The Revelations of Margery Kempe: Paramystical Practices in Late Medieval England by John C. Hirsh (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER JOHN C. HIRSH. The Revelations ofMargery Kempe: Paramystical Practices in Late Medieval England. Medieval and Renaissance Authors Series, vol. 10. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989. Pp. x, 127. $32.50, 65 guilders. "Religion exists in persons, not in books" (pp. 2, 21, 100, 110), assertsJohn Hirsh at several points in this defense of Margery Kempe's visions, thereby suggesting that religious experience is transhistorical, not tied to textual or social conventions, and that Margery Kempe's visions can be analyzed apart from her narrative of them. Accordingly the author seeks to contextualize Margery Kempe within a psychological framework that includes visionaries from medieval and modern periods, and within a tradition of devotional meditation and revelation that does not change over time. Primarily in response to readers who see Margery's revelations as fraudulent, Hirsh works to legitimize her experiences, showing how closely they resemble others' paramystical experiences from the medieval era to the present. By "paramystical" Hirsh refers to those practices "found on the boundaries between mysticism and devotion" (p. 19); he thus emphasizes early in his study modes of devotional preparation found in Middle English texts, including a Middle English translation of Margaret Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls and devotional prayers recorded in MS Bodley 789. Other analogues Hirsh brings to his analysis of Margery's visions include the writings ofJulian of Norwich and Richard Rolle and twentieth-century American pentecostal meetings witnessed by Hirsh in the late 1970s. He finds themes expressed in these meetings similar to those recorded in Margery's Book, particularly the reassuring child-parent relationship with Christ, and Christ's repeated "injunctions to love" (p. 97). Hirsh also identifies a common "intimate tone" (p. 98) in Margery's narrative and in the expression of visions he himself witnessed. Beyond this, Hirsh draws extensively on psychological and anthropological studies of religion pub­ lished in the last two decades, including works by Timothy Beardsworth, Louis Dupre, Hans W Loewald, and Victor and Edith Turner. 1 Most of Hirsh's discussion, however, focuses on the question of veracity, and hejudges not only the truth ofMargery Kempe's visionsbut also that of 1 Timothy Beardsworth, A Sense ofPresence (Oxford: Religious Experience Research Unit, Manchester College), 1977; Louis Dupre, TranscendentalSelfhood: The Loss andRediscovery a/the InnerLife (New York: Seabury, 1976); HansW Loewald, PsychoanalysisandtheHistory ofthe Individual(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978); Victor and Edith Turner, Image andPilgrimage in Chnstian Culture: AnthropologicalPerspectives (New York: Colum­ bia University Press, 1978). 156 REVIEWS the pentecostal experiences he has witnessed, and ultimately of what he calls, with Dupre, "the religious mind" (p. 109). Maintaining at one point that "it is not difficult in conversation to judge the depth and sincerity of religiousaffection" (p. 48), giving as an example his own sense ofreligious fervor both forced and true, he argues that "Margery gained much of her support after she had spoken to her ecclesiastical supporters in private" (p. 48); this proves, he claims, that her experiences were also recognized as valid by the authorities with whom she had a chance to speak. Of the connection between paramystical and pentecostal experience, Hirsh sum­ marizes: "In each case [I witnessed] there seemed to me something deeper at issue, some essential commitment, at once human and more than human. I believe Margery experienced similar emotions" (p. 100). As these quotations may indicate, Hirsh fails to recognize his own presuppositions in judging the veracity of religious sentiment, positing his subjective evaluation, often allied with "common sense" (pp. 39, 44), as an objective evaluation of religious phenomena. The study also suffers from its ten­ dency to set up rigid dichotomies-convention versus true feeling, for example-that Hirsh himself transgresses. He declares at one point that literary convention in Margery's narrative gives us "reasons to doubt the veracity" of an event she describes (p. 45), while at another he admits, "Depending on circumstances, convention can communicate, and even intensify, emotion" (p. 16). As with the evaluation ofvisionary experiences, Hirsh alone is judge ofwhen conventional language can and cannot convey experiential truth. Further, the central contradiction of Hirsh's study is that he does not address the difficulties oftreating Margery Kempe...