Margery Kempe's Dissenting Fictions

Medium Aevum, Spring, 1996 by Nicholas Watson

Lynn Staley, (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). xiii 224 pp. ISBN 0-271-01030-4, 31.50 [pounds] (hard covers); ISBN 0-271-01031-2, 15.50 [pounds] (p/b).

In this forthright study of The Book of Margery Kempe, Lynn Staley maintains that what seems to be a largely factual and often disorganized autohagiography is actually a carefully constructed and self-conscious work of fiction, designed as a sophisticated analysis of the politico-religious forces at work in fifteenth-century society. Margery, the protagonist of this fiction, is a literary character based on depictions of female saints like Bridget of Sweden or Elisabeth of Hungary, and bearing no more necessary relation to Kempe the author than do Chaucer or Langland's personae to the personalities of these avowed fictional makers. Deploying this central character with an array of others -- scribes, confessors, bishops, neighbours -- whose historical status (if it can even always be affirmed) is likewise rigorously subordinated to ethical and narrative exigencies, Kempe presents a picture of the complex negotiations between secular and sacred, women and men, rich and poor, that characterize the world as she sees it: a picture whose radical potential (one that often aligns it with Lollardy) is only partly veiled by the text's need to avoid retaliation. Reading the Book thus (and with rich illustrations from other sources, including chronicles, parliamentary records, plays and episcopal registers), Staley discerns the lineaments of a narrative argument which `probes the foundations of our need for or belief in community', finding community not in the places where it is codified as an institutional ideal but, rather, `in individual moments of charity' (p. 198).

The book deserves close attention as a serious and self-consistent attempt to read a major Middle English work, one that presents special challenges and is still sometimes treated with the merest snobbery. Staley makes her case, I think, in insisting on the presence of an active intelligence (one far from entirely self-absorbed) behind The Book of Margey Kempe's verbal peregrinations and helpfully directs our attention to its use of language, and the care with which single episodes are constructed. Her study will do much to further the analysis of a work which is too often viewed simply as a window on the life of its author. However, I remain unconvinced by most of this study's central theses in the commendably explicit forms in which they are presented here. Not only are Chaucer and Langland scholars abandoning both E. T. Donaldson's theory that narrative personae have nothing to do with authors, and the unitary assumptions implicit in the word `author' itself -- so that Staley's paradigms of medieval fiction-making and authorial intentionality are likely to emerge as inadequate; it also seems perverse to present an argument for The Book of Margey Kempe as a piece of detailed social criticism while simultaneously insisting on detaching the work from any necessary relation to actual people and events. If Staley's point was really that as readers we need to approach a text like this with both the respect and the battery of analytic tools we assume to be appropriate for reading canonical literary fictions such as Chaucer's, then I would be in full agreement. But as stated her argument ultimately only simplifies the questions surrounding the Book in a new way, offering real insights but falling short of the decisive breakthrough that it ambitiously sets out to accomplish.