The Book of Margery Kempe (3 page)

‘And therefore she would not for all this world say otherwise than as she felt…' (chapter 61).

In these dictated recollections of a woman who could not read or write it is human speech itself which continually catches and sharpens the attention and offers a clue to reading Margery's life. Margery's
Book
was not, after all, set down to answer the expectations of later readers of autobiography.
²³
Margery would probably not have believed that human experience was worth recording for its own sake. The Proem makes clear that this life is being recalled because of God's wonderful dealings with Margery, to God's glory rather than Margery's. The perceiving of pattern in one's life, which has determined the art of more modern autobiographers, is thus undertaken by Margery from a rather different vantage-point. Indeed, by later standards of autobiography, the presentation of pattern and progression may
seem disconcertingly absent or elusive. There is little concern with chronology and with noting the passing of time, little sense of ageing and of the changing phases of life. The presentation of the subject's relationships with her chief friends is mostly rather interrupted. Touches of local colour and realistic detail come vividly and spasmodically before the reader's eyes, yet observation of the outward world – often significantly hazy and offhand anyway – was very far from what Margery would have seen to be her purpose, as a woman gifted with revelations. In spite of this we cannot claim Margery's
Book
to be the autobiography of a great mystic – the quality of her mystical experience prevents this – but it remains one of the most immediate ‘Lives' of the period.

For Margery, the form of her writing was predominantly directed by the strong continuity of purpose that she saw in her own life. By comparison with the recollected revelations of the great mystics, Margery's
Book
is almost too autobiographical, too concerned with the mundane difficulties and obstacles that confronted Margery in life. Her record of those visionary experiences which were to her own mind most extraordinary – particularly her conversations with our Lord – are often among the least individual and lively parts of her work in both style and content, while other parts of her text may seem individual at the expense of authentic spiritual understanding.

Margery may be observed consistently handling the figurative language of traditional spiritual literature – particularly the nuptial imagery of mystical union with God – with an endearingly earthbound awkwardness. In following the conventional imagery of the mystical marriage-bed, the wedding, the body of the spouse, Margery's realizing imagination produces an unnerving directness and concreteness, as when God informs her: ‘You may boldly, when you are in bed, take me to you as your wedded husband … You can boldly take me in the arms of your soul and kiss my mouth, my head and my feet as sweetly as you want' (chapter 36). It is characteristic of Margery that she will take over the mystical tradition of applying metaphors of sense perception to the mystic's experience of God and apply them with such
concrete force as to risk losing the spiritual in the vigour of the real (although she is noticeably careful – perhaps because of challenges to her orthodoxy – to mention how God speaks ‘to her mind', ‘in her soul', and so forth). Yet Margery's limitations as a would-be mystic are balanced by her strengths as a strikingly individual and vivid talker and rememberer, as is shown by the way she recalls how she experienced some tokens of the Holy Ghost in chapter 36: the rushing wind and the dove of the Holy Spirit are apprehended by Margery Kempe as the sound of a pair of bellows and the song of a robin redbreast ‘that often sang very merrily in her right ear'.

In the end we must accept the
Book
as it is, a unique survival which it is pointless to think less of – by measuring it against other works and genres – when the writing seems to have so much in it of the life it seeks to present. It would be misleading to take the
Book
as if it were the transcript of conversations in which a medieval Englishwoman remembers her life. The writing has clearly been much more edited and shaped than this – edited by the bookish concerns of the scribe, and shaped and focused by that spiritualizing lens through which Margery looks back at her experience.

Yet there remain indications that we are dealing with an incompletely edited transcript – the lack of shaping in the material presented and the limitations of the spiritual life that is portrayed. There is no sense of a perceived development and interpretation which might mark a more contrivedly presented autobiography. There is also striking openness, as when Margery includes the early story of her sexual temptation in chapter 4, with its anti-climactic conclusion when she falls prey to her own will and is then rebuffed by the man who had tempted her. There seems a comparable honesty in her account of such an incident as that in which her fellow travellers desperately try to avoid her when crossing from Calais home to England (‘'What the cause was, she never knew' – II, chapter 8). For although Margery understandably remembers her successes along with her failures, she seems immune to embarrassment, and is perhaps without the kind of self-consciousness which would have led her to re-write her
experiences in a way that blurred over the awkward corners and sharp edges of her own personality, and only left the rough surfaces and bloodymindedness of other people's characters.
²⁴

The continuity of the
Book
lies in Margery's own will and, as something of a prophet in her time, the local structure of her writing is often determined by the recollection of a sequence of events which proved her foresight. As an illiterate person, the role of human speech seems central to Margery's remembering of past events, and happily central to her dictated account of that past. Her sensitivity to the spoken word is displayed in her feeling that she is being crucified by the cruel words of others. Challenged to justify herself, continually placed in the position of being tested, Margery must also speak out clearly for herself. So it is natural that she should compose and shape written ‘scenes' through the interchange of remembered speech and the climax of some successful riposte. The degree to which Margery represents scenes from years before in direct-speech exchanges may make some modern readers suspect some subsequent ‘improvement' in the writing of her history. There is certainly a likelihood of this, although the powers of the unbookish mind to remember scenes in terms of spoken exchanges can often still be remarked. If we imagine ourselves with Margery's ‘unlettered' awareness, her ability ‘to answer every clerk' is clearly a reflection of the favour shown her and of her extraordinary vocation. In this light it is understandable that Margery would long preserve in memory her exchanges with the monk whose sins she reveals to him (chapter 12), or her trouncing of her detractors at Canterbury (chapter 13). In both cases she takes on the established and advantaged; it would be natural for her to husband in her memory the spoken ‘text' of these triumphs. Clear in her mind that she should not rush into writing – indeed she almost left it too late – she was, possibly from her earliest experience, committing to the record of a kind of inner memory-book the challenges and exchanges which would one day, she felt, be outwardly set down in her
Book,
and in the meantime would serve to sustain her conviction in her often lonely and isolated spiritual pilgrimage.

It is in direct speech that Margery seems to recall some of the most pointed and independent moments of her long-past experience. (Indeed, the frustrations of not being able to speak, or to understand speech, on her foreign travels are so extreme for Margery as to be the subject of miraculous relief.) To the mild but cautious Bishop of Lincoln Margery records her grand answer that she will indeed visit the Archbishop, but not for the reason he suggests (chapter 15); she recalls the words with which she boldly rebukes Archbishop Arundel for the misconduct of his household (chapter 16). The accuracy of Margery's memory, where this can be cross-checked with recorded events, is impressively good, while her recollection of what was said to her at their meeting by Dame Julian of Norwich is also impressive with a different kind of accuracy, in that what Margery records Julian as saying rings true in content, and even in style, with Julian's own writing. Since it seems unlikely that Margery would know anything of Julian's written work, her memory of this conversation is at once a precious witness to the wholeness of vision, life and counsel in Dame Julian, and a witness to the quality of Margery's own power to recollect what was said to her both on this and, by implication, on other occasions.

When Margery returns to England after her travels her trials and difficulties with authority are naturally occasions that Margery recalls in terms of the testing questions put to her and her answers to them. She is always good at catching the edge in other people's voices, and although it was not her purpose to provide character-sketches of the people she encounters, her modern readers will feel they know something, none the less, of a person like Archbishop Bowet, because Margery's account allows him to speak in his own, splendidly testy, words.

In fact, there are far too many memorable moments in the
Book
to recall here, where the vividness of the speech brings alive the presence of those around Margery, or highlights her own relation to them. There are the comments of neighbours (‘Why do you talk so of the joy that is in heaven? … You haven't been there any more than we have,' chapter 3). There is the apparently
reasonable comfort offered by a priest for her shriekings (‘Woman, Jesus is long since dead,' chapter 60), which enables Margery to rise to the magnincent retort: ‘Sir, his death is as fresh to me as if he had died this same day, and so, I think, it ought to be to you and to all Christian people.'

Indeed, it is the kindly-meant advice of menfolk as Margery is taken under arrest towards Beverley (‘Woman, give up this life that you lead, and go and spin, and card wool, as other women do, and do not suffer so much shame and so much unhappiness …') which leads Margery to spurn such counsel in terms that reveal her idea of her vocation: ‘I do not suffer as much sorrow as I would do for our Lord's love, for I only suffer cutting words, and our merciful Lord Christ Jesus … suffered hard strokes, bitter scourgings, and shameful death at the last…' (chapter 53). As her extraordinarily heightened and suggestible imagination shows, Margery is able throughout her
Book
to step into the life of Christ and out again. Those constantly recollected scenes of his life, reinforced in her mind's eye by her visits to the Holy Places, form a kind of extra life concurrent with her own and which she sees suffused, superimposed, simultaneous, with the world of ordinary streets and rooms, humble mothers and their children. As a woman both entangled in the world and beckoned out of it, at one time nursing her senile and incontinent husband, at another called to contemplation, the extraordinary strains and variousness of Margery's life as she remembers it give her text the unevenness of living, and mean that her Book's very weaknesses prove its strengths, as a work of human memory and the life of the self.

*

In rendering Margery Kempe's
Book
from Middle English the present translation aims to give a readable text for the modern reader, while remaining as close as possible to the form of the original. In the translation, the syntactical pattern of Margery's text has been kept as far as possible: her sentences are often long and rather loosely connected, and some of her most recurrent forms of connection and transition are simply effected by ‘and' and ‘then',
which are mostly retained here. But some of Margery's characteristic diction – such terms as ‘boisterous' or ‘dalliance' – have had to be changed in the present text, because of their altered associations for the modern reader. The translation is based upon the unique manuscript, now British Library Additional MS 61823, as edited by Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen (Early English Text Society, O.S. 212, 1940), with the kind permission of the Early English Text Society.

c. 1373   Margery born.

c. 1393   Marriage of Margery to John Kempe.

1413      Summer. Margery's interview with Philip Repyngdon, Bishop of Lincoln (chapter 15).

1413      Summer or autumn. Margery's interview with Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury (chapter 16).

1413      Death (before 16 October) of Margery's father, John Brunham.

1413      Autumn? Margery leaves Lynn for the Holy Land.

1414      1 August. Margery visits the chapel of the Portiuncula in Assisi (chapter 31).

1414      7 October. Margery visits the chapel of St Bridget in Rome (chapter 39).

1414      9 November. Margery's mystical marriage to the Godhead in the Apostles' Church in Rome (chapter 35).

1415      After Easter, Margery leaves Rome (chapter 42).

1415      21 May or earlier? Margery arrives in Norwich (chapter 43).

1417      About 7 July. Margery embarks at Bristol for Santiago (chapter 46).

1417      Early August. Margery returns to Bristol from Santiago (chapter 46).

1417      August-September. Margery's trial and detention at Leicester (chapters 46–9).

1417      Margery visits York, and London (chapters 50–55).

1421      23 January. The great fire at Lynn (chapter 67).

c. 1431   Margery's son and husband die (II, chapter 2).

1433      2 April? Margery embarks at Ipswich (II, chapter 3).

1433      10–13 April? Margery in Norway (II, chapter 3).

1433      April-May. Margery's sojourn in Danzig (II, chapter 4).

1433      10–24 July. Exhibition of the four holy relics at Aachen (II, chapter 7).

1434      29 July? Margery arrives at Syon Abbey (II, chapter 10).

1436      23 July. Priest begins to revise Margery's Book I (Proem).

1438      28 April. Priest begins to write Book II (II, chapter 1).

1438      13 April. Admission of one Margery Kempe to the Guild of the Trinity at Lynn; further mentioned, 22 May 1439.