” Kempe.

2. Partner, “Reading the Book of Margery Kempe,” Exemplaria 3 (1991): 33.

3. For an excellent discussion of Kempe's “subjectivity” see Beckwith, “Problems of Authority,” and “A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe,” in Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History, ed. David Aers (Sussex: Harvester, 1986), 34-57.

4. Kempe's “legitimacy” is, of course, still at issue. For two provocative considerations of earlier critics' evaluations of Kempe see Beckwith, “Problems of Authority,” and David Aers, “The Making of Margery Kempe,” in Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing, 1360-1430 (London: Routledge, 1988). As Aers notes, psychoanalytic readings of Kempe as a “hysteric” à la Anna O. tend to view her behavior as entirely pathological and consequently underestimate her political agency (74).

5. Both Kempe's and Thorpe's “trials” could, in this sense, be seen as fictive enterprises. For formulations of the heresy trial as theater see Stephen Greenblatt's classic essay, “The Word of God in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 74-114; and Ritchie Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 50-89. See also Lee Patterson's discussion of subjectivity and dissent in Thorpe's and Oldcastle's testimonies in his introduction to Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).

6. Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages: The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent, c. 1250-c. 1450, vol. 1 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 9.

7. For an extensive treatment of the many aspects of the body involved in the Book of Margery Kempe see Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh, esp. chap. 2, “The Text as Body and Mystical Discourse.”

8. Arundel's Constitutions, issued officially in 1409, forbade all unauthorized translations of Scripture into English and curtailed the reading of Wycliffite works in the universities. See Beckwith, “Problems of Authority,” 186-8, for another reading of how the Book of Margery Kempe reflects the aftermath of Arundel's Constitutions.

9. Hope Emily Allen, in a note in her and Sanford B. Meech's edition of The Book of Margery Kempe (Oxford: EETS, 1940), points out that the Lollard William Sawtry, burned for heresy in 1401, was for a time before 1399 Margery Kempe's parish priest (259). Sawtry seems, however, a less important source for the Book's preoccupation with heterodox thought and the boundaries of heresy than Kempe's interactions with representatives of practically every order of the church, that is, with opponents of Lollardy, from the Cambridge-educated Carmelite Aleyn of Lynn to her mystics-reading priest to her Dominican anchorite confessor.

10. For the Twelve Conclusions see Anne Hudson, Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 24-9 and notes on 150-5. For a Latin version other than Dymmok's translation see Fasciculi Zizaniorum, ed. W. W. Shirley (Rolls Series 1858), 360-9.

11. See Robert Ian Moore, “Heresy as Disease,” in The Concept of Heresy in the Middle Ages, ed. W. Lourdaux and D. Verhelst (Leuven: University Press, 1976), 1-11; and Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western Europe, 950-1250 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). For more on the relations between medieval concepts of heresy and sodomy see Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Ross-Erikson, 1979), 89-123; and Vern Bullough, “Heresy, Witchcraft, and Sexuality,” in Sexual Practices in the Medieval Church (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1982), 206-17.

12. Dymmok, Liber contra duodecim errores et hereses lollardorum, ed. H. S. Cronin (London: Wyclif Society, 1922): “Et sic per hunc modum lasciviam necessariam affirmant, continenciam impossibilem predicant, et contra divinum preceptum illam esse allegant. … Et sic cum Nicholaitis hereticis conveniunt, qui voluerunt mulieres esse communes” (275); “Set nullum tale sacerdocium instituit Christus apostolis suis, ut patet ex premissis, nec in Roma fuit institutum, set forte in conventiculis hereticorum, Oxoniis vel Londoniis, ubi mulieres, ut dicunt virgines set in veritate meretrices eorum, missas non dico celebraverunt, set prophanaverunt” (64). On Dymmok's defense of courtly magnificence and how he refigures the Lollards' criticism of the church as critcism of the court see Patricia Eberle, “The Politics of Courtly Style at the Court of Richard II,” in The Spirit of the Court: Selected Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society, ed. Glyn Burgess and Robert A. Taylor (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985), 168-78.

13. The Trial of Brut is in the Registrum J. Trefnant Episcopi Herefordensis, ed. W. W. Capes (Canterbury and York Society, 1916), 258-359. Parts trans. in Alcuin Blamires, ed., Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 257-60.

14. Latin text in Alcuin Blamires and C. W. Marx, “Woman Not to Preach: A Disputation in British Library MS Harley 31,” Journal of Medieval Latin 3 (1993): 34-63.

15. For both Henry of Ghent's text, Summae quaestionum ordinarium 1.11.q.2 “Utrum Mulier Possit Esse Doctor, Sive Doctrix Huius Scientiae,” and the Harley author's, see Blamires and Marx, 53, 58-9.

16. BL MS Harley 31, fol. 200r: “Nihil differt an mulieres principantur an ipsi principes per mulieres regantur. … Si ergo mulieres sunt inepte ad regendum corporaliter multo magis sunt inepte ad regendum spiritualiter” (quoted by kind permission of the British Library). The author cites a cluster of passages from Thomas Aquinas's and Peter of Auvergne's Politics commentary (see In octo libros politicorum expositio, ed. R. Spiazzi [Rome: Marietti, 1966], 2:5, 13, 7:5; see also Margaret Aston, “Lollard Women Priests?” in Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion [London: Hambledon, 1984], 55).

17. Netter, Doctrinale antiquitatem fidei catholicae ecclesiae, ed. B. Blanciotti (Venice, 1759): “Mulier haec haeresis est, contraria (inquit) nimirum sapientiae” (1:628); “circiter annum Domini MCCCCX doctrix et lectrix illius perversitatis famosa, in Civitate Londonensi defendit et docuit Beatam Virginem Mariam, Virginem non manisse post partum” (1:362).

18. See also Aston, “Lollard Women Priests?” and Claire Cross, “Great Reasoners in Scripture: The Activities of Women Lollards, 1380-1530,” in Medieval Women, ed. Derek Baker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 359-80.

19. See Staley Johnson, “The Trope of the Scribe,” 835-8.

20. Meech and Allen, 1. For more on the relation between Kempe and her amanuenses see also John C. Hirsch, “Author and Scribe in the Book of Margery Kempe,” Medium Aevum 44 (1975): 145-50.

21. See also Anne Hudson, “Wyclif and the English Language,” in Wyclif and His Times, ed. A. Kenney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 85-103; Rita Copeland, “Why Women Can’t Read: Medieval Hermeneutics, Statutory Law, and the Lollard Heresy Trials,” in Representing Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism, ed. Susan Heinzelman and Zipporah Wiseman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 253-86.

22. For the conservative side see Henry Knighton's invective against the Lollards and “women who know how to read” in his Chronicon, ed. J. R. Lumby (Rolls Series, 1889-95), 152; and, on the 1401 Oxford debate over translation, see Ralph Hanna III, “The Difficulty of Ricardian Prose Translation: The Case of the Lollards,” Modern Language Quarterly 51 (1990): 319-40. On censorship see Hudson, “Wyclif and the English Language,” and Margaret Aston, “Wyclif and the Vernacular,” in From Ockham to Wyclif, ed. Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks (Oxford: Studies in Church History, 1987), 281-330.

23. On Kempe's anticlerical Imitatio see Susan Dickman, “Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition of the Pious Woman,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: Brewer, 1984), 150-68.

24. See the Lollard treatise Lanterne of Light, ed. Lilian Swinburn (Oxford: EETS, 1917), for a similar view of the “church”; see also Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 314-58, on Lollard ecclesiology.

25. On Repingdon's career as a Wycliffite see Joseph A. Dahmus, The Prosecution of John Wyclif (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1952), 104-28. For an interesting convergence see William Thorpe's commentary, in his examination by Arundel, on Repingdon's renunciation of Wyclif (Anne Hudson, ed., Two Wycliffite Texts [Oxford: EETS, 1993], 39). Also, for an interesting gender twist, note that in an account of Repingdon's public teaching at Oxford sent to Archbishop Courteney by his Carmelite envoy Peter Stokes (preserved in the Fasciculi Zizaniorum), Repingdon is feminized by being said to argue for Lollard beliefs, “always proceeding contentiously like a whore” (semper litigiose ad modum meretricum procedens [Fasciculi Zizaniorum, 302; trans. mine]).

26. See, for example, the Lollard tract “Of Clerks Possessioners”: “Proude possessioners ben traitours of god, of lordis & of the commune peple” (F. D. Matthew, ed., The English Works of John Wyclif [London: EETS, 1880], 119). See also the extended metaphors of treason in “The Grete Sentence of Curs Expouned,” in Select English Works of John Wyclif, vol. 3, ed. T. Arnold (Oxford, 1871), 271-337. See Hudson, Premature Reformation, 371-4, on the issue of oaths.

27. See Edward Powell, Kingship, Law, and Society: Criminal Justice in the Reign of Henry V (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 141-67, on the legal redefinition of treason after Oldcastle's rebellion.

28. See the Lollard text on images and pilgrimages in Hudson, Selections, 82-8, for ideas on the economics of pilgrimages. Note that Kempe goes out of her way to account for her finances.

29. See, for example, the sermon “Vae Octuplex,” in English Wycliffite Sermons, vol. 2, ed. Pamela Gradon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983): “Somme prechen fables and somme docken hooly wryt and somme feynon lesyngs; and so lore of Godis lawe is al put obac” (366-7).

30. J.-P. Genet, ed., Four English Political Tracts of the Later Middle Ages (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977), 5.

31. See Aston, “Lollard Women Priests?”; Cross, “Great Reasoners.”

32. Margaret Aston, “Lollardy and Sedition, 1381-1431,” in Lollards and Reformers.

33. For a fascinating comparison of “women's autonomy” in John Capgrave's Life of Saint Katherine and The Book of Margery Kempe see Karen Winstead, “Capgrave's Saint Katherine and the Perils of Gynecocracy,” Viator 23 (1992): 361-76.

34. On Kempe's relation to St. Catherine of Siena and St. Bridget see Dickman, “Continental Tradition,” and David Wallace, “Mystics and Followers in Siena and East Anglia: A Study in Taxonomy, Class, and Cultural Mediation,” in Glasscoe (n. 23).

35. Michael Wilks, “Predestination, Property, and Power: Wyclif's Theory of Dominion and Grace,” Studies in Church History 2 (1965): 135-63.

36. For an example of the political gloss on this passage see Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job (Turnhout: Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 1979), 19.25. For more on the exegetical tradition on Sodom and Gomorrah see John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 91-8.

37. The early vernacular statement of Wycliffite belief on the Eucharist that Knighton inserted in his Chronicon as the “Second Confession” of Wyclif contains this formulation: “We beleve, as Crist and his apostolus han taught us, that the sacrament of the autere white and ronde, and lyke tyl oure brede or host unsacrede, is verray Goddus body in fourme of brede. … And right so as the persone of Crist is verray God and verray man, verray godhede and verray manhede, ryth so, as holy kyrke many hundruth wyntur has trowyde, the same sacrament is verray Godus body and verraye brede, os it is forme of Goddus body and forme of brede, as techith Crist and his apostolus” (Hudson, Selections, 17). Oldcastle's version, in his statement of his beliefs, is much the same: “I byleve thaht the moost worschipful sacrament of the auter is Crystis body in fourme of bred” (Fasciculi Zizaniorum, 438-9).

38. See Dickman on Kempe's “relative aloofness from eucharistic devotion” and the implications of a mysticism “potentially away from clerical control” (165).

39. See Dymmok, Liber, 274-6.

40. For this line of argument see “The Grete Sentence of Curs Expouned,” in Arnold, 3:267-337, which treats canon law and civil law, for example, as “fictions.”

41. See, for instance, the Lollard tract “De Papa” in Matthew, 458-82.

42. For a brilliant discussion of the idea of “domestic treason” see Paul Strohm, “Treason in the Household,” in Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 121-44.

43. Hoccleve, Minor Poems, ed. F. Furnivall and I. Gollancz (London: EETS, 1892), 8-24; Thomas of Elmham, Liber Metricus, in Memorials of Henry V, by C. A. Cole (Rolls Series, 1858), 79-165: “Alligat illusum Deus, hinc ancilla scabello / Subvertit Castrum: lucta notanda datur” (158). See also Waugh, “Sir John Oldcastle,” English Historical Review 20 (1905): 434-56, 637-58.

44. For Walsingham's accounts of Lollard “schedulae” see Historia Anglicana, ed. H. Riley (London: Rolls Series, 1863-4), 2:291, 306. See also Hudson, Premature Reformation, 200-1, on the various types of Lollard public proclamations.

45. For accounts of the Scrope rebellion see Peter McNiven, Heresy and Politics in the Reign of Henry IV (Wolfboro, N.H.: Boydell and Brewer, 1987), 72-7; and Jonathan Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Wolfboro, N.H.: Boydell and Brewer, 1988), 305-15. For the cult and its politics see John W. McKenna, “Popular Canonization as Political Propaganda: The Cult of Archbishop Scrope,” Speculum 45 (1970): 608-23. For Bowet's identification with the cult see Hughes, 311.

46. See Hughes, 306-8, on the Duke of Bedford's efforts to suppress these cults. See Bellamy, The Law of Treason in England in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1-22, on the imagination of treason.

47. For the “seduction” of Oldcastle by Lollards see Gesta Henrici Quinti, ed. and trans. Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 2-11; and, in the most interesting context, Oldcastle's (false) “abjuration” in the Fasciculi Zizaniorum, 414-16.

48. See Bellamy, 102-38, on definitions of treason and, on instances of burning as punishment for “petty treason,” 226-8. See also Strohm, “Treason in the Household.”

49. See Beckwith, “A Very Material Mysticism,” for a Lacanian and politically different reading of this passage.

50. Kempe's London preaching “a-geyn swerars, banars, lyars & swetch other vicows pepil” is briefly recounted in chap. 9 of the truncated “Secundus Liber.” While she incurs the wrath of “curatys and preistys” who throw her out of the churches, she wins the adherence of “the comown pepil” (245).