7 - ‘Late hir seye what sche wyl’: Older Women’s Speech and the Book of Margery Kempe

Summary

Margery Kempe’s Book has survived in one manuscript copy, now London, British Library, MS Additional 61825, made around 1450, of a text dating from the 1430s. Although its author is named as ‘Mar. Kempe of Lynne’ (243/19), the Book was not written by the illiterate Margery but recorded by amanuenses. The Book records Margery’s life from the vantage point of her mature years: in her sixties Margery, born around 1373, recalls selected events from her twenties, and particularly the travel at home and overseas that she undertook predominantly in her middle age. A chronology can be derived from the text but its organising principle is not a sequential temporal arrangement as ‘the Book is composed of remembered events; the movement of Margery’s mind provides the narrative motion’. Its purpose is to record Margery’s attempt to follow her vocation and record her experiences as a middle-class housewife struggling towards sainthood. Margery’s faith (in Christ and herself) is tested by a cacophony of ‘the barbs and rack of baleful words, curses, sneers, and accusations of hypocrisy, played over and again in an unending martyrdom at the hands of everyday life and her community’.Because it was recorded by amanuenses – and here we must assume middle-aged male scribes; firstly her son, and then two unnamed priests (the latter of whom may have been her confessor, Robert Spryngolde) – Margery’s life story is problematic in terms of authorship. A. C. Spearing argues that The Book of Margery Kempe should be read as The Book of Robert Spryngolde about Margery Kempe because it describes events at which Margery was not present, and contains many constructions that belong to prose, not speech; ‘it is time to read The Book of Margery Kempe not as the speech from which it originated but as the written text into which that speech has been shaped’.

As stated by Carol Meale in an earlier essay in this volume, the complex textual and historical production of Margery’s Book is not to be oversimplified. Precisely who was responsible for the shaping of the Book has been the subject of much debate. Kim M. Phillips acknowledges that scribes ‘played an important role in shaping it and on occasion wrote in their own voice’.