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In 1501, early modern readers of the second generation ofprinted books read extracts from The Book of Margery Kempe ina small booklet printed by Wynkyn de Worde, Here begynneth ashorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Ihesu cryste, or takenout of the boke of Margerie kempe of lynn. 1 De Worde’s readers wouldbe drawn into his “shorte treatyse” not gently but with a graphicrevelation about Margery Kempe: “She desyred many tymes thather hede myght be smyten of with an axe vpon a blocke for theloue of our lorde Ihesu.” 2 De Worde’s extracts as a whole focusedprimarily on Christ’s words to Margery Kempe, his teachingsto move her to “holy drede of our lorde Ihesu & in knowlegeof her owne freylte.” 3 As George Keiser has asserted, the earlyEnglish printed tracts by de Worde were “responding to the pressureof the marketplace” and perhaps, as Keiser acknowledged inde Worde’s case, to “his own pious inclinations.” 4 Wynkyn deWorde’s connections with Lady Margaret Beaufort and Elizabethof York with their “commitment to devotional piety” as well asclerical patronage from the Carthusians and other religious in theLondon area would certainly have inf luenced de Worde’s printingchoices. Keiser also remarks that paring Kempe’s Book downin the way that de Worde did “seemed a reasonable way to satisfyan audience for whom [Kempe’s] name, like Rolle’s, had a certaincachet .” 5 Twenty years later, another London printer, HenryPepwell, would reprint de Worde with only some verbal and spellingvariants in the extracts but with a significant addition to thetitle. Pepwell enclosed Margery Kempe, making her “Margeriekempe ancresse.” The early sixteenth-century readership wouldsoon be faced with real-life examples of the martyr-like poseof Margery Kempe’s devotion as de Worde presented it in his

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opening extract with Pepwell’s later alteration of the title reinforcingthat image. Nearly 500 years later, other extracts from TheBook of Margery Kempe would make quite a different impressionon late twentieth-century readers. Like their sixteenth-centurycounterparts, however, these readers would also be dealing witha “Frankentext,” a pastiche of the parts of a woman as defined byher late medieval world, fashioning a woman who never existed

exactly as the extracts created her. 6In 1991, in a fervently secular age, my own students reactedincredulously and quite vocally to what they considered theravings of a mad woman after reading the translated extractsfrom The Book of Margery Kempe included in the 1986 editionof The Norton Anthology of English Literature. This anthologyoffered selections from Kempe’s chapters on the birth of herfirst child with the subsequent, critical first vision, Kempe’sbusiness failures and her pride, her vow of chastity confirmedby her husband, Kempe’s pilgrim’s journey to Jerusalem, andher interrogation by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The previousyear, another Norton anthology focusing exclusively onwomen’s writing in English had provided three chapters fromKempe’s Book that carried one title, “On Female Celibacy.” 7The extracts chosen by the editors of both anthologies createda most extraordinary late medieval woman, Margery Kempe,a being for whom this postmodern audience could largely feelneither empathy nor sympathy.

Like many other teacher-scholars after 1986, I had used thefifth edition NAEL ’s brief, generalized essay to Kempe and herworld as my students’ introduction to the extracts in that volume.The NAEL editors’ first extract was entitled “The Birthof Her First Child and Her First Vision.” The medieval dramaof that first event providing “solas and comfort” to medievalreaders became postmodern melodrama out of context. 8 Latetwentieth-century students and teachers reading this first eventdid so without the scribe’s guiding “proym” or the rest of theBook , without the context provided by the priest/amanuensisasserting that he wrote the “proym to expressyn mor openlyt an doth t e next folwyng” (5/30–32). Clearly, he meant his“proym” to guide the reader through the coming encounterwith Margery Kempe. The other four extracts from the Book

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offered in this edition of the NAEL may have been intended tobe representative of the complex narrative of the life of MargeryKempe but instead amounted to a serving of only the mostegregious examples of what they considered Kempe’s “highlyemotional style of religious expression” out of time and placewithout benefit of an in-depth overview of Kempe’s place inlate medieval spirituality. 9 Kempe’s decision to make the first

“moment” of her Book the genesis of her first vision is criticalto our understanding of her intention for the Book as a whole.But this moment extracted out of the context of the priest’sguiding proym along with Kempe’s careful, but seemingly random,ordering of other dramatic events in her life leaves thereader with a distorted notion of Margery Kempe. The extractsselected for these late twentieth-century editions directed areader to earthly considerations of a more “scientific” age—prolonged postpartum psychosis, self-aggrandizement, self-fashioning—rather than to an understanding of divine mercy andfavor through bodily tortures, mystical revelations, and spiritualelevation sent by God as these would have been comprehendedby a late medieval reader of the whole Book . Though I could givemy students a wider medieval context for Kempe, I found that Icould not provide this as fully as needed in the confines of a surveycourse. Teaching Margery Kempe and her Book under theselimitations and the concomitant responses of students reactingin isolation from the whole of Kempe’s narrative resolved me tobreak those restraints.

After a number of years of reading and teaching only suchextracts in translation, I decided to put Margery Kempe backinto the context of the whole beginning with a rereading of TheBook of Margery Kempe in its native garb, the Middle English ofthe first half of the fifteenth century. Consequently, in 1999my investigations commenced by revisiting woman’s place inlate medieval culture. For the next four years, my more thoroughstudy of Margery Kempe’s Book and her world concentratedon this medieval woman in search of control over herown life through a unique spiritual refashioning as mystic andvisionary rather than under the constraints of being medievalwoman loosed upon a myopic patriarchal world. 10 What followsis a retrospective of my own journey over these years along the

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winding narrative paths of The Book of Margery Kempe until Icame to rest on a word, crossed out in red by a hand later thanthe scribe’s and differing from the other hand writing in red.In 1999, I well knew that the Church clearly manifested themedieval culture in the West and men comprised the authoritativevoice of that culture. I learned over a closer, more comprehensivestudy that, not being cloistered and so under the direct

control of a religious prescription, laywomen like MargeryKempe found it difficult to express or even to experience aspiritual life uniquely their own. Elizabeth Petroff had alreadypointed out that “the medieval world, especially the institutionalchurch, was mistrustful of women who claimed spiritual authority.”11 Consequently, I first read Margery Kempe through thelens of medieval women’s lack of auctoritas . 12 The desire for anauthority with which to sanction their spiritual (and, by association,their earthly) lives led women like Margery Kempe to eraseand rewrite themselves through visionary experience, to becomehuman palimpsests, spiritual beings written over the erasure ofthe earthly ones. Their authority, their voice would be understoodto come from the highest auctor , God.

My initial incursion into this aspect of Margery Kempe’s spiritualjourney did not attempt to determine whether or not wecould call Kempe a “true mystic,” whether she suffered froma lingering “postpartum psychosis,” or whether her life as shechose to relate it was materially correct or meant to instruct or toedify. 13 I found a woman who had created a life of layers page bypage and clearly struggled for most of her adult life to suppress thehuman text of woman with its lack of auctoritas rewriting herself,with God as coauthor, as a spiritual text—mystic, visionary, proselyte,handmaiden of the Virgin Mary, intimate of Jesus Christ,and spouse of the Trinity. All of these aspects of Margery Kempehad a spiritual authority in her world that no woman as womanalone could ever possess. Margery Kempe became a palimpsest,a textual body erased and rewritten so as to achieve this kind ofauthority and validation for her life. In the world in which shelived Margery Kempe had to alter the “text” that she was to gaina spiritual voice and an authority to express that voice. Yet thetext Kempe obscured was never completely erased. However shehad inscribed herself before remained beneath the surface of the

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latest revision, and, most significantly, she could not fully eraseher woman’s body. She could only attempt to obscure it throughspiritual layering. But how many layers were there in the palimpsestthat was Margery Kempe, and how many layers could shemake before the original human text would be obscured to allwho would “read” it? Was it even necessary for Margery Kempe

to engage such acts of erasure and revision to gain the authorityto practice her personal devotion to God while still living in theworld?

Margery Kempe’s second amanuensis, the priest, asserted inhis “proym” that Kempe’s Book was “a comfortabyl [treatise] forsynful wrecchys” that, of course, in late medieval terms meant allhumankind (1/1–2). He also promised that the book would provide“gret solas and comfort . . . and vundyrstondyn” of the mercyof God made possible through Christ’s “exampyl & instruccyon”to Margery Kempe (1/2–3, 8). The priest’s “proym” unfolds inthe manner of a medieval sermon with its homely exempla , as asummary of related events in Kempe’s life, and as a commentarybeing presented in a late medieval, properly orthodox fashion.This “proym” clearly intended to inf luence the reader’s attitudetoward “þe next folwyng,” which was the life of Margery Kempefocused on her spiritual growth (5/31). That life, couched in termsthat ref lected the pietistic notions approved by the Church, presentedappropriate “examply & instruccyon” for its late medievalreaders. The priest “addyd a leef t erto” to write his proym primarilyeffecting another layer for the textual body of the humanwoman, Margery Kempe.

At the beginning of her Book proper where we see her physicaland spiritual struggle with the birth of her first child, thesubsequent bungled confession, the consequent (in the medievalmind) assault by “spyritys” for the best part of a year, and thehealing vision of a bedecked Christ, the woman, the original textthat was Margery Kempe, remained quite visible. She was fullyfemale in her physical and emotional suffering of first childbirthand equally woman, socially constructed by a medieval culturefiltered through the patriarchy of both Church and State thatdenied woman’s vocation beyond domestic or religious enclosure.Consequently, the textual body of Margery Kempe had tobe written over, authorized, and facilitated by men. One of those

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men was her priest/amanuensis with his prefatory “proym” andfrequent interjections whose “very existence in the text . . . testifiesto the local eminence of the holy, the exemplary,” MargeryKempe. 14 The first event Kempe presented was not her own birth

but that of her first child, which a medieval patriarchal viewwould consider the raison d’être of woman. This event provideda dramatic first episode for late medieval readers of Kempe’s Bookguided by the carefully contrived orthodox “proym” of the priestto see this as “exampyl.”

Familiarity with the plots and the lessons of exempla , like theones in medieval sermons, allowed Kempe’s conscious orderingof events in her Book, which Lynn Staley had asserted had beenintentionally designed by Margery Kempe and not the inventionof her amanuensis or scribe. 15 I considered how Kempe’s Book ,having been ordered by herself not as events occurred but afterthe fact and having a male scribe write it out rather than writingit herself, instilled in Kempe an authority that was protected bythe act of speaking instead of writing, which women were notsupposed to do. David Lawton had asserted that “the most thatthe second scribe claims to be is compiler , and that leaves Kempe—the illiterate of the book—in the role of author. . . . Authoritythus passes from what is written to what is spoken: to voice.”Lawton referred to the “sense of speech,” the “speech-acts” thatclearly take precedence in Kempe’s Book : “the issue in The Bookof Margery Kempe , is . . . not voice but authority. Authority is takenaway from writing and given to voice.” 16 But Lawton’s referenceto Kempe as “the illiterate of the book” maintained not the realbut the imagined state of Kempe’s abilities.

Sanford Brown Meech, as the first modern editor of Kempe’sBook , with others then following his lead, insisted that Kempewas illiterate. Meech based this on dubious interpretationsof comments in Kempe’s Book . He asserted as “evidences ofher illiteracy . . . that she employed others to write her experiences,but also had a master of divinity write a letter for herto a widow.” 17 That she dictated her story to male amanuensesso that it might be written or had one letter written for her ishardly evidence that she could not do so herself. First of all,dictating her experiences to a cleric would hardly be a novelconcept at the time nor evidence of illiteracy. Kempe certainly

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would have been aware, at least through what Hope Emily Allencalls “gossip,” that other women mystics and visionaries had their

“dalyawns” written by a male hand (2/32). 18 Angela of Folignodictated her visions to a priest, her confessor, but wrote letters toFranciscans who wanted her counsel on the spiritual life. BarbaraObrist says that St. Bridget, for whom we know Kempe had aspecial affinity, “wrote or dictated her revelations” but she wasnot illiterate by any means. 19 The issue here is not one of illiteracybut one of safety. As Kempe must have known, writingcould be dangerous for a medieval woman. Marguerite Por e tewas burned at the stake for refusing to stop circulating her book,The Mirror of Simple Souls . The problem for Kempe was that shehad “no wryter t at wold fulfyllen hyr desyr ne ӡ eve credens tohir felingys” (4/2–4). The “proym” again guided us revealingthat though she had often been urged to write her feelings andrevelations down, she refused until God clearly came to her ina “dalyawns” some 20 years later. In this guiding summary, thescribe insisted that she had resisted attempts by her contemporarieswho tried to get her to write her visions listening insteadto the promptings “in hir sowle . . . so it was xx ӡ er & mor frot at tym t is creatur had fyrst felyngys & reuelacyons er t an schedede any wryten” (3/27–30). This indicated that Kempe wouldnot and should not write so soon but not that she could not writeit herself. As Lynn Staley had pointed out, “by the first quarterof the fifteenth century it was fairly common for women of hersocial status to read and not unusual for them to write.” 20 Thepriest’s assertion that she had no one to “ӡeve credens to hir felingys”provided insight into why Kempe chose not to write theBook with her own hands. By not assuming a kind of authority allbut forbidden to women, Kempe avoided the harsh consequencessuffered by such women as Marguerite Por e te. Kempe’s 20-yeardelay in writing also had precedence in that of her contemporaryand advisor, Julian of Norwich.

Julian may have written about her first “showings” shortlyafter they occurred, as many scholars insist, but she, too, delayedthe writing of the “long” version for many years. As AlexandraBarratt had pointed out, “it was never suggested [in the MiddleAges, at least] that [the Bible’s] human authors were anythingother than male,” albeit divinely-inspired ones. 21 By employing

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male amanuenses and not blatantly assuming a singular authority,

Kempe shielded herself from earthly punishment. 22 Janet Wilsonhad noted that Margery Kempe and her scribe did a thoroughjob of surrounding Kempe with a community of literate maleand female mystics and visionaries. 23 There would be safety innumbers and in associating oneself with the divine. Women couldlay claim to the activity of writing as servants of God’s commandand circumvent accusations of heresy. Petroff had pointed out that“the visionary’s act of writing represents itself not as an arrogantassumption of power but as an act of submission in keeping withthe female ideal of obedience.” 24 Even a cursory examination ofthe conventional topos of humility in the writings of women whodared to put pen to paper clearly indicated their unique appropriationof this convention. 25 Julian of Norwich, like Kempe,more directly invoked the highest authority: “Botte for I am awoman, schulde I therfore leve that I schulde nought telle yowethe goodenes of God, syne that I sawe in that same tyme that [it]is his wille that it be knawen?” 26 Women had to make the bestuse of their knowledge of the literature of mystics and visionariesas well as their experience of the reality of their world when itcame to relating the “graces” bestowed on them by God. Onlywhen God himself “chargyd” her did Kempe begin to tell herstory (3/31).

That Kempe’s Book is more than just a life story has been wellarguedby such scholars as Karma Lochrie and Janel Mueller. 27That it took a good portion of her adult life and many moreexempla of her trials, tribulations, and threatenings from lay andreligious alike was essential to the use she was making of her lifestories, of the self she chose to reveal. Margery Kempe gave voiceto her experiences and her “dalyawns” with God. Yet, it wasnot like the clerical performance associated with the liturgy inthe church or that of the mystery or miracle plays on the streetsof the cities and towns. 28 Margery Kempe’s performance mightbest be understood through Julian of Norwich’s use of the term,“performid,” regarding her own Revelations.

In Julian’s conclusion to the long version of her work, she saidthat her book was “performid,” that is, completed, not at the firstwriting but at this final writing “fiftene yeere after.” 29 As Julian’sRevelations expressed her performance/completion so Margery

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Kempe’s Book did hers. Does the fact that Kempe did not, herself,take pen to paper undermine the product of the “performance”or, did the completion, the performance in the Middle Englishsense, put a finish to her book and to the life she wished to remainbehind her earthly one? Did her purported illiteracy interferewith her voice?

Like Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, Margery Kempe used the rhetoricand the strategies of the emissaries of the Word to gainauthority as well as to gain her freedom. Chaucer’s Wife beganher Prologue invoking the precedence of her human experience:“Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world,is right ynogh for me.” 30 In this way, Chaucer subtly exposedthe myopia of medieval patriarchy from the beginning throughthe Wife’s often maligned character (who, not coincidentally,has often been invoked in discussions of Margery Kempe). TheWife revealed in her Tale “[w]hat thyng is it that wommen moostdesiren.” 31 In this Tale , the Wife juxtaposed male notions ofauthority with female wisdom, that is, women’s authority. Therape in the Wife’s Tale represented the result of male authority,grounded in an artificially constructed (human) system that washierarchical and male-centered. This system depended on andcondoned physical control over any element, human or otherwise,that might disrupt the system. Further, this system relied almostexclusively on auctoritas created and perpetuated by men. Thismyopia resulted in a loss for everyone concerned. The maidenlost her “maidenhede,” the symbol of female honor, while theknight, at least initially, lost his physical freedom, the essenceof his masculine honor. Not until he let go of the prescribednotions of male dominance and authority did the knight regainhis freedom and, thus, his power. As in the ending of the Wife’sPrologue , the man in the Tale must transfer to the woman thesocially constructed position of being “on top” in order for bothparties to live in harmony. Although the Wife and the crone ofher Tale demanded sovereignty, they each gave to their husbandsthe superficial appearance of honor, which was the husbands’and, by implication, men’s primary concern. But, the womenalso granted their husbands fidelity and harmony. When eachwoman was allowed to govern her own physical and intellectualbeing, each chose wisely for both husband and wife. The crone

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had used her magic and the Wife her wits to gain their ends.Consequently, the Wife, as auctor of the Tale , and both the Wifeand her heroine, as auctor of their fates, made the Wife’s point:female experience trumps male writings every time.Margery Kempe also had to use her wits to gain independencefrom the marriage bed and her husband to go into the world asshe willed herself (or as the Lord willed her). Margery Kempebecame an auctor of herself and rewrote her self-text with theaccepted “magic” of medieval mystical experience. Accordingto Alexandra Barratt, this is one of three strategies that womenevolved to “become ‘authors’, without offending their societalnorms and appearing to infringe male prerogatives.” AlthoughChaucer’s Wife of Bath thoroughly secularized the authority ofexperience, such self-determination could be a primary routeto individual, personal freedom for medieval women. Barrattnoted that “the Church could not deny women direct access tothe divine, through mystical experience unmediated by a humanpriesthood. Visionary women could bypass the human, male,authority of the Church on earth, and claim to be the instrumentsof a higher, divine authority.” 32 This was exactly what Kempe didin “rewriting” herself as spiritual text.

In trying to retrieve Kempe from the margins of medievalmystics and society, Karma Lochrie perceived another spacefor women’s authority, that of mystical discourse that she sawas a separate discourse from literary or exegetical texts. Lochrieremarked that[u]nlike the other modes of medieval discourse, mystic discoursedoes not rely on the textual system of auctoritas . In other words,the mystical text does not rely on either textual or institutionalauthorization of its statements. Thus, the mystical text defines,identifies, and authorizes itself differently than most other kindsof medieval discourse. 33

Yet, Kempe did rely on auctoritas of another kind—that of othermystical texts to which she referred in her Book —and also onthe authority of the Church on earth. Kempe’s Book continuallyrounds on notions of authority revealing in Kempe a subtledefiance of the medieval patriarchal order while appearing to

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adhere to it in a time of turmoil and persecution over vernacularwritings, especially translations of the Bible.

Nicholas Watson has argued in his study of late medievalEnglish vernacular theology, Bible translation, and Arundel’s1409 Constitutions that the attack on vernacular translationsof the Bible included direct assaults on women as well as thelower classes. For Arundel and others the greatest fear was that“ [t]ranslation into the mother tongue will allow any old woman( vetula ) to usurp the office of teacher” and create “a world inwhich the laity prefers to teach than to learn, in which women( mulierculae ) talk philosophy and dare to instruct men—in whicha country bumpkin ( rusticus ) will presume to teach.” 34 Watsonasserted that Richard Ullerston’s determinatio , a Lollard vernacularparaphrase and defense of translation, revealed what Arundeland his followers saw as “the apocalyptic account . . . of the socialconsequences of translation.” 35 As Watson noted, this is particularlytelling in the determinatio of William Butler who believedthat “making the Bible available to illiterati is a foolish disruptionof the order of things [and] only the elite have had access to clearthinking [since the Fall].” 36 For the “populus vulgaris,” it wasenough to have “thought, prayer . . . the sacraments, and knowledgethat is gained through hearing—less dangerous than reading.”For Butler, Arundel, and like-minded clerics, these avenueshad to remain “the only legitimate means of access to the divine”for women and the “rustica.” 37

Consequently, when Margery claimed that she “herd red”such and such a text, she was not necessarily revealing illiteracy.Rather, she might have been disclosing her cultural literacy.Watson posited that “pastoral concern for the laity is in an ambiguousrelation to a fear and contempt of the ‘populus vulgaris’and their desire to encroach on clerical turf.” 38 This fear of thelaity’s wielding of the Word by the more educated clergy was afear then that clerical privilege and prestige was endangered bythe vernacular and would result in a decline in their own powerand in their control over the masses that was guaranteed by theirposition and education. According to Ullerston’s summary, theanti-translation forces argued that the laity’s “devotion is actuallyimproved by their lack of understanding of the psalms andprayers.” 39 Margery Kempe and her Book are the embodiment of

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these fears—a woman, not enclosed or in orders, a member ofthat large and at least since the mid-fourteenth-century plague

years, unruly Third Estate, and a vocal, highly visible, and selfproclaimedcommunicator of the Word of God. And Kempe evenhad the “audacity” to go to Archbishop Arundel in about 1413to ask him for “auctoryte” to choose for herself her confessor andto take communion every Sunday. He granted it as she requested“vndyr hys lettyr and hys seel thorw al hys prouynce” (36/22,24). As my investigation of Kempe’s experiences expressed in herBook continued to evolve I found myself looking more closely atthe text’s and women’s connections to another constant of medievallife, the sermon.

Medieval women, whether anchoress or lay, could not haveescaped the oral transmission of admonitions against sin andsocial order fomented in medieval sermons. 40 These constantlydrew upon the admonitions in the Bible itself or from the auctoritasof the Church Fathers and other mediators of the Wordagainst women’s voices. The Pauline messages repeated throughouthis epistles calling for women’s silence and submission servedas a patriarchal standard. 41 Following Paul, medieval preachersadmonished against women’s voices within or without thechurch. Kempe seemed largely to avoid the issue of women’ssilence and submission but instead echoed the lessons of the sermonsin regard to human frailties. In revealing her commissionof the premier sin of Pride, Kempe says that she was “smet wytht e dedly wownd of veynglory” and that the Lord saw “þis creaturyspresumpcyon” (14/1–6). Joan Young Gregg’s 1997 study,Devils, Women, and Jews , began with a quote from Augustine: “Itis my duty to give you due warning by citing the Scriptures. . . . Iam forced to preach on it. Filled with fear myself, I fill you withfear.” 42 This is most apt as a description of the content of sermonsthat Margery Kempe would have heard, sermons filled not onlywith fear of the darkness that night brings but also with that darknight of the soul that medieval sermon makers went to greatlengths to conjure up for the masses. As a woman, too, MargeryKempe was suspect and her fears preyed upon. As Gregg notes,along with devils and Jews, women became the embodiment ofhuman sin, “an unholy trinity, a dark and distorted ref lection ofthe orthodox trinity of Christian doctrine.” 43 Thus, Kempe, as

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a woman, faced even more admonishments and fears, real and

imagined.

One sermon warned that Pride is the “princypall begynnyngeof all woo and wretchedness” and has four branches thata person must eradicate in order to prepare the heart for Christ’sentrance. 44 These are “vaynglorie . . . ypocrysie . . . presumpcionand fole drede.” 45 Kempe quickly reveals her knowledge oftwo of the four branches of Pride and later her acquaintancewith the other two branches. On her way to see the Bishop ofLincoln, Kempe was called a “fals ypocryte” by a small mobthat confronted her (33/12–13). False hypocrisy was one of threeaspects of hypocrisy that the medieval preachers delineated. Thefourth and final branch of Pride, “called fole drede, or ellesproude shame” occurred when a person “dredes more mannesdome then the dome of God.” 46 This branch plagued Kempethroughout her life. Late in her story, she recalled coming backto London from across the sea and being “not clad as sche wolda ben for defawte of mony” and how she had, in her foolishshame, intended “to a gon vn-knowyn in-to t e tyme t at schemyth a made sum chefsyawns, [and so she] bar a kerche be- forhir face” (243/15–17). But, Kempe also found a neat way of gettingaround these branches of Pride when earlier in her Bookshe had been visiting “certyn places for gostly helth” and was“wolcomyd & mech made of ” (22/27, 34). Christ had to cometo her in her “dred of veynglory” and reminded her that thoughthe people “worshep t e t ei worshep me” (23/1). Kempe as theLord’s representative on earth would be worshiped or despisedbecause of Him not for her own sake. She must make neither toomuch nor too little of herself. But, as she did in Rome, Kempecould conjure up a sermon proving herself while maintainingthe masculine, clerical shield. In this event, she asserted that shehad “a story of Holy Writte whech sche had lernyd of clerkys”(97/34–35). She filtered her voice through the authorized screenof men’s learning and speech. Yet, her familiarity with the sermonliterature must not induce her to be a maker of sermonsherself.

Women were to follow St. Paul’s abrogation against speakingin church, against preaching in any way, and against the everlurking sins of the f lesh. Gregg pointed out that the instructions

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for the clergy “stipulated . . . [that] [t]he focus of the preaching wasto be on the Seven Deadly Sins . . . the Seven Virtues, the SevenGifts of the Holy Ghost, the Ten Commandments, the TwelveArticles of the Faith, the Seven Sacraments, the Seven Works ofMercy, and the Seven Petitions of the Pater Noster.” She alsoasserted that “exempla . . . played a central role in the revitalization”of the ars praedicandi and that these exempla “reinforced thedoctrinal matter of the homily . . . providing religious instructionand effectively . . . inculcating the largely unlettered medievalpopulace with the societal norms of European Christianity.” 47Whether or not Margery Kempe was “unlettered” or simplyshielding herself by having her Book written, she would havebeen well-versed in all the topics illustrated by the exempla andbelabored by the clergy. Though we know that a “prest . . . wrotþis boke,” neither Kempe nor any medieval lay person regularlyattending services would have to be formally schooled in manualsof sermon construction to know the use to which the exemplacould be put (55/6). Kempe’s own first exemplum recalls that shehad withheld her sin for a long time because “sche was euyr lettydbe hyr enmy, þe Deuel” who convinced her that, no matterwhat she did, God would forgive her without confession ifshe did penance (7/1–2). Following the teachings of the Church,Kempe attempted to “work off” her sins with regular bouts offasting, deeds of alms, and devout prayers. Yet, when Kempestill refused to confess one sin in the midst of her first childbedillness, she became mentally unbalanced for more than eightmonths. During this time, Kempe reported that she was continuallytormented by “deuelys opyn . . . mowthys al inf laumyd wythbrennyng lowys of fyr [as if ] t ei schul a swalwyd hyr in . . . [and]deuelys [who] cryed up-on hir wyth greet thretyngys” (7/24–29). Kempe was tormented by the Devil for her refusal to confessone sin, but, unlike other poor souls in sermon exempla , Kempelived to make amends. The fascinating twist was that she did sowithout ever confessing that one sin!

As the text would bear out, the initial period of Kempe’sphysical and mental suffering ended only when her visions ofdevils and hell-fire were replaced by a vision of Christ speakingto her and ascending into the air. This life-saving visioncame to her in time to free her from physical confinement at

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the hands of her husband and household. She had been boundand isolated to protect her from her own physical self-abuse butalso to protect the household. In this vision, Kempe saw a royallyattired Incarnation of God and was freed from her mentalturmoil and her bonds. At this point, her spiritual developmentcommenced, and Margery Kempe would find herself continuallyconfronting men on their own turf. That it took many moreexempla of her trials and tribulations, and threatenings from layand religious alike, provided evidence for seeing Kempe’s lifenarrative as something more akin to a sermon. Though she wasnot allowed to preach, and she denied that she did so, her Book ,in the guise of a self-made vita executed by a reputable memberof the male clergy, and her “knowledge” carefully communicatedas having been acquired by hearing books and sermons,quite neatly offered both a Book and a sermon without the direconsequences that could be leveled on a medieval woman whodared the public voice of a writer and medieval sermon maker.Kempe would be forced into no corners. And Kempe wouldnot enclose herself in a cell, although, at one point, viciouslyencouraged by a monk in Canterbury to do so. 48 She did notrecant her marriage vows, though after 14 children and some20 years of marriage she finally lived chastely. Throughout heradult life she revealed her propensity for at least five of the sevenvices constantly belabored by the clergy—pride, envy, wrath,avarice, and concupiscence. These transgressions added to thosethat she could hardly avoid—being a woman, and, even worse,a wife, the lowest form of female.

In making her point about the medieval importance placed onfemale “intactness,” Karma Lochrie said that “[w]hen virgins arethen instructed not to break that which seals them together withGod . . . [t]he seal is both boundary and suture to the consequencesof the breached f lesh.” 49 Kempe’s threat to clergy and lay folk alikeclearly came from her lack of integrity and intactness—married,14 children, running about the world with all her “unsealed”female openings, all the while proclaiming a special communionwith God. It was an obvious affront to the Church’s carefullycontrived notion of the female body and the female’s relationshipto God. Lochrie contended “that woman was identified notwith the body but with the f lesh, which stood for all the heaving

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power allied against the spirit. The f lesh was not synonymouswith the body.” 50 Yet, this academic distinction between bodyand f lesh ( corpus and caro ) may not have been so neatly made bythose medieval preachers who would have directly inf luenced awoman like Margery Kempe. Lochrie asserted that “Paul locatesthe source of man’s evil in the f lesh, rather than in the body,” but,what Paul says in Romans 7 is, at best, confusing to the layperson.51 As Peter Brown has pointed out:

Paul crammed into the notion of the f lesh a superabundance ofoverlapping notions. . . . A weak thing in itself, the body was presentedas lying in the shadow of a mighty force, the power ofthe flesh : the body’s physical frailty, its liability to death and theundeniable penchant of its instincts toward sin served Paul as asynecdoche for the state of humankind pitted against the spiritof God. 52

Paul asserted in Romans 7.8 that the law, that is, the commandmentsof God, made man conscious of sin, “[b]ut sin, findingopportunity in the commandment, wrought in me all kinds ofcovetousness. Apart from the law sin lies dead.” 53 Although Paul neverdirectly associated woman with the flesh, in his epistles herepeatedly places her below the man in daily life and the activitiesof the Church.

Using St. Paul’s words as a point of departure, the Churchhad elevated chastity to the most revered state of existence.Maidenhood was holy; marriage was a descent into filth anddegradation. In the words of the author of Hali Mei ð had :

þe hehe tur of Ierusalem . . . bitacneð . . . þe hehnesse of meið hadþe behald as of heh alle widewen under hire ant weddede bað e.For þeos, ase flesches þrealles beoð i worldes þeowdom, antwunieð lah on eorð e; ant meiden stont þurh heh lif i þe turof Ierusalem. . . . wedlac haued hire frut þrittifald in heouene;widewehad, sixtifald; meið had wið hundredtfald ouergeaðbaþe. 54In one of Kempe’s “reuelacyons,” we hear echoes of this thirteenth-century treatise on virginity. In her “reuelacyon,” theLord assured Kempe that “þow t e state of maydenhode be more

PROYM xxxv

parfyte & more holy þan þe states of wedewhode, & þe state ofwedewhode more parfyte þan þe state [of ] wedlake, ӡet dowtyrI lofe þe as wel as any mayden in þe world” (49/5–8). The marriedKempe was not to be denied her special favor though Hellawaited the transgressors at every turn; the Church proclaimedearthly pain as necessary to stave off the eternal pain of damnation.But, Kempe knew that “[a]lle [Christ’s] apostlys, martyres,confessorys, & virgynes . . . passed be the wey of tribulacyon,and sche desyrd no-thyng so mech as Heuyn”(13/9–12). And so,Margery entered on “þe rygth way to-Heuyn-ward” (13/7–8) asshe continued to erase and rewrite her human and spiritual texts.Margery Kempe would not be alone in her reforming of her selfamong women of her own time or those who, later, would haveto find similar means to gain control of their lives in a patriarchalworld.

What price did Kempe pay in the world for her constantstruggle to erase and rewrite the text that was woman? Sheinf licted physical pain on herself, tried to destroy human feelingsand sensations, struggled with self-love, Pride, and othervices. Her children barely garnered a mention save the son whocame to her for advice and eventually died in her care. Shehad confessors who shunned her company to save themselvesfrom persecution. She was detained, humiliated, ridiculed,harassed, and constantly tormented. She was impoverished,abandoned, and threatened with excommunication and executionby friends and strangers alike as well as the off icialsof the Church who felt threatened by the shift from mortalto spiritual that this woman was enacting. Yet, she was alsosolaced and revered. She was rewarded with money and recognition.She was sought out for her good counsel, for her specialrelationship with God. Margery Kempe battled with her conflicting texts—woman claiming spiritual authority for herself,claiming union with God, avowing Christ as Bridegroom andConfessor—while living in the world. She often suffered seriousphysical pain and sickness, spiritual torment, and fear asshe struggled to remove the human text and replace it with thespiritual one.

As the animal “f lesh” of the palimpsest was scraped and preparedto make a writing surface, then written on, scraped, and a

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new text written, perhaps another scraping for yet another text, soMargery Kempe, literally, scraped her body, beat it, and deprivedit to prepare it for the text of the mystic and visionary. Then again,another reworking of the texts of spirituality and mysticism, andagain. Ultimately, we understand not two texts, human and spiritual,but multiple texts working and reworking the “surface,”being written and rewritten, until the “right text” is most prominent,most visible. Her contemporaries must see her conversionfor it to be valid; she must feel it “in hyr mende and in hyr sowle”(3/14–15). The obscured text of Margery Kempe, the originalone would no longer be immediately discernible, no longer becovered in material finery, no longer be heading the procession,no longer be consuming f lesh or having carnal relations with herhusband—if it/she, the human text, could not be readily seen, it/she no longer existed. One layer had been scraped clean.Kempe reimagined herself through her own experiencesfocusing on the mystical ones and their physical manifestationscouched in terms reminiscent of the accepted oral authority ofsermons and the written authority of men sanctioned by theChurch. With elements of these, Margery Kempe infused herBook , recreating her stories in an aura of divine intervention forthe enlightenment of her readers. Lynn Staley contended thatKempe’s “growing ability . . . to trust the strength of her privateexperience of the nature of the divine” was made clear in hercreation of one well-conceived “fiction of dissent,” her Book . 55Margery Kempe’s experiences and their physical and verbalexpressions as revealed in the pages of The Book of Margery Kempeconveyed the spiritual passages of Margery Kempe from laywomanof the merchant class to bride of the Godhead. As such,Margery Kempe ended her Book with a section Meech entitled“The Prayers of the Creature.” 56

Kempe’s prayers reveal the sense of power gained by onewoman because she was willing to erase and rewrite herself froma woman fully earthly to one nearly equal, in her own mind, toChrist himself. Kempe prayed:

Lord, make my gostly fadirs for to dredyn þe in me & for to louynþe in me, & make all þe world for to han þe mor sorwe for her

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owyn synnys for þe sorwe þat þu hast ӡouyn me for o þer mennyssynnys. (249/31–34)

Further, she has the power to intercede for the highest rankingmembers of the medieval Church:

Now, good Lord Crist Ihesu, I crye ӡow mercy for alle þe statysþat ben in Holy Chirche, for þe Pope & alle hys cardinalys, for alleerchebischopys & bischopys, & for al þe ordir of presthoode, ǀ foralle men & women of religyon, & specialy for hem þat arn besy tosauyn & defendyn þe feith of Holy Chirch. (250/1–6)

It would be a scribal “correction,” the crossing out of “Pope” inthis litany of souls for which Kempe begged mercy that wouldsend me along new passages in my research.

In the summer of 2004, the excision of “Pope” in red ink andmy own earlier textualist background propelled me to the BritishLibrary to see the manuscript of Kempe’s Book and make myown determinations about the rubricators “corrections.” There,I finally held the manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe in myhands, turned its medieval paper pages, and recorded the scribalmarginalia and textual enhancements or corrections includingthat most significant word crossed through in red ink. Thisturned my scholarly trajectory from the Middle English life ofMargery Kempe to the life of the manuscript book that containedit. Although the recovery of The Book of Margery Kempe in 1934had generated volumes of scholarly expressions over the next70-plus years, I found that it was not only Kempe’s Book that hadbeen unaccounted for for 400 years. From the moment I began towork with the manuscript itself, I would focus my energies on thetransmission of the physical artifact, The Book of Margery Kempe ,whereabouts unknown until Col. William Erdeswick IgnatiusButler-Bowdon had it brought forward for identification whileasserting that “ ‘the MS. [had] been in the possession of [his] familyfrom time immemorial. The two bookplates [were] those ofHenry Bowdon born in 1754’.” 57 His family ownership markedby these two bookplates did not tell the whole story however. An

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earlier claim to this manuscript had been inscribed on the versoside of the binding leaf facing fol. 1r. The book had once been inthe possession of the Carthusians of Mount Grace in the NorthRiding of Yorkshire. That inscription along with the Carthusianswho had glossed its pages would serve as a point of departurefor my study during which other evidence connected to thatoriginary moment and after would propel me down many variedpaths. With that textual evidence, it would be one sixteenthcenturyhand writing the inscription and another the last hurriedmarginal glosses and corrections that would direct my research tothe very beginnings of English reform.

In the first decades of the sixteenth-century when these handshad been writing, I examined primary and secondary sourcescharting the ins and outs of Henry VIII’s and Cardinal Wolsey’searliest efforts at church and clerical reforms. These kept returningmy attention to the period following the first public assertionWolsey made of being “troubled by the king’s marriage” inMay 1527 especially the decade of the 1530s, the years betweenHenry VIII’s mandate against papal power and his dissolution ofthe last monasteries. 58 Mount Grace became one of the last religioushouses to be dissolved under those statutes on December18, 1539. These documents and the arguments they presentedwould open a multitude of ways along which I might travel insearch of the passages of The Book of Margery Kempe and the significanceof its eponymous heroine, Margery Kempe. After all,I found that it was women’s bodies that became the contestedspace for the Catholic-Protestant struggle for dominance thatbegan in England with Henry VIII. One collection of scholarshas contended that

Anti-Catholic discourses relied on gendered invective as anadaptable, resonant vocabulary for describing and condemningCatholicism as both the traitor within and the exotic, foreignseductress. [In contrast, the Catholics’] association of Catholicismwith the feminine might also work positively, positioning the“old faith” as a mother, a nurse, or an object of desire. 59

Humanist arguments and counterarguments about the inwardand outward, the spirit and the f lesh, began to focus not on man’s

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nature but woman’s when it came to mapping the strategy for thetheology of the post-medieval world. Women would be deemedmore suspect under the Protestants’ manipulation of the qualities,the “humours,” associated with women, an association that wouldbe firmly entrenched during subsequent centuries of the kind ofchest-pounding masculinity of nation and empire building ironicallygaining a foothold under a female monarch, Elizabeth I.Most intriguingly, “the Catholic[s were] collecting, preserving,translating, and transcribing . . . medieval spiritual texts [as] a wayof safeguarding a religious heritage that the passage of time andthe iconoclastic phases of the reformation[s] threatened to erase.” 60The Book of Margery Kempe was one such medieval spiritual textworth preserving for its embodiment of the kind of affectivepiety esteemed by the Carthusians and laypersons of faith. Othersources also revealed the Catholic resistance to reform as dependenton familial networks throughout England as much as onthe sheer rebellious nature of English subjects in the North aswell as other areas at a distance from London. Christopher Haighposited the difficulties of uncovering specifics of such resistancewithin a given community or familial network: “The process bywhich a small group or community retained Catholic norms duringa movement from conformist conservatism into recusancywill . . . be largely unrecorded, since official documentation meansoutsider interference and the disruption of the process.” 61 Yet,I persisted as I knew the family network must hold the key tounraveling this mystery.

As I started following the genealogical paths within theButler-Bowdon family itself, I discovered rebels, recusants, and aredoubtable network of Catholic continuity from the first years ofthe Henrician reform. The ways in and out of the Butler-Bowdonfamily from “time immemorial” proliferated over the course ofmy work. The evidence gathered along these paths continued toreturn me to Henry VIII’s series of statutes in 1534 that bound theclergy and others to refuse the authority of the pope to the pointthat no one was “to call the bishop of Rome pope, either in publicor in private, or to pray for him as pope.” 62 I believed that thiswas surely the impetus for the second scribal hand glossing andcorrecting The Book of Margery Kempe to strike the word, “Pope,”

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from Margery Kempe’s prayers at the end of her book. But in themidst of the spiritual and physical desecration caused by Henry’sreformation how could a book expressing one medieval woman’svery particular kind of affective piety escape unscathed? Theanswers would be revealed along the diverse paths uncovered oneafter another. Some of these would dead-end while others woulddisclose yet another way to follow. That journey is the subject ofthe rest of this book. I end my “proym” here so the reader mayproceed to “þe next folwyng.” 63

NOTES

Proym

1 . See chapter 2 below for a fuller discussion of de Worde and HenryPepwell. See also Sue Ellen Holbrook, “Margery Kempe andWynkyn de Worde,” in The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England,Exeter Symposium IV. Papers read at Dartington Hall, July 1987,ed. Marion Glasscoe (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1987),pp. 27–46 for a close study of de Worde’s printed text.2 . Quotations from Wynkyn de Worde’s treatise are taken fromSanford Brown Meech, “Appendix II. Printed Extracts fromthe Book of Margery Kempe,” The Book of Margery Kempe , ed.Sanford Brown Meech with Prefatory Note by Hope Emily Allenand note and appendices by Meech and Allen, Early EnglishText Society, o.s. 212, (London: Oxford University Press, 1940),p. 352 [352–357]. References will be to Meech’s page numbers asMeech, “Appendix II.”3 . Meech, “Appendix II,” p. 355.4 . George R. Keiser, “The Mystics and the Early English Printers:The Economics of Devotionalism,” in The Medieval MysticalTradition in England , Exeter Symposium IV. Papers read atDartington Hall, July 1987, ed. Marion Glasscoe (Woodbridge,Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1987), p. 22 [9–26].5 . Keiser, “The Mystics and the Early English Printers,” pp. 23–24.6 . I first explored the concept of a “Frankentext” in regard toeditorial procedures practiced on medieval manuscripts fromthe nineteenth-century onwards as “a regenerated pastiche madefrom parts of different texts” in my “Introduction,” in The ProseAlexander of Robert Thornton: The Middle English Text with aModern English Translation , ed./trans. Julie Chappell (New York:Peter Lang, Inc., 1992), p. 11 [1–27]. I am here using the sameconcept to indicate the results of extracting from Kempe’s Bookas life writing or autobiography, which terms are not under considerationin this book.

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7 . In 1991, the standard British literature survey anthology forteaching early English literature was The Norton Anthologyof English Literature , 5th edn., Volume 1 (New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 1986). Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar hadalready expanded the canon with another Norton textbook,The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 1985) that included the extracts as noted fromThe Book of Margery Kempe .8 . Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe , ed. Sanford

Brown Meech with Prefatory Note by Hope Emily Allen andnotes and appendices by Meech and Allen, Early English TextSociety, o.s. 212 (London: Early English Text Society, 1940),1/2–3. Hereafter Kempe. All quotations from Kempe’s Book arefrom this edition. Subsequent parenthetical references in thischapter are, as here, by page/line number from this edition. Insubsequent chapters, I will sometimes use my own transcriptionwith abbreviations as they occur in the manuscript but withthe parenthetical reference to the page and line numbers fromMeech’s edition (see chapter 3 , n. 31).9 . “Margery Kempe ca. 1373–1438,” in The Norton Anthology ofEnglish Literature , 5th edn., ed. M. H. Abrams, et al. (New York:W.W. Norton & Co., 1986), p. 298 [298–308].10 . As the bulk of this chapter presents my own scholarly passagesthrough The Book of Margery Kempe prior to my turn to thetransmission of the text that the rest of this book reveals, thediscussion that follows recounts a history of my own revelationsabout Kempe’s Book as it evolved in papers I wrote and presentedbetween 1999 and 2003 but which were never published. Theseinclude: “Woman as Palimpsest: The Layers of Margery Kempe,”presented at the XXIII Mid-American Medieval AssociationConference, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City,Missouri, February 27, 1999; “The Public Performance of Private‘Dalyawns’ with God: Margery Kempe of Lynn,” presentedat the International Congress on Medieval Studies, MedievalInstitute, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan,May 4–7, 2000; “Conf lict between the Mortal & Spiritual Texts:Margery Kempe and the Performance of Her Book,” presented atthe Texas Medieval Association Conference, Baylor University,Waco, Texas, September 7–9, 2000; “Displacing the Body:Margery Kempe, Spiritual Intimate of God,” presented at theSouth Central Modern Language Association Meeting, Tulsa,

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Oklahoma, November 1–3, 2001; and “‘Comownycacyon &good wordys’: Margery Kempe and the Rhetoric of theMedieval Sermon,” presented at the Texas Medieval AssociationConference, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, September 25–27,2003.11 . Elizabeth A. Petroff, ed., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 20.12 . I agree with Wolfgang He s ler’s assessment of this term: “Theword auctoritas belongs to the most significant and lastingcoinages of the Latin language. Its meaning is not always easyto ascertain,” as quoted in Jan M. Ziolkowski, “Cultures ofAuthority in the Long Twelfth Century,” Journal of English and

Germanic Philology 108, no. 4 (October, 2009): 421 [421–448].That said, I used auctoritas at this time to denote written spiritualauthority.13 . See Hope Emily Allen, “Prefatory Note,” in The Book of MargeryKempe , ed. Sanford Brown Meech with Prefatory Note by HopeEmily Allen and notes and appendices by Meech and Allen, EarlyEnglish Text Society, o.s. no. 212 (London: Early English TextSociety, 1940), pp. liii–lxviii. In this, Allen discusses Kempe’s“psychology.” Allen claims that she has “studied the mysticism ofMargery Kempe on the basis of her being a true mystic ” (emphasisadded). But, she qualifies her use of this term and asserts thatshe does so because “the best chance of understanding [Kempe’s]life and work lay [in]. . . . ascribing to her some degree. . . . ofendowment with the spiritual graces (or psychological phenomena)which are called mysticism” but Allen says that she merely“follow[s] the opportunist method of scholarship” in this ascription(pp. lx–lxi). In this note, Allen also discusses the inf luenceson Kempe and, thus, her Book quoting F. Vernet’s summationof “current scholarly opinion” concerning the autobiographicalwritings of or about women mystics in this period: “est-elleune autobiographie proprement dite, ou l’un de ces ecrits dontl’auteur a souci non d’etre materiellement exact, mais d’instruireet d’edificer” (quoted from p. lvi). The translation in the text ismine. Allen herself makes no comment on his remark. See AnneHudson Jones’s article, “Literature and medicine: narratives ofmental illness,” The Lancet 350 (2 August 1997): 359 [359–361],where she conjures Kempe as evidence for her subtitle withoutexplanation beyond the term quoted here. She does not addressany aspect of Kempe’s narrative or life.

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14 . Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (University Park,PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 38.15 . See Staley, Dissenting Fictions , her seminal study on this aspect ofThe Book of Margery Kempe .16 . David Lawton, “Voice, Authority, and Blasphemy in The Bookof Margery Kempe ,” in Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays , ed.Sandra J. McEntire (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992),p. 102 [93–115].17 . Sanford Brown Meech, “Introduction,” in The Book of MargeryKempe , ed. Sanford Brown Meech with Prefatory Note by HopeEmily Allen and note and appendices by Meech and Allen, EarlyEnglish Text Society, o.s. 212, (London: Oxford UniversityPress, 1940), p. xi [vii–lii].18 . Allen, “Prefatory Note,” p. liii.19 . Barbara Obrist, “The Swedish Visionary Bridget of Sweden,” in

Medieval Women Writers , ed. Katharina M. Wilson (Athens, GA:University of Georgia Press, 1984), p. 227 [227–251].20 . Lynn Staley, “Authorship and Authority,” in The Book of MargeryKempe , ed./trans. Lynn Staley (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001),p. 237 [236–242].21 . Alexandra Barratt, “Introduction,” in Women’s Writing inMiddle English , ed. Alexandra Barratt (London: Addison WesleyLongman Ltd., 1996), p. 6 [1–23].22 . For a brief but cogent discussion of Margery Kempe’s smokeand mirrors about her literacy and, therefore, her authority, seeStaley, “Authorship and Authority,” pp. 236–242.23 . See Janet Wilson, “Communities of Dissent: The Secular andEcclesiastical Communities of Margery Kempe’s Book ,” inMedieval Women in their Communities , ed. Diane Watt (Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 155–185.24 . Petroff, Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature , p. 9; see WendyHarding, “Body into Text: The Book of Margery Kempe ,” inFeminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature , ed. LindaLomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia, PA: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 168–187, for a different perspectiveabout this kind of giving over of power.25 . Women who wrote of visionary experience consistently twistthe Ciceronian model away from human authority. Gertrudethe Great in writing the revelations of Mechtild of Hackebornjustifies Mechtild’s act of writing:[Mechtild] sawe mysteries of hevenlie privetees moo than Ican nowmbre, ande of here owne lownes sche helde here so

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unworthye that sche walde noght tell bott as sche was compelledof thame that were too here famyliere in here goostelyecounselys, ande yit of that sche told in partye. Some schewithdrowe ande some sche sayde to the worschepe of OwreLorde, ande that was whene sche was constreynede be thevertue of obedience. (Quoted in Barratt, Women’s Writing inMiddle English , p. 49.)26 . Quoted in Barratt, Women’s Writing in Middle English , p. 9, fromBL MS Add. 37790, fol. 101r. Appropriately, like The Book ofMargery Kempe itself, the sole manuscript evidence for Julian’sshort version of her Revelation s, from which these lines are takenby Barratt, is this mid-fifteenth century Carthusian manuscript.Julian’s text is item four. Interestingly, the eighth entryis a Middle English translation of Marguerite Por e te’s Mirror ofSimple Souls .27 . See Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of theFlesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994);

Janel Mueller, “Autobiography of a New ‘Creatur’: FemaleSpirituality, Selfhood, and Authorship in The Book of MargeryKempe ,” in Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literaryand Historical Perspectives , ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse, NY:Syracuse University Press, 1986), pp. 155–168; also see DianeWatt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval andEarly Modern England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1997),pp. 15–50; among others.28 . For an excellent study on medieval women’s spirituality andperformance see Mary A. Suydam and Joanna E. Zeigler, eds.,Performance and Transformation: New Approaches to Late MedievalSpirituality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). In thiscollection, see especially Nanda Hopenwasser, “A PerformanceArtist and Her Performance Text: Margery Kempe on Tour,”pp. 97–131.29 . Barratt, Women’s Writing in Middle English , p. 133.30 . Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale in TheRiverside Chaucer , 3rd edn., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston:Houghton Miff lin Company, 1987), p. 105 [105–122]; FragmentIII, lines 1–2 .31 . Chaucer, WBPT , p. 117, line 905.32 . Barratt, Women’s Writing in Middle English , p. 8.33 . Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh , p. 62.34 . Nicholas Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation

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Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409,” Speculum 7, no. 4(October 1995): 843 [822–864].35 . Watson, “Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-MedievalEngland,” p. 843.36 . Watson, p. 841.37 . Watson, p. 842.38 . Watson, p. 844.39 . Watson, p. 843.40 . See chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion of the relationshipbetween The Book of Margery Kempe and medieval vernacularsermons.41 . In 1 Timothy 2.11–12, Paul (repeating himself from 1 Corinthians14.34–35) proclaimed: “Let a woman learn in silence with allsubmissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authorityover men; she is to keep silent.” See The New Oxford AnnotatedBible: With the Apocrypha, Expanded Edition , Revised StandardVersion, ed. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1977).42 . Joan Young Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews: Reflections of the

Other in Medieval Sermon Stories (Albany, NY: State University ofNew York Press, 1997), p. 1.43 .Gregg, p. 4.44 . Sermon 44, 293/13–14 in Woodburn O. Ross, ed., MiddleEnglish Sermons , Early English Text Society, o.s. no. 209(London: Early English Text Society, 1940). This editioncontains 51 Middle English sermons from BL MS. Royal 18B. xxiii. All references to quotations from Ross’s sermons willfollow his referencing system, that is, page number/line numbersin his edition and will occur parenthetically when notlikely to be confused with the Kempe parenthetical references.Hereafter Ross.45 . Ross, 294/5, 29; 295/27; 296/4.46 . Ross, 296/4–5.47 . Gregg, Devils, Women, and Jews , p. 3.48 . See Kempe, Chapter 13 (pp. 27–29), for an account of thisincident.49 . Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh , p. 25.50 . Lochrie, pp. 3–4.51 . Lochrie, p. 19.52 . Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and SexualRenunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1988), p. 48.53 . RSV.

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54 . “The high tower of Jerusalem. . . . signifies. . . . the blessedness ofvirginity, which as if from on high, sees all widows and marriedwomen both under it. For these as f lesh-thralls, are in the world’sthralldom, and live low on earth; and the maiden stands throughher blessed life in the tower of Jerusalem. . . . wedlock has its fruitthirtyfold in heaven; widowhood, sixtyfold; virginity; with ahundredfold, transcends both.” The translation is mine. HaliMei ð had, in Medieval English Prose for Women: From the KatherineGroup and Ancrene Wisse , ed. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 2/26–29–4/2,20/19–21 [2–43].55 . Staley, Dissenting Fictions , pp. 2–3.56 . Kempe, p. 248.57 . Quoted in Meech, “Introduction,” p. xxxii.58 . G. W. Bernard, The King’s Reformation: Henry VIII and theRemaking of the English Church (New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 2005), p. 9. Bernard makes a sound case in his sectionentitled “Henry’s Campaign for the Divorce” for Henry’s havinginstigated this public statement of Cardinal Wolsey, who wasArchbishop of York and a papal legate at the time.

59 . Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley,and Arthur F. Marotti, “Introduction,” in Catholic Culture inEarly Modern England , ed. Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan,Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti (Notre Dame, IN:University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), p. 5 [1–8].60 . Corthell et al., “Introduction,” p. 5.61 . Christopher Haigh, “The Continuity of Catholicism in theEnglish Reformation,” Past and Present 93 (November, 1981):43–44 [37–69]62 . Bernard, The King’s Reformation , p. 244.63 . Kempe, 5/31.