VOCAL LAITY AND THE LAY VOCATION: AN INTRODUCTION TO MARGERY KEMPE
Historians dream of discovering a long-lost manuscript, some remarkable text hidden away in a drawer or an archive somewhere. In the 1930s, just such a thing happened. Hope Emily Allen, an American medievalist, identified the only extant manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe. The manuscript belonged to one Colonel William Erdeswick Ignatius Butler-Bowdon, who informed Allen that it had been in his family’s possession “since time immemorial.” (1) The manuscript was found at a country house, and, according to the colonel, visitors would occasionally take it down and read a page or two. According to the colonel’s son, the manuscript had been stored in a ping pong cupboard amidst “an entirely undisciplined clutter” of old books. One day, unable to find a new ping pong ball, the exasperated colonel threatened to “put this whole '——' lot on the bonfire tomorrow and then we may be able to find Ping Pong balls & bats when we want them.” Fortunately, the manuscript was identified and preserved before it fell to such a fate.
Lively as these accounts of the manuscript’s discovery are, the contents of the manuscript are livelier still. The Book of Margery Kempe, sometimes called the earliest autobiography in the English language, tells the story of the spiritual conversion of an English woman who was born around 1373. Margery was the daughter of the mayor of Bishop’s Lynn, a port-town in Norfolk. She married – a little below her station, in her opinion – at around age twenty and had at least fourteen children. In the opening chapter of the book, Margery recounts falling into a grave illness, colored by madness, after the birth of her first child. Unable to be comforted by anyone, she receives a vision from Christ, who says to her: “Daughter, why have you forsaken me, when I have never forsaken you?” (2)
Some time after this – but not before the rather comical failure of two of her business ventures – Margery begins “to enter the way of everlasting life.” (3) The Book contains many colorful accounts of Margery’s piety following this conversion, from her attempts to negotiate a celibate marriage with her less-than-enthusiastic husband, to her travels on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Rome, to her confrontations with clerics, bishops, and archbishops. Perhaps most memorably, hardly a few pages go by without mention of Margery’s spiritual weeping, which is often so obtrusive that it draws censure from neighbors or clerics. She cries during sermons, she cries on pilgrimage, she cries when she sees little boys who remind her of the Christ Child. At one point, the narrator recalls how thoroughly disagreeable certain ecclesial authorities found her weeping, objecting that even “our Lady never cried so much, nor any saint in heaven.” (4) On top of that, Margery’s companions on pilgrimage try to give her the slip, annoyed because of her weeping or because she wants to focus on God rather than making merry with them, as was the custom on pilgrimage. (See Chaucer, Geoffrey.) The Book is full of such lively stories about one medieval woman’s attempt to live a life devoted to God – and about how thoroughly obnoxious her neighbors, friends, and spiritual authorities find her efforts.
Margery’s book is different in all ways from her contemporary Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, a book full of sophisticated and often original theological reflections. (However, the two women do literally meet in Margery’s book, when Margery visits the anchorite to ask her advice – a scene not to be missed for devotees of either woman.) Margery’s book, although gaining in popularity in the scholarly world, is nevertheless much less read than Julian’s Revelations or the other best-known English mystical treatise from this time, the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. Just as Margery’s neighbors did not know what to make of her, contemporary readers often do not know what to make of her Book.
But the fact that many of Margery’s contemporaries found her perplexing and obnoxious is part of her charm. Margery must have been very difficult to like, but in the pages of her book I find her very easy to love. In one scene, a friar comes to town, to Margery’s delight. (Margery loves a good sermon.) The parish priest warns the friar that Margery often sobs loudly when she hears of Christ’s Passion and begs the friar to bear with Margery patiently. The friar refuses, claiming that Margery is annoying people (“sche noyith the pepil”!). (5) Thus begins a long struggle to convince the friar that Margery’s tears are a charism, a sign of grace. The friar cannot and will not see this, and the genius of the Book is that Margery’s rather noisy devotions become a charming and somewhat comical critique of careerist religious authorities. In this and other episodes, we see that for some spiritual authorities, charisms are welcome only insofar as the charism does not disrupt their own ministry. Some people reject God’s grace not because they have willfully rejected God, but because they have gradually hardened their hearts until any check to the ego, any inconvenience or minor awkwardness is insufferable to them – even if such disruptions are ultimately harmless. (And really, who among us has not found that God’s grace has a tendency to come at inopportune moments or from just the wrong sort of people?) Margery’s book is full of this sort of comical and yet deeply subtle psychology.
The Book of Margery Kempe has been much on my mind lately, not only because I read it twice this year while preparing for doctoral exams and researching for a conference, but also because more people have begun to speak of a crisis of lay ministry in the Episcopal Church. I often joke that I have “discerned a call to the laity,” and while I have mercifully been spared the pressure to be ordained, I have become increasingly aware of how difficult it is to find a place near the heart of the Episcopal Church if one isn’t ordained. Margery is one of my favorite saints precisely because while she is something of an unlikely model for holiness, I find her a very agreeable model of lay piety – principally because of how much trouble she causes.
Margery quite often finds herself in scuffles with clergy. In an early scene of the book, Christ, appearing to her at prayer to offer comfort and instructions, says to Margery: "I shall give you grace enough to answer every cleric in the love of God.” (6) And indeed he does: In another scene, Margery is brought before the Archbishop of York to be questioned. In a moment of comic irony, one of the clerics says that there must be a devil in Margery, for “she speaks of the Gospel.” At this moment, yet another “great clerk” brings forth a book and quotes Saint Paul against Margery, telling her that no woman should preach. Here Margery answers, boldly but also cleverly: “I preach not, sir; I come into no pulpit. I use but conversation and good words, and that I will do while I live.’” (7) Everyone, she insists, is allowed to talk about God.
I have tried not to make it a habit to tussle with priests – although I have not tried very hard – but I have taken to thinking of Margery as the patron saint of lay piety. Margery – who was not a nun, but rather a married woman, and thus on the lower rungs of the spiritual ladder of her time – has become something of a ‘companion along the way.’ In The Book of Margery Kempe, Christ speaks these words of comfort to her: “And, though other people set little store by you, I set a greater value on you. As sure as you are of the sun when you see it shining brightly, so sure are you of the love of God at all times.” (8) Christ does not see Margery as others do, nor does he reject her unconventional devotions or look down upon her. Instead he speaks to her tenderly: “Therefore, I bid you and command you, boldly call me Jesus, your love, for I am your love and shall be your love without end.” (9)
For those who may wish to read The Book of Margery Kempe, there are translations by Lynn Staley (Norton Critical Editions) and Barry Windeatt (Penguin). If you wish to read in the original Middle English, which is possible even for non-specialists, there is an excellent edition with glosses and notes by Barry Windeatt, published by D. S. Brewer. All of the quotations in this article are my own modernizations of this edition.
Meech, Sanford Brown, and Hope Emily Allen, eds. The Book of Margery Kempe: The Text from the Unique MS. Owned by Colonel W. Butler-Bowdon, vol. 1, Early English Text Society 212 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), xxxii.
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