“My Body Free to God”: Pilgrimage as a Technology of Self in the Book of Margery Kempe

The Book of Margery Kempe is not simply the narrative of a pilgrim, but it is a textual pilgrimage: in it, the author retreads the way and the narrative itself. Her ability to read into her experiences the various medieval models for holiness is the final step of her progress towards Christ. The Book is clearly not hagiography or spiritual autobiography, nor does it securely establish Margery as an exemplar. Her persona in the Book may seem too bold to be saintly, too humble to be vain, and too theatrical to be madness. Yet if the Book itself is a performance, an enactment of a learned humility and detachment from self as well as a narrative about how they were learned, then Margery’s claims to speak for God are coherent with her extravagant boldness and her extravagant humility. In this essay I argue that the embodied techniques exemplified by late medieval pilgrimage provide the discipline by which Margery acquires but (more importantly) claims a public right to speak.

1. “TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF”: RITUAL AND PILGRIMAGE

Modern interpreters debate the purpose that the author Margery Kempe had for the Book and how that purpose is reflected in the tone and structure of the narrative. Lynn Staley positions Margery’s authorial voice somewhere between that expressed in a hagiographical or mystical text and that expressed in the more modern genre of autobiography. Staley’s observation of the literary sophistication and playful subversion of the Book is a helpful corrective to the (highly gendered, as she observes) classification of Margery as madwoman or mystic in some earlier literature.¹ Later critics, however, have reacted against a strong distinction between the author and subject of the Book, especially since that distinction may obscure one of the major themes of the work: the role of embodied technique in allowing Margery Kempe to attain not only mystical intimacy with God but a public voice for speaking of and on behalf of God. The Book of Margery Kempe is, in this sense, the ultimate achievement of the journey the narrative of the book records, and so the work itself unites the subject with its author.

Sarah Salih calls attention to the ways in which Margery’s actions in the Book are influenced not only by contemporary mystical accounts and pilgrimage tales but also by highly public Christian vocations such as the virgin martyr and the apostle.² It seems to me, however, that the recovery (or better, reconstruction) of the self, rather than the reclamation of virginity, is central to Margery’s project, both spiritual and literary. In this project, pilgrimage is central. Dee Dyas observes that Margery is “in a sense a construct of all the available spiritual models which her age offered to her—all of them at once and all of them still in embryonic (some would say ‘half-baked’) form. Yet there is a thread of consistent identity running through Margery’s self-revelatory narrative—and it is the identity of a pilgrim.”³ Margery’s ritual identity is assembled by bricolage, and pilgrimage is both the process by which elements (like ritual shaming and holy narratives) are acquired and the interpretive framework within which the elements are organized.

The Book of Margery Kempe examines the question of Margery’s identity most directly in Chapters 46–55.⁴ The narrative here is situated after Margery’s continental pilgrimages (Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago); she is returning from the shrine at Santiago. There is an element of irony when, as near home as Leicester, she is confronted, accused of heresy, and arrested. In these chapters, she is labeled a Lollard, a holy and blessed woman, a wicked woman, a saint, but Margery does not confirm any of these titles, often turning them upon her interlocutor: “so I hear said that you are a wicked man” and “I hope you shall be a saint yourself.”⁵ On the other hand, she not only identifies herself as a “pilgrim,” but claims a right to rebuke the clergy, including the Archbishop of...