Gender, Authority and Dissent in English Mystical Writers - Is Margery Kempe a mystic?

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H242 – English Radicals and Writers, 1370-1420

Gender, Authority and Dissent in English Mystical Writers

                                        

Is Margery Kempe a mystic?

The Book of Margery Kempe certainly provoked an intense amount of controversy, not least in the present but in her own time as well; a debate that centred on her position as a mystic. This position entailed having true knowledge of God, to work towards a union with him where they would essentially become one. Margery Kempe, at the very least views herself to be one of God’s vessels through which He can allow her to experience spiritual visions and feelings. It is in her book that Kempe conveys through words what she considered to be the most significant of these experiences, in order that those who read them would derive ‘great comfort and solace’. It is Kempe’s ‘individual and brilliant adaptation of what was originally a discipline for cloistered elites’ that draws attention to her. Yet it is this individual voice, the style she uses, and her firm relationship with the market world that questions her experiences of higher contemplation.

Certainly Kempe does not conform to the solitary life of a conventional mystic, much like Richard Rolle’s statement of ‘running off’ into the woods, and at one point she is even “sorrowful and grieving” because she has no company. Yet she uses many of her interactions with others to confirm her position as a mystic. She visits the revered mystic Julian of Norwich to seek advice as to whether her visions were genuine or not (Chapter 18), and receives confirmation from Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury. Essentially what it has been suggested that Kempe experiences is a higher level of contemplation - positive mysticism. This was the search for God through human imagery, which ‘insists on the physical as a legitimate means of access to the spiritual’. Certainly one of the standard patterns in mystical experience were the feelings of love between the mystic and God which is often described as fire, hence Rolle's 'Incendium Amoris'. Kempe notes that there was an ‘unquenchable fire of love which burnt full sore in her soul’, and that Christ had set her soul ‘all on fire with love’. Thus the intensity of her visions can not be brought into question as ‘she certainly shares with [the tradition] a mystical sense of God at work in human experiences’.   

These human experiences included her own body, as she suffers illness and indulgences in self-mutilation, wearing a haircloth, fasting and even biting her hand so violently that she has to be tied down. However, the visions that Kempe experiences, as mystics viewed them as gifts, are not a product of studious praying and meditating. In most ways what she conveys is an imitation of what many female European mystics experienced, like Bridget of Sweden and Dorothy of Montou or Catherine of Siena. She seeks justification for her mystical standing by linking herself closely to others and, though illiterate receives much of her inspiration from such mystical texts as 'Incendium Amoris', 'Stimulus Amoris', and Walter Hilton’s 'Scale of Perfection'. However, as Glasscoe has pointed out, her spiritual experiences were not an easy thing for Kempe to meditate on. Whereas Hilton focused on inner spiritual growth, Kempe can only explain her transcendence through what was familiar to her – the body. She even says that ‘sometimes, what she understood physically was to be understood spiritually’. Thus, whereas her visions may at many points seem extreme and even distasteful it does not necessarily mean that she was experiencing anything less than what is considered mystical.      

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What also inspires Kempe, whilst also bringing into question her status as a mystic is the fact that she was a woman who was firmly placed in the world. David Aers describes her as an independent businesswoman, who before her initial vision was active in the market economy, investing money, organising public work and employing men. Mysticism was overwhelmingly contemplative, and there was not much spoke about the ‘active life’, with the exception of Walter Hilton’s positive description of the ‘mixed life’. However instead of accepting that she is “too busy with worldly occupations that must be attended to’, like Hilton ...

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