The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350-1700

Chapter Four

Chapter Four Women’sLifeWriting,Women’sBodies, andtheGenderedPoliticsofFaith Margery Kempe, Anna Trapnel, and Elizabeth Cary the devotional practices and textual productions of the English Benedictine nuns of Ghent and Dunkirk illustrate ways in which modes of spirituality rooted in the medieval past shape political relations in the nuns’ present, the era of the Civil War and Protectorate, with an aim of bringing a version of that past back to life in the future. In this chapter, one of the chief figures is a very different woman from the period of the Civil War and Protectorate, the Fifth Monarchist prophet andpreacherAnnaTrapnel.SheshareswiththenunsofGhentandDunkirk ,though,legaciesfromthemedievalperiodthatinfluenceherspirituality , her visions of a sociopolitical future, and the ways in which she participates in her contemporary cultural milieu. In this chapter I examine the larger implications of what Anna Trapnel shares with the English nuns of Ghent and Dunkirk in their negotiations between past and present and in their performances of gendered religious identity in the 147 political sphere by reading Trapnel’s texts in conversation with the life writings of another set of medieval and early modern women: The Book of Margery Kempe and the biography of Elizabeth Tanfield Cary written by one of her daughters who was a nun at the English Benedictine house at Cambrai. Multivalenced body language plays a central role in the spiritual, social, and textual lives of Margery Kempe, Anna Trapnel, and Elizabeth Cary. By the term body language I mean first the bodily signifying gestures and practices of the women themselves that make such powerful meaning in their times and in their texts. I also mean the language spoken by the women and inscribed in the pages of their texts, language that is so strongly connected to the locus of its production in the female body. I want to stress that my central point in choosing to focus on embodiedpietyandbodylanguageintextsassociatedwithMargeryKempe , Anna Trapnel, and Elizabeth Cary is not to revisit well-established arguments about the pervasive associations of women with the body in medieval and early modern cultures. Rather, my aim is to explore the ways inwhich bodies andtexts interactinthese medieval andearly modern women’s life writings, forming a complex nexus that has profound theological, social, and political ramifications. In their embodied lives and the textualizations of these lives, Margery Kempe, Anna Trapnel, and Elizabeth Cary create conditions for powerful sociopolitical critiques and revisions. As they do in the texts considered in chapter 3, bodies and bodies politic intersect in these women’s lives and life writings; these women’s relationships with the Word made flesh generate imperatives for sociopolitical reform and sparkattendantsociopoliticalanxieties.Thoughinsomewaysthesecritiques andrevisions are differentincontentfromeach other,they share much in form and function. These women’s bodies intervene symbolically in political relations, represent oppositional visions of the English bodypolitic,andserveasacatalystforpoliticalaction.Correspondingly, uneasiness about women’s involvement in the politico-spiritual arena manifests itself in strikingly similar ways in these women’s lives and texts.Furthermore,eventhoughthepolitico-spiritualcontextsinwhich MargeryKempe,AnnaTrapnel,andElizabethCarypracticedtheirfaiths 148 The Embodied Word are, like their devotional practices themselves, in some respects quite different, in the face of hostility these three women also share strategies for establishing female authority. The Book of Margery Kempe scarcely needs introduction, at least to scholarsofMiddleEnglish.TheBookdescribesMargery’sdevotionallife, mystical experiences, travels, and repeated run-ins with clerics and politicalof ficials,includingnumerousaccusationsofLollardy.Mostofwhat we know of Margery comes from this text, which was most likely written inthelater1430s.Itexistsinonlyonemanuscript,whichbelongedtothe Carthusian Charterhouse of Mount Grace, though a radically abridged versionwasprintedin1501byWynkyndeWorde.1 Margeryidentifiesherself in the Book as the daughter of John Brunham, a man whose name “appears frequently and with increasing prominence” in the records of the East Anglian town of Lynn, where he served in a variety of offices: “jurat, chamberlain, member of parliament, mayor, coroner, justice of the peace, and alderman of the Trinity Guild.”2 The name Margery Kempe too appears in the records of the Trinity Guild, and she indicates that she married a man named John Kempe, for whom there are numerous extant references in fifteenth-century documents.3 Anna Trapnel is a somewhat more obscure figure than Margery Kempe, though she is relatively well known to scholars interested in seventeenth-century radical Protestantism. Anna was the daughter of William Trapnel, a shipwright from Stepney, Middlesex; her mother, Anne, a strongly “godly” woman, played an influential role in the development of her spiritual life. She remained unmarried, and her career as a visionary and...