| "Staley
has used and made advances on the best recent writing on Margery Kempe,
and her book is a consolidation of the new position that has been
won for the Book in English literary culture and history. Her distinction
of 'Kempe' and 'Margery' will become the standard mode of reference,
I think, and her argument concerning the narrative purposes and 'fictional'
status of the story, and its implication in questions of authority,
in the broadest sense, will be generally accepted as definitive."—Derek
Pearsall, Harvard University
"In this extremely original study, Lynn Staley argues that the
Book of Margery Kempe is an exploratory and subtle work, exploring
the communities, practices, and values of her fellow Christians.
It turns out that this exploration is far more searching and critical
than any studies of Kempe’s work have appreciated. In elaborating
the relevant arguments, Staley offers a range of fascinating readings
of Kempe's relations to Lollardy, to the vernacular, to received
rhetorics of gender, and to issues of national identity and its
sacralizing construction in the reign of Henry V. Not only is the
Book far more critical of late medieval church and of mercantile
life than existing scholarship has suggested, it develops a radical
investigation of the dominant social institutions and forms of relationship
in late medieval England. Furthermore, Staley argues that Kempe
produces a vision of a new ecclesia, one shaped by women and women’s
relations, in the face of a fragmented but habitually violent and
persecutory set of ruling institutions and practices. This book
is a major contribution to medieval studies."—David Aers, Duke
University
Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions, a contextual
and historical study of the Book, focuses on Kempe’s ability
to construct a fiction that exploits the conventions of sacred biography
and devotional prose as the means of scrutinizing the very foundations
of fifteenth-century English society. Thus, though the Book is cast
into a communally sanctioned "female" form, Kempe uses the very
conventions that tended to define that form to test its outer limits.
In producing a text whose apparatus locates it in a communal context,
she signals her grasp of the relationship between both gender and
genre and genre and public, but her underlying technique works to
dissolve the very community she thereby constitutes. In so doing,
she creates a work that is open to radically opposed readings.
Each of the book’s four chapters considers a key aspect of
Kempe’s fiction: her manipulation of the tropes of authorship;
her exploitation of the conventions of sacred biography; her use
of the language of gender as a means of exploring the issue of spiritual
authority; and her handling of such important contemporary issues
as vernacular translation and nationalism. The conclusion addresses
the issue of community that is radically opposed to contemporary
views of the English body politic.
In situating Kempe in relation to contemporary texts and to contemporary
issues, such as Lollardy, Lynn Staley provides a radically new way
of looking at Kempe herself as an author who was fully aware of
the types of constrictions she faced as a woman writer. As the study
demonstrates, in Kempe we have the first major prose fiction writer
of the Middle Ages. Her Book is a tribute to her keen understanding
of conventional forms and modes and thus to her ability to reshape
traditional materials. It is also a tribute to her understanding
of the ways in which she might exploit the conventions and values
of a patriarchal society to her own ends. Rather than Margery, the
hysteric, Staley insists on Kempe, the controlling author, who,
like Chaucer and Langland, creates a fiction that dramatizes the
weaknesses of the social and ecclesiastical institutions of her
day. |
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