Katherine J. Lewis concludes A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe by contending that, despite the Book's relentless portrayal of Margery Kempe as a saint, her unique vernacular vita was by itself insufficient to guarantee her reputation for sanctity. Nevertheless, according to Lewis, Margery Kempe "did at least enjoy some posthumous reputation as a visionary" (215). Lewis is thinking, of course, about Margery's standing during the years immediately following her death, but the irony of her comment, positioned as nearly the last word in this collection, is inescapable. Scholarly interest in Margery Kempe and her Book is in the midst of a steady crescendo that shows no signs of abating. Since 2000, two new editions of the Book (by Barry Windeatt and Lynn Staley), an abridged translation (by Liz Herbert McAvoy), a monograph (Anthony Goodman's Margery Kempe and Her World), and numerous articles devoted to the fifteenth-century mystic have been published. These are now joined by this Companion, co-edited by John H. Arnold and Lewis. It may have taken longer than intended, but Margery Kempe's reputation as a visionary now seems unassailable.
This volume's aspirations, masked as they are by the modesty inherent in its presentation as a "companion," are only the first of its many noteworthy features. As Arnold and Lewis note, this collection of twelve essays, which includes an introduction by Barry Windeatt, along with preface and afterword by the editors, takes a particular approach to the Book which may not be greeted with equal degrees of enthusiasm by all readers. The editors seek to fill a perceived gap in scholarship, which, they rightly argue, has tended to favor literary readings at the expense of historical ones. For Arnold and Lewis these essays "shift concentration away from the Book as a unique textual product and Margery as 'author,' towards a greater consideration of the text as a source for and of its period" (xviii). To be sure, the contributors eschew facile positivist readings of the Book (the old "Book as window into the medieval world" model) in favor of sophisticated analyses of the text in terms of social, political, and religious institutions, practices, and discourses. Readers familiar with recent literature on Margery Kempe will find in these essays much that is rewarding and, given dominant critical views of the Book and its protagonist, often refreshingly challenging.
Proclaiming the desirability of a serious rethinking of the received wisdom about the Book is Barry Windeatt's introduction. Windeatt suggests that those who label Margery as marginal, illiterate, eccentric, and preoccupied with worldly controversy risk aligning themselves with her medieval detractors, who took pains to describe her in similarly reductive and uncritical terms. Windeatt urges a retreat from studying Margery's peripheries by offering strategies for reading the Book's center: Margery's spiritual life broadly conceived. He exhorts critics to expend greater energy on the singularity of Margery's inward life rather than on the "variously bitty, petty, and largely shapeless" details of her outward life that have traditionally attracted readers.
Windeatt's entreaties should by no means be taken to suggest, however, that the Companion is not interested in the quotidian. Indeed, the first three essays posit several socially informed methods of interpreting the Book. Kim M. Phillips explores normative models of the female life cycle in order to illustrate the Book's deliberate departure from those models in its narrativizing of the life of Margery Kempe. Phillips concludes that "when set beside established forms of medieval life writing The Book of Margery Kempe is distinctly illegible" (34, emphasis original). Thus, rather than adhering to prescribed norms of maidenhood, wifehood, and widowhood, Margery seems instead to adopt a path taken by other holy women who contest, or at least complicate, the ideology of the female life cycle.
Isabel Davis measures Margery Kempe against the more general and pervasive norm of patriarchy, which she describes as a "complex set of compromises between women and men, and also between men and other men" (39). In Davis's presentation, Margery outwardly embraces the virtue of obedience enjoined upon those of her sex just as she craftily plays men against one another in order to advance her own agenda. Rather than openly defying the gender imbalance inherent in dominant patriarchal ideologies, Margery thus deliberately collaborates with and exploits gendered social boundaries in order to tip the scale in her favor.
Kate Parker's "Lynn and the Making of a Mystic" offers a detailed look at the vicissitudes of Margery Kempe's life as the daughter of one of Bishops Lynn's most prominent citizens. While John Brunham's accession to the mayoralty of Lynn five times is well known among readers of the Book, Parker further exposes a local political career deeply imbricated with great affairs of state, most notably Brunham's on-going dispute with Henry Despenser, Bishop of Norwich. Parker's impressively thorough analysis of Lynn politics enables a richer reading of Margery's interactions with her neighbors, as evidenced by Parker's very compelling discussion of Margery's encounter with Bishop Peverell of Worcester, although the title of the article is perhaps misleading in its suggestion that these events somehow shaped Margery's formation as a mystic per se.
John H. Arnold appears to heed Windeatt's earlier revisionist call by questioning Margery's commonly alleged status as a "heroic dissenter" (76). Arnold instead demonstrates that Margery takes pains to secure official approval for her activities. In advancing this argument, Arnold strikes a blow not only against scholars who wish to see Margery as a social and religious dissenter but also against those who wish to see her as a proto-feminist. Through his careful reading of the various legal proceedings which embroil Margery, he persuasively insists that it is "hard to see Kempe . . . as dissenting against these power structures in any very strong sense of the word" (92, emphasis original).
The next three essays turn to matters literary and textual. Allyson Foster's chapter addresses not the Book itself but its further transmission in early sixteenth-century excerpts printed by Wynkyn de Worde and Henry Pepwell. Unfortunately this essay is less successful than some of its counterparts. In describing these early printings much of the first part of the chapter simply retreads ground previously covered by Sue Ellen Holbrook. Elsewhere, Foster's claims appear self-contradicting. She argues, for example, that Pepwell's recasting of Margery as an anchoress was an attempt to make her "more orthodox" and therefore more palatable to a new reading audience (107) despite her claim earlier that in 1501 "Kempe's name would have had a certain 'cachet' among the laity" (102). One is left wondering what happened between 1501 and 1521, from de Worde's printing to Pepwell's, to necessitate the sanitizing of Margery's name and reputation. Foster does, however, offer an interesting reading of how the anthologized excerpts were reinforced and legitimized when positioned, as they were in 1521, alongside of fragments of Catherine of Siena's writings, although the idea of legitimization seems again to call into question Foster's earlier claims about Margery's sixteenth-century cachet.
Jacqueline Jenkins's essay on reading practices and Margery's putative illiteracy also seems to contribute less that is new than several of the other essays. She describes the Book's presentation of its protagonist's illiteracy as a conscious effort at self-fashioning, especially in light of the functional literacy achieved by most women of Margery Kempe's social status, an argument that has been made elsewhere by Josephine Tarvers. Jenkins identifies being read to as an activity appropriate to the vita contemplativa; illiteracy is therefore not practically speaking a reflection of Margery's education but of her spirituality. Moreover illiteracy and the numerous references to what precisely she had others read to her act as useful defenses against accusations of Lollardy.
For her part, Claire Sponsler suggests close affinities between Margery's brand of affective spirituality and the lay piety underlying dramatic production, especially in York and throughout East Anglia. Margery's probable familiarity with York drama has been previously noted by Windeatt, Carol Meale, and others; Sponsler's particular spin on this association is cast in terms of Pierre Bourdieu's ideas about the habitus. She argues that Margery internalizes social and cultural structures and discourses, including those of drama, in developing her distinctive modes of pious expression. Sponsler does seem to go too far, however, in establishing an inflexible divide between what she calls institutional religion and popular piety; for Sponsler all modes of the latter appear to be necessarily opposed to orthodoxy. She observes that "despite her orthodox practices, Margery also engaged the forms of popular piety," as if the category of orthodoxy necessarily excludes the so-called popular. Similarly her assertion that drama was only tolerated by the Church would seem to ignore the fact that scholarly consensus points toward specifically clerical authorship of most of the extant dramatic scripts and therefore of the plays' doctrinal content. Moreover, as Richard Rastall and others working on music in the York plays have amply demonstrated, many of the musicians who were essential performers in the biblical pageants staged in York were likely furnished by York Minster, again suggesting collaboration between clergy and laity rather than thinly disguised, begrudging toleration. These facts seem to call into question Sponsler's analogy that Margery's activity, like drama, was officially sanctioned while ultimately and subversively "popular."
The remaining essays in the Companion address Margery Kempe's spiritual practices on their own terms. Diane Watt convincingly challenges Lynn Staley's claims for the Book's fictiveness and Anthony Goodman's characterization of the mystic as naive with regard to contemporary affairs, secular and sacred, by arguing for the distinctly political nature of Margery's numerous prophecies. Watt acknowledges that Margery does not fashion herself as the kind of great powerbroker that her model, Birgitta of Sweden, was; fears of persecution for heresy doubtlessly tempered her prophetic self-presentation. Nevertheless, for Watt, Margery Kempe was indisputably aware of and involved in the very real local, national, and international events of her day.
In "Margery's Bodies: Piety, Work and Penance," Sarah Salih offers a fascinating reading of the bodily modes of spiritual activity that so frequently figure in feminist analyses of the Book by juxtaposing Margery Kempe and Marguerite Porete. She states that "[l]ike Porete, but unlike the majority of medieval holy women, Margery aspires to a purely interior piety" (167). Thus, Margery's infamous roaring and weeping are the marks of a novice who has yet to achieve a purely contemplative state. Salih's article, like Arnold's, questions the received impression of Margery as challenging the dominant ideologies of her time and place. Indeed, she explicitly cautions that "modern analyses which see them [her cryings] as subversive disruption of the patriarchal word by feminine bodily emotion oversimplify the Book's mapping of their reception" (174). Salih also appears to embrace tacitly Windeatt's earlier plea that Margery's outward piety be recognized as subordinate to her inward devotion in future scholarship.
P. H. Cullum offers an insightful analysis of Margery's shifting attitudes toward charity as these are depicted in the Book. Cullum identifies a distinction between a kind of local, bourgeois notion of charity (giving away what one can afford) and radical, continental ideas which Margery would have encountered in the course of her travels to and from Rome (charity as giving away all that one has). She further argues that in general Margery appears to have prioritized the Spiritual Works of Mercy ahead of the Corporal, the latter, among which charity numbers, deemed by Margery to be "more appropriate to ordinary lay people, not to someone such as herself, the beloved of Christ, who was anything but ordinary" (193).
Katherine J. Lewis's aforementioned chapter brings A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe to a close. In it she turns specifically to the question of Margery's legacy in arguing that the Book's author(s) did all that she/he/they could to promote Margery's sanctity, but that the Book alone was not enough to earn Margery official sainthood. Lewis notes that post-Conquest English women faced an uphill battle on the road to canonization unless they were acknowledged miracle-workers, a credential which the Book strives to document. Nevertheless, English men and women already had cultivated particularly close connections with a number of miracle-performing universal saints, like Katherine and Ursula, connections which perhaps indicate, according to Lewis, that there was "no gap for the Book to fill after all, so no need for a St Margery" (215).
A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe should be received as a welcome addition to the ever burgeoning literature available on this remarkable text and the life it portrays. Beyond the strengths of the various individual articles, which comprise the volume, and unlike many such collections, the book rewards reading as a whole. The numerous cross-references which appear throughout the footnotes show that the various contributors are often in conversation with one another, even and perhaps especially at points where disagreements emerge. And although there is no explicit or formal division of the essays into subgroups, clear relationships exist among the chapters. (Indeed, the chapters seem to follow the trajectory from bodily to spiritual described by Salih and Cullum with regard to Margery's devotional practices.) Windeatt, Arnold, and Salih offer serious revisionist challenges to the many feminist readings of the Book which have been offered to date, and further work on gender and the Book will need to address their claims. Meanwhile Salih's discussion of Marguerite Porete and Foster's of Catherine of Siena suggest that medieval women mystics still have much to say to us. Foster's and Lewis's contributions take different approaches toward the related matters of reception and legacy, while the opening chapters by Phillips, Davis, and Parker offer those of us who do approach the Book from literary fields sophisticated new ways of reading Margery Kempe's life. These approaches will enable us to imagine her thorough integration in the social fabric of Bishops Lynn in much more nuanced terms despite the well-known paucity of documentary evidence attesting to the "real" life of Margery Kempe.
In general this is a well-conceived collection that, while perhaps intended for an audience better versed in matters Margery than the word "companion" might imply, nevertheless contains much that will enrich future interpretations of this text. All readers will find useful the book's fairly thorough bibliography, although it does fail to include British Library MS Additional 61823, the actual Book, in its listing of manuscripts and omits a few relevant articles, among them Stephen Medcalf, "Inner and Outer," in The Later Middle Ages, ed. Stephen Medcalf, (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981), pp. 108-171, and Kelly Parsons, "The Red Ink Annotator of The Book of Margery Kempe and His Lay Audience," in The Medieval Professional Reader at Work: Evidence from Manuscripts of Chaucer, Langland, Kempe, and Gower, eds. Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Maidie Hilmo (Victoria: University of Victoria, 2001), pp. 143-216).
In short, there is much to recommend A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe, although (and perhaps precisely because) some of its claims will be received as conservatively revisionist by some of its readers. Then again, for a book about Margery Kempe, ambivalent reception seems only fitting.