Dr. Thomas L. Long

Associate Professor of English

Thomas Nelson Community College, Hampton, Virginia

Proem

I begin my paper the way Margery Kempe's book begins, with a proem. First, to thank George Ferzoco of the University of Leicester's Medieval Research Centre in England for the invitation to join this panel. When Margery Kempe had returned from her pilgrimage to Campostella and took the long way home (as was her wont) visiting various English holy places, the mayor of Leicester arrested her on charges that she was a Lollard heretic. I hope she and I receive a more favorable reception today. The distance between her century and ours is about the equivalent distance between the submission of a proposal abstract and the final conference paper. Therefore, I want to note that the title as it is published in the congress's program is no longer entirely accurate, since I will focus exclusively on the Book of Margery Kempe. Finally I wish to thank Gail Berlin of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, who introduced me to Margery Kempe's book; and to Thomas Nelson Community College and the Thomas Nelson Foundation for subsidizing my pilgrimage to Kalamazoo and this congress.

Between the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and the Council of Trent, whose work ended in 1563, Catholic Europe struggled with competing theories and practices of sanctification, whose significance implicated the complex power relations of medieval and early modern church and state. The canons promulgated after Lateran IV in England resulted in the Council of Lambeth in 1281, which produced a massive catechetical effort to train clergy and laity in the orthodoxy and orthopraxy of the Catholicism. Moreover, as Steven Justice notes, "the prelates who returned home from [the] Lateran Council seem to have brought with them a passion as much for documentary order as for the revitalization of the laity" (295). Among the most notable of the Lateran Council's decrees had been the requirement of annual confession and communion, what came to be called the "Easter Duty." Eventually in the dialectic with Protestant reformers' understandings of sanctity, the Roman Catholic Church's Counter Reformation Council of Trent would reaffirm the efficacy of confessing to a priest and would insist on the necessity of penitents' full confession according to both the species and number of the sins. Post-Tridentine spiritual direction would thus largely occur in the confessional and it would be inordinately preoccupied with external observances, chiefly the penitent's sacramental confession and frequency of communion. Despite the existence of a profound tradition of interior spirituality (Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross, for example) this external emphasis continued into recent memory. The formation of priests and nuns until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s concentrated on their devotional observances, their fidelity to the canonical hours, and their reception of the sacraments.

But I am getting ahead of myself, because I want to look at another snapshot--The Book of Margery Kempe--of another time before the Council of Trent--late medieval England a century prior to the Reformation. My thesis is that the Book of Margery Kempe was an attempt to document sanctity at a time and place where different theories and practices of sanctification had begun to compete openly, though not equally, and that its subsequent commentators and redactors found the document as scandalous as her contemporaries found the woman. To document is to authenticate; and to authenticate her experiences and revelations Margery Kempe was required to negotiate interiority and exteriority and the complex canons and principles that Roman Catholicism had established to manage claims of sanctity: Spiritual direction occurred in the internal forum of confession, penitents were permitted only one confessor and had to ask that confessor's permission to seek another, but claims to sanctity--the discernment of spirits--required multiple witnesses for their authentication. Margery Kempe undertook to publicize her life as virtually the only context in which to read her dense interiority. As a result, the Book of Margery Kempe documents one mystic's handling of sin but also her handling of the confessors she sought not simply for sacramental absolution but also for the discernment of spirits and the authentication of her experiences.

What kind of document is the Book of Margery Kempe? The first vexing thing about the Book of Margery Kempe is it does not neatly fit into a category. As David Wallace notes, "For over fifty years now critics have worried over Margery Kempe's standing as a religious writer. How is Margery to be classified as an English mystic? . . . Such confusion stems not from the writings of Margery Kempe, but rather from the concepts that are brought to bear on them. Much of the abuse that has been lavished on Margery reflects such critical frustration: her Book refuses to adapt itself to the critical categories that have been prepared for it" (169). Maureen Fries has suggested that:

Perhaps because the only surviving manuscript, called the Salthows manuscript after its scribe, was rediscovered in the twentieth century, there has been a tendency to characterize it as "the first autobiography in English," which is the sort of thing that you might teach students in a Cook's Tour literature survey class, but which seems to me anachronistic, applying a modern genre to a pre-modern text. Yet at the same time it is too self-defensive, self-absorbed and self-congratulatory to fit comfortably in the niche of hagiography. The priest-scribe who was Margery's initially reluctant amanuensis regularly admits that he is not in control of the material. That scribe characterizes the book as a "tretys and a comfortabyl for synful wrecchys," what we might call today an inspirational book. As much as anything, the book is a confession, in both the Augustinian and sacramental senses, which helps explain the notions of documentation behind the book's production. As M.T. Clanchy observes, "Making records is initially a product of distrust rather than social progess" (6). I am less interested, therefore, in what kind of book is the Book of Margery Kempe as in what purposes it serves, what kind of cultural work it performs.

The book is often preoccupied with its own making--its own writing and reading. The priest scribe's account of his writing provides a framing device for Book I. In the proem, the scribe explains that Margery had postponed committing to book her experiences and revelations and her way of life, despite the encouragement of some of her contemporaries to do so. When she finally believes that the Lord has commanded her to make this account, "ƿat hys goodnesse myth be knowyn to alle ƿe world," there is no one able (or willing) to write the account but an Englishman living in Germany (whom some speculate might have been her son), whose unfortunate product was "neiƿyr good Englysch ne Dewch, ne ƿe lettyr was not schapyn ne formyd as other letters ben." Margery brings this "ur-text" to a priest who found it unreadable (despite his employing eye glasses and more candles) and who suggests that she take it to another man who was familiar with the hand of the Anglo-German scribe, but he produces only one page badly written. She returns to the priest who finally relents and this time successfully undertakes the task with both God's and Margery's assistance, providing this scribal account in a proem, completing his redaction of the ur-text (Book I), and adding a second book. Finally, in the last two chapters of Book I, the scribe returns to accounts of the book's writing, relating Margery's guilt over the time she was spending with scribe, time away from prayers and devotions, describing his own susceptibility to her penitential weeping, recording how "whan ƿe creatur was in cherche, owr Lord Ihesu Crist wyth hys gloryows Modyr & many seyntys also comy in-to hir sowle & thankyd hir, seying ƿat ƿei wer well plesyd wyth ƿe writyin of ƿis boke," and ultimately recalling the proem's account of the book's inauspicious first version.

In addition to this book-production framing device for Book I, there is also another narrative frame for the entire book: Margery Kempe's encounters with confessors in which she seems to test the limits of post-Lateran penitential practice. The first chapter of the first book recounts her postpartum crisis as precipitated by "a lytyl to hastye" confessor who would not grant her the time to unburden herself of a sin that she had been withholding for some time. Only when Christ appears to her months later does she recover from a suicidal depression. In the third chapter we read of her hearing heavenly melodies, which prompts her repentance and gift of tears, and which results in her "being schreuyn sum-tyme twyes or thryes on ƿe day, & in specyal of ƿat synne whech sche so long had conselyd & curyd, as it is wretyn in ƿe gynnyng of ƿe boke." From an incomplete confession, Margery Kempe moves to an excess of confession, and in the typical pattern of the scrupulous conscience repeatedly confesses the same sin that she had initially withheld. Toward the end of Book I, we read Christ's admonition to Margery that she honor and obey her confessor: "And ƿerfor, dowtyr, yf ƿu wilt not don aftyr my cownsel, do aftyr ƿe cownsel of ƿi gostly fadyr, for he biddith ƿe do ƿe same ƿat I bidde ƿe do" (Chapter 88).

In Book II, the priest scribe recounts the newly-widowed Margery Kempe's decision to escort her newly-widowed daughter-in-law back to Germany. Despite her advanced years and poor health, the ever peregrinatory Kempe hears Christ tell her to withhold from her confessor mentioning her desire to travel. Indeed the confessor is even reluctant to permit Kempe's escorting the daughter-in-law to the seaport. On the road to Ipswich, Kempe has this colloquy with Christ: "'Lord, ƿu wost wel I haue no leue of my gostly fadyr, & I am bowndyn to obediens. ƿerfor I may not do thus wyth-owtyn hys wil & hys consentyng.' It was answeryd a-geyn to hir thowt, 'I bydde ƿe go in my name, Ihesu, for I am a-bouyn thy gostly fadyr & I xal excusyn ƿe & ledyn ƿe & bryngyn ƿe a-geyn in safte." Upon her return from this eventful journey, we read of her reconciliation with the confessor, and in this last chapter, in the transcription of her prayer, Kempe asks, "Lord, make my gostly fadirs for to dredyn ƿe in me & for to louyn ƿe in me . . . . I cry ƿe mercy, Lord, for alle my gostly faderys ƿat ƿu vochesaf to spredyn as mech grace in her sowlys as I wolde ƿe wolde ƿat ƿu dedist in myn."

Not prescinding from a pastoral assessment of Margery's compulsive spirituality, in particular her scrupulosity, I read these frames of reference as indicative of her struggle to verify and authorize her own experience, negotiating the blurred distinctions between interiority and exteriority. She seems often less concerned with reassuring herself than she does with "apologizing" and "confessing" with a wider audience of her contemporaries. Her own sense of the validity of her experiences appears in Chapter 17 of the first book in which we read of her colloquies with God--sometimes the Father, sometimes the Son, sometimes all Three, which are characterized as occurring, "so excellently ƿat sche herd neuyr boke, neyƿyr Hyltons boke, ne [B]ridis boke, ne Stimulus Amoris, ne Incendium Amoris, ne non oƿer ƿat euyr sche herd redyn ƿat spak so hyly of lofe of God but ƿat sche fel as hyly in werkyng in hir sowle yf sche cowd or ellys myght a schewyd as sche felt." However, in early fifteenth-century England, claiming the authority of unmediated experience of the divine was not without risks, even for a woman as insistently orthodox as Margery Kempe. Social and religious dissent since the Rising of 1381 had provoked swift and merciless countermeasures, and as Lynn Staley summarizes:

Five years before the priest scribe began his revision of the ur-text, Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake, charged with witchcraft because of her spiritual colloquies. Although this inquisition was war by other means, Margery's frequent Lollard accusations and her persistent refusal to seek shelter in religious and social conformity are remarkable in this context. One of the charges against Joan of Arc was that she had not laid her claims before a sufficient number of authorities to test their validity; Margery does so by seeking numerous confessors and spiritual directors and by setting her account onto paper for "alle ƿe world" to read.

That world would eventually include those living after her. Her scribe's manuscript became the exemplar for the extant mid-fifteenth-century Salthows manuscript, it is conjectured, which eventually came into the possession of the Carthusian monastery of Mount Grace in Yorkshire, which Eamon Duffy characterizes as part of a network for the production and circulation of vernacular confessional, catechetical and devotional materials (62, 296-97). The manuscript measures eight inches by six (literally a "hand book") and is comprised of 124 paper leaves, probably of Dutch origin. Clanchy observes that in the early fourteenth century paper first appeared in England in seaports, because it was imported; although cheaper than parchment and easier to write on, it did not assume the formal status of parchment for centuries because it lacked the cachet and the archival durability of parchment (120, 144-46). This leads me to wonder if the Margery's priest scribe's manuscript was not also written on paper, the copy following the exemplar. Moreover, the fact that Salthows manuscript was written on paper also suggests to me that it was not copied in a monastic scriptorium. In any case, I sense that the Book of Margery Kempe was not at first considered particularly durable. Nonetheless, it was carefully read at Mount Grace, where monkish hands made numerous notations. Particularly intriguing, however, are specific glosses on Margery's eccentric and demonstrative spirituality by reference to the monks' own contemporaries, Richard Methley and John Norton: "father M. was wont so to doo" and "so dyd prior Norton in hys excesse." In documenting Methley's or Norton's mysticism, was a monk seeking to authenticate Margery, to authenticate his confrere, or in the eternal present of monastic spirituality, to authenticate both?

The Book of Margery Kemp would take another form a half-century later. The early English printer, Wynkyn de Word, whose collation of excerpts was the only known text until the rediscovery of the manuscript in 1934, composed a redaction of the Book of Margery Kempe about 1501. As George Keiser notes:

Sue Ellen Holbrook suggests, however, that the redactor's motives were less literary than ideological:

Holbrook also speculates that Wynkyn de Word had an excerpted manuscript as his exemplar, not the complete manuscript like the Salthows. This redaction, indeed reduction, of the Book of Margery Kempe is not surprising given the persistence and sometimes vehemence with which her own contemporaries attempted to silence or constrain her. Fortunately, her courage and cunning in documenting her claims to sanctity leave her with the last word:

Works Cited