9 - 1412–1534: texts

Summary

It is a modern commonplace that the English fifteenth century – although an age of such flamboyant achievements in many of the arts – was a time of intellectual and spiritual repression, regulation and censorship, fearful of heresy and of innovation alike. Within this overstated larger picture of the age, modern assessment of contemplative life and literature in the fifteenth century becomes comparably distorted. The very accomplishment of mystical writing in English in the fourteenth century – so the standard literary history runs – is underlined by a lack of successors. In its pursuit of the contemplative life, the fifteenth century is hence nowadays characterized – in neglect of much contrary evidence – as conservative, insular, and without originality.

Emblematic of modern interpretation of fifteenth-century spirituality has been the ambivalent reception of The Book of Margery Kempe since its rediscovery in the 1930s. Soon judged an embarrassment – whether as some pooterishly unselfaware ‘Diary of a Nobody’, or because a sadly self-deceived mimicry of more authentic mystical experience – the Book embarrasses still, for all the achievement of recent commentary that variously seeks to neutralize the challenges of its embarrassments. The terms of the Book's current celebrity – its recruitment as witness to modern-day preoccupations with dissent, gender, authority, and empowerment – attain invaluable insights but evade the embarrassment of facing what centrally concerns and fills Kempe's Book: her revelatory conversations with Christ, in a stream of consciousness that constitutes the only biography that Kempe felt worth recording.