“Speke to me be thowt”: Affectivity, Incendium Amoris, and the Book of Margery Kempe

Þan schalt þow ly stylle & speke to me be thowt, & I schal ʒefe to þe hey medytacyon and very contemplacyon.

—Book of Margery Kempe¹

I

Many critics have commented on the mimetic quality of Margery’s mysticism. To quote Barbara Newman:

Although Kempe’s life and her Book are both works of stunning originality, her piety is pure imitation. In addition to her visual meditations, she seems self-consciously to have experimented with every spiritual practice she encountered in every book she could persuade her clerical friends to read to her. Under the influence of her beloved “St. Bride” (Birgitta of Sweden), she began to prophesy more harshly concerning divine judgment. Learning of St. Catherine of Siena’s experiences in Rome, she underwent a mystical marriage to the Godhead. Inspired by Richard Rolle, she perceived sweet smells, celestial melodies, and ardent fires of love in her breast.²

No wonder, then, that Margery’s attachment to these spiritual precursors has been so well documented, or that her account has often been situated within familiar paradigms of affective devotion.³ But perhaps our literary-historical typologies are less suited to the task of reading the Book when we remember that accounts of late medieval holy women “marked disjunctures, discontinuities, tensions in textual exchanges.”⁴ In the Book of Margery Kempe, I will suggest, these tensions emerge most sharply in relation to Richard Rolle and the devotional economy defined by Incendium Amoris.

Rolle’s work was important in consolidating an ideal of affective spirituality in the period and in some significant respects anticipates Margery’s assumptions about the role of the body and the emotions in devotion.⁵ Although his Meditation B was at least as influential as Incendium Amoris, only the latter is explicitly cited in the Book, where it functions as a frequent reference point for the priest-scribe to whom Margery narrates her account.⁶ In crucial moments, however, the Book adopts a surprisingly resistant attitude toward Rolle’s paradigm of inspired physical and emotional intimacy with God, elevating Margery’s visionary experience over the model for spiritual discernment provided by Incendium Amoris; this is particularly true with respect to Margery’s extended colloquies with God. Rarely found in the hagiographic and didactic literature upon which the Book so often draws, these “sacred conversations,” to use Gail Gibson’s description, deserve more extended consideration, especially because they register unease about the somatic experience which characterizes so many other aspects of Margery’s spiritual life which links her to Rolle.⁷ Her account therefore disrupts the Book’s place within Rolle’s textual community and, in doing so, traces the discursive boundaries between historically specific modes of devotion.

II

The first mention of Rolle occurs in the context of Margery’s visit to Richard Caister, vicar of St. Stephen’s Church in Norwich. Explaining her revelations, Margery describes

. . .how sum-tyme þe Fadyr of Hevyn dalyd to hir sowle as pleynly and as veryly as o frend spekyth to a-noþer be bodyly spech; sum-tyme þe Secunde Persone in Trinyte; sumtyme alle thre Personys in Trinyte & o substawns in Godhede dalyid to hir sowle & informyd hir in hir feyth & in hys lofe how sche xuld lofe hym, worshepyn hym, & dredyn hym, so excellently þat sche herd neuyr boke, neyþyr Hyltons boke, ne Bridis boke, ne Stimulus Amoris, ne Incendium Amoris, ne non oþer þat euyr sche herd redyn þat spak so hyly of lofe of God but þat sche felt as hyly in werkyng in hir sowle yf sche cowd or ellys mygth a schewyd as sche felt.

(39.16–28)

God later assures Margery that “it is trewe euery word þat is wretyn in Brides boke” (47.33–34).⁸ However, her rhetorical displacement of Rolle in this key passage is never similarly countered, a fact rarely noticed by critics, who more often read Margery’s invocation of Incendium Amoris as an attempt to secure her place within Rolle’s literate milieu.⁹ The representation of the hermit here is perplexing not...