6 - Margery Kempe’s Penitential Credit

Summary

Near the end of The Book of Margery Kempe is an episode that highlights how this famous mystic and prophet of Christ depends on commercial credit. The episode recounts Margery Kempe's arrival in London after a whirlwind pilgrimage to Germany has utterly depleted her resources, leaving her with nothing in her purse and dressed only in a ‘cloth of canvas’ (line 8179). In such dire straits, Kempe turns to credit to make ends meet, believing that in the city she might borrow money. Until such a loan is arranged, however, Kempe decides to hide her identity so that others in the city might not discover her impoverished state: ‘Sche, desiryng to a gon unknowyn into the tyme that sche myth a made sum chefsyawns, bar a kerche befor hir face’ (She, wanting to pass unknown until the time that she might have borrowed money, bore a kerchief before her face, lines 8183–4, italics mine). She does not have to hide for long. Soon enough, her credit endeavors are successful and, more adequately attired, Kempe visits a ‘worschepful wedows hows’ (line 8216). There, before the widow and her friends, including some who had previously mocked her eccentric spirituality, she proclaims a message of repentance, rebukes some of their ungodly behaviors, and openly defends herself against her mockers, doing so with such apparent success that they all repent and acknowledge her special status in Christ. The latter half of this episode has unsurprisingly garnered scholarly interest through the years, with its emphasis on Kempe's upper-class engagement, sensitivities about dress, and public self-defense acting as key examples of the social and worldly dimensions of her mysticism – dimensions that have long marked her as a radical and controversial religious figure within late medieval England. Yet the details of her credit practice that begin this episode are also important, unveiling crucial aspects of Kempe's spirituality. For her successful chevisaunce in London reveals not only her ongoing credit knowledge and creditworthiness long after her departure from trade but also, perhaps more surprisingly, how her access to credit ensures the success of her spiritual mission, opening opportunities for her to enter certain social spaces and assert her message of God's salvation and her own religious authority.