The Book of Margery Kempe: Faith, Authority, and Medieval Life

Introduction: Margery Kempe and Late Medieval Town Life

The Book of Margery Kempe is a vivid record of late medieval English life. Its central theme concerns not simply a woman, but a woman thoroughly rooted in the world. Kempe portrays neither the manners and tastes of the court nor those of the nunnery, but rather the piety, the culture, the profit-oriented values, and the status-consciousness of the late medieval town.

Margery's disengagement from conventional female roles and duties — and consequently her daring rejection of the values of her fellow townspeople — is a response to her growing commitment to her spiritual vocation. Her attempt to gain personal, financial, and spiritual autonomy is a tale of radical reversal that touches us on many different levels. Margery does what very few are ultimately able to do, and the fact that she does so as a woman enhances the force of her story.

Her story begins conventionally enough. She is married, soon thereafter conceives her first child, and goes on to bear fourteen children, presumably assuming the responsibilities of a wife and mother whose position in late medieval society is assured by the longstanding reputation of her father, John Burnham, and the lesser but nonetheless worthy repute of her husband, John Kempe. However, that conventional story is fissured early in Margery's life by a personal vision of Jesus that comes to her shortly after the birth of her first child. The Book records not the anxious efforts to secure worldly goods that we can find in the letters of the Pastons, but Margery's efforts to dissociate herself from the acquisitive and restrictive values of what we now recognize as middle-class life.

Spiritual Vocation and the Rejection of Conventional Roles

The Book tells a tale of conflict between Margery and key figures of the late medieval world who were invested with spiritual and secular authority — priests, bishops, and mayors — as well as with her husband and her fellow townspeople. Her personal relationship with Jesus leads her to espouse a radical social gospel that threatens the very basis of town life, for Kempe intimates that an orientation toward profit, an investment in qualities like stability and hierarchical ordering, and an urge toward conformist codes of dress and behavior underlie the medieval conception of community.

Margery's pursuit of spiritual autonomy thus places her in direct tension with the social fabric around her. Each confrontation with a figure of authority — secular or ecclesiastical — illuminates the degree to which late medieval community life depended on conformity, and the degree to which a woman who refused that conformity became a disruptive and threatening presence. Yet it is precisely this disruptive quality that gives her story its enduring force.

Medieval Female Sacred Biography and the Church

As contemporary as such an account of Margery Kempe's life may sound, Kempe grounds her work in the conventions of medieval female sacred biography. Throughout the annals of sanctity, holy men and women were presented as breaking with, or as challenging, the institutions of family and society. The issue of sexuality was a particularly important one for female saints: by their wish to lead celibate lives, women signified their espousal of a new and less socially defined existence. Unbound by the physical and patriarchal strictures of marriage, they could cultivate a spiritual relationship with God whose terms were frequently described by their hagiographers as freer — and, in fact, far more amatory — than any available to them as actual wives.

That this freedom was carefully circumscribed and superintended by the Church is integral to the story of women's religious movements in the Middle Ages, since it is more often through the writings of the confessors or spiritual guides of such women that we know of their lives. Those lives are radical in the sense that they are designed to challenge the tepidity of contemporary devotion, yet also conventional, since the very devotion that turns the holy person into a fitting example contains the effect of that challenge when a male member of the institutional Church records it.