Abstract
The Book of Margery Kempe brings the medieval anxieties about women’s speech into the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Indeed, it’s a good thing that Margery Kempe’s opening sentences begin in resistance, and with the body—who knows what might have been known or missed had she remained dutifully quiet—because her decision not to abide in silence, to exert, even to disrupt, her physical space/body as integral to her participation in a life with God, has been endlessly subjected to communities of criticism,1 at first frankly hostile and, only in the last two decades conceding (a still sometimes qualified) admiration. Nevertheless, despite the current thriving religious and scholarly appreciation for Margery Kempe, neither the medieval Christian community nor the current Catholic community (of which I am part) has ever, during her lifetime or in the intervening centuries, endorsed her status as a mystic,2 much less her sanctity—despite individual contemporaries’ public support and individual scholars’ articles affirming that status. I want to explore, very briefly, the reason for this range of response from both the scholarly community and, especially, the Catholic (learned) community, and then to examine the interconnection between the volatile speech and volatile body of Margery Kempe, and the attitude evinced by the scholarly (and Catholic) community toward her place in female hagiography.
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Notes
Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writing of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, Studies in Medieval Mysticism 5 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 22.
Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 1.
Kim M. Phillips, “Four Virgins’ Tales: Sex and Power in Medieval Law,” in Medieval Virginities, ed. Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans and Sarah Salih (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 81 [80-100].
Ruth Shklar, “Cobham’s Daughter: The Book of Margery Kempe and the Power of Heterodox Thinking,” Modern Language Quarterly 56.3 (1995): 278 [277-304].
Santha Bhattacharji, “Medieval Contemplation and Mystical Experience,” in Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts, ed. Dee Dyas, Valerie Edden, and Roger Ellis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 56 [51-59].
Albrecht Classen, The Power of a Woman’s Voice in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures: New Approaches to German and European Women Writers and to Violence Against Women in Premodern Times (New York: Walter de Gruyter, Inc., 2007), 272–73. Classen’s chief concern is to discover the significance of Kempe’s book as a contribution to the literary discourse of her period; in doing so, he provides a superb exploration of mysticism and autobiography in Chapter 8 of his book.
Karlheinz Stierle, “Translatio Studii and Renaissance: From Vertical to Horizontal Translation,” in The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 55–67.
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 33. Benkler’s concept of simple or complementary coexistence is largely concerned with the Internet and its ability to change patterns of information and cultural production.
John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 82.
At one time, it was virtually the “vox populi,” or local campaigns, that seemed to have promoted a cause for a particular person’s candidacy for sainthood. Later, anyone petitioning on behalf of a candidate for canonization had to be put their case in the hands of an official representative, a “procurator.” Pope Gregory IX’s Decretals (ca. 1234) established the canonization process as being under the absolute jurisdiction of the pope. In the eighteenth century, Pope Benedict XIV’s five volumes on beatification and canonization that remained the official source for procedures until Pope John Paul II’s radical reformation of the canonization process. For a brief account of the history of the development of saints and their cults, see Kenneth L. Woodward, Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t and Why (New York: Touchstone Publishers, 1996), esp. 51 and 52–86.
Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 28.
For “ethnocentric” I am relying on Webster’s Third International Dictionary (1993) and The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992) both of which offer as their first and most usual meaning of the term, “the inclination” or “habitual disposition” “to view other communities and cultures from the perspective or security of one’s own, and therefore inclined to judge them by the norms or conventions with which one is familiar” or, “to gauge other societies by those criteria which are significant in one’s own society” (Kenneth McLeish, ed., Bloomsbury Guide to Human Thought [London: Bloomsbury, 1993]).
Keith Green and Jill LeBihan, Critical Theory and Practice: A Coursebook (London: Routledge, 1996), 187.
David Knowles, The English Mystical Tradition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), 148.
Verena E. Neuburger, Margery Kempe: A Study in Early English Feminism (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), 69.
Susan Dickman, “Margery Kempe and the Continental Tradition of the Pious Woman,” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1984), 165 [150-68].
Wendy Harding, “Body into Text: The Book of Margery Kempe,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 186n18 [168-87].
Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 98.
Frank M. Napolitano, “Discursive Competition in the Towneley Crucifixion,” Studies in Philology 106.2 (2009): 170 [161-77]. (See also The Towneley Plays, Play 23, The Crucifixion, ll. 382–384).
The Little Office of the Virgin Mary—which speaks of her agony at the cross—“formed a kind of appendix to the Psalter, the prayer book normally used by the laity. Sometime during the thirteenth century it became detached and became a separate book: the Book of Hours.” The Marian Library/International Marian Research Institute Site: http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/resources/bkhours.html, accessed October 23, 2010. In turn, the Book of Hours typically had at its core the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The early fourteenth-century Hours of the Virgin, in Cambridge University Library MS Dd. 8.2, is filled with “historiated initial scenes from the life and Passion of Jesus.” Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 44.
Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 49–51.
Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), 75: “Kempe amasses the details and re-creates the dramas encircling three kinds of speech—mystical visions and communings, weepings, and cultural criticism, including prophesy.”
Ella Shohat, “The Struggle Over Representation: Casting, Coalitions, and the Politics of Identification,” in Late Imperial Culture, ed. Román de la Campa, E. Ann Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1995), 173 [166-78].
Joyce E. Salisbury, “Gendered Sexuality,” in The Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 87 [81-102].
Ibid.; Tertullian, “To His Wife,” in A Select Library of the Ante-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Eardmans Publishing, 1951), 43.
Karma Lochrie, “The Language of Transgression: Body, Flesh, and Word in Mystical Discourse,” in Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies, ed. A. J. Frantzen (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991), 115–40, esp. 120–23 and 127.
Kathleen Ashley, “Historicizing Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe as Social Text,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.2 (1998): 381 [371-88].
Laurie A. Finke, Women’s Writing in English: Medieval England (New York: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1999), 180.
John C. Hirsch, The Revelations of Margery Kempe: Paramystical Practices in Late Medieval England (Leiden, NL: E. J. Brill, 1989), 45.
Ashton, The Generation of Identity, 1, includes in her study of “medieval female hagiography produced by men during the period 1200–1500,” Mirk’s Festial, The Life of Saint Katherine of Alexandria, the Early South-English Legendary, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, and The Golden Legend. Brigitte Cazelles asserts that the hagiographic texts in her study are a “product of a predominately male discourse.” Brigitte Cazelles, The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 43. The predominately male-authored hagiographic tradition is a premise in Amy Hollywood’s insistence that scholars need to make a distinction between “male and male-defined understandings of women’s religiosity and women’s own texts” (88). See Amy Hollywood, “Suffering Transformed. Marguerite Porète, Meister Eckhart, and the Problem of Women’s Spirituality,” in Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, ed. Bernard McGinn (New York: Continuum, 1994), 88 [87-113].
Jane L. Huenneke, “Groupies for Jesus: Sexual Freedom and Female Identity in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, and The Book of Margery Kempe,” Proceedings of the 11th Annual Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature (Minot State University, Minot, ND, 2003), 128. Huenneke here cites Leslie A. Donovan, Women’s Saints’ Lives in Old English Prose (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 122.
Kathleen Ashley, “Historicizing Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe as Social Text,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28.2 (1998): 379 [371-88].
Cristina Mazzoni, “Of Stockfish and Stew: Feasting and Fasting in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Food and Foodways: Explorations in the History and Culture of Human Nourishment 10 (2003): 177 [171-82].
Liz Herbert McAvoy, “‘aftyr hyr owyn tunge’: Body, Voice, and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Women’s Writing 9.2 (2002): 166 [159-76]. The text actually describes the wine as being in a pot, with a cup sent up alongside of it, but McAvoy’s construction of the scene as reminiscent of the cup of wine offered to Christ at Calvary is valid, nevertheless.
Ashton, The Generation of Identity, 11: “Heffernan [T. J. Heffernan, Sacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographers in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 16] identifies a pattern in hagiographical tales where the act of writing gathers up all the myths and stories surrounding its subjects, whether oral, eyewitness record, or previous, perhaps contradictory, versions of a fictional life, and offers a sanctioned authority which allows all to be brought back into a Christian paradigm.” As a result, it might be said that the subject’s “single-minded pursuit of virtue is to achieve union with Christ rather than to perfect self or character.” Ashton, The Generation of Identity, 11–12.
Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 215.
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© 2011 M. C. Bodden
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Bodden, M.C. (2011). Margery Kempe: “I Grab the Microphone and Move My Body”— Volatile Speech, Volatile Bodies. In: Language as the Site of Revolt in Medieval and Early Modern England. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337657_7
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