The Book of Margery Kempe Read Online Free Page B

handling the figurative language of traditional spiritual literature – particularly the nuptial imagery of mystical union with God – with an endearingly earthbound awkwardness. In following the conventional imagery of the mystical marriage-bed, the wedding, the body of the spouse, Margery’s realizing imagination produces an unnerving directness and concreteness, as when God informs her: ‘You may boldly, when you are in bed, take me to you as your wedded husband … You can boldly take me in the arms of your soul and kiss my mouth, my head and my feet as sweetly as you want’ (chapter 36). It is characteristic of Margery that she will take over the mystical tradition of applying metaphors of sense perception to the mystic’s experience of God and apply them with suchconcrete force as to risk losing the spiritual in the vigour of the real (although she is noticeably careful – perhaps because of challenges to her orthodoxy – to mention how God speaks ‘to her mind’, ‘in her soul’, and so forth). Yet Margery’s limitations as a would-be mystic are balanced by her strengths as a strikingly individual and vivid talker and rememberer, as is shown by the way she recalls how she experienced some tokens of the Holy Ghost in chapter 36: the rushing wind and the dove of the Holy Spirit are apprehended by Margery Kempe as the sound of a pair of bellows and the song of a robin redbreast ‘that often sang very merrily in her right ear’.
    In the end we must accept the
Book
as it is, a unique survival which it is pointless to think less of – by measuring it against other works and genres – when the writing seems to have so much in it of the life it seeks to present. It would be misleading to take the
Book
as if it were the transcript of conversations in which a medieval Englishwoman remembers her life. The writing has clearly been much more edited and shaped than this – edited by the bookish concerns of the scribe, and shaped and focused by that spiritualizing lens through which Margery looks back at her experience.
    Yet there remain indications that we are dealing with an incompletely edited transcript – the lack of shaping in the material presented and the limitations of the spiritual life that is portrayed. There is no sense of a perceived development and interpretation which might mark a more contrivedly presented autobiography. There is also striking openness, as when Margery includes the early story of her sexual temptation in chapter 4, with its anti-climactic conclusion when she falls prey to her own will and is then rebuffed by the man who had tempted her. There seems a comparable honesty in her account of such an incident as that in which her fellow travellers desperately try to avoid her when crossing from Calais home to England (‘’What the cause was, she never knew’ – II, chapter 8). For although Margery understandably remembers her successes along with her failures, she seems immune to embarrassment, and is perhaps without the kind of self-consciousness which would have led her to re-write herexperiences in a way that blurred over the awkward corners and sharp edges of her own personality, and only left the rough surfaces and bloodymindedness of other people’s characters. 24
    The continuity of the
Book
lies in Margery’s own will and, as something of a prophet in her time, the local structure of her writing is often determined by the recollection of a sequence of events which proved her foresight. As an illiterate person, the role of human speech seems central to Margery’s remembering of past events, and happily central to her dictated account of that past. Her sensitivity to the spoken word is displayed in her feeling that she is being crucified by the cruel words of others. Challenged to justify herself, continually placed in the position of being tested, Margery must also speak out clearly for herself.