Illiterate Memory and Spiritual Experience: Margery Kempe, The Liturgy, and the “Woman in the Crowd”

1. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 126. Hereafter, references to the Book are cited parenthetically. I preserve Lynn Staley’s distinction between “Margery,” a narrative persona, and Kempe, a historical source of the events the Book describes; see Lynn Staley, Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). Because “fiction” seems an anachronistic concept for Kempe’s era, I treat all events described in the Book not as fiction but rather as artifacts collaboratively constructed by Kempe and the scribes, artifacts that retain detectable evidence of their different narrative styles. See

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2. Kimberley M. Benedict’s Empowering Collaborations: Writing Partnerships between Religious Women and Scribes in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2004), especially chap. 1 (“Precedents”), pp. 1–22, and for her critique of previous formalist attempts to distinguish between Margery’s contributions and those of the scribes, see pp. 88–91. My analysis, though based in stylistic analysis of form, does not presume either Margery or the scribes were inherently more powerful in the collaboration that produced the Book. The following passages of the Bible, which are referred to in the text, are found in Luke. The Latin is from the Vulgate and the English is from the Douay-Rheims Version. 11.27: “Factum est autem cum haec diceret extollens vocem quaedam mulier de turba dixit illi beatus venter qui te portavit et ubera quae suxisti.” 11.28: “At ille dixit quippini beati qui audiunt verbum Dei et custodiunt.” 11.27: “And it came to pass, as he spoke these things, a certain woman from the crowd, lifting up her voice, said to him: ‘Blessed is the womb that bore thee and the paps that gave thee suck.’ ” 11.28: “But he said: ‘Yea rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.’ “

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3. Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (London: Hambeldon Press, 1984), p. 130; Lynn Staley, Dissenting Fictions, pp. 119–21

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4. Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 109–113.

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5. Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. 130–33; Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), chap. 9; Staley, Dissenting Fictions, p. 147. Jennifer Summit points out the generalized male suspicion of female mystics’ public speech and writing in “Women and Authorship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 97–99 [91–108].

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6. Josephine Tarvers, “The Alleged Illiteracy of Margery Kempe: A Reconsideration of the Evidence,” Medieval Perspectives 11 (1996): 117 [113–24].

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7. Carol Meale, “…alle the bokes that I haue of latyn, englisch, and frensch’: Laywomen and Their Books in Late Medieval England,” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1150–1500, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp. 133–34 [128–55]. In that same collection, Felicity Riddy points out that only one woman of this era is known to have translated Latin text to English (“Women Talking about the Things of God,” p. Ill [104–27]).

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8. Diane Uhlman, “The Comfort of Voice, the Solace of Script: Orality and Literacy in The Book of Margery Kempe,” Studies in Philology 91.1 (Winter 1994): 55 [50–69].

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9. Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1977)

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10. Eric Havelock, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), and “The Oral-Literate Equation: A Formula for the Modern Mind,” in Literacy and Orality, ed. David R. Olson and Nancy Torrance (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 11–27. Patricia Bizzell critiques this work in “Arguing about Literacy,” College English 50.2 (February 1988): 141–53. Also see

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11. Joyce Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public in Late Medieval England and France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 8–13.

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12. Franz Bäuml, “Varieties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” Speculum 55.2 (April 1980): 237–65; and Joyce Coleman, Public Reading, pp. 76–108, esp. pp. 85–86. See also

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13. Ivan Ilich, “A Plea for Research on Lay Literacy,” Interchange 18.1–2 (Spring–Summer 1987): 9–22; repr. in Literacy and Orality, ed. D.R. Olson and N. Torrance (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 28–46.

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14. Illiterate minds appear not to remember numbers as literate minds do. Rather than conceiving of numbers as symbols, such as letters or words, illiterates remember the concept of number as quantity by assembling a suitable quantity of like objects in memories to stand for numbers. A. Castro–Caldas, A. Reis, and M. Guerreiro, “Neuropsychological Aspects of Illiteracy,” Neuropsychological Rehabilitation 7.4 (1997): 336 [327–38].

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15. Edwin Hutchins, “Understanding Micronesian Navigation,” in Mental Models, ed. D. Gentner and A.L. Stevens (Hillside, NJ: Eribaum, 1983), pp. 191–226.

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16. C. Clifford Flanigan, Kathleen Ashley, and Pamela Sheingorn, “Liturgy as Social Performance,” in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2001), pp. 695–714.

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17. Karl Magnus Petersson, Alexandra Reis, and Martin Ingvar, “Cognitive Processing in Literate and Illiterate Subjects: A Review of Some Recent Behavioral and Functional Neuroimaging Data,” Scandinavian fournal of Psychology 422 (2001): 251–67; and Castro-Caldas et al., “Neuropsychological Aspects of Illiteracy,” 327–38. Literacy’s changes in brain structure and mapping of mental functions appear independent of demographic factors including gender and ethnicity.

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18. Jennifer Manly et al., “Literacy and Cognitive Change among Ethnically Diverse Elders,” International fournal of Psychology 39.1 (February 2004): 47–61.

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19. The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Meech and Allen, p. 335n; Judith Rosenthal, “Margery Kempe, and Medieval Anti-Judaic Ideology,” Medieval Encounters 5.3 (1999): 409–20

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20. Carol Meale, “‘This is a deed bok, the tother a quick’: Theatre and the Drama of Salvation in the Book of Margery Kempe,” in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain: Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Brown et al. (Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 2000), pp. 49–67.

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21. William Manson, The Gospel of Luke (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930), pp. 141–42.

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22. James Strong, The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (Nashville, TN: T. Nelson, 1996). Risto Uro believes the best reading is “corrective,” a “yes, but rather [which softens] the contrast between maternal honor and true discipleship.” “Is Thomas an Encratite Gospel?” in Thomas at the Crossroads: Essays on the Gospel of Thomas: Studies of the New Testament and Its World, ed. Risto Uro (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1998), p. 148 [140–62].

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23. Sir William Smith and Sir John Lockwood, Chambers Murray Latin-English Dictionary (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1933; London: John Murray, 1933; repr. Edinburgh: Larousse, 1976), p. 610.

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24. Martin R. Dudley, “Sacramental Liturgies in the Middle Ages,” in The Liturgy of the Medieval Church, ed. Thomas J. Heffernan and E. Ann Matter (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute, 2000), pp. 221–23 [214–43].

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