Opening Passage: There is a proem and a preface, but the real beginning is when we begin to get Margery's story:
When this creature was twenty years of age, or somewhat more, she was married to a worshipful burgess [of Lynn] and was with child within a short time, as nature would have it. And after she had conceived, she was troubled with severe attacks of sickness until the child was born. And then, what with the labour-pains she had in childbirth and the sickness that had gone before, she despaired of her life, believing she might not live. Then she sent for her confessor, for she had a thing on her conscience which she had never revealed before that time in all her life. For she was continually hindered by her enemy -- the devil -- always saying to her while she was in good health that she didn't need to confess but to do penance by herself alone, and all should be forgiven, for God is merciful enough. And therefore this creature often did great penance in fasting on bread and water, and performed other acts of charity with devout prayers, but she would not reveal that one thing in confession. (p. 41)
Summary: The Book of Margery Kempe can be seen as a book of pilgrimages. Literal pilgrimage is one of the key components of the entire book, as Margery Kempe goes on quite a few, including to Rome and to Jerusalem. Much of the narrative interest of the book lies in this, since we get to see quite vividly what being a pilgrim in the early fifteenth century would be like. Margery is frank and clear about the difficulties. There are robbers and there are scammers. Sickness is common, and if you are sick you have very few options that do not leave you vulnerable to robbers and scammers. Pilgrimage in this period is not something one really does alone, especially if you are a woman, so when various plans fall through, she often ends up having to beg or negotiate to travel with someone else -- and it is often the case that the pilgrim parties are not well-matched, so that you may be traveling with someone with whom you cannot get along. (It becomes clear as we see many of these pilgrimages that Margery herself is very often the pilgrim with whom the other pilgrims find they cannot get along.) She is wealthy enough to have a few servants, but it's hard to find a servant who can endure a life of service under the difficult conditions of pilgrimage, particularly when the service is to a woman like Margery, who is continually putting her servants in embarrassing and perhaps unnecessarily difficult situations. Money is often tight, and almost impossible to replenish on the road, so despite being a moderately well-to-do woman, Margery at several points is reduced to begging door to door.
The work is also a book of moral pilgrimage. We start out with Margery recognizing her early self as devout but not devoted; that is, she goes to extensive lengths in her spiritual practices, but is doing it to avoid the one spiritual practice, sacramental confession, that she actually needs. (A very common problem that most people have to deal with at some point.) This leaves her vulnerable to the attacks of devils and many vices, but a sickness and religious vision of Christ starts her on the road to improvement. But it is a road, not an achievement. Even as she is setting out on it, she says, "she did not truly know our Lord's power to draw us to him" (p. 43), and this is, I think, what Margery's book is all about, a discovery of just how extensively one can be drawn to Christ, even often against one's will, even given one's flaws. Margery never stops being flawed. There is always a self-indulgent, self-justifying aspect to her; one suspects that even quite late in her life she is still indulging in some spiritual practices in order to avoid spiritual practices she needs more. She genuinely improves, but she never really stops being self-oriented, although she becomes capable of extraordinary sudden generosity; everything in The Book of Margery Kempe is about Margery Kempe. But she, often shortsighted and silly, generally incapable of sympathizing with or even understanding other people's points of view, occasionally outright selfish, stops being only that; she is drawn closer and closer to Christ despite that, the polar opposite of a marzipan saint.
The three key means by which Christ draws Margery are the gift of tears, persecution, and imaginative visions. The gift of tears is the root. Weeping as a religious practice has fallen out of fashion, in part through the victory of the sort of people who opposed Margery all her life, who insist that public weeping must be a sign of hypocrisy, but it was still practiced in Margery's day; to shed tears freely in prayer was often considered a grace. Margery, however, is given the gift in superabundance, to such an extent that it actively disturbs the people. She does not merely shed tears; she often wails, even to the point of disrupsting Mass (a reason why so many of her persecutors are understandably priests). She sheds so many tears so easily that people start assuming that it must be fake. And while this is certainly not true, Margery shows very little cognizance of what we find on the subject in, say, St. Catherine of Siena, who recognizes that there is a hierarchy of tears, and that one needs to progress in them to the 'tears of peace'. We do find that eventually her weeping changes character, but this happens not because of Margery but because of Christ; one sometimes gets the impression here, as one so often does with Margery, that Christ was trying to teach her lesson and that she kept not learning it because she is not self-aware enough to have an inkling that there is a lesson to be learned, until Christ eventually just arranges matters to force her to learn it. Nonetheless, St. Catherine also tells us that no tears are to be despised, whatever their motivation; coming from the heart and manifesting it (even false tears showing a false heart), they are a channel to the soul and thus a way in which we may learn and pray. The people around Margery are not so charitable, and while their irritations and annoyances are often entirely understandable, they do not stay at the level of irritations and annoyances, and at times become actively malicious.
In Book II, Margery happens in passing to give us some insight into how the people around her often saw her, which in other cases usually has to be inferred from their behavior, because Margery does not seem to have any idea why people around her treat her so badly. She tells us that a story started going around that she sat down to a table loaded with food, including herring and pike, saying, "Ah, false flesh, you would now eat red herring, but you shall not have your will," after which she ate the pike (a far higher quality and more expensive fish than herring). That is to say, she was accused of hypocritically pretending that she was being an ascetic while using that as a way to indulge herself; wanting pike, she pretended that she wanted herring so that she could 'deny' herself herring and eat pike instead. This story became so widespread that it became proverbial -- "False flesh, you shall eat no herring" (p. 288). Margery repeatedly denied that it ever happened, but denials are no match for a good story, so that it began to be the case that everywhere she went, the one thing people already knew about her was that she was the "False flesh, you shall eat no herring" lady. The point, of course, is not fish; this is how all of her actions were often seen. Margery, of course, not being a titan of insight into other people, does not seem fully to grasp that it's not just an isolated false rumor, although in this case she does find the right way to handle it -- admit that she is the woman in question, insist that she is not guilty and did not do it, but beyond that provide no criticism or recrimination and just let the ordinary decency of people do the rest. There's never any indication that she takes the general point or learns the general lesson, though; perhaps she wouldn't really be Margery if she did.
Margery is often accused of being a Lollard. 'Lollard' could sometimes just mean a common (as opposed to educated) heretic in general, but in her case it may sometimes still be used in the more technical sense. The Lollards were followers of John Wycliffe, although Wycliffe was an educated theologian, and the Lollards were not especially educated people but picked up ideas from Wycliffe in bits and pieces, not always putting them together in ways that Wycliffe himself would have accepted. William Sawtry, the first priest burned at the stake for Lollardy, was a priest at St. Margaret's Church in Lynn, which is where Margery was from; he would have been Margery's own priest until his death in 1401. He rejected transubstantiation and prayer to the saints, arguing that preaching was more important than prayer, that church funds should be given to the poor instead, and that the True Cross should not be adored. Margery, who shows no particular interest in how churches use their funds, whose pilgrimages often take her to locations of purported Eucharistic miracles and relics of the life of Christ, and who never stops praying, often talking to the saints, is absolutely not a Lollard; it's hard to imagine anyone who would be more obviously the opposite of William Sawtry. But her origin combined with her odd prayer practices likely made it easy for people to accuse her of it.
The book is also an imaginative devotional pilgrimage; if Margery's behavior is the frustrating part of reading her story, her imagination is where Margery's charm shines through. Pilgrimage is prayer, but it is simultaneously a very earthy matter; you get dusty on the road, you have to concern yourselves with mundane matters of food and sleep and evacuation and sickness, and your patience and endurance are actually tried. Most of us prefer to be pilgrims in our imagination, where we can be clean and shining and just stop in when we feel like it, and where we can perhaps easily overestimate our progress. But Margery's imagination is a bit different, perhaps because she went on so many actual pilgrimages. It is very earthy, which makes some of her religious experiences seem simultaneously vividly concrete and embarrassingly silly. At one point she experiences the Holy Spirit as sounding like a puffing of a large bellows; at another, she imagines the persons of the Trinity as seated on fine cushions (the Father on a gold cushion, the Son on a red cushion, and the Holy Spirit on a white cushion). She is perfectly aware that this is only how she imagines it -- for instance, after talking about the cushions, she goes on to explain that nonetheless her belief in the Trinity is orthodox, giving an entirely correct summary of the doctrine. The Lord's assurances to her are sometimes suspiciously flattering and detailed, but some of this seems just to be that she's not as sophisticated as other mystics of the day at communicating the line between what the experience actually was and what she imagines and infers about it.
Nonetheless, the fact that she sometimes comes across as a bit silly may be as much a sign of a flaw in ourselves as anything. We over-spiritualize these things, confining it to words and depictions in stained glass; we treat religious matters as abstract. Margery Kempe is temperamentally incapable of doing so. She doesn't just think about Christ's humanity; she imagines herself as the servant of the Holy Virgin, doing day to day chores for her so that the Virgin can look after the Christ child, and she does this over an extended period of time in great detail. She doesn't just talk about the Holy Spirit, she interacts with Him in ways that she imagines in the most concrete and realistic way possible. She doesn't grasp after fine phrases, letting everything glide on purely poetic association of words the way many false mystics do; she experienced something, and she tells you exactly what it was like, in the same way that she tells you exactly what she experienced in being sick or in conversing with an anchorite.
And it is because of this that everything begins to come into focus. We spend decades of journey with Margery as she pilgrimages through the world with her gift of tears. It is often as embarrassing and suspicious to us as it was to her contemporaries, and certainly more foreign. We follow along with her weird mix of self-justification and abject humility, and can get as impatient with it as everyone else did at the time. We learn of her highly imaginative and detailed visions through time, and we find it often silly and occasionally self-indulgent. But toward the end there are many vivid meditations on the Passion of Christ, drawing heavily from mystery plays and her own experiences as a pilgrim, imagined with the concrete and homely detail we have found before. They are often moving, and for the first time, when she recounts her weeping, it makes entire sense. We thought, and her contemporaries thought, that she was constantly weeping and wailing in disruptive ways that made little sense in context. But this was the context; this was where Margery Kempe always was, on the Via Dolorosa and at Golgotha. She was not there because she was especially good, or especially wise, or especially gifted, but she was there, and being there, how could she not weep, regardless of wherever else she might have been? Margery Kempe is silly, self-centered, and sometimes obnoxiously embarrassing -- we know it because she has shown it to us herself, sometimes with self-awareness and more often with an astonishing lack of it. Yes. But we had to go on a pilgrimage through the entire book before we reached the level of seeing the world in a less silly and self-centered way than embarrassingly silly and self-centered Margery Kempe. Perhaps we should be shedding some tears ourselves.
Favorite Passage:
Then she took ship, with the man who had provided for her, and God sent them calm wind, which pleased her very well, for there rose not a wave on the water. Her company thought they were making no progress, and were gloomy and grumbling. She prayed to our Lord, and he sent them enough wind that they sailed on a great way and the waves rose. Her companions were glad and cheerful, and she was miserable and sorrowful for fear of the waves. When she looked at them she was always frightened. Our Lord, speaking to her spirit, ordered to lay her head down so that she would not see the waves, and she did so. But she was always frightened, and she was often criticized for that.... (p. 276)
Recommendation: Recommended.
*****
Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, B. A. Windeatt, tr., Penguin Books (New York: 2004).
