Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader

Rebecca Krug

Description

Since its rediscovery in 1934, the fifteenth-century Book of Margery Kempe has become a canonical text for students of medieval Christian mysticism and spirituality. Its author was a fifteenth-century English laywoman who, after the birth of her first child, experienced vivid religious visions and vowed to lead a deeply religious life while remaining part of the secular world. After twenty years, Kempe began to compose with the help of scribes a book of consolation, a type of devotional writing found in late medieval religious culture that taught readers how to find spiritual comfort and how to feel about one's spiritual life. In Margery Kempe and the Lonely Reader, Rebecca Krug shows how and why Kempe wrote her Book, arguing that in her engagement with written culture she discovered a desire to experience spiritual comfort and to interact with fellow believers who also sought to live lives of intense emotional engagement.An unlikely candidate for authorship in the late medieval period given her gender and lack of formal education, Kempe wrote her Book as a revisionary act. Krug shows how the Book reinterprets concepts from late medieval devotional writing (comfort, despair, shame, fear, and loneliness) in its search to create a spiritual community that reaches out to and includes Kempe, her friends, family, advisers, and potential readers. Krug offers a fresh analysis of the Book as a written work and draws attention to the importance of reading, revision, and collaboration for understanding both Kempe's particular decision to write and the social conditions of late medieval women's authorship.

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• Reino Unido
• Mysticism
• Christian mysticism
• United Kingdom
• English
• Great Britain
• Anglais
• Royaume-Uni

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 07 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501708169
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

q MARGERY KEMPE AND THE LONELY READER

MARGERY KEMPE AND THE LONELY READER n R e b e cc a K r u g

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

Copyright © 2017 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.

First published 2017 by Cornell University Press

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Names: Krug, Rebecca, author. Title: Margery Kempe and the lonely reader / Rebecca Krug. Description: Ithaca ; London : Cornell University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016039392 (print) | LCCN 2016040225 (ebook) | LCCN 2016040226 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501705335 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501708152 (epub/mobi) | ISBN 9781501708169 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Women authors, English—Middle English, 1100–1500—Biography. | Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages—Early works to 1800. | Christian women—Religious life—England. | Kempe, Margery, approximately 1373– Book of Margery Kempe | Kempe, Margery, approximately 1373– Classification: LCC PR2007.K4 Z76 2017 (print) | LCC PR2007.K4 (ebook) | DDC 248.2/2092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039392

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Cover: Statue of angel holding a cross (stock image) and British Library MS Add. 61823, fol. 101v, Courtesy of the British Library Board.

q Co nte nts

Preface vii Acknowledgments xi

 Introduction 1. Comfort 2. Despair 3. Shame 4. Fear 5. Loneliness  Afterword

Bibliography 223 Index 237

1 24 58 96 135 173 211

q P r e f a c e

When I started work onMargery Kempe and the Lonely Reader, I wanted to answer one question: Why did Margery Kempe write herBook? An evergrowing body of scholarship considers various aspects of Kempe’s life and her writing, but little of it gives consideration to the issue of theBook’s origins—at least not in the emotional and experiential terms that interest me. TheBookjustis—and it is so surprising, strange, and difficult that questions more answerable than mine have occupied critics since its rediscov ery in 1934. Nonetheless, given both my previous work on women’s literate practice and my own sometimes conflicted feelings about writing, it is, for me, an urgent question. Why did Kempe, after twenty years, during which she received frequent encouragement to write her “felyngs” down but resisted doing so, finally decide, sometime in the late 1420s or early 1430s, to write herBook? Why not instead continue to read devotional books with her clerical friends, trade tales with spiritually likeminded acquaintances, discuss her revelations with her confessors, and share the “wonder”—as theBookher spiritual life,calls it—of as she had done for many years, with people at home and abroad? TheBook’s preface says that Kempe was “bodyn in hyr spyrit for to wrytyn”—meaning God told her to write theBook. But how, then (even if this is an answer to my question), did she come to fulfill this command, finally, when she was sixty years old, and why, further, did this involve such a convoluted process— including her reliance on at least three scribes (one of whom wrote “neithyr good Englysch ne Dewch”; another who drafted one page and gave up; a third who resisted Kempe’s requests for assistance for four years) and extending to the addition of a second book several years after theBookhad, seemingly, been completed? Kempe lived outside the social milieu of elite women who, at the encour agement of their confessors, may have done some writing and translating for spiritual edification. She was a late medieval laywoman with many spiri tual friends but few acquaintances who were authors. Of those who were writers, such as the Carmelite friar Alan of Lynn, the disparity between their

vii

viii PREFACE

educational and institutional backgrounds makes it unlikely that Kempe decided to begin writing herBookmerely because it seemed like “the thing to do.” None of herscholarlyfriends were laypeople. And none of them were women (unless we include Julian of Norwich, whom Kempe visits seeking spiritual guidance; theBookJulian’s status as an author).makes no mention of Whether she was completely illiterate in a strict sense or, as seems likely to me, perhaps able to make some sense of written language has little bearing on the question except to suggest even more pressingly how important it is. Which brings me back to my original question: How did it become pos sible, desirable, necessary for her to write theBook? InMargery Kempe and the Lonely Reader, I try to provide an answer by thinking about Kempe’s author ship in terms of the dynamic and changing nature of her literate practice, which includes the entire range of activities and social understandings related to written culture as it changed over the course of her life. My argument is, briefly, that Kempe wrote theBook, finally, as a revisionary act: she came, after many years of engagement with written culture as a reader and listener, to feel compelled to produce her own book of consolation, a type of devotional writing found in late medieval religious culture that taught readers how to seek spiritual comfort and, most important, how tofeelabout one’s spiritual life. She did so out of a desire to experience spiritual comfort herself, and out of the impulse to find, sustain, and interact with fellow believers who, like Kempe, were also looking to live lives of intense, devout engagement. Kempe’s decision to write was tied to her belief in the validity and truth fulness of emotional experience. She discovered—and theBookinsists—that expansive emotional expression is fundamental to a life of devotion. When a famous preaching friar attempted to force Kempe to say she was physically ill—to deny that God was the source of her revelations—she responded by refusing to disavow her feelings: she “hirself knew wel be revelacyon and be experiens of werkyng it was no sekenes, and therforsche wolde not for al this world sey otherwyse than sche felt” (chapter 61, emphasis added). In writing the Book, Kempe composed her own book of consolation, one that would, in fact, “say” as she “felt”—if at all possible. In doing so, she wrote a book about, by, and for herself. Kempe’s reader, like Kempe herself, is both “outside” the life that is repre sented and simultaneously drawn into the represented experience of self. The Bookdraws attention to the provisional nature of every attempt to capture the truth of experience: Kempe reads, rereads, and revises the truth of this “creature,” who she is and was (and believes she will in some way continue to be). The value the writer finds in this process of constant reinterpretation is thus extended to the reader. To put it another way, her subject is her own life

PREFACE  ix

and her experiences, but her representation of that self, as found in theBook, is constructed to reach out to and include the reader: “I write about my own life,” Kempe might have said, “but it could just as easily beyourlife.” This is why the prologue to theBookasserts that it is for the “solas and comfort” of the “synful wrecchys” who read it: the “grace that [God] werkyth in any crea tur is ower profyth.” Kempe thought of herself as such a wretch and believed that her readers were too. Scholars of feminist autobiography use the term “autography” to refer to life writing in which the “I” of the narrative (the “creature’s” in the case of theBook) is shared by author and reader. In place of a static, linear narrative history of Kempe’s life, theBookselfinthemaking inpresents a process of which the dynamic construction of identity is located both in lived experience and in the act of capturing and reenvisioning that life in writing. It makes it clear that Kempe’s identity is not just reported (a stable, graspable object) but performed (a variable, not quite tangible thing). Its eager, contradictory, and sometimes frustrated attempts to uncover and construct the “creature’s” identity are offered to the reader; the reader is, in turn, invited to take part in the same performative process as Kempe herself. The possibility of such self creation and uncovering of emotional truth, theBooksuggests, was missing from the books of spiritual consolation available to Kempe and her readers. This absence, or, in positive terms, the need for a lived life as a model for working through the problems of finding spiritual, emotionally felt comfort, became the grounds for writing her own book that would “say as she felt.” HerBook, then, is the book of consolation that Kempe came to write after twenty or more years of thinking about reading and writing.