| Paper 619-a | Sacred Paths, Soulful Journeys: Images of Travel and Pilgrimage in Female Mysticism
(Language: English)
Simone Kügeler-Race, a.r.t.e.s. Forschungsschule, Universität Köln
Index terms: Hagiography, Language and Literature - Comparative, Language and Literature - Middle English, Religious Life |
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| Paper 619-b | Exile as Austerity in the Book of Margery Kempe
(Language: English)
Matthew Brendan Scribner, Department of English, Queen's University, Ontario
Index terms: Language and Literature - Middle English, Lay Piety, Religious Life, Women's Studies |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
Recent studies focus on Margery Kempe as a traveller and pilgrim yet do not offer a close textual analysis of the passages describing her extensive voyages to the famous destinations of medieval pilgrimage: Rome, Santiago de Compostela, and Jerusalem. This paper explores how Margery's identity as a traveller is modelled on the pilgrim's saint, Bridget of Sweden, and on other continental female mystics. This comparison will show how travelling is transcended and becomes imitatio Christi in the holy women's journey accounts. The cross-cultural approach of analysing and comparing the literary motives of pilgrimage in female mysticism offers a new perspective on understanding The Book of Margery Kempe as being firmly rooted in a continental hagiographical tradition.
Paper -b:
The Book of Margery Kempe is often read in the context of mystical devotion, and less often, as a travel narrative, but I argue that these two facets are closely related. By going on pilgrimages and embracing the scorn of her countrymen, Margery enacts Hugh of St Victor's advice in the Didascalicon that a Christian become an 'exile' in order to prepare herself for the next world. In alienating herself from the particularity of her English identity, she attains a mystical universalism that allows for miraculous communication with non-English speakers, and reconciles her worldly nature with otherworldly spiritualism.
Paper-c:
A much-analysed meeting between Margery Kempe and the Mayor of Leicester culminates in the Mayor's curious assertion that her strange white clothes and outlandish wanderings mark her out as someone liable to stray from the beaten track (and lead other women with her). Indeed, the remarkable log of her journeys as a pilgrim is matched only by the extraordinary catalogue of accusations levelled at her as a person. Denounced as a heretic, a whore, or a fake by some, praised as a candidate for sainthood by others, her contemporaries found her as difficult to 'place' as the subsequent critics of her Book - a text straddling the faultlines between life writing, travel writing, hagiography, and mysticism. This paper looks at Margery Kempe as a traveller who moves not only between places but between identities, and argues that her continual physical roving over England and the continent reflects her equally shifting subject position, encountering, blurring, and transgressing boundaries of all descriptions.
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