Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe (Studies in Medieval Mysticism, Volume 5)

Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe Liz Herbert McAvoy

Studies in Medieval Mysticism

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Studies in Medieval Mysticism Volume 5

AUTHORITY AND THE FEMALE BODY IN THE WRITINGS OF JULIAN OF NORWICH AND MARGERY KEMPE The writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe show an awareness of traditional and contemporary attitudes towards women, in particular medieval attitudes towards the female body. This study examines the extent to which they make use of such attitudes in their writing, and investigates the importance of the female body as a means of explaining their mystical experiences and the insight gained from them; in both writers, the female body is central to their writing, leading to a feminised language through which they achieve authority and create a space in which they can be heard, particularly in the context of their religious and mystical experiences. The three archetypal representations of woman in the middle ages, as mother, as whore and as ‘wise woman’, are all clearly present in the writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe; in examining the ways in which both writers make use of these female categories, Dr McAvoy establishes the extent of their success in resolving the tension between society’s expectations of them and their own lived experiences as women and writers. LIZ HERBERT MCAVOY is Lecturer in Medieval Language and Literature, University of Leicester.

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Studies in Medieval Mysticism ISSN 1465–5683 GENERAL EDITORS

Anne Clark Bartlett Rosalynn Voaden Volume 1: St Birgitta of Sweden Bridget Morris Volume 2: Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology Christopher Abbott Volume 3: Birgitta of Sweden and the Voice of Prophecy Claire L. Sahlin Volume 4: English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle Claire Elizabeth McIlroy Studies in Medieval Mysticism offers a forum for works exploring the textures and traditions of western European mystical and visionary literature, from late Antiquity to the Reformation, aiming to cover both well- and lesser-known mystics and their texts. The series particularly welcomes publications which combine textual and manuscript study with current critical theories, to offer innovative approaches to medieval mystical literature. Proposals or queries may be sent directly to the editors or publisher at the addresses given below; all submissions will receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Anne Clark Bartlett, Department of English, DePaul University, 802 West Belden Avenue, Chicago, IL 60614-3214, USA Professor Rosalynn Voaden, Department of English, Arizona State University, PO Box 870302, Tempe, AZ 85287-0302, USA Caroline Palmer, Boydell & Brewer Limited, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF, UK

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AUTHORITY AND THE FEMALE BODY IN THE WRITINGS OF JULIAN OF NORWICH AND MARGERY KEMPE

Liz Herbert McAvoy

D. S. BREWER

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© Liz Herbert McAvoy 2004 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2004 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 1 84384 008 1

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record of this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data Herbert McAvoy, Liz. Authority and the female body in the writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe / Liz Herbert McAvoy. p. cm. – (Studies in medieval mysticism, ISSN 1465–5683 ; v. 5) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–84384–008–1 (alk. paper) 1. English literature – Middle English, 1100–1500 – History and criticism. 2. Mysticism in literature. 3. Julian, of Norwich, b. 1343. – Knowledge – Human anatomy. 4. Christian literature, English (Middle) – History and criticism. 5. English literature – Women authors – History and criticism. 6. Mysticism – England – History – Middle Ages, 600–1500. 7. Kempe, Margery, b. ca. 1373. Book of Margery Kempe. 8. Women and literature – England – History – To 1500. 9. Body, Human, in literature. 10. Authority in literature. 11. Women in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR275.M9H47 2004 820.9’3824822–dc22 2003023451

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Limited, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction

vii ix 1

1.

Motherhood and Margery Kempe

28

2.

The Motherhood Matrix in the Writing of Julian of Norwich

64

3.

Discourses of Prostitution and The Book of Margery Kempe

96

4.

‘Hyf thowe be payede,’ quod oure lorde, ‘I am payede’: Hermeneutics of the Holy Whore in Julian of Norwich

131

5.

Margery Kempe: Wisdom, Authority and the Female Utterance

170

6.

Julian of Norwich: Voice of the Wise Woman

205

Afterword

235

Bibliography

238

Index

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For my children: Siriol, Anona and Ioan who continue to make all things well.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book originates in a doctoral thesis undertaken in the Department of English at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth in 1996 and submitted in the autumn of 1999. I am, therefore, greatly endebted to my former supervisor, Diane Watt, for her solicitous overseeing of the thesis, for her enthusiasm towards my ideas and her firm but sympathetic handling of my shortcomings. My thanks also extend to Jacqueline Tasioulas and Claire Jowitt for examining it with such care and precision and for awarding me my doctorate accordingly. I am also grateful to Lyn Pykett, my former Head of Department, for continuing to offer me work, valuable office space, library and computer facilities even after the budget rendered it increasingly difficult. Thanks must also be directed towards Caroline Palmer of Boydell and Brewer for having such strong faith in my abilities to transform thesis into book and for her patience during the course of the revision process. I also remain intensely grateful to the series editors, Rosalynn Voaden and Anne Clark Bartlett for the same reasons, as well as for the enthusiasm they expressed for the project upon reading an early version of the manuscript. Such enthusiasm, support and kindnesses have sustained me during the inevitable bouts of tiredness, overwork, anxiety and self-doubt. More recently, my work on this book has benefited enormously from the scrupulous attentions of Sarah Salih from the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia. Sarah has proved to be a most insightful and incisive reader whose detailed and constructive suggestions, criticisms, comments and references were offered with tact and consideration. I remain in her debt. Thanks are also due to Elaine Treharne, Head of the English Department at the University of Leicester, for having enough faith in me to employ me and to offer further support for this project. Gratitude must also be extended to my other colleagues at Leicester for the warm welcome and friendship they provided on my arrival – all of which has contributed to the timely completion of this book. I am particularly grateful for the generous subvention offered by the English Department at the University of Leicester to support publication. Finally, my special debt of gratitude is, of course, to my family: to my parents, John and Sidonie Herbert, who gave up much of their precious retirement time to hold the domestic fort whilst my children were young, enabling me to complete chapters, meet deadlines and minimise delay; to my friend and partner, Tony, whose long-suffering patience has known no bounds, especially over the past seven years when he has had to take on far more than his

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fair share of domestic responsibility. Finally, to my children, for having to endure regular periods of my absence, both physical and psychological, during most of the years of their growing up, but most of all for anchoring me firmly in their irrepressible humour, enthusiasms and teenage angst, and for persuading me to love their very, very loud music. Above all, this book is for them. Parts of this book first appeared in earlier publications, although they have since been revised and developed. Aspects of Chapter 1 were published as ‘From Honorary Virgin to Virgin Mother: The Confessions of Margery Kempe’, Parergon 17, 1 (1999), pp. 9–44, and, along with parts of Chapter 3, as part of the interpretive essay included in The Book of Margery Kempe: An Abridged Translation (Woodbridge, 2003) and ‘Virgin, Mother, Whore: The Spiritual Sexuality of Margery Kempe’, in Intersections of Sexuality and the Divine in Medieval Culture: The Word Made Flesh, ed. Susannah Mary Chewning (London, 2004), pp. 119–36. Parts of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘ “. . . aftyr hyr owyn tunge”: Body, Voice and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe’, Women’s Writing 9, 1 (2002), pp. 159–76. Parts of Chapter 2 were published as ‘ “The Modyrs Service”: Motherhood as Matrix in Julian of Norwich’, Mystics Quarterly 24, 4 (1998), pp. 181–97, and a section from Chapter 4 appeared as ‘ “A purse fulle feyer”: Feminising the Body in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love’, Leeds Studies in English n.s. 33 (2002), pp. 99–113. All of this material is used here with the publishers’ permission.

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ABBREVIATIONS EETS e.s. o.s. s.s. LT MED n.s. ST TEAMS

Early English Text Society Extra Series Original Series Supplementary Series The Long Text Version of Julian’s Revelations The Middle English Dictionary, ed. H. Kurath and S. M. Kuhn (Ann Arbor, 1956–) New Series The Short Text Version of Julian’s Revelations The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages

Unless otherwise stated, all biblical quotations in English are from the Douay/ Rheims version of the Bible (reprint, London, 1956).

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With fele frutys be we fayr fad, Woundyr dowcet and neuyr on ill. Every tre with frute is sprad, Of them to take as plesyth us tyll. In þis gardeyn I wyl go se All þe flourys of fayr bewté And tastyn þe frutys of gret plenté Þat be in paradyse.1

These words, attributed to Eve by the playwright of the N-Town play entitled The Creation of the World: The Fall of Man, serve to identify in her a restlessly transgressive desire to move out of her allocated space at the side of Adam and access the more marginal realms beyond. Instead of being compliant to her ontological role as Adam’s helpmate and companion, the N-Town Eve displays a wanderlust which draws her away from Adam to enjoy the delights of the garden independently of her partner. In contrast, in the same play Adam is depicted as ‘a good gardenere’ and one who dutifully gathers the product of his labours with ‘gle and game’.2 It is such a flirtation with the veiled dangers of the unstructured marginal regions of her environment, brought about by an excessive appetite for consumption, which leads to Eve’s seduction by the serpent and the resultant downfall of humankind and loss of Eden. In other popular medieval depictions of Eve too – such as that of the second play of the Chester Mystery Cycle – it is a similarly socially and morally transgressive Eve who brings about human downfall and effects permanent alienation from the paradisiac space allocated to Adam and herself by God.3 This time, in keeping with the attitudes perpetrated by the early Church Fathers which percolated down through the centuries to lay claim upon prevalent attitudes towards women, Eve’s transgression is even more explicitly associated with uncontainable monstrous appetite – primarily for food, for knowledge and for sex. This is

1 2 3

The Creation of the World: The Fall of Man in The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, ed. Stephen Spector, EETS s.s. 11 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 24–34 (p. 26). N-Town Play, p. 26. The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, EETS s.s. 3, 2 vols (London, New York and Toronto, 1974), vol. 1, pp. 13–41.

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established even before Satan’s temptation of her, when he announces her susceptibility: for wemen they be full licourouse, that will shee not forsake.4

Later, too, Adam will lament: My licourouse wyfe hath bynne my foe; the devylls envye shente mee alsoe. These too together well may goe, the suster and the brother.5

The alliance between Satan and Eve established here in Adam’s despairing words reflects the common belief in the Middle Ages, which manifests itself in much of its literature, that woman was ‘the devil’s gateway’,6 in effect, the portal to an anarchic and degenerate location of lust and uncontrolled appetite. Again in the words of the Chester Cycle’s Adam: Whoe trusteth them in any intente, truly hee is disceaved.7

Such a remythologising of the Genesis narrative and its appearance in a multiplicity of versions during the late Middle Ages had rendered it, in the words of Allen J. Franzen, ‘a master narrative’ which provided a ‘context, a pretext and a metatext’ for patriarchal ideology.8 This ideology found a convenient symbol in its own construction of Eve as transgressor of the ‘natural’ female role and violator of her allotted space alongside Adam as his helpmate. This book will concern itself with some of the ways in which the late medieval writers, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, each contravened her own allocated spaces and reached out through the boundaries with her body and voice to enter the proscribed spaces beyond.9 It will also examine 4 5 6

7 8 9

Chester Cycle, p. 21. Chester Cycle, p. 28. Tertullian, De Cultu Feminarum, I: i. Much of Tertullian’s teaching on women was to enter mainstream Christian polemic in the Middle Ages. For a selection of his more misogynistic utterances see Alcuin Blamires (ed.), Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts (Oxford, 1992), pp. 50–8. Chester Cycle, p. 28. Allen J. Frantzen (ed.), Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies (New York, 1991), p. 40. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sandford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen, EETS o.s. 212 (London, New York and Toronto: 1940, repr. 1997). All references will be to this edition and page numbers will appear parenthetically in the text. All references to the Short Text (ST) of Julian of Norwich are taken from Frances Beer (ed.), Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love (Heidelberg, 1978). References to the longer version are taken from Marion Glasscoe (ed.), Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love (Exeter, 1993), unless otherwise stated, and are referred to as the Long Text (LT). Again, all page references will appear parenthetically in the main body of the text.

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how the texts produced by these women testify to the contravention of such boundaries and serve to redefine acceptable female spaces by means of a redrawing of the maps of female bodies, voices and agency. Finally, it will investigate the ways in which such a contravention enabled each writer to attain a level of personal and textual authority – an authority which I argue was dependent upon a reconstruction within their texts of what were considered to be some of the ‘specificities’ of female bodily experience.10

Proscribed Spaces and Marginalities The concept of a woman attempting to exceed the space allocated to her is a central one to any study of women writers of the Middle Ages. As Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka have observed: ‘Medieval people divided space by gender . . . Women occupied rooms, houses, quarters in the cities and villages, while men’s activities took them farther abroad to streets, highways, fields, cities, oceans, battles and council tables.’11 Elsewhere, Hanawalt suggests that in medieval culture a laywoman’s space was primarily that of the domestic sphere, and as such constituted the location within which she would carry out the necessary – and traditionally female – social activities of child-bearing, child-rearing and nurture; any independent movement outside this sphere of activity would often be suspect and open to accusations of transgressive behaviour.12 Whilst in a general sense this remained the case, in many ways the use of such a binary invites the danger of misrepresentation and lack of nuance. Many medieval women worked alongside their husbands in the fields or the cities, set up urban businesses independently of 10

11 12

For an overview of the problems of authority in mystical texts, see A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Aldershot, 1988). Nicholas Watson also addresses this briefly in the context of the female mystics in Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 1–27, especially pp. 22–4. For detailed analyses of the relationship between authority and the female body, see Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1987) and Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1992). For a specific examination of the relationship between Margery Kempe and authority see Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia, 1991), especially pp. 63–4, pp. 79–80, p. 83, pp. 86–87, pp. 97–8, p. 105; Sarah Beckwith, ‘Problems of Authority in Late Medieval English Mysticism: Language, Agency, and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe’, Exemplaria 4, 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 172–99; David Lawton, ‘Voice, Authority and Blasphemy in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in Sandra McEntire (ed.), Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays (New York, 1992), pp. 93–115; Lynn Staley Johnson, ‘The Trope of the Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe’, Speculum 66, 4 (1991), pp. 820–38. Barbara Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka (eds), Medieval Practices of Space (Minneapolis and London: 2000), p. x. Barbara Hanawalt, ‘At the Margin of Women’s Space in Medieval Europe’, in Robert R. Edwards and Vickie Ziegler (eds), Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 1–17.

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their husbands or continued a husband’s trade upon widowhood. There are even records of some urban women entering into negotiations abroad with foreign traders,13 and certainly in many European cities those groups of nonenclosed religious women known as the beguines were accepted and tolerated – albeit somewhat reluctantly – by the authorities.14 Many women, then, fell into the grey area which lay between the domestic and the religious locations and, although never fully integrated into the male sphere of activity, the marginal status this occupancy could afford them could allow for a level of participation and acceptance in both spheres, tenuous though it might be. In this context, Terence N. Bowers has examined the figure of the female pilgrim as transgressive figure, suggesting that women like Margery Kempe or Chaucer’s fictional Wife of Bath, who were presumptuous enough to undertake extensive travel alone without a male companion, were also occupants of this type of tenuous position by means of their continual movement through public spaces.15 Bower’s findings build upon an earlier study of pilgrimage undertaken by Victor and Edith Turner, who envisage the pilgrim (and for them, the pilgrim is paradigmatically male) as taking on a marginal or liminal status which ‘liberates [him] from conformity to general norms’.16 More recently, however, in the context of the woman pilgrim, Susan Signe Morrison has taken issue with this stance in her detailed examination of female pilgrimage in the Middle Ages.17 Here Morrison demonstrates how male-authored literary representations of the female pilgrim frequently tended to transform her into a symbol of transgression or aberrance and actually reinforced societal ‘general norms’.18 However, Morrison also suggests that pilgrimage could simulataneously serve to confound the traditional binaries attached to notions of gender and space by offering up to the female pilgrim a type of liminal and unfixed location within which to carry out a female performance of piety which could be potentially liberating or empowering. If, as Morrison asserts, pilgrimage enabled the woman to participate in

13

14 15 16 17

18

Shualmith Shahar discusses the nature of women’s work in the towns in The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages (London, 1990), pp. 189–205. Here she also presents evidence that a handful of women did carry out lone mercantile activites following the death of their husbands, pp. 194–5. The role of the beguine ‘sisterhood’ in European cities is examined by Shahar, The Fourth Estate, pp. 52–5. Terence N. Bowers, ‘Margery Kempe as Traveler’, Studies in Philology 97, 1 (2000), pp. 1–28. Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (Oxford, 1978), p. 35. Susan Signe Morrison, Women Pilgrims in Late Medieval England: Private Piety as Public Performance (London and New York, 2000), p. 137. See pp. 128–41 for a specific focus on Margery Kempe as pilgrim. Both Bowers and Morrison have recognised a firm interaction between travel, gender and transgression of the social order and demonstrate the extent to which socio-religious anxiety about the practice of pilgrimage tended to focus on female contravention of what was considered to be woman’s ‘natural’ identity as potential or actual wife and mother.

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a public performance of piety which by rights should be restricted to the men in the public arena, then the notion of male-identified space (the public) begins to break down with this incursion of the female upon it. Moreover, what Morrison observes in the case of Margery Kempe is a female pilgrim who not only takes full advantage of pilgrimage’s performative possibilities but continues to confound the binaries by means of offering her own literary representation of her travels. In other words, she blurs the boundaries both on the level of active participation and on the level of its representation.19 As a result, The Book of Margery Kempe, with its female perspective on pilgrimage, frequently represents the male participants as unpredictable, unfixed and lacking in the necessary spiritual commitment. Physical spaces, therefore, carried a multiplicity of meanings for those who occupied them, and those meanings were frequently highly gendered and productive of rules with which to police the boundaries. Unless negotiated carefully, those who violated those rules or transgressed the boundaries could be subject to expulsion or public humiliation, which served both to punish and to act as a warning to others. For a woman, to transgress or violate a prescribed space was sometimes, as Mary Douglas has also identified, to pollute the area upon which she encroached.20 For this very reason, we see the transgressive Margery Kempe physically enclosed under house arrest on several occasions because of her insistence on occupying a public space outside the domestic one deemed ideologically to be more appropriate for her. By returning her to the domestic sphere and forcibly restricting her movement within it, the male authorities are better able to categorise and control her according to their own precepts of what constitutes suitable behaviour for a wife and mother. Space, however, is not merely a geographically or architecturally static entity. Space, as Daphne Spain suggests, is also an abstraction, a culturally constructed ideologue which combines both location and social relations, which then proceed to reinforce one another.21 The cultural meanings attached to the enclosed spaces of bedroom and anchorhold so important to Julian of Norwich, for example, are useful for demonstrating both rupture and continuity in her writing. The inexorable movement from the ‘dyrke . . . chaumbyr’ (ST, 42), now thought to be the domestic sphere

19

20

21

As Morrison also points out, the representation of the woman pilgrim in literature rarely depicts her outside familial terms. Indeed, she regards Margery Kempe as still embroiled within her identity as wife and mother whilst performing her pilgrimages, although she observes that ‘her role as mother is displaced into the spiritual realm’ (Women Pilgrims, p. 146). Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1966), especially pp. 140–58. For a medieval perspective on this concept of the polluting female, see D. Jacquart and C. Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 74 –8. Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill, 1992), p. 2.

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where her experiences begin, to the anchorhold in which she becomes ‘recluse atte Norwyche’ (ST, 39) are central to Julian’s articulation of her own transition from lack of knowledge and youthful naïvety to the mature expression of a seasoned wisdom which characterises her later writing. Thus, the physical and metaphorical meanings attached to the female spaces of Julian’s sickroom and her anchoritic cell have a marked effect upon the production of her texts, not just because of their locational specificity but also because those meanings are inscribed upon them by Julian herself. As a result, paradoxically the apparent privation of the enclosed cell was to offer its occupant much more freedom for the development of her writing than was for a long time available to the more wordly Margery Kempe. Both physically and conceptually, then, the spaces occupied by Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich are of central concern to them as women writers, and to the various subject positions they occupy in their writing – something which will constitute one of the main focuses of this book. By very definition, of course, the term ‘woman writer’ when applied to the Middle Ages can be regarded as oxymoronic, implying as it does a contravention of space by a transgressive female voice speaking to an imagined audience outside the margins of her social or religious confinement.22 The very act of writing, be it performed within the confines of the private chamber, anchorhold or monastery, constituted a type of public speech-act directed at a real or imagined audience which necessarily moved the writer from the realm of the private into the public. This, of course, goes some way towards explaining the frequent use of the topos of humility in the works of medieval writers of both sexes, but in the writing of medieval women in particular.23 Whereas for men the public pronouncement was generally deemed appropriate or acceptable, something which rendered their use of this topos tropological, for a woman the very act of writing served to place her on the margins of her allocated space and often pushed her firmly into the grey areas beyond. For her, therefore, the use of the topos of humility was more than a customary trope; it served as a type of screen behind which she necessarily had to operate as a writer. Such a defensive stance found in women’s writing also goes some way towards explaining why women such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich either deferred the act of writing for some

22

23

Nicholas Watson asserts that during the period in the fifteenth century when these women were operating, language politics and incarnational theology became synonymous. He also argues that under such conditions the act of writing in the vernacular had major theological implications which were not always positive (‘Conceptions of the Word: The Mother Tongue and the Incarnation of God’, in Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland and David Lawton (eds), New Medieval Literatures, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1997), p. 90). Barbara Newman examines the use of the humility topos in terms of an internalisation of supposed female weakness in Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegarde’s Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 2–3, 35, 114–15, 182, 248 and 254–7.

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considerable time or else evaded certain material or subjected it to lengthy revision. Any discussion of those women who occupied the margins and the grey areas, of course, is made problematic by the fact that to some extent all women were subject to social marginalisation because of their ideological exclusion from the public sphere of influence within a patriarchal society, something which Hanawalt has also argued.24 In this respect, not only were women of all classes subject to varying degrees of physical and ideological enclosure, but for the large majority who would live a life outside the cloister or the anchorhold a destiny as wife and mother would render them per se the site of enclosure as vessels for the unborn child. In this sense, incursion into the public arena would often be tolerated if the woman were seen to be conducting herself ‘appropriately’ as wife and mother (as Margery Kempe resolutely refuses to do unless for purposes of expediency). Similarly, the unmarried woman would be half tolerated if she were also seen to be carrying her domestic roles with her into those public spaces – in the brewing, baking or other service industries, for example.25 It is an awareness of this type of legitimation effected by the portability of the domestic which Margery Kempe demonstrates on a number of occasions, particularly when she is in those situations which present her with the most danger – at Leicester and York, for instance, when she is arraigned for heresy.26 However, when she fails to draw upon her own domestic roles, reactions to her are far more hostile and can, perhaps, be best summed up by the famous exhortation directed at her by an enraged monk at Canterbury in response to her public citation of Scripture: ‘I wold þow wer closyn in an hows of ston þat þer schuld no man speke wyth þe’ (27). The evident hostility which Margery has aroused here is the result of what the Canterbury monks regard as her presumptuousness as a woman engaging in conversation of a religious nature, not only in a public space, but in one traditionally reserved for male religious. In this respect, this castigation can be read not only as a gendered desire to enclose Margery like an anchoress within the only legitimate space where such a female predilection for spiritual communion can be indulged, but it is also suggestive of the need for all transgressive and troublesome women to return to the enclosed

24

25

26

Hanawalt, ‘At the Margin’, pp. 1–17. See also Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin (eds), Framing Medieval Bodies (Manchester and New York, 1994). Particularly relevant in this context is Roberta Gilchrist, ‘Medieval Bodies in the Material World: Gender, Stigma and the Body’, in the same volume, pp. 3–61, especially pp. 50–8. Eileen Power examines women’s contribution in these areas of urban life, demonstrating how they provided a source of income, whilst incorporating those activities which they would most probably have been carrying out in a domestic capacity (Eileen Power, Medieval Women (Cambridge, 1972), pp. 62–9). On these occasions Margery relies upon her status as wife and mother from the upper echelons of urban society to act in own defence, even though in practice she has not been performing these roles for some time. See, for example, The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 112, 115 and 122. This is something I will be examining in Chapter 1.

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space of the domestic where they can be similarly categorised, controlled and contained. The message is clear: the most appropriate place for a woman’s voice to be sounded is within the stone walls of religious or domestic space. Thus, for Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, the primary dilemma is how to enter effectively the magisterial space of male intellectual activity without at best invoking censure, or at worst endangering their own lives. In this respect, the famously defensive use of humilitas by Julian in her Short Text not only testifies to a denial of encroachment upon male intellectual space whilst simultaneously taking up a position within it, but is also symptomatic of the very real fear involved in an usurpation of the male prerogative to write: ‘Botte god forbede that he schulde saye or take it so that I am a techere, for I meene nouht soo, no I mente nevere so’ (ST, 47–8). It is clear that both Julian and Margery are aware that, whether associated with the traditional space of the domestic or living within the regimented space of the religious, it is an imperative to at least retain an appearance of adhering to its imposed physical and intellectual boundaries and conform to its rules.

Female Specificities, Subjectivities and Theories of the Body In order to examine the importance of the female body in the writing of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, I have drawn upon a variety of pertinent theoretical approaches to that body, both those which were prevalent when these women were living and writing and more modern theories which have informed our present attitudes. Not all of these theories, however, have informed my work to the same extent. Some, such as those emerging from the school of French feminist thought, have provided a convenient exegetical tool only on occasion. On the other hand, more constructionist approaches, such as that proposed by Judith Butler, have proved to be fundamental to my understanding of how medieval women such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe mapped out their own perception of the female body as a means to gaining access to authority for their writing. At this point, therefore, I will first provide an overview of the theories of the body which have been most pertinent to my appraisal of these writers and secondly delineate how these interconnect with developing notions of selfhood which similarly inform their writing. Most influential in the forging of attitudes to the body in the late Middle Ages were probably the writings of Galen, the Greek physician from Asia Minor who had practised his science in Rome in the second century AD.27

27

For an in-depth study of Galenic medical theories see Rudolph E. Siegel, Galen’s System of Physiology and Medicine: An Analysis of His Doctrines and Observations on Bloodflow, Respiration, Humours and Internal Diseases (Basel and New York, 1968). On Galen’s general medical theories and on his role as medical philosopher, see Owsei Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca, 1973).

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Galen’s eclectic approach to the acquisition of information served to sustain his popularity. He shared with Aristotle a desire to create a cohesive and rational science based on philosophical precepts and cool intellectual analysis. Although Galen did not devote any treatise specifically to gynaecology or obstetrics, he nevertheless concurred with the popular Aristotelian notion that women were moister and cooler than males and, as a result, were perpetually in search of the male’s hotness and dryness in order to counter this ‘natural’ constitution. However, unlike Aristotle, who promoted the one-seed theory of generation whereby only the male produced the necessary ‘seed’ for procreation, Galen adhered to the ‘two-seed’ theory, recognising that both the male and the female produced the seeds of generation.28 Galen’s use of evaluative terminology in his discussion of sex differences led to a subtle differentiation which fed into the prevalent myth of Eve’s imperfections and the legacy of that perceived fallen and flawed human being. As in Aristotle’s system of sexual difference, the polarities of hot and cold, dry and moist were translated by Galen into a value system which favoured the male-associated qualities over those of the female, who then became relegated to the inferior position of inability and passivity. In effect, the female became interminably bound up and confined to the realm of the flesh, rather than the spirit.29 In this sense, the teachings of Aristotle were highly influential in the promotion of the belief prevalent throughout the literature of the Middle Ages that women were in some way physically monstrous; in fact, according to Aristotelian thought, they were deemed to be inverted – and therefore deformed – males: ‘females are weaker and colder in their nature; and we should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity’.30 Equally popular in the late Middle Ages (and developing in its appeal well into the early modern period) was Galen’s theory of the four humoral fluids which he considered maintained the health of the individual. This theory, first promoted by the Hippocratic writers of the classical period and later systematised by Galen, suggested that the health of the individual body was sustained by a balance of the four humoral fluids – blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. According to this theory, illness was not visited upon a body from without, but came about because of an internal imbalance of the humours.31 However, as Michael Shoenfeldt has pointed out in the context of

28

29 30 31

For a useful comparison between some of the theories of Galen and Aristotle, see Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 108–9 and 117–19. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, p. 23. Aristotle, De Generatione Animalium [Generation of Animals], trans. A. L. Peck (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1963), IV, vi. 775a, lines. 15–16. For an analysis of the way in which humoral theory affected the perceived relationship between bodies and individuality in the Early Modern period, see Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 2–39. For the ways in

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Galenic influence upon the early modern sense of selfhood: ‘While it makes the patient the agent rather than the victim of his or her health, it also provides a framework for blaming the patient for the illness that arbitrarily afflicts him or her.’32 If we return to Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich in this context, then, we are offered a framework for appraising why the texts of both of these women should be characterised at their onset by an account of their own respective life-threatening illnesses. There is no doubt, for example, that their audiences are meant to read the unique spiritualities of each of these women in terms of a self whose body has failed it, and both women implicate themselves as agents in their own illnesses for different rhetorical and hermeneutic reasons. Margery Kempe’s accounts of suffering through illness often suggest that it is her own moral corruption which brings about the malady. Indeed, her entire text is peppered with accounts of illnesses, both her own and those of other people, which she frequently identifies as God’s punishment for self-imposed unworthiness.33 Julian is equally explicit in her assertion of illness as self-inflicted when she documents the arrival of the suffering which she had prayed for during the time of her youthful piety – something she later identifies as the result of a somewhat naïve desire for ‘a bodelye syekenes . . . as to the dede’ (ST, 40). For both women, illness is represented as a self-initiated and transformative experience which sets in motion the process which ultimately leads to writing. In other words it heralds their emergence into an agency first enacted by means of the text of their own suffering bodies, and later translated into the written word on the page. In the course of this translation, their own female bodies become incorporated into their writing and become synonymous with selfhood, insight and agency itself. The concept of individuality and selfhood within medieval ideological systems has received considerable attention. For example, Colin Morris has examined the rise of the sense of personal individuality and identity within the restrictions of Church and society between 1050 and 1200.34 Morris illustrates how the desire for self-knowledge was one of the dominant concerns

32 33 34

which Galenic theory affected constructions of sexuality in the Middle Ages, see also Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, and Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, 1990). For an important analysis of the intersections of physicality, psyche and subjectivity in early modern consciousness of selfhood, with reference also to the medieval period, see Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994), Introduction, pp. 1–34. For a series of useful discussions of some theoretical issues of bodiliness in the medieval period see Kay and Rubin, Framing Medieval Bodies. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, p. 7. See, for example, The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 7–8, 53, 66, 104, 169–70 and 137–8. Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200 (Toronto, 1987). See also Peter Dronke, Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1970); R. W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance (New Haven and London, 1977); R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (New Haven, 1959), pp. 219–57.

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of the age, pointing out that the words of the legendary Delphic oracle ‘know yourself’ had long been assimilated into the traditions of the western Church, primarily through Augustine’s promotion of the importance of self- knowledge as a path to God.35 The most influential of commentators to take up this theme with enthusiasm was probably Bernard of Clairvaux, whose personal and highly individualistic experiences often became a source of material for his preaching. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bernard rejected the concept of an unbridgeable chasm existing between the individual and God, and promoted the idea of a negotiable bridge constructed out of fleshly love and respect of self. Thus, the individual, who was also linked inextricably with the human Christ, was offered access to God through the flesh, which in turn could facilitate the development of pure, spiritual union. This union, therefore, did not necessarily require the relinquishment of selfhood, but pointed towards its value and its eschatological potential if directed towards God. In her analysis of the growth of an individual consciousness in the Middle Ages, Caroline Walker Bynum has placed the development of the sense of individuality in the twelfth century within the context of belonging to recognisable groups and fulfilling certain expected social roles.36 Although contesting the accepted view that the twelfth century did, in fact, discover the individual, Bynum suggests that ‘it did in some sense discover – or rediscover – the self, the inner mystery, the inner man, the inner landscape’.37 As this quotation would suggest (and as is the case in the various other studies on this issue which Bynum cites in her essay), any idea of female selfhood is entirely absent from the picture presented to us. In spite of the flowering of female mysticism in Europe during the period under examination, and its further development well into the fifteenth century, at no point in this essay does Bynum embark upon an examination of this phenomenon in the context of the development of a sense of female individuality – even within the context of her analysis of the influence of Bernard of Clairvaux and his commentary on the heterosexual eroticism of the Song of Songs. Of course, one could argue that Bynum’s later exhaustive studies of the religious experiences of women in the Middle Ages which I have previously cited38 easily

35

36 37 38

Morris, Discovery of the Individual, pp. 65–6. For a detailed discussion of the process whereby the figure of the Sibyl was absorbed into the tradition of the Christian West, see Peter Dronke, Hermes and the Sibyls (Cambridge, 1990). On the influence of the sibylline tradition in the Middle Ages see Bernard McGinn, ‘ “Teste David cum Sibylla”: The Significance of the Sibylline Tradition in the Middle Ages’, in Julius Kirshner and Suzanne Wemple (eds), Women in the Medieval World: Essays in Honor of J. H. Mundy (Oxford, 1985), pp. 8–35. The relevance of the sibylline tradition to the writing of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich will be examined in Chapters 5 and 6 respectively. Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31 (1980), pp. 1–17. Bynum, ‘Twelfth Century?’, p. 15. See p. 3, n. 10 above.

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redress the balance, but there is no doubt that within most explicit analyses of selfhood in the Middle Ages it has been the male experience rather than the female which has been represented and favoured as definitive. Bynum’s more recent work, however, in spite of having become subject to charges of essentialism in recent times,39 has nevertheless succeeded in bringing the religious sensibilities of women to centre stage in modern scholarship. Moreover, it has opened up for debate the concept of a very different and potentially empowering female perception of self and body and its transformation into a language which is able to articulate both individuality and the sense of shared female identities. Unlike Bynum, however, my own reading of this ‘language’ of the female body is in terms of its being used as an authoritative literary tool and effective hermeneutic by the authors under examination rather than as some pre-existing, prediscursive ‘essence’ which is tapped into for purposes of achieving authority and asserting female ‘difference’. The writing of both Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich makes extensive use of the female body as female-identified literary tool and, as such, tends to constitute a textual performance of what is deemed to be ‘female’ or ‘feminine’ within a culture which did essentialise gender difference, as we have seen. What we must remember as readers, of course, is that what we have here are not the practices of those medieval women themselves, but merely the ‘textual effects’ of those practices which – unusually – are in these texts being articulated by the women themselves.40 This produces a discrepancy which also constitutes another possible site of slippage between experience and its representation. This point of slippage is then ripe for exploitation by the woman writer in its production of a screen behind which she can operate. This study will argue that both Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich consistently locate themselves at this point of slippage and take up a position behind the screen which allows them to successfully speak and to be heard. In effect, they both redefine location and reconstruct body within the indeterminate space between ideology, experience and representation. Within any study of the experiences of the female mystics of the Middle Ages, however, the moment comes when a confrontation with the question of female agency becomes inevitable. Were these women acting strictly within the confines of patriarchal thinking and tradition and assimilating patriarchal attitudes towards them and their ‘transgressive’ bodies? Or were they, by means of a strategic performance of the effects of a supposed female specificity, able to challenge and ultimately to evade apparently hegemonic socio-religious

39

40

See, in particular, Kathleen Biddick, ‘Genders, Bodies, Borders: Technologies of the Visible’, Speculum 68 (1993), pp. 389–418. Here Biddick considers Bynum ultimately to have failed in her enterprise because of a tendency towards essentialist conflation of the female and maternal. On the depiction of medieval women as ‘textual effects’, again see Biddick, ‘Genders, Bodies, Borders’, pp. 411–12.

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restrictions and produce a female-centred insight into the metaphysical and eschatological dilemmas which constitute the human condition? In recent years, the notion of female agency in the Middle Ages has been questioned by David Aers, who believes their agency to be limited because of the necessity of their operating within specific discursive regimes – something I address in Chapter 1 of this volume.41 As Aers’s discussion demonstrates, the question of female agency is a complex one and much of this present study will constitute an attempt to unravel its feasibility both in theory and in practice and investigate some of the ways in which these writers may have interrogated, used and exploited traditional attitudes towards the female body for purposes of personal and literary authority. This is not to say that I believe such women did not also internalise and accept some of these attitudes. But what is also characteristic of them is that they demonstrate a conscious attempt to provide an alternative way of thinking and behaving which diverges from traditional patriarchal – and masculinist – thought. In turn, this allows them an alternative and female-identified route by which to approach God. This alternative route, as I will suggest, was based not only upon their own experiences of what it was to be female within their own cultural and religious environments, but upon the fissure between what masculine discourse said about their bodies and their own individuated experience of them. In this context, I will argue that their use and exploitation of the accepted paradigms of gender difference allowed for the creation of a personally delineated space for self-expression and the attainment of some kind of fulfilment in their intellectual and spiritual lives. It is also true to say that any study of female interiority or subjectivity from any literary period cannot ignore the influence of post-Freudian interrogations of patriarchal thinking promulgated by some of the contemporary feminist theorists who have emerged during the last few decades. In particular, theorists such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, whose theories of the female body have had much to offer as an interpretive lens through which to examine the writing of medieval women, can provide a convenient point of departure for any investigation into how the ‘feminine’ operates in this context. Although there are self-evident problems connected with ahistoricity, anachronicity and a tendency towards an essentialist view of the feminine, within the application of contemporary post-Freudian psychoanalytical theory to medieval texts, theorist Michel de Certeau has been influential in demonstrating its potential as a means of investigating both literary and historical texts. Certeau has cogently illustrated the extent to which the lines of demarcation inscribed upon history by historiographers in order to structure time and memory can be seen as entirely arbitrary, and suggests that any

41

David Aers and Lynn Staley, Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics and Gender in the Late Medieval English Culture (Cambridge, 1996), p. 35.

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psychoanalytical approach to the past helps to break down these arbitrary boundaries.42 If, as psychoanalysis would assert, the past continues to exist in the present, then its relationship with the present takes the form of an ‘imbrication’, creating a cyclical palimpsest of experience which results in ‘games of masking, reversal, and ambiguity’.43 The principal questions arising from these different ways of revisiting the past are, of course, whether or not they are compatible and whether or not they can be reconciled. If, like Certeau, we accept that both history and psychoanalysis are strategies used to quantify and structure time and memory, then both approaches ultimately deal with the same problems and can be of assistance to each other. Both approaches, too, concern themselves with the analysis of the conditions which generate human behaviour and seek to create a discourse to enable us to appreciate how our own present is conditioned by our collective past. To embrace the possibilities contained within a psycho-analytical approach to the history of women, for example, is to disrupt the tendency of historical surveys to represent those women on the margins as being, in the words of Lyndal Roper, nothing but ‘colourful psychic primitives from a carnival world’.44 Traditional approaches to Margery Kempe, of course, have rendered her exactly that, but more psycho-analytically aware examinations have been able to create a deeper understanding of the responses of medieval women such as Margery Kempe to their own lived experiences and the materiality of their own bodies, serving also to uncover traces of their own repressed drives as gendered and sexed human beings. Roper has added further to this debate by arguing that we neglect the psychic realms of historical subjects ‘at our peril’.45 She is also emphatic that bodies ‘have materiality and this must have its place in history’.46 Similarly, in his discussion of the relationship between bodies and selfhood in early modern England, Michael Schoenfeldt also disputes the idea of radically different experiences of the body between past and present subjects. Instead, whilst acknowledging that discursive terminology and interpretations of corporeality differ widely over the course of time, nevertheless he is driven to conclude: ‘Bodies have changed little through history, even though the theories of their operations vary enormously across time and culture. We are all born, we eat, we defecate, we desire, and we die.’47 42

43 44 45 46 47

Michel de Certeau, ‘Psychoanalysis and Its History’, in Heterologies: Discourse of the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minnesota, 1986), pp. 3–17. For the application of the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of the Unheimliche to the writing of Julian of Norwich, see Nancy Coiner, ‘The “homely” and the Heimliche: The Hidden, Doubled Self in Julian of Norwich’s Showings’, Exemplaria 5, 2 (1993), pp. 305–23. Certeau, Heterologies, p. 4. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, p. 12. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, p. 21. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, p. 21. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, p. 6.

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Roper too acknowledges the universality of such corporeal phenomena, adding to the list the capacity to experience pain and illness, feel joy or religious ecstasy, sorrow, grief, loss, longing. All of these experiences are written onto the body and are carried forward into the future as both corporeal and psychic texts which, to echo Roper, ‘are more than discourse’.48 In the context of the findings of this present volume, the female-specific experiences of menstruation, gestation, giving birth, breast-feeding are also capable of being transformed into text which is written upon bodies (both male and female, human and divine) and used as a language to validate the equal worth of the feminine. So, we see Margery Kempe’s relinquished maternity re-emerge in bodily expressions of piety which reinvoke the pains of childbirth and simultaneously inscribe the imprint of Marian maternity and holy virginity upon her body. Similarly, the text of Julian’s bodily suffering during which she ‘gives birth’ to her own mystical experience is carried forward on and in her body and hermeneutically reiterated in the body of her written text, culminating in a fully realised depiction of God as divine mother. When speaking of ‘femininity’ or alluding to some kind of ‘female specificity’ in the context of medieval women, however, the danger of slipping into a blindly essentialist mindset is always a very real one. Indeed, as Kathleen Biddick has demonstrated in her critique of Bynum’s recent work, unless the notion of gender is interrogated in a highly nuanced way, modern scholarship can fall prey to simply reinforcing those very binaries which it seeks to break down. The danger is further compounded by the adoption of theories which advocate gender difference, such as those of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, who arguably themselves run perilously close to essentialising the female experience as an ontological given, forced to operate within patriarchal structures of thought. Yet, as Diana Fuss has eloquently argued, the fear of essentialism has brought about an alarming impasse in feminist criticism which has to be overcome if progress on this front is to continue.49 Fuss proceeds to demonstrate that, far from being entirely counter to a constructionist approach to gender such as that posited by Judith Butler (which I examine below), essentialism is fundamental to all belief systems connected with gender difference. According to Fuss, ‘it is difficult to see how constructionism can be constructionism without a fundamental dependency upon essentialism’.50 Indeed, she goes further to assert that constructionism merely operates as a more sophisticated form of essentialism and the line of division is by no means as solid and unassailable as advocates on both sides of the debate would have us believe. The unfixed area between the two positions, therefore, can offer up possibilities which prove entirely suitable for this present study. As Fuss suggests, the

48 49 50

Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, p. 21. Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York and London, 1989). Fuss, Essentially Speaking, p. 4.

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project of interrogating essence does not mean necessarily dismissing it out of hand; indeed, the deployment of what she terms a ‘tactical essentialism’ can form a potentially fruitful interrogative tool for the study of medieval women, particularly those writers who forged for themselves some kind of middle ground within highly essentialised dogmatic discursive regimes. What is important, however, is that essentialist discourse should not be deployed for purposes of dogma or ideological domination as is the case under patriarchy, but as a disruptive interventionist strategy which, by throwing some light on how that hegemony operates, can point towards how its prescription may be escaped, evaded or displaced. For this reason, in the words of Fuss, ‘it is a risk worth taking’.51 So Margery Kempe’s identification of herself as ‘not lettryd (in) witte & wisdom’ (128) and ‘vnstable’ (2) and Julian’s self-representation as ‘woman, leued, febille, & freylle’ and ‘wrecche’ (ST, 48), for example, demonstrate the same kind of risk-taking as Fuss is advocating. By making use of exactly the type of terminology used to repress women but in a context of proactivity, the hollowness of the hegemony is revealed for what it is – an ideological construct which can be proved erroneous and misinformed. In this way, both Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich push the boundaries of an essentialist notion of femininity discursively to the limit and bring about a breach which causes rigid gender categories to collapse. So, an equally tactical critical position within the moving terrain between the two polarities could perhaps offer a means of preventing those polarities from solidifying and occluding the fluid treatment of gender within the texts under examination. Thus I have found it expedient to draw selectively and intermittently upon some of the theories of Irigaray and Kristeva in my appraisal of the re-emergence of body and voice within the writing of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich but have also turned to more constructionist approaches in order to extend the possibilities, as I will demonstrate. Luce Irigaray is probably best known for her advocacy of sexual difference and she is highly critical of the Freudian/Lacanian employment of the one model of humanity – paradigmatically male – by which all others are defined. Irigaray considers it remarkable that such theories continue to reflect the Aristotelean concept of the ‘one-sex’ model to which I have already alluded. She recognises – and here there are obvious parallels with Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich – that the female body needs to be reconceived and represented in a way which presents it in terms of positive agency in what she regards as its very specificity rather than as merely constituting a lack of maleness. In her essay, ‘This Sex which is Not One’, from the volume of the same title,52 Irigaray attempts to posit another way of representing

51 52

Fuss, Essentially Speaking, p. 32. Luce Irigaray, This Sex which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Cornell, 1985), pp. 23–33. Other useful works which theorise the relationship between gender, language and religious experience are Luce Irigaray, ‘La Mystèrique’, in Speculum of the Other

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woman in terms of the multiple nature of female pleasure and the female sexual organs (‘two lips’) rather than her being perceived as a lack within the economy of the phallus. Such an identification serves to redefine woman in terms of agency rather than passivity, in the same way as the female mystics had done six centuries earlier in their use of a discourse of the female body in order to deconstruct traditional male religious discourse and offer in its place a language based on the specific, though not universal, bodily experiences which tended to be female-focused: menstruation, virginity, sexual penetration, pregnancy, childbirth and prophetic utterance. These ‘female’ experiences of the body, of course, are not, nor ever have been common to all women and in no sense can they be regarded as paradigmatic of a pre-existent ‘female condition’. They were and still are, however, closely associated with constructions of the feminine under patriarchy and, as Irigaray suggests elsewhere, came to constitute much of the language used to relay the mystical experience. In her essay on female mysticism entitled ‘La Mystèrique’,53 Irigaray constructs her theory of female agency both through and within that same language in an attempt to emulate the textual practices of the women about whom she is writing. In so doing, it can be said that she is indeed ‘taking the risk’ and occupying the very grey area between constructionist and essentialist argument which we have seen Fuss advocating. Like those writers too, Irigaray attempts a prose which aims to liberate herself from the restrictions of patriarchal structures and discourse by drawing upon her own definition of a discursive female body rather than remaining within the confines of masculinist rhetoric which would aim to contain it. In this way, just as is the case with Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, Irigaray’s writing both promotes and constitutes its own agency: And if ‘God’ who has thus re-proved the fact of her [the mystic’s] nonvalue, still loves her, this means that she exists all the same, beyond what anyone may think of her. It means that love conquers everything that has already been said. And that one man, at least, has understood her so well that he died in the most awful suffering. That most female of men, the Son. And she never ceases to look upon his nakedness, open for all to see, upon the gashes in his virgin flesh, at the wounds from the nails that pierce his body as he hangs there, in his passion and abandonment. And she is overwhelmed with love of him/herself. In his crucifixion he opens up a path of redemption to her in her fallen state.54

53 54

Woman, trans. G. C. Gill (Ithaca, New York, 1985), pp. 191–202; Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New French Feminisms (Massachusetts, 1980), pp. 245–64; Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez (New York, 1982). In addition, for an overview of the works of these writers, see Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London, 1988), pp. 107–73. Irigaray, ‘La Mystèrique’. Irigaray, ‘La Mystèrique’, pp. 199–200.

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Irigarayan theory then, in its recognition of the alternative hermeneutics of a reconfigured, reconstructed female body, is rich in possibilities for the modern reader to arrive at a deeper understanding of the creation of the female spaces and agency upon which the writing of female mystics such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich are predicated. Similarly, an Irigarayan lens offers an illuminating means for understanding the rich and subversive possibilities within the texts under consideration in this book. Of similar value have been some of the observations made by Irigaray’s contemporary, Julia Kristeva, who is perhaps best known for her work on the semiotics of language and for her call for the recovery of the maternal body within language. Her work on motherhood and the preimaginary symbiosis of mother and child which forms a crucial aspect of her theory of the semiotic is particularly useful as a lens through which to reread texts in which motherhood provides one of the central discourses. For Kristeva, maternity at its early gestative stage, like Irigaray’s female auto-eroticism, is one of the ‘unsymbolised instinctual drives’ and is therefore a phenomenon which ‘eludes social intercourse’.55 According to Kristeva, this process of ‘becoming’ has been misrepresented by phallocratic discourses of science and Christian theology which have tended to reify the mother as the embodiment of the phenomenon taking place within her. Thus, Kristeva argues, maternity is the location of a fissure in the symbolic order because the unborn child lies ultimately out of reach of the law of the father which focuses instead upon the gestative process’s embodiment – the mother. Ultimately it is entirely unable to impose its order upon the invisible process of gestation itself56 which becomes symbolic of an order which is prediscursive and extra-linguistic, and escapes the hegemony of patriarchal law. Such a theory, therefore, can prove particularly useful in an examination of Julian of Norwich’s own use of motherhood in her texts, employed as it is by the author to explicate the essentially inexplicable mystical experience. Although by no means the first writer to make use of this discourse, as I will demonstrate in Chapter 2, Julian takes it way beyond its traditional boundaries. Recognising its potential for the provision of a hermeneutic which simultaneously invokes and yet ultimately evades phallogocentric logic, like Kristeva, Julian of Norwich draws upon maternity as image, hermeneutic and linguistic tool which also serves to validate a widespread female bodily experience which, even vicariously, tended to lay outside the realm of the male participation in the Middle Ages. In the theological context – a context which Kristeva identifies as part of the 55

56

Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (Oxford, 1980), p. 238. See also Luce Irigaray’s interview with Hélène Rouche, an expert on placental biology, ‘On the Maternal Order’, in Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York and London, 1993), pp. 37–44. These theories of maternity are primarily taken from Kristeva’s essays entitled ‘Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini’, in Desire in Language, pp. 237–70 and ‘Stabat Mater’, in Toril Moi (ed.), A Kristeva Reader (New York, 1986), pp. 160–86.

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male symbolic and subject to the law of the father, and within which, of course, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe were necessarily operating – Julian adopts as paradigmatically feminine the discourses of motherhood amongst others and inserts them into the heart of the religious experience by inscribing them upon a masculine deity. In so doing, she disrupts the law of the father and makes way for the feminine to assert its equal validity as part of the redemptive process. Thus, in the words of Roland Barthes writing about Kristeva (but an assessment equally as applicable to Julian of Norwich): ‘Julia Kristeva changes the place of things. She always destroys the latest preconception, the one we thought we could be comforted by, the one of which we could be proud . . . she subverts authority.’57 Perhaps more consistently useful to my study, however, have been some of the constructionist gender theories of Judith Butler, in particular her refutation of the existence of fixed gender identity and her establishment of gender as a series of bodily ‘performances’ rather than a ‘natural’ phenomenon or ‘essence’ which cannot be altered in any real sense.58 Along with other writers, Butler re-examines the Irigarayan and Kristevan analyses of gender, offering a critique which reveals both their inherent strengths and their limitations, some of which I have identified above. Butler is led to conclude that gender identity is nothing more than a series of ‘acts, gestures, and desires’ which appear to be a permanent and ontological reality, but which, in fact, constitute nothing more than ‘fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means’.59 For Butler, gender is not ‘a set of free-floating attributes’ but is acutally ‘performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence’.60 Such a theory of performativity is particularly helpful to any study of Margery Kempe, as I have suggested, with her dramatic and gendered public performances of piety which draw heavily on contemporary notions of the feminine, and her uncompromisingly high-profile enactment of imitatio Mariae. Indeed, it provides a clarifying lens through which to examine the more premeditated and subversive aspects of her performances and the concomitant creation of agency. By means of a delineation of her own dramatic spaces of performance, Margery Kempe challenges contemporary notions of appropriate gender behaviour, pushes out the boundaries of societal demarcation and extends its limits: Margery Kempe teaches and preaches to the people; Margery Kempe travels often unaccompanied, albeit sometimes reluctantly; Margery Kempe takes on the ecclesiastics in their own male-defined and male-dominated 57 58

59 60

Roland Barthes, ‘L’Étrangère’, La Quinzaine Littéraire 94, p. 19, as translated and quoted by Toril Moi in Sexual/Textual Politics (London and New York, 1985), p. 150. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York and London, 1990). See also Butler’s development of much of this theory in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London, 1997). Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 136. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 24.

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spaces; Margery Kempe admonishes the archbishop of Canterbury and she creates her own authority to do so.61 All this she does in the guise of holy woman who is also a wife and mother from the higher social echelons of fifteenth-century Bishop’s Lynn – a status which also undoubtedly helps her to challenge the boundaries of acceptable female behaviour and interrogate the ‘regulatory practices’ themselves. Quite simply, her awareness of the potential agency within performances of gender and gendered performances allows her to ‘get away with it’. It is such a subversion of the ‘rules’ (or, again, the ‘law of the father’) which Irigaray has also attempted in her own strategic disruption of male discourse, and which Butler would recognise as the subversion of a gendered identity by means of a simultaneous performance of the ‘feminine’ whilst appropriating the type of authority normally reserved for the male. Along with these contemporary theorists, therefore, both Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich illustrate how the protected position of the masculine is ultimately appropriable from within.

Reception and Response: An Overview It was, of course, these same hegemonic discourses, so ripe for disruption by contemporary feminist theorists, which coloured the reception of the unique manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe following its discovery in the library of Colonel William Butler-Bowdon in 1934. Until its re-emergence, the writing of Margery Kempe had only been extant in two printed editions, forming what was ostensibly an instructional handbook for devotional purposes. Many of the extracts contained in the first printed version by Wynkyn de Worde in 1501 were taken out of context, rearranged, merged, or their chronological order altered and the narrative aspects of the text omitted almost entirely.62 As a consequence, in this version the uncompromising and insistent voice of Margery Kempe is almost entirely silenced. There is no evidence of her habitual and incontinent weeping and wailing, her highly visual and troublesome presence or her suffering at the hands of her contemporaries, nor is there any autobiographical content whatsoever.63 This highly redacted version of the Book was later anthologised by Henry Pepwell in 1521,

61 62

63

Again, for a discussion of Margery Kempe’s usurpation of space for religious performance in the context of pilgrimage, see Morrison, Women Pilgrims, pp. 128–41. An edition of this redacted version of the text appears in Meech and Allen, The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 353–7. See also Introduction, pp. xlvi–xlviii, for a discussion of its compilation. For an examination of the possible reasons for the eradicating of Margery’s voice in this text see my forthcoming essay, ‘ “Closyd in a hows of ston”: Anchoritic Discourse and The Book of Margery Kempe’, in Liz Herbert McAvoy and Mari Hughes-Edwards (eds), Intersections of Gender and Enclosure: Anchorites, Wombs and Tombs (Cardiff, forthcoming 2004).

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being included with such venerable company as Hilton’s Song of Angels and The Divers Doctrines of Saint Katherin of Seenes. It is this slightly later version which incorporated the designation of ‘ancres’ after Margery Kempe’s name: ‘Here endeth a shorte treatyse of a deuoute ancres called Margerye kempe of Lynne’ (357, n. 11), and until the discovery of the Butler-Bowdon manuscript (known also as the Salthouse manuscript after the name of the scribe, Salthows, who signed it),64 it was presumed that Margery Kempe had been an anchoress and, in the words of one early twentieth-century critic, ‘a worthy precursor of that other great woman mystic of East Anglia: Juliana of Norwich’.65 Such a categorising of Margery Kempe was thus instigated within eighty or so years of her death and served until the twentieth century to conveniently contain what we now fully recognise as a highly uncontainable persona. In this context, it was with much scholarly disappointment that the discovery of the Salthouse manuscript was greeted, revealing as it did a very different kind of woman from the ‘deuoute ancres’ it had formerly been presumed Margery was, and one who could no longer be placed conveniently inside the same ‘box’ as Julian of Norwich. More recent criticism has therefore tended to concentrate on what has been perceived as the radical differences between these two women, and in most comparisons Margery Kempe has seemed destined to be reduced to a position of inferiority. For example, although responding forcefully to her highly individual and visible presence, commentators such as David Knowles, Wolfgang Riehle, Ute Stargardt, Edmund Colledge and James Walsh have displayed traditional anti-feminist prejudices in their readings of Kempe’s behaviour, not least because of their ambivalence towards her eccentric body-language and noisy mode of self-expression.66 These commentators have inadvertently betrayed the perennial preferences within patriarchal thinking for the quiet, contemplative, recessive and physically unchallenging but spiritually informed ‘wise woman’ to the loud, vociferous, physically uncompromising and highly visible (and therefore sexualised) female, as epitomised by Margery Kempe. In comparison, Julian has been represented as quietly introspective, enclosed and controlled, in spite of the insistently radical voices emerging from her texts. More recent feminist scholarship such as that practised by Karma Lochrie, 64 65 66

See The Book of Margery Kempe, Introduction, p. xxiii, for an analysis of the scribe and his handwriting. Edmund G. Gardner, The Cell of Self-Knowledge (London, 1925), Introduction, pp. xx–xxi. See David Knowles, The English Mystic Tradition (London, 1961): ‘[Neither] in depth of perception or wisdom of spiritual doctrine, nor as a personality can she challenge comparison with Julian of Norwich’, p. 139. See also Wolfgang Riehle, Middle English Mystics (London, 1981), pp. 27– 31, 96, 102–3, 112 and 116; Robert K. Stone, Middle English Prose Style (The Hague and Paris, 1970), pp. 155–6; T. W Coleman, English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century (Westport, 1971), p. 175; Ute Stargardt, ‘The Beguines of Belguim, the Dominican Nuns of Germany, and Margery Kempe’, in J. Heffernan (ed.), The Popular Literature of Medieval England (Knoxville, 1985), pp. 277–313; Edmund College and James Walsh (eds), A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, 2 vols (Toronto, 1978), p. 38.

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Lynn Staley, Hope Phyllis Weissman, Kathy Lavezzo, Sarah Beckwith, Clarissa Atkinson, Diane Watt, Rosalynn Voaden, Sarah Salih and others has sought to rescue Kempe from dismissal as a mere ‘hysteric’, emphasising instead the positive and ultimately expedient uses to which she puts her bodily and verbal performances, and the means by which they enable her to transgress the boundaries laid down for her by the society in which she is operating.67 I am therefore much endebted to these scholars for their attempts to redeem Margery Kempe from accusations of inadequacy and aberrance, and particularly for their provision of a forum from which her worth as a writer, as a mystic and as a wholly exceptional woman can be reappraised in a less prejudiced way. Until very recent times, criticism of Julian had tended to be from a theological perspective, predicated on the firm belief that she had been writing as a Benedictine nun.68 It was for her contribution to modern theological insight that she was best known, the literary merit of her work being a secondary consideration. However, in more recent times, contemporary critical opinion has deemed it far more likely that Julian was living the life of a pious laywoman before her anchoritic enclosure which probably took place at some stage during the 1390s.69 Benedicta Ward, however, has gone further and in a compelling and persuasively argued essay has postulated Julian’s having been both a wife and a mother prior to anchoritic enclosure, which may well

67

68

69

Lochrie, Translations; Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (Pennsylvania, 1984); Hope Phyllis Weissman, ‘Margery Kempe in Jerusalem: Hysterica Compassio in the Late Middle Ages’, in Mary Carruthers and Elizabeth Kirk (eds), Acts of Interpretation: The Text in Its Contexts 700–1600 (Oklahoma, 1982), pp. 201–17; Kathy Lavezzo, ‘Sobs and Sighs between Women: The Homoerotics of Compassion’, in Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (eds), Premodern Sexualities (New York and London, 1996), pp. 175–98; Sarah Beckwith, ‘A Very Material Mysticism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe’, in David Aers (ed.), Community, Gender and Identity: English Writing 1360–1430 (London, 1988), pp. 34–57; Clarissa Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and World of Margery Kempe (New York, 1983); Diane Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997); Rosalynn Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of Late-Medieval Women Visionaries (York, 1999); Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 2001). For a variety of approaches to Margery Kempe, see McEntire, Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays. See, for example, Colledge and Walsh (eds), Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showings, vol. 1, Introduction, p. 43. See also Caroline Spurgeon, Mysticism in English Literature (Cambridge, 1913), who asserts that Julian was ‘almost certainly a Benedictine nun’, p. 120. Amongst the critics who now concur with this view are David Knowles, The English Mystical Tradition (London, 1961); Clifton Walters (ed.), Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love (Harmondsworth, 1966); Ritamary Bradley, ‘Julian of Norwich: Writer and Mystic’, in Paul Szarmach (ed.), An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe (Albany, 1984), pp. 195–216; Frances Beer, Women and the Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992); Marion Glasscoe, English Medieval Mystics: Games of Faith (London, 1993); Nicholas Watson, ‘The Composition of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, Speculum 68 (1993), pp. 637–83; Alexandra Barratt in Women’s Writing in Middle English (London, 1992).

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have taken place upon widowhood.70 Whilst Glasscoe’s reaction to this speculation considers it ‘not very fruitful’,71 Alexandra Barratt is more amenable to the suggestion and whilst she concurs that the conjecture has to date been ultimately unprovable, nevertheless her own work on Julian’s evident familiarity with medical and gynaecological tracts has certainly added fuel and credibility to this intriguing idea.72 This present book, however, is based upon accepting that Julian was probably a pious laywoman prior to enclosure, which necessarily narrows the arbitrary gulf set up between herself and Margery Kempe by early commentators and is substantiated by the aspects of her writing on which this particular study concentrates. In this context, the theological import of Julian’s writing will not be of a major concern – that is best left to the theologians themselves. What it does seek to illustrate, however, is how Julian as a simultaneously marginalised and yet centrally important member of society also relied upon aspects of female bodily experience to create a language in which to express her remarkable insights, and that her own attitudes towards gender were as flexible, as radical and utilitarian as were those of her contemporary, Margery Kempe. In Julian’s extensive use of the female body as hermeneutic tool for the explication of her unique experience of God we find yet another example of a woman writer using a malleable and manoeuvrable definition of gender in order to appropriate from within the traditionally masculine space of public utterance and written text. To that end we see Julian pushing out the boundaries not only of gender identity (as in her Motherhood of God narrative), but also those which lie between orthodox and heterodox ideologies within late medieval society. Equally transformative to studies of Julian of Norwich has been the close attention paid to her writing in recent years by Nicholas Watson and his radical reassessment of the dates of composition of both texts.73 His research has brought about a consensus that, far from being a writer operating largely during the last three decades of the fourteenth century, Julian indeed must now be regarded as an early fifteenth-century writer operating during a time of proscription against religious writing in the vernacular, and as a woman in her mature years, rather than in her early thirties as was generally considered to be the case. Equally pertinent to my own work, and probably one of the most helpful of concise appraisals of medieval women writers to date, is Watson’s suggestion that women writers of the Middle Ages, although inheritors of misogynistic gender stereotyping, responded by neither accepting 70 71 72

73

Benedicta Ward, ‘Julian the Solitary’, in Ken Leech and Benedicta Ward (eds), Julian the Solitary (Oxford, 1988), pp. 11–35. Glasscoe, Games of Faith, p. 24. See, in particular, Alexandra Barratt, ‘ “In the Lowest Part of Our Need”: Julian and Medieval Gynecological Writing’, in Sandra McEntire (ed.), Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays (New York and London, 1998), pp. 240–56. Watson, ‘Composition’.

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nor rejecting these cultural attitudes. Instead, he argues, they tended to identify with these attitudes and augment them ‘to the point where their authorised meaning undergoes basic shifts’.74 Watson has also pointed out that the tradition within which Julian was writing was one which associated devotion to the manhood of Christ with women, a tradition which she proceeds to fully exploit in her writing. Watson bases his argument upon a passage in the Short Text where the author documents her reluctance to relinquish her gaze upon Christ hanging on the crucifix in favour of beholding God in his heaven (ST, 55). In preferring devotion to the Son to contemplation of the Godhead, according to Watson Julian ‘accepts the social models which define proper female activity’ but does so in a way which fundamentally shifts or inverts those models ‘by resisting the passivity and low prestige’ with which they are associated in traditional socio-religious discourse.75 Such simultaneous acceptance of social attitudes towards themselves as women and their conscious exploitation of the same prejudices was what enabled both Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich again to create an alternative and highly individual space out of the point of slippage between these two positions from which they could operate as writers and holy women and from which their voices could be heard. In this context, I am also highly endebted to the ground-breaking work of Karma Lochrie whose identification of the ‘fissured flesh’ of the female mystic and its provision of an Irigarayan ‘blind-spot’ in the eyes of patriarchy has led to a reading of the writing of these women as also ‘fissured’.76 Thus she has provided a framework for a reappraisal of the writings of the female mystics generally – and Margery Kempe in particular – as contemporaneously traditional and assimilative, radical and subversive, essentialist and constructionist. Lochrie has also illustrated that much of the difficulty that scholars have had in coming to terms with these women has been because of the distracting inclusion of the female body at the forefront of their texts, especially Margery Kempe’s Book. My own study would concur with Lochrie in that it is the insistent presence of the female body in these texts which lends them their authority and their alternative mystical access to what they perceive as divine truth. However, I would add to Lochrie’s thesis by pointing out that it is the slippage which emerges at the point of intersection between what women were told about their own bodily experiences and their own intimate experience of them which provides the main point of departure for their writing. It is at this point of slippage that the text of the female mystic becomes fully operational, and it is the constitution and effects of this resultant lacuna with which this book will therefore be primarily concerned.

74 75 76

Nicholas Watson, ‘ “Yf wommen be double naturelly”: Remaking “Woman” in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, Exemplaria 8, 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 1–34. Watson, ‘Remaking “Woman” ’, p. 7. Lochrie, Translations.

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Following on from the work of these critical positions, this book therefore aims to develop, refocus and indeed challenge many of the accepted attitudes towards Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich and their texts and add to the ongoing debate about their agency. It will not, however, comprise a comparative analysis. The tendency of commentators to engage in comparative analyses of these two writers, as I have suggested, has usually left Margery wanting as the hysterical, hyperbolic, noisy and undignified renegade who fails to match up to the wisdom of the peaceful, serene woman of intellect and dignity which Julian is generally perceived to be.77 My own placing of Margery Kempe alongside Julian of Norwich is primarily one of convenience, therefore, in that they emerged from the same geographical and socioreligious specificity of mercantile East Anglia, and were part of the same chronology within the movement towards religious writing in the vernacular and a female-identified desire for imitatio Christi. More pertinently, however (and in contrast to the ubiquitous flowering of female mysticism experienced in continental Europe during the high Middle Ages), they were the first female visionaries of English provenance to leave their mark on late medieval religious thinking since Christina of Markyate in the eleventh century and were operating in the context of a very late and sudden flowering of mysticism in England in the early fourteenth century which included the Cloud author, Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton. Another reason, therefore, for examining these writers alongside each other is that to my knowledge no study of any depth has yet been completed which examines the commonalities within the language and imagery of their writing in spite of the material differences in the mode of production of the texts of both women. Another purpose of this book is therefore to place these two women writers alongside each other in a position of parity in order to illustrate how their generically different texts nevertheless reflect the experiences of their originators as women living within a specific socio-religious framework of belief systems and as culturally gendered beings within that structure. In addition, and in keeping with a prevalent trend in contemporary criticism, I will be referring to both writers by their first names throughout, since this will serve also to maintain some parity and balance in the face of a lack of information about Julian of Norwich’s surname. Moreover, as Sarah Salih has recognised in her own recent study of The Book of Margery Kempe which appears in her book, Versions of Virginity,78 these texts invite a closeness and familiarity between author and reader which justifies such a choice of nomenclature. Indeed, in both cases, the distinction between author and narrative voice is 77

78

Again, see Knowles, The English Mystic Tradition, p. 146: ‘There existed quite clearly, and from the beginning of her adult life, a large hysterical element in Margery’s personality.’ See also Robert K. Stone, Middle English Prose Style (The Hague and Paris, 1970), pp. 155–6; Coleman, English Mystics, p. 175; Riehle, Middle English Mystics, pp. 27–31, p. 96, pp. 102–3, p. 112, p. 116 for similar sentiments. Salih, Versions of Virginity, p. 173.

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actually a distinction between ‘the writing and written selves of autobiography’79 and the line of demarcation is therefore blurred. Another advantage of such an approach is that by placing them alongside each other as equal and virtually unique representatives of a highly rich and varied mystical tradition which was emerging in England, is to maximise on the potential of the female body to render up discourses which can be employed to explicate the unfathomability of the mystical experience. Similarly, a resistance to comparison will facilitate a greater understanding of the potential of that body to provide a means towards female empowerment and its articulation, as demonstrated by both writers in their own independent attempts to authorise their texts. Again in the words of Roper, ‘since we are our bodies (more so than we like to admit), bodily symbolism belongs to the deepest religious tools we have. It can convey what we find impossible to put into words’.80 For purposes of my analysis and in an attempt to avoid the pitfalls of comparative studies, the book will adhere to a tripartite structure, each section of which focuses on a particular aspect of widespread, if not universal, female experience which was subject to paradoxical and therefore problematic definition in the Middle Ages: motherhood, female sexuality and the public female voice. Each of these three sections is further divided into two chapters, the first of which examines the writing of Margery Kempe, the second of which looks at Julian of Norwich. In this way I aim to prioritise theme over writer and create an interwoven and yet parallel study of the ways in which both writers made use of the discourses and imagery under examination, and in the longer term draw some conclusions about the potential of the female body to provide an effective hermeneutic for women writers and female mystics in particular. These three main areas upon which I have chosen to concentrate, of course, are by no means all that exist within these texts; they do, however, reflect the most insistent of gynaecentric discourses present. Moreover, they are also discourses which seem always to have occupied a space at the forefront human consciousness re-emerging throughout world literature in such figures as the good or bad mother, the harlot, the wise woman or her antithesis – the witch. All three figures too have a history of reification and have been worshipped and deified transtemporally and transculturally in a multiplicity of ways within pre- and post-Christian religious systems.81 Within more 79 80 81

Salih, Versions of Virginity, p. 171. Roper, Oedipus and the Devil, p. 22. For an interesting study of the religions which focused on a Mother Goddess figure see Merlin Stone, The Paradise Papers (London, 1976). For the worship of the Goddess in ancient Europe, see Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe: Myths and Cult Images (London, 1982) and The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization (San Francisco, 1989). For an account of the transformation and assimilation of the Goddess by western Christianity, see Pamela Berger, The Goddess Obscured: Transformations of the Grain Protectress from Goddess to Saint (Hale, 1988). For a detailed overview of the process whereby the goddess worship became suppressed and transformed under patriarchy, see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford, 1986).

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patriarchal systems, of course, they continued to occupy a position at the forefront of consciousness, but gradually became subject to proscription and control. This is particularly well represented in western mythological and Christian systems by the transformation of the transcendent goddess into the figure of transgressive Eve, in whom the once-honoured concepts of motherhood, sexuality and desire for knowledge become problematised – demonised even – as the expression of human sinfulness and abjection. I will therefore suggest that, despite their being scapegoated by traditional patriarchal thinking, these areas of experience which were identifiably female were not always conceived as negative by the women themselves. Even whilst appearing to conform to social paradigms, both Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich demonstrate that it was also possible for a woman to define her own notion of femaleness and reassess (and cause others to reassess) the appropriateness of her own behaviour, both as an individual and as part of a corporate Christian body. Finally, by examining the ways in which both writers make use of these multilayered categories of women and their multiple possibilities in their texts, it is possible to extrapolate some conclusions about the extent to which they are successful in resolving the tension between society’s expectations of them as products of the male imagination, and their own lived experiences as women and as writers. Not only, therefore, is this an examination of the ways in which two women writers insist upon the importance of the female as part of the human condition, it is a study of how they reconstruct the female body in their own image and imbue it with lasting authority. Ultimately then, it is an examination of their redemption of Eve.

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1 Motherhood and Margery Kempe

The history of medieval women, then, is in part a history of the constraints of economic disadvantage, familial duty, and prescribed social roles. But it is also in part a history of women’s agency within and against these constraints.1

Writing these words in the context of her investigation into the lives of medieval women, Judith Bennett could indeed have been referring specifically to Margery Kempe,2 whose book has been ploughed endlessly as a rich source of information for historians, theologians, literary critics and even psychologists since the rediscovery of the only extant manuscript in 1934. Bennett’s findings have suggested that medieval women – of whom Margery Kempe is perhaps one of the best documented – were frequently able to search out and appropriate a myriad of ways of functioning more comfortably within a society which imposed the ‘pressures of patriarchal oppression’ upon them.3 Concurring with Bynum on this issue, Bennett asserts that women’s lives were subject to a central paradox which arose out of contrary expectations of them imposed by society and the Church. According to Bennett, however, such a paradox ‘both shaped the lives of medieval women and allowed medieval women themselves to shape, to some extent, the content of their own experiences’.4 Bennett’s analysis here may be productively considered in conjunction with the theoretical standpoint of contemporary gender theorist, Judith Butler, who, in her radical critique of the notion of fixed gender identity, promotes the concept of gender as ‘performative’,5 that is to say, it constitutes a series of performed

1 2

3 4 5

Judith M. Bennett, Elizabeth A. Clark, Jean, F. O’Barr, B. Anne Vilen and Sarah WestphalWihl (eds), Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages (Chicago and London, 1989), p. 6. Elsewhere, Bennett refers to Margery Kempe’s religious conversion as ‘a bold and individualistic step’ which Margery takes in order to regain some of the status lost to her during her marriage (Judith M. Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside: Gender and Household in Brigstock before the Plague (Oxford and New York, 1989), p. 188). Bennett et al., Sisters and Workers, p. 6. Bennett et al., Sisters and Workers, pp. 10–11. On this see Butler, Gender Trouble, especially pp. 24–5, 33, 115 and 134–41. Butler’s theory of the performativity of gender and injurious language is something which she develops further in a later volume: Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London, 1997).

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acts or enactments which, although suggestive of a gendered ‘essence’ or ‘core’, are nevertheless no more than mere inscription upon the surface of the body: [A]cts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.6

Such an approach to gender can prove most useful for helping us to arrive at an understanding of some of the ways in which medieval women such as Margery Kempe were able to negotiate with their bodies the restrictive hegemony of gendered identity and, through redefinition and recontextualised perfomances of that identity, manoeuvre themselves into a position which offered them a little more freedom for self-expression.7 Of course, such a claim for Margery Kempe would suggest considerable agency on her part, both in her life and in her writing, something about which commentators so far have failed to agree.8 David Hirsch, for example, has argued that Margery’s book was not simply dictated by her, but that the second scribe took on a major authorial role in the work’s creation, thus rendering the Book an effort of major collaboration.9 Hirsch, however, does also concur that ‘if the scribe did influence the language, he did not control it’.10 David Aers, on the other hand, has questioned the plausibility – even the possibility – of such female empowerment within late medieval culture, speculating that a use of the feminine – and the maternal in particular – in women’s writing, far from being subversive, merely served to echo and perpetuate what he terms a ‘divinization of maternity as the essence of “woman” ’.11 For Aers, women such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich were only ever operating within ‘specific discursive regimes with specific technologies of power’,12 in themselves hegemonic influences which they were wholly unable to escape. Whilst acknowledging the 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

Bulter, Gender Trouble, p. 136. For a useful examination of Margery’s body as the site of performance see Denis Renevey, ‘Margery’s Performing Body: The Translation of Late Medieval Discursive Religious Practices’, in Denis Renevey and Christiania Whitehead (eds), Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England (Cardiff, 2000), pp. 197–216. The case for Margery’s literary autonomy will be assessed fully in Chapter 5. John C. Hirsch, ‘Author and Scribe in The Book of Margery Kempe’, Medium Aevum 44 (1975), pp. 245–50. John C. Hirsch, The Revelations of Margery Kempe, Medieval and Renaissance Authors 10 (Leiden, New York, Copenhagen, Cologne, 1988), p. 43. David Aers, ‘The Humanity of Christ: Reflections on Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, in Aers and Staley, The Powers of the Holy, pp. 77–104 (p. 35). Aers and Staley, Powers of the Holy, p. 35.

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socio-cultural limitations imposed upon both men and women by these discursive regimes, nevertheless cultural discourses concerning the female body and the feminine may well have been received differently by women (who were in possession of that body) from men (for whom it remained a representation of ‘otherness’). If the female body, albeit one constructed by cultural narratives and mediated by systems of patriarchal power, was what was ‘known’ and ‘experienced’ by the woman, then regardless of the origins of that construction, it could present her with an experiential ‘authority’ or ‘knowledge’ of that body which was ultimately unavailable to men. Thus, the point of slippage between what she was told and what she knew (or considered she knew) could reconstruct her body as location of contested meanings which could then be filtered and manipulated expediently by the woman herself for her own purposes. Another critic who addresses this site of contested meanings is Lynn Staley, who interprets Margery Kempe as a skilful writer who treats her protagonist, Margery, as a fictional character and in so doing promotes the Book as an acerbic social commentary.13 Whilst Staley’s approach is probably one of the more helpful to date in its examination of Margery Kempe’s text as an organised and highly conscious construction and has served to restore to its author some kind of gravitas as a writer, it also largely fails to acknowledge the fact that much of Margery’s spiritual development is clearly founded on the physical experiences of being a wife and a mother within a gender-conscious society and on the recontextualisation of those experiences to support an insistent religious calling. This chapter, therefore, will examine the extent to which Margery Kempe’s progress towards her goal of spiritual perfection – what she herself identifies as ‘þe wey of euyrlestyng lyfe’ (11) – can be traced though an analysis of the variety of ways in which she redefines and re-employs the socially prescribed roles of wife and mother, both in her documented life and in her text. It will also examine how such a redefinition serves to transform these concepts from ones which initially threaten to keep her from her calling into a form of agency, both in her life as she chooses to represent it and in her writing. In particular, it will demonstrate how Margery continually draws upon both ideological and experiential discourses of motherhood in a variety of ways, exploiting the potential they hold for female empowerment and thus facilitating her own occupation of her preferred subject positions of holy woman and spiritual mother to the whole world.

The Motherhood Hermeneutic According to contemporary critic and philosopher, Julia Kristeva, who has done much in recent years to reidentify the concept of motherhood as central

13

Staley, Dissenting Fictions.

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to human experience, maternity provides a figurative grid or matrix which facilitates an analysis of its contribution to symbolic functioning.14 For Kristeva, although motherhood remains the foundation upon which the repression of women has been built, yet maternity is also the unspoken foundation to all social and signifying relations and a ‘source of archaic jouissance’.15 Within this paradigm, she regards the shared location of mother and child during gestation as the site of a primary symbiotic relationship, a process without a subject which lies ultimately outside patriarchal influence because of that absence of subjectivity. Instead, the influence of the symbolic is imposed upon the mother herself as reification of the process going on within her. At this stage too, for Kristeva the body of mother and child are initially indistinguishable: changes, growth and development take place internally and invisibly and, for Kristeva this constitutes a site of slippage and source of the semiotic – what she terms the chora16 – which can also bring pressure to bear and ultimately disrupt the patriarchal hegemony which dictates the symbolic. Similarly, she identifies this ‘pre-Oedipal mother’ as both masculine and feminine, something which helps her to escape the trap of essentialist thinking, since in pre-Oedipality the binary opposition between masculine and feminine, male and female simply does not exist. In this way, she reinforces the power of the semiotic to render up a discourse which proceeds to disrupt traditional gender binaries. Kristeva’s analysis of motherhood in these terms, which she undertakes primarily via analysis of the figure of the Virgin Mary, remains controversial. However, the semiotic possibilities offered by the pre-Oedipal mother in particular, can be helpful for a study of the marginalised medieval woman such as Margery Kempe. Both central to her own community as daughter of an influential local politician, wife to a wealthy merchant and mother to fourteen children, and yet occupying the margins because of her refusal to operate conventionally within society’s rules for daughters, wives and mothers, like Kristeva, Margery recognises both the semiotic and the performative possibilities of occupying both these discursive sites simultaneously. Not only can motherhood be recontextualised and performed at will, both physically and rhetorically (and thus constituting a strategic invocation of the language

14

15 16

For a contemporary theoretical approach to the influence of the image of the Virgin upon socio-religious attitudes towards motherhood, see Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’. For a commentary on Kristeva’s theories of motherhood see Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney, 1989), pp. 78–85. Grosz, Sexual Subversions, p. 81. According to Kristeva, once the subject emerges into the Symbolic Order (the product of the male Imaginary), the chora will be subject to various degrees of repression and remains only within language in the form of contradiction, meaninglessness, disruption, silence and absence. See also Toril Moi, who, interpreting Kristeva’s theories, defines the chora as ‘a rhythmic pulsion . . . [which] constitutes . . . the heterogeneous disruptive dimension of language, that which can never be caught up in the closure of traditional linguistic theory’. Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 162.

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of the symbolic), but it also provides an access to the semiotic which is particularly suitable for reaching a female-focused understanding of God.17 For Margery, as I will argue, this language of the semiotic emerges as a primary agent of self-expression and empowerment, as well as providing a means of disrupting those ideologies which would keep her from her calling and modifying those which encouraged that same vocation. In spite of the importance of motherhood in this text, however, overt references to Margery’s experiences of childbirth and maternity are documented only sketchily by her – ostensibly as background material to enable us to follow her on her path from worldliness to holiness. For example, her narrative informs us of how, after a difficult first delivery, she continued to have thirteen more children before being able to negotiate a vow of chastity with her husband which would enable her to travel the road to perfection to which she felt she had been called. Far from being integral to the story, however, specific allusions to her own children, who under normal circumstances would have been expected to have taken up a great deal of her time and energy,18 are isolated and tantalising in their lack of concrete detail. Surprisingly too, in view of how frequent an activity it must have been, she chooses to tell us nothing of her continual childbearing and childrearing, and the domestic details which one would suppose to have been entirely engrossing in the life of a woman such as Margery are almost entirely absent from her text. The fact that such details are not included in her treatise suggests several things to the reader. Firstly, Margery Kempe did not deem the minutiae of the lives of her children and her rearing of them relevant to her literary purpose, which was essentially to provide a spiritual (auto)biography demonstrating her personal growth towards the love and mercy of God as an example ‘for synful wrecchys, wherin þei may haue gret solas and comfort to hem and vndyrstondyn þe hy & vnspecabyl mercy of ower souereyn Sauyowr Cryst Ihesu’ (1). Secondly, she 17

18

In this context, Karma Lochrie identifies the flesh of the mystic as itself ‘fissured’ and, therefore, as a site of disruption. This she relates to the semiotics of the suffering female body which also appear prevalently in the female mystical experience, and that of Margery Kempe in particular (Lochrie, Translations, pp. 13–55). On those maternal duties carried out by mothers amongst the wealthier urban classes, see Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven and London, 2001, repr. 2003), pp. 57–60. Here Orme demonstrates how women within this particular social stratum would have had a solid support structure of servants to assist in the childrearing or to carry out basic household tasks, at the very least. This is probably what Margery is referring to when she mentions ‘hir maydens’ and ‘hir meny’ in her first chapter (pp. 7 and 8). See also Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford, 1993), especially pp. 68–88, for the description of a child’s daily routine. Hanawalt also argues for the mother as primary parent (p. 94), which presumably implies that the responsibility for the daily overseeing of their tasks or those of their carers would have been hers. For an account of a mother’s responsibility for her children in a wider context, see Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London and New York, 1992), pp. 115–16. For a history of the Church’s attitude towards childhood see Diana Wood (ed.), The Church and Childhood, Studies in Church History, vol. 31 (Oxford, 1994).

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is far more concerned with the implications of her early contamination by the sins of vanity, pride, covetousness and lechery to which she fell prey as a young wife and mother, rather than providing a literal representation of an adherence to the more socially acceptable role of mother to fourteen children. What the absence of these details suggests primarily, however, is not that Margery was merely intent on suppressing material which detracted from her self-representation in the Book as holy woman, but that as author she is highly selective in the material she chooses to include in a narrative which is far more orderly, premeditated and structured than has often been considered.19 For this reason, when domestic and maternal specificities are documented in the text, they take on special emphasis and serve not merely as contextual autobiographical material but as points of reference for the establishment of a series of powerful hermeneutics which will continue to surface at strategic points within the narrative. Such hermeneutics, in turn, will serve to uncover the cracks in the controlled façade of the dominant patriarchal socio-religious order in which Margery is operating, and allow for an unmediated glimpse of the underlying chaos beneath its fragile surface – a chaos which is eminently ripe for exploitation by Margery, both as holy woman and as author.

Margery Kempe’s Children as Structural Cohesion In spite of the rarity of specific allusion to Margery’s domestic roles as wife and mother in her text, it can be of no small importance that the only extended allusions to individual children occupy parallel places of privilege in the Book’s narrative structure. The initial chapter of both Book 1 and Book 2 is characterised by the representation of a child, both accounts then assuming pivotal positions in the narrative. The account in Book 1 documents the birth of Margery’s first child, and Book 2 the return of a prodigal, renegade adult son whom she struggles to convert to a life of goodness and temperance.20

19

20

This, of course, is the line of argument pursued by Staley in Dissenting Fictions. For a more recent argument for the Book as a highly sophisticated and crafted production see Samuel Fanous, ‘Measuring the Pilgrim’s Progress: Internal Emphases in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in Renevey and Whitehead, Writing Religious Women, pp. 157–76. Fanous, however, considers much of the Book’s organisation to be attributable to the influence of Margery’s scribe – something which I will contest in Chapter 5. It is now widely considered that this adult son of Margery’s, who was married to a German woman and who lived in Germany for a time, was also her first amanuensis whose script ‘was so euel wretyn’ and ‘neiþyr good Englysch ne Dewch’ (4). Sanford Brown Meech introduces this possibility in his Introduction, pp. vii–viii, but in note 4/4 on p. 257 indicates that it is unlikely. Knowles, however, is more favourable to the idea because of the confusion between English and German which characterised the work of the first scribe, The English Mystical Tradition, pp. 14–17. Watson also considers Margery’s son to be the probable first scribe, something he has argued in an unpublished paper delivered at the University of Wales conference, Virile Women, Consuming Men: Gender and Monstrous Appetites in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, at Gregynog in April 2000.

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Considering their absence elsewhere in the text, the dramatic entrance of both of these children at these key points constitutes a strategic engagement with the discourse of maternity, an engagement which here serves a purpose outside that of mere narrative and evidences potentialities within a maternal subjectivity to offer support and authority to Margery’s chosen vocation as holy woman of God. Margery Kempe’s description of her first pregnancy at the beginning of Book 1, occurring almost immediately after her marriage to John Kempe ‘as kynde wolde’ (6), serves initially to underscore most poignantly the changes that marriage and maternity necessarily brought about in the life of a young woman, and their ability to impose upon her a new bewildering and ambiguous identity.21 Within months of marriage, for example, Margery’s life is transformed from eligible young woman who ‘was comyn of worthy kendred’ (9) to pregnant wife who ‘labowrd wyth grett accessys’ (6) throughout her pregnancy, the experience of which, along with what she euphemistically refers to as ‘labowr sche had in chyldyng’ (6), causes her to despair of her life. It is at this point that Margery first alludes to a great sin she was harbouring in her conscience at this time (‘sche had a thyng in conscyens whech sche had neuyr schewyd beforn þat tyme in alle hyr lyfe’; 6–7), which, in spite of her own attempt at expiating it by means of the ascetic practices of ‘greet penawns in fastyng bred & watyr & oþer dedys of almes wyth devowt preyers’, without actual confession she felt the devil assailing her regularly, telling her ‘þat sche schuld be dampnyd, for sche was not schreuyn of þat defawt’ (7). Appearing where it does at the very start of the narrative and included within the account of her marriage, immediate conception, pregnancy and labour, it is generally considered that Margery’s sin is of a sexual nature.22 This supposition is supported, of course, by the fact that throughout the Book Margery continues to

21

22

Sheila Delany discusses the effects of marriage upon the Wife of Bath and Margery Kempe in ‘Sexual Economics, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and The Book of Margery Kempe’, in Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson (eds), Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature: The Wife of Bath and All Her Sect (London, 1994), pp. 72–87. For discussions of a woman’s role within marriage see also Shahar, The Fourth Estate, pp. 65–125 and pp. 177–83. See also Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, pp. 115–16. For a recent examination of Margery’s changing role and status within an esteemed family and mercantile milieu see Michael D. Myers, ‘A Fictional-True Self: Margery Kempe and the Social Reality of the Merchant Elite of King’s Lynn’, Albion 31, 3 (1999), pp. 375–94. For a detailed full-length study of the Book as literary artefact and historical source see Anthony Goodman, Margery Kempe and Her World (London, New York, Toronto etc., 2002). My interpretation here of the sexual nature of Margery’s guilt is based upon the fact that she juxtaposes descriptions of her attempts to expiate her unconfessed sin and the description of her desire not to have to endure John Kempe’s sexual advances any more (11–12) alongside the account of a potentially adulterous liaison with a male acquaintance (13–16). She appears to be using this incident as a type of confessional in the narrative in order to expiate both this ‘sin’ and her earlier unconfessed one. Likewise, she endures sexual torment later in her life when God withdraws his grace from her (144–6). Here I concur with the reading of Weissman, ‘Hysterica Compassio’, p. 208.

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be wracked periodically by sexual temptation, even as she approaches her old age,23 an aspect of the Book which will be examined in more depth in the third chapter of this volume. There is, however, some circumstantial external evidence, as well as some internal pointers to suggest that Margery’s unspeakable ‘sin’ may, in fact, have been an early flirtation with heresy.24 William Sawtre (whom Margery fails to mention in her writing) was the first heretic to be burned in England in 1401, and had previously been a priest in Margery’s own parish church and would probably have had some influence on her early spiritual guidance and those irregular confessional practices to which she confesses in her opening pages.25 In this instance, however, Margery never reveals to her readers the specific nature of this sin, suggesting it is too painfully fundamental to be uncovered. Summoning her ‘gostly fadyr’ to hear what she assumes is her final confession before death, she is on the brink of confessing when the nature of the sin – or else, her articulation of it – brings a too hasty rebuke from him, confirming to Margery her inherent wickedness and fall from grace. As a result, she is silenced by his sharp censure and unable to proceed with her expiation.26 What follows is an agony of what many modern critics like to identify as ‘post-partum psychosis’,27 or a range of other now diagnosable psychological ailments.28 Margery herself, however, interprets it 23

24 25 26

27

28

In her essay, ‘From Woe to Weal and Weal to Woe: Notes on the Structure of The Book of Margery Kempe’, in McEntire, Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, pp. 73–91 (p. 86), Timea K. Szell examines Margery’s behaviour in terms of Freud’s concept of repetitive compulsion, ‘according to which one unconsciously “repeats” some version of a negative experience with the (unconscious) hope of mastering and appropriating it’. Such a reading adds weight to the interpretation of Margery’s sin as sexual, particularly in the context of her later sexual temptations. This is something which has been suggested by Stephen Metcalf in The Later Middle Ages (New York, 1981), pp. 116–17. I will investigate the possible influence of the Lollard heresy upon Margery in Chapter 5. For an illuminating examination of the power relationship between female penitent and confessor see E. A. Petroff, ‘Male Confessors and Female Penitents: Possibilities for Dialogue’, in Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism (Oxford, 1994), pp. 139–60. Also useful in this context is Janet Dillon, ‘Holy Women and Their Confessors or Confessors and Their Holy Women?’, in Rosalynn Voaden (ed.), Prophets Abroad: The Reception of Continental Holy Women in Late Medieval England (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 115–40. For the importance of the confessor in shaping the subjectivity of the holy woman see Voaden, God’s Words, Women’s Voices, especially pp. 57–61. Critics who place Margery’s suffering within this category include, for example, Julia Bolton Holloway, ‘Bridget of Sweden’s Textual Community in Medieval England’, in McEntire, Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, pp. 203–37 (p. 214); and Janet Wilson, ‘Margery and Alisoun: Women on Top’, in the same volume, pp. 223–37 (p. 227). Maureen Fries goes even further, describing Margery’s illness as ‘a painful and lengthy postpartum depression (apparently at its unipolar manic phase)’, ‘Margery Kempe’, in Paul Szarmach (ed.), An Introduction to the Medieval Mystics of Europe (Albany, 1984), pp. 217–35 (p. 219). See in particular Mary Hardman Farley, ‘Her Own Creatur: Religion, Feminist Criticism, and the Functional Eccentricity of Margery Kempe’, Exemplaria 11, 1 (1999), pp. 1–21. Here Farley diagnoses Margery as a psychotic. However, in common with other commentators keen to diagnose Margery’s illness, Farley is unable to overcome the problem that modern diagnostic criteria are necessarily contaminated by cultural considerations. See also Richard Lawes, ‘The Madness of Margery Kempe’, in Marion Glasscoe (ed.),

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as a punitive diabolical possession which continues for eight months ‘& odde days’ (7), significantly almost the same length as a full-term pregnancy and therefore an apt ‘punishment’ to fit a perceived ‘sin’ of concupiscence. The depiction of her suffering at this time is graphically articulated in the text with its documentation of consummate physical suffering and psychological despair: Sche slawndred hir husbond, hir frendys, and her owyn self; sche spak many a repreuows worde and many a schrewyd worde; sche knew no vertu ne goodnesse; sche desyryd all wykkydnesse; lych as þe spyrytys temptyd hir to sey & do sche seyd & dede. Sche wold a fordon hirself many a tym at her steryngys & a ben damnyd wyth hem in Helle, & into wytnesse þerof sche bot hir owen hand so vyolently þat it was seen al hir lyfe aftyr. And also sche roof hir skyn on hir body ahen hir hert wyth hir nayles spetowsly, for sche had noon oþer instrumentys, & wers sche wold a don saf sche was bowndyn & kept wyth strength boþe day & nyght þat sche mygth not haue hir wylle. (7–8)

The application of twentieth-century medical terminology to explain away Margery’s suffering here is clearly too simplistic and anachronistic. Margery’s suffering is not merely a result of an unfortunate post-partum pathology, as many critics would have it. It is, in fact, brought about also by the failure of the doubly privileged male and priestly authority of the confessor with his critical ‘vndyrnemyn’ and ‘scharp repreuyng’ (7) of her for her sin. This man’s inability to recognise and respond appropriately to Margery’s female predicament leads her to sink into a madness which becomes, therefore, not only a monstrous re-enactment of the traditionally female protestations of ‘hysteria’ and self-harm but, more importantly, a language of the suffering and repressed female body which will be heard and responded to ultimately by God himself. Margery’s suffering, therefore, constitutes a raging against the world which stands between her and a desired subjectivity, and an acerbic critique of male ecclesiastic authority whose supposed ‘hot-line’ to God renders her subject to its hegemonic judgements. It is, however, also a bodily articulation of the unconfessed and sinful condition which has been deeply underscored by her transformation from virgin to wife to mother.29 Whatever her

29

The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Wales and Ireland, papers read at Charney Manor, July 1999: Exeter Symposium 7 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 147–67 and his essay, ‘Psychological Disorder and the Autobiographical Impulse in Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Thomas Hoccleve’, in Renevey and Whitehead, Writing Religious Women, pp. 217–43. Lawes, a trained psychiatrist, brings to bear contemporary scientific knowledge and diagnostic skills upon Margery’s self-representation. For an assessment of Margery’s behaviour as symptomatic of ‘madness’ see also Stephen Harper, ‘ “So euyl to rewlen”: Madness and Authority in The Book of Margery Kempe’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 98, 3 (1997), pp. 53–61. For a summary of the teachings of the Church Fathers which influenced negative medieval attitudes towards motherhood see Clarissa Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1991), pp. 71–3. For a useful discussion of

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piety before her marriage – and she does hint that she was devoted, albeit a little insouciant about undertaking orthodox confession (‘(she) nedyd no confessyon but don penawns be hirself aloone’; 7)30 – the transition into married motherhood is represented as a hideous and isolating trauma for Margery, symbolised in the text by the physical bonds which tie her up, the single room to which she is confined and by the resounding silence in the narrative about the presence of midwife or female relative who would have been expected to help her through labour, delivery and lying-in.31 Thus, in her abject suffering, the venial, sexually threatening presence of the devil becomes an anthropomorphic expression of the perceived sin she harbours within her and the embodiment of her own sense of self as polluted, sexual being. Both literally in her childbirth labour, and in her struggle with mental and physical collapse, Margery labours to the point of death. In this way, birth and death become inextricably linked at this early point in the text and, as a re-enactment of the punishment imposed upon Eve as a result of her first transgression, motherhood necessarily carries with it the punitive subtext of damnation. The implied correlation between the agonies of childbirth and the loss of Margery’s virginal state at this point prefigure her later increasing anxiety about the impediments they provide to her desired goal of living the holy life and redeeming the primal sin of Eve. By Chapter 3, for example, Margery’s narrative will be concerned with recounting her desire to live chastely with her husband (including, presumably, the desire to bear no more children) and with the expression of her disgust at her own enforced concupiscence: And aftyr þis tyme sche had neuyr desyr to komown fleschly wyth hyre husbonde, for þe dette of matrimony was so abhominabyl to hir þat sche had leuar, hir thowt, etyn or drynkyn þe wose, þe mukke in þe chanel, þan to consentyn to any fleschly comownyng saf only for obedyens. (11–12)

Even at this early stage, purity of body is something which Margery feels she has lost because of her need to be obedient to the cultural expectations which

30

31

the medieval belief in the link between female sexual pleasure and conception see Shahar, The Fourth Estate, p. 71. For an overview of the medical and anatomical theories which supported these beliefs see Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, pp. 93–7; and Laqueur, Making Sex, pp. 99–103. Again, this could present further evidence of early Lollard inclinations. According to Lollard belief, oral confession to a priest was deemed to be of no value because forgiveness and remission remained the power of God alone. See, for example, the Westminster Diocesan Archives record of the confession of Lollard Robert Cavell: ‘non est facienda alicui sacerdoti sed soli Deo, qui solus peccata dimittit’ (it [confession] is not to be made to any priest, but to God alone, who alone remits sins), as recorded in Norman Tanner (ed.), Heresy Trials in the Diocese of Norwich 1428–31 (London, 1977), p. 95. On this practice, see Monica Green, ‘Women’s Medical Practice and Care in Medieval Europe’, in Bennett et al., Sisters and Workers, p. 73. See also Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, p. 38. For a recent full-length study of childbirth ritual in Renaissance Italy see Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven and London, 1999).

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have dictated the course of her life so far. It would appear that any possibility of a life as a virgin has been consumed by marriage, and the birth of this first child testifies materially to that loss. Thus, the birth itself and its aftermath are characterised by visions of devils and attempts at self-destruction. Such is the violence of her possession that Margery scarifies her own body, creating the ‘stigmata’ on her hand which she will wear permanently as a testimony to her own ‘Christic’ suffering, and rends the flesh over her heart with her fingernails. Examined in this way, Margery’s suffering cannot be anachronistically dismissed as ‘hysteria’ or ‘psychosis’ or even in the patronisingly sympathetic terms employed by those commentators who do not entirely dismiss her suffering outright.32 Instead, it can be viewed as an early attempt to uncover a hermeneutic in order to transcend the suffering and find a meaning within the pain. Motherhood has effectively separated her from her family, her friends, from her child, from herself and from God, and appropriately it is Christ who recognises her abandonment and chooses a moment in her physical isolation to reveal himself to her. [O]wyr mercyful Lord Crist Ihesu, euyr to be trostyd, worshypd be hys name, neuyr forsakyng hys seruawant in tyme of nede, aperyd to hys creatur whych had forsakyn hym in lyknesse of a man, most semly, most bewtyuows, & most amyable þat euyr myght be seen wyth mannys eye, clad in a mantyl of purpyl sylke, syttyng upon hir beddys syde, lokyng vpon hir wyth so blyssyd a chere þat sche was strengthyd in all hir spyritys. (8)

This appearance of Christ to Margery in her abject suffering therefore serves to stabilise her in that it offers an exit-route from the prison in which she finds herself, provides her with a substitute husband who will remain constant in her times of need, and offers her not only the possibility of redemption but also engagement with a more satisfactory friend, father and beloved spouse. In effect, Christ is offering Margery a chance of rebirth as virgin and lover of God. Thus, in this moment of physical and spiritual healing, the bonds begin to fall away and an alternative modus vivendi begins to open up before her.

32

See in particular Anthony Goodman, ‘The Piety of John Brunham’s Daughter of Lynn’, in Derek Baker (ed.), Medieval Women (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 347–58, particularly pp. 351–3 in which he uses negatively weighted language to describe Margery’s early experiences as a wife and mother, presenting her in terms of a failure in both contexts. For Goodman, too, Margery’s experiences are demonstrative of a ‘mental banality’ (p. 350). More recently, he has modified this stance somewhat, although he still considers that a ‘temptation nowadays would be to put the Margery of The Book on the couch or in the surgery’ (Margery Kempe and Her World, p. 5). See also Knowles, The English Mystical Tradition, pp. 142–4, for a discussion of what he regards to be Margery’s ‘neurosis’, and Harper, ‘ “ So Euyl to Rewlyn”: Madness and Authority’, who designates Margery ‘genuine madwoman’ (p. 56). Pre-eminent amongst such critics, however, is probably Donald R. Howard who describes Margery as ‘quite mad, an incurable hysteric with a large paranoid trend’, in Writers and Pilgrims (Berkeley, 1980), p. 35.

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As soon as John Kempe returns, Margery demands from him the keys to ‘þe botery’ – that symbol of the female domestic sphere33 – and in doing so presents to her readers the image of a healed and reborn self embarking on a new journey, and to her husband and household a freshly restored appearance of conformity which is performed ‘wysly & sadly jnow’ (9). In this context then – and in the light of Bennett’s assertion of women’s agency within or against hegemonic constraints with which this chapter began – Margery’s return to the domestic sphere and apparent social conformity can be read as the initialisation of a process of recontextualisation of former constraints and a recognition of their ability to yield up for her an alternative way of proceeding. In Butlerian terms, it heralds the beginning of an active reappropriation and self-conscious performance of those socially prescribed roles to which she is evidently less than fully committed, a performance which will eventually re-emerge as primary strategy and hermeneutic in her text. In this sense, Margery recognises that the endlessly ‘stylised repetition of acts’ which constitute wifehood and motherhood can house the potential for a subversion of patriarchal hegemony in their embodiment of a myriad of ‘performative possibilities for proliferating gender configurations outside the restricting frames of masculinist domination’.34 She also sees the potential, however, of appearing to work within those frames – in her adoption of a high-profile affective piety, for example, and imitation of the Virgin, both approved religious practices at the time when Margery was operating, as I will demonstrate below. This reappropriation and performative reconfiguration of wifely and motherly duty is something which is soon endorsed by Christ in her account of a subsequent vision and which the critic Hope Phyllis Weissman has defined in suitably maternalistic terms as ‘at once an Annunciation and a Nativity, marking the birth of Christ in Margery’s soul’.35 This time, Christ appears to Margery in the chapel of Saint John in the Church of Saint Margaret in Lynn on the Friday before Christmas. Having first ‘rauysched hir spyryt’ (16) he offers her eternal absolution for her sins and confirms the way forward for her which was opened up during his first appearance: ‘I . . . forheve þe þi synnes to þe vtterest poynt . . . for I am þi loue & shal be þi loue wythowtyn ende’ (16–17). As Weissman has also suggested, this absolution is not only for the sins of Margery’s life, both past and contemporary, but also for that sin which has caused her most despair, the sin which the Church had taught her was the result of being a woman and a daughter of Eve: ‘Margery’s old sin within her life is the Original Sin within Eve’s, and it is Eve’s curse, the pains of childbirth, which compels Margery’s 33

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See Martha C. Howell, Woman, Production and Patriarchy in Late Medieval Cities (Chicago, 1986), p. 11. For a discussion of the duties of the manorial housewife which would have been replicated by an urban housewife of the upper bourgeoisie such as Margery, see Eileen Power, Medieval Women (Cambridge, 1975), p. 46. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 141. Weissman, ‘Hysterica Compassio’, p. 209.

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acknowledgement of the sin which is woman’s eternal reproach’.36 Without the absolution of Christ, this sin is essentially inescapable and unforgivable, occupying as it does a position at the core of Margery’s persistent anxieties pertaining to wifehood, motherhood and sexual activity. Christ now offers her the opportunity to ease the burden of Eve’s sin by giving her ‘an hayr in þin hert þat schal lyke me mych bettyr þan alle þe hayres in þe world’ (17), and in so doing, bestows upon her the gift of tears which will forever link her with the Virgin Mother of the Mater Dolorosa paradigm37 and the tears of the penitent whore, Mary Magdalene, both of whom will become primary rolemodels for Margery in her text.38 By means of such an identification, albeit a conventional one, Margery Kempe manipulates the irrevocability of her own motherhood and loss of virginity to create for herself a means towards selfempowerment within a socio-religious hegemony which is also intent on frustrating her desire for autonomy. Following this endorsement by Christ, therefore, Margery is ‘reborn’ to herself and to God and, in effect, emerges from her own rent and fissured body into the arms of her loving father and spouse – Christ. The curse of Eve which we saw Margery re-enacting in the Book’s opening sequence and which she is destined to revisit in the birth of another thirteen children, thus heralds her own rebirth as Mary, Mother of God, whose path she will increasingly follow in an insistent expression of an imitatio Mariae. Margery Kempe’s representation of one of her adult children at the beginning of Book 2 serves similarly as a powerful narrative device and creates a strategic structural balance within the text. The account of a fractured relationship with an adult son has much in common with that of the Prodigal Son in the New Testament,39 and it is highly likely that Margery is fully exploiting a genre of storytelling best illustrated by Christ himself during his ministry. There is little or no evidence to suggest that this transgressive son is the aforementioned firstborn of Margery, but parallels between the two narratives are nevertheless drawn by the privileged position each one takes up in the text, a position which in both cases categorically inscribes upon Margery a definitive subjectivity as mother. In both accounts too the relationship between mother and child is an ambivalent one, the child being the cause of much suffering for the mother. Similarly, both narratives depict a major rupture in the mother–child relationship, the first arising from Margery’s implied

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Weissman, ‘Hysterica Compassio’, p. 208. Weissman, ‘Hysterica Compassio’, pp. 209–10. Atkinson examines the conventional trope of maternal tears in The Oldest Vocation, pp. 106 and 144–93. For a discussion of Margery’s tears as representative of her power and her link with the Other, see Dhira B. Mahoney, ‘Margery Kempe’s Tears and the Power over Language’, in McEntire, Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, pp. 37–50. Margery’s imitation of Mary Magdalene will be examined in detail in Chapter 3 of this volume. Luke 15: 11–32.

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inability to care for her child for over eight months, as we have seen, the second because the son actively avoids what he evidently considers to be a proscriptive mother, preferring to live his own life as a merchant in ‘þe perellys of þis wretchyd & vnstabyl worlde’ (221). This son’s dissolute living is a source of much concern to Margery who constantly seeks him out to advise him ‘to leeuyn þe worlde & folwyn Crist’ (221). Margery documents his angry reaction to the advice she proffers that he repent and alter his way of life and, in a brief description of an encounter between them, the anger of both mother and son lurks palpably beneath the surface of the narrative, reflecting a very human relationship within the topos of the parabolic story. Hers is not the passive patience of Luke’s patriarch, however. Margery is convinced of the need for a forceful and proactive persuasive technique and we feel her sense of urgency as she refuses to relinquish her son to the terrors of purgatory from where his soul will be far more difficult to extricate. There is a forceful, almost parodic emphasis placed upon on Margery’s repeated efforts to dissuade her son from his course of action. It is an effort which she has performed ‘many tymys’, but nevertheless she takes it upon herself to speak to him ‘ageyn þat he xulde fle þe perellys of þis world & not settyn hys stody ne hys besynes so mech þerupon as he dede’ (221). As a result, her son continually flees her company in an ironic reversal of what she desires him to do, which is to embrace her counsel and to abjure temptation and sinful practices. At this point we recognise a complete breakdown in the mother–son relationship and a setting up of a filial antagonism in its place. Nevertheless, this mother will not relinquish her influence easily, spurred on as she is by maternal love and a recollection of Christ’s words to her in her youth: ‘ “Dowtyr, þer is no so synful man in erth leuyng, yf he wyl forsake hys synne & don aftyr þi cownsel, swech grace as þu behestyst hym I wyl confermyn for þi lofe” ’ (23). Margery’s desire to influence her son in this episode, of course, conforms wholly to a religious and maternal duty as laid down by the Church in its teachings on the seven spiritual works of mercy and the activities of mothering, in particular.40 These activities – teaching, preaching, chastising, consoling, advising, praying for enemies, and patient suffering – were common patterns of behaviour within the cloister, but were also taught to the faithful laity during the later Middle Ages.41 However, whilst acceptable within the convents, such modes of behaviour were often suspect when observed in laywomen within the public domain, in spite of the fact that they would seem to

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On a mother’s spiritual duty to her children, see Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, pp. 157 and 204. See also Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, pp. 205–6, 116 and 171–2. For this observation I am grateful to an unpublished paper by Mary Beth Davis, ‘Margery Kempe, the Spoken Word and the Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy’, as delivered at the Gender and Medieval Studies conference, Gender and Space in the Middle Ages, held at the University of East Anglia in January 1997.

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be paradigmatic of those practices performed by a mother bringing up her children in the private, domestic sphere. To bring a child to maturity, a mother would spend much of her time teaching life and domestic skills, preaching to a child about dangers and modes of behaviour, chastising misdemeanours, consoling when hurt or unwell, offering the benefit of experience, exercising patience and praying for their safe delivery into adulthood.42 The Church’s teachings on these patterns of behaviour within a religious context would, no doubt, have had the effect of impressing further the importance of maternal responsibilities upon women such as Margery. More importantly, however, they would serve to forge closer links between the world of the maternal and the religious, in keeping with the Pauline edict: ‘(Woman) shall be saved through child bearing; if she continue in faith and love and sanctification with sobriety’.43 In this way, Margery Kempe’s worldly ministry, undertaken in fulfilment of Christ’s will, can be regarded as merely a development of those motherhood activities (which were, of course, in themselves part of a hegemonic imperative) which she would have spent most of her domestic life as a mother undertaking in any case. If we examine the dissension between Margery and her son in this context, we can see that Margery’s response to his misdemeanours is therefore twofold. She is the anxious mother of the domestic sphere who feels that her guidance has been insufficient and who must now take responsibility for altering his aberrant behaviour; she is also the holy woman, chosen spokesperson of Christ and spouse to the Godhead who must redeem the fallen young man along with the rest of humanity, of which he constitutes a symbol. Whilst it can be argued that both roles are identifiably orthodox and conventional within the medieval socioreligious context, for a woman to occupy both sites simultaneously disrupts their orthodoxy and constitutes a site of slippage within which she can fashion for herself a subjectivity which emulates that of the Virgin herself. Significantly, here, however, it is the experienced, worldly mother who takes control and there are traces in the text of only partly restrained retrospective anger as years later she recounts to her amanuensis her words of reproof to her son: ‘Now sithyn þu wil not leeuyn þe world at my cownsel, I charge þe at my blissyng kepe þi body klene at þe lest fro womanys feleschep tyl þu take a wyfe aftyr þe lawe of þe Chirche. And, hyf þu do not, I pray God chastise þe & ponysch þe þerfor.’ (222)

Bearing more resemblance to a curse than the firm motherly warning she would have us believe she offers, Margery’s words here are problematic and

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Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, pp. 113–14 and 116. 1 Timothy 2: 15.

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unstable if we accept them at surface value. When her son does indeed become sick, disfigured by an illness which resembles leprosy, and which causes him to be dismissed from his employment, it seems to the reader as if the holy mother has been abusing her privileged power in a quasi-diabolical way. Margery’s neighbours are equally disturbed by her actions towards her son and consider his punishment to be a result of an invocation of evil by Margery. More poignantly, the son himself is convinced that his illness is a result of his mother’s cursing of him, signifying not only a protracted rupture in their relationship but the risks she is taking by occupying such an unstable and disruptively multiple subject position. Margery, however, will not show compassion until the son shows himself to be contrite. On one level we are privy to one of the mini-dramas of ordinary domestic life re-enacted before us – and in a household of fourteen children there must, indeed, have been many. This tale therefore provides an engaging example of Margery Kempe’s ability to universalise the personal and to personalise the universal in her text, often by means of the seemingly more mundane and prosaic aspects of existence. Representing herself here both as clichéd nagging mother, and as divine agent, she simultaneously places herself back within the domestic sphere whilst inserting herself into sacred history. She is at once Margery the earthly mother, parabolic parent of Christ’s own exemplary narrative, and spiritual mother to the entire world – in essence, the neo-Virgin Mary. When her son does return to her, having found no other remedy for his illness, we witness no cathartic mother–son reunion, however. Instead, Margery documents it in terms of the sinner begging for the intercession of Mary, Mother of God, thus subtly including a subliminal and personal vindication into her own narrative: So at þe last, whan he sey non oþer bote, he cam to hys modyr, tellyng hir of hys mysgouernawns, promittyng he xulde ben obedient to God & to hir & to amende hys defawte thorw þe help of god enchewyng al mysgouernawnce fro þat tyme forward vpon hys power. He preyid hys modyr of hir blissyng, & specialy he preyd hir to prey for hym þat owr Lord of hys hy mercy wolde forheuyn hym þat he had trespasyd & takyn awey þat gret sekenes for whech men fleddyn hys company & hys felaschep as for a lepyr. (222)

Significantly here, Margery demonstrates how maternal and Marian skills can work towards salvation and make a difference before the Day of Judgment. In so doing, she asserts the potential of the mother as agent of redemption. The son being unable to approach God directly in this instance, Margery stands in for the Virgin Mary and becomes her own son’s mediator for divine forgiveness. Thus, Margery’s son’s contrition is a triumph for Margery’s worldly and spiritual maternity, consolidating for herself, her contemporaries and her readers alike her synonymous subjectivity as dutiful earthly mother and privileged Mother of God. 43

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Imitatio: Margery as Maternal Martyr A most important aspect of Margery’s manipulation of her identity as a mother is to be found in her textual identification with the hagiographic figure of the maternal saint, who gained in popularity from the thirteenth through to the fifteenth century.44 Developing out of the image of the Virgin as Mater Dolorosa, the maternal saint provided women with a role model which was infinitely more attainable than that of virgin motherhood and it became a hagiographic stereotype which was well established by the fourteenth century,45 fuelled as it was by a newly enthusiastic support for marriage and increased devotion to the Christ child.46 The notion of the redeeming goodness of wives and mothers was reinforced by attention to Mary and her mother, Saint Anne, and an element of maternal sacrifice was exemplified by each of these holy women who voluntarily relinquished her child to divine will.47 This notion of child sacrifice (although not implicit to all maternal hagiography), which began with the story of Isaac in the Old Testament and was perpetuated in the apocryphal stories of Saint Anne and the Virgin, had now arrived at the forefront of late medieval religious consciousness and was a tradition with which Margery Kempe would certainly have been familiar.48 Two such maternal martyrs who may well have had some influence upon Margery’s desired vocation and her striving for literary authority, were Elizabeth of Hungary and the Swedish Saint Birgitta, both of whom are mentioned in Margery Kempe’s book.49 Both women were wives and mothers who

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On the tradition of the maternal martyr see Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, pp. 19–22 and 144–93. See also Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to Woman Christ: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Pennsylvania, 1995), pp. 76–107, especially pp. 91–2. On Margery’s identification with the virgin martyr again see Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 195–201. Of course, as Salih cogently demonstrates, an identification with holy virginity does not preclude the maternal because of virginity’s role as discourse rather than fixed physical state. This, of course, converges in the figure of Virgin who was able to combine both qualities at once. Newman, Virile Woman, p. 77. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, pp. 153–7. Newman, Virile Woman, p. 82; Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, pp. 161–2. For a selection of Middle English versions of the Life of Saint Anne see Middle English Stanzaic Versions of the Life of Saint Anne, ed. Roscoe E. Parker, EETS o.s. 124 (London, 1928). Also useful for an examination of the cult of Saint Anne from a number of cultural perspectives is Kathleen M. Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn (eds), Interpreting Cultural Symbols: Saint Anne in Late Medieval Society (Athens, Georgia and London, 1990). Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, p. 136; Newman, Virile Woman, p. 78. References to Birgitta punctuate Margery’s text, although the single reference to Saint Elizabeth appears in one of the sections generally attributed to scribal interpolation (154). As Alexandra Barratt has pointed out, however, the work which has influenced the priest here was probably either the Latin or a Middle English version of the Revelationes Beatae Elisabeth of Elizabeth of Toess (who is identified in one of those vernacular versions as ‘Seynt Elysabeth the Kynges Doughter of Hungarye’). Elizabeth of Toess – who was also the daughter of a Hungarian king – postdated the maternal Saint Elizabeth of

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were called to the life of perfection and spent a lifetime trying to fulfil their own vocational needs in the face of opposition from family and society. Elizabeth of Hungary, who was born in 1207, and who Margery’s scribe tells us ‘meuyd hym to heuyn credens to þe sayd creatur’ (154), was a highly influential saint who, according to the widely read Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend, was betrothed at the age of four, marrying ten years later.50 She became the mother of three children and ran a large household as befitted a Hungarian princess. Her saintly austerity was renowned during her lifetime and she struggled to reconcile the roles of wife, mother and saint. Eventually she was liberated by the death of her husband during one of the Crusades, threatening self-mutilation when her family attempted to remarry her.51 Regarding her children as worldly possessions, she abandoned them all, including a new-born baby, and concentrated instead on caring for the children of the sick, the poor and the needy. As Clarissa Atkinson explains in the context of women such as Elizabeth: ‘motherhood was comprehended in terms of physical suffering and service, and the mother-saints of the late Middle Ages extended maternal service to all those in need – with the exception, very often, of their own children.’52 By diverting her love for her children to those of the poor, Elizabeth transformed motherly love into a form of divine love, freeing her from the worldliness of the maternal and enabling her to enter the realm of the sacred. The fact that she seems to have been influential upon the priest with whom Margery spent so much time would suggest that Margery would have been fully aware of her potential as witness for her life by the time she came to write, and the example offered by Elizabeth probably provided concrete proof that it was possible for a married woman to be re-established as holy – if, however, she were able to redirect her wifely and maternal energies ultimately towards God. It is just such a rechannelling of maternal activity which no doubt also attracted Margery to the married Saint Birgitta as important role-model, especially in view of her recent canonisation at the time of writing and whose maidservant Margery had visited when on pilgrimage in Italy (94–95).53

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traditional hagiography but it was the maternal saint to whom the Revelationes were erroneously attributed. On this see Alexandra Barratt, ‘Margery Kempe and the King’s Daughter of Hungary’, in McEntire, Margery Kempe: A Book of Essays, pp. 189–201. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, trans. William Granger, 2 vols (Princeton, 1983), vol. 2, pp. 302–18. This was the standard account of Elizabeth’s life in the Middle Ages. On voluntary mutilation as a practice for early medieval women see Jane Tibbetts Schulenburg, ‘The Heroics of Virginity: Brides of Christ and Sacrificial Mutilation’, in Mary Beth Rose (ed.), Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: A Literary and Historical Perspective (Syracuse, 1986), pp. 29–72. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, p. 167. For an analysis of the influence of Birgitta’s influence in England see Holloway, ‘Bridget of Sweden’s Textual Community’. For a detailed and considered assessment of Birgitta’s prophetic authority see Voaden, God’s Word, Women’s Voices. The best full-length study of Birgitta and her influence is by Bridget Morris, Saint Birgitta of Sweden (Woodbridge, 1999). For a brief but helpful examination of the influence of Birgitta upon Margery Kempe in particular, see Sarah Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 188–91.

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Birgitta of Sweden died in 1373 at the age of seventy, whereas Elizabeth had died at the age of forty-one. It is therefore significant that the woman who seems to exert most influence on Margery (and certainly the only one to whom she herself refers most consistently in her text) was also a holy woman who survived into old age. Birgitta had also been a mother of eight children and a woman who, in the words of Atkinson, ‘shed a brilliant light on the history of Christian motherhood’.54 She was active and influential politically, a highly charismatic figure who lived for many years as a dutiful wife and conscientious mother and a woman who managed to balance her domestic life with an successful religious vocation. Freed to that vocation ultimately by widowhood, she continued to care for her children in a way that many other maternal saints did not. Birgitta’s writing, for example, is punctuated with references to her four sons and four daughters, two of whom died before reaching adulthood,55 and the fate of each one of them is known to us through the many stories told about the saint.56 For Margery, then, Birgitta was possibly the ideal worldly role model: she was a woman who only just preceded her chronologically and whose personal circumstances she may have perceived as in some ways reflecting her own. More importantly, Birgitta appeared to have survived many tribulations and setbacks to live well into old age. Like Margery, too, she had received divine sanction as to her sexual status from the Virgin, who reassured her: ‘ “For if sho þat is a modir wyll plese my son, and lufe him ouir all oþer þinges, pray for hirselfe and her childir, I will help hir to have effet of hir praier” ’.57 More importantly, Birgitta insisted on virginity as being a less desirable constituent of holiness than humility58 and it is in the context of Birgitta’s influence on Margery that we should perhaps begin to examine the perplexing idea of the suppression of Margery’s own worldly motherhood in her text. In a typically hyperbolic account – and not to be outdone by her precursor – Margery describes the reassurance offered to her by Christ himself about her lack of virginal status: ‘ “forasmech as þu art a mayden in þi sowle, I xal take þe be þe on hand in Hevyn & my Modyr be þe oþer hand, & so xalt þu dawnsyn in Hevyn wyth oþer holy maydens & virgynes” ’ (52). This example of Margery’s desire to supersede Birgitta in the love shown to her by Christ is entirely typical and constitutes another strategy used by her to achieve authority in the Book. Just as the Virgin had reassured Birgitta that her lack of virginity was compensated for by the intense maternal devotion she showed to the community and to the infant

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Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, p. 170. Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, p. 173. For an overview of some of these stories see Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, pp. 176–81. See also Morris, Birgitta of Sweden, pp. 46–52. The Liber Celestis of St Bridget of Sweden, ed. Roger Ellis, EETS o.s. 291, 2 vols (Oxford, 1987), vol. 1, p. 300. See Liber Celestis, p. 300, for Birgitta’s documentation of several revelations concerning the problems of sexual status for women.

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Christ, so the superior reassurance of Christ for Margery would similarly serve to place Margery neatly within the space between prescribed care of her own children and total abandonment. She is, in effect, liberated from either necessity, resulting in a selective treatment and literary non-committal to them in her text.

Margery and the Maternal Dichotomy The regular appearance of Birgitta and allusion to other maternal and virginal saints in Margery’s narrative nevertheless points towards an ongoing dichotomy in her life concerning commitment to her family, although it is something which is largely repressed in her account. At one point, for example, Christ advises Margery that to achieve her desired goal of perfection: ‘þu must forsake þat þow louyst best in þis world’ (17). Margery has already documented how she has chosen to relinquish her former worldly pleasures of fashion, commerce and secular prestige (‘sche . . . forsoke hir pride, hir coueytyse, & desyr þat sche had of þe worshepys of þe world’; 11) and, in view of her evident affinity with saints Elizabeth and Birgitta, it is tempting to read this instruction in terms of a requirement to relinquish home and family in order to follow the path of holy woman. This is further suggested by the fact that Christ’s instructions here take place on the Friday before Christmas and in the church in Lynn dedicated to the virgin martyr, Saint Margaret, another firm role-model of Margery, as Sarah Salih has demonstrated.59 As readers we would be perfectly justified in presuming now upon Margery’s requirement to leave her children in order to adopt an ideal of ‘neo-virginity’ and ‘holy poverty’ as did some of her precursors. However, with what is almost a twist of disingenuity both humorous and disarming, Margery has Christ explain what it is that she actually does love the most in the world: ‘& þat is etyng of flesch’ (17). Ostensibly then, we are being led to believe that Margery’s love of eating meat – and by implication the status and sense of belonging which it imbues – is superior to everything else, even her love for her own children. I would argue that this confounding of reader expectation is deliberate and it is by no means the only time when Margery disarms the expectations of her readers in this way.60 For a moment we are being lured by the narrative into judging Margery in the same way as she is judged by her contemporaries.61 She is tempting the reader to express incredulity in spite of

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Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 196–7. On Saint Margaret’s significance and popularity in the Middle Ages see Teresa Reed, Shadows of Mary: Reading the Virgin Mary in Medieval Texts (Cardiff, 2003), pp. 90–105. See, for example, when she chooses to share the joy of heaven with Robert Spryngolde, her spiritual confessor rather than her family (The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 50), as discussed below. Bynum, of course, has argued that food is inextricably linked to the social role expected of women in most cultures, and certainly in medieval Europe. She links this requirement

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the fact that this information is being proffered and endorsed by Christ himself. The presumed-upon reference to her children, however, fails to materialise and the void left by their textual absence at this point creates a space in the narrative for the representation of something altogether more serious. Christ proceeds to inform Margery that he is to become the living flesh upon which she will feed: ‘þow schalt etyn my flesch & my blod, þat is þe very body of Crist in þe Sacrament of þe Awter. Thys is my wyl, dowtyr, þat þow receyue my body euery Sonday, and I schal flowe so mych grace in þe þat alle þe world xal meruelyn þerof’ (17). The intensely anthropophagic and sacrificial images connected to the Mass are obvious here, and it is likely that Christ is articulating the explicit iconographic link between the Mass and child sacrifice which was drawn during the late Middle Ages.62 As Miri Rubin has comprehensively documented, connections between child sacrifice, maternal deprivation and the Eucharist had increased in importance during the thirteenth century and a theological emphasis on the paternal loss inherent in Christ’s Passion was now superseded by that of a specifically maternal loss and sorrowing.63 It would seem that Margery is here making full use of these connections to assert that the child who will fulfil her will not be that born of her own body, but is the divine child who will enter her body as sustenance in the form of the Host and keep her as its figurative mother in a perpetual state of grace. In effect, she will enter a state of perpetual pregnancy, but the progeny will be a grace which she will hold within herself and which will

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to a woman’s ability to lactate, something which renders her the essential provider of nourishment. Bynum also points out, however, that women are more often associated with food provision rather than with its consumption, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 190–1. In support of her argument Bynum cites Elias Canetti who has suggested that the mother offers her own body to be eaten, first nourishing the child within her and then with her own milk. Thus, she continues this ‘passion to give food’ over the course of many more years. See Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York, 1962), p. 221, as cited in Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 190. The main problem with this argument, of course, is its essentialist assumption that the maternal and the female are synonymous. For a critique of this approach see Biddick, ‘Genders, Bodies, Borders’. For a satirical representation of how reservedly a pious woman was supposed to approach food, see Chaucer’s depiction of the Prioress’s eating habits in ‘The Prioress’s Tale’, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson (Oxford, 1988), p. 25. On the prevalence of this link see Leah Sinanoglou, ‘The Christ Child as Sacrifice: A Medieval Tradition and the Corpus Christi Plays’, Speculum (1973), pp. 491–509. On this, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christ: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991), especially pp. 135–9. The image of the suffering mother was also a popular one in those writings attributed to Saint Bonaventure, to which Margery Kempe refers later in her book (154). These accounts departed from the Gospels in content and served to encourage popular meditation on the Passion. Much of the writing attributed to the pen of Saint Bonaventure, including the Stimulus Amoris mentioned in Margery’s book (pp. 39, 143, 153 and 154) were actually the works of other writers. I am grateful to Richard Higgins of Durham University Library for directing me towards the Bonaventure bibliography, Bonaventurae Scripta Authentica, Dubia vel Spuria Critice Recensita, by Balduinus Distelbrink, Subsidia Scientifica Franciscalia 5 (Rome, 1975), which gives 56 authentic texts and 184 attributed texts, including three versions of the Stimulus Amoris.

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direct her on her desired path towards perfection. Indeed, when she visits him soon after this vision, her anchorite confessor proceeds to interpret this revelation for her by means of an inversion of the same imagery. Reassuring her, ‘ “Dowtyr, he sowkyn euyn of Crystys brest, and he han an ernest-peny of Heuyn” ’ (18), the anchorite here renders Margery both divine child and divine mother. The idea of Christ as feeding the faithful from his breast, of course, was not an uncommon one in medieval religious iconography and there was a firm analogy between the blood of Christ consecrated at the Mass, and the milk of the Virgin mother used to sustain the faithful.64 In fact, as Bynum has shown, in one literalistic depiction of the infant Christ, he is even represented as a child with engorged breasts.65 Thus, some aspects of medieval religious discourse rendered Christ as both child and mother, a discourse which Julian of Norwich was also to exploit in her own visionary narrative, as we shall see. Such a conflation of the literal and metaphorical allows for the development of a hermeneutic which functions on various levels and enforces a response which incorporates the text of the nurturing mother as a means of understanding the ineffable. One can imagine that such a imagistic pattern and discourse would have been particularly empowering for Margery when she came to document her experiences, given the number of children to whom she had probably offered similar sustenance. Moreover, it would not only have appealed to her aspirations towards a fully realised imitatio Mariae but also to her desire to emulate Christ himself. Thus, this endorsement of maternity reassures on a literal level that Margery’s sex and marital status does not preclude an achievement of an imitatio Christi but is actually privileged by it. Now Christ as mother to Margery is also transformed into her own mother as she figuratively receives divine sustenance from his breasts. The childHost within Margery thus effects her transformation into daughter of Christ as well as into his virgin mother, a transformation which clearly exonerates her for leaving her worldly husband and children and helps her in her desire for a subjectivity as neo-virgin in her insistent quest for holiness. Thus, the same transformation of lived motherhood into spiritual and textual hermeneutic as I have been examining previously also provides Margery with a clear resolution to what seems to have been the source of repressed dilemma. 64

65

See, for example, Hildegarde of Bingen’s depiction of the wedding of Ecclesia and Christ from the second part of Scivias for a literal depiction of the conflation of breast milk and the blood of Christ. This and other similar representations are to be found in Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, plates 12 and 25–30. Jan Gossaert, Madonna and Child, as reproduced in Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 213. Again, Biddick takes exception to Bynum’s uncritical inclusion of these images which, as Biddick points out, Bynum fails to discuss, except in passing. However, Gossaert’s depiction of an ambiguous and lactatating Christ is fully in keeping with the web of imagery regarding both Margery and Christ in the Book at this point and its implications for the dissolving of gender boundaries.

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Another instance when we witness a trace of this dilemma resurfacing is in a conversation which she has with the Virgin, again soon after her religious conversion (20). When asked whom she would most desire to accompany her to the privileged place which has already been reserved for her ‘be-for my Sonys kne’ in heaven, Margery again disarms her audience by requesting the company of ‘fadyr Maystyr R’, that is to say her principal confessor, Robert Spryngolde. Even the Virgin’s response to this answer contains a note of only semi-disguised incredulity and reproof: ‘Why askyst thow mor hym þan thyn owyn fadyr er þin husband?’ (20). In this way, Margery allows the Virgin to ventriloquise the question which we as readers most want to ask at this point, and Margery’s explanation is characteristically persuasive. Robert Spryngolde, she says, has shown such goodness to her in ‘þe gracyows labowrys þat he hath had abowt me in heryng of my confessyon’ (20) that she feels she could never herself repay him. In view of her devastating experience with the first confessor carefully documented at the onset of her narrative, we can certainly appreciate the inordinate amount of love and gratitude she would have felt towards this new, sympathetic and humane ‘gostly fadyr’. The Virgin, however, is not that easily convinced. Whilst acknowledging Margery’s love for her confessor and granting her this desire, in a telling addendum she nevertheless insists upon including Margery’s family within this sphere of divine privilege: ‘ “I grawnt þe þi desyr of hym, & het schal þi fadyr ben sauyd, & þi husbond also, & alle þi chylderyn” ’ (20). Evading the articulation of the dilemma, the author instead allows the Virgin to voice the dichotomy by having her point out to her what, as a wife and mother, she is expected to feel and desire. In so doing, not only does the Virgin identify for the reader the tactical vacuum left in the text by the absence of Margery’s children, but she also intimates that the choice Margery has to make is perhaps not as radical as she may think. Typically, Margery’s response to this solution is to reassert her own position as desiring, speaking subject. Without drawing breath, she moves in to destabilise even the Virgin’s authority by continuing to insist on the worth of Robert Spryngolde and, more significantly, her own desire to do penance to save the whole world – a world, of course, which necessarily includes her own husband and children. Thus, by incorporating her personal responsibilities into the universal, Margery simultaneously evades them and yet recoups the same reward as if she had actually undertaken them. By implication, she will honour and perform the duties of wifehood and motherhood and protect her children by absorbing them into her salvific duties towards the whole of humankind.

Motherhood as Performative Strategy It is now becoming clear that Margery’s treatment of motherhood in the Book – no doubt based upon her own experience of it – gradually begins to 50

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constitute an adept performative strategy which is at the same time both validatory and liberating. In a literary context, Margery punctuates her text with examples of how the performance of her maternal skills come to be highly valued by many of those with whom she comes into contact, something which also serves to offset the opprobrium she receives at the hands of others who do not appreciate her special talents. Some of these performances take the form of physical re-enactments of maternal activities; others, however, are purely visionary and serve to corroborate the suitability of these maternal skills for redirection towards a spiritual goal. This is perhaps best illustrated in Margery’s visionary assumption of the role of handmaid to Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin, whilst she is herself still entrapped by the bonds of domesticity, sexual compliance and childbirth. In her adoption of this role, Margery acts not only as midwife upon the birth of the Virgin but is also present at the birth of Christ (18–19). Popular contemporary iconographic representations of Saint Anne emphasised her role as teacher to the young virgin66 but in Margery’s narrative it is Margery herself who, in her usurped role as ‘handmayden’ to the infant Mary ‘tyl it wer twelve her of age’ (18), takes on a quasi-instructional role, telling the young Mary, ‘Lady, he schal be þe Modyr of God’ (18).67 In the same visionary experience she will do the same for the infant Christ, not only procuring food and shelter for him and his mother, but also anticipating his particular destiny, covering him ‘with byttyr teerys of compassyon, hauyng mend of þe scharp deth þat he schuld suffyr’ (19). Similarly, in another much later visionary encounter, Margery describes to her readers how she ministers to the distraught Virgin following the death of Christ, even carefully preparing for her ‘a good cawdel . . . to comfortyn hir’ (195). This type of visionary manifestation of a maternal ministry, which is self-evidently informed by Margery’s own lived experiences, is also translated into Margery’s worldly ministry on a number of occasions. She is, for example, called upon to care for an old and infirm woman for six weeks whilst in Rome on the way home from Jerusalem, a role which she performs ‘as sche wolde a don owyr Lady’ (85). Much later in her life in her capacity as spiritual healer and woman of some authority, Margery will similarly be called upon to comfort and heal a young woman obviously

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By the early fourteenth century artists had begun to represent Saint Anne as teaching the Virgin to read, although this tradition does not seem to have entered the literary one. On this, see Orme, Medieval Childhood, p. 244. Miriam Gill has identified twenty-two possible examples of wall paintings in English churches which represent Saint Anne reading to the Virgin. Of these, fourteen are still clearly or partly visible. Miriam Gill, ‘Female Piety and Impiety: Selected Images of Women in Wall Paintings in England after 1300’, in Samantha Riches and Sarah Salih (eds), Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe (London, 2002), pp. 101–20 (p. 105). As Reed points out in Shadows of Mary, p. 43, by the fourteenth century, Mary was commonly associated with a schooling in prophecy and she is frequently depicted as reading from Isaiah 7: 14 which anticipates the virgin birth of Immanuel, thus ‘enmeshing her sexuality in the necessities of Christian history’.

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suffering from the same post-partum problems as she had endured herself so many years previously – and, of course, she is supremely qualified to come to her aid (177–89). On yet another occasion, following years of separation from her husband, Margery will once again find herself caring for him after he has suffered a life-threatening fall in his home which causes him to become ‘chidisch ahen’. At pains to emphasise John’s double-incontinence and his senility, Margery cares for John until his death ‘as sche wolde a don Crist himself’ (181). Such a reappropriation and recontextualisation of her own maternal practices as part of a strategy of self-empowerment is everywhere apparent in Margery’s text. Perhaps, however, it is nowhere more fully sustained than when she finally embarks upon her pilgrimage to Jerusalem some time during the autumn of 1413.68 Following a recent vow of chastity with John Kempe (25) and the assurance from Christ that she will bear no more children (38), this journey heralds for Margery a new mode of existence for her. In setting sail to the Holy Land she is freed from the physical shackles of earthly motherhood and is able to fully explore her developing vocation as spiritual mother and holy woman on this most important of journeys,69 something nowhere more evident than in her intensely realised identification with the Virgin whilst in Jerusalem. In an important essay examining Margery’s imitation of the Virgin as recounted in the Jerusalem narrative, Hope Phyllis Weissman has already illustrated the full extent of this imitatio and has suggested an inextricable connection between Margery’s identification with the Virgin’s grief at Calvary and her own previous experience of what she terms the ‘woman’s disease of womb-suffering’.70 Redefining the anachronistic term ‘hysteria’ which has often been levied against Margery by antipathetic commentators,71

68 69

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For a detailed analysis of the chronology of Margery’s pilgrimage see The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 284, n. 60/18–19. For a brief overview of the importance of pilgrimage in the late Middle Ages see Lochrie, Translations, p. 28. For the importance of pilgrimage to Margery Kempe in particular see Glasscoe, English Medieval Mystics, pp. 292–5, and Bowers, ‘Margery Kempe as Traveler’. For a more general overview of medieval pilgrimage see D. J. Hall, English Medieval Pilgrimage (London, 1966), especially pp. 1–2; R. C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London, 1971), p. 40; Norbert Ohler, The Medieval Traveler (Woodbridge, 1989). Particularly useful is Diana Webb, Pilgrims and Pilgrimage in Medieval Europe (London, 1999) and Susan Signe Morrison, Women Pilgrims. Morrison also includes a helpful critique of earlier works on pilgrimage, medieval or otherwise, pp. 84–105. Weissman, ‘Hysterica Compassio’, especially p. 217. Also useful on the link between the expression of Marian piety and the pains of childbirth is Amy Neff, ‘The Pain of Compassio: Mary’s Labour at the Foot of the Cross’, Art Bulletin 80 (1998), pp. 254–7. Again see Howard, Writers and Pilgrims, p. 35. The most vociferous of the early critics on this issue was Herbert Thurston, who referred to Margery’s ‘terrible hysteria’ and ‘hysterical temperament’ in ‘Margery the Astonishing’, The Month 2 (1936). Interestingly, whilst accepting this early ‘diagnosis’, Hope Emily Allen, the Book’s first coeditor for the EETS edition, views it in a much more positive light than Thurston and later critics of a similar opinion, regarding Margery’s ‘hysteria’ in terms of a suggestibility which is a

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and returning to its etymological root in this way, Wiessman suggests that Margery’s uncontrollable sobbings and cryings (which emerge for the first time in Jerusalem) constitute the ultimate expression of a maternalistic womb-for-womb identification with the Virgin Mary as Margery re-experiences the Passion in Jerusalem alongside the envisioned grieving Virgin. Accounts of the Virgin’s maternal suffering at Calvary, of course, were highly popular during this period and served to encourage an intensely affective response to the Passion amongst the laity. However, in most treatments of it – unlike Margery’s own – the Marian body tended to retain its dignity within the narrative. In other words, the excess of weeping and lamentation induced in the Virgin remained contained within the topos of bodily control appropriate for the mother of God. As a result, maternal suffering was partially internal, resulting ultimately in swooning and silence. This, of course, allowed the weeping Virgin to conform to the culturally desirable reticence demanded of the perfect woman whilst simultaneously giving voice to maternal grief. In one meditation on ‘þe sorowe þat oure Lady had’, for example, an account of the Passion translated into English from the writing of Pseudo-Bonaventure by Robert Manning of Brunne,72 the Virgin everywhere retains her bodily integrity in spite of the fact ‘she swouned, she pyned . . . she fylle to grounde’.73 In this text Mary’s performance of grief never transgresses the boundaries of acceptable female behaviour and any potential embarrassment is offset by the stress which is placed upon the epithets of passivity attached to her: she is ‘meke & mylde’ (line 779) and ‘so gracyus, so meke and so mylde’ (line 814), in addition to which her actions are also performed ‘softly & myldely’ (line 808). In contrast, Margery Kempe’s emulation of such a maternal expression of grief, whilst drawing on an orthodox imitatio and identification which was actually encouraged by the Church during the later Middle Ages,74 nevertheless shifts the ground beneath it by means of her quasi-hyperbolic use of words and phrases such as ‘walwyd & wrestyd’ (68), ‘roryng’ (69) and ‘labowryn’ (70). Thus, her description of her own Jerusalem experiences of the Passion comprise a radical deviation from these traditional pseudoBonaventuran narratives and inscribe upon herself an intensely active rather than a gently passive and socially acceptable performance of suffering. More pertinently too, it is a performance of maternal grief enacted and written from the perspective of a mother herself, rather than comprising an account

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‘valuable source for a historian tracing the cross-currents of religious influence in medieval East Anglia during its great period’ (The Book of Margery Kempe, p. lxv). For a cogent refutation of negatively weighted accusations of hysteria, see Atkinson, Mystic and Pilgrim, pp. 210–12. Robert Manning: Meditations on the Supper of Our Lord and the Hours of His Passion, ed. J. Meadows Cowper, EETS, o.s. 60 (London, 1875). Manning, Meditations, p. 25. For an account of this kind of identification with maternal grief again see Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, especially pp. 147, 176, 188, 191 and 192–3.

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of its appropriate expression from a male (and ecclesiastic) point of view. Such a discrepancy is, therefore, the site of yet another lacuna which opens up between the male perspective on a woman’s experience and what she experiences herself, and it is a point of slippage between representation and meaning of which Margery then proceeds to take full advantage in her text. Far from being meek and gentle, her own account of her response to the Passion in Jerusalem is laced with abandonment and indignity, so much so that even a contemporary audience well versed in devotional affectivity were entirely ‘astoynd’ by it (69): ‘þan sche fel down & cryed wyth lowde voys, wondyrfully turnyng & wrestyng hir body on euery syde, spredyng hir armys abrode as hyf sche xulde a deyd, & not cowde kepyn hir fro crying’ (70). Here, and in the narrative which follows on from this extract, Margery’s sufferings not only comprise a hyperbolised expression of those of the grieving mother but are articulated in terms of an auto-suggestive performance of the pains of childbirth fully reminiscent of the account of the pre- and post-natal suffering documented in the opening passages of the Book, as we have seen. Such a recontextualisation of that earlier suffering suggests that Margery’s extensive performances at Jerusalem are not only a result of her own visionary and affective participation in the death of Christ which she experiences there, but also serve as a validation of her own life experiences and thus separate her further from the sin of Eve which had previously been the cause of so much anxiety. Now the punishment of Eve with which she had been so well acquainted is transformed into the cathartic agony of redemption in emulation of both Mary and Christ.75 Moreover, it is a redemptive process which is identified as intensely gynaecentric and maternal. By the time Margery reaches the burial place of the Virgin, her identification with the Virgin Mother is almost complete. Here both the Virgin and Christ appear to her in order to endorse her newly acquired gift of tears and somatic bodily responses: ‘be not aschamyd . . .’ Mary tells her earthly counterpart, ‘no mor þan I was whan I saw hym hangyn on þe Cros, my swete Sone, Ihesu, for to cryen & to wepyn’ (73). It is at this point in the narrative that Margery’s long journey towards a conflation with the Virgin is finally effected, a conflation which will serve to authorise her life and her calling and which has been achieved primarily by a recontextualised and overdone performance of her own worldly motherhood.76 It is at this point that Margery’s redefined sense of

75

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For a useful examination of the unique relationship between Mary and Eve see Reed, Shadows of Mary, pp. 22–9. See also Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London, 1990), pp. 59–61 and Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York, 1993), pp. 137–8. On a parent’s emotional attachment to a child during the Middle Ages see Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, especially pp. 149–55. Here Shahar disputes earlier findings such as those of Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962), demonstrating that, rather than being a mere topos, written evidence suggests that parents displayed a great deal of affection for their infants

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identity, as informed by her own subjectivity as a mother, fully establishes itself as powerful hermeneutic in the text and from this point onwards constitutes a performance which will be publicly sustained within the new and dramatic responses to the Passion which she will display throughout the remainder of her life. Perhaps one of the most intriguing examples of Margery’s public performance of maternity is to be found in a most extraordinary encounter as she returns from Jerusalem to Rome (76–8). During this journey, Margery, who has been abandoned by her fellow pilgrims because of what they see as her embarrassing and aberrant behaviour, meets up with a ‘broke-bakkyd’ man (76) whom she attempts to persuade to accompany her to Rome. The road is fraught with dangers including many bandits eager to attack and rob the steady stream of travelers, but more tellingly, this man, Richard, fears that he will be unable to protect Margery from capture and rape along the way (incidentally confirming for us that Margery’s periodic anxiety about rape is fully justified).77 Margery, however, assures this reluctant guide, ‘God xal kepyn vs boþen ryth wel’ (77) and she offers him two nobles for his pains. Within a few miles along the road they encounter two Grey Friars accompanying an enigmatic woman carrying with her a casket which houses a curious devotional doll made in the likeness of the infant Christ. At each stop along the way, the woman removes the doll from the casket and places it in the laps of women whom she encounters. These women then proceed to dress and undress the doll and shower it with kisses ‘as þei it had ben God hymselfe’ (77). So overcome is Margery by this very physical expression of maternal devotion to the Christ child embodied in this doll that she has to be taken away temporarily and put to bed by the women who redirect their maternal ministrations from the Christ-like doll to Margery:78 Whan þes good women seyn þis creatur wepyn, sobbyn, & cryen so wondirfully & mythyly þat sche was nerhand ouyrcomyn þerwyth, þan þei ordeyned a good soft bed & leyd hir þerupon & comfortyd hir as mech as þei myth for owyr Lordys lofe, blyssed mot he ben. (78)

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in the Middle Ages. In this context, Shahar proceeds to examine parental bereavement in some detail (pp. 149–55). For her refutation of earlier findings on this issue (which suggested that parents had become indifferent to the deaths of their children), see pp. 1–4 and 145. This is also the stance taken up by Nicholas Orme in his recent reassessment of medieval childhood, Medieval Children. For other instances of this anxiety see The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 112, 113 and 241. For a variety of perspectives on representations of rape in the Middle Ages and early modern period, see Christine Rose and Elizabeth Robertson (eds), Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (Basingstoke and New York, 2002). Kathy Lavezzo has examines this incident in some detail in the context of a queer reading of The Book of Margery Kempe in ‘Sobs and Sighs between Women’, pp. 184–7. Here Lavezzo suggests that the doll becomes the instrument for a homosocial bonding between the women as well as the means by which Margery is able to represent herself as a similar object of female devotion. For an explication of this type of religious practice

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As we have seen, Margery has left her own fourteen children, including a new-born baby, back in England, something which has added to the difficulty of many critics to take Margery’s religious vocation seriously. Yet, as this episode illustrates, Margery’s motherhood is a concept which is intrinsic to her shifting identity and as we will see, possesses a flexibility which will be employed and re-employed by her wherever she travels and whatever she encounters. Here, the outpouring of maternal feeling of the women and of herself – albeit ostensibly directed at a doll – is juxtaposed as a counterbalance to the specifically male-identified violence of female rape, and it is significant that the Grey Friars and Richard are entirely excluded from the female and maternal ritual performed by these women. Through her identification and sense of solidarity with the other mothers she encounters here, Margery is establishing an alternative not only to the threat of male violence which was lurking in the shadows at the beginning of this episode but to patriarchal proscription generally to which all these women, herself in particular, are subject. Thus, the protection of God which she was so assured of receiving on the journey arrives from within herself in the form of her own maternal responses which, united with those of the other women, wrap around them like armour as they join together to assert the superiority of maternal love and compassion over the constantly hovering threat of male disapprobation and violence which everywhere permeates the narrative. As Bynum has shown, the use of such dolls as devotional objects, especially amongst women religious, was not uncommon in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. She proceeds to argue that such artifacts were increasingly seen to reflect what was considered to be a woman’s biological nature and her perceived domestic instincts, whilst serving also to sanctify these experiences at the same time.79 However, far from being ‘just little girls playing with dolls’ (as Bynum allows herself to speculate for a moment about these nuns),80 Margery and the women around her take their devotion very seriously, just as maternal work for them has been and continues to be a serious

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in medieval piety see Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 198. For an in-depth analysis of the use of ‘holy dolls’ in Florence during the fourteenth century see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Chicago and London, 1985), pp. 310–29. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 198. Also useful here is Freud’s analysis of the role played by the doll in the expression of female sexuality. On this see ‘Feminine Sexuality’, in Philip Rieff (ed.), Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York, 1963), pp. 205–6. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 198. Here Bynum proposes that this is a natural assumption to be made about those women who used the liturgical cradle from the Grand Beguinage in Louvain (now to be found in the Metropolitan Museum in New York) and which is pictured on p. 199 of her book. Perhaps more helpfully, however, Klapisch-Zuber speculates that the appearance of these devotional dolls amongst both the laity and the religious ‘broke down the transparent wall that separates reality from its figuration’ (Women, Family, and Ritual, p. 329).

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activity.81 As a result, Margery is once more driven to tears of maternal pleasure and agony, what Kristeva would recognise in terms of maternal jouissance which is brought about by the transcendence of pain through pleasure. In this context, Kathy Lavezzo has argued for such moments in the Book as displaying an intense homoeroticism as the women bond together in their reaction to a wholly ‘passivated Christ’ (sic), who thus becomes the vessel for the expression of ‘feminine needs and desires’.82 This innovative reading is further enhanced by the fact that motherhood can also constitute a similar type of female bonding agent as can lesbian sexuality, something which is important to our understanding of Margery’s complex and often genderfluid relationship with both Christ and the Virgin.83 When she is stirred to react with the grief of a bereaved mother during this episode, the other ‘mothers’ clearly recognise and identify with the language of her bodily response, solicitously putting her to bed and offering the care which seems to have been so resoundingly absent during her first traumatic birth-giving. At the same time, of course, the response of these women is evocative of familiar iconographic images of the Virgin being ministered to by women at the foot of the cross during Christ’s Passion. However, whether maternal, homoerotic or both, what is particularly pertinent about this episode is its exclusion of all men, except for the passive male child whose very passivity arguably serves to feminise him. This image of the Christ-child and the feminised scenario which encompasses him, therefore, provides a site for the displacement of patriarchal socio-religious discourse by asserting this exclusively female ritual as being of a superior eschatological value to those embraced by the men who hover around the margins of the narrative. Such an expression of a transcendent and salvific maternal jouissance has perhaps been most effectively summed up by Julia Kristeva in her analysis of the role of the Virgin Mary in western culture: Marian pain is in no way connected with tragic outburst: joy and even a kind of triumph follow upon tears, as if the conviction that death does not exist were an irrational but unshakeable maternal certainty, on which the principle of resurrection had to rest.84

Thus, Margery Kempe’s depiction of the spirituality of the women at this point can be read in terms of a specifically female, maternal and homosocial

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For a useful examination of motherhood as a philosophy, see Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (London, 1990). Here Ruddick points out that maternal work is long and arduous, forming ‘an organised set of activities that require discipline and active attention’, p. 50. Lavezzo, ‘Sobs and Sighs between Women’, pp. 175–98, especially p. 187. At one point in one of her meditations, for example, Christ thanks Margery for taking both himself and his mother into her bed, p. 214. In a different context, Klapisch-Zuber investigates the incestuous representation embodied in these devotional dolls in Women, Family, and Ritual, pp. 326–7. Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, p. 175.

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drama in which the power and the potential for agency remain with the women, a potential which, like Kristeva, she recognises as lying at the heart of motherhood – and divine motherhood in particular as its hypostatisation.85

Motherhood as Protective Strategy Yet, as Margery Kempe is soon to discover, a status as mother to the whole world does not necessarily lead to automatic acceptance in the world of men, particularly if still categorised as an earthly wife and mother. Back in England Margery continues to be vilified for not behaving in a conventional, uxorial and maternal manner. Upon her return, for example, she is accused of having borne an illegitimate child whilst on pilgrimage (103), following which ‘folke spitted at hir . . . & bannyd hir & cursyd hir & seyd þat sche dede meche harm among þe pepyl’ (105). Thus, a quest for validation of her calling leads her from city to city, many of which were centres renowned for the hounding of heretics. Her journeying is perpetually punctuated by a search for ecclesiastic support, often in vain, and by the continued need to find authorising strategies and defences to protect her from the animosity of both her peers and the authorities. Although now separated from her family, she nevertheless continues to draw upon her former subjectivity as wife and a mother, particularly upon those occasions when most under threat. Already we have seen how the cumulative experience of wifely duties, childbirth and childrearing have provided her with a way of thinking86 and have guided her spiritually, but during her pilgrimage to the north of England in 1417 Margery now begins to demonstrate how an invocation of the discourses of domesticity can create a maternal space which she can reoccupy for purposes of her own self-protection. Margery has never been averse to utilising both husband and children in order to manipulate the attitudes and reactions of others to her and such a strategy of defence proves particularly effective when she is at her moments of greatest danger when answering charges of heresy in the Lollard centres of York and Leicester. Margery is arrested at York ostensibly on suspicion of heresy but in truth it seems likely that the authorities are also challenged by her because she is travelling alone without written permission from her husband and is not dressed in the way that a categorisable wife and mother should be (122).87 85 86 87

This is a concept also examined by Ruddick, who refers to motherhood as ‘the bodily potentiality, vulnerability and power which is woman’s alone’ (Maternal Thinking, p. 48). On motherhood as providing an alternative way of thinking, again see Ruddick, Maternal Thinking, especially pp. 220 and 222–9. For a discussion of the links between fashion and the public perception of morality in the Middle Ages see J. Scattergood, ‘Fashion and Morality in the Middle Ages’, in Reading the Past: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Dublin, 1996), pp. 240–50. See also Diane Owen Hughes, ‘Regulating Women’s Fashion’, in Christiane Klapisch-Zuber (ed.),

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Arraigned before the archbishop, his first concern is that she is wearing the ambiguous white garb, leading him to question initially her sexual status rather than her religious stance (‘Art þu a mayden?’; 124).88 Margery’s measured answers, however, proceed to confound him and he becomes increasingly irate with her controlled, articulate defiance, asking the perplexed court, ‘What xal I don wyth hir?’ (125). His anger mounts as Margery refuses to swear that she will not publicly preach or teach, thus further compromising herself in a situation of intense danger, it being considered a sure sign of Lollard inclinations to refuse to swear an oath on the Bible.89 In reply, as she has done in other threatening or trying circumstances,90 Margery recounts a parabolic story there in the archbishop’s chapel, fettered as she is and hiding her shaking hands beneath her garment. It is, however, the story which is to save her life. This tale of priestly incontinence and corruption is told with great aplomb91 and contains many of the elements of traditional fairy or folk tale: a wood, nightfall, a sheltered arbour, a pear-tree in blossom, an ugly bear, a seemingly virtuous protagonist. Margery shows herself to be thoroughly well versed in the art of story-telling, probably a skill developed during the course of her twenty years of child-rearing92 when her role as mother

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Silences of the Middle Ages, A History of Women II (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 136–58. On the significance of the virginal white garb to Margery’s reconstruction of virginity, see Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 218–24. See also Mary C. Erhler, ‘Margery Kempe’s White Clothes’, Medium Aevum 62, 1 (1993), pp. 78–85. Janet Wilson has pointed out that accusations of heresy were often founded more upon the inability to classify a person rather than on an obvious lack of religious orthodoxy (‘The Communities of Margery Kempe’s Book’, in Diane Watt (ed.), Medieval Women in Their Communities (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 153–85 (p. 160)). On this see, for example, Tanner, Norwich Heresy Trials, p. 15. See also ‘The Examination of Lollards’, in Anne Hudson, Lollards and their Books (London and Ronceverte, 1985), pp. 125–40, for the most common accusations levelled against those arrested for Lollardy. See, for example, Margery’s arraignment in Canterbury before her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, pp. 27–9. Although Margery’s tale in this instance incenses the monks, it has the effect of diffusing the situation and creates the hiaitus which allows her a speedy escape. For a detailed analysis of the telling of fairy stories see Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tale (London, 1976), pp. 150–6. Here Bettelheim asserts that the effectiveness of the tale is shaped by the teller rather than the tale itself and is dependent on the narrator’s own feelings about the tale. Margery cannot afford for her tale to be ineffective or distorted by her audience at this point as she is using it to bargain for her survival. Derek Brewer has illustrated how three of the synoptic Gospels adhere closely to the formulae of folktales, emerging as they did from a tradition of oral transmission in ‘The Gospels and the Laws of Folktale’, Folklore 9 (1979), pp. 37–52. The earliest Gospel, Saint Mark’s, in particular has a familiar, colloquial style and Brewer asserts that what is written is still very close to the spoken word (p. 38). It is likely that Margery’s evident acquaintance with these Gospels would have further increased her awareness of the possibilities of oral narrative. For a discussion of women’s sociological role in the disseminating of fairy tales see Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (London, 1994), Introduction, pp. xviii–xx and 17. See also Karel Capek, Nine Fairy Tales and One More Thrown in for Good Measure, trans. Dagmar Hermann (Evanston, 1990), for a discussion of the orality of the fairy tale and of the importance of the female sphere of the hearth for its dissemination from generation to generation. Other folklorists who

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(and in keeping with those qualities of Saint Anne and the Virgin previously discussed) would have involved not only the telling of tales, nursery rhymes and singing songs but also the recounting of biblical stories.93 She moves skilfully between the language of the magical to the earthy and crude, creating a contrast and ambivalence which has always thrilled and delighted audiences and is one which invokes a similar response here from the listening court. As a result of Margery’s performance, the archbishop capitulates, praising the tale and releasing her into the custody of an escort to take her from York (128). Relying upon her narrative skills Margery diffuses a potentially explosive situation with a story. Not only that, but her anger at the injustice of her arrest, her treatment at the hands of the authorities and the attempts made to silence her voice and frustrate her vocation are also articulated as the subtext to this story which is not only about ecclesiastic hypocrisy, but also constitutes a thinly veiled attack on the humiliation she has received at their hands. If, as psychoanalysis would have it, as well as entertaining, fairy tales can also serve the purpose of enabling both teller and listener to articulate and reenact the deepest fears and frustrations in their lives and reconcile them to their own lived experiences,94 it is probably the most important story that Margery will ever tell, except perhaps for the Book itself, and is a firm testimony to Margery’s often overlooked skill as a teller of tales and their use as a medium for social and institutional critique.95 Margery’s greatest recourse to her previous role as wife and mother for purposes of self-protection is probably on arrest at Leicester during the same pilgrimage after several days of abuse and threats full of innuendo, this time of a sexual nature (111–17). Forced on this occasion too to appear before a full ecclesiastical court to answer a charge of Lollardy, once more she finds herself in a situation of mortal danger and her invocation of her role as dutiful wife of John Kempe which has been an effective protection on previous occasions has so far

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make this assertion are Linda Degh, Folktales and Society: Storytelling in a Hungarian Peasant Community (Indiana, 1969), pp. 90 and 92, and Narratives in Society: A PerformerCentred Study of Narration (Helsinki, 1995), pp. 10 and 63. Also useful in this context is Karen E. Rowe, ‘To Spin a Yarn: The Female Voice in Folklore and Fairy Tale’, in Ruth B. Bottigheimer (ed.), Fairy Tales and Society: Illusion, Allusion and Paradigm (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 53–74. On the role of the mother in the teaching of songs, rhymes, tales etc. see Orme, Medieval Childhood, pp. 129–62, especially, p. 134. For the mother’s role in the religious upbringing of her child see Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, p. 157. See also Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages, p. 116. On the nature and uses of fairy tales see Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment, especially pp. 5, 45–53 and 57–60, and Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, especially Introduction, pp. xvi and 3–197. See also Max Luthi, Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales (Bloomington, 1977), especially pp. 70 and 113–14. For an illuminating account by contemporary artist, Paula Rego, of the influence of fairy tales upon her work, see John McEwen’s interview with her in Paula Rego, The Serpentine Gallery 15 October – 20 November (London, 1988), pp. 43–4. In a Bakhtinian reading of the text, Lochrie deals briefly with Margery Kempe’s use of parable as a source of disruptive laughter in Translations, pp. 141–4.

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failed to protect her from arraignment in a court charged with sexual aggression. Although terrified, however, Margery’s reaction is incisive as she invokes an even more powerful image to reinforce proof of her religious orthodoxy and to silence her accusers. Speaking to the mayor, she admonishes him thus: ‘Sir’, sche seyde, ‘I take witnesse of my Lord Ihesu Crist, whos body is her present in þe Sacrament of þe Awter, þat I neuyr had part of mannys body in þis worlde in actual dede be wey of synne, but of myn husbondys body, whom I am bowndyn to be þe lawe of matrimony, & be whom I haue born xiiij childeryn. For I do how to wetyn, ser, þat þer is no man in þis world þat I lofe so meche as God, for I lofe hym abouyn al thynge, & ser, I telle how trewly I lofe al men in God & for God.’ (115)

In addition to asserting her belief in transubstantiation – the denial of which constituted another almost universal Lollard heresy96 – Margery delivers the coup de grace by lining up her fourteen absent children alongside her absent husband to testify in her defence as a chaste, loyal and godly woman. No matter that the ‘lawe of matrimony’ has been renegotiated in her marriage and her children are obviously being cared for by others or by each other.97 Margery is equally as capable of using protective labels to designate position and rank in the moral hierarchy of fifteenth-century England and of reappropriating the words of Paul in his first epistle to Timothy, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, which are used implicitly against her during her series of arrests. On this occasion, as at York, Margery reappropriates Pauline proscription in her own defence and in so doing successfully disrupts the hegemony of this male-dominated court by imitating their own tactics. In a hyperbolic flourish, she dismisses their accusations of fleshly incontinence by invoking the product of her marital fidelity – her children – alongside the ideal and orthodoxically approved lover of humanity – Christ – to stand between herself and her accusers. Margery’s own arbitrary categorising of herself here renders her dutiful wife, devout lover of Christ, and most effectively, the socially acceptable mother of fourteen children, which in turn diffuses the court’s antipathy and disapproval towards her. With prior

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On this see Tanner, Norwich Heresy Trials, pp. 12–22. Tanner’s findings also suggest that almost every defendant who was accused of Lollardy denied the doctrine of transubstantiation (p. 10). See John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York, 1988). Boswell asserts that parents of Margery’s class would often have paid someone else to look after some or all of their children, either part-time or permanently, which did not necessarily terminate the parent–child relationship. He adopts the term ‘extra-mural fostering’ to describe this concept (p. 358). These children, he claims, would often adopt the names of the foster family and continue with ‘their unrecorded lives’ (p. 399). This seems to me far more likely than the theory of Verena E. Neuburger who works on the premise that all of Margery’s children were dead before she embarked upon the writing of her book (‘Margery Kempe: A Study in Early English Feminism’, Zurich University dissertation (Berlin, 1994), p. 87).

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knowledge of her more than ambivalent attitude to motherhood, as readers we are privy to the irony of her performance and her manipulation of the perceived symbolic order as dictated and represented by these powerful men sitting in judgement over her. The immediate result of this adept manoeuvre is the creation of a space into which Margery moves and from where she can attack the hypocrisy and abuse of power exemplified by the steward of Leicester, for example (who has previously threatened her with rape), but which are also by implication prevalent in the attitudes of all the men in the courtroom and in patriarchal ideologies in general: ‘Also ferþermor sche seyd pleynly to hys owyn persone, ‘ “Sir, he arn not worthy to ben a meyr, & þat xal I preuyn be Holy Writte . . . for, syr, he han cawsyd me myche despite for thyng þat I am not gilty in. I pray God forheue how it” ’ (115–16). It is perhaps here that the most subtle clue lies as to the reason for the physical absence of Margery’s own children in the text. The apparent failure of representation which is thrown into relief by this sudden reinvocation of her children is the site of a fissure through which Margery is able to pass. Moving instantaneously from uncategorisable and marginal to somebody with a central social and familial role causes the meaning inscribed upon her body by the court to slip and Margery’s tactical reinstatement of all fourteen children at the forefront of both her life and her text at this point serves to reclose the fissure behind her and thus screen her from the patriarchal and prejudiced court. As a result, it is the representation she has constructed which then receives judgement. In this context, Margery never abandons her children, but carries them with her as a strategic screen with which to obscure the place which she wilfully occupies and in order to follow her vocation in a world hostile to it. In this instance the authorities are convinced as to her orthodox piety and she is released to continue her travels and her journey towards spiritual independence. In a powerful confirmatory speech towards the end of Book 1, Christ reveals just how far Margery has matured towards this autonomy. Her struggle to attain a chaste and spiritual motherhood and her ability to recontextualise her own experiences of worldly motherhood have finally effected her own spiritual freedom. In a wonderfully subversive twist (and a conversation which again smacks of authorial ventriloquism) Margery records Christ’s sympathetic understanding for herself and for all those wives and mothers who have been desirous of the same grace but who have had no choice but to endure and lament their reluctant earthly wifehood and motherhood: ‘[Þ]u thynkyst þat þu art meche beholdyn to me þat I haue houyn þe swech a man þat wolde suffryn þu leuyn chast, he beyng on lyue & in good hele of body. Forsoþe, dowtyr, þu thynkist ful trewe, & þerfore hast þu gret cawse to louyn me ryth wel. Dowtyr, hyf þu knew how many wifys þer arn in þis world þat wolde louyn me & seruyn me ryth wel & dewly, hyf þei myght be as frely fro her husbondys as þu art fro thyn, þu woldist seyn þat þu wer ryght meche beheldyn onto me.’ (212)

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Thus, in a remarkable textual flourish, Margery summarises her release from a deep anxiety coterminous with the agony of all those wives and mothers who are precluded from living the life of spirituality dictated by their impulses and desires. Now, instead of earthly children, Margery is able to give birth to a special spirituality which is the most powerful of all her progeny. It is born from the accumulation of all her earlier labours, and the pains have been long and exacting. Finally, twenty years after Margery abandons the worldly for the spiritual she gives birth to one of her greatest and lasting triumphs, ‘þis boke’, her written testimony which has made permanent the gendered space and agency created out of the constraints of her own motherhood and from which her imperative voice continues to be heard.

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2 The Motherhood Matrix in the Writing of Julian of Norwich

[T]he gestation drive – just like the desire to write: a desire to live self from within, a desire for the swollen belly, for language, for blood.1

Society and Enclosure: Maps of Experience Aftyr this my syght byganne to fayle, and it was alle dyrke abowte me in the chaumbyr, and myrke as it hadde bene nyght; save in the ymage of the crosse there helde a comon lyght, and I wyste nevere howe. Alle that was besyde the crosse was huglye to me as hyf it hadde bene mykylle occupyede with fendys. (ST, 42)

One could be forgiven for interpreting these disembodied words from Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love as the representation of the experiences of an anchoress following the act of enclosure. The door to her cell has been sealed and she is left with a sense of her own separation from the ugliness of the world and with an awareness of the brightness of the crucified Christ who alone remains with her. As the physical darkness of the anchorhold descends, so her consciousness begins to merge with the illuminated crucifix and we feel we are witnessing the approach to spiritual union of the anchoress with Christ. Yet, restored to its context, this passage describes not the mystical experience of the anchoress but that of a mortally ill woman of thirty whose mother has summoned the priest to deliver the last rites as her life ebbs away (41). The woman holds centre stage in this sickroom drama, her proximity to death diminishing her eyesight and paralysing her body. Those keeping vigil talk in hushed tones, watching and waiting, separated from Julian by her rapidly advancing death. The sickroom becomes her figurative anchorhold; the inert body which houses her soul echoes its tomb-like walls and the only visible animation is that which emanates from the suspended crucifix before her. Thus, a homogeneity between Julian’s worldly suffering in the sickroom and the otherworldly existence she will later embrace within 1

Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, p. 261.

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the anchorhold is established even in the early stages of the Short Text. This chapter will argue that Julian’s experience of both these locations of enclosure was crucial to the production of both texts and particularly to the development of imagery connected with maternity which underpins much of the visionary insight contained within them. In other words, we can recognise in Julian’s sickroom narrative evidence of an embryonic desire to withdraw into the anchoritic life in order to contemplate the meaning of her visionary experiences and to permit the development of the initial Short Text into the complex and imagistically rich Long Text. In a study of the female visionaries of the closed community of Helfta in the late thirteenth century, Rosalynn Voaden has examined the prevalent gynaecentric imagery used in the writing of these literary precursors of Julian of Norwich, namely Gertrude the Great, Mechthild of Hackeborn and Mechthild of Magdeburg, who were instrumental in the development of the cult of the Sacred Heart as it materialised at Helfta.2 The veneration of the Sacred Heart was based on belief in the Incarnation and developed out of devotion to the wound of Christ. It was from this opened side that the birth of Christ’s Church had metaphorically taken place and through which access could be gained to his womb-like redemptive heart within.3 As Voaden argues, this highly gendered image ‘became a site of female biological characteristics: it bleeds, it flows, it opens, it encloses’.4 Moreover, as Voaden also suggests, it was enclosure within the supportive and empowering environment of the female community of Helfta which allowed these women to develop this unique expression of the cult of the Sacred Heart in terms of the female. More importantly, the Helfta visionaries seem to have drawn specifically on the experiences of their own biologically female bodies and from their companionship with other females within the cloister for this particular expression of their mystical insights.5 The association made by these women in their writing between the mystical Sacred Heart of Christ (made accessible by means of his wounded side) and the female womb therefore anticipates a similar use of such imagery in the writing of Julian of Norwich, although there are crucial differences in how they employ female imagery in their writing. Both Voaden and Bynum conclude that women such as Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Hackeborn, both of whom were raised from an early age in convents, seem to have been less conditioned by prevailing attitudes towards the female intellect as inferior and the female body as corrupt than was their 2 3 4 5

Rosalynn Voaden, ‘All Girls Together: Community, Gender and Vision at Helfta’, in Watt, Women in Their Communities, pp. 72–91. For a detailed study of the development of the cult of the Sacred Heart at Helfta see Mary Jeremy Finnegan OP, The Women of Helfta (Georgia, 1991), especially pp. 131–43. Voaden, ‘Community, Gender and Vision’, p. 74. On this see Voaden, ‘Community, Gender and Vision’, p. 73. See also Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (California and London, 1982), pp. 228–9.

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contemporary, Mechthild of Magdeburg.6 As a former beguine, Mechthild of Magdeburg had lived most of her life outside the walls of the convent and her writing appears to lack the sense of authority of the other two women which was likely to have arisen from their own secure experiences as biological females living as part of an enclosed community of women.7 As a result, Mechthild of Magdeburg is far more likely to express a sense of her own unworthiness as female in her writing.8 In her book, The Flowing Light of the Divinity,9 Mechthild of Magdeburg tells her readers: ‘Now many people may wonder how I, such a sinful being can dare write such things. I can tell you truly that, had God not intervened in my heart seven years ago, I would still be silent and would never have done it’.10 Elsewhere, she similarly anticipates criticism and counters it: ‘Dear People, how can I help it if these things are happening to me and have so often happened to me? In humble humility and wretched poverty and in oppressed degradation God has shown his marvels’.11 Mechthild of Magdeburg’s employment of the topos of humility in this way would suggest that, as a woman who had lived outside the walls of the convent, she was more intrinsically aware of both the benefits and the liabilities of being classified as a vulnerable and inadequate female than were her two other contemporaries at Helfta.12 Such an awareness of this basic paradox leads her to exploit the lacuna between these two positions and embrace the notion of her femaleness as an expedient expression of a lack of both authority and power, as is clear from these extracts. The resultant void created by this lack can then be filled by the Word of God, therefore making women as the most lowly of his subjects particularly suited to this kind of divine revelation.13 In a sense too, Mechthild also envisages herself in terms of a womb which receives and encloses the redemptive seed of God in the

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8 9 10 11 12 13

This reading is also supported by that of Alexandra Barratt in her essay examining the erotic imagery in the writing of Gertrude the Great. In this essay Barratt argues for a liberated and unconditioned use of erotic imagery on the part of the writer which ‘well(s) up with a total lack of self-consciousness or guilt (‘ “The Woman Who Shares the King’s Bed”: The Innocent Eroticism of Gertrud the Great of Helfta’, in Susannah Mary Chewning (ed.), Intersections of Religion and Sexuality: The Word Made Flesh (London, 2004), pp. 105–17). Voaden, ‘Community, Gender and Vision’, pp. 72–3. For a useful essay which examines what enclosure might mean in terms of empowerment, see Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘Chaste Bodies: Frames and Experiences’, in Kay and Rubin, Framing Medieval Bodies, pp. 2–42. This is something which Bynum also points this out in Jesus as Mother, p. 214. Susan Clark (ed.) and Christiane Mesch Galvani (trans.), Mechthild von Magdeburg: The Flowing Light of the Divinity (New York and London, 1991). The Flowing Light, 3:1, pp. 65–6. The Flowing Light, 3:1, p. 61. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, p. 241. Susannah Mary Chewning draws on the psychoanalytical theories of Luce Irigaray to suggest that the mystical experience and associated loss of subjectivity is particularly suited to women, who have in any case already relinquished their subjectivity in the patriarchal social context in ‘Mysticism and the Anchoritic Community: “A Time . . . of Veiled Infinity” ’, in Watt, Women in Their Communities, pp. 116–37.

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form of the Word, gestates it within her, and then proceeds to give birth to it in the production of the written text. In an allegorical passage from The Flowing Light of the Divinity, for example, Mechthild depicts herself as a humble maiden inside a vast church who suddenly finds herself wearing a golden coronet like that of the Virgin on which is inscribed these words: His eyes in mine, His heart in mine His soul in mine, Uninhibited and unabashed.14

The concept of uninhibited enclosure here, leading to an ‘unabashed’ union with God which follows closely on from the situating of the female subject within a cavernous church/womb from which the Word of God is born, invokes the Kristevan concept of the prediscursive chora as a means of accessing a primary jouissance. In this context it is significant such a union is entirely liberating for Mechthild, achieved as it is by means of a feminine abjection, and her use of such inherently gynaecentric imagery to identify the mystic as both abject and transcendent is entirely typical of her writing.15 Moreover, by simultaneously implicating herself within the topoi of both the weak and flawed woman and the Marian salvatrix, Mechthild places herself at the forefront of the redemptive process, paradoxically empowering herself as woman, visionary and writer as she does so. Julian of Norwich also adopts to the same ends the topos of the inadequate female early in the Short Text. Here she refers to herself both as ‘a woman, leued, febille, & freylle’ (ST, 48), and as ‘a synfulle creature’ (ST, 43). Although the expression of such humilitas was clearly an accepted convention of her day, particularly for women writers,16 the use of this topos would suggest that Julian, like Mechthild of Magdeburg, had internalised contemporary socio-religious attitudes which considered women as weak and intellectually inferior beings, and that she was seeking to justify the birth of her own text at this early stage in her literary career. However, it is also significant that, like her visionary precursor, Julian also qualifies this statement of weakness with a defensive caveat: ‘Botte I wate wele this that I saye. I hafe it of the schewynge of hym that es souerayne techare’ (ST, 48). Like the Helfta visionary, Julian is depicting her perceived female weakness as the agency through which the Word of God can be made known to her ‘evencristen’. The important point as far as this present 14 15

16

The Flowing Light, 2:1, p. 34 For a more detailed examination of the appeal of such imagery to enclosed women, see my essay, ‘ “ Ant nes he him seolf reclus i maries wombe?”: Julian of Norwich, the Anchorhold and Redemption of the Monstrous Female Body’, in Liz Herbert McAvoy and Teresa Walters (eds), Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Cardiff, 2002), pp. 128–43. For a discussion of the topos of humility as used by medieval writers see Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. 2.

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study is concerned, however, is that Julian also appears to be actively transforming an apparently internalised sense of female inadequacy from a passive concept into an active and authoritative agent of redemption. Such a transformation continues to develop gradually in the Short Text, but will be entirely characteristic of the Long Text which was to preoccupy much of Julian’s more mature years, perhaps even the remainder of her life. Moreover, it demonstrates clearly an increasingly confident reliance upon the female body to provide both interpretive tool and central hermeneutic which would finally culminate in her specific inscription of the female upon God. Until fairly recent times it was widely presumed that Julian had lived her life as a nun before entering the anchorhold attached to Saint Julian’s church in Norwich as a recluse,17 and that her writing and unique theological insights which developed following her mystical experiences in 1373 were a result of years of contemplation within the relative solitude of the cloister and later in the enclosed environment of the anchorhold. However, since Benedicta Ward’s astute reappraisal of both internal and external evidence to refute this theory, her subsequent argument for Julian as having been a young wife and mother who might well have been widowed or have lost a child prior to her withdrawal into the anchorhold has brought about a radical rethink of perspective within Julian studies.18 Although Ward’s theory remains conjecture only, nevertheless it has encouraged the examination of Julian’s writing as being the product of a woman with far more worldly and secular experiences than hitherto considered. It is now considered probable that, like those worldly experiences of Mechthild of Magdeburg, Julian’s own experiences within the world were ones which could well have shaped her theological understanding and the themes and the patterns of imagery she chose to employ in order to disseminate it in her writing. Although at present we have no way of corroborating Ward’s hypothesis, as I have just suggested,

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On this see my Introduction, n. 68. Ward, ‘Julian the Solitary’, pp. 23–4. Although most commentators remain careful about making assumptions about Julian’s early life experiences because of the conjectural and circumstantial nature of the evidence, nevertheless her work is now being appraised as perhaps being the product of more diverse life experiences than religious or anchoritic enclosure would have provided. For some of those critics on both sides of the argument see my Introduction, nn. 68 and 69. More recently, in his monograph on Julian entitled Julian of Norwich: Autobiography and Theology (Cambridge, 1999), Christopher Abbott has dismissed Ward’s claim as ‘unlikely’, although he fails to elucidate why he considers this to be the case. In the same note, too, Abbott is equally as ambivalent about Julian’s anchoritic status at the time of writing because of the unsure nature of the evidence. See p. 53, n. 15. It would seem to me, however, that the evidence of local wills, which certainly place a Julian in the anchorhold in 1393, as well as The Book of Margery Kempe which places her there in 1413, and the incipit at the start of the only extant manuscript of the Short Text which designates her ‘recluse ate Norwyche and hitt ys on lyfe anno domini millesimo CCCCxiii’, when read in conjunction with Watson’s redating of both texts, would seem to provide evidence enough to dispel most conjecture. This is something I will be addressing in the final chapter of this book.

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there is no doubt that Julian’s writing is saturated with images drawn from being a woman in the world; allusions to childbirth, motherhood, sexuality and domesticity, for example, combine to form a powerful statement asserting the centrality of female experience to the redemptive process and its articulation. Such an identification of Julian with both the social and the solitary, the worldly and the spiritual therefore radically alters how we respond to her writing, particularly the different uses to which she puts the theme of motherhood in both texts, an examination of which will constitute the primary focus of this chapter. In addition, such varied experiences as a woman in the world outside the cloister would have provided the writer with the suitably accessible interpretive framework for those visionary insights which we find in her writing and, perhaps, to offer the sense of gentle authority for which it is renowned. It is likely that Julian’s withdrawal from the world did not occur until the early to mid-1390s, a time when Julian would have been about fifty years of age. Contemporary research has failed to find evidence of any solitary attached to the church of Saint Julian in Norwich in the intervening period between the 1320s and 1390s, which would seem to preclude earlier anchoritic enclosure at Norwich.19 Indeed, using the evidence of local wills, the earliest recorded bequest to an anchoress named Julian there appears to have been in 1394.20 This late date for enclosure is further supported by Nicholas Watson’s important redating of both the Short and the Long Texts. Watson has argued for the Short Text as being the product of the mid to late 1380s at the earliest,21 rather than constituting the immediate documentation of Julian’s visionary experiences soon after they occurred in the early 1370s, as was originally thought. Similarly, he demonstrates the likelihood that the Long Text is a work over which Julian laboured from the late 1380s until she died, probably some time after 1416.22 A date of enclosure for Julian as late as 1394 would therefore appear to coincide with the early stages of the Long Text and lends credence to Ward’s assertion that Julian could have continued to live in her own household alongside her mother and her servants following her visionary experiences of 1373.23 Watson’s redating therefore makes it increasingly likely that Julian would have been living and writing in a domestic, albeit

19 20 21 22

23

J. Hughes, Pastors and Visionaries: Religion and Secular Life in Late Medieval Yorkshire (Woodbridge, 1988), p. 89. See Glasscoe’s Introduction to the Long Text, p. vii. Watson, ‘Composition’, p. 663. This date is suggested by the fact that a will made by Isabel Ufforde, Countess of Suffolk, and dated 1416, records the bequest of twenty shillings to Julian, a recluse at Norwich, as cited in Glasscoe’s Introduction to her edition of the Long Text, p. vii. Although a later will dated 1429 also records a bequest to an anchorite in the church of Saint Julian’s, no recipient’s name accompanies the bequest. On this, see Long Text, Introduction, p. vii. Ward, ‘Julian the Solitary’, p. 23. For a discussion of the activities of pious laywomen such as Julian in the high to late Middle Ages see Helen Jewell, Women in Medieval England (Manchester, 1996), pp. 165–72

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devout setting prior to enclosure, rendering the earlier Short Text entirely a product of that domestic setting. Julian’s later enclosure would then have provided an appropriate environment for contemplation, deeper analysis and revision of the already completed Short Text and its reworking in the form of the Long Text, which thus becomes a product of perhaps almost a quarter of a century of writing within the anchorhold.

Anchorhold: Womb and Tomb The anchoritic life was, of course, a well-established and highly respected tradition throughout the Middle Ages and, as Ann Warren has shown, seems to have been particularly attractive for women during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.24 It is possible that women with a particularly strong calling to the religious life found that enclosure provided them with a paradoxical freedom for self-definition, self-expression and spiritual development which was unlikely to be available to them if they remained in the world. It would also mean a separation from society’s attitudes and prejudices and the creation of the space, both literal and metaphorical for a less conditioned way of thinking. The term ‘anchorite’ came originally from the Latin (and ultimately Greek) ‘anchoreta’, meaning ‘one who has withdrawn’, and in theory it implied a complete withdrawal from the world and its influences, although in practice it seems that not all female anchorites adhered so strictly to the guidelines. For example, Ancrene Wisse, an anonymous thirteenth-century work written originally as a guide for a group of anchoresses, stresses the esteem in which the anchoress was held in contemporary society but also reveals the multifarious temptations and secular influences to which the recluse could fall prey.25 Similarly, the ready access which Margery Kempe seems to enjoy to a variety of anchorites, including, of course, Julian herself, would suggest that the anchoritic life was not as segregated an existence as it is often deemed to have been. However, in a rhetorical sense at least, although often living within the heart of a bustling city, as was the case with Julian, or else often situated symbolically at its gates, the anchoress was a marginalised figure. Both physically and spiritually, she was set apart from the rest of society and, by implication, relatively free from the hitherto restrictive prejudices 24

25

Ann K. Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons in Medieval England (Los Angeles, 1985), especially pp. 20–2. For a reappraisal of the reasons for the gender imbalance within the anchoritic community in England again see my essay, ‘Redemption of the Monstrous Female Body’. J. R. R. Tolkien (ed.), Ancrene Wisse, EETS o.s. 249 (London, 1962). See in particular pp. 92–153 for an account of the bodily and spiritual temptations to which an anchoress might be subject. Contemporary research suggests that this text (of which there are several versions) was reworked for an increasingly lay audience during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. On this, see in particular Bella Millet, ‘Ancrene Wisse and the Book of Hours’, in Renevey and Whitehead, Writing Religious Women, pp. 21–40.

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and gendered attitudes of that society, as well as from the ties of family and friends. Considered to be dead to the world, an anchoress’s immurement in her cell would probably have been preceded by the recitation of the offices of Extreme Unction and the Prayers for the Dead by the bishop.26 From this point onwards her cell would be as a tomb, the marginalised domain of the living dead, and often placed in the liminal location of a churchyard or attached to the north side of a church.27 Such a notion of liminality is again drawn upon by the author of Ancrene Wisse in his explicit correlation of anchorhold and grave, a connection which reflects not only in the cell’s function of separating its occupant from the living, but also its tomb-like architecture:28 as the author asks his audience, ‘for hwet is ancre hus bute hire burinesse?’ (for what is the anchorhold but her grave?).29 It was from this location that an anchoress such as Julian would be simultaneously dead to the world and reborn into the glory of God. In this sense the anchorhold was indeed her tomb, but by means of the rebirth which it enacted and the enclosure which it performed, it was also envisaged in terms of a womb.30 Again, as the anonymous author of Ancrene Wisse tells his audience: Ant nes he him seolf reclus i maries wombe? þeos twa þing limpeð to ancre nearowðe & bitternesse. for wombe is nearow wununge þer ure lauerd wes reclus and þis word marie as ich ofte habbe iseid spealeð bitternesse hef he þenne i nearow stude þolieð bitternesse he beoð his feolahes reclus as he wes i Marie wombe.31 And was he not himself a recluse in Mary’s womb? These two things concern an anchoress: confinedness and bitterness. For the womb is a confined dwelling where Our Lord was a recluse. And this word ‘Mary’, as I have often said, means ‘bitterness’. If you then endure bitterness in a confined place, you are his fellows, recluse as he was in Mary’s womb.

26 27

28 29 30

31

On this, see, for example, Frances Beer, Women and the Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1992), p. 121. See Roberta Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture: The Archaeology of Religious Women (London and New York, 1994), for a study of how gender works in relation to material culture. In particular, Gilchrist examines how attitudes towards gender influenced the archaeology of churches and nunneries in the Middle Ages. For the prevalence of anchorholds placed on the north side of churches, see p. 177. See also Christiania Whitehead, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory (Cardiff, 2003), for an in depth study of the use of architectural allegory in the literature of the Middle Ages. See in particular pp. 91–2 for a discussion of architectural allegory in Ancrene Wisse. For a description of the architecture of a selection of anchorholds in England see Gilchrist, Gender and Material Culture, p. 178. See also Warren, Anchorites and Their Patrons, pp. 31–4. Ancrene Wisse, p. 58. This image of the anchorhold as womb draws upon imagery connected with the ancient Sibyl within the classical tradition, a connection which I will examine in Chapters 5 and 6, as well as the penitential prison-like caves to which the Desert Fathers withdrew and, as Roberta Gilchrist has illustrated, is part of an ongoing ontological association between the mysteries of the womb and mystical insight. Gilchrist (Gender and Material Culture, p. 181). Ancrene Wisse, p. 192.

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For the anchoress then, the movement into the tomb of the anchorhold, as well as constituting a figurative death, could also be seen in terms of a return to the womb, a rejection of the past and the announcement of the beginning of a new life, a passion which would be enacted until the moment of her physical death.32 For Julian, the material expression of that new life and passion became her Long Text which, if we adhere to Watson’s assessment, was created over the duration of her life within the womb-like anchorhold and is therefore coterminous with her physical and spiritual rebirth into the more mature wisdom and understanding which she herself identifies in the Long Text, as we shall see. In this way, the extraordinarily complex use to which Julian puts the theme of motherhood in her texts can now be examined in terms of the older woman’s response to worldly motherhood, the maternal body and the recontextualisation of both within the context of an articulation of the mystical experience.

Images of the (M)other: Tears, Suffering and Jouissance As the inheritor of a well-established tradition of female anchoritism, such as that reflected in the Ancrene Wisse, much of Julian’s writing evidences aspects of a specifically female spirituality. However, like that displayed by Julian’s forerunner, Mechthild of Magdeburg, this spirituality is one which seems to have been firmly mediated by traditional attitudes towards women and their problematic bodies, as has been suggested. Like Mechthild, too, these attitudes seem to have been simultaneously internalised and exploited by the writer in the production of a series of hermeneutics which interrogate traditional notions of God and serve to assert the feminine as an alternative means of accessing him. Knowledge of and/or misconceptions about the workings of the female body, of course, had shaped the spirituality of women over countless millennia as much as it had done their physical lives. At various stages within the human history of the West woman had been sometimes worshipped (as in the goddess-revering cultures of the ancient world),33 subjugated as sinful (a primary tenet within the medieval Church), or idealised (as in the various cults based on the maternal saints discussed in the previous chapter). Intense debate about the relation between motherhood, human sexuality and how both fitted into God’s divine plan for humankind characterised much intellectual activity 32

33

For enclosure as a re-enactment of the Passion see Nicholas Watson, ‘The Methods and Objectives of Thirteenth-Century Anchoritic Devotion’, in Marion Glasscoe (ed.), The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Papers Read at Dartington Hall, July 1987: Exeter Symposium 4 (Cambridge, 1987), p. 142. On the tradition of the goddess, see Gerder Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, Chapter 7, especially pp. 141–4. Also useful on this subject is Gimbutas, Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, pp. 152–200.

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throughout the Middle Ages, both in a secular and a religious context. In recent times Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset have suggested that popular medieval theories pertaining to female sexuality (most of which were based on the teachings of Aristotle and Galen) were perpetually being reinterpreted and reworked in order to support the cultural belief in the superiority of the male contribution to procreation.34 This putative superiority hinged on the ‘one sex’ model of human anatomy – that is to say, the belief that the female was anatomically merely a defective male with a sexual physiology analogous to that of the male, only inverted and internal.35 Similarly, whereas the male was considered to be hot and dry, the female was considered to be of a much colder and wetter disposition and as a result constantly craved union with the heat of the male through repeated intercourse.36 The belief in such a physical need for sexual intercourse therefore served to justify the existence of sexual pleasure in medical discourse by stressing its biological purpose. Since human beings were not considered to be endowed with unflawed wisdom and limitless self-knowledge, the void had been filled by an all-powerful pleasure principle attached to sex in order to guarantee the preservation of humankind and we find many medical treatises from the Middle Ages repeating this type of justification.37 Theology, however, kept encountering difficulties in its attempt to reconcile itself with such medical theory, and medieval theologians continually grappled with problems connected to the existence of sexual pleasure. Medical theory, however, continued to pursue its own logic, seemingly heedless of religious implication and ultimately left the patient with the responsibility of choosing which course of action to take – that is to say, whether to follow the demands of the body at the risk of endangering the soul or vice versa.38 Nevertheless, within medical discourse, there was also a belief that excess intercourse, or intercourse outside of marriage, could result in infertility because of the slippery nature of the womb if not restricted to a single partner. As a result, in medical terms, a lack of sexual control came to be seen merely as a vice based on excess, whereas in theological terms, it was viewed as a sin.39 As Jacquart and Thomasset have demonstrated, the link between medical and theological discourse was therefore a close one and throughout history theology would construct its sexual ethics on the medical beliefs which were promoted during any given period.40 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

Jacquart and Thomasset point out that this was particularly true of the fourteenth century when Aristotelian ideas were riding to ascendancy (Sexuality and Medicine, p. 195). See Laqueur, Making Sex, pp. 25–62, and also Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, pp. 31–4, for a summary of the Aristotelian influence on medieval thought, and Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 220–1, for a discussion of how the human body was seen as ‘paradigmically male’. On this see Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, pp. 19–26. Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, p. 80. Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, p. 196. Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, p. 81. Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, p. 195.

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Medical and theological views of women in particular during the fourteenth century thus served to reinforce one another and would no doubt have been thoroughly internalised by women such as Julian and her female contemporaries.41 One of the primary results emerging from all this was that full expression of female sexuality tended only to be culturally acceptable within the context of marriage – and preferably motherhood too,42 although this was further problematised by the ascendance of the cult of the Virgin, which had been developing inexorably since the fifth century.43 As Maurice Hamington has suggested in his study of the fragile relationship between Catholicism and womanhood, the concentration on the sexual status of the Virgin Mary and the creation of the ‘unique religious image of virgin motherhood’ has always had a problematic effect upon its Christian adherents because of its ultimate unobtainability.44 Whether this served to restrict women – either physically in the suppression or extinction of their sexual desire, or psychologically in that they were constantly made aware of their own sinful state as Eve’s daughters – is still a matter open for debate,45 but what is evident is that motherhood provided an important motif or matrix for many medieval writers attempting to describe the love of God for his human creation and the reciprocal love of humankind for God. As discussed in the previous chapter, the iconographic motif of Jesus as mother feeding sinful humans from his motherly breasts was a popular one during the later Middle Ages, developing alongside a more affective expression of spirituality from the eleventh century onwards.46 As devotion began to concentrate on the humanity of Christ rather than the trinitarian Godhead, there was no better symbol than woman as the most fleshly and fallen of humankind to illustrate God’s condescension in becoming human. The seemingly ‘natural’ act of a mother breast-feeding her child thus provided a powerful representation of the bond between God and humankind. The fact that in the medieval belief system, milk and blood were considered to be variants in a ‘corporeal economy of fluids and organs’,47 a complex web of symbolic representation centring on sacrifice and salvation came into play, something which women writers such as Julian and Margery were able to draw upon, develop and exploit to its fullest potential. In her Long Text, for example,

41

42 43

44 45 46 47

Watson defends what he sees as an apparent lack of radicalness in women writers of the Middle Ages by asserting that most women accepted the notions of gender difference and tried to interpret them as positively as they could (‘Remaking “Woman” ’, p. 8). Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, pp. 144–93. For a summary of the process of construction of the cult of the Virgin, see Maurice Hamington, Hail Mary: The Struggle for Ultimate Womanhood in Catholicism (London, 1995), pp. 9–29. See also Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, especially pp. 68–78. Hamington, Hail Mary, p. 53. Warner asserts that the cult of the Virgin sets up an impossible double bind for women, leading them to a position of hopelessness (Alone of All Her Sex, p. 337). Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 212–18. Laqueur, Making Sex, p. 35. See also Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, p. 52.

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Julian asserts unequivocally in the context of God’s love that ‘the moders service is nerest, redyest and sekirest, for it is most of trueth’ (LT, 97), illustrating an apparent internalisation of common notions about Christian motherhood, as well as an ability to exploit them by immediately putting them to work in the creation of a language of maternity readily accessible to her ‘evencristen’. One commentator who concurs with this reading of Julian is Elizabeth Robertson who considers the author to be ‘a subtle strategist who sought to undo assumptions about women and to provide . . . a new celebration of femininity through contemplation of Christ’s “feminine” attributes’.48 Moreover, as Robertson also argues, Julian’s internalising of essentialist assumptions is symptomatic of a desire to take part in the dialogue attached to contemporary religious debate and that the end product of this participation, rather than being subversive, is celebratory.49 And, indeed, there is much that is celebratory about the use of the motherhood matrix in Julian’s writing. There is also considerable evidence in both texts to suggest that she saw motherhood as a powerful trope to explain the mystical experience and her unique knowledge of God. Of course, Julian’s theological exposition of the Motherhood of God is not unique to her writing, as Caroline Walker Bynum has clearly demonstrated.50 However, as developed in the Long Text, Julian’s treatment of it is now probably the best known and most fully expounded example of this trope in fourteenth-century religious writing. Nevertheless, its pervasiveness within both of Julian’s texts has continued to be vastly underestimated by modern commentators. Indeed, the concept of motherhood as a literal truth, metaphorical tool, textual matrix, religious ideology and philosophy is central to her work, underpinning both the Short and the Long Texts. A brief article by Sarah McNamer appearing in 1989 has done much to alert modern scholars to some of the more subtle uses to which Julian puts the theme of motherhood in her writing and modern Julian scholarship has much reason to be endebted to her astute and insightful investigation.51 Nevertheless, the brevity of McNamer’s study has left gaps in our understanding and the remainder of this chapter will therefore continue the examination from where McNamer left it, serving to uncover some of the more strategic uses to which Julian puts the motherhood theme in her work. Perhaps the most literal representation of motherhood with which Julian presents us is to be found in the allusion to her own mother at the onset of the Short Text. Along with other unspecified persons, possibly friends or relatives, she is keeping vigil over her mortally ill daughter, a practice which 48

49 50 51

Elizabeth Robertson, ‘Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings’, in Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (eds), Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia, 1993), p. 161. Robertson, ‘Medieval Medical Views’, p. 161. Bynum, Jesus as Mother Sarah McNamer, ‘The Exploratory Image: God as Mother in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love’, Mystics Quarterly 15, 1 (1989), pp. 21–8.

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seems to have been entirely in keeping with deathbed ritual amongst the gentry and nobility in the fifteenth century.52 At this point, Julian’s ‘curette’ is summoned to deliver the last rites, and those who care most about Julian’s physical and spiritual welfare, particularly her mother, are depicted as watching, waiting and praying, vigilant in addressing her needs whilst her illness reaches crisis.53 There is no doubt here that they are also witnesses to what Julian herself initially suspects is an interlude of madness (‘and I sayde that I hadde raued þat daye’; ST, 72), but what is in fact the onset of her extraordinary visionary experiences. Julian’s detailing of a delicate and touching moment of reciprocal laughter due to her realisation that ‘the feende ys ouercomyn’ (ST, 51) adds to the atmosphere of mother–daughter intimacy which she seems to be establishing in her account of this episode. When the moment comes when the onlookers are convinced of Julian’s death, however, it is – significantly – her own mother who takes control of the situation and attempts to close the eyes of her daughter: ‘My modere that stode emangys othere and behelde me lyftyd vppe hir hande before me face to lokke myn eyen, for sche wenyd I had bene dede or els I hadde dyede’ (ST, 54). In commenting on this incident, Ward is unduly harsh in her response to this maternal reaction and misses the multivalence of the description altogether: It always worried me to think that a woman of Julian’s maturity still held such memories of her own mother but showed no warmth at all in her solitary mention of her; in fact, her own mother totally misunderstood her, and attempted to close her eyes when all Julian wanted was to have them wide open.54

Far from lacking in warmth, however, the response of Julian’s mother is qualified by this touching display of a heightened concern for her dying daughter, mixed as it is with a poignant misunderstanding. Julian’s medical condition has rendered her unable to move, the reflex action of her eyes is inoperative and her attention is rooted to the crucifix before her from which her visions are emanating. Not privy to her daughter’s visionary encounter, from her different vantage point the mother naturally presumes her daughter’s 52

53

54

For a description of medieval deathbed ritual see Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes towards Death from the Middle Ages to the Present (London, 1976), p. 12. Here Ariès claims that death would become a type of public ceremony with the bedchamber becoming a public place to be entered and left at will by family, friends and neighbours, a gathering which would also include children. For an interesting analysis of the nature of Julian’s illness, see James McIlwain, ‘The “Bodelye syeknes” of Julian of Norwich’, Journal of Medieval History 10 (1984), pp. 167–80. McIlwain identifies four disorders as being the leading candidates for a correct diagnosis of Julian’s illness: diphtheria, inflammatory polyneuropathy, tick paralysis and botulism. Of the four, he argues, ‘ botulism seems the most likely to have been responsible for Julian’s illness’, p. 167. Ward, ‘Julian the Solitary’, p. 24.

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demise and Julian’s phrasing of the episode with her use of words such as ‘behelde me’ and ‘wenyd’, far from being indicative of cold detachment, in fact articulates a connection between mother and daughter which is imbued with intimacy. Julian’s mother is watching her deterioration closely and responding to what she is witnessing with care and concern. This woman is performing one of the last bodily acts available to her as a mother as she reaches forward to close the eyes of her seemingly dead daughter and her misunderstanding, rather than rendering her culpable, as Ward’s reading would intimate, serves to articulate the unique space into which Julian is moving as a result of the experiences which will forever separate her from the days of her youth. Julian’s sorrow and anxiety are therefore represented as twofold: she does not want to relinquish the vision of Christ which has been granted her and yet is aware of the misconception – and the consequent sorrow – of her mother. Unable to reassure her, the pain she feels for her mother’s sense of loss becomes palpable, juxtaposed as it is with the reference to Julian’s own pain engendered by the fear of the potential loss of Christ within the enclosed sickroom: ‘And this encresyd mekille my sorowe, for nouhtwithstandynge alle my paynes, I wolde nouht hafe been lettyd for loove that I hadde in hym’ (ST, 54). Thus, even at this early stage in the narrative, we see Julian subtly translating the experience of maternal grief into an expression of the pain and subsequent despair caused by the potential loss of Christ. Drawing on her own mother’s muted sense of loss here, Julian proceeds to assert that the loss of Christ would be so unbearable that she would prefer to ‘hafe dyede bodylye’ herself. Thus, in her analysis of her deeply personal experience of the Passion in that room of sickness, whilst in the company of her own mother, Julian identifies with a worldly, maternal despair of loss, which she will subsequently reappropriate as primary hermeneutic to describe that most indescribable loss of all, the loss of Christ. ‘I thougt, “Es any payne in helle lyke this payne?” And I was aunswerde in my resone that dyspayre ys mare for that es gastelye payne’ (ST, 54). Julian’s treatment of her material here is wholly in keeping with what Watson has recognised as the ability of medieval women writers to adopt and render positive many of those negative attitudes which abounded towards them.55 It is therefore apt that in order to contextualise and validate the discourse of maternal loss she is engaging with here, Julian now moves on from the description of her own mother to a depiction of the most revered of all mothers, the Virgin Mary, in her role as Mater Dolorosa standing with the disciples at the foot of the cross. Moreover, this narrative transition from her own mother to Virgin Mary is an entirely seamless one, the depiction of Mary obviously predicated upon the role which Julian’s own mother herself has just been performing in the narrative:

55

See Introduction, pp. 23–4.

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Hereyn I sawe in partye the compassyon of oure ladye saynte Marye, for criste & scho ware so anede in loove that þe gretness of hir loove was the cause of the mykillehede of hir payne. For so mykille as scho lovyd hym mare than alle othere, her payne passed all othere, and so alle his disciples & alle his trewe lovers suffyrde paynes mare than thare awne bodelye dying. (ST, 55)

This allusion to the Virgin and the disciples draws upon the scenario of family and friends gathered around Julian in her own suffering which she has just been recounting and draws a firm link between worldly and visionary experience which will characterise her exposition of the entire mystical encounter. Julian’s imitatio here is therefore multilayered: not only is she linking the pain of her own mother to that of Mary, but in acknowledging the role played by herself as source of that pain, identifies with Christ in an imitatio of his own particular moment of suffering. Thus, as Christ is to the Virgin, so Julian is ‘anede’ to her own mother and as a result this multifaceted correlation between herself and Christ as suffering children, and between both suffering mothers, is skilfully manipulated in order to render her new mystical understanding of God’s love in terms of the relationship between mother and child. In so doing, she manages even at this early point to articulate clearly the maternal bond as being representative of the love shared between God and humanity in its never-ending cycle of maternal and filial reciprocity. Such a use of the link between motherhood and emotional vulnerability is used by Julian elsewhere in her depictions of the Virgin in other guises. Soon after this first encounter in the Short Text Julian tells us that the Virgin appears to her as a ‘sympille maydene & a meeke, honge of age in the stature that scho was when scho conceyvede’ (ST, 44). This time Julian is drawing on a tradition of the mother of God as a child-woman, a representation which was fundamental to the development of the cult of the Virgin within the medieval Church.56 The fact that Mary is also ‘owre ladye’ therefore serves to create a tension in the text. She is both child and woman, simple and yet her soul is constituted of both ‘wisdom’ and ‘trowth’. This apparently oxymoronic assertion, of course, as well as reflecting the essential paradox within the concept of virgin motherhood, in fact echoes perfectly the position of the ordinary, worldly mother within medieval society. Considered potent in her role as carer, teacher, nurturer and guide for the child and as sustainer of 56

Depictions of the Virgin as a precociously adult child are common in the many noncanonical representations of her which proliferated during the Middle Ages. See, for example, J. K. Elliott (ed.), The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation based on M. R. James (Oxford, 1993), pp. 48–67. In this account the young Mary is subject to excessive piety and daily visions, even as a small child. Similarly, the East Anglian N-Town Mary Play initially depicts Mary as a highly articulate three-year old, dressed in white and already fully acquainted with her unique destiny (Stephen Spector (ed.), N-Town Play, 2 vols EETS s.s. 11 and 12 (Oxford, 1991), vol. 1, p. 82).

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home and family, yet the mother has also always been subject to the constraints of a patriarchal society which simultaneously serve to marginalise and control her and yet render her a central figure within the domestic and familial realm.57 This crisis of identity has again been recognised in more modern times by Kristeva who argues that the Virgin’s dualism comes closest to representing the lived experience of the mother within society in that she continues to be the embodiment of both female masochism and female jouissance.58 This, claims Kristeva, is the reason behind an increasing number of churches which were dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when there was a new tolerance of marriage and an idealisation of motherhood in particular as a means towards redemption.59 For women, therefore, the figure of the Virgin served to forge and affirm accepted socio-religious ideology; as Kristeva points out, then as now, the future of the species was dependent on the self-sacrificial or masochistic work of the mother, but such self-sacrifice could also result in endless jouissance because of a belief in her own procreative power.60 Thus, in Julian’s empathetic representation of the Virgin we are able to recognise the same paradox; not only does she display a type of self-sacrificial masochism but also demonstrates a jouissance which will later result in her transformation into triumphant Queen of Heaven and crucial member of the salvific hierarchy: ‘ryght so he schewed here than, hye and nobille and gloriouse and plesaunte to hym abouen alle creatures’ (ST, 59). Through her humility, then, and her suffering – what Kristeva would define as a specifically maternal masochism – Mary has achieved the ultimate reward. However, whereas for Kristeva the image of the transcendent Virgin is a coercive one ‘utilised by totalitarian powers of all times to bring women to their side’,61 here Julian reappropriates the coerciveness of the image in order to manipulate and exploit it to her own textual – and personal – advantage. In so doing, she creates a hermeneutic of the maternal female in order to express the essentially inexpressible. As a result, Christ is now ‘mare gloryfyed as to my syght than I sawe hym before’. As a mirror image of his own mother’s suffering and transcendence of it, Christ’s salvific labouring on the cross becomes the process by which he gives birth to redemption for humanity. Thus, Christ is already being absorbed into a hermeneutic of divine motherhood, even at this early point in Julian’s writing, and such a depiction forms a clear precedent for the passages which will represent him explicitly as our mother in the Long Text.62 57

58 59 60 61 62

For a discussion of this dualism in connection with the influence of the Virgin see Hamington, Hail Mary, p. 151. This is also addressed by Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, p. 254. Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, pp. 160–85. Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, p. 171. On this, see also Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, p. 144–5. Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, p. 172. Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, p. 183. See in particular Long Text, pp. 93–103.

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Blood and the Imagery of Childbirth In the context of the Julian’s use of motherhood as interpretive and explicatory tool, there are two major patterns of imagery which work together to reinforce this developing notion of motherhood as a means of understanding Julian’s mystical perception of the word of God. The first of these is the use of blood and the associated imagery of fluids, part of a recurring pattern which permeates both the Short and the Long Texts; the second takes up the theme of enclosure with reference to the womb. Both image patterns again draw heavily on contemporary Aristotelian beliefs about the female body, and the synonymy of blood, sweat, tears, milk and urine. According to such beliefs, women tended to be identified with an unsealed body which was characterised by blood-loss, lactation and weeping. It is therefore highly significant that Julian’s suffering Christ is particularly susceptible to just such a loss of moisture during her vision of the Passion.63 Again in the Short Text, Julian’s vision of the crucified Christ is dominated by the shedding of his blood, a blood-loss which she sees ‘trekylle downe fro vndyr the garlande alle hate, freschlye, plentefully, & lyvelye’ (ST, 43). The association drawn immediately between this bleeding and Christ’s redemptive suffering again echoes the female masochism of the suffering mother in that it is an expression of ‘anly lovynge’ and ‘tendyr loove’ (ST, 43) – just as the labouring mother sheds her own blood and suffers to bring her child into the world. This is further reinforced later in the text when Julian returns to the image of Christ’s blood-loss. Now she muses that ‘hif itt hadde bene so in kynde . . . itt schulde hafe made the bedde alle on blode & hafe passede on abowte’ (ST, 50). Read in the context of Julian’s earlier identification with the suffering Christ, the association drawn here between blood-loss and bed – in fact, the bed which is currently being occupied by a woman’s own suffering body – creates a subtext which equates Christ’s precious blood with a specifically female blood-loss, whether ruptured hymen, menstrual flow, or blood-loss associated with childbirth. Thus, the bleeding of Christ is depicted not in traditional terms of the blood-loss associated with Christ as wounded soldier, such as we find in the texts of Langland and other of Julian’s near-contemporaries,64 but is subtly feminised by means of its association with the sickroom and suffering body of the woman onlooker, Julian. It therefore comes as no surprise to find that in the equivalent passages in the Long Text Julian

63

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For a useful discussion of the influence of this belief system upon women’s lives see Robertson, ‘Medieval Medical Views’, pp. 142–67, and on the associations of fluids p. 149. See also p. 73, n. 36 below. See, for example, William Langland, Piers Plowman, Passus XVIII, for a protracted representation of Christ as medieval knight. See also the allegory of the lady and the king in Ancrene Wisse, pp. 199–200.

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proceeds to develop this association more explicitly. Like the blood of childbirth or menstruation, for example, it appears to be a woundless bleeding: ‘so plenteously the hote blode ran oute that there was neither sene skynne ne wound, but as it were al blode’ (LT, 19). Contrary to most popular depictions of the bleeding Christ, the blood emerges from an open but apparently woundless body – just as it would have done ‘if it had be so in kind’ (LT, 19). Julian then continues by associating this blood with water (‘God hath made waters plentivous in erthe . . . but yet lekyth him better that we take full homely his blissid blode to washe us of synne’; LT, 19), a traditional biblical allusion which now, however, takes on a new relevance. Not only do both water and blood flow from Christ’s side during the Crucifixion, they flow also from the similarly opened body of the birthing mother. Just as the mother’s labour brings forth new life along with blood and amniotic fluid, so Christ through his labour on the cross and his exuding of blood and water gives birth to human redemption. In both cases too, the labouring process brings about a bodily dryness and aridity, an image pattern which wholly dominates Julian’s Eighth Revelation (LT, 24–31). Here she considers the shriveling of Christ’s flesh as ‘the maste payne of his passion’ (LT, 25), a suffering which is encapsulated quite simply in his dying words, ‘I threste’. Loss of fluid and the resultant thirst, of course, are experiences which are integral to the birth experience,65 and by linking the images of blood, water and thirst and associating them with the labouring body of Christ, Julian presents him explicitly as a labouring mother; in so doing she asserts a recontextualised maternal body as central to an understanding of the redemptive process. Moreover, the authority which she uses to validate this depiction is drawn from her own bodily experiences of extreme suffering: ‘And I was als barane and drye as hif I hadde neuer had comforth before bot litille’ (ST, 72). Thus Julian again implicates both herself and the maternal female in the pattern of imagery she chooses to employ, overlaying it upon traditional representations of a bleeding Christ and thus modifying its import. In effect, she validates

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This has also been pointed out by Maud Burnett McInerney in an essay which focuses on Julian’s construction of a poetics of anchoritism in her writing. ‘ “In the Meydens Womb”: Julian of Norwich and the Poetics of Enclosure’, in John Carmi Parsons and Bonnie Wheeler (eds), Medieval Mothering (London and New York, 1996), pp. 157–99 (p. 171). Traditional childbirth iconography frequently included images depicting the offering of wine or water to the newly delivered mother, for a selection of which see Jacqueline Marie Mussacchio, Art and Ritual in Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven and London, 1999), especially pp. 12, 40, 43, 81 and 107. This is also corroborated by the multiplicity of water or wine-based herbal concoctions which the midwife is instructed to administer to the labouring mother. See, for example, The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing: A Middle English Version Derived from the Trotula Texts, ed. Alexandra Barratt (Turnhout and Cheltenham, 2001), in which travailing women are to be offered ‘watyre of fenygrek’ (p. 64), ‘ysop & hiote water’ (p. 64), ‘myrre . . . in wynne’ (p. 64), ‘ptisan made with barly dryed before & sodyn in watyre’ (p. 82). Perhaps even more pertinently here, this text advises that a woman haemorrhaging in labour should be given ‘juce of syngrene with red wynne’ to arrest the blood-flow (p. 80).

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the concept of female participation within theological discourse by means of an inscription of a female-identified body upon the suffering and bleeding Christ. Another recurrent image in Julian’s writing is that of the womb, a specifically female image and one which was closely connected to the concept of enclosure within an anchorhold, as we have seen.66 Like the image of Jesus as Mother, the womb metaphor had been used before – in the image of the Sacred Heart discussed in the context of the Helfta visionaries at the start of this chapter, for example. However, in the hands of Julian it becomes transformed from traditional topos into fundamental hermeneutic which pervades her writing. In fact, images of enclosure in Julian’s writing begin to take on, in the words of Maud Burnett McInerney, an ‘almost mesmeric repetition’ as her texts progress, especially the use of the words ‘closyd’ and ‘beclosyd’ in the Long Text:67 [T]he depe wisdam of the Trinite is our moder in whom we arn al beclosid; the hey goodnes of the Trinite is our lord and in him we arn beclosid and he in us. We arn beclosid in the Fadir, and we arn beclosid in the Son, and we arn beclosid in the Holy Gost; and the Fader is beclosid in us, and the Son is beclosid in us, and the Holy Gost is beclosid in us. (LT, 87)

Thus, according to McInerney: ‘Julian develops the concept of enclosure into an imagistic system which plays upon the related images of anchorhold and womb, developing a discursive strategy that links the apophatic and the maternal’.68 Such an imagistic system, of course, like that of motherhood, is dependent for its import upon contemporary attitudes towards the womb which were equally as ambivalent as those towards motherhood. On the one hand medical texts informed their readers such things as ‘whatever superfluities are generated during the course of the month may be sent to this organ, as if to form the bilge-water of the whole body; this is the nature of the menses which women have’. On the other, the very same text could offer a set of wholly contradictory images such as ‘this organ is also nature’s field, which is cultivated that it may bear fruit’.69 The womb, therefore, was simultaneously the seat of poison and procreation, a paradox which was further enhanced by widespread belief in the Platonic concept of an insatiable and 66

67 68 69

Although sceptical that Julian was an anchoress at the time of writing the Long Text, McInerney suggests that she was nevertheless thinking like an anchoress. ‘ “In the Meyden’s Womb” ’, p. 160. McInerney, ‘ “In the Meyden’s Womb” ’, p. 157. McInerney, ‘ “In the Meyden’s Womb” ’, p. 158. Anatomia Cophonis (sometimes referred to the as the Anatomia Porcis because of the Salernian practice of dissecting pigs rather than human corpses for purposes of anatomical study). This text, probably composed between 1100 and 1150, comprised one of the most important of Salernian texts. For a modern edition see G. W. Corner (ed.), Anatomical Texts of the Earlier Middle Ages, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 364 (Washington, 1927), pp. 48–50.

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‘wandering womb’. Within this economy, the womb was envisaged as a dangerous living animal able to wander around the body at will if not regularly satiated by sexual intercourse and pregnancy.70 In the same way, therefore, that Julian exploits socio-religious ambivalence towards motherhood for her own hermeneutic purposes, so now we see her exploiting the mouvance arising from cultural ambivalence towards the womb in order to further illuminate God’s love for humankind. Perhaps one of the most memorable symbols used by Julian which is demonstrative of this – and one which incorporates a conglomeration of her gynaecentric imagery – is the womb-like hazelnut, which appears in both texts. It is significant in this context that Julian introduces the image by identifying Christ once more in terms of the offices of the mother to her child, again employing the familiar trope of enclosure: ‘He is our clotheing that for love wrappith us, halseth us and all beclosyth us for tender love’ (LT, 7). She then she proceeds to transform this insight into one of the most memorable metaphors within her writing: Also in this he shewed a littil thing, the quantitye of an hesil nutt in the palme of my hand; and it was as round as a balle. I lokid thereupon with eye of my understondyng and thowte: ‘What may this be?’ And it was generally answered thus: ‘It is all that is made.’ (LT, 7)

It is eminently possible that, as well as drawing on a common domestic image here (the hazel-nut was used as a kitchen measure), Julian is also making reference to the single reference to a nut which appears in the popular, highly influential and erotically charged biblical poem, the Song of Songs, with which she would certainly have been familiar.71 The relevant section of the poem reads: ‘I went down into the garden of nuts, to see the fruits of the

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According to Plato, ‘In women . . . what is called the matrix or womb, a living creature within them with a desire for child-bearing, if it be left long unfruitful beyond the due season, is vexed and aggrieved, and wandering throughout the body and blocking the channels of the breath, by forbidding respiration brings the sufferer to extreme distress and causes all manner of disorders; until at last the Eros of the one (the male) and the Desire of the other bring the pair together’ (Francis Macdonald Cornford (trans.) Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato (London, 1937), p. 357). For a useful and informative study of this particular belief in the context of iconographic representation in the Middle Ages, see Laurinda S. Dixon, ‘The Curse of Chastity: The Marginalization of Women in Medieval Art and Medicine’, in Robert Edwards and Vickie Ziegler (eds), Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society (Woodbridge, 1995), pp. 49–74. For the religious influence of the Song of Songs and the sermons on them written by Bernard of Clairvaux see Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner, ‘Puellae Litterae: The Use of the Vernacular in the Dominican Convents of Southern Germany’, in Watt, Women in Their Communities, pp. 58–9. Here Ehrenschwendtner looks at the tradition which would have been inherited by Julian and emphasises that the widespread nature of its influence should not be underestimated.

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valleys, and to look if the vineyard had flourished, and the pomegranates budded.’72 The Latin Vulgate, renders the word as nux (feminine) meaning a ‘nut’ or ‘a thing of no value’. However, within the context of the Song of Songs the tiny nut of little value takes on an inordinate significance in its association with the hortus inclusus which is also the location of sexual desire and its fulfilment.73 Not only is there an abundance of nuts in the garden but the nut with its hard and enclosed shell becomes a synecdoche for the garden itself with all its procreative and erotic potentialities. In similar vein, the hazelnut of Julian’s text takes up this theme of reproductive potential which the theme of womb-like enclosure has already established in the text and, in particular, reiterates the powerful/powerless paradox which we saw Julian draw upon in the context of the Virgin. Not only is it ‘a litill thing’ which can lie in the palm of the hand, but enclosed within it is ‘all that is made’ (LT, 7). When examined in association with Julian’s other use of gynaecentric imagery, the hazelnut encompasses perfectly all the patterns which we have seen emerge so far. Like the womb (and like Mary and all women generally) this ‘litill thing’ is small and intact and yet it is capable of housing within its walls future promise and growth. It will bring forth a new tree infinitely larger than itself and infinitely more powerful. Such was the womb of Mary which housed the world’s salvation within it and such is the womb of those women who will give birth to future generations of ‘evencristen’. Similarly, just as the hazelnut is dependent on the earth for survival and fruition, so the medieval belief system associated woman with earth and matter.74 Thus, the unborn child is as dependent on the mother for its bodily form and survival as the hazelnut is on the earth, and Christ was on his earthly mother. Thus, both images – that of nut and of womb – become conflated to encapsulate the images of enclosure which everywhere permeate Julian’s writing. The image of womb-like enclosure, therefore, becomes another powerful hermeneutic to facilitate understanding of Julian’s mystical insight into the immanence of God and neatly dovetails with her identification of both Christ and the salvific process as maternal.

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Song of Songs 6: 11. Some translations of the version in the Greek Septuagint (from which the Vulgate was largely derived) read ‘to the garden of a nut’ and it is significant that the Greek word for garden (kepos) is also used as the word for female genitalia in some contexts. It would seem that the figurative link between the nut and the female anatomy is inescapable, although the extent to which Julian was aware of that link is debatable. Nevertheless, the procreative potential and womb-like appearance of the hazelnut and its function as erotic image in the Song of Songs is self-evident. I am grateful to John Herbert for his observations on this issue. For a discussion of the etymological associations of the nut in this context see Marvin H. Pope, The Anchor Bible Song of Songs (New York, 1977), p. 577, n. 11a. It was widely believed that the female provided the matter or flesh of the unborn child, the male the spirit. On this see Cadden, Sex Difference, pp. 24 and 121.

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It is, of course, here that Julian becomes most radical in her conflation of the feminine and God. Rather than leave her analogy as mere similitude, by the time she comes to write the Long Text she has become confident enough to extend simile to metaphor, which she then develops into her unique assertion that, rather than being like our mother, in fact Christ is our mother. In so doing, Julian surpasses the traditional (and primarily male) use of the motherhood similitude and transforms it into something which is entirely her own. Thus, we see her redefining the boundaries between male and female experience and between the literal and the metaphorical by exposing a commonality normally obscured by contemporary medical and essentialist attitudes. In Julian’s theology, God can be male and female, father and mother (‘our fader, God almyty . . . is our moder in kynde’; LT, 94); Christ can be son, brother, mother (‘for he is our moder, brother and savior’; LT, 94). The arbitrary lines of delineation between these categories are no longer relevant, and the motherhood of Mary, of Christ and of God creates a unity in which we as men, women, but primarily humans, are ‘oned’ with the Holy Trinity. Within Julian’s theology of the maternal, just as the unborn infant is fed with the mother’s dealbated blood,75 so Christ feeds the faithful with his own; just as the mother encloses her child within her own flesh and wraps it in her love, so we are surrounded by the body of Christ and the love of the Trinity by whom we are entirely enclosed. Thus, God’s flesh is our flesh, given to him by a woman, and through him we are ‘endlesly borne and never shall come out of him’ (LT, 93). There is no longer any need to fear loss, for we are one and the same: ‘for I saw full sekirly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our sensualite God is; for the selfe poynte that our soule is mad sensual, in the selfe poynte is the cite of God’ (LT, 88).

Love without Condition: Reading the Maternal in the Parable of the Lord and Servant The parable of the Lord and Servant does not appear in the earlier Short Text, having been suppressed on Julian’s own admission because of an initial failure to understand it (‘For the fulle vnderstondyng of this mervelous example was not goven me in that tyme’; LT, 74). Most of those commentators who have examined the parable have done so in the context of Julian’s general theological insight but few have considered it in the context of her later

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On the equivalence of fluids in medieval physiological theory see Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, p. 52. See also Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, pp. 179 and 270.

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representation of Christ as Mother, in spite of its appearing to be the catalyst for such a representation which follows immediately on from the parable’s lengthy exegesis. Read in juxtaposition to one another, however, it soon becomes clear that both episodes are interdependent and rely upon a recontexualisation of the maternal-feminine principle which we have already seen gathering momentum in Julian’s writing. By the time she came to write the Long Text, of course, Julian had already received a secondary vision in 1388 in which the meaning of not only the parable, but of all her earlier visionary experiences had been transformed for her.76 The parable itself was ostensibly provided as a response to the dilemma Julian had experienced following her thirteenth revelation which deals with the problematic nature of sin. The exegesis of this revelation is considerably more detailed than that of any of her other revelations, pointing to a crisis of understanding, and much of Julian’s anxiety about it was doubtless because many of its teachings appear to be in conflict with orthodox Augustinian teaching on sin. According to Augustine, ‘Sinners are ordained to punishment. This order is contrary to their nature, and is therefore penalty. But it suits their fault and is therefore just.’77 Augustine’s solution to the problem of human sinfulness, following on as it did from the teachings of the Old Testament and those of Saint Paul, concentrated on the notion of God as wrathful and vengeful, the fear of which pervaded the religious climate of the Middle Ages.78 As Denise Nowakowski Baker has argued, the concepts of ‘wrath’ and ‘vengeance’ were traditionally associated with a masculine God79 and it is evident that, even before this Thirteenth Revelation which brought into question for Julian the nature of sin, Julian had been troubled by the discrepancy between this Augustinian view of God’s response to human sinfulness and the maternal love of God for humankind which she had perceived by means of her visionary experiences. This is especially true since a compassionate and forgiving God was also a central part of the teaching of the Church and her treatment of the parable here can be seen as an attempt to reconcile an apparent paradox. Earlier in the Long Text, for example, she reveals to us: ‘aforn this tyme often I wondrid whi by the gret forseyng wysdam of God the begynnyng of synne was not lettid; for than, thowte me, al shuld a be wele’ (LT, 38). For Julian, there

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This is something which will be examined further in Chapter 6. Augustine, ‘The Nature of the Good’, in John H. S. Burleigh (trans.), Augustine: Earlier Writings, Library of Christian Classics 6 (Philadelphia, 1953), as cited by Denise Nowakowski Baker, Julian of Norwich’s Showings: From Vision to Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 83. Baker examines Augustinian teaching on sin in the context of Julian’s own insights in From Vision to Book, pp. 63–82. Both Augustine and Aquinas also found the concept of a vengeful God troubling, concluding that God’s punishment of humankind was not an emotional act but a rational one. On this see Baker, From Vision to Book, p. 84. Baker, From Vision to Book, p. 84.

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is an illogicality in an apparently dispassionate punishment of sin by a God who is depicted as possessing unbounded love for his creatures and yet who – so taught the Church – can be ruthless and merciless in allocating endless torment to atone for their sins. Julian is therefore at first unable to reconcile the optimistic concept of a future well-being with the knowledge that unrepentant sinners were to be condemned to the fires of hell and attributes the discrepancy to the slippage between the imperfect knowledge of the Church (or the theologians who interpret the Scriptures) and that which she learns of via direct mystical experience: I understode that synners arn worthy sumtime blame and wreth; and these ii cowth I not se in God, and there my desir was more than I can or may tell; for the heyer dome God shewid hymselfe in the same tyme, and therfore me behovyd neds to taken it; and the lower dome was lern me aforn in holy church, and therfore I myte in no way levyn the lower dome. (LT, 63)

In consequence, she is left to muse uneasily upon its apparent lack of cohesion for nearly twenty years before arriving at a reconciliatory understanding. The longevity of this dilemma is demonstrated further by a cursory allusion to these difficulties in the earlier Short Text just after Julian’s vision of the Virgin as Queen of Heaven in Chapter 13 (ST, 59). Indicating that she had found this dilemma perplexing in the past, she attempts to gloss over the problem in this account with the vague assertion that ‘Ihesu in this vision enfourmede me of alle that me neded’ (ST, 60). In an attempt to disguise this self-evident evasion, Julian defensively and self-consciously moves on to a dramatic confirmation of her belief in the teachings of the Church: ‘and I am hungery and thyrstye and nedy and synfulle and freele, & wilfully submyttes me to the techynge of haly kyrke, with alle myne euencrysten, into the ende of my lyfe’ (ST, 60). In a gesture which reveals a lack of confidence about her own insights as well as alarm at the explosive possibilities of her revelation, Julian anticipates possible accusations of heterodoxy and counters them within the text before they can be levelled against her. Thus, the dilemma not only troubles her on an intellectual and theological level, but is also the source of a potential threat to both author and text in the form of accusations of heretical inclinations. At a time when the Lollard heresy was regarded as being in its ascendancy and appeared to be constituting a particular threat to the orthodox Church in East Anglia,80 it would have been perfectly reasonable for Julian to avoid such accusations by withdrawing into the authority

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Norman Tanner makes this claim in The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370–1532 (Toronto, 1984), p. 165. More recently, however, Paul Strohm has problematised this accepted viewpoint by suggesting that Lollardy was, in fact, what he terms a ‘rhetorical plaything’ for both Church and State (England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399–1422 (New Haven and London, 1998), p. 34).

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of orthodoxy, as Watson has suggested,81 and indeed it seems she was well into her fifties before she had sufficiently resolved both import and dilemma to write down the Thirteenth Revelation in detail and confront the crucial parable of the Lord and Servant. On first appearance this parable has all the ingredients of familiar Hebraic rhetoric. We are presented with the image of a typical Old Testament patriarch sitting solemnly in state, his long, opulent robe flowing around him. He sits in hierarchical opposition to the lowly servant standing before him who, we are told later, is dressed in the ragged clothes of a rural labourer (‘it semyd be his outward clothyng as he had ben a continuant labourer’; LT, 77), and our preconceptions tell us that this lord has complete dominion over his servant. The lord is austere in his authority, the servant responding by remaining ‘aforn his lord reverently, redy to don his lords will’ (LT, 72). As befits his subservient position, he is expecting a command and is preparing to act upon it. We are reminded of a minion standing before an Elijah or a Solomon – the lord’s power is steeped in absolute authority and provides us with the entirely familiar figure of the biblical patriarch whose authority can and will provoke terror in those subject to his hegemony. Julian, however, draws upon and exploits our own preconceived notions of how these stories develop in the Old Testament only to disarm us completely with her depiction of both lord and servant. Having allowed our complacency to assert itself she proceeds to disrupt our thought-patterns by presenting us with wholly atypical characteristics for such a powerful man: ‘The lord lookyth upon his servant ful lovely and swetely, and mekely he sendyth hym to a certain place to don his will’ (LT, 72). Not only is this lord both lovely and sweet in his authority, but he is also meek in the way he proffers his commands to his servant. This description is highly reminiscent of the epithets which Julian has used earlier in the context of her account of the first vision of the bleeding Christ (‘This shewing was quick and lively, and hidouse and dredfull, swete and lovely’; LT, 11). The echoing of the terminology at the beginning of the parable thus serves to emphasise the pre-eminence and desirability of these more passive – and therefore more ‘feminine’ – concepts of sweetness and loveliness, because of their earlier association with Christ.82 Elsewhere, Julian has used similar language in her descriptions of the young Virgin, as we have seen, which also serves to reinforce the subtle inscription of the feminine upon the figure of the lord in the parable which is taking place here. Just as the Virgin was ‘simple’, and ‘meke’, ‘litel’ and ‘pore’, and the suffering Christ was ‘lowest

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See Watson, ‘Composition’, pp. 657–66, for a discussion of the influence of the Lollard threat upon Julian’s writing. The Middle English definitions offered for these terms are multifarious but both words tend to be associated with beauty, kindness and affection. See, for example, MED definition 6a which specifically associates the term ‘swete’ with God and the Virgin . See also definition of ‘lovely’ (4a), which associates the term with a beautiful lady.

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and mekest, homlyest and curteysest’ (LT, 11), Julian’s use of similar terminology to modify the initial representation of the lord as dominant and patriarchal throws into relief his more feminine properties which in turn emerge as wholly more desirable and empowering as a means of modifying his hitherto masculine demeanour. This is further reinforced by Julian’s later employment of this same terminology in her fully developed Motherhood of God narrative (to be discussed below) which follows on from the parable and during which she outlines the qualities of what she considers to be the ideal mother (‘This fair, lovely word “moder”, it is so swete and so kynd’; LT, 98). Such a usage in the context of a parable of this type, however, is unusual and serves to disrupt the hierarchies implicit within traditional binaries within which sweetness, liveliness and loveliness have tended to be regarded as more passive and ‘feminine’.83 In so doing, Julian releases these terms from their binary framework and, by applying them to the figure of the lord in the parable, renders them wholly desirable and prepares the ground for their later inscription upon God himself in her depiction of him as divine mother.84 As the narrative proceeds, Julian’s depiction of a feminised lord gains in momentum and enthusiasm. The lord’s reaction to his beloved servant’s stumbling into a ditch whilst he hastens to perform his master’s wishes, for example, is wholly devoid of the anger or disapproval which the early description appears to anticipate and instead the lord reacts with the love and compassion more readily associated with the maternal female elsewhere in her texts: ‘And ryth thus continualy his lovand lord ful tenderly beholdyth him; and now with a double cher; on outward, ful mekely and myldely with grete ruth and pety’ (LT, 73). Instead of meting out punishment, the response of the lord is one of empathetic love and understanding of the frailty, naïvety and eagerness of the servant and his desire to please his master, and his reaction is repeatedly presented to us by Julian in terms of the gaze of the loving mother upon her growing child. His eyes, for example, constitute the same paradox as does his general demeanour: although ‘his eyen were blak’, they are also ‘faire and semely’ and, moreover, they are ‘shewand ful of lovely pety’ (LT, 75). Similarly, his motherly gaze modifies his patriarchal appearance: it is a ‘lovely lokeing’, a ‘fair lokeing’, and ‘a semely medlur . . . [of] ruth and pity . . . ioye and bliss’ (LT, 75). Also like the mother towards her child, the lord recognises that he is himself implicated in the fall of his servant and bears a measure of responsibility for his suffering. The servant has fallen as a direct result of his love for his lord and his eagerness to please him. The lord’s 83

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Linda Rose associates Julian’s disrupting of accepted binary oppositional concepts with a recognisably ‘feminine style of writing’ in her essay, ‘The Voice of a Saintly Woman: The Feminine Style of Julian of Norwich’s Showings’, Women and Language 16, 1 (1993), pp. 14–17. In keeping with Cixous, Rose points out ‘the feminine side of an opposition tends to be negative and powerless and the masculine side active and powerful’ (p. 16). Toril Moi discusses the implications of patriarchal binary thought in connection with the work of Hélène Cixous and l’écriture feminine in Sexual/Textual Politics, pp. 104–10.

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response is therefore to reward rather than to blame because of the physical and psychological anguish which the fall brings to the beloved servant and because he is himself indirectly responsible for it. Addressing his servant in the tender terms of the colloquial, his words also conjour up echoes of the intimacies enjoyed between mother and child: ‘ “Lo, lo, my lovid servant. What harme and disese he hath takeyn in my service for my love, ya, and for his good will! Is it not skyl that I award hym his afray and his drede, his hurt and his maime and al his wo?” ’ (LT, 73). The most resonant echo here, however, is not only maternal but also Christic. The initial words of the lord to his servant paraphrase the words uttered by Christ to his ‘servant’, Julian, during the Tenth Revelation when he ‘loked into his syde and beheld, enioyand’ (LT, 35). Gazing upon Julian and leading her understanding with the same ‘swete lokyng’, he professes to her: ‘Lo how that I lovid the’ (LT, 35). Just as Julian’s own mother in the Short Text gazed on her daughter in her suffering, so Christ and this lord feel the suffering of their servants and are united with them in their hurt and confusion. The pain of the fall unites both servant and master, in the same way as the birthing process, maternal love and the duties of care unites mother and child in a continuous cycle of reciprocity.85 In Julian’s perception, mother and child, master and servant, God and humanity are at the same time one and other; they are simultaneously united and separate, which necessarily precludes wrath or vengeance, for to inflict this upon the other is, in fact, to impose that punishment on the self. In this context, the pain of the servant’s fall is paramount, as was the suffering of Christ upon the cross. The most poignant result of the servant’s fall for Julian, however, is ‘that he lay alone’. She tells us that she ‘lokid al aboute and beheld, and fer ne nere, hey ne low, I saw to him no helpe’ (LT, 73). Her use of the first-person personal pronoun at this point has the effect of conflating herself with the lord as onlooker. She is now herself the loving ‘mother’ gazing on her hurt and seemingly lost child, becoming one with the onlooking lord, united with him in mutual motherhood. Meanwhile, in his recognition of separation and isolation the child/servant feels abandoned and unloved. It is the primeval fear of loss made manifest and constitutes the rematerialisation of Julian’s very early fear of losing Christ during her illness and of her own mother’s anguish at the prospect of Julian’s likely death. In effect, it is a type of death. The failure of the lord/mother to reappear at this point would result in actual death and Julian’s empathetic articulation of this is central to her interpretation of the scene and to the parable as a whole. It is, in fact, central to the sophisticated theological insights which inhere upon her eventual understanding of this deceptively complex story. Here, however, the mother does reappear in the guise of the lord who is now clad in a voluminous blue robe, the ‘larghede’ 85

Maria R. Lichtman suggests that Julian’s non-dualist vision of the self reflects ‘the capacity of the womb to hold otherness and opposition within itself’ in ‘ “I desyrede a bodylye syght”: Julian of Norwich and the Body’, Mystics Quarterly 17, 1 (1991), p. 16.

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of which ‘betokenith that he hath beclesid in hym all’ (LT, 76). Not only does the robe of the lord invoke the robe of Mary in its blueness86 – Mary was frequently depicted as wearing blue in popular medieval iconography87 – but the fact that it encloses within its folds all that there is, serves to reinvoke the persistent image of the womb which pervades Julian’s writing and further consolidates the feminisation of the lord. One of the most crucial of Julian’s insights to emerge from her exegesis of the parable, however, is the theological centrality within the divine schema of unconditional love (something which Julian refers to repeatedly as ‘kinde’ love which ‘will not be brokin for trespas’; LT, 100). In order to reach this point of understanding Julian continues to draw upon both an idealised version of maternal love, as embodied by Christ and the Virgin, allied to a more pragmatic and realistic version of an everyday, lived and ‘working’ love (which was, no doubt, closer to the reality of every earthly mother). In the Middle Ages, of course, the image of the ‘good mother’, based on stories attached to Saint Anne and the Virgin, was a fully idealised construct, in reality unattainable but which had developed alongside – perhaps, even, as a counter measure to – traditional misogynistic discourses pertaining to the female body. Conjoined with more secular images such as that represented by Chaucer’s patient Griselda or the long-suffering Custance who in their patience and self-sacrifice were also paradigmatic of the perfect wife and mother,88 ordinary, worldly motherhood was only ever destined for failure.89 In his own display of patience towards his fallen servant, of course, the lord appears to be allying himself with the more idealised representation which he then proceeds to modify because of his apparent inability to prevent the fall of the 86

87

88 89

New methods of creating paints and dyes were being developed at this point in the Middle Ages and the values accorded to different colours were changing. As a result, the hitherto problematic colour blue was taking over from red as the most popular and prestigious of colours. On this see François Delamare and Bernard Guineau, ‘Les Matériaux de la Couleur’, Beaux-Arts Magazine 189 (2000), pp. 39–44. It is also likely that the high cost of lapis lazuli (it was more valuable than gold), which was the stone of choice for producing blue pigment, led to the Virgin’s mantle often being depicted as blue. Sarah McNamer has argued that, through its association with steadfastness, mercy, the Virgin of the Mantle and the Regina Misericordiae, the mantle has a crucial confirmatory effect on Julian’s feminising of God. She also recognises that ‘Julian makes the maternal image central to the parable. And at the same time she gives mercy an integral place within God’ (‘Exploratory Image’, p. 27). For an analysis of the Virgin’s influence on medieval motherhood see Atkinson, The Oldest Vocation, pp. 101–43. For an account of the Griselda influence, see pp. 145–8. There were also a myriad of more misogynistic literary traditions within which the mother often fell woefully short of the ideal. Many of the mothers who appear in the Lives of the virgin martyrs, for example, are often instrumental in attempting to keep their daughters from God. The Life of Christina of Markyate, tells us of the lengths which Christina’s mother goes to in order to trade her daughter’s virginity to an unwelcome suitor, resulting in a permanent rift between mother and daughter (C. H Talbot (ed.), The Life of Christina of Markyate (Oxford, 1959)). See in particular p. 73 for the ill-treatment of Christina by her mother, and p. 93 for details of Christina’s eventual escape from the family home.

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servant – something which seems to render him somewhat culpable. As a result, Julian appears to be negotiating a merger in the figure of the lord between the idealised concept of the mother and that of the realistic and everyday ‘good enough’ mother who would normally choose to facilitate her child’s development rather than inhibit it, but is not always entirely successful. In this context, the lord does not prevent the fall of his servant into the mire, neither does he go immediately to his aid, but instead gazes on with love and compassion as the servant tries to rectify his own mistake. If we relate this behaviour to a later analysis by Julian of what constitutes good mothering (‘The moder may suffre the child to fallen sumtyme . . . but she may never suffre that ony maner of peril cum to the child, for love’; LT, 100), we see that both the lord and the mother display the same duty and desire to ensure the growth and development of their child/servant through nurture and guidance, and it is evident that the one narrative is entirely informing the other here, just as the benefits of good mothering and good lordship also inform each other. Similarly, the love of both the lord and the mother is also entirely capable of being hard-edged. Just as the lord sits patiently awaiting the contrition of his servant, so the mother ‘may suffre the child to . . . be disesid in dyvers manners for the owen profitt’ (LT, 100). Thus, within Julian’s economy of motherhood, the truly loving mother is the one who is capable of admonishing her child in order to facilitate development and understanding. By means of a mixture of love and admonishment, the child must learn to negotiate and avoid the world’s pitfalls and transcend the difficulties of experience. The effective mother will guide the child on that journey. This, then, is the nature of the unconditional love which Julian identifies as central to God’s relationship with humankind, and which lies at the core of her mystical revelations. Typically, however, she removes it from the realms of the idealised by relating it directly to a recognisable, everyday, flawed and human motherhood. This she then proceeds to overwrite, firstly upon the lord of the parable, and then upon Christ himself in terms such as: ‘for in our moder, Criste, we profitten and encresin’ (LT, 94), soon qualified by ‘and what is that but our very moder Iesus, he, al love, beryth us to ioye and to endles lyving’ (LT, 97). Thus, the concept of Christ’s motherhood remains clearly within a familiar context whilst being simultaneously recontextualised and elevated to offer an understanding of the ineffable. In the parable, therefore, by means of its inscription of an accessible and achievable maternity upon the lord which serves not to replace, but to modify his traditional masculine qualities, Julian paves the way for her fully realised depiction of Christ as the embodiment of unconditional maternal love which follows seamlessly on from it. One of the primary functions of Julian’s detailed and highly complex exegesis of this parable has therefore been to illustrate her insight into the centrality of unconditional love within the relationship between the human and divine, and such a reassessment and recontextualisation of the discourses of motherhood is wholly typical of her compassionate understanding of God’s 92

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love for flawed humanity and of its potential to both articulate and attain apotheosis. The crucial importance of Julian’s secondary vision of 1388 should now be clear. The effect of this final revelation of love was to transform Julian’s exegetic emphasis from that of the meaning of sin to that of unconditional, maternalistic love as the universal principle upon which the relationship between the human and divine is predicated: ‘Thus was I lerid’, Julian explains, ‘that love was our lords mening’ (LT, 135). In effect, it brings about the realisation for Julian that God is the maternal, he is the unconditional love which counters sin, an insight, of course, which immediately necessitates the creation of a new text to be written with new-found confidence over a remaining lifetime. It was this insight, therefore, which was to liberate Julian’s intellect and enable her to move on to her fully realised and entirely unique vision of God as our mother with its intrinsic message of comfort and optimism. This means that the parable, far from standing separately from Julian’s theology of God as Mother, is, in fact, integral to it and provided her with the final piece of exploratory machinery which would unlock her unique insight into God’s love for humankind. In turn, this would allow the maternal to become the most important tool in Julian’s hermeneutic store.

From Worldly to Spiritual: The Maternal Inscription upon the Divine By the time we reach the culmination of the motherhood imagery at the climax of the Long Text Julian’s overt representation of Jesus as mother reaches an unstoppable momentum as her mystical insights take shape. Following her exegesis of the parable, Julian guides us into her explicit description of Jesus as mother with the image of our own immanence as ‘evencristen’ housed within his womb: ‘our kindly substance is beclosid in Iesus’ (LT, 90), and later, ‘in Criste . . . our heyer partie is groundid and rotid’ (LT, 92). This leads on to the now confident assertion that ‘he is our moder in mercy in our sensualite takyng’ (LT, 94). As her theme progresses, Julian begins to draw overtly on those accepted standards of maternal emotion and behaviour as discussed previously, ascribing them to the perfect and ideal mother, Jesus. She re-emphasises the concepts of fairness and sweetness, for example, just as previously she had inscribed these terms upon the dying Christ and the patient lord. Now, however, these terms are bound up with the hard work of active mothering: ‘All the fair werkyng and all the swete kindly office of dereworthy moderhede is impropried to the second person’ (LT, 96). As Julian develops her analysis, so we feel her warming to her theme. She tells us that ‘we have our beyng of him wher the ground of moderhed begynnyth’ (LT, 95) and attributes all the endless labours and services a mother carries out for her children to Christ. As she becomes absorbed in the theme, Julian’s pleasure is palpable as the insights follow on one from another. 93

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She begins to summarise for us what she sees as the most important services a mother renders to her child and in this active, maternal ‘werkyng’ we can again recognise the jouissance which Kristeva locates at the heart of motherhood, and in this case it is a jouissance born from a redefined and reapplied appraisal of its relevance to God’s creation and to his cosmic plan for humankind. Once more we are reminded of the philosophical stance of Ruddick, who regards the work of mothering as leading to a politics of peace which can be established as an alternative to the male aggression and militarism which tend to shape most cultures.90 The promotion of motherhood as philosophico-theological necessity in Julian’s text therefore creates a palpable sense of freedom from the constraints of traditional thought structures and serves to liberate the visionary as both woman and writer as her inspired theological exegesis moves on: The kynde, loveand moder that wote and knowith the nede of hir child, she kepith it ful tenderly as the kind and condition of moderhede will. And as it wexith in age she chongith hir werking but not hir love. And whan it is waxen of more age, she suffrid that it be bristinid in brekyng downe of vices to makyn the child to receivyn vertues and graces. (LT, 98)

For Julian, a mother’s love is equally liberated and liberating. In her analysis, a maternalistic, unconditional love, although utterly consistent, is not a fixed, unchangeable phenomenon, but can move and alter as circumstances dictate. As we have seen, it can overwrite and modify both the feminine and the masculine which is why we find Julian at this point summing up Christ’s maternal role with words which appear to be imbued with the patriarchal tone of Church liturgy: ‘He kyndelyth our vnderstondyng, he directith our weys, he esith our consciens, he comfortith our soule, he lightith our herte and gevith us, in parte, knowyng and lovyng in his blisful Godhede’ (LT, 99). However, in the same way as Julian inscribed upon her patriarchal lord the modifying qualities of the maternal, so here she redresses a potential imbalance by reverting to the tone of patriarchal religious discourse, something which is perfectly in keeping with Julian’s literary style and her professed adherence to orthodoxy. Throughout her texts – and the Long Text in particular – Julian takes pains to restore balance wherever there is a possibility of imbalance and her discussion of God’s motherhood is no exception to this rule. Julian’s unique feminisation of God in no way eradicates those masculine characteristics traditionally attributed to him, as we also saw in the case of the lord. For example, she asserts that ‘the almyty truth of the Trinite is our fader’ (LT, 87) and, more significantly, ‘as veryly as God is our fader, as verily God is our moder’ (LT, 96). Having firmly established that Jesus is indubitably our mother, Julian thus proceeds to qualify it in this

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way so that the final representation is, if not androgynous, one of balance and hybridity. Not only can God’s response to humankind now be recognised as that expected of a paternal deity to his beloved subjects, but it is also the expected response of a maternal God to hers. Thus she asserts the equal value of the female experience as a means to unification and brings about a fundamental change within theological exegesis. Such an articulation of mystical insight by means of the maternal feminine fundamentally subverts the inherently hierarchical binary logic within language and successfully unites the male and the female within the Godhead. In so doing, traditional binary oppositions are ‘oned’ with each other and the female is elevated to form an intrinsic and fully active part of theological discourse. In conclusion, just as modern feminist commentators such as Kristeva and Cixous have seen the bodily impact of mothers as a powerfully subversive tool in the struggle to oppose the phallogocentric discourse of traditional western thought, so Julian also recognised and exploited its potential as exegetical tool and means towards establishing her own authority as interpreter of the ineffable love of God. By ‘writing the body’ of the maternal in this way she lays down a challenge to traditional religious discourse and offers as a counterbalance a fully developed theology of the maternal feminine which is unique in English mystical writing. For Julian, the human experience is valid in all its forms and the male perspective is not necessarily the definitive one. She recognises both the male and female as being integral to the deity and, like Kristeva’s Virgin Mary, Julian’s theology ‘swallows up the goddesses and removes their necessity’.91 Finally, Cixous could indeed have been writing about Julian when she says: Text; my body-shot through with streams of song; I don’t mean the overbearing, clutchy ‘mother’ but, rather, what touches you, the equivoce that affects you, fills your breast with an urge to come to language and launches your force; the rhythm that laughs you; the intimate recipient who makes all metaphors possible and desirable; body . . . no more describable than god, the soul or the Other; that part of you that leaves a space between yourself and urges you to inscribe in language your woman’s style.92

91 92

Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, p. 185. Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, p. 252.

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3 Discourses of Prostitution and The Book of Margery Kempe

Wynne whoso may, for al is for to selle.1

By the time Chaucer came to write these words in the context of his depiction of the Wife of Bath in the late fourteenth century, the country was in the throes of major economic and social change. The Black Death of mid-century had brought about the loss of up to one half of the population in some areas and had contributed to what R. H. Britnell has identified as a ‘mid-century crisis’.2 During Margery Kempe’s lifetime this population deficit had not recovered; on the one hand it had created a decline in the demand for certain commodities within the market,3 but on the other, it resulted in an increase in productivity in the urban centres to which people flocked from the rural areas in order to find more lucrative types of employment.4 Margery Kempe’s attempts at commercial brewing and milling are testimony to the increased opportunities for women during this time of population decline, which released many people into social productivity who had previously lived on the most basic level of subsistence5 – although it is also true to say that many of the professions still remained closed to women. Between the 1360s and early 1400s, a time when Margery Kempe was being brought up in a relatively affluent and influential family in Bishop’s Lynn,6 the standard of living rose considerably alongside the new commercial atmosphere in the towns and the importance of exports in East Anglia in particular was at its height. A preoccupation with wealth, status and material goods as characteristic of urban life at this time is depicted by contemporary writers such as Chaucer and Langland; indeed, The Canterbury Tales is saturated with the language of commerce and the marketplace which, as Lee Patterson has suggested, carries important implications about both audience and current 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Riverside Chaucer, p. 110, line 414. R. H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 155. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, p. 156. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, p. 166. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, p. 168. Again, for a detailed study of Margery in her socio-religious milieu, see Goodman, Margery Kempe and Her World.

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social ethos.7 Margery Kempe’s own account of her preconversion vanity during which time she claims to have valued her social status above all, serves to verify such a social preoccupation with materialism, something also symbolised by the highly fashionable clothes which she felt were desirable in order to suitably reflect this esteemed position within society: ‘sche weryd gold pypys on hir hevyd & hir hodys wyth þe typettys were daggyd. Hir clokys also wer daggyd & leyd wyth dyuers colowrs betwen þe daggys þat it schuld be þe mor staryng to mennys sygth and hir self þe mor ben worshepd’ (9). It is, however, not only these early accounts which characterise a pecuniary preoccupation on the part of Margery. Although she attempts to shed the importance of wealth and status to her as her religious vocation develops, Margery Kempe’s writing continues to be punctuated with references to money, reflecting a persistent anxiety present throughout the text. In spite of a desire to adhere to a life which reflects in essence the holy poverty of the mendicants,8 Margery nevertheless relies upon her own capital in order to travel abroad, buy her passages across the seas, and purchase the services of others – including the right to her own body from her husband, as we shall see. In a discussion of the crisis of moral values at the heart of the economic system in the Christian West, Walter T. Owensby points out that central to biblical faith is an intrinsic condemnation of self-advancement at the expense of others, which in turn imposes upon a Christian community the responsibility of joint ownership and joint benefit of the world’s resources.9 Such a doctrine, of course, would seem to run contrary to that of the profit economy within a culture of Christianity and it is highly likely that Margery’s ensuing crisis over her own worldliness and passion for the new socio-economic values was caused in part by the gulf which was developing between these values and those promulgated by the traditions of the Christian doctrine. During Margery’s lifetime, too, the Christian Church had attributed an increased role to purgatory within the arena of spiritual redemption.10 According to late medieval religious doctrine, the human soul would spend many years in purgatory awaiting final judgement whilst sins were assessed. Those left on earth could, however, bring about a remission of the purgatorial sentence through prayers, the saying of masses and the formation of chantries,

7 8

9 10

Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (London, 1991), p. 323. On the concept of holy poverty in the late Middle Ages see R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (London, 1970), pp. 281–2. Southern asserts that although this concept had been a part of every religious movement, the call of Saint Francis for poverty was something entirely new, insisting upon total renunciation of all worldly goods and to live the life of Christ literally. According to the Franciscan idea of poverty, possessions were a symbol of wealth, wealth was profit and therefore evidence of corruption. Walter L. Ownesby, Economics for Prophets (Michigan, 1988), Introduction, p. xvii. For an overview of this see Joseph H. Lynch, The Medieval Church: A Brief History (London and New York, 1992), pp. 298–300. For a more detailed account of the increased role of Purgatory in the late Middle Ages see Jacques le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (London, 1984).

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which became a popular form of endowment to commemorate friends and relatives. Thus there opened up a further economic opportunity for ecclesiastics to offer masses for remuneration which, as a result of this type of commodification, also became subject to the rules of the marketplace. Instead of the unreliable intercession of the saints, masses could be purchased from human mediators and control thus returned to those left on earth. Indeed, as Margery’s reputation as holy woman grows, there are times when she too receives payment for prayers of intercession, a skill which will allow her to fund further travel, escape from threatening circumstances, or even quite simply to establish her own authority in her text. Early in her religious career, for example, she is approached by a monk whom she recognises as having ‘synned in letthery, in dyspeyr, & in wordly goodys kepyng’ (26). Having brought him to the point of repentance and assured him that he would be amongst the saved, Margery tells us that this monk ‘haf hyr gold to prey for hym’, and indeed, when she returns to the place at a later date, ‘(he) was turnyd fro hys synne, & was mad suppriowr of þe place’ (27). Soon after recounting this tale of prophecy and miraculous conversion, Margery documents another moment of physical imperilment at Canterbury which has been occasioned by her insistent discussion of religious matters in the presence of other monks. In order to dissipate their anger and preserve her safety, she relates a story of a sinful man who hired a group of men for a year to chastise him as part of his penance and to whom he ‘heue[n] . . . syluer for her labowr’ (28). The significance of the financial incentive and reward here in the context of repentance and salvation evidences the role which money had begun to play within the redemptive process and religious ideology generally in the early part of the fifteenth century, an ideology which Margery Kempe is fully prepared to exploit in her relationships with her contemporaries. Another facet of this commercialisation of the redemptive process can be seen in the increased availability of papal indulgence offered to the faithful in the late Middle Ages, and by the early fourteenth century it had grown to enormous proportions.11 By the second half of the century, plenary privilege had been extended to local churches in England and full remission for all one’s sins could be obtained from a confessor at the hour of death.12 Thus, by the end of the fourteenth century plenary remission had become entirely subject to the same rules of the marketplace as any other commodity; almost anyone with the requisite finance was able to purchase remission of his or her sins. In the words of Southern: ‘Once the bottomless treasure had been opened up there could be no restraining its distribution’.13 11 12 13

Southern, Western Society, p. 137. Southern, Western Society, p. 139. On the origins of deathbed penitence see Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (New Jersey, 1977), pp. 6–9. Southern, Western Society, p. 139. For a discussion of the link between commodification and religiosity in East Anglian society and its drama, see Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago and London, 1989), p. 29.

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The Female Body as Commodity: Theory and Practice In the context of western commercial practices, the role played by the female body is one which has been examined by feminist theorists in recent years and offers us a useful lens through which to examine Margery Kempe’s attitude towards the trading potential of the female body. Perhaps most helpful in this context is Gayle Rubin’s important analysis of the patriarchal sexualpolitical economy.14 Drawing on the structuralist thinking of Lévi-Strauss, Rubin examines the contribution which women as bearers of both ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’ make to the successful continuance of the patriarchy and to the capitalist system in particular. According to Rubin the ‘sex/gender system is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied’.15 Thus, she believes, women have underpinned the stability of society, capitalism and the family because of their tradability and their use value to that society, but in so doing they have also been commodified by the dominant group, placing female oppression firmly within our social systems, rather than biology.16 In the light of Rubin’s theory, we can perhaps see why, following her conversion and attempts to eschew the shallow materialism which she saw all around her, Margery’s increasingly nonconformist attitudes to the givens in society about both her use value and exchange value have the effect of disrupting social equilibrium and offer an explanation as to why she often feels it necessary to persuade others and herself that her appropriation of alternative use value (such as pilgrim or intercessor, for example) is a more valid and valuable role for her to play than that of conventional wife and mother. In more recent times, this issue has also been addressed by Luce Irigaray in her examination of how the use, consumption and circulation of women allow our social and cultural lives to exist.17 Irigaray claims that as a commodity, woman is a dualistic entity – that is to say, she is the possessor of her own ‘natural’ body and also of a social and cultural body which is imbued with a symbolic value because of its exchangeability. In Irigaray’s estimation: The value of symbolic and imaginary productions is superimposed upon, and even substituted for, the value of relations of material, natural, and corporal (re)production.18

14

15 16 17 18

Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex’, in Rayna Reiter (ed.), Towards an Anthropology of Women (New York and London, 1975), pp. 157–210. Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women’, p. 159. Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women’, p. 175. Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, in This Sex which is Not One, pp. 170–91. Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, p. 171.

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This exchangeable body, therefore, and its potential for common ownership, reflects masculine values and its subjectivity is therefore controlled by men. In the context of marriage and/or the onset of maturity, however, women cease to possess any exchange value and become relegated to mere use value. Again, according to Irigaray: This means that mothers, reproductive instruments marked with the name of the father and enclosed in his house, must be private property, excluded from exchange . . . As both natural value and use value, mothers cannot circulate in the form of commodities without threatening the very existence of the social order.19

Certainly, in the case of Margery Kempe, the early descriptions of her illness and maternity as examined in Chapter 1 reflect the violent transition between the two positions of value, a transition which Irigaray terms ‘the ritualised passage from woman to mother’ which can only be accomplished ‘by violation’.20 It is also her contravention of her ‘use value’ and her adoption of a high-profile independence as if she were still the possessor of ‘exchange value’, which confounds her peers and the authorities and makes her ultimately elude effective categorisation. In the absence of a satisfactory space which the transgressive Margery can legitimately occupy, she is therefore subject to the same patriarchal pigeonholing which was applied to a whole panoply of ‘transgressive’ women, and which leads her on a number of occasions to be categorised as ‘common woman’ or whore. In an analysis of the role performed by the prostitute in society, Irigaray also suggests that the prostitute’s body becomes more useful to society the more it is used by it.21 Moreover, she regards prostitution as ‘usage which is exchanged’; in other words, the qualities of the prostitute have value ‘only because they have been appropriated by man, and because they serve as the locus of relations – hidden ones – between men’.22 Irigaray concludes that the prostitute is therefore a woman whose nature has been ‘used up’ by society whilst continuing in its exchangeable use value, permitting her to be nothing but another ‘vehicle amongst men’.23 Yet, in spite of her consideration of the prostitute as one who is explicitly condemned by the social order but also implicitly tolerated, Irigaray fails to recognise the potential of this position for the disruption of hegemonic masculinist values from within by means of the deliberate setting up of a tension between determinedly coexisting use value and exchange value within one body. It is just such a tension which

19 20 21 22 23

Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, p. 185. Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, p. 186. Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, pp. 186–7. Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, p. 186. Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, p. 186.

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Margery Kempe enthusiastically embraces and nurtures in order to exploit the monetary values of her day and the expectations of her audiences, as shall be demonstrated. By the time Margery was operating in the late Middle Ages commercial prostitution in Europe had become a significant aspect of a burgeoning urban socio-economic life.24 In the century between 1350 and 1450, many European cities appear to have institutionalised prostitution, providing either designated areas for prostitutes to operate within, or sanctioning buildings which were to operate as brothels.25 As one important study of the region of Languedoc in France reveals, by the mid-fourteenth century most of even the smaller towns in the region had established official locations for prostitution,26 suggesting a certain degree of tolerance of the practice amongst urban authorities on the Continent, at least. In England, the situation appears to have been somewhat different with different town authorities demonstrating varying levels of proscription and tolerance. In this context, P. J. P. Goldberg concludes that those centres of prostitution in England which were most like brothels – the Southwark stews in London, for example – were never fully institutionalised like some of their European counterparts; instead, they tended to be informal and private locations where women congregated to sell sex in a disorganised and haphazard way when need required.27 There is also evidence to suggest that, whilst officially condemning prostitution, the medieval Church, was also prepared to tolerate it as a preferable activity to fornication.28 In the late thirteenth century, for example, the relatively liberal theologian, Thomas Aquinas, had warned that a proliferation of sexual abuses would be the result of any uniform prohibition of prostitution.29 In a treatise on kingship written in about 1266 widely attributed to Aquinas, prostitution is represented as a necessary evil which helps to avoid worse transgression: ‘Remove the sewer and you will fill the palace with ordure; similarly with the bilge from a ship; remove whores from the world and you will fill it 24

25 26 27

28 29

For a comprehensive study of the practice of prostitution in the Middle Ages, see Jacques Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution (Oxford, 1988). See also Ruth Karras, Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England (New York and Oxford, 1996), for an examination which attempts to bridge the gap between the lived experience of the prostitute and contemporary representations of her. Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, p. 59. Leah Lydia Otis, Prostitution in Medieval Society: The History of an Urban Institution in Languedoc (Chicago and London, 1985), p. 38. P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘Pigs and Prostitutes: Streetwalkers in Comparative Perspective’, in Katherine J. Lewis, Noel James Menunge and Kim. M. Phillips (eds), Young Medieval Women (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), pp. 172–93. See also Karras, Common Women, pp. 14–24 and 135–6 for a discussion of the type of legislation which was drawn up to counter prostitution in England. Karras asserts that although laws prohibiting prostitution were common in England, they were never very effective (p. 14). Rossiaud, Medieval Prostitution, p. 160. Otis, Prostitution, p. 23.

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with sodomy’.30 In another highly popular and influential work, the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas demonstrates the same tolerant attitude towards prostitution as the provider of some positive benefits: ‘tolerari possunt vel propter aliquod bonum quod ex eis provenit vel propter aliquod malum quod vitatur’31 (they (prostitutes) may be tolerated on account of some good that results or some evil that is avoided). It would seem, therefore, that by the fourteenth century urban prostitution had become a practice which was at the same time reviled for its inherently evil embodiment of basic human lustfulness and yet tolerated as a lesser evil than the corruption of respectable women – and men – by other predatory men in search of regular and contractual sex.32 It is, of course, also highly significant that prostitution was enjoying a period of social and ecclesiastic tolerance at the same time as the market economy was burgeoning, particularly in the new urban areas where there lived greater numbers of women than men.33 Indeed, it would appear that trading commercially on the body formed part of the ‘new opportunities for women’ which Britnell recognised as having opened up in the urban centres during the period in question.34 As it was used in the late Middle Ages in England, the term ‘whore’ not only designated a woman who accepted money for sex but seems also to have been applied to any woman whose sexuality was considered to be outside the control of a man. Whether commercial prostitute, adulteress, lover of a priest or even sexually active unmarried woman, any woman who was seen to be shared by men and who was therefore ‘common’ to them all was likely to be branded as whore.35 In the persona of the whore, therefore, was conflated a myriad of sexually ‘transgressive’ women, and it was just such women who were deemed dangerous because of their disruption of a homosocial bonding between men – a bonding which is predicated on male ownership and control of female use value and exchange value, as we have seen. Threatened by the disruptive behaviour of the sexually transgressive woman and her potential for imposing her own value upon her body in order to exchange it where she will, patriarchal society

30

31 32 33 34 35

De Regimine Principum ad Regem Cypri, in Opera Omnia (Parma, 1864), vol. 16, p. 281, as cited in Karras, Common Women, p. 185, n. 7. Although there is evidence to suggest that these words may wrongly have been attributed to Aquinas, they were nevertheless disseminated as his words in the writing of others throughout the late Middle Ages. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. and trans. T. Gilby (London, 1964–76), 2a2ae, XXXII, 10: 11, p. 73. This is something which is corroborated by the findings of Karras, Common Women, pp. 32–3. Miri Rubin, ‘Religious Culture in Town and City: Reflections on a Great Divide’, in David Abulafia et al. (eds), Church and City 1000–1500 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 3–22 (p. 21). See p. 9, n. 5. Again see Karras, Common Women, especially pp. 70–6.

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therefore attempts to contain and control it by means of a hegemonic strategy of interpellation. In this context, the recent findings of theorist Judith Butler can again prove useful. Drawing on Altusserian notions of how the subjects of any given society are interpellated by its ideologies and institutions, Butler has examined the ways in which abusive naming and labelling possess the power to inflict damage on an individual or groups within society.36 For Butler the speech act of ‘injurious naming’ renders the addressee out of his/her own control and establishes him/her as occupying a socially subordinate subject position to the speaker who has taken control by this act of naming.37 The result is a re-enforcement of the subject’s social constitution and a bringing into line of the ‘aberrant’ behaviour.38 The relevance to my argument here, of course, is that the effect of this interpellative subjection is ambiguous. On the one hand it humiliates and demeans, on the other it brings the addressee into being, realising what Butler has termed, ‘a certain possibility for social existence’.39 Such ambiguities within patriarchal interpellative practices therefore constitute the site of a lacuna, or ‘blind-spot’40 which can be turned to the woman’s own social advantage, allowing her a potential for social existence which would otherwise be denied her under the rules of the patriarchy.41 Male fears regarding the female ability to exploit such ambiguities is demonstrated in much of the secular literature of the later Middle Ages and in The Book of Margery Kempe in particular.42 Time after time we find representations of women who are quick to exploit the blind-spots at the heart of patriarchal thinking in an attempt to achieve for themselves a measure of personal empowerment. In the Canterbury Tales, for example, Chaucer presents us with a variety of women who engage in transactional sex to varying degrees, be they wives exchanging sex for husbandly favours as in ‘The Shipman’s Tale’,43 or commercial prostitutes like the wife in ‘The Cook’s Tale’ who, in spite of running a shop ostensibly to earn her living, nevertheless ‘swyved for hir sustenance’.44 It is, however, Chaucer’s exuberantly insouciant Wife of Bath who displays the most

36 37 38 39 40

41 42

43 44

Butler, Excitable Speech. Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 4. Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 18. Butler, Excitable Speech, p. 2. This is a term adopted by Irigaray in her essay on the absence of symbolic representation for women in culture which results in perpetually ‘amputated desires’ if it remains unexploited. See her essay, ‘The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry’, in Speculum of the Other Woman, pp. 13–129 (p. 124). Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, p. 186–7. On this type of exploitation, see Karras, Common Women, p. 130. See also pp. 88–95 for a discussion on what secular literature from this period can tell us about public attitudes towards sexuality. The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 203–8. The Riverside Chaucer, p. 86, lines 4421–2.

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celebratory – or, from a male perspective, perhaps, reprehensible – willingness to trade sex for power and advancement. In her own words: And therefore every man this tale I telle, Wynne whoso may, for al is for to selle; With empty hand men may none haukes lure. For wynnyng wolde I al his lust endure, And make me a feyned appetit; And yet in bacon hadde I nevere delit.45

As Laurie Finke has demonstrated in a highly productive Marxist-feminist reading of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’, rather than envisaging marriage as a means to social production and procreation, the Wife of Bath has instead exploited to the limit its in exhaustible potential for the accumulation of property and capital, and power.46 For Alisoun, marriage is primarily a financial transaction in which she trades her body for economic advantage, and any sexual pleasure to be gained is a fortuitous byproduct. Her use of the word ‘profit’, therefore, not only takes on a literal meaning in the text, but is also imbued with a highly relevant metaphoricity in its suggestion of a subtext of sexual satisfaction.47 It is just such a subtext of a sexual economy predicated on a personal deployment of the female body which we will observe in Margery Kempe’s account of her own struggle for bodily and spiritual autonomy and, if the words of Chaucer’s Manciple can tell us anything, they corroborate society’s anxiety that in every woman lurks a potential whore, regardless of her social status: Ther nys no difference, trewely, Bitwixe a wyf that is of heigh degree, If of hir body dishonest she bee, And a povre wenche.48

Nor were biblical women extraneous to such projected anxieties in contemporary popular representation. In the East Anglian play from the fifteenthcentury N-Town cycle, for example, which focuses on the biblical narrative of the Woman Taken in Adultery (whose protagonist was frequently conflated with Mary Magdalene),49 an imaginative series of violently sexual 45 46 47

48 49

The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 105–22 (p. 110), lines 416–18. Laurie Finke, ‘ “All is for to selle”: Breeding Capital in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’, in Peter G. Beidler (ed.), The Wife of Bath (Boston and New York, 1996), pp. 171–88. For a discussion of how Alisoun ‘consents to the abuse of her own sexuality’, see Delany, ‘Sexual Economics, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and The Book of Margery Kempe’, in Evans and Johnson, Feminist Readings, p. 85. The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 282–6, lines 212–15 (p. 284). On this see Susan Haskins’s detailed study of Mary Magdalene, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York, 1993), pp. 26–7.

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interpellations are hurled at the adulterous woman by the authoritarian scribes and pharisees: SCRIBA: Come forth, þu stotte, com forth þu scowte! Com forth, þu bysmare and brothel bolde! Com forth, þu hore an stynkynge bych clowte! How longe hast þu such harlotry holde? PHARISEUS: Com forth, þu quene, com forth, þu scolde! Com forth, þu sloveyn, com forth, þu slutte! We xal the teche with carys colde A lytyl bettyr to kepe þi kutte.50

In the same cycle, too, even the young, virginal Mary, Mother of God, is accused of infidelity and betrayal by Joseph when he discovers her pregnancy on his return from his travels:51 JOSEPH: That semyth evyl, I am afrayd. Þi wombe to hyhe doth stonde. I drede me sore I am betrayd, Sum other man þe had in honde.52

As familial representative of the patriarchy, Joseph is quick to assume Mary’s explanations to be lies and proceeds to judge her according to society’s cynicism about the steadfastness of women, rather than relying upon his own knowledge of her as blameless individual. Most pertinently here, however, his use of the phrase ‘in honde’ can be seen to incorporate not only its literal meanings ‘to take possession of physically’ or ‘to bring under control’, but also its more figurative meanings of ‘to pay directly’ or ‘to pay in ready money’.53 In this sense, Joseph is not only accusing his wife of adultery but is at the same time intimating that she is both common woman and paid whore.54 The concept of harlotry as being synonymous with the behaviour of the sexually indiscriminate woman is also borne out in contemporary court records where significant numbers of women seem to have been prosecuted as whores who were not, in fact, commercial traders in sex at all,55 suggesting that in England at least, the remunerative aspect of prostitution was 50 51

52 53 54

55

The N-Town Play, vol. 1, p. 255. The N-Town Play, vol. 1, pp. 123–30. For an examination of the representation of the Virgin in the N-Town plays, see J. A. Tasioulas, ‘Between Doctrine and Domesticity: The Portrayal of Mary in the N-Town Plays’, in Watt, Women in Their Communities, pp. 222–45. The N-Town Play, vol. 1, p. 124. Both of these definitions are cited in MED under ‘hond(e)’, 2a and 1b (g). Chaucer also makes full use of both these meanings when he puts the same words into the mouth of his Wife of Bath in connection with her relationship with her first three husbands: ‘But sith I hadde hem hoolly in mine hond’, The Riverside Chaucer, p. 108, line 211. This aspect of prostitution is examined by Karras in Common Women, pp. 13–31. See also p. 131.

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not in itself considered a significant moral issue and merely constituted an advantageous by-product of what was perceived as a flawed female ontology.56 The labelling of a woman as whore, as these male-authored and fictional examples clearly demonstrate, was therefore primarily a sexualisation of her aberrant behaviour rather than being an economic slur, and as such constituted an interpellative attempt to contain the threat posed to the patriarchal and homosocial status quo by this act of female sexual independence.57

‘Þei clepyd hir Englisch sterte’: Strategies of Disruption The sexualising of unacceptable female behaviour within patriarchal discourse is everywhere attested in The Book of Margery Kempe, and Margery is quick to recognise in its ambiguous logic not only a potential for agency but also its provision of a powerful textual trope. On several occasions, for example, Margery takes full advantage of the sexual vilification directed at her by strategically overplaying its ability to transform her into suffering and misunderstood subject. In this way she redeploys her own sexuality to allow it to incite utterance of the male speaker’s own moral blindness and the prejudices of society which he embodies, and also to facilitate the author’s depiction of herself as the wronged and much-maligned visionary woman who is marginalised or excluded by an unenlightened society. Moreover, such a depiction of an inscribed social marginality throws into relief a privileged relationship with God which necessitates and legitimises an occupation of the liminal spaces at the boundaries of the acceptable whilst living within the heart of society. Thus, Margery’s treatment of her own sexuality in the Book becomes part of a personal and narrative strategy which will lead eventually to some measure of social autonomy and literary empowerment. In this context, the commodification of Margery’s sexuality constitutes a dominant discourse from the outset of her narrative, initially resting uneasily alongside those discourses of motherhood already examined. The resultant tension is something which not only characterises Margery’s relationships with many of her contemporaries throughout her documented life, but is also fundamental to the unique relationship which she forges with her divine lover – Christ. It is also entirely characteristic of her problematic relationship with her largely bewildered husband who finds his wife increasingly resistant to his sexual advances, in spite of their having at one time enjoyed a satisfying and enjoyable sexual relationship. On Margery’s own admission,

56 57

On the female as ontologically flawed being, see, for example, Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, p. 161 and 268–9. See also my Introduction, p. 9. Karras, however, points out a common association made in the Middle Ages between greed and lust which converged in the figure of the prostitute (‘Holy Harlots: Prostitute Saints in Medieval Legend’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, 1 (1990), pp. 3–32 (p. 6)).

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‘in hir hong age [she] had ful many delectabyl thowtys, fleschly lustys, & inordinat louys to hys persone’ (181). However, within a few months of her religious conversion, sexual contact with her husband becomes utterly abhorrent to her, so much so that the ever-supportive Christ tells her that he will slay John Kempe if he will not eventually agree to a chaste marriage (21). These matrimonial and sexual tensions reach a crescendo and explode into narrative climax during the account of the couple’s return from York where Margery tells us they had been ‘for gostly helth’ (22). Although they have already been living chastely for eight weeks, possibly in preparation for the pilgrimage they have undertaken, or else because she has recently given birth to her last child, Margery is distressed to find renewed pressure put upon her by John to restore their physical relationship. Such is her anguish – possibly her anger too – that John intends to reclaim his conjugal rights58 that she tells him she would prefer him to die: ‘ “I had leuar se how be slayn þan we schuld turne ahen to owyr vnclennesse” ’ (23). Needing to retaliate quickly, John resorts to predictable insult when articulacy fails him, confronted as he is by a vehemently determined and confidently manipulative Margery. Attempting to undermine her socially acceptable role as his wife, her concomitant respectability and her situational control, John tells her, ‘He arn no good wyfe’ (23). With this conventional insult and all its implications of sexual inadequacy, John Kempe attempts to subject and shame his wife, regain control over her body and relocate her firmly back within the social order which she appears to be eschewing. Of course, the appellation here of ‘bad’ wife serves conversely to illustrate what the ‘good’ wife should be: one who, in true Pauline fashion, is prepared to follow instruction and adhere to the code: ‘Wives, be subject to your husbands, as it behoveth in the Lord’.59 This, of course, would naturally include sex on demand in fulfilment of the marriage debt.60 For Margery to be a ‘good’ wife in this context, however, she would have to trade her body without desire for the dubious gains of her husband’s approval and goodwill. In effect, she would have to prostitute herself, sinking down the scale of acceptable female sexual expression into that of the whore or the ‘common woman’ with her husband as perpetual client. This reading is further corroborated by the fact that the episode is recounted directly following a remarkable lyrical profession by Christ of his own devotion to Margery at the end of Chapter 10 where he assures her: ‘I am in þe, and þow in me. And þei þat heryn þe pei heryn þe voys of God’ (23). In the light

58 59

60

The tensions arising from theological attitudes for men and women in marriage are discussed by Georges Duby in Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1994), pp. 29–32. Colossians 3: 18. See also 1 Corinthians 7: 1–16 for further Pauline teaching on marriage. For a study of the contribution of Paul’s writing to the idea of marriage in the Middle Ages see Christopher N. L. Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford, 1994), pp. 48–51. For a discussion of sexual attitudes within marriage see Michael M. Sheehan, ‘Sexuality and the Married State’, in James L. Farge (ed.), Marriage, Family and Law in Medieval Europe: Collected Studies (Cardiff, 1996), pp. 297–306.

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of these words, with all their implications of both spiritual and sexual satisfaction and exclusivity, for Margery to comply with John Kempe’s definition of a good wife would create in her an adulteress of the worst order – that is the fornicating, adulterous wife of Christ himself. Such a strategic placing of these two nuptial narratives alongside each other – Christ’s loving affirmation and John’s frustrated defamation – serves, therefore, to offer a critique of social attitudes towards marriage, and the required sexual compliance of wives in particular. John’s attempt to bring his wife under control by labelling her in this way is thus doomed to failure by Margery’s exploitative treatment of it and he is forced into renegotiating his relationship with her in a transaction which is described in terms fully worthy of the marketplace. Attempting to retain control within the transaction, John Kempe imposes three conditions on his wife before he will agree to consent to a chaste marriage, conditions which ironically serve to link sexuality and economics in a highly functional way: ‘ “My fyrst desyr is þat we xal lyn stylle togedyr in o bed as we han do befor; þe secunde þat he schal pay my dettys er he go to Iherusalem; & þe thrydde þat he schal etyn & drynkyn wyth me on þe Fryday as he wer wont to don” ’ (24). With Christ as mediator, Margery agrees to two out of the three of these conditions: she will eat and drink with him on a Friday and she will pay off all his debts before departing for Jerusalem. On no account, however, will she lie again with him in her bed and, in a skilful textual closure, she proceeds to invert and parody the conventional sexual exchange expected of her within matrimony. Now, instead of trading her body for her husband’s approval and goodwill she becomes its own beneficiary and buys back John’s right of access to her: ‘Grawntyth me þat he schal not komyn in my bed, & I grawnt how to qwyte howr dettys er I go to Ierusalem. & makyth my body fre to God so þat he neuyr make no chalengyng in me to askyn no dett of matrimony aftyr þis day whyl he leuyn, & I schal etyn & drynkyn on þe Fryday at howr byddyng.’ (25)

Thus, in Margery’s newly defined matrimonial sexual economy it is John who purchases financial security from his wife, paid for by the withdrawal of his sexual persona from their marriage. John capitulates, evidently happy with the arrangement and they kneel down together beneath a wayside cross to give thanks before sharing a celebratory meal ‘in gladnes of spyryt’ (25). What we have therefore witnessed is the injurious speech of John Kempe being entirely appropriated by his wife and ‘returned’ to him in a different form, serving to disrupt and negate its original effects.61 Hence the ‘bad’ wife metamorphoses into a now redefined ‘good’ wife who saves her husband not only from social and financial embarrassment but also from heavenly censure

61

On the efficacy of ‘subversive reiteration’ as a strategy see Butler, Excitable Speech, pp. 14 and 19.

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for his impulse towards continued ‘vnclenennesse’ and heedless concupiscence. The whole episode therefore constitutes a type of sexualised economic transaction in reverse. Not only does it remain one of mutual benefit but, more importantly, will allow Margery Kempe to regain the freedom of her body by linking it herself to that most effective of negotiating tools – money. Discourses of prostitution and the trading of bodies are evidenced at other strategic points in the narrative, and on other occasions Margery actively and performatively embraces her own subjection to interpellation in order to disrupt the expectations of her audience and throw into relief what she regards as her misunderstood subjectivity as holy woman. At the beginning of her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, for example, Margery is again subject to injurious speech and labelled a ‘bad woman’, this time by her fellow travelers who have taken great exception to her overt piety and her perpetual allusion to spiritual matters (61–2). Their treatment of her deteriorates from intense verbal abuse to physical isolation and rejection and at one point they remove her maidservant from her company for the fear that she too will be labelled a ‘strumpet’ for having been in Margery’s company. The word ‘strumpet’, of course, incorporates notions of the debauched or unchaste woman, the harlot or the common woman, again containing within its various definitions a wide range of female sexual behaviour.62 The origins of the word are unclear but one suggestion has been that it originates from the Middle Dutch term ‘strompen’, meaning to stride or stalk.63 The sexual connotations of ‘stride’ are obvious and the image of the stalker would appear to fit in not only with the medieval idea of a woman as sexually insatiable whose seductive nature lures the male into sexual temptation, but also with the image of the moneyminded marriageable woman as pursuer of the unsuspecting male, as epitomised by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath or the young women of his fabliaux.64 This unilateral reaction to Margery by the company again implies a sexualisation of what they regard as a socially transgressive behaviour. In her refusal to talk of anything but spiritual matters she has impinged upon the company’s hedonistic abandon and has disrupted their homogeneity. They also fear her independent behaviour will contaminate the other women in the company and when their attempts to contain it by means of verbal insult fails, they inscribe upon it a specifically sexual transgressiveness, once again demonstrating society’s reliance on the sexual slur as a means of controlling the aberrant woman. Margery thus becomes the recipient of the most extraordinary treatment at their hands, a treatment which some critics have read in

62 63 64

MED, ‘strumpet’, 1a. Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (London, 1966). Similarly, MED entry for ‘stomperen’ (1b) defines it as ‘to walk clumsily’ or ‘to stagger’. See, for example, ‘The Shipman’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 203–8, and ‘The Merchant’s Tale’, pp. 154–68.

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terms of a Bakhtinian expression of the grotesque.65 Certainly it would seem that in her retelling of this episode Margery is representing her own body in these terms. However, in another example of Butlerian ‘subversive reiteration’, Margery’s literary treatment of this incident serves to transfer the overdetermined and grotesque inscription back upon the bodies which are so intent on abusing her. Graphically she recounts the attempts of this company to consolidate their imposed identity of strumpet upon her by forcing her to wear a torn, white, apron-like garment – a ‘sekkyn gelle’ – which is so short that it reveals her legs to the knee (62). It is likely that this ‘sekkyn gelle’ would have carried connotations of prostitution because of its etymological link with ‘gill’, a common term of female sexual derision, and because it is inappropriately revealing parts of her body and making them thoroughly accessible to all the onlookers.66 Moreover, both Margery’s body and her personal space have been invaded for the enforcement of the wearing of this garment, which renders her yet another version of the ‘common woman’ who appears to have been thoroughly taken ‘in honde’ by the company. They now deem her to be dressed appropriately for this role and this material manifestation of her aberrance further justifies their common disparagement of her. The torn and curtailed garment, of course, constitutes a parody of the modest yet ambiguous garment of white linen which Christ has previously asked Margery to wear and which she will adopt permanently whilst in Rome on her return journey from Jerusalem (92). By means of its parodic imposition upon her here, however, the company attempts to inscribe upon Margery the identity of the hypocritical, would-be-virgin whore67 but in fact ends up foregrounding its own ungodliness. The end result, therefore, is the emphasis of Margery’s own Christian humility and an acerbic critique of the cruel limitations of her ‘pharisaic’ accusers. Moreover, Margery then proceeds to document how she is forced to sit at the bottom of the table in an inversion of the honour which would be attributed to a visiting holy dignitary – a bishop, for

65

66

67

According to the findings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), the female body was paradigmatic of the open, accessible and grotesque body within medieval culture. See, for example, p. 339: ‘it swallows and generates, gives and takes’. For a discussion of such grotesquery in connection with the aging body see Sarah Kay, ‘The Old Body in Medieval Culture’, in Kay and Rubin, Framing Medieval Bodies, pp. 161–86. This reading is supported by Meech’s observation that, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the etymology of ‘gelle’ links it to the word ‘gylle’, a possible extension of ‘gill’ or ‘jill’, a term of sexual contempt applied to a woman. The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 286, n. 62/16–17. Alternatively, in her analysis of the prostitutes of Southwark in the late Middle Ages, Karras has pointed out that these regulated women were prohibited from wearing aprons and suggests that Margery’s imposed garment can be seen as a parody of the ecclesiastic, apron-like garment of a bishop (Common Women, p. 157, n. 39). Barbara Hanawalt points out in her essay, ‘At the Margin’s of Women’s Space in Medieval Europe’, in Edwards and Ziegler, Matrons and Marginal Women, pp. 7–8, that the imposing of dress codes upon women was another way of confining and controlling them. She then proceeds to discuss dress codes imposed upon prostitutes in European cities during the Middle Ages.

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example. Such a positioning further transforms her into a figure of fun and ridicule, indeed into a type of grotesque Pope Joan figure,68 embodying all society’s fears of the disruptive powers of the common whore as well as the perceived obscenity of the would-be woman priest. Karma Lochrie’s interpretation of this incident injects it with unlikely humour in a reading which responds to Margery’s self-representation here as God’s ‘holy fool’ as an incitement of her readership to share in the merriment of her detractors as well as in the anguish and humiliation experienced by herself.69 Although Lochrie claims to resist a strong Bakhtinian reading because of its failure to take into account the implications of gender, nevertheless she relies heavily on his study of the role of laughter and the grotesque in the medieval world for her interpretation.70 For Bakhtin, extrainstitutional folk licentiousness such as the Feast of Fools demonstrated society’s reliance upon the figure of the clown to create a laughter which in turn would help to dissipate what he terms the ‘mystic terror of God’.71 Although it is likely that it was just such a type of extra-institutional licentiousness which Margery’s particularly vocal brand of religious piety was disrupting for her fellow pilgrims, and why much of their vindictive behaviour towards her revolves around the meal table,72 on re-examination, Margery’s selfdenigration at this point in her text is more devoid of humour than Lochrie’s quasi-Bakhtinian interpretation assumes. Nevertheless, she is accurate in her assessment of the gendered nature of the pilgrims’ treatment of Margery’s body as being central to an accurate interpretation of this disturbing episode. Far from depending on her reader’s sense of amusement here as Lochrie suggests, however, Margery appears to be drawing upon the intensely

68

69 70

71

72

According to medieval legend Pope Joan’s sex remained hidden until the time when she gave birth on the street during a papal procession. A brief allusion to the legend can be found in Newman, From Virile Woman, pp. 238–9. See also David J. Madison, ‘The Popess Who Never Was’, Mississippi Folklore Register 19, 1 (1985), pp. 31–5, and Steven M. Taylor, ‘Martin le Franc’s Rehabilitation of Notorious Women: The Case of Pope Joan’, FifteenthCentury Studies 19 (1992), pp. 261–78. Lochrie, Translations, p. 156. On the role of holy laughter in the Middle Ages, and in particular the tradition of the risus paschalis, see Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 71–5. For his analysis of the Feast of Fools, see pp. 78–82. For Lochrie’s reading of this see Translations, pp. 156. and 161. For an alternative examination of the role of holy laughter in medieval writing, see Stephen Metcalf, ‘Inner and Outer’, in The Later Middle Ages, pp. 108–71 (pp. 138–9). Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, p. 90. The Feast of Fools was eventually banned by the medieval Church and moved outside into the marketplace and the taverns, where, according to Bakhtin, it ‘became one of the most colourful and genuine expressions of medieval festive laughter’ (p 78). For a discussion of the importance of the feast motif to the grotesque and carnivalesque see Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, pp. 278–303. For an analysis of the licentiousness of the meal-table, see Margaret Healy, ‘Monstrous Tyrannical Appetites: “& what wonderfull monsters have there now lately ben borne in Englande?” ’, in McAvoy and Walters, Consuming Narratives, pp. 157–69. Here Healy examines the power structures embedded in the motif of the feast and its display of conspicuous consumption.

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emotive and gendered image of the whore or ‘common woman’ which she then proceeds to inscribe hyperbolically upon her own body in order to disrupt the company’s interpellative strategy and again turn it back upon the speakers themselves. Thus she succeeds in disrupting the assumptions of both her fellow pilgrims and her readers and wrests from them control over her situation, her body and the textual reconstruction of both. In this highly public performance of the company’s interpellative abuse of her, Margery disrupts and dissipates its efficacy as controlling mechanism because it is re-enacted at her own pace and according to her own script. The end result is that she is allied in the mind of the reader with the lowly, wretched and needy in society, a position which, paradoxically, will serve to elevate her. Conversely, her detractors are allied to the arrogant, the self-interested and the self-inflated, a position which ultimately serves to derogate them in the text. Indeed, this is something which is represented even more explicitly soon afterwards in the narrative when the ‘good man’ of the hostelry where the company is lodging at Constance proceeds to make much of the abused Margery, feeding her from his own plate, in spite of the fact that she has been made her sit in the most lowly position at the table (62). Once again Margery empowers herself, translating the text of her denigrated body into a manipulation of the responses of her readers and thus disrupting the intended effects of her sexual vilification. Such an intensely gendered performance of the role which has been imposed upon her is the source of another fissure through which Margery Kempe as subject passes, taking her audience with her and leaving behind her tormentors to be defeated by their own gendered inscriptions. One of the most sinister and threatening incidences in which Margery is designated as whore takes place at Leicester during a later pilgrimage to the north of England in 1417. In an episode which serves perfectly to illustrate the weight of both secular and ecclesiastic dictates about suitable behaviour for women, Margery is arrested and ridiculed by the mayor who names her as ‘a fals strumpet, a fals loller, & a fals deceyuer of þe pepyl’ (112). In his equating of the terms ‘strumpet’ and ‘Lollard’, the mayor lays bare the primary fears invoked by women generally, but particularly those invoked by women who overtly transgress the boundaries of established socio-religious proscription. As a self-fashioning group, and as one also fashioned by others,73 the Lollards had set about creating a new identity for themselves which would supplant the old religious order and establish them in opposition to everything they abhorred – which included the misuse of authority.74 The potential independence of the ‘common woman’ as similar ‘self-fashioner’ was equally disruptive to the patriarchal socio-religious order, as we have seen, and in 73 74

See p. 87, n. 80. On this see Shannon McSheffery, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420–1530 (Pennsylvania, 1995), p. 10.

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this context, for the mayor of Leicester at least, Margery’s unconventional behaviour can only mean one thing – she must be in religious terms a heretic and in secular terms a whore. Thus the two terms become synonymous within the patriarchal semantics adopted by this man and, as a result, Margery is passed on to the steward of Leicester to be dealt with by him. However, unable to make any of his accusations of heresy adhere because of Margery’s reasonable – and entirely orthodox – verbal responses to his accusations, the steward resorts to the now familiar sexualisation of her transgressiveness in order to bring her under control in what he deems as the appropriate manner: ‘Than þe Steward toke hir be þe hand led hir into hys chawmbyr & spak many fowyl rebawdy wordys vnto hir, purposyng & desyryng, as it semyd hir, to opressyn hir & forlyn hir’ (113). Here the steward proceeds to brand Margery as sexually available in order to restore her to her rightful position as subservient and objectified ‘other’ and to justify his abusive treatment of her. When even this sexual inscription upon Margery fails to subjugate her in spite of her very evident fear of the situation, the steward moves on from trying to control her with ‘fowyl rebawdy wordys’ to an attempt upon her body itself: ‘seyng hir boldenes þat sche dred no presonyng, he strogelyd wyth hir, schewyng vnclene tokenys & vngoodly cuntenawns’ (113). For the steward, Margery’s display of courage, defiance and lack of appropriate deference to him as an authoritative male paradoxically signifies a woman out of control. His solution is to attempt to force upon her his own masculine control by means of the act of rape, and in so doing inscribe upon her the subjectivity of whore. As she is labelled by him, so she will also be treated by him in this ultimate act of interpellative naming and defining, and the man is only restrained by her timely invocation of her own divine gifts which she is at pains to tell him come ‘of þe Holy Gost & not of hir owyn cunnyng’ (113). Driven into confusion by Margery’s unconventionality, the steward’s final response – which echoes appropriately the confusion displayed by John Kempe during his own negotiations with Margery – articulates the disruption of his male authority: ‘Eyþyr þu art a ryth good woman er ellys a ryth wikked woman’ (113). Such a resort to what is now becoming a cliched articulation of those patriarchal binaries used to classify women, not only undermines the authority of the steward’s interpellative strategy but by means of its overdetermined representation also effects his defeat in the text by its foregrounding of his own moral inadequacy. Such a treatment of male presumption on Margery’s sexual availability continues to surface at frequent intervals throughout her text, suggesting that the dividing-line between the subjectivity of whore and that of holy woman is very thin indeed and yet the location of a subtle lacuna ripe for authorial exploitation. It is, therefore, such a fragile and permeable boundary which offers Margery Kempe the opportunity to move in and out of these subject positions at will, a movement which constitutes both a strategy of protection and a means towards selfauthorisation. 113

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Some critics such as T. W. Coleman have suggested that Margery’s sexual anxieties and her frequently articulated fear of rape is a result of ‘sexual aberrance’ on her part, and evidence of a more general neurosis.75 However, as we have seen previously, male aggression towards Margery as a transgressive woman is often sexualised in the course of an attempt to control her behaviour, and such sexual aggression as an integral component of patriarchal repression becomes the subject of an important critique within the Book. As a single woman travelling alone, even in her old age, Margery’s sexual status continues to be challenged and interrogated by those men with whom she comes into contact, providing further evidence of its strategic importance within the Book as a whole. This is never more apparent than when as a sexagenarian she finds herself abandoned and isolated on mainland Europe having impulsively accompanied her widowed daughter-in-law back to her home in Germany from England. Rendered lame by a foot injury, and having contravened the advice of her confessor, Margery’s greatest difficulty is finding travelling companions who will tolerate her singular behaviour and compromise their own safe passage home by taking into account her tardiness. Whilst one companion ‘went so fast þat sche myth not folwyn wythowtyn gret labowr & gret disese’ (233–4), others abandon her altogether (240). Following her expulsion from a monastery near Aachen for her uncontrollable sobbing when viewing the Sacrament (235–6), as night falls Margery’s situation becomes dire. Not knowing where or with whom she might stay the night, in a multilayered section of narrative Margery tells of how she is approached by a group of priests who, instead of offering her solace and protection as their position would demand, sexualise her predicament and presume upon her sexual availability and commonality (236). As an unaccompanied woman who is attached to no man, her solitude and vulnerability render her available to them for their sexual purposes. The preconceived and reductive notions of suitable female behaviour displayed by these priests attempt to remove from Margery her individuality and inscribe upon her their own abusive desires. Hence she is addressed by them with ‘many lewed wordys’ (236) and labelled as ‘Englisch sterte’ – a word used on the Continent to insult both men and women, its literal meaning probably deriving from the Anglo-Saxon ‘steorte’ meaning ‘tail’, alluding to a commonly told myth that the English had tails beneath their clothing.76 The sexual connotations here are evident, particularly in the context of the lewdness of the 75 76

Coleman, English Mystics, p. 158. For information on this word and its usage see The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 345, n. 236/29–30. See also Klaus Bitterling, ‘Margery Kempe and English “sterte” in Germany’, Notes and Queries 43 (241), 1 (1996), pp. 21–2. Bitterling contests this origin of the word, suggesting instead that it derives from the Middle High German word for a vagabond or tramp, ‘sterzer’. However, from the context in which the word is used in Margery Kempe’s text, it would appear to be closely associated with the priests’ sexual advances, suggesting the former more vulgar etymology rather than that suggested by Bitterling.

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priests and the ‘vnclenly cher & cuntenawns’ (236) which they exhibit towards Margery. Significantly too, this is a behaviour which is highly reminiscent of a former textual representation of sexually aggressive ecclesiastics and appears to be the threatened manifestation of one of Margery’s greatest fears. During the days of her sexual temptation and torment when her gift of tears had been removed from her, Margery had been plagued by lewd visions of naked and sexually active priests whom she feared would cause her to be ‘comoun’ to them all (144–6). Now, years later, those priests have materialised in reality before her when she is old and most vulnerable and thus serve a variety of purposes in the text. On one level they underscore the hypocrisy of the established elite, especially as Margery herself has only recently been branded a hypocrite by the monks near Aachen because of her excess of tears (235). On another level, they serve to highlight the injustice of the female position in society which renders her subject to male commodification and transformation into object to be passed between them and used by each of them in turn, according to their own desires. In view of the fact that sexual liaison between priests and whores was commonplace in the late Middle Ages,77 this passage also serves to reinforce the text’s underlying criticism of those servants of God who fail to live up to the privileged position bestowed upon them by socio-religious ideology.78 At this point, therefore, Margery’s self-depiction as potential whore or ‘common woman’ functions textually as a catalyst for the examination of the hypocritical position held by many men in the established Church. Through her self-representation as potential whore, Margery provides a focus for the critique of patriarchal attitudes towards women within contemporary culture, suggesting that the trappings and labels which bestow power and authority upon the male subject are nothing more than a screen behind which baser tendencies are allowed to operate. This criticism is reinforced by the fact that help comes not from a new, protective male but, as so often happens in the narrative, from another woman – in this case the owner of a hostelry who provides Margery with some female companions and somewhere to sleep (236). This woman’s profession and position within society, of course, would also be an ambiguous one. Women who kept taverns were not considered wholly respectable79 and, like Margery, lay on the margins of social acceptability. Yet, this is where Margery’s support lies, creating a subtle and acerbic subtext at this point in the narrative. Here, Christian values are adhered to by the women labelled by society as being of dubious virtue, again re-emphasising the singular lack of Christian charity displayed by the priests who were supposed to embody it. The following day Margery is rescued by a group of people whose identity 77 78 79

Karras, Common Women, pp. 77–8. For a discussion of Margery’s subtextual criticism of the Church and its hierarchy of ‘holy men’ see Staley, Dissenting Fictions, pp. 105–8. Karras, Common Women, p. 72.

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pushes traditional meanings of fellowship to its limits and throws into relief the hypocritical ‘fellowship’ of both pilgrims and priests which Margery has had to endure previously. Although highly vulnerable and needy themselves, it is a group of vermin-ridden beggars which offers Margery both company and protection. Moreover, in order to rid themselves of their vermin they are compelled to strip naked at intervals, as Margery is at pains to point out: ‘hir felaschep dedyn of her clothys, &, sittyng nakyd, pykyd hem’ (237). In the same way as she identifies with their poverty and humility, however, so the symbol of their lowliness – this infestation by body lice – is transferred to her by association: ‘& þerfor sche thorw hir comownyng had part of her vermyn’ (237). In spite of her narrowly veiled revulsion for their physical degradation, nevertheless, Margery enrolls them in the narrative in support of her own humility and the nakedness of these people, although troubling for her too, is rendered synonymous with and indistinguishable from their vulnerability and spiritual purity. They are both literally and spiritually free from the type of trappings which dress up and disguise the abusive behaviour of the lascivious priests whose own potential nakedness is fundamentally more threatening and abhorrent than the innocent shedding of clothes by these essentially unthreatening beggars. In this scenario even their dirt, lice and fleas are represented as an honest contamination in the face of the corruption lurking beneath the religious veneer of the priests. Thus, the subtext of this section asserts the transcendent goodness of both beggar and common woman, both of whom cast into relief the corruption of the powerful priesthood and the patriarchal attitudes which they represent. Throughout this episode and those examined previously, Margery’s textual positioning of herself is firmly in the role of the common woman, serving both to underline the antipathy and misunderstanding of society towards her and to offer an acerbic critique of masculine abuses of power. Thus her role as figurative whore conflates with that of holy woman, both of whom are in some sense common to humanity and who, in their humility, are intrinsic to the redemptive process, as we shall see. The success of such a conflation reflects Margery Kempe’s ability to break down the boundaries which have been imposed upon her from without and to offer a new, reconstructed self which asserts a variety of female subject positions as being of equal value for achieving direct access to God.

‘[S]che stode in þe same place þer Mary Mawdelyn stode’: The Whore and the Holy Woman The figure used most consistently by Margery Kempe in an attempt to reconcile her own sexual history with a desired subjectivity as holy woman is the sexually experienced and yet entirely redeemed Mary Magdalene. Allusions to this most renowned of biblical whores not only punctuate Margery’s text but 116

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her ubiquitous presence is also manifested by means of a subtle inscription upon Margery’s own body. Such a textual and subtextual insistence upon the presence of the Magdalene therefore serves to consolidate, underscore and validate the compatibility of sexuality and holiness which Margery then proceeds to establish as authoritative strategy within her text. Surprisingly, most modern commentators have failed to recognise the full significance of the early reference to Mary Magdalene made by Margery’s amanuensis in the closing sentence of the first draft of his Proem to the treatise (6). Most of those who have commented on it have done so in the context of what they interpret as Margery’s conventional imitatio of the Magdalene as best placed of the saints to represent the author’s sense of fallen self.80 However, Margery’s identification with Mary Magdalene is a much more complex and multivalent an appropriation of that persona than allowed for by the simple concept of imitatio, and the introduction of this so-called ‘harlot saint’ into the narrative by Margery’s scribe as an introit to the onset of Margery’s own account offers an apologia not only for Margery’s experiences but for the very act of writing itself. The scribe announces that his struggle to interpret and continue what the first amanuensis had initiated was finally won when he began his writing ‘in þe her of owr Lord a m.cccc.xxxvj on þe day next aftyr Mary Maudelyn aftyr þe informacyon of þis creatur’ (6). This temporal placement of the inauguration of Margery’s text provides a specific context for Margery’s opening account which deals with the abjection resulting from the loss of her virginity, her first experience of maternity and her unexpiated sin which I examined in Chapter 1. This has the effect of anchoring the entire account within the context of female concupiscence as well as providing a firm point of reference for the text as a whole. From the outset it is Mary Magdalene as the patron saint of both prostitutes and contemplatives81 who will oversee the narrative, provide sponsorship for Margery’s lived and written lives, and who, by

80

81

See, for example, Suzanne Craymer, ‘Margery Kempe’s Imitation of Mary Magdalene and the Digby Plays’, Mystics Quarterly 19 (1993), pp. 173–81, for a sustained examination of the role this saint plays in the life of Margery. The main drawback to Craymer’s evaluation, however, is that she is anachronistic in her assumption that Margery Kempe may have been directly influenced by the Digby play’s representation of Mary Magdalene. Since the play originates from the late fifteenth century, this would be an impossibility. It is, however, more likely that the same type of devotional practices which influenced the Digby playwright also exerted an influence upon Margery. See also, Susan Eberley, ‘Margery Kempe, St. Mary Magdalene and Patterns of Contemplation’, Downside Review: A Quarterly of Catholic Thought 368 (1989), pp. 208–33. Susan Haskins also points out Margery’s identification with Mary Magdalene in Mary Magdalen, p. 176. In addition, Haskins also draws the link between female mysticism and prostitution as ‘having both emerged from the new urban society’, p. 176. For a discussion of this see Chapter 4, p. 146. Marjorie M. Malvern, Venus in Sackcloth: The Magdalene’s Origins and Metamorphosis (Illinois, 1975), p. 84; Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p. 253. For an account of the Magdalen’s patronage of houses for repentant whores, see Haskins, Mary Magdalen, pp. 171–3.

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implication, will guide the responses of the hitherto recalcitrant amanuensis, allowing him to respond to Margery’s feminine discourses of sexuality and prophecy, as we shall see. As Ruth Karras has illustrated in her examination of the popularity of the harlot saints in the late Middle Ages, Mary Magdalene was probably the most popular saint in all of medieval Europe after the Virgin Mary.82 Rising to popularity in the twelfth century, by the fourteenth century her feast day had become one of the greatest festivals of the Church year.83 Without a doubt this was enhanced by the medieval Church’s new emphasis on penitence and confession following the Gregorian reforms and the Fourth Lateran Council’s edict of 1215 which made annual confession to a priest compulsory for the faithful.84 In medieval consciousness, the Magdalene was a composite figure of penitence in whom were conflated three of the well-known New Testament figures. Firstly, there was Mary of Magdala who had been possessed by seven devils which Christ exorcised from her.85 It was this Mary who was the first to see the risen Christ and who thus took on the role of ‘apostless’ to the apostles.86 This Mary later became confused with Mary of Bethany, sister to Martha and Lazarus and was renowned for preferring to listen to the teachings of Christ whilst her sister busied herself with more active and domestic chores.87 No doubt, this aspect of the Magdalene, too, had a marked influence upon Margery Kempe in her desire to abjure the domestic and commonplace in order to contemplate Christ’s Passion.88 Finally, there was also some confusion between these two Marys and the sinful woman who came to Christ and washed his feet with her tears in the house of Simon the Pharisee.89 It was primarily the characteristics of this latter woman (who remains unnamed in the New Testament)90 which were to inscribe themselves upon this multilayered figure in medieval consciousness and, in keeping with the misogynistic code inherited from the Church Fathers, the biblical vagueness of her sins was translated into sexual transgression.91 Significantly too, on no occasion in the

82 83 84 85 86 87 88

89 90 91

Karras, ‘Holy Harlots’. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p. 132. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p. 133. On this practice see also Tentler, Sin and Confession, pp. 20–2. See Luke 8: 2. See Mark 16: 9; and John 20: 17–18. Margery’s identification with Mary Magdalene in this capacity is discussed in Chapter 5, pp. 186–8. Luke 10: 38–42. Society’s suspicion of Margery’s abjuring of traditional domesticity is demonstrated during her travels in the north of England. On one occasion Margery is pursued by the women of Hessle in Yorkshire and threatened by their distaffs. On arrival at Beverley, the men there tell her to ‘go spynne & carde as oþer women don’ (129). See, for example, Luke 7: 37–8. Saint John attributes this action to Mary, sister of Martha and Lazarus, recounting it as having taken place at their home in Bethany (John 12: 1–7). Karras, ‘Holy Harlots’, p. 18. See also Haskins, Mary Magdalen, pp. 14–18 for an account of the sexual associations of these women’s ‘sins’.

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New Testament is Mary Magdalene depicted as a commercial prostitute but, as we have seen from contemporary records, that term was very loosely applied to any woman in the Middle Ages whose sexual morality fell short of the dictates of the Church, and it was therefore hardly surprising that tradition would translate the female sinner into a woman who traded her body for sex. In addition to this, the Magdalene’s role as common whore in public consciousness was further exacerbated by her confusion with another of the popular harlot saints, Saint Mary of Egypt.92 Like Mary Magdalene, Mary of Egypt spent years of dissolute living before a conversion which ultimately resulted in a life of severe asceticism in the desert. However, the various extant Vitae of this particular Mary (such as we find in de Voragine’s account in The Golden Legend, for example)93 are emphatic about her activities as commercial prostitute, trading her body to sailors in order to pay for her passage by ship to the Holy Land.94 It follows, therefore, that by the time the popularity of the Magdalene legend reached its height in the late Middle Ages, it bore very little resemblance to canonical biblical depictions of the saint. However, as a ‘paradigm of the feminine’,95 this prostitute saint, in her capacity as essential and sinful Everywoman, offered an unique opportunity to the medieval woman for a renunciation of the legacy of Eve through repentance and proclamation of the risen Christ, as well as providing her with the possibility of a similar apotheosis.96 An examination of popular thirteenth- and fourteenth-century hymns which feature Mary Magdalene prominently also attests to the all-pervading popularity of this saint during this period.97 Joseph Szövérffy has illustrated how the language and content of hymns adhere very closely to the pattern of changes and developments in the cult of medieval saints and those composed to celebrate Mary Magdalene are no exception. In many instances in the hymns of this period composed to celebrate the saint it is her penitence which is emphasised rather than her sinfulness; she is, for example, frequently referred to as ‘Maria poenitens’ (penitent Mary), or else her transcendence is glorified by her transformation into ‘lux serena’ (shining light) and ‘stella 92

93 94 95 96 97

Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p. 108. For an account of the legend of Mary of Egypt and an analysis of her relevance to the Mary Magdalene story see Karras, ‘Holy Harlots’, pp. 6–10. See also Benedicta Ward, Harlots of the Desert: Studies of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources (Oxford, 1987), pp. 35–56, for a translation of the Latin Vita of Mary of Egypt. De Voragine, The Golden Legend, vol. 1, pp. 227–9. De Voragine, The Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 227. This is a phrase used by Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p. 32. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p. 32. See also p. 160 for the assertion that the composite figure of the Magdalene came to represent womankind in general. This survey of the medieval hymns which feature Mary Magdalene has been made by Joseph Szövérffy in ‘ “Peccatrix Quondam Femina”: A Survey of the Mary Magdalene Hymns’, Traditio 19 (1963), pp. 79–146. For this survey Szövérffy has used the collection of medieval hymns found in G. M. Davies and C. Blume (eds), Analectica Hymnica Medii Aevi, 55 vols (Leipzig 1886–1922).

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radiosa’ (radiant star).98 Most pre-eminent, however, are those labels which allude directly to her sinful past. She is very often referred to as ‘peccatrix’ (sinner), sometimes as ‘femina infamis’ (infamous woman)99 or ‘meretrix impudica’ (unchaste whore),100 and one hymn in particular takes this even further in its identification of the unfathomable depths of womanly sinfulness: Tu es stella radiosa Diu tamen nebulosa, Obducta caligine Et peccatrix appellata, Supra modum deformata Facta membrum Satanae.101 You are a shining star, for a long time obscured by fog, however. Seduced by moral darkness and called ‘the sinner’, deformed beyond measure, you formed a limb of Satan.

In attributing here the very worst characteristics of womankind to Mary Magdalene, the ostensible effect, of course, is to create a contrast with her later conversion experiences and apotheosis, which become further elevated. Moreover, unlike the wholly unique Virgin, Mary Magdalene’s ontological inheritance was that of all women, and her particular route to sainthood was available to other repentant women in a way that the Virgin’s was not. As Joseph Szövérffy has illustrated, in spite of the apparent rigidity of the hymn tradition and format, medieval hymns appeared to conform to changes and reconfigurations of public attitudes towards medieval saints,102 as well as echoing patterns, symbols and phrasing found in homiletic literature and legends of the period.103 From the evidence of the Magdalene hymns it is therefore possible to ascertain that both her gender-specific sinfulness and glorious transcendence was being offered readily to faithful female followers within the Church of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and that she offered a colourful, human and – more importantly – attainable example for them to follow. In the context of Margery Kempe, one of the very few commentators to recognise the importance of the influence of the figure of Mary Magdalene upon the writer has been Suzanne Craymer.104 In her analysis of some of the ways in which Margery manipulates the legend of this saint to suit her own purposes, Craymer also astutely points out that Margery’s early self-representation as egotistical hedonist taking pride in her prestigious parentage in

98 99 100 101 102 103 104

115 (1) as cited by Szövérffy, ‘ “Peccatrix” ’, p. 92. 100 (7), as cited in Szövérffy, ‘ “Peccatrix” ’, p. 92. 2 (4a), cited in Szövérffy, ‘ “Peccatrix” ’, p. 92. 115 (2), cited in Szövérffy, ‘ “Peccatrix” ’, p. 115. Szövérffy, ‘ “Peccatrix” ’, p. 85. Szövérffy, ‘ “Peccatrix” ’, p. 139. Craymer, ‘Margery Kempe’s Imitation’.

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Bishop’s Lynn and her passion for ostentatiously fashionable attire draws heavily on Middle English representations of Mary Magdalene which, in turn, had been influenced by de Voragine’s version of her life.105 According to de Voragine, her beauty and wealth led to such personal corruption ‘that her proper name was forgotten and she was commonly called “the sinner” ’.106 Osbern Bokenham too, writing his version of Mary Magdalene’s Life in the middle of the fifteenth century,107 would also emphasise Mary’s exceptional beauty and social advantages: She of naturys yiftys had þe souereynte And passyd alle wummen in excellent bewte, For, as it semyd to yche mannys syht, Feyrer þan she no wumman be myht.108

Thus, in her attempt to gain a reputation for beauty and social graces, Margery Kempe similarly receives ‘mech velany’ (9) from her contemporaries, some of whom ‘seyden sche was acursyd’ (10), and the failure of her business ventures is seen by her accusers (and herself in retrospect) as God’s punishment for her arrogance and self-absorption: ‘[She] thowt it weryn þe skowrges of owyr Lord þat wold chastyse hir for hir synne’ (11). More significantly, at this time Margery is also incited by a church acquaintance to embark upon an adulterous liaison with him (14–15). Whilst having invited Margery’s response to his advances, this man nevertheless rejects her and proceeds to inscribe upon her the vilification incited by the common whore: ‘sche was ouyrcomyn, & consentyd in hir mend, & went to þe man to wetyn yf he wold þan consentyn to hire. And he seyd he ne wold for al þe good in þis world; he had leuar ben hewyn as smal as flesch to þe pott’ (15). Craymer’s interpretation of this episode recognises it simply as providing Margery with an opportunity to identify with Mary Magdalene.109 However, its significance is more complex than this interpretation would allow for. Margery’s treatment of the episode constitutes experimentation with the legend of the Magdalene as hermeneutic in order to investigate the triadic process through which the self is eliminated and rediscovered in the process of redemption. Firstly, the innate self is lost to worldly vice, to ‘pride’ and ‘pompows aray’ (9) in order to facilitate the self-imposed identity as desirable seductress. This, in turn, leads to an act of naming on the part of others in response to this altered identity. The ‘self’ which is acceptable to God, however, can only be released from the tyranny of this imposed identity by means of a figurative death followed 105 106 107 108 109

Craymer, ‘Margery Kempe’s Imitation’, p. 174. De Voragine, The Golden Legend, p. 375. Mary S. Serjeantson (ed.), Osbern Bokenham: Legendys of Hooly Wummen, edited from MS. Arundel 327, EETS o.s. 206 (London, 1938), pp. 136–72. Bokenham, Legendys, p. 148. Craymer, ‘Margery Kempe’s Imitation’, pp. 175–6.

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by rebirth into a holier, more self-critical and self-aware life. Bokenham recounts Mary Magdalene’s initial loss of self in the following terms, echoing and embellishing de Voragine’s earlier narrative: So comoun she was, þat ful pytously Hir name she lost, for of foly So in þe cyte was sprungyn hir fame, That ‘Marie þe synnere’ þei dede hir name.110

Clearly, Margery’s use of contemporary accounts of the saint in her own selfrepresentation at this early stage is already more than a mere act of imitatio. In documenting her own adulterous impulses, what she refers to as ‘hir owyn vnstabylnes’ (15), and subsequent humiliating rebuff, Margery draws upon the lost identity of Mary Magdalene and her reinscription as ‘comoun’ by others, telling us of herself, ‘[She] was labowrd wyth horrybyl temptacyons of letthereye . . . ny al þe next her folwyng’ (16). In effect, she merges with the Magdalene in an act of becoming, and the despair she documents when selfawareness beckons is indistinguishable from that popularly attributed to the Magdalene on the moment of her conversion. In her study of the influence of Mary Magdalene upon Margery Kempe, Craymer anachronistically considers the likelihood that the Digby Mary Magdalen had a significant influence upon Margery’s self-representation in her narrative,111 based upon Jacob Bennett’s argument for the likely provenance of the Digby Mary Magdalen as having being Bishop’s Lynn, Margery’s home town.112 As Carole Meale and others have demonstrated, however, Craymer’s argument falls down since the Digby play postdates The Book of Margery Kempe by at least six decades,113 although there does seem to be some evidence to suggest that there may well have been some kind of play cycle, now lost, being performed at Lynn during the time when Margery

110 111

112

113

Bokenham, Legendys, p. 148. Craymer, ‘Margery Kempe’s Imitation’, p. 173. The Digby Mary Magdalen play is extant in MS Digby 133, fol. 95r–145r and has been edited by Donald L. Baker, John L. Murphy and Louis B. Hall Jr, Digby Plays, EETS o.s. 283 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 24–95. Jacob Bennett, ‘The Mary Magdalene of Bishop’s Lynn’, Studies in Philology 75, 1 (1978), pp. 1–9. Similarly, Gail McMurray Gibson has argued for East Anglia as having been one of the main, if not the main centre of English drama during the fifteenth century in The Theatre of Devotion, pp. 31–2. Carole Meale, ‘ “This is a deed bok, tother a quick”: Theatre and the Drama of Salvation in The Book of Margery Kempe’, in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (eds), Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 49–67 (p. 59). The Digby Mary Magdalen editors consider that the play predates the extant manuscript, which they date as 1515–25 (Digby Plays, p. xxx). They lay down a date in the 1490s as the likely date of the play’s composition (p. xl). See also Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 204–5, and, ‘Staging Conversion: The Digby Saint Plays and The Book of Margery Kempe’, in S. Riches and Sarah Salih (eds), Gender and Holiness: Men, Women and Saints in Late Medieval Europe (London, 2002),pp. 121–34.

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was operating.114 What emphasis was placed on the character of Mary Magdalene, if any, remains unknown, however. Much less speculative, however, is the likelihood that Margery and her husband attended the performance of the Corpus Christi cycle of plays whilst at York in 1413. Evidence suggests that the cycle was performed on Corpus Christi day that year and Hope Emily Allen has ascertained that it was the day afterwards – that is to say ‘a Fryday on Mydsomyr Evyn’ in 1413 (23) when Margery and her husband left the city on foot. Since the pageant would have taken over most of the urban centre during its performance, it is unlikely that it had escaped their attention. Indeed, as Meale demonstrates, Margery’s meditation on the crucifixion whilst in Rome (80) bears strong affinities with the York crucifixion pagent,115 suggesting that popular drama – and the York cycle in particular – did play some role in helping to craft the more performative aspects of Margery’s representations. It is, therefore, tempting to speculate that Margery may have been immersed in the workings of medieval drama; indeed much of her other visionary Passion narratives with their extensive use of direct speech and affective vocabulary116 take on the immediacy of dramatic representation:117 And anon aftyr þe creatur was in hir contemplacyon wyth Mary Mawdelyn, mornyng & sekyn owr Lord at þe graue, & herd & sey how owr Lord Ihesu Crist aperyd to hir in lekenes of a gardener, seying, ‘Woman, why wepist þu?’ Mary, not knowyng what he was, al inflawmyd wyth þe fyre of lofe, seyd to hym ageyn, ‘Sir, hyf þu hast awey my Lord, telle me, & I xal takyn hym ahen.’ Þan owr merciful Lord, hauyng pite & compassyon of hir, seyd, ‘Mary’. And wyth þat word sche, knowyng owr Lord, fel down at hys feet & wolde a kyssyd hys feet, seying, ‘Meyster’. (197)

The dramatic implications of this passage are further enhanced by Margery’s own participation in them. From the outset she is present and active and when Christ speaks it is no longer clear to which of the women he is addressing his question. The scene’s authenticity is established by the witness of the assertion ‘þe creature . . . herd & sey . . .’ and by the fact Margery is herself conflated with the figure of Mary Magdalene; in effect, both her tears and the Magdalene’s are one and the same. The dialogue, although highly reminiscent of Scripture, has the immediacy of the fifteenth-century vernacular and we are left with the sense of Margery Kempe’s mystical participation in the

114 115 116

117

Meale, ‘ “This is a deed bok” ’, p. 52. Meale also points out that there is evidence dating from 1384–5 of a Corpus Christi play having been performed in Bishop’s Lynn (p. 52). Meale, ‘ “This is a deed bok” ’, p. 52. Again, Gibson points out the close connection between Margery’s language in this Passion narrative and elsewhere and that of the Meditationes, commenting, ‘when Margery sounds most like herself she is, in fact, most like the Pseudo-Bonaventure’ (Theatre of Devotion, p. 49). See, for example, The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 187–97.

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original drama through its textual and dramatic re-enactment. By means of this dramatic medium, Margery is therefore able to normalise her behaviour and experiences and render them utterly appropriate within the frame of legitimate performance. This is nowhere more evident than in the case of Margery’s performances of weeping which constitute the source of so much vilification by her contemporaries: [S]che had . . . repentawns of hir synne wyth many byttyr teerys of compunccyon & parfyt wyl neuyr to turne ageyn to hir synne, but raþar to be deed hir thowt . . . Þan fel sche half i dyspeyr. Sche thowt sche wold a ben in Helle for þe sorw þat sche had. (15–16)

Such tears and expressions of despair are well documented in most of the Mary Magdalene legends and are implicit in the weeping and sobbing already examined in the context of Margery Kempe’s identity as Mater Dolorosa.118 The Magdalene’s tears, in fact, serve to externalise her new and lasting identity as reformed whore and become iconographically coterminous with her tears of sorrow at the foot of the cross and with her role as lover of Christ. Her tears not only single her out and separate her from the rest of humanity, but also paradoxically reunite her with that same humanity by representing the sorrow of the sinful and potentially redeemable Everywoman. Thus her tears become part of the language of salvation and as such help Margery to articulate her own perceived special status as redeemed sinner and lover of Christ. It is therefore her tears which, like the Magdalene, render her both holy whore and holy woman. In this context, such a multivalent performance of grief provides the potential in Margery’s own life for self-definition in terms of redeemed femininity – whether through motherhood or through recontextualised expression of sexuality – and constitutes a femaleidentified language with which to bargain with the Almighty for the souls of other sinners. In words which display uncanny echoes of Julian of Norwich’s own concerns about the tensions between the nature of sin, divine retribution and redemption, Margery firmly links femininity, contrition and salvation within the topos of the weeping woman:119 Hyf I myth as wel, Lorde, heuyn þe pepyl contricyon & wepyng as þu heuyst me for myn owyn synnes & oþer mennys synnys also & as wel as I myth heuyn a peny owt of my purse, sone xulde I fulfille mennys hertys wyth contricyon þat þei myth sesyn of her synne. I haue gret merueyl in

118

119

Meale considers Margery’s performances of grief whilst in Jerusalem to be more an imitation of the Magdalene rather than a traditional imitatio Mariae (‘ “This is a deed bok” ’, p. 59). My own reading is that Margery is undertaking a dual imitatio in these instances, something which I argue in the interpretative essay included in my abridged translation of the Book (Liz Herbert McAvoy (ed. and trans.), The Book of Margery Kempe: An Abridged Translation (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 105–26). See, for example, Long Text, pp. 38–9.

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myn hert, Lord, þat I, whech haue ben so synful a woman & þe most vnworthy creatur þat euyr þu schewedist þi mercy onto in alle þis werlde, þat I haue so gret charite to myn euyncristen sowlys þat me thynkyth, þou þei had ordeynd for me þe most schamful deth þat euyr myth any man suffyr in erde, het wolde I forheuyn it hem for þi lofe, Lord, & han her sowlys sauyd fro euyrlestyng dampnacyon. And þerfor, Lord, I schal not sesyn, whan I may wepyn, for to wepyn for hem plentyuowsly, spede hyf I may. (141–2)

The key importance of Margery’s weeping, then, is its potential to re-enact female biblical precedent and to create an appropriate affective response in her own audience. In the same way as the tears of the Virgin and of Mary Magdalene have provoked both identification and conflation, so Margery engages in a fully embodied Corpus Christi-like performance with full stage instructions and special effects to be watched and experienced by her audience. In effect, she performs her own sexuality alongside that of Mary Magdalene, transforming it into a central component of the redemptive process.

The Song of Songs and the Two Faces of Eve Although postdating Margery’s own representations of the Magdalene, in a scene which appears to be unique in medieval drama, the Digby Mary Magdalen play depicts the dissolute Magdalene as lying recumbent in a garden, languidly awaiting the arrival of a tardy lover. In a pose reminiscent of early fourteenth-century representations of the Soul receiving her Lover in the mystical marriage bed,120 this Mary Magdalene tells her audience: I wll restyn in þis erbyr Amons thes bamys precyus of prysse, Tyll som lover wol apere, that me is wont to halse and kysse.121

The echoes from the biblical Song of Songs here are inescapable where the Shulamite, long interpreted as an allegory of the soul or Bride of Christ,122 lies

120

121 122

See the highly erotic image of the Soul receiving the long-awaited Bridegroom in the Rothschild Canticles, MS 404, fol. 66 (Beineke Library, Yale University), as reproduced in Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 193. Digby Mary Magdalen, p. 76. For an account of the Christian exegetical history of the Song of Songs, see Marvin H. Pope (trans.), The Anchor Bible Song of Songs (New York, 1977), pp. 112–29. See also Ann Astell, The Song of Songs in the Middle Ages (New York, 1990) and Neil Mancor, ‘Tradition in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermons On the Song of Songs’, Reading Medieval Studies 21, pp. 53–67. For an important full-length study of the western tradition of the Song of Songs, see Ann E. Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia, 1990).

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in a garden awaiting her bridegroom.123 Later, the bridegroom/Christ will tell her: My sister, my spouse, is a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up. Thy plants are a paradise of pomegranates with the fruits of the orchard. Cypresses with spikenard. Spikenard and saffron, sweet can and cinnemon, with all the trees of Libanus, myrrh and aloes with all the chief perfumes. The fountain of gardens: the well of living waters, which run with a strong stream from Libanus.124

In representing Mary Magdalene in this way prior to her conversion (and drawing heavily on the popular Golden Legend for his source material),125 the Digby playwright not only emphasises the overtly erotic way in which she was traditionally considered to live her life but, more importantly, through its allegorical potential, it acts as a pointer towards her approaching role as holy woman, sponsa Christi and apostless to the apostles.126 As if in anticipation of this type of representation, Margery’s own spiritual role and her highly physical relationship with Christ as established during her first vision of him in her postnatal sickroom is also essentially a marital alliance, one which becomes increasingly intense, erotic and Magdalene-like as her confidence in her own sanctity increases. The marital imagery of her narrative which culminates in her mystical marriage to the Godhead in Rome whilst she is returning from Jerusalem has often been glossed over as part of what is regarded as Margery’s characteristically naïve literalisation of the more abstract concepts inherent in the mystical experience.127 In her study of the influence of the biblical Song of Songs upon the thinking of the Middle Ages, for example, Ann Astell suggests that Margery shows no real sense of affinity with the language of the Song, unlike Richard Rolle whom Astell claims saw the psalter and the Song as an extension of one another, becoming in effect, one song.128 This attitude towards Margery and her Book falls into line with a reductive tradition which compares her to the more canonical mystics such as Rolle, usually to her detriment. Yet, in her Book, Margery acknowledges both a literary and intellectual

123 124 125 126

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128

Song of Songs 1: 2–4. This link has also been pointed out by Salih, ‘The Digby Saints Plays’, p. 127. Song of Songs 4: 12–15. Baker and Murphy consider the Golden Legend version of Mary Magdalene’s life to be the play’s main source (The Digby Plays, p. xl). This is an aspect of Mary Magdalene which Haskins examines in Mary Magdalen, pp. 55–94. See also Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 204–5 and my own discussion of the Magdalene as apostless in Chapter 5, pp. 186–8. Bynum points out that commentators have been over-hasty in their dismissal of Margery’s use of erotic imagery as being ‘simply a case of an uneducated woman taking literally metaphors from the Song of Songs’ (Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 44). Astell, The Song of Songs, p. 107.

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debt to Rolle’s Incendium Amoris (143 and 154), a work which he was writing alongside his psalter and which, as Hope Emily Allen points out in her edition of Rolle’s English writings,129 enjoyed great popularity and seems to have been used as the orthodox psalter up until the Reformation.130 Far from being uninfluenced by the Song of Songs tradition, Margery, in her overwhelming appropriation of the Magdalene’s identity as sponsa Christi and the deeply erotic imagery she uses to document her physical encounters with Christ, illustrates her appreciation of a tradition to which Rolle also belonged and which, in turn, allegorised and then reliteralised the Song of Songs in its exegetic emphasis. Astell has also asserted that this reliteralisation of the text of the Song of Songs reached a climax in the works of Richard Rolle,131 particularly in his repeated use of imagery and metaphors connected with fire, representing the ardour of mystical love. Likewise she comments on Rolle’s fusion of the carnal and the spiritual in his search to discover meaning which resulted in a wealth of allusions to sensory stimuli – sounds, tastes, smells – all of which also characterise the sensual imagery of the Song of Songs. Similarly, Nicholas Watson has categorised Rolle’s ardour for Christ as a ‘bold fearlessness’ and an ‘aggression’ which enables him to single-mindedly embrace Christ and ignore the criticism of the world.132 Such an analysis of Rolle, of course, is highly pertinent to Margery Kempe’s own relationships with Christ and her contemporaries, and the link between them is readily apparent in areas of Rolle’s commentary on the psalms in his English Psalter. For example Psalm 56 reads: ‘exurge gloria mea, exurge psalterium et cythara. Exurgam diluculo.’ Rolle first translates this extract as ‘Rise my ioy, rise psauteri and harp. I sal rise in þe dawynge’, following which he proceeds to explain, ‘Þat es, Jhesu, þa is my ioy, make me to rise in ioy of þe sange of þi lovynge, in mirthe of þi lufynge’, followed by, ‘Jhesu be þou my ioy, al melody and swetnes, and lere me for to synge þe sange of þi lovynge’.133 Given Margery’s professed interest in Rolle’s writing, it is hardly surprising that such imagery finds its way into her own writing to help her verbalise her own similarly transcendent passion for Christ. Whereas we can readily recognise in Margery’s writing what appear to be direct appropriations from Rolle, such as the ‘melodye so swet & delectable’ (11) which she hears as a young woman before her lasting conversion, or her experiences of ‘þe fyer of lofe (which) qwenchith alle synnes’ (89), there is nothing to suggest that Margery’s understanding of these concepts is merely literalistic, naïve or corporeal. What

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131 132 133

Hope Emily Allen (ed.), English Writings of Richard Rolle of Hampole (Oxford, 1931; repr. 1988). Allen, English Writings, p. 3. For a discussion of the influence of Rolle upon Margery see Lochrie, Translations, pp. 114–21. For a detailed analysis of Rolle’s commentary on the Song of Songs, see Watson, Invention of Authority, especially pp. 222–56. Astell, The Song of Songs, p. 107. Watson, Invention of Authority, pp. 154 and 159. Allen, English Writings, p. 15.

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we find is that these experiences are channelled through her body and its very human responses and transformed, as in the case of her motherhood, into a much more complex and spiritual hermeneutic. No sooner has she insistently defined this example of a Rolle-esque calor in terms of how it feels within her own body, then she moves on to document Christ’s explanation of its mystical import, how it evidences the presence of the Holy Spirit within her and, therefore, her union with God. This intellectual processing of her initially corporeal and affective material is entirely typical of the way in which Margery operates, just as we witnessed in her ability to transform and intellectualise her own motherhood and in her appropriation of the label of harlot for her own spiritual and textual purposes. This is nowhere more evident than in the overtly erotic passages for which Margery has often been ridiculed and denigrated. Critics have often scorned Margery’s apparently literal appropriation of Christ as a sexual partner to supplant her earthly one and, in consequence, she has often been denied any valid mystical insight at all.134 Yet, on re-examination of these passages in their context it is possible to interpret them in a very different light. The first, appearing in Chapter 36 soon after Margery’s mystical marriage to the Godhead in Rome, documents the first encounter with Christ following that union, as well as functioning as a textual consummation and affirmation of her new status as sponsa Christi. Now it is Christ who is articulating physical desire for his spouse, Margery, telling her to ‘take me in þe armys of þi sowle & kyssen my mowth, myn hed, & my fete as swetly as thow wylt’ (90). Earlier he has told her, ‘most I nedys be homly wyth þe & lyn in þi bed wyth þe’ (90), and in both these extracts we hear articulated clearly echoes of the opening verses of the Song of Songs which depict the Bride awaiting the Bridegroom who has been away too long: ‘Let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth: for thy breasts are better than wine’.135 Skilfully, though, Margery attributes to Christ the words which inscribe upon her the sexual longing of the bride, thus freeing her from any taint of the former lechery which has haunted her own sexual responses. Christ tells her, ‘Dowtyr, thow desyrest gretly to se me and þu mayst boldly, whan þu art in þi bed, take me to þe as for þi weddyd husbond, as thy derworthy derlyng . . .’ (90). In another passage towards the end of Book 1 (213), he again inscribes upon Margery not only the identity of his physically desired spouse, but also overtly that of the Shulamite who is

134

135

See Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, p. 396, n. 21, where she erroneously interprets Margery’s rejection of her husband’s sexual advances as being because she found him ‘unsatisfactory’. However, Margery makes it quite clear in her narrative that John Kempe is a considerate man who is loyal and supportive of her, in spite of her abjuring of sexual contact with him. See p. 32, ‘for he was euer a good man & an esy man to hir’. On occasions Christ, too, reminds Margery how lucky she is to have a husband who was willing to release her from the marriage debt; see for example p. 212, ‘ “þu art meche beholdyn to me þat I haue houyn þe swech a man þat wolde suffryn þe leuyn chast” ’. Song of Songs 1: 1.

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‘as any lady in þis werld [who] is besy to receyue hir husbonde whan he comyth hom & hath be long fro hir’ (213). Not only does Margery demonstrate an acute awareness of the language of the Song of Songs, but also its legitimising effect upon human desire and eroticism through its allegorical potential. Thus, her own encompassing arms are those of a sexually aroused and specifically human woman but at the same time are ‘þe armys of [her] sowle’ (90). Moreover, the permission that Christ has granted her in response to her desire to kiss his feet as well as his head and mouth is inescapable in its evocation of Margery as the new Mary Magdalene who, because of her washing of Christ’s feet with her tears of contrition her anointing of them with oil, has always been associated with that part of his suffering body.136 In the extended Passion narrative towards the end of Book 1 (187–97), the Virgin gives leave to Mary Magdalene to kiss the feet of the dead Christ after the Deposition (193). Margery also makes much out of the fact that the risen Christ refuses to let Mary Magdalene kiss his feet when she meets him in the garden, announcing that ‘hyf owr Lord had seyd to hir as he dede to Mary, hir thowt sche cowde neuyr a ben mery’ (197). We note here that Margery, pulling rank again, has earlier been given permission to monopolise the feet of the risen Christ with the kisses of her own mouth (90). Thus, again, she succeeds in validating this highly erotic response to Christ’s body through associating it with – indeed, surpassing – the legitimised post-conversion desire of Mary Magdalene, and in so doing reinscribes herself as both physical lover of Christ and allegorically significant bride of the Song of Songs. This particular aspect of Margery’s identification with the Magdalene can therefore be recognised as being of crucial importance to her validation process and her attempt to come to terms with the sexual impulses and responses which have tormented her periodically. She displays a growing awareness in her book of the liberating potential within an achieved balance between the corporeal/literal and the spiritual/allegorical and it is the composite and complexly alluring figure of Mary Magdalene who constitutes the figurehead of these possibilities. In a final confirmation by Christ of Margery as sponsa Christi in which the carnal and the spiritual, the literal and the metaphorical rest in perfect balance, he reassures her: ‘I knowe þe holy thowtys & þe good desyrys þat þu hast whan þu receyuyst me & þe good charite þat þu hast to me in þe tyme þat þu receyuyst my precyows body into þi sowle, and also how þu clepist Mary Mawdelyn into þi sowle to wolcomyn me’. (210)

The multivalence of the language here, imbued as it is with ambiguity and doubles entendres, testifies to a far more sophisticated and controlled mysticism

136

For an overview of this type of iconographic representation of Mary Magdalene, see Haskins, Mary Magdalen, particularly pp. 189–205.

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than has been attributed to Margery, lying at the heart of which is a redirected and alternative performance of the socially prescribed identity of common woman and daughter-of-Eve harlot who, through the example of Mary Magdalene and the grace of Christ, has been able to transform her own sexuality into an expression of mystical love. Thus we see how Margery has finally effected her escape from her alliance with Eve as taught her by medieval socio-religious ideology. In one late medieval Magdalene hymn, Eve and Mary Magdalene are balanced against one another in juxtaposition, asserting the inherent link between them as messengers and sexual exploiters of men: Prior Eva fuit olim mortis nuntia. Et tu prima nuntiasti vitae gaudia.137 The former Eve was once a messenger of death. And you first announced the joys of life.

These simple lyrics reveal how the Magdalene, rather than being the messenger of suffering and death as she was in her former role as harlot, has escaped the bonds of Eve to re-establish herself as the messenger of hope and everlasting joy. So too Margery, through the interplay and performance of the literal and the allegorical within her textual representation of her own life is able to establish both a link and a contrast with her fallen foremother. Ultimately, then, she is able to transcend the implications of her own sexuality through her gendered re-enactment and recontextualised performance of its connotations. This, in turn, will lead to and inform her final and lasting role as wise woman and seer who, like Mary Magdalene, will become the apostless who will fulfil Christ’s prophecy that ‘be þis boke many a man xal be turnyd to me & beleuen þerin’ (216).

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2: 9a-9b as cited by Szövérffy, ‘ “Peccatrix” ’, p. 126.

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4 ‘Hyf thowe be payede,’ quod oure lorde, ‘I am payede’: Hermeneutics of the Holy Whore in Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich’s negotiation of contemporary sexual attitudes towards women is an aspect of her writing which has been largely overlooked, in spite of the fact that so much has been written about her perception of God as specifically maternal. One possible reason for this oversight is that her status as an anchoress (and, by implication an a-sexual or desexualised religious) has acted as a modern-day screen to such investigations. Or, perhaps, the now largely rejected theory that she was a nun at Carrow prior to enclosure has also been thoroughly internalised by modern commentators, leading them to treat her writing as a wholly disembodied corpus. Indeed, a consistent focus upon Julian’s re-envisioning of God as mother has had the effect of dominating or even obscuring alternative discourses and hermeneutics of the female body in her writing. This chapter, therefore, will attempt to address this absence by investigating the extent to which the concept of a sexualised female body, in its capacity as commodity to be used, bestowed and/or traded with, is utilised by Julian as a means of explicating her vision of God’s divine covenant with humankind. In so doing, it will also attempt to address the question of whether Julian’s writing demonstrates an internalisation of contemporary attitudes towards the female body, or if her ubiquitous use of it as a referent reveals a subtle rechannelling of such attitudes into a means of contemporising and expressing her perception of God’s love for humanity.

Julian and the Body: A Critical Overview There is much in Julian’s writing to suggest that she was just as aware as Margery Kempe of the potential of the female body and contemporary attitudes towards it as commodified entity to yield up discourses with which to construct a further hermeneutic of the feminine, both as exegetical tool and as a means towards authority. Indeed, this is something which has been recognised in part by Nicholas Watson who argues for Julian’s deployment of social models of female activity in order to facilitate for her readers a deeper 131

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understanding of her mystical insight and theology.1 In his essay Watson addresses Julian’s use of commonly held beliefs about women as they emerge in her Passion narrative, particularly the notion of woman’s inconstancy and inconsistency. Examining Julian’s refusal to relinquish her visionary encounter with the crucified Christ in order to contemplate God in his heaven (ST, 55; LT, 28), Watson demonstrates how Julian refutes a commonly held belief in the ‘doubleness’ and untrustworthiness of women. The passage in question reads as follows in the Long Text, and is worth quoting in full: Than had I a profir in my reason as it had be frendly seyd to me: ‘Loke up to hevyn to his Fader.’ And than saw I wele with the feyth that I felte that ther was nothyn betwix the crosse and hevyn that myght have desesyd me. Either me behovyd to loke up, or else to answeren. I answered inwardly with al the myghts of my soule and said: ‘Nay, I may not, for thou art my hevyn.’ This I seyd for I wold not; for I had lever a ben in that peyne til domysday than to come to hevyn otherwyse than by hym; for I wiste wele that he that bonde me so sore, he sholde onbynde me whan that he wolde. Thus was I lerid to chose Iesus to my hevyn, whome I saw only in payne at that tyme. Me lekyd no other hevyn than Iesus, which shal be my blisse whan I come there. (LT, 28)

In keeping with the increased identification of religious women with the humanity of Christ during this period, a form of devotion considered less prestigious and therefore more appropriate for the female,2 Watson recognises Julian’s choice to remain with Christ as being a gendered one, prioritising as she does the humanised Son above his deified Father (‘Me lekyd no other hevyn than Iesus’; LT, 28).3 In so doing, Watson argues, Julian both conforms to cultural assumptions about women as more suited to the inferior type of devotion and yet, through her act of choosing and constancy, refutes the less complimentary assumptions at the same time. Again, according to Watson: Julian . . . accepts the social models which define proper female activity, but does so in a way which fundamentally shifts (in some respects even inverts) those models by resisting both the passivity and the low prestige traditionally associated with them.4

In spite of this assertion, Watson still remains somewhat tentative in his examination, falling short of suggesting that women such as Julian may have been 1 2

3 4

Watson, ‘Remaking “Woman” ’. Watson, ‘Remaking “Woman” ’, p. 7. For a definitive examination of this form of devotion in the lives of medieval religious women see Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, especially pp. 151–79. In similar vein, Margery Kempe attempts to resist allegiance to the Father, preferring to remain in relationship with Christ. See, for example, The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 86–7. Watson, ‘Remaking “Woman” ’, p. 7.

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conscious of the literary possibilities contained within cultural attitudes towards them in order to delineate a space for personal expression and the achievement of authority. Resting his case with an analysis of Julian’s refutation of a single aspect of medieval anti-feminist discourse, Watson fails to acknowledge the issues of female sexuality and fleshliness which this discourse necessarily incorporates. In spite of this shortfall, Watson’s analysis provides a highly useful springboard for a more detailed examination of Julian’s use of attitudes towards a sexualised female body in her writing, how she adapts and exploits these attitudes and to what ends. Insight into this aspect of Julian’s writing has also been provided by Elizabeth Robertson who has identified the importance of the female body in a general sense within Julian’s texts.5 Focusing on contemporary medical treatises which tended to reduce woman to the realm of disparaged body, Robertson argues that popular notions of female ontology resulted in issues of female sexuality and the body becoming central problematics for women contemplatives and mystics.6 Like Watson, however, Robertson’s conclusions are rather more tentative than the early line of argument in her essay would suggest, leading her to sum up somewhat inconclusively: ‘it is important to recognise that Julian’s approach carries with it at least her initial acceptance of the age’s misogynistic views of the nature of her body’.7 In similar vein, Robertson later hazards that those hyperbolised ‘feminine’ traits evidenced within other female-authored texts (some of which I have already examined in the context of Margery Kempe) ‘makes them gendered and . . . at least destabilises those categories’.8 Although both Robertson’s and Watson’s findings remain inconclusive, they do succeed in identifying a crucial area of instability or slippage in such texts – something which this present chapter will concern itself. Such slippage, I will argue, is not only brought about by tensions between medieval ideologies and belief systems, but also by the discrepancy between ideological stances and personal experience and thus provides an ideal site for a redefinition of both a sexualised and commodified female body to emerge in Julian’s writing as another primary hermeneutic.9 Perhaps the only commentator to date who has focused directly on Julian’s use of the experiences of her own female body in her writing is Maria R. Lichtman who, in a short study, suggests that Julian’s bodily experiences can be recognised as constituting an ‘epistemology of the Divine’.10 For Lichtman,

5 6 7 8 9

10

Robertson, ‘Medieval Medical Views of Women’. Robertson, ‘Medieval Medical Views of Women’, p. 149. Robertson, ‘Medieval Medical Views of Women’, p. 157. Robertson, ‘Medieval Medical Views of Women’, p. 159. For an assessment of Julian’s possible acquaintance with medical writings see Alexandra Barratt, ‘ “In the Lowest Part of Our Need”: Julian and Medieval Gynecological Writing’, in McEntire, Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, pp. 239–56. Maria R. Lichtman, ‘ “I desyrede a bodylye syght”: Julian of Norwich and the Body’, Mystics Quarterly 17, 1 (1991), p. 12.

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Julian’s response to her own body provides the means through which she reaches a thoroughly grounded experience of God who is embodied within it, and ultimately it is through the medium of this female body – a body which Julian sees as being as paradigmatically human as that of the male or that of a male-female Christ – that she is allowed the perception of ‘God in and as body’.11 Similarly, Lichtman recognises that this holistic approach to the embodiment of theological insight is predicated on bodily suffering, which in turn gives rise to a ‘feeling-minded-body’.12 However, in spite of a ready acknowledgement that ‘Julian’s experience of the body . . . informs nearly every dimension of her book’,13 Lichtman similarly overlooks the extent to which that body is also a sexualised body, in spite of her conclusion that ‘Julian’s is clearly a feminine spirituality’, born out her own bodily experience.14 The remainder of this chapter, therefore, will argue for Julian’s growing and eventually firm acceptance of her own sexual – and fleshly – body, an acceptance which will become central to her exegetical process.

The Flesh, the Body and the Abject The previous chapter served to determine the extent to which Margery Kempe was able to reappropriate her own female sexuality in order to transform a culturally negative and proscriptive view of women into an expression of authority, autonomy and, eventually, the production of a voice. So too in Julian’s texts, the author’s gradual reappraisal and acceptance of the fleshly and sexualised female body which, when allied to the maternal, eventually provides her with a more encompassing hermeneutic for the interpretation and expression of the complexities of divine love. Moreover, as I have suggested, the efficacy of such a hermeneutic is dependent ultimately on an exploitation of the fissure between how women such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich may actually have experienced their bodies and what they were told about those bodies by contemporary ideologies.15 From the medical and anatomical perspective, the highly popular Aristotelian and Galenic beliefs about woman, of course, focused on her ‘inherent’ promiscuity (sexual or otherwise) which was formulated by a belief in her physical incompleteness as ‘deformed’ male, and her naturally cold and

11 12 13 14 15

Lichtman, ‘ “I desyrede a bodylye syght” ’, p. 17. Lichtman, ‘ “I desyrede a bodylye syght” ’, p. 15. Lichtman, ‘ “I desyrede a bodylye syght” ’, p. 12. Lichtman, ‘ “I desyrede a bodylye syght” ’, p. 15. Again, Lichtman identifies the link Julian draws between the female and a God-informed sensuality lying at the heart of humanity and her unusual treatment of it: ‘in her incarnational affirmation of the self as God-informed sensuality, Julian brings to the foreground a principle of the body much neglected in the patriarchal tradition’ (‘ “I desyreded a bodylye syght” ’, p. 17).

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wet constitution.16 It followed that she experienced an enhanced and ultimately insatiable sexual appetite as a result of the desire for continual union with the heat of the inherently hot and dry male. Such medical theories, of course, fed seamlessly into the biblical myth of Eve’s corrupt sexuality, producing a legacy of assumptions regarding women and their untrustworthy bodies – assumptions which were everywhere both explicitly and implicitly incorporated into contemporary literature. Ancrene Wisse, for example, makes explicit how sin can enter the heart of a woman through the senses, asserting that even her uncontrolled gaze can promote sinful activity – as it did, indeed, in the case of ‘cakele’ (cackling) Eve (‘Eve þi moder leop efter hire ehnen. from þe ehe to þe eappel’ (Eve your mother leapt after her eyes; from the eye to the apple)).17 Elsewhere, the author draws on the assumption that, like the biblical Dinah, who went out to ‘bihalden uncuðe wummen’ (look at foreign women)’, and as a result ‘was imaket hore’ (was made a whore),18 a woman who cannot control her gaze and who becomes too sociable is just as likely to be rendered a whore.19 In fact, even the compassionate anchoress is in danger of being transformed into a type of whore if she concerns herself too much with altruistic pursuits (‘Forschuppet of ancre to husewif of halle. Godd wat swuch feaste maked sum hore’ (God knows, this sort of feast makes whores of some)).20 For this author at least, the sensuality of the imperfect female body is a dangerous site of corruption and provides a highly permeable residence housing the potential whore within. Such attitudes were fed by what Karma Lochrie has identified as the Augustinian notion of the ‘fissured flesh’.21 According to Augustine who, in turn, was deeply influenced by the Pauline concept of ‘flesh’ as synecdoche for general flawed humanity,22 the flesh was all that caused human will to rebel against God and formed the basis of human concupiscence. The body’s role in this severance between humankind and God was merely that of facilitator for fleshly rebellion – something brought about by the Fall when the first humans, Adam and Eve, learnt to indulge their own desires rather than those of God.23 The result of this rebelliousness was a continual struggle 16

17 18 19 20 21

22

23

See Introduction, p. 9. A useful overview of such attitudes is to be found in Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 8–9. Ancrene Wisse, p. 32. Ancrene Wisse, p. 32. Ancrene Wisse, p. 32. For the biblical account of Dinah’s rape and subsequent vilification see Genesis 34: 1–31. Ancrene Wisse, p. 115. Lochrie, Translations, especially pp. 19–23. For a useful biographic and thematic overview of Augustine see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1998, repr. London, 1990), pp. 387–427. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, 7 vols, vol. 4, trans. Philip Levine (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1966), XIV: ii, p. 263, discussed by Lochrie, Translations, p. 19. Brown, Body and Society, p. 418.

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against the impulses of the ‘flesh’ and the human concupiscence which had led to this irrevocable fissuring of soul and flesh. Thus, for Augustine, the ‘flesh’ was not ultimately synonymous with the body; indeed, he regarded the relationship between body and soul as essentially a harmonious one, albeit constantly jeopardised by the impulses of the unruly flesh which were aided by the body’s sensual nature. As Lochrie points out, however, Augustine’s notion of ‘fissured flesh’ is often explicated and interpreted in highly gendered terms. For example, elsewhere Augustine likens the unruly flesh to the disobedient wife who must be both loved and chastised by the husband (who, as a man, remains allied to the ‘spirit’): ‘caro tamquam coniunx est . . . ama et castiga’ (your flesh is like your wife . . . love it and rebuke it).24 It was this type of feminisation of the flesh, taken up enthusiastically by later medieval theologians such as Bernard of Clairvaux, for example,25 which helped to identify women further with the ontological fissuring of body and soul, offering a further corroboration for what was regarded as her own inherently natural ‘doubleness’. However, as Lochrie’s study clearly demonstrates, this set of beliefs also provided a site of ideological instability which was ripe for exploitation by the female mystic, not only as fleshly embodiment of the fissure between body and soul but also as someone who experiences God and his fleshly embodiment, Christ, directly through her own female body, apparently reconciling the ‘fissure’ as she does so. And here, perhaps, we can see in play the potential slippage between the fundamentally different ways in which women may have experienced their own bodies from those ‘experiences’ which were imposed ideologically upon them from without. In this capacity, Lochrie asserts: The association of woman with flesh also puts their desire to imitate Christ in a different position from the equivalent male desire. In other words . . . the gendered ideology . . . rendered those equivalent actions fundamentally different . . . Men begin from a position of the spirit, and this makes all the difference.26

Moreover, that ‘difference’ which Lochrie is identifying is evidenced in the texts under scrutiny here by their female authors’ tendency to overwrite the orthodox line on the interrelationship between spirit, flesh and body using a series of hermeneutics pertaining to a redeemed female body for authority. If we recall the examples just cited from Ancrene Wisse, for example, it is evident that its male author is dealing with the discourse of contemptus mundi (in which the flesh is seen as the seat of corruption and has to be kept firmly 24 25 26

Augustine, Enarationes in Psalmos, ed. D. Eligius Dekkers and Iohannes Fraipoint, CCSL 40 (Turnhout, 1956) 16, p. 2037, as cited in Lochrie, Translations, p. 19. For a brief overview of Bernard’s contribution to the debate see Lochrie, Translations, pp. 20–3. Lochrie, Translations, p. 23.

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under control by means of a bodily asceticism and the redirecting of the will towards God) in a radically different way from Julian, as will be demonstrated further. This more traditional expression is also to be found in the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing, written in about 1370, which identifies the human body explicitly as the location of worldly degradation and corruption which feeds the corruptness of the flesh: ‘For alle bodely þing is sogette vnto goostly þing & is reulid þerafter & not ahensward’.27 For this author too, the human body is the site of sin which has caused its unruly flesh to solidify into a festering lump; moreover, as he tells his readers in no uncertain terms, it is ‘none oþer þing bot þi-self’.28 Other writers are even more emphatic in their depiction of the female body as especially paradigmatic of the corrupt flesh of humanity, or else, as we saw in the case of Augustine, they make use of specifically female-associated terminology to construct their discourse. One of the most scathing of meditations of this type – and one which continued to inform religious attitudes towards women well into the late Middle Ages – was that manifested in the writing of Odo of Cluny in the tenth century who famously envisions woman as ‘saccus stercoris’ – a sack of filth or excrement – which then becomes synecdochal for the corrupt flesh itself: All beauty consisteth but in phlegm and blood and humours and gall. If a man consider that which is hidden within the nose, the throat, and the belly, he will find filth everywhere; and, if we cannot bring ourselves, even with the tips of our fingers, to touch such phlegm or dung, wherefore do we desire to embrace this bag of filth itself.29

The image of the body as a sack of excrement can be traced back as far as John Chrysostom in the fourth century who, writing in the context of sex and marriage, identified the licentious populace of the city of Antioch as being the ‘devil’s garbage tip’, and the ‘devil’s manure’.30 By the later Middle Ages, however, this type of analogy tended to be a feminised one and it is a similarly gendered discourse of the corrupt female body as synecdoche for the corrupt flesh which also leaves its traces in the writing of Richard Rolle towards the middle of the fourteenth century – and in a text, incidentally, which we know had a marked influence upon Margery Kempe, as we have seen: Species uero mulierum multos decipit, cuius concupiscencia, corda eciam iustorum quandoque subuertit, utque spiritu inceperant, in carnem

27 28 29

30

The Cloud of Unknowing, ed. Phyllis Hodgson, EETS o.s. 218 (London, 1944), p. 113. The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 73. J.-P. Migne (ed.), Patriologia Latina, 221 vols (Paris, 1844–6), vol. 133, col. 556. This is a passage cited and discussed by G. G. Coulton in Five Centuries of Religion, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1923), vol. 1, p. 528. John Chrysostom, Homiliae Duodecim in Corinthios and Homiliae in Epist. I ad Corinthios as cited in Brown, Body and Society, pp. 313 and 314. For an overview of John Chrysostom’s attitude towards the body see pp. 305–22.

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terminentur. Caue ergo ne ita in principio bone conuersacionis cum mulieris pulchritudine colloquium habeas, quod inde sumpto uenenose delectacionis morbo, ad perferendam et implendam mentis immundiciam scienter deceptus et uecorditer ab inimicis deuictus traheris . . . specie quoque alliciente propter carnis infirmitatem, uoluntas tua in eis ultra modum poteris delictari. Womanly beauty leads many astray. Desire for it can sometimes subvert even righteous hearts, so that what began in spirit ends up in flesh. So beware of entering into conversation with a woman just because she is lively. You will be caught by the poisonous disease of pleasure, and dirty thoughts . . . and the weakness of your flesh can beguile your will beyond measure.31

Again we find an identical discourse being utilised by the Ancrene Wisse author who intensifies its gendered connotations in his own dualistic explication of the female body for his initial audience of female recluses: Amid te menske of þi neb. þat is þe fehereste deal. bitweonen muðes smech. & neases smeal. ne berest tu as twa priue þurles? Nart tu icumen of ful slim? nart tu fulðe fette. ne bist tu wurme fode?32 In the middle of the glory of your face, which is your most beautiful part, between the mouth’s taste and the nose’s smell, do you not bear two toilet holes, as it were? Are you not come of foul slime, are you not a vat of filth, will you not be worm’s food?

In the minds of such writers, salvation was always jeopardised by the unruly flesh, and in medieval discourse, as these extracts clearly demonstrate, the flesh eventually took on a synonymy with the female and her dangerously seductive body. Moreover, it was a body which could not only corrupt men from without but also the woman herself from within. If we now return to Julian, we find, in contrast, that her attitude towards the human body is far more relaxed, compassionate and almost wholly devoid of this traditional treatment of the contemptus mundi trope. In fact, for Julian, the body – and the feminised body in particular – along with its vulnerable flesh is a reflection of nothing less than the beauty of creation and provides an apt symbol of God’s love for humankind. This attitude, as we have seen, is nowhere more evident than in Julian’s empathetic and compassionate treatment of the suffering body of Christ and its maternal propensities. Moreover, by means of its association with the female body, its procreative potential and its blood-losses, this depiction serves to exploit the fissure between flesh and spirit and allow the female who traditionally occupies that space and whose flesh Christ has taken on himself via the Virgin (‘blissid kinde that he toke of the mayd’; LT, 9), to emerge as the equally ‘fleshly’ agent

31 32

Richard Rolle, The Fire of Love, ed. and trans. Clifton Walters (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. 136. Ancrene Wisse, pp. 142–3.

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of redemption. In so doing, Julian demonstrates that the female body, far from being emblematic of permanent severance from God, can, in truth, be read in a different way by those who possess it as productive of salvation and as ultimately unificatory (‘And I saw no difference atwix God and our substance, but as it were al God’; LT, 87). This is further attested to in one extraordinary passage which appears in only two of the extant manuscripts containing witnesses to Julian’s revelations: the so-called Paris manuscript which contains a version of the Long Text, and the Westminster manuscript containing a redacted version of the Long Text (and probably based on the Paris version).33 This passage, which has evidently been excised from both the Sloane manuscript versions of the Long Text34 and is absent from the only extant Short Text witness,35 serves to illustrate most lucidly how far Julian deviates from the type of vilification of the human body as adjunct to the corrupt flesh so common in the writing of her contemporaries; furthermore it demonstrates how her mystical insight into a loving God’s immanence in all things is to be understood: A man goyth vppe ryght, and the soule of his body is sparyde as a purse fulle feyer. And whan it is tyme of his nescessery, it is openyde and sparyde ayen fulle honestly. And that it is he that doyth this, it is schewed ther wher he seyth he comyth downe to vs to the lowest parte of oure nede.36

Julian’s depiction here of the act of human defecation in such delicate terms is unprecedented in medieval literature which tends to depict it in terms of the abject.37 Similarly, most contemporary figurative and colloquial usage of the word ‘purse’ is in the context of male genitalia.38 Indeed, as we might 33

34 35 36 37

38

Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds Anglais no. 40. This is the manuscript used for the edition by Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, this choice being a source of contention amongst other scholars who have commented on its apparently amateurish construction. For a brief overview of this debate see Ritamary Bradley, ‘Julian of Norwich: Everyone’s Mystic’, in William F. Pollard and Robert Boenig (eds), Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 139–40. The so-called ‘Westminster redaction’ can be found in London, Westminster Archdiocesan Archives MS. I will embark upon a discussion of this version in Chapter 6. London, MS British Museum Sloane 2499; London, MS British Museum Sloane 3705. London, MS British Museum Add. 37790. Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, pp. 306–7. Compare, for example, Margery’s treatment of a defecating bear in a story which she delivers to the ecclesiastical court at York during a trial for heresy. Here the bear becomes a symbol for priestly hypocrisy and corruption which transforms the ‘blooms’ of virtuous living into wordly sin and corruption (The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 126–7). See also her description of her doubly incontinent and senile husband for another use of defecation as abjection (p. 181). Michael Camille examines the use of the purse as a sexual pun in The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (London, 1998), pp. 64–5. Here Camille claims ‘the purse is one of the most charged signs in medieval art’ (p. 64).

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expect, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath uses the word as a catch-all term with which to allude to the physical (and pecuniary) prowess of her various husbands: I have wedded fyve, of which I have pyked out the beste, Bothe of here nether purs and of here cheste.39

Similarly, an earlier usage in Jean de Meun’s Le Roman de la Rose explicitly associates the ‘purs’ with the penis and testicles: Ainz qu’il muirent puissent il perdre E l’aumosniere e les estalles Don il ont signe d’estre malles! Perte leur viegne des pendanz A quei l’aumosniere est pendanz!40 May they (those men who deliberately misconstrue Nature) suffer before their death the loss of their purse and testicles, the signs that they are male! May they lose the pendants on which the purse hangs.

Use of the word ‘purs’ in connection with the anus, however, is rare. In fact, one of the only other instances in which the word is used in this context41 is to be found in a relatively obscure manuscript which contains a late fourteenthcentury English translation of an anatomical treatise written by Henri de Mondeville who, the manuscript tells us, was ‘þe kyngis chef maister surgian of ffraunce’.42 In this treatise, which tends to consider the human body as paradigmatically male, the allusion appears in the context of an anatomical description of the anal muscles: ‘He haþ twoward his neþer ende foure lacertis þe whiche openeþ þe Ers and closiþ as a purs is opened & schittiþ wiþ his þwongis’. Although patently referring to the bodily act which facilitates defecation, this anatomical account does not display the delicacy and aesthetics which we have seen in Julian’s own treatment of the same subject, but the author’s use of the purse image does succeed in imposing upon the description a type of necessary functionality which rescues it from the realm of the abject. In Julian’s text too, any sense of abjection is countered further by the author’s depiction of the body as being specifically ‘vppe rygth’ (upright), something which invokes resonances of the Cloud author’s assertion that ‘it schulde figure in licnes bodily þe werke of þe soule goostly’,43 and that walking 39 40

41 42

43

The Riverside Chaucer, p. 105, lines 439–41. Ernest Langlois (ed), Le Roman de la Rose par Guillaume de Lorris at Jean de Meun, Société des Anciens Textes Français, vol. 5 (Paris, 1927). The English translation is taken from Charles Dahlberg (trans.), Romance of the Rose (Princeton, 1971), p. 324, lines 19,666–70. MED does not record the word being used in this context at all. It does, however, indicate use of the term to denote haemorrhoids in some instances. See definition 4b. MS Wel. 564, 46r, col. 1. This manuscript, dating from the early 1390s, was the subject of an article written in 1896 by a previous owner, Joseph Frank Payne (1840–1910), physician to St Thomas’s Hospital, ‘On an Unpublished English Anatomical Treatise of the Fourteenth Century and Its Relation to the “Anatomy” of Thomas Vicary’, British Medical Journal (1896) 1, pp. 200–3. The Cloud of Unknowing, p. 113.

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upright is wholly appropriate so that the gaze can be directed towards heaven without impediment. More pertinently, however, at this point Julian would seem to be engaging with some of the rhetoric often found in those texts initially directed specifically at women. For example, in Hali Meiðhad, written by a male author in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century to persuade women against sexual activity and marriage in favour of a life of holy virginity, the audience is told: ‘þu . . . art i wit iwraht to Godes ilicnesse, ant iriht ba bodi up ant heaued toward heouene, forþi þet tu schuldest þin heorte heouen þiderwart as þin ertage is, ant eorðe forhohien’44 (you . . . are created as a rational being in God’s image, and made erect, both body and head raised towards heaven, so you should lift your heart to where your heritage is, and despise the earth). Here the term ‘eorðe’ is used specifically to refer not only to the earth beneath the woman’s feet but also figuratively to the ‘fulðe’ (filthiness) to which he has formerly been alluding (‘Al þet fule delit is wið fulðe aleid’).45 This filthiness, of course, is the corruption of the flesh incited by the sexual act which, in this author’s estimation at least, reduces the woman to the level of ‘witlese beastes, dumbe ant broke-rugget, ibuhe toward eorðe’ (witless beasts, dumb and hunchbacked, bending towards the earth) who know no better.46 The echoes between this treatment of the abject and Julian’s own are resonant here (although it is unlikely that she would have been familiar with this particular text whose inaccessible language seems to have made it obsolete by this stage).47 However, instead of forming part of a misogynistic diatribe or one of self-loathing, what we find is Julian transforming the potentially abject body into an expression of God’s love for a genderless (or even multigendered) humankind, even at the moments of its most pressing necessities. Again she seems to be exploiting the point of weakness, the inconsistency or the fissure within traditional treatments of the abject (female) flesh and its body and allying it to a further lacuna which now emerges between its rhetorical representation in male-authored texts and Julian’s own experience of it. For Julian, the physical body and the abject – specifically here its waste matter (what she refers to as its ‘soule’)48 – rather than being representative of the excesses of the 44 45 46 47

48

Hali Meiðhad, ed. and trans. Bella Millett and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, in Medieval Prose for Women (Oxford, 1990), p. 22. Hali Meiðhad, p. 22. Hali Meiðhad, p. 22. Although diachronic linguistic shifts would probably have made the early Middle English inaccessible to a fifteenth-century audience, we do find similar sentiments in Ancrene Wisse, a text which continued to be revised and adapted for contemporary audiences well into the sixteenth century. For a discussion of anchoritic culture in the context of a wider cultural milieu, see Bella Millett, ‘Ancrene Wisse and the Book of Hours’, in Renevey and Whitehead, Writing Religious Women, pp. 21–40. This word is glossed by Colledge and Walsh as ‘undigested food’, A Book of Showings, p. 306, n. 35. Nicholas Watson, however, contends that the word refers to ‘the body’s nourishment’ and derives from the Old French ‘saoulee’ meaning ‘satiated with food and drink’ (‘Conceptions of the Word’, p. 86, n. 2). Whichever definition we prefer to accept, however, a similar concept of waste is incorporated within it.

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foul flesh, are more a reflection of the beauty of creation and, in particular, the human soul (significantly also denoted as ‘soule’ in Julian’s text), rather than something to be disparaged, denigrated and transcended. The body, in effect, is something to be glorified in since it demonstrates the workings of God’s infinite love for humankind, whether in the system of bodily digestion and waste elimination, the physically demanding work of the servant, the life-long ministrations of the mother or the salvific sacrifice of a maternal God. In her treatment of it here, therefore, an ultimately non-dualistic and defecating body becomes a unified and fine, delicate material – celestial even – as, indeed, is the decaying matter held within it, along with its now synonymous and homophonic counterpart – the human soul. Thus, a traditionally abject body is rendered one with the human soul as a reflection of God’s glory, his compassion and love for a humankind which incorporates the flesh of both the fallen male and the female, both Adam and Eve. Moreover, in the same way as the soul will eventually return to its maker by divine decree, so too the ‘soule of the body’ is returned to the earth whence it came by means of a similar divine decree. In this way, Julian’s insight rejects the possibility that God could despise any part of humanity, even those abject parts which humanity despises about itself – which, of course, rhetorically, at least, included the female as paradigmatic of the dangerous flesh which was often accorded synonymy with human excrement because of the perceived incontinence of its appetites, as we have seen. Julian’s non-dualist attitude to the body as exemplified in this extract would therefore suggest at least an acquaintance with the surprising tolerance to the human body shown by other medieval commentators, in particular the influential commentator, Thomas Aquinas. Rejecting the problematics of a pain–pleasure and flesh–body dichotomy, Aquinas recognises the pleasures inherent in those two most insistent of human impulses, eating and sexual activity.49 In this context, Aquinas asserts the dual role of body and will in his call for temperance rather than abstinence, firstly because they ‘sunt magis nobis naturalis’ (are so profoundly natural to us),50 and secondly because they ‘sunt necessaria ad vitam hominis’ (are about things highly needful for human life).51 In her defence of the abject body and vilified flesh, Julian therefore appears to be engaging with such Thomist liberalism in this extract, especially in her suggestion that God could not possibly disdain any need which ‘to oure body longyth in kynde’52 – which, of course, includes both defecation as the result of the intake of food, and sexual activity, both of which are implicated in the use of the fine purse image. Aware that overindulgence

49 50 51 52

See Aquinas’s teachings on temperance in Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae, XLIII, trans. Thomas Gilby, OP (London and New York, 1963), qu. 141–54. Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae XLIII, qu. 141, art. 7, pp. 28–9. Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae XLIII, qu. 141, art. 5, pp. 20–1. Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 307.

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in both these activities can lead to sin, Aquinas nevertheless concedes that excess of indulgence and pleasure is not always spiritually threatening and can, in fact, provide the most sublime expression of divine love. Thus, the acts of consumption and of intercourse possess the potential to represent the life of virtue and of beauty. For Aquinas, the aesthetic and the ethical are intrinsically linked and pleasure invoked by the beauty of food and human (hetero)sexual love is predicated upon the need for individual survival and can be redirected to the glory of God. In this context then, and in view of widespread belief in the sexual insatiability of the female which was foregrounded in most discussions of the body, it is also possible to read Julian’s ‘fine purse’ passage not only as comprising a subtly confident Thomist defence of the workings of the human body, but also as a subtle vindication of disparaged female body in particular because of its traditional association with the corrupt and unruly flesh – in the metaphorical terminology of the Hali Meiðhad author, ‘eorðe’. This suggestion is further substantiated by the equal applicability of the image of the fine purse to depict the opening vagina or the womb of the female which in turn permits the expulsion of the menses or of new human life. Although this usage is rare in medieval writing, nevertheless in the translated de Mondeville anatomical text, there are several examples of the image of the purse being employed as a euphemism for the female sexual organs and, moreover, the author appears to assume its common usage as euphemism in this context: ‘Þe secunde doctrine . . . schal treten of Ossium, þat is to seie, þe cheste or þe purs of þe cod or ballokis. The balloc coddis ben official membris . . . and of wommen it is y-callid a purs for curtesie’.53 Similarly, elsewhere in the same manuscript, and in keeping with the Aristotelian ‘one-sex’ model discussed previously, we find the womb directly compared with the male testicles, using the same purse image: ‘þe self matrice is as þe Osse or bursa testiculorum, þat is to seie, þe balloke cod of a man’.54 However, the most explicit connection between the female sexual organs and the opening purse drawn by this author is to be found in a more extended passage which concerns itself with the anatomy of the vagina and the womb which are ‘i þe same maner as ben þe rose leeues or þa þe rose leues be fully sprad or ripe and so þei beþ schett togideris & constreyned riht as a pursis mony, so þat no þing may passe out of it but þe urine aloone til þe tyme com of childynge’.55 In spite of the rarity elsewhere in the use of this image in an explicitly female context, the employment

53 54

55

MS Wel. 564, fol. 45r. col. 1. My emphasis. MS Wel. 564, fol. 41r. col. 1. Again, I am grateful to Monica Green for pointing me towards the sixteenth-century text known as The Boke Mad [by] a Woman Named Rota, in which a prolapsed womb is described as ‘hangeynge downe lyke a greatt purs’ (Glasgow, Glasgow University Library, MS Hunter 403 (V.3.1), an. 1544). Although this usage differs from Julian’s in that it is an analogy of appearance rather than of function, it is likely that its ability to be opened or closed is informing the author’s use of the simile. MS. Wel. 564, fol. 42r, col. 2.

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of the purse simile in this manuscript on a number of occasions (and particularly its alliance with the rose – that ubiquitous symbol of the female genitalia and sexuality in medieval literature, and particularly tales of courtly love) serves not only as effective explicatory device, but also imbues the description with the same sanitised delicacy as does Julian’s own use of it, suggesting that Julian could well have been familiar with this type of medical usage and recognised within it a potential for incorporating the feminine within what seems to have been primarily a masculine image in its deployment elsewhere.56 Thus, in its potential to be associated with love, beauty and the ‘rose’ of female sexuality, as well as in its underlying association with the womb, Julian’s use of the word ‘purs’ can be read in terms of its being an image of tenderness, sexual expression and protection and part of a hermeneutic which feeds into that of divine motherhood, as examined in Chapter 2. In this sense, it constitutes the most pertinent and multifaceted of images for inclusion within Julian’s own text and it would seem likely that Julian was exploiting the mouvance within a variety of colloquial and figurative associations of the purse with aspects of the human body, both male and female, and thus characteristically problematising traditional notions of gender and body–soul separation. This claim is further substantiated on turning to a later depiction of an apparently abject body in Julian’s Long Text. Here we are presented with the vision of a dead body, again connected to the earth on which it is lying: which body shewid hevy and ogyley, withoute shape and forme as it were a bolned quave of styngand myre. And sodenly out of this body sprang a ful fair creature, a little childe full shapen and formid, swifie and lively, whiter than lilly, which sharpely glode up onto hevyn. And the bolnehede of the body betokenith gret wretchidnes of our dedly flesh, and the littlehede of the child betokenith the clenes of purity in the soule. (LT, 105)

Whilst Benedicta Ward reads this vision as evidence of the likelihood of Julian’s having been a mother and perhaps even having lost a child during the plague,57 when read in the context of the defecating body previously examined, its import becomes more apparent. Rather than comprising a traditional body–soul duality and therefore compromising what we have seen as Julian’s tendency towards unity, this extract actually serves to corroborate and intensify the sense of body-and-soul unity which overwrites her discourses of the flesh and which is characteristic of her thinking. This is achieved in spite of an apparent contrast being set up between the ‘ful fair creature’ and the ‘hevy and ogyley’ body from which it emerges. The contrast however, is not one of 56

57

As Barratt convincingly argues in her essay ‘ “In the Lowest Part” ’, it is likely that Julian was familiar with Middle English gynaecological and obstetrical treatises (p. 239). Moreover, she asserts that ‘if we . . . read Julian beside or even against such (medical) texts, she will continue to surprise and enlighten us’ (p. 255). If this was indeed the case, then it is entirely possible that Julian had come across the use of the purse simile in this context. Ward, ‘Julian the Solitary’, pp. 24–5.

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duality but one of metamorphosis which retains unity within movement as the body alters between one state and another.58 In keeping with God’s teaching in the book of Genesis, this body, like the ‘soule’ of the previous passage is now returning to its maker via the earth from whence it came.59 In this context, what we have here is a decaying body which, in its apparent abjection, is actively returning to its essence – the earth. In so doing it is releasing via a process of metamorphosis the spotless soul (in itself the essence of God, as we have seen) to the glory of heaven. In this way, the embodied soul returns to its maker clothed in a redeemed body now free of the constraints of the flesh in a representation which therefore aligns itself with the earlier representation and adheres to an Augustinian notion of eventual body and soul (re)union. The episode of the defecating body, therefore, when considered in the context of Julian’s propensity to inscribe the feminine upon the traditionally masculine – as in her Motherhood of God narratives, for example, or the parable of the Lord and Servant – serves to complicate and thus break down traditional images of and attitudes towards the gendered body in a way which is far more inclusive and has the effect of incorporating humanity in its entirety into her vision of salvation. In this instance, therefore, we see Julian making initial use of body imagery more commonly associated with the concupiscent female but then apparently masculinising it by means of the allusion to the purse/testicles (‘saccus stercoris’). This image, however, becomes ultimately unstable because of its possible association with the female vagina or womb and its interplay between images and meanings, male and female categories. Thus, Julian not only constructs another effective and accessible hermeneutic by inscribing the feminine upon the masculine and offering up another malefemale body with which to explicate her vision of God’s love for humankind; she also simultaneously rescues the feminine from the realm of the traditionally abject by interrogating the validity of that category itself.

Saints and Sinners: Sex and the Redemptive Female It is becoming evident from this analysis that Julian’s texts are beginning to demonstrate a certain sanguineness about the human body and its fleshliness (and the female body and its fleshliness, in particular) as a result of her ability to release it from the rigid binaries which tended to contain it, something which becomes particularly marked in the Long Text, as we shall see. A further

58

59

The concept of metamorphosis and its importance within the western literary tradition is examined in some depth by Caroline Walker Bynum in Metamorphosis and Identity (New York, 2001). See Genesis 3: 19: ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth out of which thou wast taken: for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return.’

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point of slippage which enables this release lies in the potential of the body (and, within a patriarchal society, the sexually marked female body in particular) to act as an object of exchange or as bargaining tool between men, as both Rubin and Irigaray have argued.60 However, arguably within such an exchange is the capacity for a woman to herself reap and redefine the benefits of bestowing her body where and how she chooses, not to mention any concomitant financial gain which might also be reaped. In Julian’s texts, therefore, we see this type of discrepancy provide an opportunity for the representation of a bodily trading which will prove to be of benefit to the whole of humankind in its capacity to purchase the love of God. It is therefore significant that, just as we saw in the case of Margery Kempe, Julian (who was, of course, writing in the same geographical and newly urbanised area and as a product of the same socio-religious climate) draws similarly on the figure of redeemed prostitute, Mary Magdalene, to lend authority to her writing. Indeed, she tells us that one of her early desires was to ‘have beene that time with Mary Magdalene and with other that were Crists lovers’ (LT, 3). As a pious and spiritually ambitious young woman, Julian had obviously identified with Mary Magdalene, both as sinner and as saint – something we might expect of a young woman with ambitions of becoming the lover of Christ – and when she comes to writing, the Magdalene in her role as announcer of the risen Christ, provides a suitable anchor for this daring act of female literary and mystical self-expression. As patron saint of both prostitutes and contemplatives during the late Middle Ages, Mary Magdalene stands, of course, as appropriate icon for an age which witnessed both the flowering of female mysticism alongside an increase in commercial prostitution within the new culture of urbanisation within which both Julian and Margery were operating.61 Susan Haskins has posited that both these primarily urban phenomena came about as the result of a specifically female reaction to the huge increase in wealth within the towns – the one group actively embracing the opportunity of sharing in that wealth, the other determinedly eschewing its worldly appeal.62 However, it seems to me that its primary significance is more a question of a recognition of an increased opportunity for female agency within this new, money-centred society. For both groups of women – contemplatives and commercial prostitutes – the changes in society would have allowed for the adoption an active socio-economic or socio-religious position simultaneously at the heart of society and on its margins which would enable them to exploit the type of ‘blind spots’ created by this duality and create for themselves a measure of personal autonomy. Thus, both Julian and Margery, as holy women and writers in possession of bodies

60 61 62

See my discussion of this in the previous chapter, pp. 99–101. On the parallel growth of mysticism and prostitution in urban centres see Haskins, Mary Magdalen, pp. 173–88. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, p. 176.

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with which to trade, demonstrate an awareness in their texts of the potential of this dual subjectivity to provide them with both empowerment and authority – or at least create an ambivalent space from which to speak and be heard. As a result, both writers draw heavily on the idea of the tradable female body which, in the case of Julian, reconfigures itself within what can be read as a discourse of divine ‘prostitution’, serving ultimately to disrupt and dispel those commonly held beliefs about women and their threatening sexuality and bodies. Such an assertion is further corroborated by Julian’s identification with another popular saint – this time early in the Short Text. The young Saint Cecelia, whose three death-wounds Julian admires so much as a young woman (ST, 40) was one of the early virgin martyrs so beloved by pious women within the medieval Church. It remains the case, however, that the importance of Julian’s allusion to this saint in the Short Text and the fact of her expulsion from the Long Text has remained largely overlooked in critical commentary.63 Susan Hagan is one commentator, however, who has set out a case for Cecelia’s initial inclusion by Julian and subsequent excision in the Long Text as being of crucial relevance to our understanding of Julian’s development as an author.64 On reappraisal, it seems likely that for Julian the story of Cecelia’s life was thematically even more multivalent at this early point in her writing career than even Hagan’s analysis would suggest. Indeed, I suggest that, like the legend of Mary Magdalene, it offered Julian not only a heteroglossic discourse from which she was able to extract a validation of the female voice and the sanctity it proclaimed (and, by implication, her own voice and status as mystic) but also one which asserted the female body as sexual signifier as providing a useful exegetical tool.65 In spite of her adherence to the traditional image of the saintly virgin, Cecelia was in fact married, although she did succeed in establishing a life of celibacy with her young husband.66 Interestingly, however, in spite of her adherence to this topological virginity, Cecelia is not depicted as asexual or

63

64

65

66

Nicholas Watson comments on Julian’s reference to Saint Cecelia in the context of fourteenth-century reactions to the concept of women preachers in ‘Composition’, pp. 651–2. Another commentator who makes note of Julian’s identification is Benedicta Ward, who asserts the appropriateness of Julian’s admiration for the type of piety exemplified by Cecelia in ‘Julian the Solitary’, pp. 22–3. Susan K. Hagan, ‘St. Cecelia and St. John of Beverly: Julian of Norwich’s Early Model and Late Affirmation’, in McEntire, Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, pp. 91–114. Hagan is the only commentator to date who devotes any significant space to the relevance of the allusion to this saint in the Short Text. See in particular Hagan’s assertion that ‘St. Cecelia . . . provides Julian with historical affirmation of woman’s value as a voice for Christian wisdom in the face of skeptics and nay-sayers’, p. 108. For an essay which uses current postcolonialist theory to negotiate the conflict between the apparent victimhood of the virgin martyr and the empowerment which it can also render her see Robert Mills, ‘Can the Virgin Martyr Speak?’, in Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans and Sarah Salih (eds), Medieval Virginities (Cardiff, 2003), pp. 187–213. De Voragine, The Golden Legend, vol. 2, pp. 318–23.

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even desexualised as we might expect. As with many of the virgin martyrs, or indeed the harlot saints like Mary Magdalene who equally captured public imagination,67 Cecelia’s sexuality is highly animated – albeit redirected towards an angelic bridegroom figure and reconfigured as a spiritual passion. As Cecelia informs her young husband in de Voragine’s account: ‘I have as my lover an angel of God, who watches over my body with unceasing vigilance’.68 Elsewhere in the legend, Cecelia’s sexuality is similarly absorbed into the discourse of conversion as she adopts the role of earthly and womanly procuress of men ripe for conversion to Christianity, reportedly bringing over four hundred people to conversion with words fully imbued with the transactional language of the marketplace: ‘I am not losing youth but exchanging it, giving up clay and receiving gold . . . If someone offered you a gold piece for a copper, would you not accept it readily? God indeed, gives back to us a hundred for one’.69 Within such an economy, Cecelia offers up as exemplar her youthful body to be exchanged for payment in ‘gold’, that is to say the love of Christ. In encouraging others to do the same, Cecelia renders Christ as ideal and common love-object of them all – their lover-in-common – and it is for him that they will proceed willingly to trade their own bodies and undergo execution. Meanwhile, Cecelia’s own apotheosis is achieved only after a scalding in a bath, the infliction of three grievous wounds to her neck in the attempt to sever it from her naked body, and a Christ-like absorption into suffering which lasts for the requisite three days. It is of no coincidence, therefore, that the boiling water in which Cecelia is submerged has no effect on her highly visible, excessive and icy female body, the ontological coldness of which can only be countered by the passionate calor of union with her divine lover, Christ. It is Chaucer, in his retelling of this tale in his ‘Second Nun’s Tale’ who specifically emphasises this aspect, suggesting that he was also aware of the ironic protection offered to Cecelia by her inherently icy female body: The lone nyght, and eek a day also, For al the fyr and eek the bathes heete She sat al coold and feelede no wo. It made hire nat a drop for to sweete.70

Because of the efficacy of Cecelia’s feminine resistance to their tortures, her persecutors eventually have to resort to the phallic blade and dismemberment in order to effect her execution; but even this figurative rape is a botched by the male executioner and she finally bleeds to death in suitable Christic fashion from the three wounds inflicted upon her. Thus, this highly gendered execution 67 68 69 70

On the harlot saints see Karras, ‘Holy Harlots’. De Voragine, The Golden Legend, p. 319. De Voragine, The Golden Legend, vol. 2, p. 322. The Riverside Chaucer, p. 269, lines 519–22.

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unites her forever with her divine spouse and her concomitant martyrdom validates the redemptive potential of an exchanged and penetrated female body. Julian’s allusion to Saint Cecelia is therefore likely to be more than mere reference to a saint whom we would expect have been popular with a conventionally pious young woman. This legend, with its multiplicity of coincidental discourses of female sexuality, bodily trading and their potential for validating the female speech act (Cecelia is, of course, a particularly vocal woman whose voice not only brings about salvation for others, but also accelerates her own death and sanctification), will offer Julian encouragement in her own search for a suitable hermeneutic of the female to explicate her own personal experiences of God and justify her articulation of it. It is therefore probable that for this writer, who was herself about to utter the unutterable and risk the vilification or worse of her contemporaries, the endorsement of Saint Cecelia and her alliance with Mary Magdalene announce loudly to her audience a variety of consciously constructed precedents which facilitate a redemption of the female body as paradigmatic site of a traditionally problematic sexuality.

The Female Body as Commodity: Recontextualisation Julian’s strategic and personally defined use of her own female body alongside those of her role-models is everywhere apparent from the onset of her narrative. At the beginning of the Short Text, for example, Julian depicts herself as active agency, invoking upon herself the affective experience of illness (‘a wylfulle desyre to hafe of goddys gyfte a bodelye syekenes’; ST, 40). Not content with outlining the details for us, Julian appears keen to emphasise a pious assertiveness here, symptomatic of her youthful enthusiasm and energy. She continues emphatically: And I wolde þat this bodylye syekenes myght have beene so harde as to the dede, so that I myght in the sekenes take alle my ryghtynges of halye kyrke, wenande myselfe that I schulde dye; and that alle creatures that sawe me myght wene the same, for I wolde hafe no comforth of no fleschlye nothere erthelye lyfe. In this sekenes I desyrede to hafe alle manere of paynes bodelye & gastelye that I schulde have hyf I schulde dye, alle the dredes & tempestes of feyndys & alle manere of othere paynes safe of the owhte passynge of the sawlle, for I hoped that it myht be to me a spede when I schulde dye, for I desyrede sone to be with my god. (ST, 40)

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dramatic conception, becoming object to the repetitively subjective assertions, ‘I wolde’, and ‘I shulde’. Like de Voragine who controls the pace in his account of the martyrdom of Cecelia, Julian controls her own anticipated quasimartyrdom, and we detect her laying down for divine perusal the terms of her negotiation, terms which are firmly rooted in the most immediate and material commodity she has to trade with – her female body. It will be God’s decision whether or not to respond in the appropriate terms to the offer of this physical trade-off (‘hyf it be thy wille that I have itt, grawnte itt me’; ST, 40). For Julian, however, the reward which she envisages will be a clarified awareness of how Christ’s body suffered for humankind and an opportunity to participate herself in that suffering through this act of imitatio Christi. In her essay speculating on Julian’s knowledge of gynaecological texts, Alexandra Barratt points out that suffering and pain was considered to be inherent to the female condition.71 Barratt also points out that the specifically female suffering involved in gynaecological ailments and childbirth was considered necessary for the continuation of human life – an expression not only of Eve’s legacy but also representative of both Christ and the Virgin who were also born to suffer. Thus, female suffering occupied a similar multivalent site of slippage as did the fleshly female, from where such suffering could be read in terms of both punishment and redemption and even at this early point in Julian’s writing we see her taking up such an ambivalent position in her treatment of her own body. Not only that, but even prior to her mystical experiences she appears to have been quite familiar with the concept of trading on the resource of her own body. Thus, she readily imposes a ‘condicyon’ on God for the granting of her request for illness – even to the point of identifying the optimum moment for it, that is the time when she would have reached ‘threttye heere eelde’ (ST, 40). This, of course, coincides with the exact age of Christ at the start of his ministry which, in turn, heralded his inexorable journey towards his own Passion and death. Moreover, we discover that this bargain which Julian strikes with God is fulfilled to the letter when she has just passed the requisite age, following which she becomes dangerously ill (ST, 41). There is no doubt at this point that Julian’s overt substitution of her own suffering body for Christ’s, along with her emphasis on the correlation between their ages, has the effect of overlaying Christ’s body with a female-identified suffering, even at this early point in the Short Text. Through its merging with Julian’s own body, the body of Christ metamorphoses into a female-associated site of negotiation, a primary commodity of exchange and a feminised route to salvation. Thus, Julian’s mystical experiences which follow are incorporated within an economy of the female body which renders it a tradable commodity from the outset, something which is wholly in keeping with the socio-economic climate of her day in which women were frequently regarded as sexual

71

Barratt, ‘ “In the Lowest Part” ’, p. 242.

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commodity (as illustrated in the previous chapter in the context of Margery Kempe), and one which will continue to have a marked influence on her depiction of Christ in both texts. Although the mutual benefits of the transaction which Julian envisages both for herself and for Christ are ostensibly metaphysical, nevertheless Julian’s means of explication is firmly rooted in the language of the physical – as we witnessed in the case of the ‘fine purse’ passage and that of the decaying body. The fact, of course, that the location of Julian’s trade-off with God is her own bedroom also bears multiple suggestions; not only does it conjour up intimations of sexual intimacy which relies, in part, on the bed imagery but it is also heavily imbued with an invocation of the love-bower of the biblical Song of Songs.72 Later too, as we have seen, Julian envisions her bed as bloodsoaked, and there are aspects of her depiction of her prone body lying beneath that of the suffering Christ on the animated cross which also bear the eroticised resonances of the bride of the Song of Songs awaiting the embrace of her heavenly bridegroom – something which will later be parodied in Julian’s encounter with the fiend, as we shall see. Julian’s treatment of her mystical encounter with Christ with its sexual and nuptial overtones has a lot in common with traditional Jewish exegesis of the Song, with its far more positive attitude towards eroticism and its resistance to the type of allegorical interpretation which predominated within the Christian tradition.73 We have no evidence, however, to suggest that Julian was familiar with this tradition, although as Cynthia Kraman points out, ‘Jews continued to live and write in the Christian world, and their views were persistently hovering . . . within it’.74 Nevertheless, the correlation does demonstrate how far Julian’s reading of the Song as subtly evidenced here diverges from mainstream western interpretive tradition. Similarly, her well-documented use of the topos of humility in the Short Text can similarly be read as an engagement with the notion of the weak and concupiscent female as being a potentially transcendent

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The Song of Songs is characterised by the Shulamite (soul) languishing in her bed whilst awaiting the arrival of her bridegroom (Christ), as we saw in the previous chapter. See, for example, Song of Songs 3: 1: ‘In my bed by night I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, and found him not.’ See also 1: 15: ‘Behold thou art fair, my beloved, and comely. Our bed is flourishing.’ In an analysis of the Jewish tradition of the Song of Songs, Cynthia Kraman has examined how this highly popular poem became an expression of hieros gamos in Jewish exegesis, asserting that it fed directly into the Christian tradition via Rashi Shlomo (1040–1105), whose eleventh-century commentary was considered definitive. Cynthia Kraman, ‘Communities of Otherness in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale’, in Watt, Women in Their Communities, pp. 138–54 (p. 144). Kraman also points out that for Judaism, marriage provided a sacred model in which the body was both created and possessed by God. Celibacy was an alien concept within this ideology, and sexual love within marriage was considered a reflection of God’s fecundity and omnipotence. Earthly marriage in the Jewish exegesis of the Song is consequently far more polysemic and multidirectional than the highly allegorical interpretations of the Christian tradition (p. 145). Kraman, ‘Communities of Otherness’, p. 140.

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and redemptive agency. For example, at one point she announces to her readers ‘fulle gretlye I was astonnyd for wondere . . . that y had that he (Christ) wolde be so hamelye with a synfulle creature lyevande in this wrecchyd flesche’ (ST, 43). Julian’s use of the ambiguous ‘hamelye’ here – a word which was, in certain contexts, associated with sexual intimacy as well as conveying the more frequent meaning of friendliness or familiarity75 – both augments the concept of her own sexualised body as being desirable to Christ whilst de-eroticising it at the same time and thus removing some of its more problematic associations. Julian’s amazement here is therefore not only a result of the singularity of the mystical experience which is unfolding before her eyes but, more significantly, that Christ (among whose lovers she has desired to be included, alongside the sexually transgressive Mary Magdalene, as we have seen) should overlook what she terms her ‘wrecchyd flesche’ because of the bargain she has managed to strike with him by means of that same flesh and its wretchedness in its sexuality and suffering. Thus, from the outset, Julian links the divine gift of redemptive illness with her own perceived female ontology as ‘leud, febille, & freylle’ (ST, 48), which in turn, becomes a metonym for the suffering flesh of Christ himself. Such mutual abjection can therefore be read as a tropological representation of divine love and reciprocity, something which Julian will recognise years later after a secondary visionary experience in 1388 as ‘our lords mening’ (LT, 135), and it is a revelation which is brought to her to no small degree by means of a personal exegetical reading of her own female body, its suffering and fleshly impulses and its potential to act as explicatory tool. It is, of course, possible to argue that the sexual connotations of Julian’s encounter with Christ are entirely orthodox within the tradition of female mysticism in which she is located. One could even add that the highly erotic imagery used to depict the nuptial mysticism of some of her Continental precursors such as the Flemish beguine, Hadewijch of Brabant76 or, in the English tradition, even Richard Rolle, for example,77 renders Julian’s treatment of mystical union subdued or inconsequential. As a result, what we find taking precedence in Julian’s

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MED ‘homli’ 2e. For another example of the use of this term within a sexual context see The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 90: ‘For it is conuenyent þe wyf to be homly wyth hir husbond’. For a concise summary of what is known of Hadewijch’s life and writing career and some extracts from her poetry, see Carolyne Larrington, Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook (London and New York, 1995), pp. 242–8. See also J. Reynaert, ‘Hadewijch: Mystic Poetry and Courtly Love’, in E. Kooper (ed.), Medieval Dutch Literature in Its European Context (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 208–25; and Bernard McGinn (ed.), Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystic: Hadewijch of Brabant, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete (New York, 1994). The erotic and bridal imagery of Richard Rolle’s Melos Amoris in particular has been examined by Sara de Ford, ‘Mystical Union in the Melos Amoris of Richard Rolle’, in Marion Glasscoe (ed.), The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Papers read at Dartington Hall, July 1980: Exeter Symposium 1 (Exeter, 1980), pp. 173–201. For a detailed study of mystical sex for women in the Middle Ages, see Karma Lochrie, ‘Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies’, in Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCraken and James A. Schultz (eds), Constructing Medieval Sexuality, Medieval Cultures vol. 11 (Minneapolis and London, 1997), pp. 180–200.

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writing is not the sensual or overtly erotic discourses of her precursors, but an emphasis on the body as a desirable, valuable and God-given commodity which can be used as a means of purchasing a mutual and reciprocal love. In this economy too, sexuality plays only a part and is by no means the measure of that body. Such a modification of traditional paradigms of nuptial mysticism is in itself deeply unconventional, and imbues the relationship between lover and beloved with a pragmatism which it is tempting to attribute to an authorial awareness of the economic utilitarianism of contemporary urban life. This was, after all, a primary concern, albeit from differing perspectives, of a number of Julian’s contemporaries including Langland and Chaucer as well as Margery Kempe.78 Similarly, Julian’s narrative of mystical consummation is just as material, pragmatically simple and downplayed, accompanied as it is by the outpouring of Christ’s blood and the loud female utterance at the moment of union: Ryght so both god and man the same sufferede for me. I conseyvede treulye & myghttyllye that itt was hymselfe that schewyd it me withowtyn any meet, and than I sayde, ‘Benedicite Dominus’. This I sayde reuerentlye in my menynge with a myghtty voyce. (ST, 43)

The release of Christ’s blood along with the female voice in this moment of spiritual ‘orgasm’ as mystical knowledge floods in again diverges from traditional treatments of eroticised union. Instead, it forms a trope for the relinquishing of doubt and anxiety and makes way for the later narratives of motherhood and ultimately the birth of the mystical text. Most importantly, it serves as a validation of the sacredness of a unified body (and Julian’s own female body as its representative) and a vindication of human corporeality generally, a theme which gains in power and momentum as Julian’s confidence in her own insights and her means of accessible exegesis develop.

Sexuality and the Fiendish Encounter Another area of Julian’s writing which is shot through with more overt discourses of sexuality is her account of two encounters with the fiend endured whilst she is paralysed by her illness. Once again, critical commentary has tended to overlook how these depictions of what amounts to an attempt at demonic rape are used by the author to throw into relief the positive and productive qualities of Christ and Julian’s own responses to him. Just as we saw 78

For insight into a pragmatic approach to love and marriage in the fifteenth century, see the letters of the Paston family, particularly those which react to John Paston II’s premature desire for marriage. Particularly interesting are those which allude to Margery Paston’s clandestine marriage to one of the Paston servants, Richard Calle (Norman Davis (ed.), The Paston Letters (Oxford and New York, 1983), no. 83 (pp. 174–5) and no. 84 (pp. 181–3)). For a letter sent by Calle to Margery Paston following their enforced separation after betrothal, see no. 85 (pp. 178–80).

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in The Book of Margery Kempe how the author continually seeks to establish a contrast between Christ as beautiful young lover, and the imperfections and limitations of any worldly lover, so too in Julian’s writing we find the representation of the fiend’s assaults established as a counterbalance in order to throw into relief the desirability of the heavenly lover and mother, Christ. One of the few commentators to actively grapple with the sexual nature of Julian’s encounter with the fiend to date is Jay Ruud,79 whose argument, although initially engaging with recent feminist analysis of Julian’s writing, nevertheless tends towards a more androcentric reading of the text. Ruud begins his investigation with the claim that ‘the majority of [Julian’s] imagery surrounding God is masculine’,80 an assertion which fails to take full account of the more subtle and skilful layering of gendered imagery and palimpsestic representation of both male and female characteristics so typical of much of Julian’s writing which this present study is attempting to identify. Although Ruud sets out to demonstrate that both God and the humanised Christ are feminised by Julian by means of an employment of a courtly discourse (for example, ‘he kepeth us mytyly and mercifully in the tyme that we are in our synne and monge all our enemies that arn full fel upon us’; LT, 125),81 he does not adequately resolve the inherent contradiction in his argument which sees the tension between the courtly lover, Christ, and the masculine figure of the fiend in terms of ‘direct masculine competition’,82 in spite of the ‘feminising’ effect of the courtly discourse. Ruud thus identifies these episodes as being the site of a masculine struggle-to-the-death to win possession of the prostrate body of a traditionally impotent female.83 In part, many of Ruud’s observations are pertinent and useful, but his final analysis leaves us with a reading of the fiendish encounter which reinforces traditional binaries by rendering the female as inevitable victim and the masculine – whether the text’s negative or positive example – as inevitable victor. On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that Julian’s intentions in her foregrounding of this

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Jay Ruud, ‘ “I wolde for thy loue dye”: Julian, Romance Discourse and the Masculine’, in McEntire, Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, pp. 183–205. See also David F. Tinsely, ‘Julian’s Diabology’, in the same volume, pp. 207–37. More recently, the encounter has been addressed by Judith Dale in ‘ “Sin is behovely”: Art and Theodicy in the Julian Text’, Mystics Quarterly 25, 4 (1999), pp. 127–46. Here Dale comes to some of the same conclusions as myself about Julian’s setting up of these narratives as parodic parallels to the earlier Passion narratives. Ruud, ‘ “I wolde for thy loue dye” ’, p. 183. I quote here from the Glasscoe edition which is based upon the Sloane 1 manuscript, whereas Ruud uses the Paris manuscript which has been edited by College and Walsh. I will embark upon a more extended discussion of the manuscript tradition in Chapter 6. Ruud, ‘ “I wolde for thy loue dye” ’, p. 197 (my emphasis). For an alternative reading of the applicability of the ethics of courtly love to the female mystical discourse of sex, see Lochrie, ‘Mystical Acts’, especially p. 185: ‘The terms of courtly love are simply not adaptable to the discourse of women mystics because they are gendered, and we must be careful not to subsume the violence of the sexual language in their writings to the masculine uses of the language of courtly love’.

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devilish encounter are far more complex and far more in keeping with an increasingly confident invocation of the feminine which we have witnessed elsewhere. In this context, it is significant that Julian’s descriptions of her assaults by the fiend vary considerably between the Short and Long Texts.84 For Ruud, the expansion of the original Short Text material into the more dramatic Long Text version reflects the author’s need to balance Christ’s wholly desirable masculine/feminine qualities with a figure which represents a mixture of undesirable masculine/feminine qualities.85 Whereas Ruud depends upon the sexualised and overtly venial devil of the Long Text for his analysis, for the purposes of my own interpretation it is the less graphic and more concise Short Text representation which is of initial importance. Julian has already learned in her Fifth Revelation ‘be worde formede in [her] vndyrstandynge’ (ST, 48) that ‘the passyon of [Christ] is ouercomynge of the fende’ (ST, 50), but whereas her intellectual acceptance of this concept is one thing, dealing with the physical presence of the fiend in her own bedchamber is wholly another. In Chapter 11 she describes her first physical encounter with the fiend, an episode which constitutes a familiar topos within the writings of medieval religious women.86 Yet, as David Tinsely has pointed out, unlike her precursors such as Christina Mirabilis or Ita of Hohenfels whose trials with the devil function to accentuate their suffering in the narrative and thus prioritise the discourse of imitatio Christi,87 Julian’s Short Text account of the fiend’s initial visit is muted and almost dismissive: ‘me thought the fende sette hym in my throte and walde hafe strangelede me, botte he myght nought’ (ST, 72). Here, Julian seems to be using the incident, not as the affective mnemonic which Susan Hagan considers it to be,88 nor as explicatory device, as David Tinsely suggests,89 but as a literal and material reinforcement of Christ’s reassurance to her that ‘the feende is ouercomyn’ (ST, 51). This interpretation is further substantiated by the lack of any emotive literary devices in her description of this visit as it appears in the Short Text. Briefly, Julian alludes to ‘smoke’ and ‘a fowle stynke’ in her chamber, details to which those in attendance in the chamber are not privy (ST, 73). Similarly, her account of the fiend’s second assault on her is just as restrained and unexploited in spite of a slight increase in affective vocabulary: ‘The stynke was so vile and so paynfulle, and the bodely heete also dredfulle & trauaylous’ (ST, 74–5). This time she also adds sound to the account, documenting the

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Ruud also makes this point in ‘ “I wolde for thy loue dye” ’, p. 194. Ruud, ‘ “I wolde for thy loue dye” ’, p. 200. On this see David, F. Tinsely ‘Julian’s Diabology’, in McEntire, Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, pp. 207–37 (p. 209). Tinsely ‘Julian’s Diabology’, p. 209. Hagan makes this suggestion in her essay, ‘St. Cecelia and John of Beverley’, pp. 98 and 106. Tinsely’s essay explores the use that Julian makes of the convention and what this convention would have signified for her readers, ‘Julian’s Diabology’, pp. 209–10.

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‘iangelynge’ and ‘speche . . . as hif thay had haldene a parliamente with grete besynes’ (ST, 75). Nevertheless, Julian herself still remains at centre stage and her characteristically assertive use of the repetitive subject position ‘I’ serves to dissipate any agency which the fiend might have in the narrative. What is important to Julian in this early version is how she evades the (neglible) influence of the fiend, and it is significant that it is the comfort of orthodox, rather than mystical, ritual to which she turns in order to rid herself of the fiend’s presence: ‘my tunge I occupyed with speche of cristes passion & rehersynge of the faith of hali kyrke, and my herte I festende on god, with alle the triste and alle the myght that was in me’ (ST, 75). According to medieval diabology as expounded in the ‘satisfaction theory’ of Anselm of Canterbury, for example, the devil, as a result of the Fall, was granted only limited agency to tempt and seduce mankind,90 and in many ways Julian’s theodicy as displayed in her initial reaction to her experiences with the devil adheres to this orthodox belief.91 She is clearly avoiding the implications of her own dialogue, something nowhere more evident in the text than her account of how she attempts to talk herself out of the implications of the fiendish encounter: ‘And I triste besely in god & comforthede my sawlle with bodely speche as I schulde hafe done to anothere person than myselfe that hadde so bene travaylede’ (ST, 75). Julian’s salvation at this point comes about because of a ventriloquising of the orthodox line on the devil and by literally talking herself out of its more sinister connotations. In the same way, the entire Short Text version will attempt to ‘talk away’ the sexual overtones of the encounter. At no point, for example, is the fiend anthropomorphised or bestialised in any explicit way as we would expect to find in other fourteenth-century depictions with which Julian would surely have been familiar.92 Instead, we are presented with a quasiconceptual, quasi-personified vision of evil not-quite-embodied, which falls short of adhering to traditional representations of the devil which saw him as a concrete reality and body rather than abstract concept.93 In the context of more traditional representation, Julian’s fiend’s lack of a concrete body or 90

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This is something pointed out by Baker, From Vision to Book, pp. 17–19. According to Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century, the devil only had certain rights over humankind because they had relinquished total obedience to God because of the Fall. Anselm thus repudiated the so-called ‘devil’s rights’ theory which saw redemption as a legal contest between God and Satan, with humanity standing on the sidelines. Instead, Anselm recognised the position of Christ’s humanity as being at the centre of the eschatological debate. For the influence of Anselmian thinking upon later medieval spirituality see Thomas H. Bestul, ‘Antecedents: The Anselmian and Cistercian Contributions’, in Pollard and Boenig, Mysticism and Spirituality, pp. 1–20. See, for example, Jean le Tavernier, ‘St. Jerome sees a devil on the train of a Bourgeoise of Bethlehem’, Miracles de Nostre Dame (Paris, Bibliotèque Nationale MS fr. 9198, fol. 91). For a brief but well-contextualised and well-illustrated overview of the iconographic depictions of the devil in western tradition see Jacques Levron, Le Diable dans l’Art (Paris, 1935). On this see Tinsely, ‘Julian’s Diabology’, p. 213. Here Tinsely quotes Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-making in Medieval Art (Cambridge, 1989), p. 63: ‘Evil was not an idea to medieval people. It was real and had bodies. These bodies were devils.’

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morphology in the Short Text becomes the location of an intriguing lacuna, an explanation for which can only be ascertained by unraveling the possible reasons for Julian’s non-disclosure of information in this text. For Tinsely, Julian’s Short Text reticence on this issue can be understood within the context of Julian’s fear of her own potential for corruption. Using the stance of Gregory the Great who associated demonic stenches with those ‘stained by the sins of the flesh through the pleasures of thought’,94 Tinsely concludes that the sexual implications of the stink accompanying Julian’s fiend renders her most feared inner enemy to be ‘the deadly sin of lust’.95 He suggests, and I concur with this view, that Julian’s readers may well have associated the stink of the fiend in that bedroom location with lascivious longings and the ‘delights of the flesh’ to which a young woman was considered easy prey. If this is the case, then the suppression in the Short Text of her own material would suggest that Julian is indeed trying to evade the implications of these episodes because of their troubling and sordid sexual overtones, just as she admits in the Long Text to having evaded an explication of the parable of the Lord and Servant because of her failure to understand it.96 Here again, therefore, we see Julian avoiding a confrontation with her own material and retreating into the religious orthodoxy of church ritual. By the time she came to revise and expand her text some years later, however, Julian appears to have shed her ambivalence towards the sexually threatening fiend of her experiences and, by implication, its impact upon her own self-representation in the text. Thus, in the equivalent narratives in the Long Text she demonstrates an acceptance of the more unsavoury implications of the fiend’s presence in her bedroom and of his assault upon her. This time her description of her attacker is so fully realised that its animation rivals that of her earlier descriptions of Christ’s suffering and bodily disfigurement, and thus takes on the appearance of a demonic parody of the central motif of her Passion narrative. Most significantly in this context, Julian represents the predatory fiend as appearing in the likeness of a young man, a representation which again diverges radically from traditional representations of the devil which had been growing increasingly sinister since late antiquity,97 and by this stage more frequently depicted as a serpent, a dragon, a dog, a wolf, or some kind of admixture of these types of animals:98 ‘the fend set him in my 94 95 96 97 98

Gregory the Great, Dialogues, trans. Odo John Zimmerman, vol. 39 (New York, 1959), pp. 242–3, as cited by Tinsely, ‘Julian’s Diabology’, p. 215. Tinsely, ‘Julian’s Diabology’, p. 215. See Long Text: ‘And yet cowth I not taken therin ful vndersondyng to myn ese at that tyme’, p. 74. Jeffrey Burton Russell, Satan and The Early Christian Tradition (Ithaca and London, 1981), p. 190. Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (London and Scarborough, Ontario, 1977), pp. 245–6. See also Rhodes Montague James (ed.), The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1924), pp. 35, 36 and 82, for the devil’s association with the wolf and dog.

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throte, puttand forth a visage ful nere my face like a yong man; and it was longe and wonder lene; I saw never none such’ (LT, 108). Decontextualised, the physical details of this description seem to emphasise a masculine youth, vigour and leanness which in turn introduce echoes of conventional depictions of the naked and suffering Christ whose physical vulnerability, youth and beauty add to the poignancy of his destiny and provide powerful stimulation for desired affective responses to the Passion. Indeed, in many ways Julian’s graphic depiction of the devil’s advances in this text can be read as a hideous parody of the Bride’s relationship with the Bridegroom in the Song of Songs which had been invoked earlier or, indeed, of Saint Cecelia’s emotionally and physically satisfying relationship with her divine lover, and does, in fact, provide a key to the narrative strategy which Julian is employing in her extended and fully developed description of this encounter. Just as traditional affective treatments of the young and physically beautiful suffering Christ are sexualised, particularly in female-authored texts, so now Julian proceeds to develop a similarly sexualised description of the aggressive fiend to its full exploitative potential: The color was rede like the tilestone what it is new brent, with blak spots therin like blak steknes fouler than the tilestone. His here was rode as rust, evisid aforn, with syde lokks hongyng on the thounys. He grynnid on me with a shrewd semelant, shewing white teeth . . . Body ne hands had he none shaply, but with pawes he held me in the throte. (LT, 108–9)

The redness of Julian’s devil is also an interesting divergence from traditional representations of the devil, who was nearly always black.99 In his study of Christian iconography, Louis Reau suggests that conventional representations of the devil as black served to reflect the black emptiness of hell,100 but he also concedes ‘le rouge . . . (le) convien(t) aussi’101 because of its association with blood and the flames of hell. It would therefore appear that in associating the devil’s red colouring with that of ‘tilestone’ in her account, Julian is further emphasising the fiend’s hellish connections. Often forged from red sandstone, the tilestone relies upon the heat of the fire for its solidity and its characteristic colour. In effect, it is from the realm of the earth, is fashioned with fire, and takes on the appearance of its location. So the physicality of Julian’s fiend

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Russell, Perceptions of Evil, p. 246. A typical example of the devil represented as black can be found in the Middle English Life of St Margaret where the devil is ‘muche deale blackre þen eauer eani blamon, se grislich, se ladlich, þet ne mahte hit na mon relich e areachen’ (much blacker than any black man, so grisly, so loathsome, that no-one could easily find words to describe it) (Seinte Margarete in Millett and Wogan-Browne, Medieval English Prose for Women, pp. 44–85 (p. 60)). The devil is similarly black in colour in Sawles Warde (an edition of which appears in the same volume, pp. 86–109). See, for example, the comparison between those suffering souls in hell and ‘þe blake deouel’ (the black devil), p. 92. Louis Reau, Iconographie de l’Art Chrétien, vol. 11, no. 1 (Paris, 1965), p. 62. Reau, Iconographie, p. 62.

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reflects its own origins and essence. Not only that, of course, but much more importantly here, the redness of its hue also provides a direct parody of the face of the bleeding Christ of Julian’s earlier vision when she tells us: ‘I saw how halfe the face, begyning at the ere, overrede with drie blode til it beclosid to the mid face, and after that, the tuther halfe beclosyd on the same wise’ (LT, 14). Now we begin to realise that, whilst ostensibly describing an encounter with the fiend, this assault narrative also engages with the subtext of Christ’s redeeming Passion. Julian is, in effect, telling two stories at the same time. This is further corroborated by Julian’s focusing on the intriguing ‘blak spots’ and ‘blak steknes’ covering the visage of the fiend. These too would also appear to be an invention of Julian’s own imaginative powers and are similarly imbued with connotations of corrupt sexuality. Although the commonest reading of this description is that it is an allusion to the physical ravages of the bubonic plague which had devastated the population of much of Europe during the course of the fourteenth century,102 it is more likely that Julian was attempting to depict a face ravaged by leprosy, a common complaint which was consistently associated with sexual dissoluteness and loose living, as we saw in the case of Margery Kempe’s son, and was believed to be a punishment for general moral depravity.103 Moreover, Julian’s fiend’s physical countenance adheres closely to the standard fourteenth-century medical description of leprosy which was founded on the personal experience of its author, Gilbert Anglicus. In his Compendium Medicinae Gilbert examines the various stages of the disease, documenting, amongst other symptoms, a dusky redness of the face, scabs, nodules and boils, lumps on the face and earlobes, thickened lips, hands and feet.104 For another contemporary expert on the disease, Guy de Chauliac, one of the unequivocable signs of the illness was a horrible satyrlike appearance (‘horrible in þe manner of a beste þat highte satoun’).105 Again, this is a representation to which Julian’s fiend would seem to adhere and one which may well have been informing her description. In addition, because of its associations with the figure of the sexually hedonistic Pan from classical antiquity, the concept of a corrupt – and specifically masculine – sexuality is foregrounded here which hints at an aggressive and bestial body beneath the graphically described face. Similarly, the redness of face and body would also add to the impression of an angry passion, enabling us yet again within this disturbing narrative to read the subtext of the tormented and bloody Christ,

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See, for example, Ruud, ‘ “I wolde for thy loue dye” ’, p. 195. For a detailed account of attitudes to and beliefs about leprosy in the Middle Ages, see Peter Richards, The Medieval Leper and His Northern Heirs (Cambridge, 1977). Gilbert Anglicus, Compendium Medicinae, as cited in Richards, The Medieval Leper, p. 98. Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium sive Collectorium Parvis Chirugicalis Medicinae (1363), as cited in Richards, The Medieval Leper, p. 99. For a Middle English translation of this text, see The Cyryrgie of Guy de Chauliac, ed. Margaret S. Ogden, EETS o.s. 265 (London, New York and Toronto, 1971). For an account of the ravages and treatments for leprosy, see pp. 377–89; for the satyr analogy, see p. 380.

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stripped naked, his body covered in dark lacerations which Julian witnesses during her encounter with his Passion. Popular representations of Christ in some fifteenth-century manuscripts depict him as bruised and bleeding, holding a charter before him. All visible parts of his naked body are covered in evenly placed spots which contrast significantly with the obvious and traditional blood-flow from his five major wounds. Although Christ’s lacerations in this type of representation tend to be picked out in red, nevertheless there is a striking resemblance between the ubiquitous pattern of wounds on this image of the wounded Christ and the blemishes on the face of Julian’s fiend.106 Earlier too, Julian has stressed the changing hues of the dying Christ’s face, concentrating at times on its bloody redness, as we have seen, but also at other times depicting its ‘brownehede and blakehede’ (LT, 15). Elsewhere she tells us ‘the swete body was brown and blak’ (LT, 24), and ‘as cloderyd blode whan it is drey’ (LT, 26). Likewise, the face is ‘more browne than the body’ and all of these graphic depictions of dark lacerations and congealed blood could well invoke comparison with Julian’s depiction of the devil and his ‘blak spots . . . like blak steknes’. Such a palimpsest of descriptive possibility again serves to throw into relief the transcendent beauty of Christ, in spite of his injuries, as opposed to the destructive corruption of the venial and threatening fiend. The entire episode of diabolic assault as recounted by Julian can thus be read as constituting an obscene parody of the Soul’s union with God, or the Bride of God’s long-awaited union with her celestial Bridegroom, or the consummation of Christ’s love for Julian which has taken place in her own bedchamber. In effect, what we are witnessing is an attempted demonic rape upon a woman’s prostrate and paralysed body which threatens to render her the devil’s whore, and so close does the perpetrator come to success that Julian can feel his breath upon her face and his side-locks hanging down to further obscure her vision.107 Ruud takes these curious hirsute appendages as invocations of the hairstyle associated with the medieval image of the ‘demonic Jew’ so often conflated with the devil in medieval consciousness.108 His assertion however is that Julian uses the image of Jewishness to suggest the fiend’s lack of masculinity – indeed, that the image imbues the fiend with a type of perverted femininity – which creates an impotency which ultimately prevents him from possessing Julian.109 Whilst I do not take issue with his recognition of the 106

107 108

109

Catherine Jones suggests that the detailed and graphically depicted nature of Julian’s visions could have been inspired by a familiarity with the school of manuscript illumination which centred on Norwich in the late fourteenth century (‘The English Mystic, Julian of Norwich’, in Katharina M. Wilson (ed.), Medieval Women Writers (Athens, 1984), p. 272). Long Text, p. 108. Ruud, ‘ “I wolde for thy loue dye” ’, p. 199. See also p. 204, n. 13. For an examination of the conflation of Jews and the devil in medieval thinking, see Philip Zeigler, The Black Death (Harmondsworth, 1969), p. 99 Here Ruud draws on Leon Poliakov who points out that Jewish men were long considered to menstruate (The History of Anti-Semitism, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1965), p. 142). Since it was common during the fourteenth century for Jews to appear

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demonised Jew within this representation, there is no evidence in Julian’s text to suggest such a feminisation of the fiend here. On the contrary, Julian’s use of parody to highlight an unadulterated and therefore undesirable masculinity is what is central to this episode. What she is actually expressing is her perception of the danger of untrammeled masculine sexual aggression if devoid of what she has already identified as the ‘feminine’ qualities of gentleness and unconditional love as personified by the figure of Christ, who is both mother and ideal lover. Far from evidencing an impotent masculinity, or a ‘lack’ which constitutes a feminisation, then,110 I argue that the fiend’s failure to overcome Julian in the Long Text establishes him as the embodiment of a dangerous and unmodified aberrant masculinity and that Ruud’s own conclusion fails to take account of the full extent of the gender politics with which Julian is engaging here. Whilst acknowledging that her fiend is indeed lacking, it is a lack, not of masculinity but of all those characteristics associated with the feminine in this text (and as possessed in abundance by Julian’s Christ), such as gentleness, nurturance, compassion and unconditional love. Thus, the fiend’s lack of any modifying feminine qualities leaves him wanting which, in spite of his desire to possess Julian, renders him ultimately impotent. This, in turn, serves to throw into relief the perfection of a Christ whose male body and unquenchable desire have been palimpsestically overwritten by the feminine – something which can now be turned to humanity’s advantage since ‘everyday he is redy to the same if it myght be . . . for this might be done everyday if he wold’ (LT, 32). Once again – and by means of an unique treatment of a recognisable topos – Julian demonstrates how the feminine can be redefined and redirected to constitute a potent adversary of evil. Moreover, without the modifying features of its redemptive propensity, humankind is reduced to a fiendlike bestiality as embodied by the wholly unmodified devil. Therefore, what appears to be Julian’s own feminine impotency at this point – that is to say her paralysed body and inabilitiy to defend herself from a diabolic predator – becomes, in reality, a steadfast, determined and infinitely powerful agent by means of its conflation with Christ as embodiment of divine love. Thus, just as we have seen Julian’s development of the motherhood imagery in her texts lead inexorably to its climactic bursting forth in the Long Text, so we can see a similar explosion of hitherto suppressed sexual energy in Julian’s depiction of the devil’s assaults upon her in the Long Text. In turn, this sudden flowering of both image patterns evidences a new confidence on the part of

110

alongside lepers as the most popular scapegoats for human depravity, this singular depiction of the venial fiend would seem to be conflating both representatives in one demonic, masculine body. Again this is Ruud’s stance in ‘ “I wolde for thy loue dye” ’, p. 199: ‘the Fiend comes up short in the competition with the masculine God by proving to be less than a man in being more like a beast. In another sense, the Fiend proves less than a man, in being more like a woman. That is, in his ultimate impotence, Julian’s Fiend is portrayed as effeminate.’

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the author to draw upon the workings and impulses of the female body to provide an accessible means of explicating for her ‘evencristen’ those mystical insights which would otherwise remain impenetrable.

Hermeneutics of Profit and Loss As I have been arguing, the hermeneutic of fleshly and tradable bodies is one which is central to Julian’s explication of her unique insight into the salvific process. It not only emerges in her treatment of illness, suffering and diabolic assault, but is everywhere incorporated into the language of her texts, producing an exposition which is at the same time highly contemporary and intensely mystical. This aspect of Julian’s writing has been recognised in part by Ritamary Bradley who, in a detailed study of the author’s use of the language of purchase and debt, demonstrates the extent to which such language is tightly interconnected with the themes of sin, divine love and the motherhood of God.111 Bradley’s study concentrates on Julian’s use of the word ‘asseth’ and its conglomerate meanings of ‘atonement’, ‘satisfaction’ and ‘sufficiency’. She suggests, moreover, that Julian’s frequent use of this word is closely connected to an equally prominent use of the language of transaction – that is, words which denote buying and selling. Of course, the use of this type of language to express theological concepts was not invented by Julian. As early as the third century Saint Ambrose was explicit in his use of such vocabulary to express the theme of debtor–creditor within a divine context.112 Equally, Julian’s contemporary, the mystic Walter Hilton, uses a similar language to illuminate his vision of God’s justice: Jhesu . . . made amendis to the Fadir of hevene for mannys gilt. And that myght He wel doon, for He was God, and He oughte not for Hymsilf, but for as mykil as He was man born of the same kynde that Adam was that first trespacede. He ought it of His free wille for the trespas of mankynde, the whiche kynde He took for savacioun of man of His endeles merci.113

Where Julian’s treatment of this theme differs, however, is that she associates it throughout with the ability of the Christian to bargain with God via a transaction which is predicated on the body – whether Christ’s, the Virgin’s, her own or that of her fellow Christian – and, as already demonstrated, those bodies in this text tend to be overwritten as feminine or feminised. What is even more pertinent here (something which Bradley fails entirely to take account 111 112 113

Ritamary Bradley, ‘Julian of Norwich: Everyone’s Mystic’, in Pollard and Boenig, Mysticism and Spirituality, pp. 139–58. Bradley, ‘Everyone’s Mystic’, p. 148. Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, ed. Thomas H. Bestul, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 2000). Online at http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/hilfr1.htm. Book 2, Chapter 2, lines 59–65.

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of in her own assessment) is that Julian’s use of this type of transactional language in the context of the tradable body is dependent for its effect upon a repeated use of the term ‘profytte’. Given the close connection between the concepts of transaction and profit within contemporary society, not to mention its prevalence in Julian’s writing, Bradley’s oversight is surprising and in this section I will attempt to draw a link between the language and influence of the marketplace and the thematic of profit and loss which is everywhere apparent in Julian’s writing. From the onset of the Short Text Julian adopts the term ‘profytte’ to establish what she has learned from her own bodily suffering, something which points clearly towards her recognition of the potential embodied within her own female corporeality to offer profit to herself and her ‘evencristen’. As she tells her audience soon after her dramatic account of her illness: ‘And so ys my desyre that it schulde be to euery ilke manne the same profytte that I desyrede to myselfe’ (ST, 47). Indeed, this part of the narrative is punctuated with references to what she had hoped to gain from such bodily suffering and what she feels the nature of the benefit has actually been. She tells her audience, for example, that the entire experience has been for the ‘edificacyon of houre saule’ (ST, 46) and in order to ‘love god the better’ (ST, 47). Such a juxtaposing of the benefits she hopes to reap for her audience alongside her representation of those experiences which will facilitate them demonstrates clearly that Julian considers any profit gained has been part of a divinely ordained transaction which is – crucially – predicated on her own female body as commodity. In this sense, the salvific by-product of Julian’s mystical insight has been bought firstly by Christ’s own suffering and subsequently by Julian herself, by means of an infinitely suffering and tradable female body. Such a commercialised bodily transaction is later explicitly confirmed by Christ who demands of Julian, ‘ “Arte thou wele payde that I suffyrde for the?” ’ (ST, 56), to which Julian’s response is enthusiastic and unequivocal: ‘ “Ha, goode lorde . . . Gramercy goode lorde, blissyd mut thowe be.” ’ Christ then proceeds to speak for both of them and confirms the success of the transaction: ‘ “Hyf thowe be payede . . . I am payede” ’ (56–7). Although the conventional reading of the word ‘payede’ as it is used here is in the sense of ‘well satisfied’ along with its alternative meaning of ‘to settle a debt’,114 another common use of the word paien was to denote the ‘gratifying of the flesh’.115 Such an association and layering of meaning is entirely typical of Julian’s literary technique, as we have seen, and here serves to implicate both a suffering and a fleshly body within the successful mystical transaction which has been effected between Christ and Julian for the profit of all humankind.

114 115

MED ‘paien’ 2a, 3a and 1b. MED ‘paien’ 1b. One of the earliest known usages of the word in this sexual context is in Ancrene Wisse, p. 164, ‘þus ich sohte delit, hu ich meast mahte paien mi lustes brune’ (thus I sought delight, how I might most satisfy my burning lust).

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In this sense, both female and Christic suffering are depicted in terms of an economic principle which is of benefit to both giver and recipient(s), whose roles merge as giving and receiving become indistinguishable in this context of mutual benefit. As a result, like Cecelia, she will ultimately emerge as a type of ‘common woman’ or procuress who trades her body in order to procure for God the love of all her ‘evencristen’. Such a transaction, in turn, will obtain for her fellow Christians the love of God which will be ‘plentously profitable to his lovers in erth’ (LT, 49).

Commonality and the Holy Whore By the time Julian came to write the longer version of her experiences, this concept of commonality, like that of Christ’s motherhood, is adeptly integrated into a text which everywhere insists upon the author’s trading with her own body as being of profit to all of humankind. Confidently she asserts: ‘for I would it were comfort to they, for al this sight was shewid general’ (LT, 12–13), telling us also, ‘I pray you al for Gods sake and counsel you for your owne profitt that ye levyn the beholding of a wretch that it was shewid to, and mightily, wisely and mekely behold God’ (LT, 13). As previously demonstrated, because of Julian’s abject and female suffering, the self-denigrating word ‘wretch’, whilst a generic term used to refer to fallen humanity, is also one marked by gender in the context of the female speaker,116 further exploiting the concept of trading on bodily abjection as being a female-associated phenomenon in this text. This is something which is subsequently reinforced by Julian’s use of the concept of ‘commonality’ – a use which is particularly pronounced in the Long Text, as I have suggested. Commentators have frequently pointed out the author’s eradication of references to her own frail womanhood in this text, the absence of autobiographical detail and a new sense of confidence in her own authority in what they see as an attempt to degender her writing and make it applicable to humankind generally. Watson, for example, comments that by the time Julian came to write the Long Text, it was all her fellow Christians whom she envisioned as ‘leued, feble and freylle’ rather than herself as representative of womankind, and that for Julian all human life falls into the female category of ‘sensuality’.117 However, rather than the Long Text reflecting an attempt to degender, I would argue that the gendering of the material goes underground to form a palimpsestic expression of the human. In this context, Julian’s use of the female body as tradable commodity continues to inform her concept of ‘commonality’ which, like the 116 117

For a discussion of how femaleness became a synonym for humanity in the Middle Ages, see Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 151–79. Watson, ‘Remaking “Woman” ’, p. 24. On Julian’s reconfiguration of ‘sensualyte’, again see Lichtman, ‘ “I desyrede a bodylye syght” ’, especially pp. 15–17.

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Motherhood of God thread, becomes an increasingly insistent motif as the Long Text gathers pace. For example, Christ now tells Julian about her mystical insights that she must ‘Take it generally’ (LT, 47), and that she should expect its relevance to be ‘nothyng in special’ (LT, 48). Moreover, the frequency of her use of the subjective ‘I’, so prevalent in the Short Text, is now supplanted by language which is more inclusive, her experiences being recounted in the context of their common relevance to the whole of humankind: And that I say of me I sey in the person of al myn even cristen, for I am lernyd in the gostly shewing of our lord God that he menyth so; and therefore I . . . counsel you . . . that [God] of his curtes love and endles godenes wolde shewyn it generally in comfort of us al; for it is gods will that ye take it with gret ioy and likyng as Iesus had shewid it onto you all. (LT, 13)

This dynamic assertion, appearing where it does in Chapter 8 of the Long Text, makes quite explicit the altered emphasis of the revised version and pulls together the several threads which have emerged in this analysis. Julian’s experiences, filtered as they are through an explicitly female and suffering body and interpreted for by her by means of a set of matrices provided by societal attitudes towards that body, are now to be shared so that all who recognise the patterns may partake of its wisdom. Thus, commonly held beliefs about the ‘inherent nature’ of the female, allied to Julian’s own experiences of being female, are re-examined, dissected, relayered, recontextualised and redirected to enable her ‘evencristen’ to be brought closer to Christ, the divine lover they hold in common with her, and by means of a language they similarly all hold in common. Above all, Julian wants to make common her insight that divine agency shall indeed be ‘worshipful to God and plentously profitable to his lovers in erth’ (LT, 49). Thus, the overarching themes of the Long Text become those of union, commonality and profit, themes which are relayed to the reader by means of their being grounded in both the maternal and the fleshly body, and all of which are transformed from a more familiar worldly import by their association with the transcendent. Such a recontextualising of contemporary discourses and their ability to yield more positive connotations has been examined in recent times by Anne Clark Bartlett in the context of male-authored works directed at women. In her study, Bartlett suggests that proscriptive and essentialist attitudes towards women such as expounded in the many male-authored devotional texts in circulation in the fourteenth century, could have had the effect of ‘regendering’ its female readership in order to bring them back into line with popular attitudes towards them.118 She asks the reader to consider whether such a process of

118

Anne Clark Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers: Representation and Subjectivity in Middle English Devotional Literature (Ithaca and London, 1995), Introduction, p. xi.

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acculturated regendering would have had the effect of limiting female literary activity, or whether it is possible that those ‘counterdiscourses’ within such texts could be appropriated and exploited by the female readership and disrupt from within the hegemony of the more misogynistic ones.119 Bartlett has, for example, identified three major counterdiscourses as being integral to works such as Aelred’s De Institutione Inclusarum120 and Ancrene Wisse. Running counter to the less than complimentary views about women’s ‘nature’ which seem to predominate in such texts, themes such as courtly love, spiritual friendship and narratives of nuptial passion are interwoven and, as Bartlett suggests, offer women alternative readings with which to counter the proscriptive sentiments ostensibly comprising the subject matter. According to Bartlett too, such texts, with their emphasis on the type of nuptial union with the divine which I have previously examined, could enable women to develop, express and recontextualise their own sexuality, desire and pleasure as females in a way which was theologically orthodox. Significantly too, Bartlett politicises the female adoption of the nuptial theme, asserting that union with the divine can be interpreted as ‘a thinly disguised protest movement’.121 In this scenario, both nuptial discourse and its sister, Passion discourse, provide powerful and liberating alternatives to those traditional ascetic and misogynistic discourses so prevalent in male-authored devotional texts. Moreover, such discourses, both of which allow for the expression of female desire and the achievement of female jouissance, offer an opportunity for women to subvert and resist the all-pervasive religious attitudes towards the female body promulgated in literature produced largely by the male and celibate clergy.122 Indeed, The Book of Margery Kempe has already yielded for us the potential for self-empowerment contained within contemplation of the Passion and a psycho-sexual devotion to the fleshand-blood body of the man, Jesus. In the case of Julian, although similarly predicated on the workings of the female body, her treatment of it is far less performative than is Margery’s and more systematically intellectualised. Ultimately, however, it serves the same purpose in both texts: both the complexity and the simplicity of God’s love for humankind is clearly explicated by the foregrounding of a desiring female subject as humanity’s ideal representative as told from the perspective of the woman mystic and writer. Thus, in Julian’s writing it is her Passion narrative which rules supreme in both texts, both discursively and imagistically, leading on inexorably towards her cumulative exposition of the motherhood of God, as previously demonstrated. Nevertheless, as this present chapter has demonstrated, deeply embedded within this narrative of passion and maternity is what can now be regarded

119 120 121 122

Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers, Introduction, p. xi. John Ayto and Alexandra Barratt (eds), Aelred of Rievaulx’s De Institutione Inclusarum, EETS o.s. 287 (London, New York and Toronto, 1984). Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers, p. 121. Bartlett, Male Authors, Female Readers, p. 132.

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as a counterdiscourse which concerns itself with notions of profit, loss and the trading of commonly owned female/feminised bodies within a commercialised transactional arena. Moreover, as this theme begins to emerge more insistently, it begins to conglomerate into a trope which takes on the defining characteristics of a type of ‘holy prostitution’. In fact – and here again there are echoes of Saint Cecelia’s own transactional activities – Julian now transforms herself in the Long Text from lone recipient of the mystical experience into one of Christ’s many lovers, by implication rendering him at the same time lover held in common by all humanity with whose souls he willingly and repeatedly engages in ‘comenyng and daliance’ (LT, 90). Now, Julian’s insights assert that she and her ‘evencristen’ must actively ‘sekyn into our lord God in whom it (knowledge of our soul) is inclosid’ (LT, 90), and that they should ‘be led so depe into God that we verily and trewly knowen our own soule’. This, then, for Julian, ‘is the onyng that it [human sensuality] hath in God’, and it is a ‘onyng’ which is achieved by means of both penetration and enclosure of and by sexual/mystical/divine bodies with release and unity as its profit (‘Of this substantial kindhede mercy and grace springith and spredith into us, werking al things in fulfilling of our ioy’; LT, 90). Thus Julian leads us towards perhaps the most explicit image of union within the text, a union which is simultaneously sexual, spiritual, maternal and mystical and which brings together the complex and heteroglossic themes which we have been examining. Now the open-bodied Christ invites Julian, as representative of all Christ’s lovers on earth, to enter what amounts to a vagina-like wound in his side.123 In an extraordinary passage which shows none of the tentativeness in its use of sexualised imagery which characterises the corresponding passage in the Short Text, Christ is defined in terms of the sexual female as he invites Julian to enter the wound/vagina as his lover in order to achieve union: Than with a glad chere our lord loked into his syde and beheld, enioyand; and with with his swete lokyng he led forth the understondyng of his creture by the same wound into his syde withinne. And than he shewid a faire delectabil place, and large enow for al mankynd that shal be save to resten in pece and in love. And therwith he browte to mende his dereworthy blode and pretious water which he lete poure al oute for love. And with the swete beholdyng he shewid his blisful herte even cloven on two. (LT, 35)

123

Bynum suggests that the sexual overtones of Christ’s wounded side which are evident to modern readers may also have existed for a medieval audience ‘who frequently spoke of entering God’s side’, Fragmentation and Redemption, p. 278. For a similar interpretation, see also Voaden, ‘Community, Gender and Vision at Helfta’, in Watt, Women in Their Communities, p. 74. For a particularly perceptive analysis of the importance to mystical women of Christ’s wound as a feminine image see Lochrie, ‘Mystical Bodies’, pp. 188–94.

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If we compare this to the corresponding passage from the Short Text, it becomes immediately evident how Julian’s confidence in her own use of female imagery has developed since she wrote this initial account: Fulle merelye and gladlye oure lorde lokyd into his syde and behelde and sayde this worde, ‘Loo, how I lovyd the’, as hyf he hadde sayde: My childe, hyf thow kan nought loke in my godhede, see heere howe I lette opyn my syde, and my herte be clovene in twa, and lette oute blude and watere all þat was thareyn. (ST, 58)

Whereas in this earlier version it is Christ who looks into his own wounded side and explains its import to Julian as onlooker, in the Long Text revision she is entreated to penetrate Christ’s wound and enter the ‘faire delectabil place’ within, an allusion whose invocation of the erotically charged hortus conclusus of the Song of Songs is simply too strong to be ignored.124 Moreover, it is a place from whence flows the same blood and the water which earlier has been established as identifiably female, thus compounding the conflation between wound and vagina, female womb and Christ’s heart.125 As Cynthia Krayman has demonstrated, the hortus conclusus was closely associated with the geography of the female body in the Middle Ages,126 and here the conflation of Christ here and the ‘garden of delights’ into which a multiplicity of earthly lovers may fit (‘large enow for al mankynd’) transforms him into a type of holy whore with ontologically open body, voracious appetite and capacious womb. Such a representation forms a daring and innovative treatment of the traditional motif of the wounded Christ which, whilst affirming Christ’s traditional salvific role, also serves to insert the female body into mainstream theological exposition and validate its presence there. Thus, the words of Christ following this sacred (re)union between God and mystic, Bride and Bridegoom, body and soul in the very place where the flesh is fissured is amplified by his passionate profession of love upon union: ‘My derling, behold and se thy lord, thy God, that is thy maker and thyn endles ioy. Se what likyng and bliss I have in thy salvation, and for my love enioy now with me . . . Lo how I lovid the. Behold and se that I lovid the so 124

125 126

See Song of Songs 4: 12–13: ‘My sister, my spouse, is a garden enclosed, a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up./ Thy plants are a paradise of pomegranates . . .’. On Julian’s engagement with the Song of Songs tradition see Baker, From Vision to Book, p. 25. Here Baker uses Bernard of Clairvaux’s commentry on the Song of Songs to contextualise the tradition in which she considers Julian to be writing. The closest she comes to recognising Julian’s own use of its erotic imagery, however, is in her acknowledgement that in desiring God, Julian adheres to a topos of desire utilised by the women in the German Brautmystik tradition. For a full-length study of the western tradition of the Song of Songs see Matter, The Voice of My Beloved. On the interconnection between such imagery again see Voaden, ‘All Girls Together’, in Watt, Women in Their Communities. Kraman, ‘Communities of Otherness’, p. 139.

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mekyl ere I deyd for the that I wold dey for the; and now I hay deyd for the, and suffrid wilfuly that I may. And now is al my bitter peyn and al my hard travel turnyd to endles ioy and bliss to me and to the.’ (LT, 35)

Julian’s depiction of the promiscuous Christ here becomes highly personalised as he directs his profession of passion towards her as representative of general humanity. Whereas, therefore, Julian’s desire in the Short Text has been to purchase and possess her lover by means of her own individual suffering, in the Long Text she not only casts herself as one of Christ’s many lovers but also, like Cecelia, procures the quasi-sexual services of her divine lover for a myriad of ‘evencristen’, inscribing upon this feminised Christ the additional role of ultimate and transcendent ‘holy whore’ in the process. Sifting through the confusing, contradictory and frequently misogynistic inscriptions of her day, it would seem that Julian, like Margery Kempe, was able to deftly extract their more positive associations in order to articulate her direct experience of God’s love. In so doing, she succeeds in reinstating the female and the feminine into the upper ranks of the salvific hierarchy, locating alongside the redefined mother the redeemed ‘common woman’ in order to clarify God’s relationship with the ordinary Christian. Julian therefore leaves us with a text shot through with what have become familiar and comforting images of both the maternal and the fleshly female which, when inscribed upon the body of Christ, is able to help define, clarify and deliver the process of salvation. Significantly, in a final question directed at her readers at the end of the Long Text, both the unconditional love of motherhood and that of transactional sexuality are united in one final unifying moment of insight: Woldst thou wetten thi lords mening in this thing? Wete it wele: love was his mening. Who shewid it he? Love. What shewid he the? Love. Wherefore shewid it he? For love. Hold the therin and thou shalt witten and knowen more in the same. (LT, 135).

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5 Margery Kempe: Wisdom, Authority and the Female Utterance

I am a womman, nedes moot I speke Or elles swelle til myn herte breke.1

These words, spoken by Proserpina to her husband Pluto in Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale’, take up a common thread in medieval literature – that of women as being unable to control their voices. Within this paradigm, the female voice is often represented as a monstrosity which is always threatening to break out and damage the socio-religious or the domestic status quo.2 Like a monstrous pregnancy, its progeny will necessarily burst forth and spread its poison into the world of men. Such a discourse of the disruptive female voice is everywhere apparent in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and throughout the collection we see the female voice acting as a measure of the female subject and as a reflection of the values of those men who have to deal with her. Within this discourse – and it is a discourse which also characterises many of those texts such as Ancrene Wisse specifically written for women – the most acceptable woman tended to be the sealed one whose orifices were closed and therefore less threatening. Orality and sexual activity, as examples of female excess, needed to be contained in order to prevent the dangerous release of a female and fleshly text, most famously exemplified, perhaps, in Chaucer’s depiction of his Wife of Bath. Gap-toothed, garrulous and widehipped, and promoting the experience of her body as a challenge to the Latinate learning of the ecclesiastic intelligentsia,3 she embodies her own discourse

1 2

3

The Riverside Chaucer, p. 167, lines 2305–6. For an analysis of this theme within the Canterbury Tales, see David Wallace, ‘Household Rhetoric: Violence and Eloquence in The Tale of Melibee’, in Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, 1997), pp. 212–46. For a discussion of carnal female rhetoric in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, see Lee Patterson, ‘ “For the wyves love of Bathe”: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales’, Speculum 58 (1983), pp. 656–95. Wallace notes that the Wife of Bath ‘holds off the Parson and everything he stands for’, Chaucerian Polity, p. 225. For a full examination of this aspect of the Wife of Bath, see John A. Alford, ‘The Wife of Bath versus the Clerk of Oxford: What Their Rivalry Means’, The Chaucer Review 21 (1986), pp. 108–32.

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and rhetoric.4 Her deafness, a permanent signifier of marital violence, and possibly the source of what is represented as an excessively strident voice, is more eloquent about the tensions between the sexes than any of the pages in Jankyn’s book. Alisoun’s destruction of this symbol of scripted male rhetoric, emerging as it does from the site of the male imaginary, attempts to establish the text of the female body as an authoritative and unmediated location of what Margery Kempe in her own book refers to as ‘very trewth schewyd in experiens’ (220). That ‘trewth’ is then depicted by both Margery and Chaucer as literally pouring forth from one of the primary exit-points of the body in the form of a challenging and uncontainable utterance. It is just this type of discourse of uncontained orality which Margery Kempe draws upon in her account of her vilification and marginalisation on her return from the Holy Land, where, as we have seen, she has been filled with the Holy Spirit and given the gift of uncontrollable crying as a sign of her singularity (68–71). This divine gift, however, proves to be a double-edged sword; on the one hand it provides evidence to Margery and those who support her of the presence of the Holy Spirit within her and allows her to draw upon an esteemed tradition of prophetic and legitimised female voices, as we shall see. On the other, its text will be misunderstood by all but a handful of her acquaintances and will frequently be the instigator of situations of intense danger. Again, it is this type of orality which she depicts as leading to her arraignment at Leicester, for example (111) when, as at other times, her highly vocal and uncompromising response to a crucifix in a local church insists upon its own articulation and leads immediately to Margery’s arrest: Þan þe fyr of lofe kyndelyd so hern in hir hert þat sche myth not kepyn it preuy, for, whedyr sche wolde er not, it cawsyd hir to brekyn owte wyth a lowde voys & cryen merueylowslyche & wepyn & sobbyn ful hedowslyche þat many a man and woman wondryd on hir þerfor. (111)

Margery’s use of language here not only displays the embodiment of a new sense of self within her text, but also lets slip the tensions which this embodiment contains both for herself and her audience. Like the monstrous pregnancy with which this chapter began, the sounds ‘brekyn owte . . . merueylowslyche & . . . ful hedowslyche’. More importantly, the oral text here is depicted as autonomous and resists any closure on it by Margery, the man who has arrested her or any other authoritative agency. Quite simply – and as she has emphasised on other occasions – she is unable to contain it.5 Moreover, once the utterance has emerged, it necessarily enters that interpretative ‘freefor-all’ – what Julian has earlier referred to during Margery’s visit to her in

4 5

For a discussion of the Wife of Bath and Prudence as the embodiments of their own discourse see Wallace, Chaucer’s Polity, pp. 225–6. See also Patterson, ‘Feminine Rhetoric’. See, for example, The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 68, 69, 70 and 235.

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Norwich as ‘þe langage of þe world’ (43) – and from that point of utterance it is left to her immediate audience to read and interpret it as they will. Margery’s coming to writing and her search for a suitable scribe, therefore, can be seen as an attempt on her own part to impose some discipline upon and provide an accessible reading strategy for the anarchic voice which spills forth the mystical utterance. In this capacity, Margery’s scribe is quick to assert from the outset of the Proem that an understanding of Margery’s written text will not be automatic, but will be wholly dependent upon the reader’s own reading strategy being based upon charity (‘yf lak of charyte be not ower hynderawnce’; 1), as indeed should the ‘readers’ of her performing body. Those lacking in this charity will later be typified as those who prefer to focus on her articulations as expressions of socio-religious aberrancies and accuse her of Lollardy, for example;6 others will spread rumours about her perceived hypocrisy,7 and a very small proportion of the recipients of her oral text will read it as divine inspiration.8 Whatever its reception, however, the insistent oral utterance in The Book of Margery Kempe remains fundamental and is everywhere prioritised – even over the ‘authority’ traditionally provided by the written word, and even when the narrative appears to be at its most literary. This chapter, therefore, will argue that the textual effect of this prioritising of the insistent and apparently unmediated female voice is carefully constructed in order to imbue it with an authority which will ratify the woman’s ability to ventriloquise the voice of God.

‘[Þ]e muð þe speoweð ut atter’:9 Orality and the Female Voice Ambivalent attitudes towards the female voice pervade much of the literature of the Middle Ages, making their presence felt in almost every literary genre. Whilst texts such as Ancrene Wisse exhorted its audience of female anchorites to emulate the softly spoken Virgin and speak only when necessary, others such as the highly popular Lives of the virgin martyrs legitimised a highly vocal and strident female voice – provided it were put to the use of evangelising or conversion, as we found in the case of Saint Cecelia examined in the previous chapter. Even historical documents such as those examined by Karras in her study of prostitution and those scrutinised by Power, Shahar and others in the context of women’s work in the towns suggest that social attitudes to the female voice were rarely neutral and, if Margery Kempe’s narrative is anything to go by, the loud and public use of the female voice was as 6 7 8

9

See, for example, The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 28, 112, 124, 129, 132 and 135. For example, The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 13, 83, 156 and 112. See in particular Margery’s meeting with Julian of Norwich (42–3), to be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. See also her conversation with Archbishop Arundel (37), and the response to her request for an audience by Richard Caister (40). Ancrene Wisse, p. 43 (the mouth that spews out poison).

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troubling to the authorities as was a high-profile female presence.10 This is perhaps captured perfectly in a late medieval carving in the church of Saint Margaret in Lynn which depicts a woman scold as bridled like a horse, in keeping with a perceived need for her to be ‘reined in’ and kept firmly under control.11 Further afield, in a church at Chanteussé in France, the dangers associated with the female voice are clearly illuminated in a depiction of the devil and his henchmen gleefully writing down the spoken words of a group of gossiping women.12 It would seem that both on the institutional level and the social, the voice of a woman – rhetorically at least – was often deemed tedious, dangerous and inappropriate for many public settings. The origins of this suspicion of the female voice, of course, lay deep within the Christian tradition. As identified in part in the previous chapter, theological and religious convictions about the nature of women were predicated on the assumption that they were by nature corporeal, sensual, deeply carnal and the embodiment of original sin as perpetrated by Eve.13 It was Eve’s untrammelled desire for knowledge and experience which led to the inappropriate use of her voice to persuade Adam to eat the apple. It was thus a woman’s voice which had separated humankind from God. One of the primary results of this misogynistic tradition was proscription against women teaching or preaching in public during the days of early Christianity,14 although, as the work of Elaine Pagels as clearly demonstrated, there had also been a coincidental openness towards women’s participation in the early days of the Christian Church.15 Eventually, however, preaching and teaching by women became associated with the more marginalised heretical sects and by the end of the second century women’s participation in worship was explicitly condemned.16 Taken up with enthusiasm by Saint Paul in his epistles, this more proscriptive attitude towards women’s public utterances, and in particular the danger of their voices, was to feel his influence throughout the Middle Ages and rest in uneasy tension with the legitimised voices of the biblical women prophets such as Miriam, Huldah, Anna and the four daughters of Philip, for example,17 as well as those Corinthian women prophets of the early 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

The findings of Karras suggest that women who were considered to be ‘scolds’ were often accused of being ‘common women’, sometimes by their neighbours who may have had a grudge against them. In this sense, see Karass, ‘Common Women’, pp. 138–9. Similarly, there is evidence to suggest that men in the towns were often disgruntled by the employment of women, who were paid less and who appeared to be taking what they considered to be their jobs (Power, Medieval Women, p. 60). I am grateful to Sarah Salih for pointing me towards this image. ‘Les femmes qui médisent, les diables qui écrivent’ (church of Chanteussé, France). Reproduced in Levron, Le Diable dans l’Art. For an overview of misogynistic attitudes see Voaden, God’s Words, pp. 19–34. Voaden examines this in the context of female prophecy, God’s Words, pp. 37–40. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (London, 1979), p. 61. For a discussion of this development see Pagels, Gnostic Gospels, pp. 60–3. Miriam was the saviour of the prophet Moses who in Micah 6: 4 is accorded equal status to both Moses and his brother, Aaron. Huldah is the wife of Shallum who appears in

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Church such as Maximilla, Priscilla and Quintilla who comprised part of an alternative tradition.18 In his first epistle to Timothy, for example, Saint Paul explicitly links the notion of woman’s inferior human and social status to her voice: ‘Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence’.19 In calling for both ‘silence’ and ‘subjection’, Paul clearly sees the public use of the female voice as a direct challenge to male authority and is unequivocal about the need for its suppression. Such attitudes were consolidated throughout the Middle Ages, coming to fruition in the thirteenth century in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, who remained a pivotal influence within the intellectual climate of the period. Whilst recognising in his Summa Theologiae that woman’s voice does have a role to play within a domestic and maternal context (women were expected to be teachers for their children and offer them religious and moral guidance, as suggested previously), Aquinas nevertheless wholeheartedly supports and endorses Pauline proscription against the public female utterance and the reasons for it: quia communiter mulieres non sunt in sapientia perfectae, ut eis possit convenienter publica doctrina committi . . . unde mulieres, si gratiam sapientiae aut scientiae habeant, possunt eam administrare secundum privatam doctrinam, non autem secundum publicam.20 Women are not generally perfected in wisdom so as to be fit to be entrusted with public teaching . . . Women, if they have the grace of wisdom or of knowledge, can impart it by teaching privately but not publicly.

It was these types of sentiments which were taken up with particular enthusiasm by the authors of instructional literature directed at women in an attempt to impress upon the intended audience the need for silence and the ever-present danger of the unchecked female voice. Furthermore, recent research has uncovered evidence which suggests that anchoritic texts such as

18

19 20

Jeremiah 52. Her role runs in parallel to that of Jeremiah in that she predicts the fall of Jerusalem and the premature death of the king. Anna and the four daughters of Philip are New Testament prophets who appear in Luke 2: 36–8 and Acts 21: 9 respectively. For an interesting reading of these prophets from a feminist perspective see Cullen Murphy, The Word according to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own (London and New York, 1998). These female prophets are also discussed briefly in the context of medieval prophecy by Watt in Secretaries of God, p. 23. These women were leaders within the Montanist movement, were accepted as prophets and exercised considerable authority within early Christian groups. For an examination of their influence see Karen King, ‘Prophetic Power and Women’s Authority: The Case of The Gospel of Mary (Magdalene)’, in Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamel J. Walker (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1998), pp. 21–41 (p. 21). 1 Timothy 2: 11–12. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. Roland Potter (London and New York, 1970), 2a2ae, vol. 45, 117: 2, p. 134.

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Ancrene Wisse had, by the late fourteenth century, become much more widely available to an increasingly literate population at large, causing such antipathetic attitudes towards the female voice to be disseminated to a far wider lay audience.21 As the author of Ancrene Wisse informs his readers: ‘Þe deouel is leas & leasunge feader. Þe ilke þenne þe stureð hire tunge i leasunge ha makeð of hire tunge cradel to þe deofles bearn & rockeð hit heorn liche as his nurrice’22 (the devil is a liar and the father of lying. She, then, who stirs her tongue in lying makes a cradle for the devil’s child out of her tongue and rocks it diligently, as if she were its nurse). Here the deeply gendered exhortations of the author for the moderation of the female voice reflect perfectly ecclesiastic anxieties concerning the public female utterance and the unsealed body from which it emerges.23 As we have seen previously, the author of this work also emphasises the traditional contrast between garrulous Eve and the softly spoken Virgin. As the author reminds his anchoresses – and echoing a common topos within the literature the Middle Ages which served to regulate the aberrant female voice: ‘Vre deore wurðe leafdi seinte Marie þe ah to alle wummen to beo forbisne wes of se lutel speche þ nohwer in hali srit ne finde we þ ha spec bute fowr siðen ah for se selt speche hire wordes weren heuie & hefden much mihte’24 (Our precious Lady, Saint Mary, who should be an example to all women, spoke so little that nowhere in Holy Writ except four times do we find that she spoke. But because she spoke so seldom her words were heavy and had great power). As Atkinson has shown in her study of medieval attitudes towards motherhood as discussed in Chapter 1, women, and especially mothers, were required to follow the quiet, stoical and self-controlled example of the Virgin. Promoting this expectation, the Ancrene Wisse author tells the anchoress that as a result of this bodily and verbal control she ‘mei ec hopien þat ha schal singen þurh hire silence sweteliche in heouene’ (she may also hope that she will sing, through her silence, sweetly in heaven).25 The implications of this, of course, are that whereas female silence can lead to apotheosis, the female voice, emerging as it does out of Eden, will direct both speakers and listeners to sure damnation. In spite of these types of negative attitudes frequently informing Margery Kempe’s own use of her voice as documented in The Book of Margery Kempe, Margery nevertheless modifies their effects by making emphatic the 21

22 23

24 25

On this, see in particular Bella Millet, ‘Ancrene Wisse and the Book of Hours’, in Renevey and Whitehead, Writing Religious Women, pp. 21–40. Also useful in this context is Marleen Cré, ‘Women in the Charterhouse? Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love and Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls in British Library, MS Additional 37790’, in the same volume, pp. 44–62. Ancrene Wisse, p. 44. Using Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror as a starting point, Lochrie examines the concept of the sealed body in ‘The Language of Transgression: Body, Flesh, and Word in Mystical Discourse’, in Franzen, Speaking Two Languages, pp. 115–40. Ancrene Wisse, p. 41. Ancrene Wisse, p. 42.

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fundamental orality of a God-inspired text made possible primarily because of the female voice. The conclusion of Book 1 and the opening of Book 2, for example, take up the theme of the Book’s orality which was first presented to us in the Proem (and which will be discussed in greater depth below). Margery’s scribe tells us he ‘had wretyn as mech as sche wold tellyn hym for þe tym þat þei wer togydder’ (4; my emphasis). At the end of the first book and as he begins the second, we are again presented with the curious image of Margery and priest enclosed within the womb-like space of ‘hir chambre’ (216) in homely and intimate communication, she dictating her experiences from memory (‘lych as þe mater cam to þe creatur in mend . . .’; 5), he writing down for public consumption the words which she is dictating to him. At one point, this process of composition begins to draw Margery’s attentions away from orthodox religious ritual which she has always held so dear: ‘[She] seyd fewer bedys for sped of wrytyng þan sche had don Herys beforn. & whan sche cam to chirche & xulde heryn Messe, purposyng to seyn hir Mateyns . . . hir hert was drawyn awey fro þe seying . . .’ (216). However, such anxieties about the amount of her devotional energies which are being redirected towards this literary enterprise are allayed by Christ, who tells her: ‘het xulde he not plesyn me more þan he don wyth howr writyng, for dowtyr, be þis boke many a man xal be turnyd to me & beleuyn þerin’ (216). The corporeal speech-act of Margery’s dictation is to be transformed into a channel for the attainment of human salvation, and the female voice ventriloquising the word of God substitutes for and even bypasses the hegemony of Church ritual. Similarly, the priestly amanuensis is keen to emphasise that the ownership of the new material constituting Book 2 is also a record of Margery’s own speaking voice, told ‘aftyr hyr owyn tunge’ (221). Not only can we read the word ‘tunge’ in terms of Margery’s orality, but also in terms of the gynaecentric language which she employs in the course of that orality. The scribe is, in fact, keen to establish for her readers that Margery is writing the story of her extraordinary body with her extraordinary body, an assertion which not only adds to the status of Margery as holy woman but also enhances his own position as scribe who is privileged enough to be asked to turn oral text into scripted treatise.26 In this sense, the scribe makes permanent the epistemological drama which is enacted within and by Margery’s body and enters the realm of human language by means of its tongue. Such a bodily outpouring may deplete and exhaust the body’s resources, but paradoxically, it will also replenish it as the Word rushes in and the words are ushered forth: ‘And sche was many tyme seke whyl þis tretys was in writyng, and, as sone as sche wolde gon abowte þe writyng of þis tretys, sche was heil & hoole sodeynly in a maner’ (219). As M. T. Clanchy has famously 26

For an examination of the relationship between scribe and holy woman and the variety of functions of that relationship see Catherine Mooney (ed.), Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and their Interpreters (Philadelphia, 1999).

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recognised, for many medieval writers the act of writing was frequently a speech act of dictation, rather than an activity undertaken with pen in hand.27 Rosalynn Voaden has cogently argued in her recent study of holy women prophets, however, that the scribe could also act as a major collaborator and shaper of both text and its reception.28 These findings are further corroborated by Catherine M. Mooney who argues in the context of hagiographical or autohagiographical texts, that when women claim to be speaking textually in their own voices they are frequently more assertive and active than are their male promoters in their own accounts.29 Using the case of Hildegarde of Bingen as an initial example, Mooney points out that the two co-authors of her Vita, Gottfried and Theoderic, preferred to render her as aristocratic abbess and foundress, rather than the prophet of God she announced herself to be in her own writing.30 Other scribes, however, such as John Marienwerder, who documented the experiences of Dorothea of Montau, were deeply concerned with their own self-authorisation and had in mind a self-aggrandisement as contributors to what they hoped would be the beatification of their holy protégées and an increased status for themselves.31 Henry Suso, on the other hand, seems to have taken great liberties with the notes written by Elsbeth Stagel about her experiences in order to compose his own version of her Vita;32 and in his account of Catherine of Siena’s life, Raymond of Capua stresses Catherine’s war with demons rather than the passion for Holy Church and intense optimism which forms the crux of her own letters on which Raymond’s account claims to be based.33 Interestingly, Margery Kempe’s scribe would appear to possess all of these traits in some measure – something which has, of course, contributed to much of the debate surrounding the level of his contribution. This is also what has brought Lynn Staley to the conclusion that Margery’s scribe is primarily a literary trope which functions on the textual level along the lines of such scribes I have just been identifying and thus provides a number of literary functions

27 28

29

30 31

32 33

M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1979), pp. 125–6. Voaden raises questions about the nature of the collaboration between Margery and her scribe, stating ‘It is obvious that at least three people are writing this book, and none of them is particularly good at it’. God’s Words, p. 113. For an examination of the reception of such ‘holy women’ see Elizabeth Makowski, ‘Mulieres Religiosae Strictly Speaking: Some Fourteenth-Century Canonical Opinions’, The Catholic Historical Review 85, 1 (1999), pp. 1–14. See also Voaden, Prophets Abroad. Mooney, Gendered Voices, Introduction, p. 10. Mooney, Gendered Voices, p. 11. On the relationship between Dorothea of Montau and John Marienwerder, see Dyan Elliott ‘Authorizing a Life: The Collaboration of Dorothea of Montau and John Marienwerder’, in Mooney, Gendered Voices, pp. 168–91. See Frank Tobin, ‘Henry Suso and Elsbeth Stagel: Was the Vita a Cooperative Effort?’, in Mooney, Gendered Voices, pp. 118–35. On the relationship between Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua see Karen Scott, ‘Mystical Death, Bodily Death: Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua on the Mystic’s Encounter with God’, in Mooney, Gendered Voices, pp. 136–65.

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in the text.34 Foremost among these is the scribe’s ability to offer written authorisation for a woman who was not herself authorised to speak on matters of God from within official culture. Moreover, as a figure who is represented as having spent a great deal of time with her in an intimate setting, the scribe takes on the role of witness to Margery’s life and its sanctity. In addition to this, if, as Staley argues at length in Dissenting Fictions, Margery’s primary role is that of social critic rather than holy woman35 the female voice used in this context might appear to subvert that very culture, if left unmediated36 – indeed, the French mystic Marguerite Porete went to the stake for it.37 However, whatever our final verdict on Staley’s reading of the figure of the scribe (and my own position is that the scribe is probably both actual and tropological) it necessarily brings about an important interrogation of his function, his influence and the complicated relationship between scripted and oral text which emerges from the pages of Margery’s book. Indeed, what is also evident from even a cursory reading of the text is that, like those holy women authors examined by Mooney and others, she is far more proactive and vociferous in promoting her own abilities and sanctity than ever her amanuensis is, or indeed any of the other figures of male authority in her text. Indeed, her voice is simultaneously both highly disruptive medium, as we have seen, and yet intensely productive agent which not only defiantly preaches the word of God and articulates what she regards as his prophesies but ultimately initiates the final, scripted version of its oral text by persuading the priest to write it down and by dictating it to him. Thus, rather than doggedly defying proscriptions against the public use of her voice, by means of her scribe, Margery is able to embark upon a self-fashioning literary performance which works with and within the constraints in order for her version and vision of God’s truth to be permanently recorded and disseminated. I shall argue in this context that, in spite of the scribe’s transliteration of her oral text into the physical and written book, the text’s literary focus remains within the spoken – and female – word as primary vehicle for the dissemination of its mystical content. To this end, this chapter argues against major scribal collaboration and influence, asserting that it is the directness of the female utterance which has shaped both subject matter and its physical record and which continues to resonate once the scribe has finished his own important job. 34

35

36 37

As well as Staley’s Dissenting Fictions, see Lynn Staley, ‘The Trope of the Scribe and the Question of Literary Authority in the Works of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe’, Speculum 66 (1991), pp. 820–38. Staley, Dissenting Fictions. See also, ‘Trope of the Scribe’, p. 837, where Staley asserts that the ‘scribe’s framing of Margery as holy woman serves to shift attention away from her role as social critic’, p. 837. Staley, ‘Trope of the Scribe’, p. 828. On Marguerite Porete see Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, pp. 217–28 and pp. 275–8; and Katharina M. Wilson (ed.), Medieval Women Writers (Manchester, 1984), pp. 204–26. Here, Wilson suggests that Porete lost her life because she was unable to draw upon the ‘safe conduct’ accorded to the female prophet, p. 217.

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‘[A] fals loller, & a fals deceyuer of þe pepyl’: Margery and the Lollard Threat In order to fully examine Margery Kempe’s self-fashioning as wise and holy woman, and, by implication, her reception, it might first be useful to examine her deployment of voice in the context of the so-called ‘Lollard threat’ which was prevalent at the time when she was most active. It is certainly true to say that contemporary attitudes towards Lollards – and female Lollards in particular – would have had a marked effect upon her reception by her contemporaries and there is much to suggest that Margery was not as unsympathetic to the Lollard cause as some of her more orthodox professions to the contrary would allow us to believe. As we have seen, when Margery is at her most public and vocal, her male detractors frequently attempt to categorise her as both sexually and religiously aberrant. Operating at a time when the Lollard movement was at its height in England, much of Margery’s unorthodox behaviour was inevitably in danger of being branded heretical, in spite of her own frequent assertion of orthodoxy.38 Moreover, it appears from the records of heresy trials during the early fifteenth century that Lollardy was particularly well established in East Anglia at this time and far more developed that has previously been thought.39 In addition, as Margaret Aston has illustrated, Lollard teaching helped to produce some very well-schooled women in the fifteenth century,40 amongst whom one might add to Aston’s list Margery Kempe who was herself also travelling around the countryside at that time and ‘talking about things of God’.41 In spite of her spirited defences against accusations of heretical activity, however, there is much evidence in The Book of Margery Kempe to suggest that Margery was more than familiar with the tenets of Lollardy and its perpetrators, and it is likely that, like many of those born and brought up in areas of enthusiastic heretical activity, she had absorbed much of its teachings and hovered around the grey areas on its margins.42 As Hudson

38

39

40 41

42

The definitive text on the Lollard movement in England during this period remains Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Tests and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988). Also valuable is Shannon McSheffery, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities 1420–1530 (Philadelphia, 1995). Tanner, Norwich Heresy Trials, p. 29. See also Claire Cross, ‘Great Reasoners in Scripture’, in Donald Baker (ed.), Medieval Women (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 359–80. For evidence of a community of Lollards living on the Norfolk–Suffolk border in the 1420s, see pp. 362–3. Margaret Aston, ‘Lollard Woman Priests?’, in Margaret Aston, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 31, 4 (October, 1980), pp. 441–61 (p. 443). Felicity Riddy borrows this phrase from Bunyan to head her chapter on holy women as a religious subculture in the Middle Ages (‘ “Women talking about the things of God”: A Late Medieval Subculture’, in Carole Meale (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain 1150–1500 (Cambridge, 1993; second edition, 1996), pp. 104–27). It would seem that Maureen Fries is of this opinion when she asserts, ‘The Lollard Feminism of Margery’s day . . . was eminently suited to Margery’s own idea of her vocation’ (‘Margery Kempe’, in Szarmach, Medieval Mystics, p. 230), although, contrary to my

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also suggests, books and literacy were very important within Lollard circles when the movement was at its height of popularity from the 1380s through to the 1530s.43 Originating as a literate heresy in the form of the writings of John Wycliffe, Lollardy became, in turn, a heresy which served to foster literacy.44 For Lollard communities, books were crucial and the popularity of the movement gave rise to a demand for the Scriptures in the vernacular, the so-called ‘naked text’ of the Bible. In response to this move towards the dissemination of the Scriptures in the vernacular, Archbishop Arundel, whom Margery met in 1413 prior to her journey to Jerusalem (36–7), had in his Constitutions of 1409 forbidden the dissemination or ownership of vernacular biblical texts, except under episcopal licence.45 We know for certain that Margery was familiar with a variety of devotional and mystical texts written in the vernacular, and it is significant that she first documents some of these texts in the chapter immediately following the account of her visit to Arundel (39).46 She admits to the influence of the Revelations of Saint Bridget for example, which was in circulation in the vernacular during the fifteenth-century,47 and Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, which was also written in English. More interestingly, in the context of the Lollard need for books, Margery Kempe tells us that after an intolerable period of spiritual deprivation and exclusion from church, a priest who arrived in Bishop’s Lynn probably in 141348 began to read to her a selection of popular texts, including books like Rolle’s Incendium Amoris and ‘Þe Prikke of Lofe’ erroneously attributed to Saint Bonaventure.49 These texts, of course, were not suspect per se under Arundel’s constitutions but it also remains true that in circumstances where heresy was suspected, possession of any works in the vernacular could increase the case against the accused.50 Margery, however, then proceeds to document how this priest also

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46 47 48 49

50

own findings, Fries also asserts that Margery ‘does not record any connection with the Lollard movement’, p. 231. Anne Hudson, ‘Laicus Litteratus: The Paradox of Lollardy’, in Biller and Hudson, Heresy and Literacy, p. 228. On this see Hudson, ‘Laicus Litteratus’, p. 229. Hudson, ‘Laicus Litteratus’, p. 232. See also Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond (eds), Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages (Stroud and New York, 1997), p. 19. Nicholas Watson also examines the effect of Arundel’s Constitutions upon vernacular religious literature in ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate, and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum 70 (1995), pp. 822–65. For an account of the other texts with which she was familiar see The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 143. The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 276, n. 39/24. The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 320, n. 142/29–31. Meech points out that this reference is to a fourteenth-century compilation entitled Stimulus Amoris which includes the chapters from a similarly entitled work by a thirteenth-century friar, Jacobus Mediolanensis, The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 323, n. 153/38–154/1. This is something which Watson suggests in the context of ownership of the Canterbury Tales in Nicholas Watson, ‘The Politics of Middle English Writing’, in Jocelyn Wogan-Browne,

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reads to her from a Bible which had been glossed by commentators (‘þe Bybyl wyth doctowrys þerupon’; 143). Elsewhere, Margery has been most explicit about her inability to understand Latin,51 which suggests that this may well be a copy of the Bible in the vernacular, something which is altogether more problematic. It is, of course, a possibility that Margery’s priest here is actually paraphrasing the words of the Latin Vulgate as he reads it aloud to her,52 but in view of Margery’s continual and almost obsessive need to receive spiritual guidance, reassurance and fulfilling intellectual stimulation, it may well have been that she had access through this priest to a Bible written in the vernacular. Lochrie rather dramatically asserts that ‘Access to vernacular translations of the gospels was tantamount to possession by the devil’,53 whereas A. I. Doyle has suggested that the extensive number of surviving copies of the New Testament written in English and dating from this period would suggest a wide market and readership – even after Arundel’s 1409 prohibition.54 Similarly, in their introduction to a recent volume of essays examining the relationship between Lollardy and the gentry, Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond draw attention to the wealth of evidence in wills dating from the early fifteenth century testifying to female ownership of vernacular Gospel texts.55 Even more relevantly, the author of The Myroure of Oure Ladye, a ‘rationale’ of Divine Service written in the mid-fifteenth century for the sisters of Syon Abbey56 (which we know Margery visited in 1434; 245–6), takes for granted that the readers of his work would themselves probably be licensed to possess English Bibles: ‘Of psalmes I have drawen but fewe, for ye may haue them of Richarde hampoules drawynge, and out of Englysshe bibles if ye haue lysence therto’.57 In the light of this evidence, we may well consider the likelihood that Margery had access to the vernacular Bible and if this were so, in view of the continued harassment of her own book,58 it would not have

51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor and Ruth Evans (eds), The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory 1280–1520 (Exeter, 1999), pp. 331–52 (p. 345). During her arrest at Leicester Margery had demanded that the steward abandon his Latin and speak English, asserting ‘for I vnderstone not what he say’, The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 113. It is not impossible that Margery is being somewhat disingenuous here, as on other occasions in her book she is represented as being able to quote lines and passages from the Vulgate at will. However, much of the Latin she does utilise in her Book could have been learned by rote and absorbed during her years of regular church attendance. Meech also makes this point in The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 276, n. 39/23–5. Lochrie, Translations, p. 109. I. A Doyle, ‘English Books in and out of Court from Edward III to Henry VII’, in V. J. Scattergood and J. W. Sherborne (eds), English Court Culture (London, 1983), p. 169. Aston and Richmond, Lollardy and the Gentry, p. 18. The Myroure of Oure Ladye, ed. John Henry Blunt, EETS e.s. 19 (London, 1873). Myroure of Oure Ladye, p. 3. It seems likely that Margery was writing her book with the help of the first scribe in 1430 and abandoned it in 1431 upon the first scribe’s death. The revisions and addition of Book 2 were made in 1436–8. Bishop Alnwick’s persecution of Lollards at Norwich took place in 1428–31 and three men were burnt at Norwich alone in 1428. For an account of this persecution see Tanner, Norwich Heresy Trials, pp. 7–10.

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been something which either she or her amanuensis would have wanted to advertise overmuch through its pages. Margery’s geographical links with Lollardy are further intensified by her connection with other local ecclesiastics who may have had Lollard leanings. Amongst these figures was Richard Caister, a Norwich priest whom Margery visits on a number of occasions for spiritual guidance and who offers her wholehearted support following an initial scepticism.59 According to John Bale in his Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytannie . . . Catalogus, although considered to be a pious and erudite man who was eventually canonised, Caister nevertheless inclined towards Lollardy, disapproving vociferously of the clerical abuses of the time.60 If this were the case, it would go some way to explaining what can now be read as Margery’s somewhat overdetermined apologia for Caister with which her account of her first visit to him culminates. Here, Margery heaps praises upon Caister whilst evidently recounting another otherwise unrecorded incidence of her being arraigned for heterodoxy, this time in her own East Anglia (‘sche was on a tyme moneschyd to aper before certeyn offycerys of þe Bysshop to answer to certeyn artyculys which xuld be put ageyn hir be þe steryng of envyows pepyl’; 40). Caister however, we are told, leaps to Margery’s defence going ‘with hir to her hir examynacyon & delyueryd hir fro þe malys of hyr enmys’ (40). The turn-around of Caister from cynic to saviour as recorded in this section of narrative would suggest that Margery and he had more in common, perhaps, than merely the shared love of God she would have us believe. Another likely associate of Margery’s was William Sawtre who took on the unenviable infamy of being the first Lollard to be burned in England in the early fifteenth century following Arundel’s statute De Heretico Comburendo of 1401, which legislated for the burning of heretics.61 Sawtre, an unbeneficed chaplain who was first arraigned and convicted for heresy in 1399, was burned publicly some time after 2 March 1401. Before his arrest in 1399, he had been a priest in Margery Kempe’s own parish church and she would probably have had regular contact with him during that time, although he remains singularly absent from her narrative.62 Whatever his influence had been within the parish, it must nevertheless be considered that Margery would have been aware of Sawtre’s heretical inclinations and would certainly have been aware of his later notoriety as the first heretic to be burned in England. 59 60 61

62

See The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 38–40. John Bale, Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytannie . . . Catalogus (Basle, 1557–9), 1, p. 556, as cited in The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 276, n. 38/12. For an account of the drawing up and legislating of this statute and how it affected heretics like Sawtre, see A. K, McHardy, ‘De Heretico Comburendo, 1401’, in Aston and Richmond, Lollardy and the Gentry, pp. 112–26. See p. 35, nn. 24 and 25.

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In this context, it cannot be without significance that Margery’s documentation of one of the incidents when she is accused of Lollardy, this time at Canterbury (23), immediately precedes her successful interview with Archbishop Arundel. Arundel, of course, was notorious for his enthusiastic persecution of Lollards and Margery would surely have been aware that he had presided at the trials of William Sawtre. With this in mind, and in view of having been accused of Lollardy minutes before her audience with the archbishop, Margery’s emphasis (which one, perhaps, might again qualify as overemphasis) of Arundel’s unequivocal support for her can therefore be read as a strategic screen behind which she can hide from public scrutiny a possible tendency towards Lollard sympathies. However, not only is Margery a woman who insists upon her God-given authority to speak in a world which would proscribe her voice, at the same time she must everywhere assert her Christian orthodoxy in order to carve out her own particular space of relative safety in which to operate. This encounter with Arundel therefore serves her purpose perfectly. Entering the company of the anti-Lollard zealot and still carrying the recent interpellation of Lollardy upon her, here Margery counters it by dramatically overstating Arundel’s enthusiasm for her female voice and insights: ‘And he fond no defawt þerin but aprevyd hir maner of leuyng & was ryght glad þat owyr mercyful Lord Cryst Ihesu schewyd swech grace in owyr days, blyssed mot he be’ (36–7). Margery’s immersion in the politico-heretical climate of the early fifteenth century is further substantiated by the obtuse link she sets up in her book between herself and that most infamous heretic of her day, Sir John Oldcastle. Also known as Sir John Cobham, John Oldcastle was convicted after a trial in September 1413, a time which coincides almost exactly with the period in which Meech and Allen place Margery Kempe’s visit to Arundel.63 That same autumn, Oldcastle managed to escape from the Tower and flee to Herefordshire, where he lay low for another four years until being finally recaptured in 1417 – at which point he was hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of the duke of Bedford. This would have meant that he was still at large when Margery was facing her greatest threats during her arraignments for heresy at Leicester, York and Beverley. In the latter location, brought before the archbishop of York for a second time in as many weeks, two yeomen of the duke of Bedford accuse Margery of being ‘Combombis daughter’ whom he had sent ‘to beryn lettrys abowtyn þe cuntre’ (132). These ‘lettrys’, of course, probably refer to the medium facilitating the organisation of the Lollard insurrection which was orchestrated by Oldcastle in hiding. At the same time, however, it invokes the dissemination of vernacular material by irrepressibly ‘arrogant’ women who, according to Reginald Peacock, archbishop

63

The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 274, n. 35/28–9.

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of Chester, ‘make themselves so wise by the Bible, that they are most haughty of speech regarding clerks’.64 Like Margery, the public voices of these women, aired in criticism of male ecclesiastic authority, are seen as presumptuous, usurping and dangerous and therefore naturally to be considered heretical. Here the court is told of the duke of Bedford’s anger with Margery, and of the certainty that ‘he wyl han hir’ (132). Hope Emily Allen notes that the duke of Bedford had many encounters with claims of diabolical manifestations in his administration of the kingdoms of England and France and posits that this might have made him very ambivalent about Margery’s claims to direct access to the word of God.65 She proceeds to assert that in addition to these doubts, ‘he was in direct contact with religious persons who knew Margery and thoroughly distrusted her claims as a mystic’.66 In conjunction with this accusation, Margery is later summoned to the chamber of the archbishop where he puts to her a further accusation which has been made against her – this time that she has used her disruptive voice inappropriately in persuading the Lady Greystoke to leave her husband (133). Elizabeth Greystoke was the daughter of Lady Westmorland whom Margery admits to having visited two years previously; Lady Westmorland was none other than Joan de Beaufort, daughter of John of Gaunt, and from the nature of Margery’s response, someone with whom she was on familiar terms. This connection between Margery and the de Beaufort family is further reinforced towards the end of Book 2 when Margery describes how she is invited to dinner with a company of people from ‘þe Cardenalys hows’ with whom she had ‘a gret fest & ferdyn ryth wel’ (244). This cardinal was one Henry Beaufort, legitimated son of John of Gaunt, sister to Joan de Beaufort and half-brother to Henry IV.67 The house of John of Gaunt, of course, had been patron to Wycliffe himself, albeit before his beliefs had consolidated into a heresy. Indeed, as Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond suggest, John of Gaunt’s own pro-Lollard inclinations were probably responsible for keeping the father of Lollardy alive and out of prison.68 It would seem then, that far from being unconscious or unconcerned about the political scene beyond her own local milieu as is often 64 65

66

67

68

As quoted in Aston, Lollardy and the Gentry, p. 51. The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 316–17, n. 132/23 ff. Unfortunately, Allen never produced the promised introduction in a second volume in which she had hoped to discuss this point further. For an account of the duke of Bedford’s involvement in the campaign which led to the burning of Joan of Arc, see M. H. Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages (London, 1973), pp. 386–8. The duke of Bedford is recorded as having referred to Joan as ‘a disciple and limb of the fiend, called the Pucelle, that used false enchantments and sorcery’, in H. Nicholas (ed.), Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council, vol. 4 (London, 1834–7), p. 223, as cited in Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages, p. 386. It is also significant that Margery’s prophetic abilities have earlier come into play in the context of the erroneously reported death of Henry Beaufort (as bishop of Winchester). On hearing the report of the bishop’s death, nevertheless Margery ‘had felyng þat he leuyd’ (The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 172). Aston and Richmond, Lollardy and the Gentry, Introduction, p. 7.

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assumed, Margery was more closely embroiled in the Lollard controversy of her day than is usually considered. In recounting this episode at Beverley, however, Margery places herself strategically between the powerful political poles of the vehemently anti-Lollard duke of Bedford and the pro-Lollard John of Gaunt, locating her body firmly at the site of contest between these two figures. It is from this location that her own quasi-heretical, quasi-orthodox voice rings out and such a position would suggest a protagonist who is inadvertently embroiled in the religious politics of her day and who seeks to suppress the extent of that involvement in her text by her production of screens which masquerade as orthodoxy. These in turn, serve to shield her from definitive categorisation by the male establishment and allow her to construct her own subject positions of visionary, prophet and preacher, drawn from what would appear to be a conglomeration of inherited traditions.69 Thus, it would seem that Margery’s repeated denials of any heretical inclinations are a little disingenuous on her part. If Lollardy was characterised as a reading community based on a firm commitment to the private reading of the Scriptures in the vernacular,70 for example, then she was certainly part of such a community. Although it seems that women were not necessarily drawn to the Lollard heresy because of their gender,71 Lollardy nevertheless offered both men and women a structure in which they had access to the Scriptures, opportunity for intellectual analysis and exegesis and allowed them unmediated access to the Holy Spirit via their own vernacular. In view of this evidence, one can hardly believe that Margery Kempe did not find such a structure an intensely attractive option in her quest to forge a subjectivity for herself as woman of wisdom and prophetic insight.

Apostless, Sibyl and Margery’s Own Cité des Dames Margery Kempe’s heterodox tendencies, of course, emerge textually from a very personal and embodied experience of Christ, and her self-representation as a woman on the margins of organised heterodoxy are suggestive of more than a sympathy with aspects of its tenets. Positioned somewhere in the lacuna between accepted orthodoxy and potential heresy, it is evident from 69

70 71

This is something pointed out by Watt who, like Voaden, examines Margery Kempe within the context of traditions of female prophecy and political influence, but asserts the need to examine the phenomenon of female prophecy within its specific socio-religious context. Watt concludes that Margery’s prophetic activities ‘were largely confined to her immediate social and religious communities, and did not take an overtly political turn’ (Secretaries of God, p. 4). McSheffery, Gender and Heresy, p. 58. This is something agreed upon by Claire Cross in ‘Great Reasoners in Scripture’ and Shannon McSheffery, who indicates the importance of the reading of books in Lollard circles in Gender and Heresy, p. 4. Similarly, Aston and Richmond assert the importance of vernacular texts to women in Lollardy and the Gentry, pp. 18–19.

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the outset that she must find a way of authorising her problematic voice by means of that same voice. In this context, most commentators are keen to point out what they recognise as an obsessive search for patriarchal approval for the public use of this voice within Margery’s account of her life. Most recently, in her examination of the relative successes as visionaries of Saint Birgitta and Margery Kempe, Voaden has concluded that Margery’s lack of an influential male supporter and her failure to engage fully with the discourse of discretio spirituum led to an ultimate failure to convincingly represent herself as a prophetic holy woman.72 This is a claim which will be investigated a little later in this chapter, but on re-examination of the text it is clear that one of the primary ways in which Margery seeks to validate herself is by establishing alongside an often ambivalent male authority a community of female voices with varying degrees of authority. I have already examined in Chapter 3 the extent to which Margery’s imitatio is dependent upon an identification with the transgressive sexuality and subsequent redemption of Mary Magdalene. Her importance to Margery, however, is likely to have been even more substantial than my initial examination allowed for. Within the context of her prophetic propensities and the public use of her voice in an evangelising capacity, Mary Magdalene is another figure who would have served to further legitimise Margery’s public ministry and insistent use of her own female voice. As Katherine Ludwig Jansen has demonstrated,73 from the early twelfth century onwards, Mary Magdalene was widely referred to as Apostola Apostolorum (Apostless to the Apostles), a title initially awarded to her because of her role in announcing the risen Christ to the apostles, as recorded in John 20: 1–8. However, with the rise in popularity of the apocryphal material regarding the Magdalene already examined, which emphasises her evangelical role in Gaul following the crucifixion and her widespread conversion of the ‘pagan’ populace there, the epithet seems gradually to have become a commonplace in the rhetoric of religious commentators and preachers.74 Indeed, even the proscriptive Odo of Cluny (who, if we remember, had famously likened women to excrement) had confirmed Mary Magdalene’s apostolic role in a sermon preached on the saint’s feast day in the eleventh century, when he referred to her as apostolorum consors (consort of the Apostles).75 The findings of Salih, however, suggest

72 73

74 75

Voaden, God’s Words. Katherine Ludwig Jansen, ‘Maria Magdalena: Apostolorum Apostola’, in Kienzle and Walker, Women Preachers and Prophets, pp. 57–96. See also Haskins, Mary Magdalen, pp. 55–94 for a detailed account of this tradition. For a brief discussion of the influence of the Magdalene as apostless upon Margery Kempe see Salih, Versions of Virginity, pp. 204–5, and Salih, ‘The Digby Saints Plays’, p. 127. Also useful in this context is Alcuin Blamires, ‘Women and Preaching in Medieval Orthodoxy, Heresy and Saints’ Lives’, Viator 26 (1995), pp. 135–52. Jansen, ‘Maria Magdalena’, p. 71. Odo of Cluny, Sermo II in Veneratione Sanctae Mariae Magdalenae, Patrologia Latina 133, col. 714. The various definitions for ‘consors’ are ‘partner’ (Lewis and Short, Latin

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that contemporary literature was somewhat slower to adopt the epithet, although I would argue that it is highly significant that the only extant texts in which Mary Magdalene does retain the interpellation are ones which bear close intertextual connections to Margery’s own – de Voragine’s Golden Legend account, the writings of Pseudo-Bonaventure and the Digby Mary Magdalen.76 As Jansen also points out, the proselytising voice of Mary Magdalene provided a type of ‘salvific symmetry’ which helped to negate the illicit use of the female voice as undertaken by her foremother, Eve, and by the later Middle Ages, the Magdalene in this role was appearing regularly in iconographic depictions and became a popular subject for the sermons of mendicant preachers throughout Europe77 as well as making a regular appearance in Lollard texts as a missionary preacher.78 As we know from Margery’s narrative, mendicant preachers were a commonplace in Bishop’s Lynn and frequently the source of much anxiety for her because of their lack of tolerance for her loud cryings in church (e.g. 152). Indeed, her access to this type of sermon is further corroborated when Margery tells her audience in the context of the vision of Mary Magdalene and the risen Christ discussed below: ‘The creatur had so gret swem & heuynes in þat worde [Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene] þat euyr whan sche herd it in any sermown, as sche dede many tymys, sche wept, sorwyd, & cryid’ (197). As a result, it would seem that Margery would have been fully conversant with Mary Magdalene in this role, although she never overtly refers to her as ‘apostless’. Indeed, following the example of Saint Birgitta, Margery appears to prefer to engage with the widespread non-scriptural belief that it was the Virgin to whom the risen Christ first appeared on Easter Day and not Mary Magdalene (75). Nevertheless, in a later meditation which leads to a vision in which she experiences the appearance of the risen Christ in the garden alongside Mary Magdalene (‘þe creatur was in hir contemplacyon with Mary Mawdelyn’; 197), Margery assumes the Magdalene’s role as apostless by association when Christ instructs her, ‘ “Go telle my bretheryn & Petyr þat I am vpreson” ’ (197) which Mary Magdalene proceeds to undertake with joy. Margery, however, is rather sceptical of the Magdalene’s ability to be joyful at this juncture because of Christ’s refusal to let her kiss his feet (‘ “Towche me not” ’.). Moreover, in one of the more passionate of his expressions of love for Margery on an earlier occasion (as discussed in Chapter 3), Christ has previously expressed his desire for Margery to kiss his mouth, his head and his feet (90). In this capacity, there are firm echoes from de Voragine’s life of Mary Magdalene as recorded in his Golden Legend which draws an explicit link between her mouth, her

76 77 78

Dictionary, 1b), ‘wife’ (2a) or ‘consort’ (2b). The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources also renders it ‘consort’ or ‘partner’. Salih notes these texts in Versions of Virginity, pp. 204–5. Jansen, ‘Maria Magdalena’, p. 69. Blamires, ‘Women and Preaching’, pp. 137–8.

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voice and her apostolic role: ‘all wondered at her . . . for her eloquence, which eloquence was not indeed a matter of surprise, of lips that had touched the Lord’s feet’.79 In the face of his refusal to allow Mary Magdalene the same privilege in Margery’s text,80 Christ’s ardently granted permission to Margery to touch his feet with her own lips endorses both her own role as announcer of his risen self to her audience and the concomitant salvation it will offer them. Thus we see Margery taking full advantage of this type of representation of Mary Magdalene which, as Jansen has demonstrated, had virtually taken over by this stage in the Middle Ages, inserting itself into the space where the Church’s former hegemony on the issue of women’s preaching had begun to fracture. The major point of slippage, of course, was that whilst running counter to the orthodox line on women’s voices as established by the Church, the emergence of the Magdalene as apostless and evangelist in sermons, hymns, liturgical drama and church iconography was also produced in the service of the Church and thus provided an infinitely malleable role-model for the equally orthodox and heterodox Margery Kempe. Allied to the biblical and hagiographic female voices already discussed, all these authorised female voices play a part in enabling Margery to legitimise the use of her own voice in what she evidently regards as her performance of similar roles. However, there remains one further tradition of authorised female vocalness to examine which may well have had an influence upon Margery’s self-representation as evangelist and her attempts to authorise her right to adopt that role. This is a tradition which predates the Christian tradition but had managed to make an almost seamless transition from a pagan past into mainstream Christianity and continued to coexist somewhat uneasily alongside the more misogynistic traditions examined at the beginning of this chapter. Equally as dangerous as the female voice crying out of Eden, but admired as much as it was feared, the God-inspired female voice of the ancient Sibyl was perhaps the earliest of idealised female prophetic voices to be heard crying out from the wilderness. Moreover, it is an authoritative female voice which has reverberated obscurely through time, has been shaped and modified by a succession of cultures and has permeated much of western thought and literature in the process.81 The influence of this figure 79 80 81

De Voragine, Golden Legend, vol. 1, p. 357. See The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 193–4. On this occasion, however, it is significant that it is the Virgin, not Christ himself, who grants Mary Magdalene this permission. For a useful account of the development of the figure of the Sibyl in myth, legend and folklore, see Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, pp. 67–96. For an examination of the role of the Sibyl in classical antiquity see H. W. Parke, Sibyls and Sibylline Prophecy in Classical Antiquity (London and New York, 1988). For the significance of the Sibyl in the Middle Ages see McGinn, ‘Teste David cum Sibylla’, and Dronke, ‘Hermes and the Sibyls’. Also helpful for a reading of the Sibyl in the context of body theory see Giulia Sissa, Greek Virginity, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1990).

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upon visionary women such has Margery, however, has remained largely unexamined, in spite of a wealth of evidence to suggest that there was an upsurge of interest in the Sibyl and her prophetic voice during the high to late Middle Ages. The first fragment of information which we have about the tradition of the Sibyl in antiquity comes from Heraclitus (c. 500 BC) who refers to ‘the Sibyl with the frenzied lips’.82 Early references to a sibylline figure are also to be found in Aristophanes and Plato, who presuppose a single prophetic female figure who speaks for the god and foretells future events.83 However, by the fourth century BC the number of sibyls seems to have proliferated and their prophetic pronouncements tended to be apocalyptic, concerning themselves with changes of dynasties, approaching disasters for cities and empires, and the return of a Golden Age. Originating in the Middle East in the region of Anatolia, the history of the Sibyl is one of metamorphosis and complex disguise. Working her way through ancient Greek tradition, she emerges again and takes up an official role in Roman religion, although many of her pagan prophetic pronouncements have been lost over the course of time. What is clear, however, is that these pronouncements were originally associated with frenzy and ecstasis, resulting in a bodily text which precluded her from writing well or even from speaking coherently – something reflected in the obscure and ambiguous nature of her utterances.84 By the second century AD Judaeo-Christian authors had begun to rekindle interest in the sibylline tradition, largely because a pronouncement by the Cumaean Sibyl, as documented in Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, was widely believed to have been a prophecy of the birth of Christ: ‘Ultima Cumaei venit iam carminis aetas/ . . ./ iam redit et virgo’ (Now the last age of Cumae’s prophecy has come/ . . ./ Now too returns the virgin).85 Similarly, the Erythraean Sibyl was considered by early Christians to have been the author of an obscure acrostic poem which was also interpreted as a forseeing of the birth of Christ.86 Thus, the prophetic

82

83 84

85 86

This fragment (fragment 92) is preserved in Plutarch, The Pythian Oracle, 397a, as cited in McGinn, ‘Teste David cum Sibylla’, p. 8. For a detailed examination of the Pythia in the context of Greek attitudes towards the female body, see Sissa, Greek Virginity, especially pp. 2–5, 9–14, 25–35, 49–51 and 168–72. McGinn, ‘Teste David cum Sibylla’, p. 8. Sissa asserts a link between divinatory speech and female sexuality which also embodies a paradox: on the one hand the body of the Sibyl is wide-open and penetrated by truth which then brims over into public utterance. On the other hand, the same body is depicted as a ‘vessel, hermetically sealed and virginal and utterly silent when not in proximity to men (Greek Virginity, p. 5). Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–IV, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1957), Eclogue IV, lines 4–6, p. 28. Augustine, City of God against the Pagans, ed. E. H. Warmington, 7 vols (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1968), V, xvii, pp. 442–4. Here Augustine attests to the fact that the first letters of each line of the poem spell out ‘ichthys’ (fish), standing for ‘Iesous Christos Theou hyios Soter’, which translates as ‘Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour’. For a discussion of this poem see McGinn, ‘Teste David cum Sibylla’, p. 12.

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female figure of the pagan Sibyl managed the transition into mainstream Christianity and by the second century AD commentators such as Justin and Tertullian were referring to her with the utmost respect. In fact, she came to be quoted more often than the Old Testament prophets,87 and was taken up vigorously as a propagandist tool in the fight to eradicate paganism in the Christian West. A crucial point in the history of the Sibyl in the context of Christian tradition and her reputation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, however, was forged by an endorsement of her by Saint Augustine in his City of God against the Pagans in which he proclaims ‘in eoroum numero deputanda videatur qui pertinent ad civitatem’ (she is clearly to be assigned to the number of those who belong to the City of God).88 There are clear resonances here between the Sibyl’s being assigned by Augustine to the City of God and Margery Kempe’s own documentation of an angel dressed in white appearing to her in the form of small child to display her name as included in the Book of Life just below that of the Trinity – thus guaranteeing for her her own place within the heavenly city: [A]non aperyd verily to hir syght an awngel al clothyd in white as mech as it had ben a lityl childe beryng an howge boke beforn hym. þan syd þe creatur to þe childe, er ellys to þe awngel, ‘A,’ sche seyd, ‘þis is þe Boke of Lyfe.’ And sche saw in þe boke þe Trinite al in gold. Þan seyd sche to þe childe, ‘Wher is my name?’ þe childe answeryd & seyd, ‘Her is þi name at þe Trinyte foot wretyn’. (206–7)

Evoking the words of Augustine, too, Christ will later reassure Margery as to this privileged status, telling her, ‘Dowtyr, loke þat þu be now trewe & stedfast & haue a good feith, for þi name is wretyn in Heuyn in þe Boke of Lyfe’ (207). The endorsement of the theological importance of the female prophetic figure as displayed by Augustine was also adopted by the normally cautious Thomas Aquinas, resulting in increased contemporary enthusiasm for the prescient. Again in the Summa Theologiae Aquinas declares: ‘unde etiam Sibyllae multa vera praedixerunt de Christo’ (so even the Sibyls predicted much that was true of Christ),89 an admission which lays the ground for the validity of the prophetic insights and mystical awarenesses of a whole series of holy women in the later Middle Ages. This type of popularity enjoyed by the figure of the Sibyl (who by this time had begun to lose her idealised status and had fragmented into a variety of individual figures) is also attested to by the extraordinary number of extant manuscripts (130 in all) in which are to be found the pronouncements of the Tiburtine Sibyl. Similarly, in another tradition the Cumaean Sibyl is depicted as showing the Emperor Augustus a 87 88 89

McGinn, ‘Teste David cum Sibylla’, p. 13. Augustine, City of God, V, xviii, p. 447. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae XL, 2a2ae, qu. 172: art. 6, p. 48.

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vision of the Virgin Mary in heaven,90 a popular tropological image which reimerges in the writing of both Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, both of whom on several occasions respond textually to their own mystical insights by revealing visions of the Virgin to their readers.91 It would appear, therefore, that by the late Middle Ages the tradition of the wise and prophetic holy woman, inspired by God through whom he spoke and announced his sacred Word fed into those other traditions which I have just been examining which also legitimised a vocal female prophetic or evangelising voice. In turn, these rested in an uneasy tension with those far more misogynistic depictions of women also examined, which reached their most grotesque expression, perhaps, in the fabliau tradition which contains a whole host of leaky and garrulous old women.92 It was this apparent dichotomy which, like Margery Kempe, the French writer, Christine de Pizan, writing in France in the fifteenth century, was similarly able to exploit in her Livre de la Cité des Dames, in order to counter what she regarded as an all-pervasive misogyny within male-authored literature. In Part II of the Livre, for example, particularly sections 1–6, Christine de Pizan uses the narrative voice of the unorthodox female figure of Droitture to tell tales of women whose authority lies outside that of patriarchal law and through whom she identifies a location of elusive female power. For Christine, this power is best represented by the figures of ten now fully individuated sibyls who manifest for her various aspects of the ideal from which they originated and which Christine identifies as the secret and hidden wisdom of the female in the world. The Lady Reason, like Droitture, has prophesied to Christine telling her: ‘Mais je te prophetise, come vraye sebille’93 and Christine is then led by the Sibyl in a vision and shown the fountain of Sapience with which sibylline ‘truth’ is closely associated and which constitutes the source of all female-centred knowledge.94 For Christine, sibylline wisdom and prescience belongs to an initially non-textual and extralegal tradition which lays claims to female authority and wisdom and whose influence calls for a revision of history and the ‘deconstruction of the cities

90

91 92

93 94

See, for example, Curt F. Buhler (ed.), The Epistle of Othea, trans. Stephen Scrope, EETS o.s. 264 (London, 1970), p. 120. Maureen Quilligan also examines this legend in The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames (Ithaca and London, 1991), p. 144. See, for example, The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 50; and Long Text, p. 36–7. For a useful examination of this type of representation see the essay by Jane E. Burns, ‘This Prick which is Not One: How Women Talk Back in Old French Fabliaux’, in Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (eds), Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 188–212. This is also something observed by Jansen who suggests that the endorsement of women’s speech by such figures of female authority stood out in stark contrast to the vilification and mockery heaped upon the ‘garrulous, gossipy woman who inhabited much of medieval discourse’ (‘Maria Magdalena’, p. 79). Christine de Pizan, Livre de la Cité des Dames I, iv. Quoted in Quilligan, Allegory, p. 105. The Christian tradition of sapiential theology with which the Sibyl was closely associated is something which will be examined in the context of Julian of Norwich in the following chapter.

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of men’.95 Although, like Margery’s own ‘wisdom’, it does become scripted in an attempt to make permanent its pronouncements, Christine depicts the sibyls as powerful and authoritative female figures who are united within a tradition which provides an oral alternative to what she regards as inflexible – and erroneous – masculine, misogynistic, scripted rhetoric. In the words of Maureen Quilligan, it is an orality which ‘speaks the transtemporal generativity of female knowledge’.96 Not only that, of course, but for Christine the Sibyl represents a female authority which is not reliant on traditional hierarchical distinctions based on gender, but forms part of a community of women who draw on the authority of legitimised female voices and their articulation of prescient female knowledge. In her original, idealised role, the voice of the Sibyl was legitimised through her ventriloquism of the word of the male god and thus she could be viewed in terms of privileged, albeit passive, vessel in which that word was housed. Like the scripted version of Christine de Pizan’s sibyls, her voice and pronouncements, although still recognisably female, were consequently overlayed with masculine ‘legitimacy’ which served to contain, or else screen the ‘threat’ posed by her voice’s apparently unruly, unpredictable and uncontrollable tendencies. Its very lack of recognisable boundaries, however, also made it the perfect conduit for the limitless and the ineffable, and the unfathomable body of the ‘dangerous’ female was therefore able to take up a place within mainstream Christian prophecy alongside Miriam, Huldah, Anna, the daughters of Philip and others, to be drawn upon later both explicitly and implicitly by a succession of female holy women and writers such as Margery, Julian and Christine for purposes of authorisation. It is therefore highly likely that this venerable tradition of authorised female utterance was covertly informing Margery Kempe in her attempt to counter public anxieties regarding the disruptive use of her own speaking voice and bodily utterances. As a woman apparently operating alone and refusing to adhere to accepted guidelines about the appropriate use of that voice (indeed, attempting to redefine the very category of ‘appropriateness’) Margery Kempe’s potential as a catalyst for public disorder is quickly recognised by the courts of Leicester, York and Beverley, as we have seen. Indeed, the vision of female-invoked public disorder is rarely far from the forefront of male anxieties in the Book and it is significant that within days of her York trial where Margery has proclaimed ‘I come in no pulpytt’ (126), the court’s anxieties are revealed as fully justified when her appearance on the streets of Hessle incites a crowd of women to chase after her, threatening her with their distaffs (129). Within a day or so she is again under arrest – this time in Beverley, accused of being a ‘fals heretyk’ (229). Now, in an example of the 95 96

This phrase appears in Roberta Davidson, ‘Suspicion of the Sibyl: Truth and Authority in Le Livre de la Cité des Dames’, unpublished paper, as quoted in Quilligan, Allegory, p. 117. Quilligan, Allegory, p. 128.

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strategic crafting of her material so often denied her by critics, Margery details her defiant preaching from the makeshift ‘pulpit’ of an upstairs window in the house to which she has been confined under house arrest, from where she proceeds to win over of the women of the town: Þan stode sche lokyng owt at a wyndown, tellyng many good talys to hem þat wolde heryn hir, in so meche þat women wept sor & seyde wyth gret heyynes of her hertys, “Alas woman, why xalt þu be brent?” Than sche preyid þe good wyfe of þe hows to heuyn hir drynke, for sche was euyl for thryste. And þe good wife seyde hir husbond had born awey þe key, wherfor sche myth not comyn to hir ne heuyn hir drynke. And þan þe women tokyn a leddyr & set up to þe wyndown & houyn hir a pynte of wyn in a potte & toke hir a pece, besechyng hir to settyn awey þe potte preuyly & þe pece þat whan þe good man come he myth not aspye it. (130–1)

It would be difficult to find a more overt example of a woman taking up the role of preacher in medieval literature outside traditional hagiography.97 Not only does Margery represent herself here explicitly in terms of a preacher in the pulpit, but she also firmly regenders both the role and the location by means of this self-representation. The scene is further feminised by the support of the jailor’s wife who actively encourages Margery in her husband’s absence, and the explicitly female audience to whom she preaches. Thus, just as Christine de Pizan envisaged a female wisdom which operates outside the legitimising influence of male authority, so Margery here depicts herself as disseminator of that same female wisdom in the absence of the male and within a self-supporting female community. In effect, the urban centre of Beverley has become a true Cité des Dames where the women are reduced to tears by her words of wisdom: ‘[the] women wept sor & seyd wyth gret hueynes of her hertys, “Alas, woman, why xalt þu be brent?” ’ (130–1). In this way, Margery further defends herself against accusations of heretical inclinations just at the moment when she is describing a performance which would substantiate them.98 By moving her audience along rapidly from the ultimate location of male authority – the ecclesiastical courtroom – and transferring them to the accepted sphere of the female – the domestic residence – and by exercising an active and overt contravention of the boundaries of this female 97

98

There is a striking resemblance between Margery’s role as preacher depicted here and a representation of Mary Magdalene preaching to the converted in Gaul which appears on the Lazarus altar in the church of Saint Mary Magdalene in Marseilles. This image is reproduced in Jansen, ‘Maria Magdalena’, p. 72. In an essay on women and preaching in the Middle Ages, Alcuin Blamires’s findings lead him to assert that ‘Lollardy probably did countenance female preaching’ (‘Women and Preaching in Medieval Orthodoxy, Heresy and Saints’ Lives’, Viator 26 (1995), pp. 135–52 (p. 136)). Aston, however, concludes that there is no real evidence to suggest that Lollard women actually set themselves up as priests; nevertheless it was a theoretical possibility which was aired in popular myth in the fourteenth century. Aston examines this idea in ‘Lollard Women Priests?’, pp. 441–61.

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sphere by quite literally shouting from the window to other women in the public street, Margery thus throws down a challenge to accepted notions of female behaviour and draws upon a tangential tradition of Magdalenean preaching and sibylline utterance for purposes of validation. Her account of this incident also provides her with an opportunity to illustrate how interpellative male judgements can be circumvented and an alternative system of female solidarity constructed in its place. Such a strategy is evidenced everywhere in the Book, in which Margery’s women are frequently – although not ubiquitously99 – represented as both receptive and supportive of her transgressive identities. Those who do support her, however, frequently serve to authorise Margery’s calling far more effectively than the male authorities who frequently remain somewhat ambivalent towards her. The question of female solidarity, for example, becomes a major discourse on Margery’s journey back from Jerusalem. In recounting this journey, Margery documents a series of women who offer both physical comfort and moral support when she is at her most vulnerable. There is, of course, the woman with the devotional doll whom I have already discussed along with the women who tend to the distraught Margery during the same episode. Similarly, there is the alluring Margaret Florentyne who makes a lasting impression on Margery (79 and 93) during the same pilgrimage. Although they only have a ‘fewe comon wordys’ (79) and a series of gestures with which to communicate, Margery’s attempts at conversation with this woman, uttered as it is in a mixture of broken English and pseudo-Italian, echo the difficult genesis of the Book when the male amanuensis is unable to decipher the eccentric mix of two badly written languages. The language with which these two women do communicate is, however, resolved by means of a language of the female body – gestures and the offering of food. Moreover, Margaret Florentyne’s recognition of Margery’s bodily requirements and her provision of food for her suggests a recognition of her voice as that of the authoritative female. She insists upon Margery’s company at her own table, indeed she ‘set hir at hir owen tabil abouyn hirself & leyd hir mete wyth hir owyn handys’ (93). Her support of Margery, of course, offered by means of the traditional female offerings of food and drink, not only serves to alleviate Margery’s difficulties, but also reinforces her sense of spiritual authority.100 This, in turn, reactivates Margery’s own sense of authority here and induces other local women to acknowledge her wisdom and spiritual insight. On one occasion, for example, a ‘holy mayden’ follows Margaret Florentyne’s example and 99

100

Margery admits to having been rejected by a York anchoress, for example (119), and whilst on pilgrimage her maidservant abandons her (62), although she does make an attempt to make reparation when Margery meets her again on her way home from Jerusalem (95). For an examination of charitable food distribution by women see Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, especially pp. 233–4, where she illustrates the type of contribution made by aristocratic women to the charitable distribution of food to the needy.

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offers Margery food. At another time two young mothers request recourse to Margery’s female wisdom by desiring her to be godmother to their children (94), a position which in both folk and religious lore carried with it all the associations of female wisdom, female support, social bonding and the passing on of knowledge.101 Significantly, the child for whom she agrees to perform this role has been named after Birgitta, about whom the child’s mother and others ‘haddyn knowlach . . . in hir lyuetyme’ (94). Thus, by means of her association with this woman and child, Margery is able to draw upon their first-hand knowledge (and the concomitant authority) of that other newly famous sibylline figure – Saint Birgitta herself – in order to authorise her selfrepresentation. This is further intensified by the account of her subsequent visit to the saint’s handmaid in Rome on ‘Seynt Brigyptys days’ and the documenting of the conversation between the two women in the newly consecrated chapel which had originally been Birgitta’s own domestic residence (95). As she kneels on Birgitta’s stone and communicates with the handmaid, Margery literally steps into Birgitta’s place, usurping both her female prophetic authority and the authority of the tradition in which she had been operating: ‘Sche was in þe chawmbre þat Seynt Brigypt deyd in . . . & sche knelyd also on þe ston on þe whech owr Lord aperyd to Seynt Brigypte and telde hir what day sche huld deyn on’ (95). Thus Margery carefully constructs around herself an edifice of female communitas and understanding, culminating in her own conflation with Saint Birgitta in that saint’s own chamber. In the absence of consistent male approval, therefore, Margery’s sense of her own authority is often achieved by an insistent drawing on effectively inclusive female-centred discourses which ultimately serve to destabilise accepted notions of orthodoxy and the need for male approval. In this context, Saint Birgitta operates in Margery’s text not simply as a role model; she forms the apex of an active community of women whose voices call out from both past and present in support of Margery’s life and her textual endeavours. Rosalynn Voaden has already illustrated the extent to which Margery Kempe’s narrative concerns itself with an almost obsessive need to document proof of her visionary and prophetic capabilities; indeed, Margery rarely misses an opportunity to emphasise for her readers these gifts. At times this self-representation is highly artificial in its construction and there is a sense that she is amassing as much material as she can remember and employing a wide range of narrative techniques in order to substantiate her claims to prophetic insight. In places, for example, she employs a protracted narrative rhythm of prophetic utterance followed closely by its substantiation which is

101

On this see Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde, p. 33. Similarly, Warner discusses the etymological link between the word ‘godmother’ and ‘gossip’, which originally was used to refer to a christening feast. However, increasingly it became associated with idle and dangerous women’s speech and by the seventeenth century had evolved to mean the content of idle chatter, or the perpetrator of it, p. 33.

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then further endorsed by such validating phases as, ‘sche sey it was so in dede’, and ‘so it was in trewth’, ‘so sche dede’ and ‘so it ferd wyth hir’.102 These confirmatory phrases, with all their cadences of the spoken voice, take on a type of mantric role in the text, punctuating it with linguistic reassurances for the reader that Margery’s prophetic abilities are genuine and Godgiven. In this way, Margery creates a type of alternative personal and textual discretio spirituum which is dependent ultimately not on a traditional, scripted discourse to lend it authority, but on the ability of her female voice and its own orality to validate the truth of her own experiences. This is not to say, of course, that she is not also dependent upon her scribe to turn body and voice into text, as I have suggested. Some level of dependency on his material contribution remains a given – unless, of course, we concur with Staley’s thesis. However, Margery’s scribe appears to be prioritising this type of oral selfvalidation in his recording of Margery’s life and appears to be retaining the cadences of her voice with little attempt to eradicate them by means of editorial adjustment in a way that other hagiographers appeared to do in their accounts of other holy women’s lives.103 This is nowhere better substantiated than in the account which documents the gullibility of Margery’s amanuensis in being tricked out of some money by a young man purporting to be desirous of entering the priesthood,104 in spite of the fact that he appears to have killed a man in a brawl (55–7). Entirely hoodwinked by this young man’s ‘prestly . . . gestur & vestur’ (56), all the amanuensis’s book learning and masculine authority fail to offer him insight into the real intentions of this young man – intentions which Margery, of course, with her intuitive understanding that ‘he xal dysceyue how at þe last’ (56), is able to determine from the outset. In the same chapter we are told of how the same priest again fails to heed Margery’s prophetic warnings about a second trickster who tries to sell him a non-existent book (‘Syr . . . byith no boke of hym, for he is not to trustyn vpon’; 57). The results, of course, are predictable and the whole episode makes for amusing reading, especially as we have the impression that the

102

103

104

For example, at one point Margery tells us of her ability to correctly predict the death of her spiritual advisor (The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 170), describes her prescience of times of pestilence and her own survival of the plague (pp. 185 and 202), and also predicts the survival of a friend’s husband (p. 202), as well as the wrongful report of the death of a bishop (p. 172). Again, the problem of discerning ‘voice’ in hagiographic texts is addressed in the essays included in Mooney, Gendered Voices. If we compare the scribe’s treatment of Margery’s voice with that of the later redactor of her text whose version appears in The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 353–7, we can see more clearly the full extent to which her voice is retained in the original book. On this see also my Introduction, pp. 20–1. This entire chapter is one which is generally considered to be an interpolation by the amanuensis himself rather than by Margery. However, in the context of the Book’s mode of production, which required the priest to read back to Margery the written material, and to make alterations where any were deemed necessary by her (5), it is likely that the decision to include – or at least approve – the account was again Margery’s own.

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amanuensis, through his act of writing and collaboration with Margery, is telling these tales against himself – whether inadvertently or deliberately as a topos of humility – and thus to some extent undermines his own priestly authority (and, by implication, the male-identified doctrine of discretio spirituum itself). However, the real purpose for the inclusion of this entertaining interlude becomes apparent from what precedes it. The chapter opens with considerable attention being allocated to the scepticism of this priest about Margery’s authenticity. We are told he went to great lengths ‘to preuyn þis creaturys felyngys’ (55), no doubt anxious about his own reputation and his contribution to the production of what could become a dangerous written text. We have the impression of Margery and the priest locked in verbal combat, he quizzing her and demanding answers ‘to preuyn þis creaturys felyngys’, and she ‘vnsekyr & vncerteyn . . . what xuld be þe ende’ (55). The priest compels her to produce a type of ‘prophecy on demand’ to allay the vestiges of his cynicism, and she hesitantly agrees for fear that he will renege on his promise and refuse to ‘wretyn þe boke’. This priest is reluctant, of course, to verify the oral text of Margery’s experience through transliteration and thus to compromise his own authoritative masculine position. For this reason, he ‘wold not alway heuyn credens to hir wordys’ (55). He fears the very orality of Margery’s pronouncement and would prefer to defer to the written text in order to reinforce his position. Indeed, this is exactly what we will see him do on later occasions when his confidence in Margery waivers and he turns to a series of written sources to shore up his faith in her.105 It is therefore particularly ironic, as Margery herself intimates here, that he is beguiled and his trust in such scripted authority abused by a young man attempting to sell him a written text which in reality does not exist. By implication, the ‘authority’ he is so keen to seek in the written word is not definitive – in this case, it does not even exist – and he is left with nothing but damaged pride and an enforced confrontation with the alternative and ‘real’ authority of a woman’s spoken voice. Thus, it is with much loss of face that he is eventually driven to acknowledge ‘þat þe forseyd creaturys felyng was trewe’ (58). Indeed, when his writing gets fully under way and his faith in Margery is established, we find that ‘hir writer cowde not sumtyme kepyn hymself from wepyng’ (219). By drawing on recognised tradition of authoritative female prophecy which is accompanied by such physical manifestations of grace, and by carefully avoiding all explicitly political implications, Margery is able to construct a self which prefers to resist the powers of politicised and institutionalised male discourse as its primary authority, and establish alongside it, both inside and outside the text, an insistent presence of a prescient female voice.

105

The priest admits that his faith in Margery only returns after he has read the lives of Marie d’Oignies and Elizabeth of Hungary, two Vitae which give credence to the female voice as privileged and tears of devotion as demonstrative of exceptional piety (The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 153 and 154).

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‘Settyth al howr trust in god & feryth not þe langage of þe world’: The Authority of the Word Perhaps the most significant episode which assists Margery in her struggle for authority is that of her visit to Julian of Norwich in 1413. Unlike her encounters with representatives of ecclesiastic authority, this meeting between Margery and the respected anchoress is female-focused, non-hierarchical and, from Margery’s perspective at least, mutually satisfying: ‘Mych was þe holy dalyawns þat þe ankres & þis creatur haddyn be comowngyng in þe lofe of owyr Lord Ihesu Crist many days þat þei were togedyr’ (43). In Julian, Margery discovers, perhaps for the first time since her conversion, positive support and active encouragement, and at no point does she report the anchoress as illustrating any of the initial scepticism so characteristic of some of the male representatives of religious authority whom Margery has approached. On the contrary, from the outset Julian is represented by the author as the embodiment of the same authoritative and female-centred wisdom which Margery is always so keen to identify with: þe ankres . . . hyly thankyd God wyth al hir hert for hys visitacyon, cownselyng þis creatur to be obedyent to þe wyl of owyr Lord God & fulfyllyn wyth al hir myghtys what euyr he put in hir sowle yf it wer not ageyn þe worshep of God & profyte of hir euyncristen. (42)

There is no hint of condescension in Julian’s words to Margery in this extract (although, of course, we cannot be sure that Margery would have chosen to record it if there were) and it is highly significant that the only other person apart from Christ to encourage Margery not to heed the criticisms levelled at her by the world is this respected and authoritative holy woman who tells her: ‘feryth not þe langage of þe world’ (43). Besides comprising an allusion to the type of verbal abuse with which Margery is already familiar, the ‘langage of þe world’, of course, can also be viewed as the traditional patriarchal discourse which we have witnessed from a whole host of Margery’s male associates and enemies – Richard Caister and the court presided over by Bishop of York amongst them.106 The implication of Julian’s advice is that she recognises that Margery’s language is not that of the world; like the language of Julian’s own texts, its female-centred hermeneutics reflect its female locutor as ‘þe sete of God’ (43) and therefore as the privileged and utterly extraordinary

106

See pp. 182 and 58–60 above. Caister, of course, is initially sceptical about a woman’s ability to engage in theological discussion but is quickly brought round by Margery’s abilities and puts his trust in her bodily and vocal expressions of piety. See, for example, The Book of Margery Kempe, pp. 38–40. It is significant, however, that she convinces him otherwise and modifies the prejudice which he displays on this occasion (40).

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conduit of the Word.107 Above all, Julian’s advice to Margery gives her the reassurance that as possessor of the Holy Spirit in her soul, she has the right to speak and to be heard. The struggle to exercise this right will thus become Margery’s primary concern – both within and without the text, and must surely have been a convincing factor in her eventual decision to transform into written text and make permanent her oral ministry, whether she was aware of Julian’s own status as an author, or not. Margery’s difficulties in translating Word into word is, of course, reflected in the difficult genesis of her written treatise, as fully documented before the onset of her text itself. In the Proem we have been made privy to the text’s problematic birth twenty-five years or more after Margery’s conversion and the onset of her mystical experiences.108 Even when she does finally begin to write, she is hampered by a series of well-documented problems which last for four years or so, during which time the first amanuensis dies, leaving behind a script which is ‘so euyl sett & so vnreasonably wretyn’ (4) that it is unreadable. Not only that, but we are told that ‘þe lattyr was not schapyn ne formyd as oþer letters ben’ and that it is ‘neiþer good Englysch ne Dewch’, in effect falling into the impenetrable fissure between two languages. It is only on Margery’s appeal to God that the third and final amanuensis finds he can tackle the work and begin to understand what has been written. Most critics alluding to this episode accept its literal interpretation: Margery as a supposedly illiterate woman (or, as they would argue, the scribe as her literate ‘voice’) is describing the mechanical problems of producing a book from an initial and poorly written manuscript. However, and I concur with Lochrie here,109 there is much more to this initial caveat than an attempt to explain away an amateurish effort at creating an autobiographical text. What is also being articulated is the difficulty of producing a mystical work of any kind, particularly that written by a woman, and it is significant in this context that from the outset this text is associated with specifically female bodiliness, sickness and pain which are transformed into ‘wonderful spechys & dalyawns whech owr Lord spak and dalyid to hyr sowle’ (2). Margery’s understanding of the Word is similarly embodied and internal, being received in and by her female body (‘Sche knew & vndyrstod many secret & preuy thyngys whech

107

108

109

On the problematic and often dangerous relationship between women and the Word, see Janet L. Nelson, ‘Women and the Word in the Earlier Middle Ages’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), Women in the Church, Studies in Church History 27 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 53–78. For an overview of the attitude of the medieval Church to female spirituality, see Voaden, God’s Words, pp. 27–34. For a summary of the ambivalence towards female prophecy from the Middle Ages through to the seventeenth century, see Watt, Secretaries of God, especially pp. 1–14. In her useful analysis of the orality of Margery’s book, Diane Uhlman examines the function of the Proem in this context. ‘The Comfort of Voice, the Solace of Script: Orality and Literacy in The Book of Margery Kempe’, Studies in Philology 91 (1994), pp. 50–69. See also Voaden, God’s Words, pp. 112–13. Lochrie discusses the difficult genesis of the Book in Translations, pp. 99–101.

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schuld beffallen aftyrward be inspiracyon of þe Holy Gost’; 2). However, like the initial attempts of the first amanuensis to transcribe Margery’s experiences, her own first attempts at articulating these ‘priuy thyngys’ result in primeval weepings and sobbings, as we have seen. Such primeval language of the body, rooted in its prelinguistic recesses, perhaps even the semiotic, re-emerges whenever the writing process is thwarted and the stream of creativity is stopped up. At the end of Book 1, for example, Margery describes her need to write in terms of a bodily compulsion which, if frustrated or impeded, would result in illness, as we have seen. Moreover, from the outset, Margery consistently emphasises how language remains inadequate for the task of explicating her insights, and that, where it fails, the body takes over. Like her first script then, articulation of her communications with God, also falls between two languages: ‘Ne hyr self cowd neuyr telle þe grace þat sche felt, it was so heuenly, so hy abouen hyr reson & hyr bodyly wyttys . . . þat sche myth neuyr expressyn it wyth her word lych as sche felt it in hyr sowle’ (3). As a result, Margery herself problematises her own speech as well as her own writing. What she says and what is written down can only be an approximation and dilution of the utterances received in her soul. If the primeval, sibylline scream is the closest that human language can get to articulating the mysteries of this experience, then the organised written language of maleidentified authority as represented by the priestly scribe can only further dissipate, confuse and erroneously represent the female mystical utterance. In this context then, far from being evidence of a lack of authority as has been argued by many critics, the Book’s apparently haphazard organisation and chronological structure would appear to adhere much more closely to the organising principles of the oral voice, depending as it does on memory, quality of recall, stream of consciousness, lateral thinking and other devices which the written text is normally intent on eliminating. This being the case, the very authority that Margery is attempting to achieve for herself in her writing and which so many critics would deny her, is achieved implicitly by its non-linear structure and its very adherence to the rhythms, cadences and idiosyncrasies of the very spoken voice which dictates it.110 Moreover, the Book is heavily reliant on dialogue for its impact and authority, a fact which again seems to escaped many commentators. Comparative works, such as Birgitta’s Revelations or Catherine of Siena’s Dialogue are often less dialogic than monologic. What seems to be important to these highly literate disseminations of the mystical utterance is their prioritising of the long monologic utterances of Christ, with the mystic remaining largely the silent conduit. For Voaden again, it is this very act of disappearance which lends the necessary authority to the ‘successful’ female mystic.111 In the case of Margery, however, except on 110 111

On the issue of subtextual structure and authority in the Book, again see Fanous, ‘Measuring the Pilgrim’s Progress’, in Renevey and Whitehead, Writing Religious Women, pp. 157–76. Voaden, God’s Words. See, in particular her conclusion, pp. 155–7.

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the occasions of her Marian and Passion narratives (18–19; 187–97), we detect a resistance to the structured organising of her communications with Christ in order to produce a traditional monologic coherence. Margery’s emphasis is always the mutuality of the experience. She is no mere passive conduit, whatever she would have us believe. She is a fully active partner – lover even – of the Divine and at times is not even averse to resisting his instructions or advice if they appear to contravene her own vision of appropriate behaviour.112 Her female voice is everywhere to the forefront of her narrative, recorded as it is in direct speech, and ironically it is this insistent orality with its capturing of the cadences and intonations of her own voice which has provided most ammunition for her main critics, both during her own time and since the discovery of the manuscript in 1934. Quite simply, because she is noisy, she is not believed, and her perceived lack of authenticity has hinged on the noise of what is often considered her own self-delusion. The issue of the untruthful language of the female is, of course, something which has always threatened the status quo, contravening as it does, social ethics and threatening social cohesion. What we have witnessed in much of twentiethcentury criticism’s reaction to Margery Kempe113 is the same subtly misogynistic resistance to and vilification of the ‘embarrassing’ and ‘transgressive’ female voice as exemplified by the series of male ecclesiastics who persecute and ostracise Margery from the flock of the faithful.114 Yet, as has been demonstrated, it is this very orality of the insistent female voice, albeit now embedded within the permanency of script, which creates for The Book of Margery Kempe the authority which its author so keenly sought throughout her life. The apparent tension which this orality-embedded-in-writing throws up here has been resolved to some degree by Karma Lochrie in her discussion of what she terms Margery’s ‘interdiction’, defined as the insertion of an authorial voice between text and reader.115 According to Lochrie, in spite of a newfound willingness to cooperate, Margery’s amanuensis is nevertheless wholly reliant on such interdiction in the form of a fresh oral input by Margery ‘aftyr hyr owyn tunge’ (221) in order to render the sense of the text clear and remain 112 113

114

115

See, for example, Margery’s attempts to resist the wearing of white clothes, The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 32. In addition to the reactions of the early critics to the Book’s discovery cited on p. 21, n. 66, see, for example, Clifton Walters, who refers to Margery as a ‘queer, unbalanced creature’, in Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love, Introduction, p. 16. Similarly, R. W. Chambers echoes both Thurston’s and the Canterbury monk’s attitude to Margery’s highly vocal expression of piety when he suggests that ‘things might have been better for Margery if she had been a recluse’, in William Butler-Bowden (trans.), The Book of Margery Kempe, 1436 (London, 1944), Introduction, p. vii. See for example the refusal of a monk to let her into the chapel, The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 139, and the proscribing against her presence in Church during his sermons by the Fransciscan preacher, William Melton, pp. 148–9. Lochrie, Translations, p. 100. The term is borrowed from Donma C. Stanton, ‘Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?’, in Domna C. Stanton (ed.), The Female Autograph (Chicago, 1987), p. 13.

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true to the original: & so he red it ouyr beforn þis cratur euery word, sche sumtym helpyng where ony difficulte was (50). The original, dictated material is thus still reliant on the further oral interdiction of its originator to clarify and confirm its authenticity and ends up ‘sandwiched’ between the two oral inputs which shape it. It is very likely, for example, that the attempt to impose order upon the highly confused chronology between Chapter 18 and Chapter 22 (which document the conception and birth of Margery’s last child), is directly attributable to such interdiction rather than reflecting an independent attempt by the amanuensis to impose some order upon the material.116 In this way a second dialogue is established between writer and amanuensis, which is inadvertently recorded as a palimpsest to the original words set down upon the page. Similarly, the passages which are usually recognised as interpolations by the priest himself can also be read in terms of similar interdiction.117 One such addition has been attributed to Chapter 64 in which the amanuensis recounts his battle with disbelief and how the Vita of Marie d’Oignies amongst other written texts, brought him back to trusting in Margery’s authenticity (152–4). Diane Uhlman has suggested that this authenticating interpolation by the priest serves to illustrate how he has had to revert to the written word to find intertextual support for Margery’s credibility,118 arguing that such verification is crucial for his understanding of Margery’s orality from which he has recently been alienated. However, the true significance of this episode lies beyond the priest’s recourse to scripted verification of Margery’s authenticity. The priest tells us that ‘he had not ryth cler mende of þe sayd mater whan he wrot þis tretys’ (153), indicating that he was not able to fully recall the story of Marie d’Oignies from memory at the time of writing. Just as we have been told in the Proem that Margery ‘had forgetyn þe tyme & þe ordyr whan thyngys befellyn’ because ‘it was so long er it was wretyn’ (5), so memory, the store of the oral utterance, also fails the priest when he wishes to draw upon it to substantiate Margery’s claims. In documenting this lapse, the scribe therefore inadvertently underlines the importance of writing and its relation to the oral. The one major weakness of the oral text is its very impermanence and the primary benefit of the written is, therefore, the making permanent and the preservation of the oral utterance. Thus, in validating Margery’s orality by invoking his impaired memory

116

117 118

These passages have been examined by Laura L. Howes, ‘Margery Kempe’s Last Child’, Modern Philology 90, 2 (1992), pp. 220–5. In this article, Howes asserts that the text points towards the birth of a final child in Venice whilst Margery Kempe is on pilgrimage. I have, however, disputed this claim, pointing out that on careful analysis, the non-linear narrative would point towards a date early in 1413 as the likely time of birth for this last child. See Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘Margery’s Last Child: A Refutation’, Notes and Queries, n.s. 46 (June 1999), pp. 181–3. The passages which are generally regarded as scribal contributions are the Proem, Chapters 24–5 and Chapter 62. Uhlman, ‘The Comfort of Voice’, p. 67–8.

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of the life of Marie d’Oignies, he also justifies the act of writing and his own contribution to a permanent inscription of the orality of the mystical Word. The written text everywhere, therefore, returns to an oral mode of utterance for validation, just as the oral utterance has ultimately to turn to the written text for its own immortality. In this context, the words of John of Salisbury about the relationship between written and spoken utterance are particularly pertinent: ‘Fundamentally, letters are shapes indicating voices. Frequently, they speak voicelessly the utterance of the absent’.119 Any written text which is based on absent voices and retains their original echoes is therefore itself fundamentally oral in that it literally stands in for those voices. In The Book of Margery Kempe the ‘shapes’ resound with multifarious voices which burst through and frustrate any attempt by the page to contain them. It is precisely these absent voices which are rendered present by the process of interpolation, interdiction, and ventriloquism employed by Margery as she dictates her experiences. Thus, superimposed upon the dialogue between Margery Kempe and God, we have a continuous dialogue between herself and her amanuensis in the intimate space of the chamber. These palimpsests of production will eventually result in the birth of a fully realised text, able to be understood by its readers and adhering to a formula which will enable ‘many a man [to] be turnyd to [God] & beleuyn þerin’ (216). As if in recognition of this, during the final chapters of Book 1 when Margery returns to the problem of the Book’s genesis, she likens her conversations with Christ to the way in which ‘on frende xulde spekyn to anoþer’ (214). There is little doubt that her conferences with this priest and the intensive work which they perform together, withdrawn as they are from other human contact for much of the time, has led to this invocation of the intimacy which she has shared with Christ. Now both source and means of dissemination of her mystical insights become conflated and source material and production become one. Margery’s mystical desire, allied to the increasing desire of the priest to record it, provides us with a text which is uniquely oral and one in which script tends to be subsumed by the insistent and overlaying female voice of its author, both as recipient and disseminator. Just as God has said to Margery in the early days of her mystical experiences: ‘I am in þe and þou art in me. And þei þat heryn þe þei heryn þe voys of God’ (23), so Margery’s noisy, uncontrollable body remains the sacred text itself and her disruptive voice the means of its dissemination. Far from failing to authenticate life and text as both Voaden and Dillon have asserted,120 Margery takes the sacred text of the Word determinedly into an unprepared world and disrupts its expectations. Her refusal to remain silent is her ultimate strength and any attempts to silence her voice are equated with trying to silence the multifaceted and mystical voice of God 119 120

John of Salisbury, Metalogicon 1, 13, as cited by Lochrie, Translations, p. 102; quoted and translated by Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, p. 200. Voaden, God’s Words, and Dillon, ‘Holy Women and Their Confessors’.

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himself. Thus, her voice reverberating from the binding of her book is offered as a permanent means to enlightenment so that indeed ‘many a man xal be turnyd to [God] & beleuyn þerin’ (216). In this capacity, we may well be reminded of the words of the immortal Sibyl: Usque adeo mutata ferar nullique videnda, Voce tamen noscar; vocem mihi fata relinquent.121 Even to such changes shall I come. Though shrunk past recognition of the eye, still by my voice shall I be known, for the fates will leave me my voice.

121

Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1958), II, xiv, lines 147–50, p. 152.

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6 Julian of Norwich: Voice of the Wise Woman

This booke is begunne be Gods gift and his grace, but it is not yet performid, as to my syte. (LT, 134)

At the climactic moment as the Long Text draws to a close, Julian of Norwich admits to having experienced a secondary vision ‘xv yer after [the original vision] and more’ (LT, 135). Julian tells us that it was in this secondary revelation (which must have occurred some time during or after 1388) that she was made privy to the crucial and transforming insight that ‘love was our lords mening’ (LT, 135), and it is an insight which crowns the entire Long Text and brings it to its close: And I saw ful sekirly in this and in all, that ere God made us he lovid us; which love was never slakid, no never shall. And in this love he hath don all his werke; and in this love he hath made all things profitable to us; and in this love our life is everlestand. In our making we had beginning; but the love wherin he made us was in him from withoute begynning; in which love we have our beginning. And all this shall be seen in God without end. (LT, 135)

In his examination of this passage, Watson has pointed out its similarity in tone and content to the wholly undeveloped allusions to divine love which appear at the end of the Short Text, a correlation which suggests that both passages originate from this secondary insight dating from the late 1380s.1 Indeed, it is highly likely that it was this overarching insight that necessitated the complete reworking and rethinking of the original material, resulting in the production of the Long Text. It is therefore significant that the Short Text ends with an unusually incongruous passage which follows on from what appears to be a natural point of closure occurring half way through Chapter 23 where Julian adopts what is normally a traditional ending for religious treatises, ‘Amen par charyte’ (ST, 75).2 Following this attempt at closure,

1 2

Watson, ‘Composition’, pp. 665–72. For examples of similar endings in contemporary texts, see, for example, the ‘Legend of St Euphrosyne’, in C. Horstman (ed.), The Smaller Vernon Collection of Legends (1878), pp. 174–82, which ends ‘God graunte vs þat hit so be! Amen, amen for charite’. In another

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Julian then uncharacteristically proceeds to digress at this very late stage and introduces several new strands which do not sit happily in a text which is otherwise measured, balanced and skilfully crafted. Similarly discordant are the metaphysical questions incorporated within these strands such as: ‘What er we?’ and ‘What is alle in erthe that twynnes vs?’ (ST, 76). Moreover, the author then attempts somewhat unsuccessfully to integrate these questions into a summary of her text’s primary assertions, using such phrases as ‘as I hafe sayde before’, and ‘I haffe sayde as I sawe’, no doubt hoping to resolve this unhappy marriage between what appears to be the natural conclusion of the Short Text and the subsequent introduction of new material. What we are left with is the image of a writer struggling with an enforced reassessment of her material due to some additional insight, which in turn has transformed the entire meaning of her work. In this context, therefore, the intrusive ‘Amen par charyte’ is not just the simple, formulaic phrase which it at first appears to be. In fact, it heralds a wholly new and transformative insight which is indeed based on the concept of ‘charyte’, but it is a charity which is now heavily imbued with a transcendent and transformative divine love. In the final pages of the Short Text the enormity of this new insight becomes clear and it contrasts radically with the preoccupation with sin which has characterised this version up until this point: ‘luffe was moste schewed to me, that it is moste nere to vs alle, and of this knawynge er we moste blynde’ (ST, 77). Julian’s insight into the centrality of divine love has inadvertently underlined for her her own ‘blindness’ in not having grasped this central concept before and thus she will embark upon a wholly new text with a newly restored perception. Such a blindness in the face of God’s love, therefore, can be read initially as autobiographical and as prefiguring Julian’s own intellectual movement from a somewhat naïve desire to gain experience through imitation of Christ’s suffering (in the Long Text Julian stresses that this desire was ‘in youth’; LT, 2) towards a far more mature wisdom and insight than is evidenced in the Short Text.3 In addition, the flash of understanding brought about by this late and supplementary vision serves to transform not only her exegesis of the earlier

3

late fifteenth-century manuscript, MS Ashmolean, 61, in which there appears a version of Ipotis we find similar words unequivocally creating closure: ‘Amen, amen fore charyte! God grante vs þat it so be! Here endys þis talking’. The ending of The Book of Margery Kempe also adheres to this pattern: ‘worschepyd be God. Amen’ (p. 247) as do the ‘Prayers of the creature’ which appear after the Book’s narrative closure: ‘I pray þe, Lord, grawnt hem for þe multitude of þi mercy. Amen’ (p. 254). When I refer to Julian’s ‘youth’, ‘middle age’, ‘old age’ in this chapter I do so advisedly because of the relative nature of the terminology and the variety of interpretations possible in different contexts. For example, in The Book of Margery Kempe, Christ refers to Margery as ‘het but hong’ (87), although she is in her early forties. For Julian, however, her ‘youth’ is quite clearly more identified with early womanhood. I am grateful to the general discussions which arose during the Gender and Medieval Studies conference, Gender and Life-Cycle, at Canterbury, January 2000, for clarifying my thinking on these issues. For more detailed information on the definitions of childhood, youth and adolescence in the Middle Ages see Hanawalt, Childhood in the Middle Ages.

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visions but also her fundamental knowledge of God, thus provoking the need for an entirely new text, a life’s work mediated by this transformed understanding. In this sense, the narrative voice contained within both versions of Julian’s experiences must be regarded as one which was modified over the course of an entire adult lifetime, the latter part of which was spent within the stone walls of the anchorhold, which location, in turn, facilitated this radical and new reappraisal of the original mystical utterance.

Cave and Anchorhold: The Presence of the Absent Body The legacy of the anchoritic tradition and its importance to Julian as a writer was something I examined briefly in Chapter 2. Similarly, the previous chapter argued for the tradition of the ancient Sibyl as being one which helps to cast some light upon the type of gynaecentric authority available to female mystics and writers in their attempts to validate the public, sometimes prophetic, female utterance. What has not yet been considered, however, is the influence that the tradition of sibylline prophecy may have had upon anchoritism as it emerged in the later Middle Ages (and as inherited by Julian), and how it goes some way to offer an explanation for the appeal of the enclosed way of life for women like Julian.4 Although best known for her high-profile prophetic excess and ecstasis, as we have seen, like the anchoress the Sibyl was most frequently represented as a sedentary and solitary figure. Depictions of the Erythraean Sibyl and the Almathaean Sibyl which appear in the text Des Cleres Femmes, a late medieval French translation of Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris, as found in London, British Library MS Royal 20 C V, present both sibyls as sitting alone at their desks, each with a script before them.5 The Erythraean Sibyl is engrossed in the writing down of her pronouncements onto a scroll whilst the Almathaean Sibyl, represented as a more aged woman, is reading from a series of books. Both women, however, are wholly enclosed in a room of darkness, and in the case of Almathaea, wrapped up tightly in wimple and veil, representations which would probably have summoned up images of anchoritic enclosure for a contemporary audience.6 The most memorable representation of the Sibyl, however (and one which pertains most closely to my argument here), was that immortalised by Ovid in Book XIV of the widely disseminated Metamorphoses.7 Here, we find a deeply 4 5 6

7

For a more detailed discussion of this possible appeal and how it relates to Julian, see my essay, ‘Redemption of the Monstrous Female Body’. London, British Library MS Royal 20 C V, fol. 23v and fol. 38v. The author of Ancrene Wisse does not prescribe wimpling for his anchoresses but instead leaves it to their own preferences (p. 215). He does, however, insist upon a head covering of some sort. Ovid, Metamorphoses, II, xiv, pp. 309–11.

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enigmatic depiction of the ancient Cumaean Sibyl whose tragic and prophetic voice emerges insistently from the womb-like depths of the cave of Phoebus Apollo. In Ovid’s account (from which the quotation at the end of the previous chapter is taken) the Sibyl laments the deterioration of her youthful beauty and her descent into decrepit old age within that gloomy and dustridden cave. Ovid recounts how the Sibyl, after being seduced by the promise of Phoebus Apollo to bestow upon her eternal life in return for her sexual favours, had foolishly demanded as many years as there were grains of sand beneath her feet. However, in her youthful ignorance and naïvety she failed to ask also for eternal youth. Hence, seven generations later when visited by Aeneas, she has yet another three hundred years to live, during which time her wizened body will shrink to the size of a man’s palm. Poignantly she foresees her own approaching invisibility: Tempus erit, cum de tanto me corpore parvam longa dies faciet, consumptaque membra senecta ad minimum redigentur onus.8 The time will come when length of days will shrivel me from my full form to but a tiny thing and my limbs, consumed by age, will shrink to a feather’s weight.

The Sibyl’s once youthful and seductive body will gradually occupy a diminishing space, crumbling into insignificance to become, finally, nothing. What will remain, however, is her authoritative and disembodied prophetic voice, a permanent testimony to her life and destined to reverberate through time: ‘voce tamen noscar’ (by my voice shall I be known). A classic tale of tragedy and metamorphosis as this is, ostensibly the story of the downfall of an inexperienced and desirable young woman effected by an all-powerful god, the powerful sociological subtext nevertheless adheres to a traditional topos everywhere apparent in the Metamorphoses (and in much medieval literature, as we have seen) of a dangerously irrepressible and potent female orality which resists all attempts to curtail and contain it. It is, perhaps, the same female voice about which in more modern times Hélène Cixous has said, ‘[it] never stops . . . [r]esonating . . . [and] retains the power of moving us . . . [and] draws her story into history’.9 Long after her sexual and potentially procreative body has dissolved into dust, however, the voice of the Cumaean Sibyl remains, insisting upon its own articulation and its place within history. Youthful idealism and inexperience have eventually paved the way towards wisdom, prescience and divine inspiration, all of which ultimately combine to transcend her disappearing female body. Moreover, the loss of her feminine beauty and seductive charms allows for the 8 9

Ovid, Metamorphoses, II, xiv, p. 310. Cixous, ‘Laugh of the Medusa’, p. 251.

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establishment of a potent and significantly more enduring female knowledge, and thus constitutes an alternative tradition of vocal female empowerment which found its way into the ethos of late medieval anchoritism – and the writing of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich in particular. Thus, in Julian’s terms, the ‘blyndhede’ of her youthful ignorance and idealism now weathers into the wisdom of maturity, and in the powerfully enigmatic figure of the Cumaean Sibyl we are able to recognise a precursor to the wise and contemplative anchoress of the Middle Ages for whom, ‘ripe wordes lates ripe & werkes bilimpeð’ (mature words, mature behaviour and acts are appropriate).10 Like the Cumaean Sibyl too, Julian’s anchoritic life constitutes figuratively a living death, albeit one which has been voluntarily invoked in order to attain wisdom through contemplation. Stone walls similarly hide her aging body from the outside world, whilst the dusty earth of the floor beneath her feet serves in the same way to remind her of her own mortality. Again according to Ancrene Wisse the anchoress ‘schulden schrapien euche dei þe eorðe up of hare put þat ha schulien rotien in. Godd hit wat þat put deð much god moni ancre’11 (should, each day, scrape up the earth of their graves in which they will rot. God knows the grave does a lot of good to many an anchoress). Yet, like the Sibyl, the articulation of the anchoress’s wisdom will not be suppressed. Although invisible and withdrawn behind wall, curtain and veil, nevertheless she is permitted to articulate divine truth and mystical insight, both of which are understood by means of a mature wisdom. Consequently, elsewhere in this text the degree to which the anchoress is invisible is explicitly dependent upon her age: ‘Na wepmon ne chastie he ne edwiten him his unþeaw . . . Halie alde ancres hit mahe don summes weis ah hit nis nawt siker þing ne ne limpeð nawt to hunge’12 (Do not preach to any man and do not reproach him for his fault . . . Old and holy anchoresses may do it in certain ways, but it is not a safe or appropriate thing for young ones). For this author it is the aging process itself which makes a woman gradually less visible and the crumbling to dust of the Cumaean Sibyl, of course, stands as a poignant metaphor for this type of disintegration both as body and as beauty. Yet, for the author of Ancrene Wisse, such a disintegration ultimately renders the aging anchoress altogether less threatening to men than her younger, youthful sisters and his insistent proscription against her speaking to men from her location of enclosure becomes much more flexible as she ages. The aging anchoress is therefore offered an opportunity by this physical and social construction of invisibility to speak out and to be heard – and to be associated with a sought-after wisdom. In suggesting that the aged anchoress provides less of a threat and is herself less likely to be threatened under these circumstances, the author of 10 11 12

Ancrene Wisse, p. 59. Ancrene Wisse, p. 62. Ancrene Wisse, p. 38.

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Ancrene Wisse seems to be recognising a type of sanctity which fills the fissure left by the disappearing body and which can be articulated legitimately by means of a disembodied voice. By colluding in the construction of its own absence therefore, the anchoress’s body is in a position to exploit that absence and the resultant influx of spiritual wisdom – a wisdom which can then be articulated by the female voice without the usual impediments. In effect, voice is able to subsume problematic body and refocus attention on orality rather than corporeality. It was just such a recognition of the potential housed within the aging body for an exploitation of a newly authoritative female voice which characterised the latter stages of The Book of Margery Kempe, as we have seen, and may inadvertently go a little way towards explaining the intriguing popularity of the anchoritic life for women in the later Middle Ages. The question remains, however, to what extent was Julian of Norwich also able to employ and exploit such attitudes towards the aging woman in order to ensure the lasting efficacy of her own voice?

Youth versus Experience: Body Problematics and the Prophetic Female Voice Unlike Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich makes very little use of overtly prophetic topoi in her texts, and she is generally considered to have no interest in forging for herself a persona as prophetic visionary along the lines of her other contemporaries such as Birgitta of Sweden or Catherine of Siena.13 Whereas for these other mystics, self-establishment as divine conduit is one of the foremost considerations of their narratives, for Julian it seems to have been the process of intellectualisation and exegetical analysis of the visionary material which was of primary concern. Both approaches to the dissemination of the mystical utterance, however, are subject to the same problematic paradox, as Voaden has pointed out in the context of Birgitta and Margery Kempe.14 Firstly, the female mystic is compelled to articulate and publicise the Word in a highly audible voice, but in order to be successfully heard and understood she is also required to erase her distracting and problematic body from her discourse. In the context of Margery Kempe, however, I have argued for a measure of success in her self-representation as prophetic wise woman

13

14

Apart from Voaden, God’s Words, on Birgitta’s prophetic authority, see Claire L. Sahlin, ‘Gender and Prophetic Authority in Birgitta of Sweden’s Revelations’, in Jane Chance (ed.), Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages (Gainesville, 1996), pp. 69–95. On Catherine of Siena see Suzanne Noffke (trans.), Catherine of Siena: The Dialogue (London, 1980), Introduction, pp. 1–22. For an examination of the political influence of Catherine of Siena from her perspective as marginal woman, see Thomas Luango, ‘Catherine of Siena: Rewriting Female Holy Authority’, in Lesley Smith and Jane Taylor (eds), Women, the Book and the Godly (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 89–111. Voaden, God’s Words.

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in spite of, or even because of, an insistence from the very outset of her text that voice is body and body is voice. For Julian too, whilst aware of the body’s potentially distracting presence, her non-dualistic approach to her material nevertheless insists upon that presence in her texts as a central and vital hermeneutic, as has been demonstrated. Thus, the long process of Julian’s textual production can be examined in terms of a transference of that body from the forefront of text to a position of immanence within it. In other words, it goes underground. In this way she is able to effectively prioritise voice over body and body over voice where necessary – but without eradicating either. At the time when Julian would have been embarking upon the Long Text in the early 1390s, the works of her continental forbears (and those who adhere most closely to Voaden’s paradigm of the ‘disappearing visionary’) were just becoming available in England and it is now considered possible that they could have had some influence upon Julian’s spirituality and her decision to write down her experiences.15 Thus, Julian’s famous Short Text caveat ‘for I am a woman, leued, febille, & freylle’ (ST, 48) can be read as, amongst other things, a wholly self-conscious attempt to deprioritise body in favour of voice at a very early point in her writing career. To obliterate the body, of course, it must first be visible, and such a highly unsubtle attempt at erasure as this comprises serves only to re-emphasise its presence in the discourse and offer it an even clearer profile. Evidently aware of this paradoxical situation, Julian further embroils herself in confusion, again addressing her projected audience directly: ‘if itte be welle and trewlye takyn . . . [t]han schalle he sone forgette me that am a wrecche’ (ST, 49). In other words, if her audience puts its trust in her voice, then it will forget about the presence of her intrusive and distracting body – and the use of the word ‘wrecche’ here serves to highlight the inadequacy of both the body and the imperfect spirit deemed to be within. Yet, in drawing attention to this problematised body in this way, it is, of course, automatically reprioritised. Thus, even in the early days of her writing career, it would appear that Julian is aware of the traditional problematics presented by both female body and voice, and here appears to be unsure about how best to proceed in a self-representation which includes both secretary of God, and undeniably physical, visionary woman. Thus, in the Long Text Julian seems to have made a highly conscious effort to depersonalise the original material in an attempt to make it less subjective and to render it relevant to all her readers. In other words, the problem inherent within her initial representation of a bodily self who occupies a primary position at the forefront of the Short Text is one which she sets out to rectify from the start of the Long Text.

15

Baker points this out in Julian of Norwich’s Showings, p. 167, n. 6. Similarly Watson, although at pains to emphasise the differences between the continental and insular traditions of female visionary experiences, allows for the fact that the contemporaneous influx of this material and its circulation in Julian’s geographical area placed her in the ideal location for early notice of this tradition (‘Composition’, pp. 652–7).

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In this context, it is significant that both texts begin with an overtly gendered representation of her own vulnerable body in her detailed account of her youthful desires and of the dangerous illness which she experienced some years later, as we have seen. However, if we re-examine the latter episode as recounted in the Long Text what we find is an effective paradigm for the reconciliation of the paradox of bodily presence and absence within the mystical text. As we have seen, Julian’s illness is characterised by developing paralysis and lack of sensation (‘my body was dede fro the middis downewards’; LT, 4) until her body becomes wholly inactive and impotent – in effect, absent from feeling. In its absence, however, it is at its most insistently present because of Julian’s consciousness of that very absence of feeling. In its inability to feel or to move, Julian’s body is both there and not there. Encased within this simultaneously absent and present body, Julian’s voice is also apparently silenced, but at the same time it is in fact bursting and exploding into mystical utterance. Later, through the act of writing, that same voice will experience a re-embodiment and permanence of expression, and in this way Julian’s experience of body and no-body will develop into a paradigm for her physical and textual embodiment of the Word. In effect, it will provide the key for the production of a final and definitive text in which there will also be body and no-body. Now the female body will become less explicit and more implicit, and in becoming less visible – moving ‘underground’ as it were – it will take up a position as hermeneutic to ultimately facilitate the explication and interpretation of its own prophetic voice. In this way, self and body will eventually be superseded by the insistent and increasingly confident voice of the mystic, and the physical paralysis which dominates the early stages of the Long Text will allow body to take on the role of exegetical tool rather than constitute the distracting focus of the reader’s attention. It is therefore highly likely that another of Julian’s purposes in embarking on the Long Text almost as soon as the Short Text drew to an end was to resolve this paradox of the ever-present female body and attempt its complete integration into, rather than eradication from, the text. Thus the female body remains implicitly immanent in the Long Text because it is no longer deemed by a more mature and insightful Julian to be threatening or occluding. Indeed, it now rests comfortably within the text as a subtle epistemological presence which offers support to the newly prioritised insights of the maturing mystic. In many ways, Julian’s treatment of prophetic discourse is similarly problematised. How can she reveal her prophetic insights without transforming them into subjective – and thus limited – pronouncements? As we have seen in the case of Margery Kempe, it is very easy to misinterpret female prophecy as an attempt to achieve personal aggrandisement and self-empowerment by an otherwise marginalised member of the community. This dichotomy, of course, was one of the primary reasons for the development of the ecclesiastical doctrine of discretio spirituum in the Middle Ages which demanded the 212

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absent body, and the absent body of the female in particular, and it is a doctrine with which Julian was evidently intensely familiar, as her sound advice to Margery Kempe would testify:16 What creatur þat hath þes tokenys [gift of tears] he muste stedfastlych belevyn þat þe Holy Gost dwellyth in hys sowle. And mech mor, whan God visyteth a creatur wyth terys of contrisyon, deuosyon, er compassyon, he may & owyth to leuyn þat þe Holy Gost is in hys sowle. (42–3)

When Julian offered these words of comfort to Margery Kempe in 1413 she was in her early seventies and, self-evidently, her words resonate with confidence, assuredness and the mature wisdom of someone who has mused on these issues over the course of a long lifetime (‘þe ancres was expert in swech thyngys & good cownsel cowd heuyn’; 42 ). From her own texts, however, it is clear that Julian was not always so well acquainted with the fundamental purposes of prophetic insight and grace, and one episode in particular, recounted in both texts, serves to illustrate the dangers of abusing the gift of prophecy. Immediately following her well-known exposition in of God’s optimistic revelation to her in her Short Text account, ‘I may make alle thynge wele’ (ST, 63), Julian describes what initially seems to be an impulsive attempt to apply this insight to her own subjective and personal desires. In a moment of self-revelation she attempts to exploit her privileged subject position as prophetic conduit by questioning God about the specific welfare of a personal female friend or family member: ‘I desyred of a certayne person that I lovyd howe it schulde be with hire’ (ST, 64). Unlike Margery Kempe’s God, however, who is always ready to oblige his chosen spouse’s personal requests in such matters, Julian’s God, whilst not quite offering a rebuke, is nevertheless unequivocal in his instruction as to the true value of prophetic discourse: ‘Take it generally, and behalde the curtayssy of thy lorde god as he schewes it to the, for it is mare worschippe to god to behalde hym in alle than in any specyalle thyng’ (ST, 64). What is of particular importance here is the nature of Julian’s reaction to this quasi-admonishment. In the light of God’s instruction to her that her insights are to be for the long-term general good, rather than for instant gratification of personal curiosity, Julian’s response is to feel deeply chastened about her own intrusive naïvety and lack of understanding: ‘Hyf I schulde do wysely eftyr this techynge, I schulde nought be glad for nathynge in specyalle, na desesed for na manere of thynge’ (ST, 64). As if to excuse this early lack of insight she qualifies her desire to know the fate of her friend thus: ‘in this desyre I lettyd myselfe, for I was noght taught in this tyme’ (ST, 64). Julian is quick to learn that the gift of prophetic insight is

16

Voaden, God’s Words, pp. 127–8. Here Voaden demonstrates the extent to which Margery’s interview with Julian is characterised by Julian’s use of the discourse of discretio spirituum.

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wholly irrelevant without the gift of wisdom, and that wisdom is unattainable without teaching and learning from God’s example. Moreover, such wisdom is acquired with experience and contemplation over time. In her self-depiction in this episode the author is a flawed young woman asking God about the welfare of another woman whom she loves and utterly lacks the seasoned wisdom which she has evidently attained in her old age as demonstrated both in the Long Text as well as in her encounter with Margery Kempe. In time too she will come to realise that, indeed, ‘al shal be wele’ – both in the particular sense and in the general. Not only that, but she will be able to recontextualise, utilise and apply her own subjective experiences to her later text in order to make sense of initially obscure eschatological concepts which in turn will become clearer as her wisdom develops in maturity. Perhaps now we can see the full complexity of Julian’s dramatic representation in both texts of her own immature and impetuous desire for illness and how its function alters over time. Initially offering a mere context to her mystical experiences, by the end of the Long Text it has come to stand in for the nature of prophetic insight itself. Although an apparent – and simplistically formulaic – fulfilment of Julian’s prophetic desire for illness is very quickly established for her readers in both texts, in the Short Text it is nevertheless presented initially more in terms of unwitting foresight than genuine prophetic ability (‘This sekenes desyrede I yn my Hought þat y myght have it whene I were threttye Heere eelde’; ST, 40), and its fulfilment is almost as coincidental (‘Ande when I was thryttye wyntere alde and a halfe, god sente me a bodelye syekenes’; ST, 41). It is only when viewed through the distancing lens of retrospect – that is to say, the perspective of the Long Text – that the full import of the prophetic announcement and the pivotal role it has taken on can be appreciated. Now Julian begins to recognise that the true prophetic fulfilment of this episode lies far beyond the mere onset of illness. If, as Julian has begun to appreciate, experience is a precursor to the development of wisdom and an essential support to mystical insight, this experience of illness and subsequent visionary encounter forms a mere beginning to, rather than a fulfilment of, prophetic enlightenment. Rather than fulfilling the immature request of a young girl to experience an ascetic illness in order to increase her pious understanding of God, in fact the onset of illness immediately precipitates a desire in Julian to stay alive in order to fulfil what she is already beginning to recognise as the crux of the true prophetic announcement: ‘I was ryght sarye & lothe thouht for to dye . . . fore I walde hafe lyevede to have lovede god better and lange tyme, that I myght, by the grace of that lyevynge, have the more knowynge and lovynge of god in the blysse of hevene’ (ST, 41). For Julian, the onset of her illness offers her her first mature insight: that life is precious because its continuation allows the devoted Christian to strive for a deeper understanding of God’s love. To die without achieving that insight would be to cut short the prophetic consummation rather than to experience it in its entirety. Thus, it is not without considerable anxiety that the already 214

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less naïve young woman demands of God: ‘Goode lorde, maye my lyevynge be no langere to thy worshippe?’ (ST, 40).17 It is now becoming clear that the central prophecy with which Julian begins her texts is located not in the desire for and achievement of illness, quasi-death and visionary experience, but in the visionary’s survival of those experiences which, in turn, will lead to the attainment of wisdom and a greater knowledge of God over the course of a long and privileged lifetime. No doubt, it is for this reason that the equivalent passage in the Long Text provides us with a much more matter-of-factual account which is almost entirely devoid of the uncritical youthful idealism foregrounded in the Short Text. This time, Julian implicitly stresses her immature naïvety as a ‘simple creature’ whose request was made ‘in youth’ (LT, 4). Similarly, as we have seen, the youthful Saint Cecelia is also eradicated from this version, no longer as significant a role model for the now mature and selfconfident woman of the 1390s. The result of this shift is that the Long Text account of this early prophetic experience implicitly points towards its own ongoing fulfilment because of the chronological distance between the experience itself and this moment of definitive documentation. As a result, it is rendered proleptic: its author is recording a prophetic episode from her inexperienced and unpracticed youth, but is representing it from the privileged vantagepoint of full knowledge and understanding of its continued fulfilment. In this way, the episode both prefigures and effects Julian’s growth from a ‘febille & freylle’ young woman to one who ‘lered that it is mare wyrschippe to god to behalde hym in alle’ (LT, 64). In effect, Julian’s very act of articulation of this perpetual prophetic announcement and its ongoing fulfilment, emerging as it does from her location of enclosure, serves to transform Julian into sibylline wise woman whose voice has indeed been privileged by God. Thus, Julian becomes fully incorporated within a tradition of female embodiment of the Logos, and re-emerges in the Long Text as fully fledged figure of sapience. It is in this role that she is finally able to offer living proof to her ‘evencristen’ that God and his wisdom are immanent in all things and in all beings, and it is such a bodily immanence which she then proceeds to translate into the textual body of her narrative. In so doing, the divine message contained within her prophetic voice is simultaneously performed for her readers and ‘not yet performid’, each new reading perpetuating the ongoing and cyclical (re)enactment of the reciprocity of divine love.

17

For an interesting investigation of Julian’s use of the phrase ‘our good lord’ in her writing see Alexandra Barratt, ‘Julian of Norwich and the Holy Spirit: “Our Good Lord” ’, in Mystics Quarterly 28, 2 (June 2002), pp. 78–84. Here Barratt argues for the phrase as possibly having a bearing on Julian’s class position, of which we know very little. She suggests that Julian’s positive use of the phrase as metaphor would come naturally to a woman belonging to the country gentry. Barratt also posits that Julian’s metaphoric use of this phrase could also suggest that the Motherhood of God conceptualisation is equally metaphorical and should be perhaps taken as such (p. 83).

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‘Wintering into Wisdom’:18 Sapiential Theology and the Female Voice Julian’s growth towards maturity and wisdom which is evidenced throughout her writing is usefully examined in the context of yet another important tradition within the Christian Church – one which is also in dialogue with sibylline tradition and which was again able to offer women a positive example of the contribution of the prophetic female voice. The so-called ‘sapiential’ writings of the Old Testament constitute a body of writing which remains remarkable for its contradictory feminine imagery within texts which take as their ostensible subject the omnipotence of a masculine, patriarchal deity.19 In the Book of Ecclesiasticus, for example, the aspect of God consistently referred to as ‘Wisdom’ (Hokhmah) is represented as an autonomous female who is both wise and voluptuous: Approach me, you who desire me, And take your fill of my fruits, For memories of me are sweeter than honey.20

In these books – which incorporate images of sexual union in the Song of Songs tradition – Wisdom is depicted as offering her wisdom (and herself as its embodiment) to humankind as moral guidance. Frequently she takes on the role of Bride of God and becomes the ethical and physical guide to God’s followers. What is significant, however, is that within this tradition this figure always remains separate from the aspect of God of which she is a part, retaining a distinct – and indisputably female – persona. Recent studies have begun to uncover the considerable importance of this ancient concept of female-identified Wisdom – translated into Greek as ‘Sophia’ and subsequently into Latin as ‘Sapientia’21 – for the understanding of the patterns of early Christianity which left their mark on the religious thinking of the later Middle Ages.22 The hypostatisation and personification 18 19

20 21

22

‘Awræc wintrum frod’, C. L. Wrenn (ed.), Beowulf (London, 1973), lines 1722–24, p. 161. For an interesting overview of Sapiential theology see Marina Warner, ‘Lady Wisdom’, in Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (London, 1985), pp. 177–209. For a more detailed approach see James Wood, Wisdom Literature: An Introduction (London, 1967); Joseph Blenkinsop, Wisdom and Law in the Old Testament and the Ordering of Life in Israel and Early Judaism (Oxford, 1995); R. J. Clifford, The Wisdom Literature (Nashville, 1998). Ecclesiasticus 24: 19–20. For purposes of this chapter, I have chosen to use the Latin term ‘Sapientia’, primarily because this is the term used in the Vulgate Bible with which Julian would probably have been familiar. William R. Schoedel documents how ancient Jewish wisdom left its mark upon the sayings attributed to Christ in the canonical Gospels and thus passed into mainstream Christianity, in ‘Jewish Wisdom and the Formation of the Christian Ascetic’, in Robert L. Wilken (ed.), Aspects of Wisdom in Judaism and Early Christianity (Notre Dame, Indiana, 1975), pp. 169–99.

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of the concept of wisdom in Jewish wisdom literature (such as the canonical Book of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and The Wisdom of Solomon and the noncanonical Ecclesiasticus) was to have a marked effect upon the progress of Christology and early Christian thought, particularly as Christ himself also came to be identified with this female figure.23 It is also likely that the authority invested in this figure was a result of her being conflated with the ancient Judaic tradition of the male Sophos, to which her Greek name would also attest.24 The figure of the Sophos incorporated both sage and teacher and combined practical common sense and prudence with a detailed knowledge of the Old Testament stories and teachings. Similarly, he would gather around him a group of pupils whom he was able to instruct in the moral and religious values essential for good living. Moreover, the Sophos undertook a street ministry which was entirely legitimate,25 and was differentiated from his peers by the way he walked, the way he spoke and the way he dressed.26 Like the female tradition of the ancient Sibyl, he was at the same time part of and set apart from the people, and his knowledge was similarly both of this world and otherworldly. What is significant in this context is that Wisdom appears to have been a concept which had long been associated with inspiration by the divine Logos in association with learning and common sense. Crucially too, it could be represented as both masculine and feminine. Emerging as it did in different guises in a wide variety of religions and cultures over a period of time, it finally came to rest in western Christianity in the female figure of Sapientia, who was nevertheless still an aspect of an essentially masculine trinitarian God. It is such an overlaying of the feminine upon the masculine, of course, which also characterises Julian’s own depiction of the Trinity, as we have seen. It is therefore wholly appropriate that this ambiguous figure should make her veiled appearance within Julian’s texts as a means of increasing and explicating the author’s mystical understanding of Christ’s feminine aspects and, in so doing, authorise her own role as female visionary, as I shall demonstrate. The western tradition of Sapientia depicts her as intensely female and vociferous, calling out in an unprecedented way in the public places as did the male Sophos within Judaic tradition (and, indeed, invoking images of Margery Kempe at the height of her own vociferous ministry). Proverbs 8, for example, characterises Sapientia as a female street-preacher who is 23

24

25 26

For an analysis of the influence of sapiential theology upon medieval theologians, and in particular on the visions of Hildegarde of Bingen, see Newman, Sister of Wisdom, especially pp. 42–5. For an account of the influence of the figure of the Sophos on early Christology, see James M. Robinson, ‘Jesus as Sophos and Sophia: Wisdom Tradition and the Gospels’, in Wilken, Aspects of Wisdom, pp. 1–16. Robinson, ‘Jesus as Sophos’, p. 2. See also J. Reiling, Hermas and Christian Prophecy: A Study of the Eleventh Mandate (Leiden, 1973), pp. 8–11. Wilken, Aspects of Wisdom, Introduction, p. xvi.

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attempting to call people to their senses, exhorting them to listen out for the Word of God: Does not wisdom call out? Does not understanding raise her voice? On the heights along the way, where the paths meet, she takes her stand; beside the gates leading into the city, at the entrances, she cries aloud: ‘To you, O men, I call out; I raise my voice to all mankind. You who are simple, gain prudence; you who are foolish, gain understanding. Listen, for I have worthy things to say; I open my lips to speak what is right. My mouth speaks what is true, for my lips detest wickedness. All the words of my mouth are just; none of them is crooked or perverse. To the discerning all of them are right; they are faultless to those who have knowledge.’27

In this biblical account, the voice of the prophetic woman is central and – again like Margery Kempe – entirely irrepressible. Instead of lies pouring from her lips, as was the case in other biblical traditions such as that of garrulous Eve or duplicitous Delilah, she utters a truth reminiscent of sibylline prophecy, only discernable to those who have knowledge of how to receive it. What is more, she is compelled to call out that truth unashamedly in the street, in spite of the fact that in reality women were utterly proscribed from this type of public behaviour. What is important here is that this street ministry later came to be identified with Christ’s public ministry and his own role as sage, as teacher and as embodiment of his father’s Wisdom, an identification which again allowed female access to a particularly empowering expression of imitatio Christi. This theological endorsement of the feminine was further increased by the fact that in the days of the early Christian Church the figure of Sapientia had also become conflated with Ecclesia or Mother Church.28 Although concerted attempts were made during the patristic period to suppress her celebratory femininity in the interests of a developing Christology,29 nevertheless during Carolingian times (primarily under the influence of Alcuin’s Mass of the Holy Wisdom) a sapiential cult emerged which became widespread as a result of this votive, the use of which continued in the medieval Church until as late as 1570.30 27 28 29 30

Proverbs 8: 1–9. Warner, Monuments, p. 179. Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. 43. Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 43–4.

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Upon the flowering of Christian mysticism in the West, Wisdom theology was taken up with some enthusiasm and the figure of Sapientia continued to metamorphose into an unmistakably female figure who was able to facilitate a more immediate and personal experience of God for the humble Christian. Most significantly in this context, the most dramatic and fully realised depictions of this female figure flowed from the pens of the female mystics, no doubt speaking to them directly in the same way as the figure of the Sibyl spoke to Christine de Pizan. Such extensive and fully developed depictions of Sapientia as we find in female-authored mystical texts served not only to define the nature of the Godhead, but also the mystic’s own subjectivity in relation to that Godhead. Perhaps the best-known of the female mystics to explicitly adopt the figure of Sapientia in her writing is Hildegarde of Bingen writing in the twelfth century and herself known as the ‘Rhenish sibyl’.31 Hildegarde’s theology is heavily dependent on the figure of Sapientia for its expression. Sometimes she appears in the guise of Caritas with whom she was closely associated and at others she is conflated with the figure of Ecclesia. At all times, however, she is represented as shining, transcendent, beautiful and exuding the power and force of the Logos: I saw the image of a woman of great size . . . She had her head crowned wondrously, and her arms were covered with the long sleeves of a tunic which glistened from heaven right down to the earth . . . I could not look at her garment closely except that I noticed it shone with a very bright peacefulness. Her breasts were surrounded with such splendour that they shone as a reddish dawn full of reddish lightening.32

Newman has argued for the figure of Sapientia as allowing Hildegarde to largely evade the tradition of misogyny which she had inherited, suggesting that, in combination with her knowledge and insight into folk-wisdom, medical lore and motifs from classical mythology, her use of this female figure allowed her to take up herself the position of female prophet within a society which was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the ability of the patriarchal Church to offer leadership.33 It seems more likely, however, that the tradition of Sapientia allowed more for a reconciliation of misogynistic attitudes and possible female empowerment than for the total evasion of antifeminist sentiment as posited by Newman, and in view of the fact that by the time Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe came to writing in the late Middle Ages there had been an upsurge in such misogynistic discourse, their

31 32 33

See Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages, p. 144. See pp. 144–201 for a comprehensive overview of Hildegarde’s writing and her impact upon her peers. Hildegarde of Bingen, Hildegarde von Bingen’s Mystical Visions: Translated from Scivias, trans. Bruce Hozeski (Santa Fe, 1986), p. 97. Newman, Sister of Wisdom, p. 4.

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need for recourse to such figures of female authority had become paramount. Moreover, by this stage both Sapientia and Ecclesia had become increasingly associated with the figure of the Virgin (and, therefore, a wholly redeemed Eve), something which again rendered her the ideal female authority upon which these female mystics could draw for purposes of validation.34 In so doing, each female mystic could not only reinforce her own self-representation as sponsa Christi, but also imbue herself and her potentially dangerous female voice with both biblical and divine authority. Julian’s own absorption of the Wisdom tradition is evidenced in both texts, as I have suggested, but becomes a much more insistent discourse in the Long Text as a product of her growing maturity. At the beginning of Chapter 1 – and no doubt again dependent upon her 1388 insight into the nature of divine love – Julian explicitly associates God with both wisdom and love, telling us: ‘our lord God [is] almighty wisdome, all love, right as verily as he hath made every thing that is’ (LT, 1). Similarly, elsewhere she explicitly associates the Virgin with wisdom. In both texts ‘the wisdam & the trewth of hir [the Virgin’s] sawle’ is associated with her youth and simplicity (‘a sympille creature of his makynge’; ST, 44). However, in the Long Text version Julian insists upon a further contemplation of the Virgin’s youth and simplicity. This time the Virgin is redefined in terms of her possession of a mature and sublime wisdom (‘hey wisdom’; LT, 10) which contrasts with her previous description of her as ‘little waxen above a child’ (LT, 6): ‘Our lord God shewed our lady Saint Mary in the same tyme; that is to mene the hey wisdome and trewth she had in beholding of hir maker so grete, so hey, so mightie and so gode’ (LT, 10). Crucially, this higher, more sublime (and, by implication, more seasoned) wisdom is born not of the Virgin’s motherhood, but of her ability to watch, listen and contemplate the meaning of that motherhood and, by implication, the Word itself. It is such a wisdom which the incarnate Christ will take on in the form of female flesh and which Julian will take on as a mature female visionary who learns over time to similarly watch, listen and contemplate the divine utterance. Julian’s complex adoption of sapiential theology finally comes together in the Long Text during her fully realised Motherhood of God narrative, however. Here the mother, as synecdochal figure of wisdom, is used to incorporate not only the Virgin and Christ, but also Julian herself as writer-visionary giving birth to the wisdom of the mystical text. Now she asserts authoritatively, ‘God is our moder; and that shewid he in all, and namely in these swete words where he seith . . . “I it am: the wisdam of the moderhede” ’ (LT, 96). Elsewhere, she assures us, using her own ‘swete words’: ‘the depe wisdom of the Trinite [is] our moder in whom we arn al beclosid’ (LT, 87). Moreover, like the work of the writer-visionary, this motherhood is specifically a ‘moderhede

34

On this see Newman, Sister of Wisdom, pp. 196–7.

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of werkyng’ (LT, 96). Just as, for Julian, motherhood as constitutes a life-long work, so the achievement of wisdom is a similarly life-long process. Thus, the ‘werkyng’ of motherhood and that of visionary become paradigmatic of the life-long task undertaken by Christ on the behalf of humanity. Julian’s eventual understanding of unitive love, therefore, comes about as a result of a synonymy which she establishes between herself, Christ and the Virgin, who, in their ‘werkyng’ and their ‘moderhede’ embody the wisdom of the Sapiential tradition which is to be disseminated on behalf of the trinitarian God – of whom it is also a part. Typically, however, Julian insists that this embodied wisdom is directed ‘not to hem that be wise’, but to ‘yow that be simple for ese and comfort, for we arn al one in comfort’ (LT, 13). Her wisdom, she tells us (and by implication the wisdom of the entire Trinity) is not for the already enlightened (and it is tempting to read this latter extract as a subtle critique of those male ecclesiastics and theologians who claim insight and wisdom, but whose lack of simplicity and ‘female’ humility separates them from it entirely);35 on the contrary, it is for those like herself who were once naïvely ignorant, but who may now benefit from sharing her mystical insight into the truth of God’s feminine wisdom as disseminated by his mature female representative on earth, by means of her increasingly authoritative female voice. In this context the caveat generally considered to have been inserted by the scribe at the end of the Sloane manuscript’s Long Text36 can be read as a most selfconscious attempt to reappropriate the material from the realm of the feminine and reimpose upon it an orthodox masculine authority: I pray almyty god that this booke com not but to the hands of them that will be his faithfull lovers, and to those that will submitt them to the feith of holy church and obey the holesom vnderstondyng and teching of the men that be of vertuous life, sadde age and profound lernyng; for this revelation is hey divinitye and hey wisdam . . . And thou, to whome this booke shall come, thanke heyley and hartily our saviour Crist Ihesu that he made these shewings and revelations for the. (LT, 135–6)

Intriguingly, the readers of Julian’s text are exhorted to obey the teaching of learned old men, that is to say the very priests and theologians whose claims to wisdom Julian may well have been questioning earlier in her text. What we are left with is the figure of a scribe who rests uncomfortably with Julian’s theology of the feminine and even, perhaps, with the female voice by which it is disseminated. Possibly, then, what we witness here is a very early attempt at suppression, reappropriation or remasculinisation of this gynaecentric

35

36

Robert E. Lerner has pointed out that it is characteristic of medieval prophecy to offer implicit criticism of the ‘unenlightened’ and often obstructive clergy, ‘Medieval Prophecy and Religious Dissent’, Past and Present 72 (1976), pp. 3–24. See, for example, Glasscoe who notes this attribution to the scribe at the end of her edition, p. 143, n. 276.

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text for the male reader. In fact, it could be said that this scribal addendum contains echoes of the initially patronising words of Richard Caister to Margery Kempe about the inability of a woman to be able to sustain a conversation with him for more than ‘an owyr er tweyn in þe lofe of owyr Lord’ (38). Yet, Julian of Norwich occupied over half of her seventy or so years in the contemplation and analysis of the nature of divine love, striving relentlessly for the attainment of a wisdom which she then proceeds to incorporate into the detailed and complex exegesis which comprises the Long Text. Through the medium of text, too, she has enabled others to be equally ‘occupied’ and, in spite of a possible male resistance as represented in the words of this scribe, has, like Margery Kempe, insistently articulated the female voice as being an equally valid medium for the dissemination of God’s salvific love for humankind. Preservation and Dissemination of the Female Voice: Questions of Audience þe ancre þe wearnde an oþer a cwaer ti lane for ha hefde heoneward ward hire bileaue ehe.37 The anchoress who refused to another the loan of a book would have the eye of her faith far away from this.

On 31 July 1429 Christine de Pizan completed the last recorded piece of writing of her life, the Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, a contemporaneous celebration of the life of the French woman hero. Since 1418 when she had been forced to flee Paris upon its capture by the Burgundians, Christine had been living in exile in a walled abbey. She documents this experience in the opening huitain of the Ditié thus: Je, Christine, qui ay plouré XI ans en abbaye close, Ou j’ay tousjours puis demouré Que Charles (c’est estrange chose!) Le filz du roy, se dire l’ose, S’en fouÿ de Paris de tire, par là traison la enclose, Ore à prime me prens à rire.38 I, Christine, who have wept for eleven years in a walled abbey where I have lived ever since Charles (how strange this is!), the king’s son – dare I say it? – fled in haste from Paris, I who have lived enclosed there on account of the treachery, now, for the first time, begin to laugh.

37 38

Ancrene Wisse, p. 127. Angus J. Kennedy and Kenneth Varty (eds), Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, Medium Aevum Monographs, n.s. IX (Oxford, 1977), p. 28.

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In so doing, Christine de Pizan establishes her voice as emerging not only from the invisible space of a walled room, but also as being specifically female and autobiographical. For the authority of this poem, both the enclosed female body and disembodied female voice are crucial for the authority which she claims as a woman and as a writer, which enables her to produce one of the only known contemporary celebrations of the French visionary, Jehanne d’Arc.39 The heroism which Christine is celebrating in this poem, however, is far more than that of intense nationalistic fervour or religious conviction (although these are both major elements in the poem); it is primarily to do with its embodiment within a young woman (‘Une fillette de XVI ans’). The sex of the poem’s protagonist is of primary importance to the poem’s impact and the impulse of its writer to compose it. Presented as a historical chronicle of ‘truth’, in which a woman usurps the role of a male clerk to record another woman’s usurpation of the male role of soldier, each woman lends to the other an indisputable authority which is celebrated by the author in her declaration: Hee! Quel honneur au femenin Sexe! Que Dieu l’ayme il appeert, Quant tout ce grant peuple chenin, Par qui tout le regne ert desert, Par femme est sours et recouvert, Ce que Cm hommes fait n’eussent, Et les traictres mis à desert! A peine devant ne le creussent.40 Oh! What honour for the female sex! It is perfectly obvious that God has special regard for it when all these wretched people who destroyed the whole kingdom – now recovered and made safe by a woman, something that five thousand men could not have done – and the traitors have been exterminated. Before the event they would scarcely have believed this possible.

This assertion of God’s public inscription of superiority upon a woman’s ability to carry out his will as embodied in the figure of Jehanne, is at the same time directly applicable to the author herself because of her shared female identity with the subject of her poem.41 Thus her celebration of Jehanne d’Arc becomes equally a celebration of the authorial and authoritative female voice, inscribed as it is in her text and fixed there by the assertion in the first lines,

39 40 41

The only other known contemporaneous treatise on Joan of Arc is that attributed to Jean Gerson. Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, p. 34. Kevin Brownlee makes this point in his essay, ‘Structures of Authority in Christine de Pizan’s Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc’, in Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinki (ed.), The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan (New York and London, 1997), pp. 371–90.

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‘Je, Christine’ and in the last huitain, ‘Donne ce Ditié par Christine’. In this way, Christine de Pizan represents herself in this poem not only as clerk, but also as prophetic Sibyl whose voice records Jehanne’s achievements for future generations and as the preserver of the ‘truth’ of female achievement – both that of the French hero, her own as a writer and that witnessed by the long tradition of women achievers who have been marginalised within patriarchal tradition. In effect she establishes herself alongside Jehanne as a ‘mother to think back through’ which, although a concept to which Sheila Delaney has taken some exception,42 nevertheless, as defenders of privileged female access to both word and Word, Jehanne d’Arc and Christine de Pizan explicitly represent what we have recognised in Julian’s texts – the increasingly confident awareness that within the female lies a privileged means of accessing divine Wisdom and love. Not only that, but the female voice, because of its associations with age-old prophetic wisdom, can also provide the ideal medium for the preservation and dissemination of divine truth. If we return to Julian’s writing in this context, in the same way as the addendum at the end of the Long Text attempts to remasculinise the material, the incipit attached to the only extant manuscript of Julian’s Short Text, the so-called ‘Amherst’ manuscript,43 can be examined in terms of a scribal attempt to locate this text within this tradition of female prophetic insight and to establish the femininity of the text: There es a vision schewed by the goodenes of god to a deuoute woman and hir name es Iulyan that is recluse atte Norwyche and hitt ys on lyfe anno domini mellesimo CCCCxiii, in the whilke visyon er fulle many comfortablylle wordes and gretly styrrande to all thaye that desyres to be crystes looverse. (ST, 39)

This scribal addition also serves to lend authority to the notion of textual femininity by means of a close syntactical association between the ‘deuoute woman’ and ‘the goodenes of god’. What is more, the scribe specifically names the author as ‘Iulyan’ and emphasises her status as a living recorder of God’s Word. The correlation here between this strategy and that which we have just examined as employed by Christine de Pizan is self-evident and could well have been added by a scribe who was particularly sympathetic to the notion of an authoritative female voice and its role in recording, announcing and preserving. 42

43

See Sheila Delany’s essay, ‘ “Mothers to think back through”: Who are They? The Ambiguous Example of Christine de Pizan’, in Renate Bomenfeld-Kosinki (ed.), The Selected Writings of Christine de Pizan (New York and London, 1997), pp. 312–28. Here Delaney urges caution against the uncritical adoption of women writers as ‘mothers to think back through’ merely because they were writers. She argues instead that such rolemodels should be carefully selected and an attempt made to understand historically both their successes and their failures. This manuscript is also known as London, MS British Museum Add. 37790.

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Of course, since the Amherst manuscript’s rediscovery in 1909,44 this scribal addition has been valued for providing important biographical evidence about Julian herself, as well as helping us to speculate on possible circulation and audience. Until the time when it was acquired by the British Museum, the existence of the mansucript was only known of through the writing of Francis Blomefield who, in the second volume of his Norfolk published in 1745, made reference to Saint Julian’s church in Norwich and to Julian herself in the following terms: Lady Julian the Ankeress here, was a strict Recluse, and had 2 Servants to attend her in her old Age, Ao 1443. This Woman in those Days, was esteemed one of the greatest Holynesse. The Rev. Mr. Francis Peck, Author of the Antiquities of Stanford, had an old Vellum Mss. 36 4to Pages of which, contain’d an Account of the Visions &c. of this Woman, which begins thus . . .45

Blomefield then proceeds to quote almost verbatim the aforementioned incipit of the Short Text, its close agreement with which, according to Colledge and Walsh, ‘cannot be fortuitous’.46 It is therefore highly likely that the manuscript to which Blomefield alludes is the Amherst manuscript itself. Francis Peck, the then owner of the manuscript, died in 1743 and on the death of his widow in 1758, Peck’s books were sold at auction.47 An old binding of this manuscript, however, still preserves the bookplate belonging to William Constable, and although it is not known how it came into his possession, it is intriguing that some of the daughters of the Constable family had been revered members of the exiled post-Reformation English Benedictine communities at Cambrai and Paris. It was these communities of women which were to prove so important to the preservation and dissemination of the Long Text after the dissolution of the monasteries, as we shall see. Colledge and Walsh, however, consider the acquisition of the manuscript by the Constable family as ‘as remarkable accident (and) no more than that’,48 suggesting a coincidence which seems to me unlikely. As these editors have shown, the first printed version of the Long Text by Serenus de Cressy – a version which was the only witness of Julian’s writing available to scholars for over two hundred years49 – was almost certainly begun when de Cressy was at Paris where he had been sent to the newly founded house of English Benedictine nuns soon after his

44 45

46 47 48 49

For the full account of this manuscript’s history see Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, pp. 10–12. Francis Blomefield, An Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, 5 vols (Fersfield and Lynn, 1739–75), vol. 2, The History of the City and County of Norwich (Norwich, 1745), p. 564, as quoted by Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 11. Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 12. Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 12. Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 12. Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 14. For a description of this manuscript see p. 6.

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ordination in 1651.50 It is also known that one of the two extant truncated versions of the Long Text, known as the Upholland redaction (the other being the Westminster Text to be examined presently)51 was copied by the nuns at Cambrai, and one of its scribes was none other than Barbara Constable who had been professed at Cambrai in 1640.52 Most commentators are also in agreement that Upholland was compiled from the Paris manuscript containing the Long Text, or its source. Colledge and Walsh also speculate from inscription evidence that the Paris manuscript could well have fallen into private hands, having been part of the conventual library of Cambrai or Paris, and indeed present convincing evidence to suggest that the nuns’ libraries at Cambrai and Paris did in fact possess copies of Julian before 1637.53 Etymological evidence would also suggest that the two so-called ‘Sloane’ manuscripts on which Glasscoe’s edition of the Long Text is based54 originated from a religious community, probably located somewhere between the border towns of northern France and the Low Countries.55 It would seem then that the survival of the Long Text in particular was entirely dependent on the English Benedictine nuns of northern France (who comprised, in fact, just the sort of transhistorical and transcultural community of women which Christine de Pizan had envisaged some time before) and, given the web of connections between these communities and the Constable family in England, it seems less of an accident or coincidence that the Short Text should also end up in the hands of this family than Colledge and Walsh consider. As the work of a most singular English female writer whom the exiled female communities of northern France obviously held in high esteem, it would be unlikely if the book-loving Constable family were unaware of the import of the book which they were buying. Indeed, it is more likely that they knew of the existence of Julian’s texts and that the purchase by William Constable in about 1758 was a deliberate one.56 50 51 52 53

54 55 56

Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 13. MS Saint Joseph’s College, Upholland, for a description of which see Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 9. On this see Hywel Owen et al., ‘The Upholland Author’, Downside Review 107, 369 (October 1989), pp. 274–92. An extract from MS Colwich Abbey 18, a work attributed to Dame Margaret Gascoigne of Cambrai and copied at Cambrai in 1650, is bound with a piece of the same office book as that of the Upholland Manuscript and reads, ‘thou hast saide, O Lorde, to a deere childe of thine, Lette me alone, my deare worthy childe, intende . . . to me, I am inough to thee, reioice in thy Sauiour and Saluation (this was spoken to Iulian the Ankress of norw(ich), as appeareth by the booke of her reuelations)’ (as cited in Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 16). Similarly, MS Mazarine 4058, which documents the ‘bookes belonging to the Liberary of the English Benedictine Nunnes of our B. Lady of Good Hope in paris’, records ‘The Reuelations of Sainte Julian’ (A Book of Showings, p. 17). London, MS British Museum Sloane 2499 and London, MS British Museum Sloane 3705. These are popularly known as Sloane 1 and Sloane 2 respectively. Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 16. Dame Barabara Constable, as mentioned above, was professed at Cambrai in 1640; Dame Mary Joseph Constable was professed at Paris in 1695 and died in 1767. Similarly, Dame

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The Amherst manuscript containing the Short Text bears an inscription which records on fol. 33r an early owner as being James Grenehalgh, whom it has been established was working to benefit the female religious house of Syon and other English Carthusian houses.57 Grenehalgh annotated extensively the Amherst manuscript58 and Colledge and Walsh speculate that this manuscript may therefore have been written at Syon’s sister-house of Sheen. These editors also suggest that following the production of the Long Text, this Short Text version might well have been forgotten or suppressed.59 On the other hand, Vincent Gillespie reminds us of the evident keenness amongst the Carthusians for simplified rather than theologically complex texts, a preference which he suggests was ‘very English’.60 Gillespie draws the conclusion that this is a likely reason for their valuing of Julian’s Short Text and even their evident interest in Margery Kempe, whom we know visited Syon on about 29 July 1434.61 There was a close relation between the houses of Sheen and Syon; in particular they seem to have collaborated on the production and circulation of mystical, paramystical and devotional books, often written in the vernacular, during the course of the fifteenth century.62 Of course, if the Short Text had found its way into the library at Syon as did other manuscripts produced by Grenehalgh, written as they were for the special attention of his friend and confidante at Syon, Joanna Sewell,63 then it would be interesting to speculate on whether she could have become acquainted with Julian’s work during a visit there. It is unlikely that evidence will emerge to prove such a connection, but what is evident from the circumstantial jigsaw of association and connection is that Julian’s writing was circulated, disseminated, preserved and copied by communities of women for whom, no doubt, Julian’s inclusive theology of the feminine and her prioritising of the female body and voice would have had a particular affective and intellectual import. As in Christine

57 58

59 60

61 62 63

Frances Sheldon who returned to England on the arrest and release of the Paris community in April 1795, was closely connected to William Constable. On this see Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 12. Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 3. For a detailed description of Grenehalgh’s annotations on this manuscript see Michael G. Sargent, James Grenehalgh as Textual Critic, 2 vols, Analecta Carthusiana 85, 2 (1984), pp. 499–510. Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, p. 11. Vincent Gillespie, ‘Dial M for Mystic: Mystical Texts in the Library of Syon Abbey and the Spirituality of the Syon Brethren’, in Marion Glasscoe (ed.), The English Mystical Tradition in England, Wales and Ireland, Papers read at Charney Manor, July 1999, Exeter Symposium 7, pp. 241–68, p. 262. For further information on the spirituality of Syon, see Roger Ellis, ‘Further Thoughts on the Spirituality of Syon Abbey’, in Pollard and Boenig, Mysticism and Spirituality, pp. 219–43. For a particularly informative essay on the Sheen–Syon connection and the role of the Carthusians in disseminating and preserving mystical texts for the laity, see Cré, ‘Women in the Charterhouse?’ See The Book of Margery Kempe, p. 348, n. 245/31–2, and p. 349, n. 245/31, for information on the importance of the monasteries of Sheen and Syon. Gillespie, ‘Dial M for Mystic’, p. 241. Colledge and Walsh, A Book of Showings, pp. 10–11.

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de Pizan’s assiduous collection of positive images of women, it is likely that for these communities of women Julian spoke to them and their bodies in a way that other more androcentric writers could not. Significantly in this context, we find a similar case emerging with the so-called Westminster redaction of Julian’s Revelations, which until recently had received very little attention in spite of its being the earliest extant witness to the Long Text.64 This redaction seems to be the result of extensive expurgation and editing of the original version and scholars have been generally at odds about to which branch of the Long Text manuscripts it belongs.65 Whatever its origins, however, the Westminster version remains only a partial reproduction of the Long Text, and has generally been considered to be of only minor importance to Julian studies. Very recently, however, Hugh Kempster’s probing article as to its provenance appearing in the McEntire volume of essays, in conjunction with his new edition published in Mystics Quarterly in 1997, has rekindled interest in this text in which the female body is retained as an insistent and active presence, as we shall see.66 Examining the Westminster florilegium as a whole, Kempster suggests an audience which was committed to the newly popular concept of the ‘mixed life’ and to a new type of piety which allowed for a deep level of contemplative spirituality whilst still remaining in the world.67 However, Kempster also suggests that such a highly original and potentially dangerous text as Julian’s, produced as it was by a highly skilled female theologian, would not be able to withstand the stilldominant forces of conservatism and orthodoxy prevalent at this point in the fifteenth century68 and that it would have needed rigorous editing in order to be an acceptable aid for those intent on the mixed life. Kempster therefore 64

65

66

67

68

For an account of the provenance of the Westminster Manuscript, see Hugh Kempster, ‘Julian of Norwich: the Westminster Text of A Revelation of Love’, Mystics Quarterly 23, 4 (December 1997), pp. 177–202. Beer and Glasscoe agree that it appears to belong to the same branch as the Paris manuscript (Beer, Revelations, p. 28; Glasscoe, A Revelation of Divine Love, p. 106). Colledge and Walsh, however, locate it as originating from the same ancestor as the Sloane manuscripts (A Book of Showings, p. 27). Kempster, the most recent editor of the Westminster version, however, argues for the existence of a third distinct branch of provenance for the Long Text, a view which is supported by Watson, who points out that the Westminster text, whilst sometimes preferring the Sloane text to the Paris text, occasionally diverges from both. Not only that, but the Short Text and the Paris text agree against Sloane most of the time, suggesting that the Paris text is actually a more accurate representation of Julian’s original than has previously been considered. Hugh Kempster, ‘A Question of Audience: The Westminster Text and FifteenthCentury Reception of Julian of Norwich’, in McEntire, Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, pp. 257–89. Kempster points out that Archbishop Arundel, once so antipathetic to vernacular religious texts, was to sanction Nicholas Love’s translation of the Meditationes Vitae Christi, written primarily for the laity and which specifically acknowledges the ‘mixed life’ as a viable alternative to religious enclosure for the laity (‘A Question of Audience’, p. 262). Whilst this remains worthy of note, nevertheless Arundel’s constitutions were intent on regulating theological rather than devotional texts. Kempster, ‘A Question of Audience’, p. 271.

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concludes that the editor of the Westminster Text would probably have been working on Julian’s writing with the laity in mind,69 and particularly those amongst the laity who had a strong religious calling, a calling which in itself would have increased the demand for spiritually edifying texts, as we have seen in the case of Margery Kempe. The findings of Norman Tanner in his study of wills in medieval Norwich during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries70 would suggest that very few people, if any at all amongst the laity, owned contemplative texts during the period in question.71 Our knowledge about Margery Kempe and her priest, however, would challenge this conclusion and suggest that such texts were, in fact, available for the consumption of the laity. Similarly, in his study of the period between 1440 and 1489, Tanner records only one contemplative book owner amongst the laity in Norwich but it is a record which nevertheless remains highly significant here.72 Margaret Purdans was a bourgeois widow whose will is recorded as having been written in 1481 in which she bequeaths three mystical texts to the Franciscan nuns of Bruisyard in Suffolk: an English translation of De Doctrina Cordis sometimes attributed to Bishop Grosseteste (c. 1168–1253) but now considered to have been written by Hugh of Saint-Cher (1200–63),73 an ‘English book of Saint Bridget’ and, finally, ‘a book called Hylton’. What is of particular interest, of course, is that two out of these three mystical texts bequeathed in this isolated record are the same as those documented by Margery Kempe as having been read to her, illustrating what the likely market for such texts would have been. Moreover, the much earlier findings of Margaret Deansely in this area are entirely contrary to Tanner’s own – something of which Kempster provides an overview in his 69 70 71

72 73

Kempster, ‘A Question of Audience’, p. 268. Tanner, The Church in Medieval Norwich. Of Tanner’s sample of wills between 1370 and 1439, out of a total of 167 lay wills and 96 clerical bequests, only 16 books were left by lay people, of which 13 were liturgical in nature and one scriptural. Tanner finds no evidence of the ownership of contemplative texts by the laity. Tanner, The Church in Medieval Norwich, p. 112. De Doctrina Cordis has been a singularly underexamined text to date. However, recent work by scholars such as Christiania Whitehead and Denis Renevey has done much to redress this shortfall. See, in particular, Whitehead’s discussion of the architectural allegory contained within this work in Christiania Whitehead, Castles of the Mind: A Study of Medieval Architectural Allegory (Cardiff, 2003), pp. 100–1 and pp. 122–3; and Denis Renevey, ‘Household Chores in The Doctrine of the Heart: Affective Spirituality and Subjectivity’, in Cordelia Beattie, Anna Maslakovic and Sarah Rees Jones (eds), The Medieval Household in Christian Europe, c.850–c.1550: Managing Power, Wealth, and the Body, International Medieval Research, vol. 12 (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 167–85. The text in its English translation has been edited by M. P. Candon in the form of an unpublished doctoral thesis, The Doctrine of the Hert, in which he asserts in his Introduction, pp. xlii–xliii, ‘Where an author is mentioned the work is attributed to such diverse characters as Robert Grosseteste in England, Gérard de Chartreux, Hughes le Cardinal, Gérard de Liège of the Order of Preachers, Alphonse de Spire in Germany, Albert de Brescia, and Guido’. I am grateful to Denis Renevey for clarifying this issue of attributed authorship and for furnishing me with the reference.

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essay.74 Deansely’s research suggests, not a dearth of lay ownership of contemplative or mystical texts during the same period but, conversely, points towards a steady increase in such ownership across the rest of England, a trend which became much more pronounced in the third decade of the fifteenth century. It therefore seems highly likely that the production of the Westminster redaction of the Long Text reflects not a limited, but a growing demand, and particularly a growing demand for accessible contemplative texts in the vernacular amongst laywomen such as Margaret Purdans and Margery Kempe. Another type of text which emerged alongside the contemplative texts during this same period seems to have met with similarly widespread popularity, namely the so-called ‘common-profit’ book. These books were commissioned and circulated not only for the ‘comyn profite’ of the laity whose access to such literature might be limited, but also to benefit the soul of the donor.75 Kempster isolates one such owner of a ‘common-profit’ book, a John Colop whose book included a compilation of Hilton’s works, The Scale of Perfection and his Mixed Life, and various commentaries on the psalms. In this respect, the content of this book would adhere closely to the Westminster florilegium in which the highly edited version of Julian’s Long Text appears.76 Not only that, but as early as 1402 there appears to have been a ‘common-profit’ library established at York.77 Sometime after 1423 a public library was also established in the Guildhall in London which extended the ‘common-profit’ concept of individual books to an entire collection housed under the same roof, and seems to have been directed at the poor laity of both sexes.78 It may well be that such an audience would have been particularly receptive to this short redaction of Julian’s writing, containing as it does a much more immediate and accessible version of a complex mystical treatise. The concept of books being commissioned, compiled and bequeathed for the profit of the common people takes on a much deeper significance in the context of Julian’s writing, of course. As previously examined, Julian’s Long Text is characterised by her assertion of its importance to her ‘evencristen’ (‘I was leryd to take it to al my even cristen’; LT, 51) and that her insights are relevant to humanity in general rather than specifically to herself (‘al in general and nothing in special’; LT, 51). The Short Text also reveals a dawning

74

75

76

77 78

Margaret Deansely, ‘Vernacular Books in England in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’, The Modern Language Review 15 (1920), pp. 349–58, as examined by Kempster, ‘A Question of Audience’, pp. 264–6. For an account and examination of the growth in popularity and ownership of these books, see Wendy Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock, John Carpenter and John Colop’s “CommonProfit” Books: Aspects of Book Ownership and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century London’, Medium Aevum 61 (1992), pp. 261–74. The manuscript contains two extracts from commentaries on the psalms, ‘Qui Habitat’ and ‘Bonum Est’, one from Hilton’s Scale of Perfection and the abridged version of A Revelation of Love. Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock’, p. 263. Scase, ‘Reginald Pecock’, pp. 268–70.

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realisation of her experience’s potential to provide common profit to humanity when Julian tells her readers, ‘and I am sekere I sawe it for the profytte of many oder’ (ST, 47). Indeed, as has been demonstrated, one reason for the need to produce a second version of this text was her insight into the love of God for humanity in general, rather than just for the privileged and the pious, an insight which left her treatment of her experiences wanting in the Short Text. By the time she reaches the end of the Long Text, however, Julian is able to assert: ‘Thus I saw and vnderstode that our feith is our light in our night; which light is God our endless day’ (LT, 132). She proceeds to explain that our perception of this light is available if we become privy to the ‘wisdam of God’, a wisdom which, as his chosen vehicle, Julian’s voice and text embodies and which by implication, will allow her readers to benefit ‘profitably’ from its pronouncements. Elsewhere in the text, Julian has been emphatic that ‘in al this I was mekil sterid in charite to mine even cristen, that thei might seen and knowyn the same that I saw; for I would it were a comfort to they, for al this sight was shewid general’ (LT, 12–13). Julian’s voice as represented in this text is both word and Word of God. As its female conduit, Julian renders it feminine and she is entirely confident that its purpose is explicitly for the common profit of humanity. Not only that, but in Julian’s treatment of her experiences in the Long Text, Word and word become utterly conflated, so that the one becomes indistinguishable from the other in Julian’s memory: and therfore me behovith now to tellen iii propertes in which I am sumdele esyd. The frest is the begynnyng of techyng, that I understod therein in the same tyme; the ii is the inward lernyng that I have vnderstodyn therein sithen; the iii al the hole revelation from the begynnyng to the end, that is to sey, of this boke, which our lord God of his goodnes bryngeth oftentymes frely to the syte of myn vnderstondyng. (LT, 74)

After so much time spent rethinking and reworking of the original visionary material, it is evident that Julian is no longer clear about what it was she originally saw.79 Now, in her estimation, ‘the hole revelation’ is conflated with ‘this boke’; seeing, listening, contemplating, speaking, and writing thus unite in an unique and all-embracing absorption of the wisdom of God. In this merging of voices, the voice of God, Julian’s voice and the variety of other voices in the text combine to form an articulation of the prophetic insight which will prove to be of ‘common-profit’ to all humanity and will continue to be reworked with every subsequent reading. And, one such subsequent 79

This conflation between original experiences and their later textual expression is something examined by Nicholas Watson in his essay, ‘The Trinitarian Hermeneutic in Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love’, in McEntire, Julian of Norwich: A Book of Essays, pp. 61–90. In particular see p. 74: ‘all her comments on the “text” of her showings – both her brief responses and remarks as an actor in the drama and even her vastly extended meditations as its narrator – turn into further “sights” and “showings”, thus in effect becoming “text” themselves.’ See also Watson, ‘Composition’, p. 677.

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‘reading’ or ‘performance’ of Julian’s Long Text was, of course, undertaken by her first editor, the anonymous compiler of the Westminster redaction. Moreover, in this text we see a fully empathetic desire to establish the authority of a specifically female wisdom, something which is unequivocally announced in the opening words and which sets the tone of the entire compilation: ‘Oure gracious and goode Lorde God shewed me in party þe wisdom and þe trewthe of þe soule of oure blessed Lady, Saynt Mary’.80 The Virgin’s humility, represented here in terms of God’s ‘handmayden’ along with her ‘lytyllnes’, genders the concept of wisdom in the same way as we have seen it done in the Long Text. Here, however, it is further prioritised because of its location at the start of the text, which in turn effects an association between the concept of wisdom and Julian herself as author. Although not specifically identified as female at this stage, the author is nevertheless gendered female by means of an implied association between her use of the words ‘me’, ‘wisdom’, ‘trewthe’ and ‘oure blessed Lady’, an association which is corroborated at a later stage by means of the editor’s overt allusion to his writer’s gender: ‘our Lord seyd to her thus . . .’, and ‘she seyd . . .’ (my emphasis).81 Kempster considers the identification of the author as female at this point to be an oversight on the part of the editor and that, probably meant as an instruction or an aside for the scribe, it was subsequently erroneously incorporated into the text itself.82 Nevertheless, whether a deliberate inclusion or not, its appearance would suggest at least an internalisation on the part of editor and/or scribe of Julian’s femaleness as relevant, and there is no doubt that the rest of the material which this editor saw fit to include also serves positively to gender author, text and voice as female. Almost entirely absent from this text, for example, is the depiction of God as a father figure or as authoritarian, and a large proportion of the text concentrates on the maternal properties of the deity whose motherhood is explicitly analogous with wisdom, as we have seen: ‘þe deepe wysedome of þe Trynite is oure moder . . .’83 Even within the first hundred lines or so, God is represented emphatically in terms of his ‘moder love’84 in an allusion which immediately follows on from an account of Julian’s ‘hasyl nott’ insight85 and immediately precedes a reproduction of the intriguing ‘fine purse’ passage discussed previously.86 As I have shown, both of these images have important feminine implications, as does the subsequent ‘feyre delectable place’ excerpt with its wound/vagina associations and its feminised blood and water.87 In the context of this highly 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Westminster Text, p. 210. Westminster Text, p. 220. Kempster, ‘A Question of Audience’, pp. 283–4. Westminster Text, p. 234. Westminster Text, p. 214. Westminster Text, pp. 211–12. Westminster Text, p. 215. Westminster Text, p. 223.

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abridged version of the Long Text then, the close proximity of all three passages serves to insist upon the feminisation of both text and context and to prioritise the female wisdom proffered by its speaking voice. Not only that, but the right of this female voice to speak out is asserted equally as insistently in this text: ‘And oure Lorde wyll þat this be knowen of all his louers in erthe. And þe more þat we knowe it, þe more shulde we beseke it, yf it be wysely taken; and so is oure Lordis menyng’.88 Thus, the aforementioned explicit identification of its author as female serves only to further validate a text which has already fully validated itself and insisted upon the medium of the female voice as appropriate, indeed essential, for the dissemination of divine truth. In this context, far from being a diluted version of Julian’s insights, this Westminster text is invaluable in providing its audience with the concentrated distillation of Julian’s intentions, including her celebratory use of the female as hermeneutic and means of access to the feminine concept of divine wisdom. It is thus highly likely that such a concept, although more diffuse in the Long Text itself, is what attracted the various groups of exiled nuns to Julian’s work and caused them to embark upon its careful copying and preservation. No doubt Julian’s feminisation of both text and context, her use of her own female voice and its eventual interchangeability with that of God, served to reinforce these nuns’ confidence in their own particular female spirituality, as I have suggested, alienated as they were from their country of origin once the Reformation took hold in England and brought about the destruction of the religious houses. Like Christine de Pizan, their work of preservation and dissemination continued from exile behind their walls of stone. Examined from this perspective it can be argued that it was Julian’s prioritising of female voice and body within her texts which was indirectly responsible for their preservation and availability for us today. A scribal colophon at the end of the Sloane text encapsulates this likelihood, addressed as it is directly to Julian’s audience: ‘and thou, to whome this booke shall come, thanke heyley and hartily our savior Crist Ihesu that he made these shewings and revelations for the’ (LT, 135–6). No doubt such words would have carried home the importance of this text to a female audience within a milieu of female spirituality typified by the communities of Cambrai and Paris and unwittingly reinforce a feminine reception to a feminised text. Thus it would seem that the gynaecentric ‘core’ of Julian’s texts always leads back to the female reader and continued female ‘performance’ of ‘this booke’. In this context we can reinterpret and reapply the Ancrene Wisse author’s behest to his anchoresses to be generous in the lending of their books with which this section began. If, as he recognises, the lending of a contemplative or meditational book is part of the act of faith and Christian charity, then Julian’s ‘book’ as embodiment of the Word of God, is similarly redistributed,

88

Westminster Text, p. 226.

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shared in repeated and new performances. We recognise repeated performances within the pages of the various extant versions, in the careful preservation and copying of the manuscripts by communities of nuns, and finally in the new generation of feminist scholars who have attempted to rescue Julian from the realm of androcentric theology to which she had been allocated as a ‘token man’ by much twentieth-century criticism. Such responses and performances provide a lens through which we can recognise Julian as one of the most enduring and accommodating examples of the prophetic female who is able to plough the depths of a transhistorical and transcultural human anxiety, lay bare its essence and offer her famous words of comfort which continue to be of ‘common-profit’ to her readers of either sex and all genders: ‘but al shal be wel, and al shal be wel, and al manner of thyng shal be wele’ (LT, 38).

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AFTERWORD ‘Make now tablets of stone and other tablets of clay and write in them all my life and your father’s which you have heard and seen from us.’1

So speaks Eve to her many children from the lonely heights of her deathbed. According to an apocryphal tradition which records the post-Edenic life of Adam, Eve and their offspring, on Adam’s death and prior to her own demise Eve instructs her son, Seth, to set down their lives in tablets of clay and stone in order to make permanent for posterity their transgression and suffering. Although he knows no writing, following his mother’s death Seth’s hand is guided by God as he writes the lives of the first mother and father into clay and stone, becoming essentially the first scribe. Within orthodox Judaeo-Christian tradition, of course, this inauguration of writing was regarded as a patrilineal inheritance, with figures such as Moses, Enoch, or sometimes even Adam himself as the originator of the written script. Within the alternative tradition, however, to be found in the apocryphal Adam Books, Eve herself is quite explicitly depicted as the originator of writing, in keeping with the written word’s later association with the fleshly, seductive nature of women.2 The Latin version of this legend, known as the Vita,3 seems to have enjoyed widespread influence and popularity throughout the Middle Ages, as evidenced in a number of popular texts, ranging from the Townely and Chester Cycle plays to the continenental Genesis B, and later even re-emerging in the early modern period in Milton’s epic, Paradise Lost.4 A series of versions of the Vita written in Middle English and dating from between 1300 and 1475 would also testify to its ongoing popularity, including one which appears in the famous Auchinleck manuscript.5 Not all of these

1

2

3

4 5

M. D. Johnson (trans.), Life of Adam and Eve: A New Translation and Introduction, in J. H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigraphia, 2 vols (London, 1985), vol. 2, pp. 249–95. On this tradition see Eric Jager, ‘Did Eve Invent Writing? Script and the Fall in The Adam Books’, Studies in Philology 93, 3 (1996), pp. 229–50. Although his reading of Eve’s representation in this tradition is essentially a masculinist one, his analysis is nevertheless a useful one for an appraisal of woman’s position within the politics of the oral versus the written word in the Middle Ages. The translation of the Greek version of this text is known as the Apocalypse of Moses and is included alongside the Vita in this edition for purposes of comparison. It differs considerably from its Latin counterpart, including its omission of Eve’s inauguration of writing. Johnson, The Adam Books, p. 256. Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland MS 19.2.1 (Auchinleck MS), pp. 139–47. Three other Middle English versions can be found in Carl Horstmann, Sammlung Altenglischer Legenden (Heilbron, 1878, reprinted Hildesheim, 1969) and two in Horstmann, ‘Nachträge

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versions place the same emphasis on Eve’s initiation of writing, however, although one account appearing in the Wheatley manuscript adheres closely to the original apocryphal material. In this Wheatley version Eve instructs her son: ‘ “Therefore heere þou, my sone Seeth: make þou tweyne tablys, of stoon and of schynynge cley erthe, and wryte thereynne þe lijf of Houre fadir and of me, and tho þinges that Hee han herd and seen of us” ’.6 The life of Adam and Eve which is to be written down by Seth is one which has been characteristed by sin, loss, and pain brought about by the libidinous appetite of the woman, whose ‘lippis ben vnclene’, because of having eaten from ‘þe forboden tre’.7 Her licentiousness has led to pollution, death and exile from God, and her prolific motherhood8 has served to perpetuate and multiply the anguished suffering and disperse it throughout growing humanity. Even the words of her mouth are a pollutant, to counter which, during their time of mutual penance whilst submerged in the River Tigris, Adam instructs her to remain silent in case her contagious breath further offend God: ‘ “go þou to þe flood of Tygre, and bere a stoon wiþ þee, and stonde þereon in þe watir vp to þe necke, and lete no word come out of þi mouþ” ’.9 Thus, fully implicated in her transgression is her sexual appetite, her motherhood and her illicit female knowledge as disseminated by means of her proscribed voice. It is this same transgressive voice, however, which will dictate to Seth her life and set in motion the whole redemptive process. In this sense, Eve’s coming to writing constitutes the literal transformation of her suffering female body into a text which will thus re-embody that same maternity, sexuality and voice. As the dying matriarch, Eve consequently redeems herself by founding a transcription of her own bodily suffering into a permanent written record, and writing thus becomes her lasting progeny and final salutary gift to humankind. In many ways this book has been concerned primarily with Eve’s legacy to humankind within western patriarchal tradition, and the means by which these two women writers under scrutiny – Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich – succeeded in transforming the negative and inhibiting connotations of that legacy into active agency. The quest for such agency – for themselves as holy women, as writers, and for the authority of the texts they produced – involved both a redefinition and redeployment of the female body to effect its successful transformation into articulate and effective validatory hermeneutic.

6 7 8 9

zu den Legenden’, Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Litteraturen 74 (1885). In addition see Oxford, Trinity College MS 57, pp. 124–38; Bodleian Library, Bodley MS Eng. poet. A.1 (Vernon MS, pp. 220–7); Wheatley MS: British Library Add. MS 39574 which has been edited by Mabel Day, The Wheatley Manuscript, EETS o.s. 155 (London, 1921), pp. 76–99, and which is the manuscript which will be referred to in this afterword. For more details about these manuscripts see Jager, ‘Did Eve Invent Writing?’, pp. 230–3, n. 4. The Wheatley Manuscript, p. 97. The Wheatley Manuscript, p. 82. The Vita claims for her Seth, Cain and Abel, along with thirty other sons and thirty daughters, p. 292. The Wheatley Manuscript, pp. 81–2.

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As such, each woman succeeded in a variety of ways of transforming Eve’s vilified body into an agent of redemption and as a means of gaining and articulating direct access to God. In transforming female body into text in this way they were each able to make accessible their own mystical knowledge of God and disseminate it to their ‘evencristen’. In so doing, also like Eve, their own physical and psychological anguishes have been rewritten onto the bodies embedded within their texts, re-emerging in the body their feminised Christ, for example, and allowing for the female body to perform a central role in the universal drama of salvation. Thus, if Eve’s inauguration of writing was necessitated by an eternal alienation from the immediacy of God’s voice in the Garden because of her own ontological femaleness, if the only way of knowing God ever afterwards was to be through abstract symbol and script, so now, by means of the embodied and mystical texts of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, direct access to God is restored to humankind. The Word: once more made flesh by the mystic daughters of Eve. When Eve had said this to her children, she stretched out her hands to heaven, praying, and bent her knees to the ground and worshipped the Lord, giving thanks, and gave up the spirit.10

10

Johnson, Life of Adam and Eve, p. 294.

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INDEX Aachen 114, 115 Abbott, Christopher 68 n.18 abjection 67, 117, 139–45, 152, 164 Abulafia, David 102 n.33 Adam 1, 2, 135, 173, 235, 236 Adam Books 235 adultery 104–5, 108 Margery’s attempt at 34 n.22, 121–2 Aelred of Rievaulx De Institutione Inclusarum 166 Aeneas 208 Aers, David 13, 22 n.67, 29 Alcuin Mass of the Holy Wisdom 218 Alford, John A. 170 n.3 Allen, Hope Emily 2 n.9, 20 n.62, 52–3 n.71, 123, 127, 183, 184 Alnwick, Bishop 181 n.58 Ambrose, Saint 162 Amherst manuscript 224–5, 226–8 Anatomia Cophonis 82 n.69 anchoritic life 70–72 Sibyl and 207–10 see also enclosure, female Ancrene Wisse 70, 71, 72, 80 n.64, 135, 136–7, 138, 163 n.115, 166, 170, 172, 175, 207 n.6, 209–10, 233 angels 190 Anne, Saint 44, 51, 91 Anselm of Canterbury 156 Antioch 137 anus 140 appetite, uncontrolled female 1–2 Aquinas, Saint Thomas 86 n.78, 101–2 Summa Theologiae 102, 142–3, 174, 190 architectural allegory 71 n.27, 229 n.73 Ariès, Philippe 54 n.76, 76 n.52 Aristophanes 189 Aristotle 9, 16, 73, 80, 134, 143 Arundel, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury 172 n.8, 180, 181, 182, 183, 228 n.67 Ashley, Kathleen M. 44 n.47 ‘asseth’, Julian’s use of 162 Astell, Ann 125 n.122, 126–7

Aston, Margeret 179, 180 n.45, 181, 182 n.61, 184, 185 n.71, 193 n.98 Atkinson, Clarissa 22, 36 n.29, 40 n.37, 41 n.40, 44 nn.44, 46, 47, 48, 45, 46, 53 nn.71, 74, 60 n.93, 74 n.42, 91 n.88, 175 Auchinleck manuscript 235 Augustine, Saint 86, 135–6, 137, 145, 189 n.86, 190 Ayto, John 166 n.120 Baker, Denise Nowakowski 86, 156 n.90, 168 n.124, 211 n.15 Baker, Derek 38 n.32 Baker, Donald L. 122 n.111, 126 n.125, 179 n.39 Bakhtin, Mikhail 110, 111 Baldick, Robert 54 n.76 Bale, John 182 Barratt, Alexandra 22 n.69, 23, 44–5 n.49, 66 n.6, 81 n.65, 133 n.9, 144 n.56, 150, 215 n.17 Barthes, Roland 19 Bartlett, Anne Clark 165–6 Beattie, Cordelia 229 n.73 Beaufort, Henry 184 Beaufort, Joan de (Lady Westmorland) 184 Beckwith, Sarah 3 n.10, 22 bed imagery 151 Bedford, Duke of 184, 185 Beer, Frances 22 n.69, 71 n.26 Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love (ed.) 2 n.9, 228 n.65 beggars, Margery rescued by 116 beguines 4, 66, 152 Beidler, Peter G. 104 n.46 Benedictine nuns 225–6, 233 Bennett, Jacob 122 Bennett, Judith M. 28, 37 n.31, 39 Benson, Larry 48 n.61 Berger, Pamela 26 n.81 Bernard of Clairvaux 11, 83 n.71, 125 n.122, 136, 168 n.124 Bernau, Anke 147 n.65

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Bestul, Thomas H. 156 n.91, 162 n.113 Bettelheim, Bruno 59 n.91, 60 n.94 Beverley, Margery’s trial in 183–5, 192–4 Biddick, Kathleen 12 nn.39, 40, 15, 48 n.61, 49 n.65 Biller, Peter 180 n.43 binary oppositional concepts, disruption of 89, 95, 113, 145 Birgitta of Sweden 44–7, 186, 187, 195, 210 Revelations 180, 200 Bishop’s Lynn Margery’s early life in 96–7, 120–21 play cycles performed in 122–3 Bitterling, Klaus 114 n.76 Black Death 96 Blamires, Alcuin 2 n.6, 186 n.73, 187 n.78, 193 n.98 blind spot (lacuna) 103, 113, 141, 146, 157, 185 Blomefield, Francis 225 blood 80–82, 85, 138, 151, 153, 158, 160, 168, 232 see also menstruation blue robes 90–91 Blume, C. 119 n.97 Blumenfeld-Kosinki, Renate 223 n.41, 224 n.42 Blunt, John Henry 181 n.56 Boccaccio, Giovanni De Mulieribus Claris 207 Boenig, Robert 139 n.33, 156 n.91, 227 n.60 Bokenham, Osbern 121, 122 Bonaventure, Saint 48 n.63, 180 Boswell, John 61 n.97 Bottigheimer, Ruth B. 60 n.92 Bowers, Terence N. 4, 52 n.69 Bradley, Ritamary 22 n.69, 139 n.33, 162–3 breast milk 48 n.61, 49, 74, 80 Brewer, Derek 59 n.92 Bridget, Saint see Birgitta of Sweden Britnell, R.H. 96, 102 Brooke, Christopher N.L. 107 n.59 brothels 101 Brown, Peter 135 nn.21, 23 Brownlee, Kevin 223 n.41 Buhler, Curt F. 191 n.90 Burleigh, John H.S. 86 n.77 burning of heretics 182 Burns, Jane E. 191 n.92

Butler, Judith 8, 15, 19, 20, 28–9, 39, 103, 108 n.61, 110 Butler-Bowden, William 20, 21, 201 n.113 Bynum, Caroline Walker 3 n.10, 11–12, 15, 28, 47–8 n.61, 49, 56, 65–6, 73 n.35, 74 n.46, 75, 85 n.75, 125 n.120, 126 n.127, 128 n.134, 132 n.2, 145 n.58, 164 n.116, 167 n.123, 194 n.100 Cadden, Joan 9 n.28, 37 n.29, 73 nn.35, 36, 84 n.74, 106 n.56 Caister, Richard 172 n.8, 182, 198, 222 Calvary 52, 53 Cambrai, Benedictine nuns at 225–6, 233 Camille, Michael 139 n.38 Candon, M.P. 229 n.73 Canetti, Elias 48 n.61 Canterbury, Margery’s trial in 59 n.90, 183 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer) 4, 48 n.61, 91, 96–7, 103–4, 105 n.54, 109, 140, 148, 170–71, 180 n.50 Capek, Karel 59 n.92 Caritas 219 Carruthers, Mary 22 n.67 Carthusians 227 Catherine of Siena 177, 200, 210 Catholicism 74 Cavell, Robert 37 n.30 Cecilia, Saint 147–9, 150, 158, 167, 169, 172, 215 Certeau, Michel de 13–14 Chambers, R.W. 201 n.113 Chance, Jane 210 n.13 Charlesworth, J.H. 235 n.1 Chastity, Margery’s vow of 32, 37, 52, 106–9, 128 n.34 Chaucer, Geoffrey 153 Canterbury Tales 4, 48 n.61, 91, 96–7, 103–4, 105 n.54, 109, 140, 148, 170–71, 180 n.50 Chester Cycle plays 1–2, 235 Chewning, Susannah Mary 66 nn.6, 12 child sacrifice 44, 48 childbirth 15, 17, 32, 54, 150 birth of Margery’s first child 33, 117 illness following 10, 35–40 birth of Margery’s last child 107, 202 in Julian’s writing 69, 80–81 chora 31, 67 Christina Mirabilis 155

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Christina of Markyate 25, 91 n.89 Christine de Pizan 219, 226, 227–8, 233 Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc 222–4 Livre de la Cité des Dames 191–2, 193 Chrysostom, John 137 Church, Christian confession emphasised by 118 expectations imposed on women by 28, 36 n.29, 41–2, 53 hypocrisy of men within 115, 139 n.37 and profit economy 97–8 prostitution tolerated by 101–2 churches architecture of 71 n.27 dedicated to Virgin Mary 79 female voice depicted in 173, 193 n.97 Cixous, Hélène 17 n.52, 64 n.1, 89 nn.83, 84, 95, 208 Clanchy, M.T. 176–7 Clark, Susan 66 n.9 Clifford, R.J. 216 n.19 Cloud of Unknowing 137, 140 Cobham, Lord see Oldcastle, John (Lord Cobham) Coiner, Nancy 14 n.42 Coleman, T.W. 21 n.66, 25 n.77, 114 Colledge, Edmund 21, 22 n.68, 139 nn.33, 36, 141 n.48, 142 n.52, 154 n.81, 225–6, 228 n.65 Colop, John 230 commodity, female body as 99–106 in Julian’s writing 145–69 in Margery’s writing 106–30, 146–7 ‘common-profit’ books 230 commonality, Julian’s use of 164–9 confession, Church’s emphasis on 118 confessors, Margery’s 35, 36–7, 47 n.60, 49, 50, 114 Constable, Barbara 226 Constable, Mary Joseph 226 n.56 Constable, William 225, 226 constructionism 15–16, 17, 19 contemplative texts, lay ownership of 229–30 contemptus mundi 136–7, 138 Copeland, Rita 6 n.22 Corner, G.W. 82 n.69 Cornford, Francis Macdonald 83 n.70 Corpus Christi plays 123 corruption, human body as site of 136–8, 141, 157

Coulton, G.G. 137 n.29 counterdiscourses 166–7 court records 105–6 de Courtivron, Isabelle 17 n.52 courtly love 154, 166 Cowper, J. Meadows 53 n.72 Craymer, Suzanne 117 n.80, 120–22 Cré, Marleen 175 n.21, 227 n.60 de Cressy, Serenus 225–6 Cross, Claire 179 n.39, 185 n.71 crucifix 24, 64, 76, 171 crying see weeping Custance 91 Dahlberg, Charles 140 n.40 Dale, Judith 154 Davidson, Roberta 192 n.95 Davies, G.M. 119 n.97 Davis, Mary Beth 41 n.41 Davis, Norman 153 n.78 Day, Mabel 236 n.5 De Doctrina Cordis (Hugh of Saint-Cher) 229 De Heretico Comburendo (1401) 182 deafness 171 Deansely, Margaret 220–30 deathbed ritual, medieval 76 defecation 139, 140, 142, 144, 145 Degh, Linda 60 n.92 Dekkers, D. Eligius 136 n.24 Delamare, François 91 n.86 Delany, Sheila 34 n.21, 104 n.47, 224 Des Cleres Femmes (medieval French translation) 207 devil see Satan devotional doll 55–8, 194 Digby Plays 117 n.80, 122–3, 125–6, 187 Dillon, Janet 35 n.26, 203 Dinah 135 discretio spirituum 196, 197, 212–13 divine love, Julian’s insight into 86, 205–7, 220, 221, 231 Dixon, Laurinda S. 83 n.70 doll, devotional 55–8, 194 domestic space, female 3, 5–6, 7–8, 39, 42, 43, 193 Dorothea of Montau 177 Douglas, Mary 5 Doyle, A.I. 181 dress code, female 110 n.67 Droitture 191

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Dronke, Peter 10 n.34, 11 n.35, 178 n.37, 188 n.81, 219 n.31 Duby, Georges 107 n.58

in Margery’s writing 106–30, 146–7 discourses adopted by Julian 68, 95, 131–4, 138–69 discourses adopted by Margery 106–30, 146–7 flesh synonymous with 32 n.17, 135–45, 152, 157, 169 grotesque 110, 111, 191 leakages from 80, 170, 175, 189 n.84, 191 maternal 18–19, 31 as site of contested meanings 30 subsumed by voice 208–12 suffering of 32 n.17, 36, 134, 150, 163, 236 theories of 8–20, 72–4, 82–3, 133, 134–5 see also female voice female gaze 135 female sexual organs 17, 84 n.73, 143–4, 145, 167, 168, 232 female solidarity 193–5 female space, contravention of 2–8 see also domestic space, female female voice body subsumed by 208–12 in Book of Margery Kempe 171–2, 175–204 in Canterbury Tales 170–71 in Julian’s texts 207, 210–15, 220–22, 224–34 medieval attitudes to 172–5 preservation and dissemination of 222–34 sapiential theology and 191, 216–22 see also prophets, female fiend, Julian’s encounter with 153–62 Finke, Laurie 104 Finnegan, Mary Jeremy 65 n.3 Finucane, R.C. 52 n.69 fissures 18, 24, 32 n.17, 40, 62, 112, 134, 135–6, 141, 168 flesh, female body synonymous with 32 n.17, 135–45, 152, 157, 169 Florentyne, Margaret 194 fluids, body 74, 80, 85 n.75 see also blood; lactation; menstruation; weeping food pleasure associated with 142–3 women linked with 47–8 n.61, 194–5 de Ford, Sara 152 n.77 fornication 101, 108

East Anglia, Margery’s trial in 182 eating, pleasure of 142–3 Eberley, Susan 117 n.80 Ecclesia 218, 219, 220 Edwards, Robert R. 3 n.12, 83 n.70, 110 n.67 Ehrenschwendtner, Marie-Luise 83 n.71 Elizabeth of Hungary 44–5, 46, 197 n.105 Elliott, Dyan 177 n.31 Elliott, J.K. 78 n.56 Ellis, Roger 46 n.57, 227 n.60 enclosure, female anchoritic life 70–72, 207–10 male desire for 7–8 society and 64–70 womb as site of 65, 66–7, 71–2, 80, 82–5, 91 ‘eorðe’ 141, 143 Erhler, Mary C. 59 n.87 erotic imagery Julian’s use of 152–3, 167–9 Margery’s use of 126–30 essentialism 15–16, 17, 31 Eucharist 48–9 Evans, Ruth 34 n.21, 104 n.47, 147 n.65, 181 n.50 Eve transgression of 1–2, 9, 27, 37, 39–40, 54, 130, 135, 173, 236 writing initiated by 235–7 exchange value, women’s 99–100, 102, 146 excrement, woman likened to 137, 142, 186 fabliau tradition 191 Fairclough, H. Rushton 189 n.85 fairy stories 59–60 Fanous, Samuel 33 n.19, 200 n.110 Farge, James L. 107 n.60 Farley, Mary Hardman 35 n.28 Feast of Fools 111 female body as authoritative literary tool 3, 12, 24, 26, 30, 68, 81–2, 95, 134, 146–7, 153, 161–2, 170–71, 172, 200–201, 203–4 as commodity 99–106 in Julian’s writing 145–69

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fostering, extra-mural 61 n.97 Fradenburg, Louise 22 n.67 Fraipoint, Iohannes 136 n.24 Francis, Saint 97 n.8 Franzen, Allen J. 2, 175 n.23 Freccero, Carla 22 n.67 Fries, Maureen 35 n.27, 179–80 n.42 Fuss, Diana 15–16, 17

Grenehalgh, James 227 Greystoke, Lady Elizabeth 184 Griselda 91 Grosseteste, Bishop 229 Grosz, Elizabeth 31 nn.14, 15 grotesque female body 110, 111, 191 Guineau, Bernard 91 n.86 Guy de Chauliac 159 gynaecentric imagery 67, 83–5

Galen 8–10, 73, 134 Galvani, Christiane Mesch 66 n.9 Gardner, Edmund G. 21 n.65 Gascoigne, Margaret 226 n.53 gender as performance 19–20, 28–9, 39, 50–58, 112, 123–5, 130 gender difference theories 15–19 gender stereotyping 23–4 Genesis B 235 genitalia see sexual organs Germany, Margery’s visit to 114–16 Gerson, Jean 223 n.39 Gertrude the Great 65, 66 n.6 gestation 15, 17, 18, 31, 64, 67 Gibson, Gail McMurray 98 n.13, 122 n.112, 123 n.116 Gilbert Anglicus 159 Gilby, Thomas 102 n.31, 142 n.49 Gilchrist, Roberta 7 n.24, 71 nn.27, 28, 30 Gill, G.C. 17 n.52 Gill, Miriam 51 n.66 Gillespie, Vincent 227 Gimbutas, Marija 26 n.81, 72 n.33 Glasscoe, Marion 22 n.69, 23, 35 n.28, 52 n.69, 72 n.32, 152 n.77, 227 n.60 Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love (ed.) 2 n.9, 69 nn.20, 22, 154 n.81, 221 n.36, 226, 228 n.65 goddesses 72, 95 Godhead Margery’s marriage to 42, 126, 128 male and female united within 95 le Goff, Jacques 97 n.10 Goldberg, P.J.P. 101 Goldhammer, Arthur 97 n.10, 188 n.81 Goodman, Anthony 34 n.21, 38 n.32, 96 n.6 Gospels, Margery’s knowledge of 59 n.92 Gossaert, Jan 49 n.65 Gottfried (scribe) 177 Granger, William 45 n.50 Green, Monica 37 n.31 Gregory the Great 157

Hadewijch of Brabant 152 Hagan, Susan K. 147, 155 hagiographic texts, discerning ‘voice’ in 177, 196 Hali Meiðhad 141, 143 Hall, D.J. 52 n.69 Hall, Louis B. Jr 122 n.111 Hamington, Maurice 74, 79 n.57 Hanawalt, Barbara A. 3, 7, 32 n.18, 110 n.67, 206 n.3 Hanning, R.W. 10 n.34 harlot saints 118–19, 148 Harper, Stephen 36 n.28 Haskins, Susan 54 n.75, 104 n.49, 117 nn.80, 81, 118 nn.83, 84, 91, 119 nn.92, 95, 96, 126 n.126,129 n.136, 146, 186 n.73 hazelnut 83–4 Healy, Margaret 111 n.72 Heffernan, J. 21 n.66 Helfta, cult of Sacred Heart at 65, 82 hell 87, 158 Henry IV 184 Heraclitus 189 heresy see Lollardy Hermann, Dagmar 59 n.92 Hildegarde of Bingen 49 n.64, 177, 219 Hilton, Walter 21, 25, 162, 180, 230 Hirsch, David 29 Hodgson, Phyllis 137 n.27 Holloway, Julia Bolton 35 n.27, 45 n.53 Holy Spirit, Margery filled with 128, 171, 199, 200 homoeroticism 57 Horstmann, Carl 205 n.2, 235–6 n.5 Howard, Donald R. 38 n.32, 52 n.71 Howard, Richard 160 n.109 Howell, Martha C. 39 n.33 Howes, Laura L. 202 n.116 Hozeski, Bruce 219 n.32 Hudson, Anne 59 n.89, 179–80

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Hugh of Saint-Cher De Doctrina Cordis 229 Hughes, Diane Owen 58 n.87 Hughes, J. 69 n.19 Hughes-Edwards, Mari 20 n.63 humility topos 6, 66, 197 adopted by Julian 8, 67–8, 151–2, 211 humoral theory 9–10 hymns, medieval 119–20, 130 hypocrisy, Margery’s perceived 172 ‘hysterical’ behaviour, Margery’s 20, 21–2, 52–5, 57, 114, 115, 123–5, 171, 187, 200

110, 123, 128–30, 176, 187–8, 200–201, 203 as Margery’s lover 106–8, 124, 126–30, 166, 201 as mother 49, 74–5, 79, 81, 83, 85, 86, 89–95, 131, 138, 161, 166, 220–21, 232 Passion of 48, 52–4, 72 n.32, 77, 80–82, 118, 123–4, 129, 132, 150, 156, 157–60, 166, 201 public ministry of 150, 218 Sacred Heart of 65, 82 Shulamite as bride of 125–6, 128–9, 151 n.72 Jewell, Helen 69 n.23 Jews 151, 160–61, 216–17 Joan of Arc 184 n.66, 222–4 John of Gaunt 184, 185 John of Salisbury 203 Johnson, Lesley 34 n.21, 104 n.47 Johnson, Lynn Staley 3 n.10 Johnson, M.D. 235 nn.1, 4, 237 n.10 Jones, Catherine 160 n.106 Jones, Sarah Rees 229 n.73 Joseph, Saint 105 jouissance, female 31, 57, 79, 94, 166 Julian of Norwich anchoritic enclosure (in 1390s) 22, 68 n.18, 69 anchoritic life of 70–72 death 69 discourses of female body adopted by 68, 95, 131–4, 138–69 discourses of motherhood adopted by 18–19, 23, 64–95, 131, 138, 161, 166, 220–21, 232 encounter with fiend 153–62 identification with Mary Magdalene 146, 149 illness suffered by 10, 64–5, 75–8, 90, 149, 150, 153, 163, 212, 214–15 life before enclosure 22–3, 68–70, 131, 144 Margery’s meeting with 171–2, 198–9, 213 as prophet 212–15, 220–22 risk-taking by 16 spaces occupied by 5–6, 8, 77 visions of Christ 76–8, 80–82, 86, 88, 90, 93, 132, 160, 165, 205–7 mystical union with Christ 150–53, 163, 167–9

imitatio Christi 25, 49, 78, 150, 155, 218 imitatio Mariae 19, 40, 49, 52–5 ‘in honde’ 105, 110 individuality loss of, in redemptive process 121–2 sense of 10–12 interdiction 201–3 interpellatative practices, patriarchal 103, 106, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114–15 Irigaray, Luce 13, 15, 16–18, 20, 99–100, 103 nn.40, 41, 146 Isaac 44 Ita of Hohenfels 155 Jacquart, Danielle 10 n.31, 73, 74 n.47, 85 n.75 Jager, Eric 235 n.2, 236 n.5 James, Rhodes Montague 157 n.98 Jansen, Katherine Ludwig 186, 187, 188, 191 n.92, 193 n.97 Jean de Meun 140 Jerusalem, Margery’s pilgrimage to 51, 52–8, 109–12, 126, 171, 194–5 Jesus Christ birth of 189 blood of 49, 80–82, 85, 138, 151, 153, 159, 160, 168 female devotion to manhood of 24, 132, 136, 166 Julian’s fear of losing 77, 90 Julian’s visions of 76–8, 80–82, 86, 88, 90, 93, 132, 160, 165, 205–7 mystical union with Christ 150–53, 163, 167–9 as lover of humanity 167–9 Margery’s conversations with 38, 39–40, 46–8, 57 n.83, 62, 107–8,

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Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love (long text) 2 n.9 bodily presence and absence in 211–12 Cecilia’s exclusion from 147 commonality concept in 164–9 date of composition 23, 69–70, 211 devotion to manhood of Christ in 132 discourses of female body in 68, 95, 132, 139, 144–5, 155, 157–62 divine love central in 205–7, 220, 221, 231 Julian’s illness described in 215 motherhood matrix in 74–5, 79, 80–85, 88–95, 220–21, 232 Paris manuscript 139, 225–6, 228 n.65 preservation and dissemination of 225–6, 228–34 sapiential theology in 220–22 scribal additions to 221–2, 233 sin examined in 86–7, 93 Sloane manuscripts 139, 221, 226, 228 n.65, 233 Upholland redaction 226 Westminster redaction 139, 226, 228–33 Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love (short text) 2 n.9 Amherst manuscript 224–5, 226–8 bodily presence in 211–12 date of composition 23, 69–70 devotion to manhood of Christ in 24 discourses of female body in 147–53, 155–7, 163, 168, 169 humilitas in 8, 67–8, 151–2, 211 Julian’s illness described in 214–15 locations of enclosure in 64–5 Lord and Servant parable omitted from 85 motherhood matrix in 65, 75–9, 80, 81 new material introduced at end of 205–6 preservation and dissemination of 224–5, 226–8, 230–31 scribal addition to 224–5 sin examined in 87, 206

Keen, M.H. 184 n.66 Kempe, Margery accused of heresy 7, 58–62, 112–13, 171, 172, 181 n.51, 182, 183–5, 192–4 attempt at adulterous liaison 34 n.22, 121–2 birth of first child 33, 117 illness following 10, 35–40 birth of last child 107, 202 clothing worn by 59, 110, 201 n.112 commitment to family 47–50, 56 confessors used by 35, 36–7, 47 n.60, 49, 50, 114 conversations with Christ 38, 39–40, 46–8, 57 n.83, 62, 107–8, 110, 123, 128–30, 176, 187–8, 200–201, 203 conversations with Virgin Mary 50 early life in Bishop’s Lynn 96–7, 120–21 gendered performances by 19–20, 29, 39, 50–58, 112, 123–5, 130 identification with Mary Magdalene 40, 116–30, 186–8 identification with Virgin Mary 19, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 49, 52–5 as lover of Christ 106–8, 124, 126–30, 166, 201 marriage to Godhead 42, 126, 128 marriage to John Kempe 34 meeting with Julian of Norwich 171–2, 198–9, 213 motherhood and 28–63 pilgrimages of see pilgrimages, female preoccupation with money 96–8, 100–101, 104 as prophet 185–204, 210–11 rift and reconciliation with adult son 33, 40–43 risk-taking by 16 spaces occupied by 4, 5, 7–8, 39, 42, 43, 58, 62, 100, 113, 188, 193–4 threatened with rape 62, 113 unexpiated sin of 34–40, 117 vow of chastity with husband 32, 37, 52, 106–9, 128 n.134 weeping of 20, 21–2, 52–5, 57, 114, 115, 123–5, 171, 187, 200 Kempe, Margery: The Book of Margery Kempe 2 n.9 childbirth and maternity in 32–43 chronology of 202

Karras, Ruth 101 nn.24, 27, 102 nn.30, 32, 35, 103 n.42, 105 n.55, 106 n.57, 110 n.66, 115 nn.77, 79, 118, 119 n.92, 148 nn.67, 68, 172–3 Kay, Sarah 7 n.24, 10 n.31, 66 n.7, 110 n.65

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Kempe, Margery (continued) discourses of prostitution in 106–30, 146–7 discourses of uncontained orality in 171–2, 175–204 Julian mentioned in 68 n.18 Margery’s act of writing 199–204 motherhood as performative strategy in 50–58 Pepwell version (1521) 20–21 Salthouse manuscript discovered (1934) 20–21, 28, 201 scribes’ contribution to 21, 29, 33 nn.19, 20, 117–18, 172, 176–8, 181 n.58, 194, 196–7, 199, 201–3 as social commentary 30, 178 unexpiated sin mentioned in 34–40, 117 Wynkyn de Worde version (1501) 20 Kempe, John (Margery’s husband) Margery cares for in old age 52 Margery’s marriage to 34 Margery’s vow of chastity with 32, 37, 52, 106–9, 128 n.134 Kempster, Hugh 228–9, 229–30, 232 Kennedy, Angus J. 222 n.38 Kienzle, Beverly Mayne 174 n.18, 186 n.73 King, Karen 174 n.18 Kirk, Elizabeth 22 n.67 Kirshner, Julius 11 n.35 Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane 56 nn.78, 80, 57 n.83, 58–9 n.87 Knowles, David 21, 22 n.69, 25 n.77, 33 n.20, 38 n.32 Kobialka, Michal 3 Kooper, E. 152 n.76 Kraman, Cynthia 151, 168 Kristeva, Julia 13, 15, 16, 17 n.52, 18–19, 30–31, 57, 79, 94, 95, 175 n.23

Larrington, Carolyne 152 n.76 laughter, role of 111 Lavezzo, Kathy 22, 55 n.78, 57 Lawes, Richard 35–6 n.28 Lawton, David 3 n.10, 6 n.22 Leicester, Margery’s trial in 7, 60–62, 112–13, 171, 181 n.51, 183, 192 leprosy 43, 159 Lerner, Gerda 26 n.81, 72 n.33 Lerner, Robert E. 221 n.35 Levine, Philip 135 n.22 Levron, Jacques 156 n.92 Lewis, Katherine J. 101 n.27 libraries, public 230 Lichtman, Maria R. 90 n.85, 133–4, 164 n.117 liminality 71, 106 literacy 180 Lochrie, Karma 3 n.10, 21, 24, 32 n.17, 52 n.69, 60 n.95, 111, 127 n.130, 135–6, 152 n.77, 154 n.83, 167 n.123, 175 n.23, 181, 199, 201 Lollardy Margery accused of 7, 58–62, 112–13, 171, 172, 181 n.51, 182, 183–5, 192–4 Margery’s familiarity with 35, 179–85 Lomperis, Linda 75 n.48, 191 n.92 Lord and Servant, parable of 85–93, 157 Love, Nicholas 228 n.67 loveliness 88 Luango, Thomas 210 n.13 Lumiansky, R.M. 1 n.3 lust 157 Luthi, Max 60 n.94 Lynch, Joseph H. 97 n.10 Maclean, Ian 135 n.16 Madison, David J. 111 n.68 Mahoney, Dhira B. 40 n.37 Makowski, Elizabeth 177 n.29 male sexual organs 17, 139–40, 143, 145 Malvern, Marjorie M. 117 n.81 Manciple 104 Mancor, Neil 125 n.122 Manning, Robert 53 Margaret, Saint 47 margins, women occupying 1, 4, 6–7, 31, 71, 79, 106, 115, 146, 185, 224 Marienwerder, John 177 Marks, Elaine 17 n.52

labelling 103, 106, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114–15 lactation 48 n.61, 49, 74, 80 lacuna (blind spot) 103, 113, 141, 146, 157, 185 Langland, William 80, 96, 153 Langlois, Ernest 140 n.40 Languedoc, brothels in 101 Laqueur, Thomas 10 n.31, 37 n.29, 73 n.35, 74 n.47 larder, keys to 39

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marriage, women’s role in 34, 100, 104, 107–8 Martin, Alison 18 n.55 Mary, Virgin accused of adultery 105 blue mantle of 91 cult of 74, 78 Julian’s mother linked with 77–8 Margery as handmaid to 51 Margery’s conversations with 50 Margery’s identification with 19, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 49, 52–5 powerful/powerless paradox of 78–9, 84 as Queen of Heaven 87 voice of 175 in Western culture 57 wisdom of 220, 232 Mary Magdalene as apostless 118, 126, 130, 186–8, 193 n.97 Julian’s identification with 146, 149 Margery’s identification with 40, 116–30, 186–8 as whore 104–5, 116–30, 146 Mary of Bethany 118 Mary of Egypt 119 masculinity, undesirable 161 Maslakovic, Anna 229 n.73 masochism, female 79, 80 Mass 48, 49 remuneration paid for 97–8 Massumi, Brian 14 n.42 maternal body 18–19, 31 maternal dichotomy 47–50 maternal grief 52–5, 57, 77 maternal martyr, Margery as 44–7 maternity see motherhood Matter, Ann E. 125 n.122, 168 n.124 Maximilla 174 McAvoy, Liz Herbert 20 n.63, 67 n.15, 70 n.24, 111 n.72, 124 n.118, 202 n.116, 207 n.4 McCraken, Peggy 152 n.77 McEntire, Sandra 3 n.10, 22 n.67, 23 n.72, 35 nn.23, 27, 40 n.37, 45 n.49, 133 n.9, 147 n.64, 154 n.79, 228, 231 n.79 McGinn, Bernard 11 n.35, 152 n.76, 188 n.81, 189 nn.82, 83, 86, 190 n.87 McHardy, A.K. 182 n.61 McIlwain, James 76 n.53

McInerney, Maud Burnett 81 n.65, 82 McNamer, Sarah 75, 91 n.87 McSheffery, Shannon 112 n.74, 179 n.38, 185 nn.70, 71 meal table, licentiousness of 111 Meale, Carole 122–3, 124 n.118, 179 n.41 meat-eating 47 Mechthild of Hackeborn 65 Mechthild of Magdeburg 65–7, 72 medical texts 8–10, 23, 73–4, 82–3, 133, 134–5, 144, 150, 159 Meech, Sandford Brown 2 n.9, 20 n.62, 33 n.20, 110 n.66, 180 n.49, 181 n.52, 183 Melton, William 201 n.114 menstruation 15, 17, 80, 82, 143 Menunge, Noel James 101 n.27 metamorphosis 145, 150, 189, 207–9 metaphors in Julian’s texts 82–5, 215 n.17 Rolle’s use of 127 Metcalf, Stephen 35 n.24, 111 n.70 Migne, J.-P. 137 n.29 Miller, Frank Justus 204 n.121 Millet, Bella 70 n.25, 141 nn.44, 47, 158 n.99, 175 n.21 Mills, David 1 n.3 Mills, Robert 147 n.65 Milton, John Paradise Lost 235 Minnis, A.J. 3 n.10 misogyny 219–20 ‘mixed life’ 228 Moi, Toril 17 n.52, 18 n.56, 19 n.57, 31 n.16, 89 n.84 de Mondeville, Henri 140, 143 monstrous female 1, 9, 170, 171 Montanist movement 174 n.18 Mooney, Catherine M. 176 n.26, 177, 196 n.103 Morris, Bridget 45 n.53, 46 n.56 Morris, Colin 10–11 Morrison, Susan Signe 4–5, 20 n.61, 52 n.69 motherhood Christ as mother 49, 74–5, 79, 81, 83, 85, 86, 89–95, 131, 138, 161, 166, 220–21, 232 in Julian’s texts 18–19, 23, 64–95, 131, 138, 161, 166, 220–21, 232 and Margery Kempe 28–63

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motherhood (continued) as performative strategy 50–58 as protective strategy 58–63 theories of 18–19, 30–31 Murphy, Cullen 174 n.17 Murphy, John L. 122 n.111, 126 n.125 Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie 37 n.31, 81 n.65 Myers, Michael D. 34 n.21 Myroure of Oure Ladye, The 181 Mystics Quarterly 228

Parker, Roscoe E. 44 n.47 parody 110, 161 Parsons, John Carmi 81 n.65 Partridge, Eric 109 n.63 Paston Letters 153 n.78 patriarchal sexual-political economy 99 Patterson, Lee 96–7, 170 n.2, 171 n.4 Paul, Saint 42, 61, 86, 107, 135, 173–4 ‘payede’, Julian’s use of 163 Payne, Joseph Frank 140 n.42 Peacock, Reginald 183–4 Peck, A.L. 9 n.30 Peck, Francis 225 penitence, Church’s emphasis on 118, 119–20 Pepwell, Henry 20 performance, gender as 19–20, 28–9, 39, 50–58, 112, 123–5, 130 Petroff, E.A. 35 n.26 phallus 17 Phillips, Kim M. 101 n.27 Phoebus Apollo 208 pilgrimages, female 4–5, 52 n.69 Margery’s 4, 5, 20 n.61, 45, 52–8 funding for 97, 98 to Jerusalem 51, 52–8, 109–12, 126, 171, 194–5 to North of England 7, 58–62, 107, 112–13, 118 n.88, 123, 171, 181 n.51, 183–5, 192–4 to Norwich 171–2, 198–9, 213 Plato 82–3, 189 plenary remission 98 Plutarch 189 n.82 Poliakov, Leon 160 n.109 Pollard, William F. 139 n.33, 156 n.91, 227 n.60 Pope, Marvin H. 84 n.73, 125 n.122 Pope Joan 111 Porete, Marguerite 175 n.21, 178 Porter, Catherine 16 n.52 post-partum sickness Margery heals woman with 51–2 Margery’s, following birth of first child 10, 35–40 Potter, Roland 174 n.20 poverty, holy 97 Power, Eileen 7 n.25, 39 n.33, 172–3 pre-Oedipal mother 31 pregnancy 15, 17, 18, 31, 64, 83 female voice as monstrous 170, 171 Margery’s first 34

N-Town Plays 1, 78 n.56, 104–5 nakedness 116 naming see labelling narrative techniques, Margery’s 195–6 Neff, Amy 52 n.70 Nelson, Janet L. 199 n.107 Neuburger, Verena E. 61 n.97 New Testament, English translations of 181 Newman, Barbara 6 n.23, 44 nn.44, 45, 47, 67 n.16, 111 n.68, 217 n.23, 218 nn.29, 30, 219, 220 n.34 Nicholas, H. 184 n.66 Noffke, Suzanne 210 n.13 nuptual discourse 166 Odo of Cluny 137, 186 Ogden, Margaret S. 159 n.105 Ohler, Norbert 52 n.69 d’Oignies, Marie 197 n.105, 202–3 Oldcastle, John (Lord Cobham) 183 ‘one sex’ model of human anatomy 9, 16, 73, 143 orality, female see female voice Orme, Nicholas 32 n.18, 51 n.66, 55 n.76, 60 n.93 orthodoxy, female adherence to 87–8, 94, 113, 156, 157, 179, 183, 185 Otis, Leah Lydia 101 nn.26, 29 Ovid Metamorphoses 204 n.121, 207–9 Owen, Hywel 226 n.52 Owensby, Walter T. 97 Pagels, Elaine 173 Pan 159 papal indulgence 98 parental bereavement 55 n.76 Paris manuscript 139, 225–6, 228 n.65 Parke, H.W. 188 n.81

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Margery’s spiritual 48–9, 62 priests female 193 n.98 sexual aggression shown by 114–16 Priscilla 174 Prodigal Son 40 profit and loss, in Julian’s texts 162–4, 165, 167 ‘profytte’, Julian’s use of 163 prophets, female 173–4, 192 Julian as prophet 212–15, 220–22 Margery as prophet 185–204, 210–11 sapiential theology and 191, 216–22 scribes used by 177, 196 Sibyl 71 n.30, 188–92, 204, 224 and anchoritism 207–10 Proserpina 170 prostitutes see prostitution; whore(s) prostitution in court records 105–6 discourses of in Julian’s writing 146–7, 167, 169 in Margery’s writing 106–30, 146–7 institutionalisation of 101–2 in medieval secular literature 103–5 see also whore(s) psalms 127, 230 Pseudo-Bonaventure 53, 123 n.116, 187 psychoanalytical theory 13–14 punishment 87, 90, 150 Purdans, Margaret 229, 230 purgatory 97–8 purse imagery 139–40, 142–4, 145, 151, 232

Renevey, Denis 29 n.7, 33 n.19, 36 n.28, 70 n.25, 141 n.47, 175 n.21, 200 n.110, 229 n.73 repetitive compulsion 35 n.23 Reynaert, J. 152 n.76 Richard (Margery’s companion on the journey to Rome) 55, 56 Richards, Peter 159 nn.103, 105 Riches, Sam 51 n.66, 122 n.133 Richmond, Colin 180 n.45, 181, 182 n.61, 184, 185 n.71 Riddy, Felicity 179 n.41 Rieff, Philip 56 n.79 Riehle, Wolfgang 21, 25 n.77 Robertson, Elizabeth 55 n.77, 75, 80 n.63, 133 Robinson, James M. 217 nn.24, 25 Rolle, Richard 25, 126–8, 152 Incendium Amoris 127, 137–8, 180 Rome, Margery’s visit to 55–8, 110, 123, 126 Roper, Lyndal 10 n.31, 14–15, 26 Rose, Christine 55 n.77 Rose, Linda 89 n.83 Rose, Mary Beth 45 n.51 rose symbol 144 Rossiaud, Jacques 101 nn.24, 25, 28 Rothschild Canticles 125 n.120 Roudiez, L.S. 17 n.52 Rowe, Karen E. 60 n.92 Rubin, Gayle 99 Rubin, Miri 7 n.24, 10 n.31, 48, 66 n.7, 102 n.33, 110 n.65, 146 Ruddick, Sara 57 n.81, 58 nn.85, 86, 94 Russell, Jeffrey Burton 157 nn.97, 98, 158 n.99 Ruud, Jay 154–5, 159 n.102, 160–61

Quilligan, Maureen 191 nn.90, 93, 192 Quintilla 174 rape Julian threatened with, by fiend 153–62 Margery threatened with 62, 113 Margery’s fear of 55, 56, 114–15 Raymond of Capua 177 Reau, Louis 158 red, Julian’s fiend described as 158–60 redemption 121–2, 150, 152, 169 Reed, Teresa 47 n.59, 51 n.67, 54 n.75 Reformation 127 regendering 165–6 Rego, Paula 60 n.94 Reiling, J. 217 n.25

Sacred Heart, cult of 65, 82 Sahlin, Claire L. 210 n.13 Saint Julian’s church, Norwich 68, 69, 225 Saint Margaret’s church, Lynn 39, 47, 173 Salih, Sarah 22, 25–6, 44 n.44, 45 n.53, 47, 51 n.66, 59 n.87, 122 n.113, 126 nn.123, 126, 147 n.65, 186–7 Salthouse manuscript, discovery of 20–21, 28, 201 Salthows (scribe) 21 salvific symmetry 187

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sapiential theology 191, 216–20 Julian’s adoption of 220–22 Sargent, Michael G. 227 Satan 2, 37, 120 Julian’s encounter with 153–62 satisfaction theory 156 Sawtre, William 35, 182–3 Scase, Wendy 6 n.22, 230 nn.75, 77, 78 Scattergood, J. 58 n.87 Scattergood, V.J. 181 n.54 Schoedel, William R. 216 n.22 Schoenfeldt, Michael 9–10, 14 Schulenburg, Jane Tibbetts 45 n.51 Schultz, James A. 152 n.77 Scott, Karen 177 n.33 scribes and hagiographic texts 177, 196 Julian’s 221–2, 224–5, 233 Margery’s 21, 29, 33 nn.19, 20, 117–19, 172, 176–8, 181 n.58, 194, 196–7, 199, 201–3 Seth 235, 236 Scrope, Stephen 191 n.90 ‘sekkyn gelle’ 110 self-mutilation 45 selfhood loss of, in redemptive process 121–2 sense of 10–12 semiotics of language 18, 31–2 Serjeantson, Mary S. 121 n.107 Seth 235, 236 seven spiritual works of mercy 41–2 Sewell, Joanna 227 sexual intercourse 73, 83, 141, 142–3 sexual organs female 17, 84 n.73, 143–4, 145, 167, 168, 232 male 17, 139–40, 143, 145 Shahar, Shualmith 4 nn.13, 14, 32 n.18, 34 n.21, 37 n.29, 41 n.40, 42 n.42, 54–5 n.76, 60 n.93, 172–3 Sheehan, Michael M. 107 n.60 Sheils, W.J. 199 n.107 Sheingorn, Pamela 44 n.47 Sheldon, Frances 226–7 n.56 Sherborne, J.W. 181 n.54 Shulamite (soul) 125–6, 128–9, 151 n.72 Sibyl 71 n.30, 188–92, 204, 224 and anchoritism 207–10 Siegel, Rudolph E. 8 n.27

sin entering female body through senses 135 Julian’s writings on 86–8, 93, 206 Margery’s unexpiated 34–40, 117 Sinanoglou, Leah 48 n.62 Sissa, Giulia 188 n.81, 189 nn.82, 84 Sloane manuscripts 139, 221, 226, 228 n.65, 233 Smith, Lesley 210 n.13 sodomy 102 Song of Songs 11, 83–4, 125–9, 151, 158, 168, 216 Sophos 217 soul, human 125–6, 128–9, 136, 142, 144, 145, 151 n.72, 160 ‘soule’ (waste matter) 139, 141–2, 145 Southern, R.W. 10 n.34, 97 n.8, 98 nn.11, 12 Southwark stews 101, 110 n.66 Spain, Daphne 5 Spector, Stephen 1 n.1, 78 n.56 Spryngolde, Robert 47 n.60, 50 Spurgeon, Caroline 22 n.68 Stagel, Elsbeth 177 Staley, Lynn 13 n.41, 22, 29 n.12, 30, 33 n.19, 115 n.78, 177–8, 196 Stanbury, Sarah 75 n.48, 191 n.92 Stanton, Domna C. 201 n.115 Stargardt, Ute 21 ‘sterte’ 114 Stewart, Carol 48 n.61 stigmata 38 Stone, Merlin 26 n.81 Stone, Robert K. 21 n.66, 25 n.77 story telling, Margery’s aptitude for 59–60 Strohm, Paul 87 n.80 strumpet, Margery labelled 109–10, 112 subversive reiteration 108, 110 suffering female body 32 n.17, 36, 134, 150, 163, 236 Summa Theologiae (Aquinas) 102, 142–3, 174, 190 Suso, Henry 177 sweetness 88, 89, 93 Syon Abbey 181, 227 Szarmach, Paul 22 n.69, 35 n.27, 179 n.42 Szell, Timea K. 35 n.23 Szövérffy, Joseph 119–20, 130 n.137

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Talbot, C.H. 91 n.89 Tanner, Norman 37 n.30, 59 n.89, 61 n.96, 87 n.80, 179 n.39, 181 n.58, 229 Tasioulas, J.A. 105 n.51 le Tavernier, Jean 156 n.92 Taylor, Andrew 181 n.50 Taylor, Jane 210 n.13 Taylor, Steven M. 111 n.68 Temkin, Owsei 8 n.27 Tentler, Thomas N. 98 nn.12, 13, 118 n.84 Tertullian 2 n.6 testicles 143, 145 Theoderic (scribe) 177 thirst 81 Thomasset, Claude 10 n.31, 73, 74 n.47, 85 n.75 Thurston, Herbert 52 n.71 Tinsely, David F. 154 n.79, 155, 156 n.93, 157 Tobin, Frank 177 n.32 Tolkien, J.R.R. 70 n.25 tomb, anchorhold as 71–2 Townely plays 235 transubstantiation 61 Turner, Edith 4 Turner, Victor 4 two-seed theory of generation 9

Vita 235–6 Voaden, Rosalynn 22, 35 n.26, 45 n.53, 65–6, 167 n.123, 168 n.125, 173 nn.13, 14, 177, 185 n.69, 186, 195, 199 nn.107, 108, 200, 203, 210, 211, 213 n.16 voice, female see female voice de Voragine, Jacobus 45, 119, 121, 122, 147 n.66, 148, 150, 187–8 Walker, Pamela J. 174 n.18, 186 n.73 Wallace, David 170 nn.2, 3, 171 n.4 Walsh, James 21, 22 n.68, 139 nn.33, 36, 141 n.48, 142 n.52, 154 n.81, 225–6, 228 n.65 Walters, Clifton 22 n.69, 138 n.31, 201 n.113 Walters, Teresa 67 n.15, 111 n.72 ‘wandering womb’ 82–3 Ward, Benedicta 22–3, 68, 69 n.23, 76, 77, 119 n.92, 144, 147 n.63 Warmington, E.H. 189 n.86 Warner, Marina 54 n.75, 59 n.92, 60 n.94, 74 nn.43, 45, 79 n.57, 188 n.81, 195 n.101, 216 n.18, 218 n.28 Warren, Ann K. 70, 71 n.28 water, blood associated with 81, 168, 232 Watson, Nicholas 3 n.10, 6 n.22, 22 n.69, 23–4, 33 n.20, 69, 72 n.32, 74 n.41, 77, 88, 127, 131–3, 141 n.48, 147 n.63, 164, 180–81 nn.45, 50, 205, 211 n.15, 228 n.65, 231 n.79 Watt, Diane 22, 59 n.88, 66 n.12, 83 n.71, 105 n.51, 151 n.73, 167 n.123, 168 n.125, 174 n.17, 185 n.69, 199 n.107 Webb, Diana 52 n.69 weeping 80 Margery’s 20, 21–2, 52–5, 57, 114, 115, 123–5, 171, 187, 200 Mary Magdalene’s 123–5 Virgin Mary’s 53 Weissman, Hope Phyllis 22, 34 n.22, 39–40, 52–3 Wemple, Suzanne 11 n.35 Westminster redaction 139, 226, 228–33 Westmorland, Lady (Joan de Beaufort) 184 Wheatley Manuscript 236 Wheeler, Bonnie 81 n.65 white clothing, worn by Margery 59, 110, 201 n.112

Ufforde, Isabel 69 n.22 Uhlman, Diane 199 n.108, 202 unconditional love 91–3, 94 Upholland redaction 226 upright, body standing 139, 140–41 use value, women’s 99–100, 102 vagina 143–4, 145, 167, 168, 232 Varty, Kenneth 222 n.38 vengeance 86, 90 vernacular religious texts 180–82, 183–4, 185, 228 n.67 Virgil 189 virgin martyrs 91 n.89, 147–9, 172 Virgin Mary see Mary, Virgin virginity 17, 141 Margery’s loss of 36–8, 40, 46–7, 117 see also Mary, Virgin visions Julian’s 76–8, 80–82, 86, 87, 88, 90, 93, 132, 150–53, 160, 163, 165, 167–9, 191, 205–7 Margery’s 51, 123–4, 187–8, 190, 191

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Whitehead, Christiania 29 n.7, 33 n.19, 36 n.28, 70 n.25, 71 n.27, 141 n.47, 175 n.21, 200 n.110, 229 n.73 whore(s) Margery categorised as 100, 107, 109–16 Mary Magdalene as 104–5, 116–30, 146 medieval definition of 102–3 role performed by 100–101 women prosecuted as 105–6 see also prostitution Wife of Bath 4, 96, 103–4, 105 n.54, 109, 140, 170–71 Wilken, Robert L. 216 n.22, 217 nn.24, 26 wills, evidence drawn from 68 n.18, 69, 181, 229–30 Wilson, Janet 35 n.27, 59 n.88 Wilson, Katharina M. 160 n.106, 178 n.37 wisdom 208–9 feminised in Julian’s texts 232–3 Julian’s growth towards 209, 213–15, 220–22 sapiential theology and 191, 216–22 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn 66 n.7, 122 n.113, 141 n.44, 158 n.99, 180 n.50

womb Christ’s wound compared to 65, 168 enclosure within 65, 66–7, 71–2, 80, 82–5, 91 purse image used for 143–4, 145 slippery nature of 73 ‘wandering’ 82–3 Wood, Diana 32 n.18, 199 n.107 Wood, James 216 n.19 de Worde, Wynkyn 20 wrath 86, 90 Wrenn, C.L. 216 n.18 writing, female act of 6–7, 23–4, 199–204, 235–7 Wycliffe, John 180, 184 Wynkyn de Worde 20 York, Margery’s visit to 107, 123 trial for heresy 7, 58–60, 183, 192 Zeigler, Philip 160 n.108 Ziegler, Vickie 3 n.12, 83 n.70, 110 n.67 Zimmerman, Odo John 157 n.94

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