LANGUAGE AS THE SITE OF REVOLT IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ENGLAND by M. C. Bodden

Author:M. C. Bodden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Margery “Grabs the Microphone”

Margery Kempe’s speech, especially her unauthorized public speech and her repeated reflections of her place in God’s favor, fundamentally problematizes scholars’ validating her spirituality. Women unable to control their own voices were, of course, a “common thread in medieval literature”46 and in medieval socioreligious discourse.47 As Chapter 1 established, that lack of control fell, likewise, within the theological classifications of the abuses of speech as one of the sins of the tongue. For her own interpretative communities Kempe’s voluble speech and her loud weeping created a divided view of her spirituality. Some praised her publicly; some cursed her, as she says, and ascribed a devil to her weeping and her preaching. The fact is that “mysticism was a public discourse” in the Middle Ages.48 “It was neither private nor passive, but communal, dialogic, and active.”49 Kempe’s roarings and copious tears as an expression of her bodily communication with God were, it seems, too public. Nevertheless, within the hagiographic tradition, “a tearful display [was] closely linked to the concept of patience, and, thus, an important validation of saintly worth.”50 Marie d’Oignies was supposed to have wept so much whenever she saw or heard the Passion, that “the kerchiefs intended to cover her head remain[ed] perpetually damp.”51 Pauline, Mary of Egypt, Clare of Assisi, and Elizabeth of Hungary were all said to have wept copiously during moments when they felt an exceptional closeness to Christ.52 Despite the fact that tearful responses as part of female mystical experiences are sanctioned and recorded by male hagiographers, Kempe’s roarings and weeping were met with hostility by most in her community at Lynn.53 At one point, the famous preacher, Friar William Melton,54 banished her from his sermons at her parish church, St. Margaret. And, at Canterbury, where she had gone on a pilgrimage, the monks cited her excessive weeping as signs of a heretic. Kempe recognized that her own interpretative community’s hostility toward her loud weepings was both interconnected with and complicated by the friar’s open criticism of her.55 This cultural tension is shrewdly read by Susan Dickman: “In Margery Kempe we see female mysticism moving out of its traditional Eucharistic context and, therefore, potentially away from clerical control.”56 And William Melton, the preaching friar “seems to have sensed this.”57 Despite the number of “doctors of divinity” and “bachelors of divinity” and friars who went to him asking that Margery be allowed to remain in church during his sermons, telling him that her tears were “a gift of God,” the friar “would not believe that it was a gift of God.”58 Rather, he said, she could return on one condition only: that she “would acknowledge” that her weepings were a “heart condition, or some other sickness.”59 In other words, in his view the language of her body was not an authoritative means of communicating grace from God whereas sermons from the pulpit were. In that he was heir to a strong tradition.60 But, in fact, it is precisely the “deficiency in clerical discourse,” that the “mystics’ physical response redress[ed].

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