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  • Lechery, Pride, and the Uses of Sin in The Book of Margery Kempe
  • Robert Stanton

The opening line to the prologue of The Book of Margery Kempe bills the work as “a schort tretys and a comfortabyl for sinful wrecchys, wherin thei may have gret solas and comfort to hem and undyrstondyn the hy and unspecabyl mercy of ower sovereyn Savyowr Cryst Jhesu . . . that now in ower days to us unworthy deyneth to exercysen hys nobeley and hys goodnesse.” 1 Thus Margery and/or her scribe/collaborator immediately identifies the book’s readership as sinners who are in need of the savior’s mercy and goodness and its purpose as didactic and redemptive. 2 The main character, we are told, will be “a synful caytyf” who is drawn to the love of Jesus (Prologue, 13–14). The book’s famously dramatic first chapter makes it clear that the prologue’s mentions of sin are not merely conventional; the reader is plunged in medias res with an early episode of Margery’s madness, triggered by an unconfessed sin, and much follows from this trauma.

Julian of Norwich, Margery’s older contemporary and today her only serious rival as the most famous English medieval woman writer, organizes her Revelation of Love around the question of sin and the related issues of damnation and mercy. Like Margery, Julian experiences direct communication from God and attempts to interpret it in the course of her text, but the two writers’ methods could hardly be more different. Julian tackles big questions such as the paradox between a loving God and the necessity for hell and damnation and works them out theologically, by carefully categorizing thoughts and actions both human and divine and by interrogating the fundamental nature of the basic concepts of sin, evil, and mercy. Margery, by contrast, attacks similar questions through an intensely personalized autobiographical structure in which her own uniqueness is [End Page 169] equally foregrounded with her work’s utility for other sinners. Margery does not deal in theological categories but in personal conversations with God and Jesus and in stories about flesh-and-blood people: herself especially, but also her husband, her children (conspicuous by their near-absence), and the rest of the world, broadly divided into those who supported her and those who opposed her. The presentation of Margery’s spiritual and psychic development through vivid incident, the alternation of support and revilement, and extended conversations with living people, two persons of the Trinity, and numerous scriptural figures builds what Gail McMurray Gibson has called a “theater of devotion,” a playing out of forces both internal to herself and socially constitutive. 3

I want to propose a reading of Margery’s approach to sin that sorts out, as far as it is possible to do so, what she drew from her likely sources and analogues and what she contributed from her own experience, psychology, and unique method of structuring her book, in collaboration with her scribes. When Margery speaks and writes about sin, she frequently draws on known sources for terms, categories, and explanations but ends up radically reinterpreting them to achieve an idiosyncratic and highly personal vision of sin and its functions within herself and in the world. 4 Any discussion of Margery’s attitudes to sin will need to take account of both her stated, conscious goals—to tell her own story of humbled pride, to reform sinners and draw them into the mercy of God, and ultimately to use her own sins to generate forgiveness for others—and her unconscious desires and fears, which often work in ways that she herself does not fully understand and which do not result in a program or structure readily imitable by her fellow Christians. To this end, I will focus on the sins of lust and pride, which appear more frequently than any others in the book and are closely related. I hope that my conclusions will contribute to the ongoing debate over where to position Margery on a continuum between a devotional subject explicable by the available models of her day and a unique individual who can be subjected to some degree of psychological analysis.

I. Margery as Sinful...

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