Medieval Mysticism: The Book of Showings and The Book of Margery Kempe

Today we look at the literature of female mysticism in the English 14th and 15th centuries, particularly  the landmark texts Dame Julian of Norwich's Book of Showings and Margery Kempe's The Book of Margery Kempe,  which are not only profound religious statements but the earliest voices of women in the English language.

Special thanks to Jessica Orluck for her advice and assistance!

Transcript

Pax et bonum! Salve! And welcome to the Classic English Literature Podcast, where rhyme gets its reason.  

The sharper among you may have noticed that there is a significant body of medieval literature that I’ve hardly even mentioned in this podcast.  In fact, I don't believe I've mentioned it at all.  It’s called didactic literature and its purpose is, as the name indicates, to instruct.  So we’re talking about things like sermons, saints’ lives, rules, and treatises.  Generally, these were religious in nature, designed to intellectually elucidate the nature of God and of human duty to him.  If I’m honest, they’re of limited interest to the general audience, rather unidimensional, and (for lack of a better word) preachy.  Very informative and valuable as cultural artifacts, but not very sexy for a thrusting podcast.

There is one, though, that is particularly germane for today’s episode.  It’s called variously the Ancrene Wisse or the Ancrene Riwle, a Middle English manual for the monastic life of anchoresses composed in the early 13th century for three sisters.  Anchoresses, or anchorites, were religiously devout people who took a vow to separate themselves from the world in order to devote all their time and energy to prayerful contemplation.  Many anchorites and anchoresses actually received the office of the dead – that is, a funeral rite – as they entered their cells, binding their bodies and material life to God.  They were, in effect, dead to the world.  The Ancrene Wisse provided guidance on such concerns as divine service, morality, temptation, and confession.  

Many scholars, including JRR Tolkien (haven’t mentioned him in a minute!), consider it the pinnacle of medieval English prose.  Here’s a little sample, an amuse-bouche before the episode’s main course:

Hope halt te heorte hal, hwet-se þe flesch drehe; as me seið, "Ȝef hope nere, heorte tobreke."

Hope keeps the heart in health, whatever the flesh may suffer. "Without hope," as they say, "the heart would break".

It’s prose, but you could easily mistake it for poetry.  It has a very pleasing, almost lilting, rhythm – especially the first phrase: note how the vowel sounds move up in the mouth at first, then retreat back in the second: O-A-E then E-A leading to the end of the whole sentence with that cracking K sound.  And the alliterative “h” forces an exhale, a releasing breath that supports the meditative, optimistic sentiment of the line which exhorts us to one of the cardinal virtues, hope.  And hope is the great underlying theme today.

Interestingly, we can see the interpenetration of the rise of courtly love poetry and romance and the renewal of personal monasticism seeking a more direct communion with God.  When he set down his rule for monastic communities in the early 6th century, St. Benedict of Nursia employed a military metaphor: “They have built up their strength and go from the battle line in the ranks of their brothers to the single combat of the desert. Self-reliant now, without the support of another, they are ready with God’s help to grapple single-handed with the vices of body and mind.”

The Ancrene Wisse includes “The Parable of the Christ the Lover-Knight,” a brief allegory in which a hard-hearted young lady, beset by her enemies, disdains all the lavish gifts, protection, and love offered by a handsome king.  Finally, he says, 

"Dame, thu art i-weorret ant thine van beoth se stronge thet tu ne maht nanes-weis withute mi sucurs edfleon hare honden, thet ha ne don the to scheome death efter al thi weane. Ich chulle for the luve of the neome thet feht up-o me ant arudde the of ham the thi death secheth. Ich wat thah to sothe thet ich schal bituhen ham neomen deathes wunde, ant ich hit wulle heorteliche for-te ofgan thin heorte. Nu thenne biseche ich the, for the luve thet ich cuthe the, thet tu luvie me lanhure efter the ilke dede dead, hwen thu naldest lives." Thes king dude al thus: arudde hire of alle hire van, ant wes him-seolf to wundre i-tuket ant i-slein on ende - thurh miracle aras thah from deathe to live. 

"’You are under attack, lady, and your enemies are so strong that without my help there is no way that you can escape falling into their hands, and being put to a shameful death after all your troubles.  For your love I am willing to take on that fight, and rescue you from those we are seeking your death.  But I know for certain that in fighting them I shall receive a mortal wound; and I will accept it gladly in order to win your heart.  Now, therefore, I beg you, for the love I am showing towards you, to love me at least when this is done, after my death, although you refused to during my life."  This king did just as he had promised; he rescued her from all her enemies, and was himself shamefully ill-treated and at last put to death.  But by a miracle he rose from death to life.” 

Right, Jesus is the king who gives his life to secure our soul’s (the lady’s) love, yeah?  Might seem weird that the pacifist and chaste Christ is portrayed as a chivalrous lover, but there is a passage in St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians that makes the case a bit more plausible.  Here it is from the 14th century Wycliffe Bible:

Therefore take ye the armour of God, that ye be able to against-stand in the evil day; and in all things stand perfect. Therefore stand ye, and be girded about your loins in soothfastness [Therefore stand ye, girded about your loins in soothfastness], and clothed with the habergeon of rightwiseness, and your feet shod in making ready of the gospel of peace. In all things take ye the shield of faith, in which ye be able to quench all the fiery darts of him that is most wicked.

How do we justify Christ as a lover?  Well, listen on, and you shall hear.

As I said, hope is today’s great underlying theme, and so the Ancrene Wisse provides context for this episode. It is an interesting one – and a bit off our usual path.  Today, we’ll take a look at two of the most influential and historically significant works of medieval literature:  The Book of Showings by Julian of Norwich and The Book of Margery Kempe by . . . wait for it . . . Margery Kempe.  These are texts by medieval women, speaking in their own voices, and I think this is the first time we’ve had this.  Yes, there is the slight possibility that the Anglo-Saxon “Wife’s Lament” that we looked at recently may have been from a female poet, but that is speculative at best.  With today’s books, we know that we are indisputably hearing medieval women speak of their own personal experiences.  And what experiences!  These books deal with mysticism.  No, not hokey sideshow tent seances or streetside palm readings.  No quartz crystals or incense.  These popular conceptions have led scholars away from the term mysticism because of the derogatory associations they give to  – especially female – religious experience.  I'm going to stick with the term mysticism for this podcast because I think it best explains the phenomenon to a wide audience.

Mysticism, properly understood, denotes a way of understanding, communicating, or uniting with God – or whatever divine principle is appropriate to the mystic – in a way inaccessible to the intellect, in a way that transcends thought or reason or intention.  It may take the form of ecstatic visions or altered states of consciousness.  Now, to many of us in the 21st century, this all seems a bit “woo-woo” and Hippie-New Age.  But many peoples throughout history have recognized alternate ways of knowing and experiencing the divine and, skeptical or not, I think they are fascinating to read.

The two women I mentioned, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, are the most well known of medieval English mystics, and they are an interesting pair because, while there is much in common between them, there are significant differences, and those differences give us a much wider understanding of medieval mystical experience.

We’ll start with Julian.  We don’t know her real name, but she spent most of her life in a sealed room attached to St. Julian’s Church in Norwich.  Yes, a sealed room.  Julian became an anchoress after suffering a severe illness on May 13, 1373 in which she experienced hallucinatory visions, paralysis, and fever.  She saw 16 visions of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary and it is the substance of these visions, and her meditations upon them, that comprise the first book in English written by a woman: The Book of Showings, sometimes called Revelations of Divine Love.  It exists in what’s called the Short Text and the Long Text.  The Short Text she wrote soon after she made a full recovery, and the Long Text is the product of decades of contemplation.

Julian wrote her book in Middle English, which is significant for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, it makes the work accessible.  Latin was, of course, Europe’s lingua franca, but it was restricted to the educated classes.  A book in English could be read by those without Latin, or read to those without Latin.  Also, writing in the vernacular allows for a better communication of the very personal nature of her encounter with the divine.  We understand that Julian addresses the entire faith community, not just the clergy.  

Additionally, her language is quite tactile.  The text abounds in the adjective “bodily.”  She refers to her “bodily sickness” that preceded the visions, which she calls “bodily visions”: that is, there is a palpable, physical presence, not some ghostly apparition.  She makes continual references to the sense of sight – using her “eye of understanding”, a physical sense.  She describes Christ wearing the crown of thorns: “I saw the red blood running down from under the crown, hot and flowing freely and copiously, a living stream.”  She calls Jesus “our clothing, who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces us and shelters us, surrounds us for his love.”

A famous passage, from chapter 5, concerns the analogy of a hazelnut, using a physical metaphor for a spiritual insight  She writes:

He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God.

In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover,—I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially united to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me.

Julian realizes the hazelnut’s symbolism at once as an expression of all created existence. So how could a thing so tiny keep from falling into nothingness? All living things move ineluctably toward an abyss, right?  Well, no, not necessarily.

The entire universe is held in being, prevented from falling into nothingness, by God’s love for everything he made. The universe is, in fact, because of that love.  Julian understands the trifold lesson of the hazelnut: 1) God made the hazelnut, since a hazelnut cannot make itself.  2) God loves the hazelnut. Because they are delicious.  Frangelico?  Nutella?  C’mon!  God must love all he made because otherwise he would not make it.  Therefore, all creation is essentially good.  And 3) that God takes care of the hazelnut throughout time.  Yet while she kens the lesson, she also acknowledges that she can never fully comprehend God himself until she unites with him.

And here we see the mystical fissure: it’s not just the vision, it’s the understanding that true knowledge exceeds the finite human intellect.  The hazelnut example is a purely intellectual exercise, but it only takes her so far.  Beyond that, she must be “oned” or “united” or “fastened” substantially to the divine.

The notion of God’s love as the ground of being gets further treatment in her frequent references to Jesus as a mother.  And these include all the phases of motherhood, from conception, to labor, to nursing, nurturing, and upbringing: 

And thus is Jesu our very mother in

kind of our first making, and he is our

very mother in grace by taking of our kind

made.  All the fair working and all the

sweet kindly offices of dearworthy

motherhood is impropered to the second

person, for in him we have this goodly

will, whole and safe without end, both in

kind and in grace, of his own proper

goodness.

This feminization of Jesus probably harkens back to Julian’s insistence on the bodily reality of her visions.  If we run on the gender paradigm of the Middle Ages, motherhood is of necessity a physical, natural state predicated upon physical, natural processes.  These things are intimately bound up with the material world.  Motherhood, in Julian’s imagination, is the realest thing in the world. Jesus becomes a “mother sensual.”

Furthermore, Julian refers to Jesus in this passage as “the second person,” meaning the second person of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  So Son is the second person.  Fair enough.  Remember that the Son is also referred to as the Logos in the Gospel of St. John; logos is usually translated as “word” but “wisdom” may be nearer the mark.  Here, too, Julian forges an understanding of the divine not just through intelligence (which is particular to the intellect) but also through wisdom, which is the caretaker of the being engendered by love.

Which is why Julian does not share her culture’s general pessimism about the material world, a view encapsulated by the man who would become Pope Innocent III as “de contemptu mundi” – hatred of the world – in the mid 1190s.  Julian does not condemn the “fallen” natural world.  As indicated earlier, she comes to believe that all creation is essentially good, as stated in the first Genesis creation account.  Even the proverbial “Fall of Man,” from slightly later in that book, and from whence the doctrines of sin and fallen nature come, Julian regards as the “felix culpa” – the happy fault.

Why happy? Because the original transgression of Adam and Eve, which introduce sin and death into the world, culminates in the salvation and redemption secured by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross.  Paradoxical, yes – a bad thing results in a good thing that wouldn’t have been necessary without the bad thing.  But maybe the good thing is a capital G capital T Good Thing and so outweighs the catalytic bad thing.  In the philosophy of religion, this is called a theodicy – a justification of God’s goodness in the face of evil and suffering.

Julian begins, as most of us do, I suspect, with wondering why a good God would permit sin and suffering.  The perennial “problem of evil” that has vexed many a believer.  She wonders why, “through the great prescient wisdom of God, the beginning of sin was not prevented.  For then it seemeth to me that all would have been well. ”  But she calls this folly.

Jesus answers (in what is probably the most famous quote from the Book of Showings): “Sin is behovely, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.”  He means that sin is necessary – that it isn’t a mistake or a bug.  It is actually the mechanism by which God makes his love manifest.  This seems an echo of St. Paul’s letter to the Romans: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”  So God uses sin and suffering to bring about the greater good.  St. Paul concludes that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  That is the meaning of all will be well and why it is repeated three times.  

This optimism in the fallen world marks a wave of what scholars call “affective spirituality” which emphasized the humanity of Jesus Christ and an experience of him through a heightened sensual experience. This wave probably resulted from a swelling of disaffection from the institutional church – the kind of disaffection we’ve noted in the works of Langland, Chaucer, and others.  But here the point is not satire or invective, rather it's a call for that institution to broaden its acceptance of divergent religious expression.

In 1413, Julian received a visit from Margery Kempe, a woman from a rather bourgeois family of merchants, mayors, and members of Parliament.  She had at least 14 children by her husband John, but after the birth of her first, she suffered an extreme bout of what we would call postpartum psychosis (though Margery herself vehemently denies that her mental health was ever compromised).  She insists “there was no delusion in [my] manner of living.”  During that 8 month period, she had visions of tormenting demons tempting her to suicide and damnation.  But she also engaged in intimate conversation with God, Jesus, Mary, and others.  These visions continued throughout her life, leading to a radical alteration of her lifestyle.  She embarked on frequent and extensive pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Compostella, Norwich, and others.  She came to Julian to ensure that her visions are heavenly, not infernal. She eventually convinced her husband John to join her in a celibate life (I must say he was rather an understanding bloke – but after 14 kids . . . .).  A sort of “born again” virginity.

Yet, despite this, the description of her visions are quite corporeal, like Julian’s, quite tactile, but Margery’s often veer into the erotic.  There’s almost a sexual passion in her contact with Jesus. Interestingly, she writes in the 3rd person, referring to herself as a creature (a means by which she emphasizes her subordination to God the Creator).  So she describes how Jesus “ravished her spirit” and he exhorts her to “call me Jesus, your love, for I am your love and shall be your love without end.”  He almost seduces her, saying, “I must be intimate with you, and lie in your bed with you. Daughter, you greatly desire to see me, and you may boldly, when you are in bed, take me to you as your wedded husband. . . .”  God tells her “Daughter, you are sucking even at Christ’s breast!”  

Phew!  Steamy!  And a bit odd, yeah?  That last sucking line seems to me simultaneously erotic and materna.  We’ve already seen how Julian has feminized Jesus.  Margery does also, while, at the same time casting herself variously as his daughter, lover, and wife.  So we have a multivalent, intensely intimate relationship here.  She usually uses informal pronouns when addressing Jesus: “thou” and “thee” while she uses the formal “ye” when addressing John her husband. 

Unlike Julian, however, who divorces herself from the world, Margery embraces something of a living martyrdom.  She clothes herself in white (which required special ecclesiastical permission) and cries, yowls, hoots, and howls incessantly.  She vicariously experiences Christ’s pain on the cross, she is overcome by sorrow and fear, and is very very demonstrably emotional.  People start to find her annoying. One woman threatens to bring a bundle of sticks to burn Margery.   But she finds strength in Jesus’ urging: “Yes, daughter, the more ridicule you have for love of me, the more you please me.”

Allow me to say I think this relationship is beginning to show signs of alarming toxicity.

But when Margery visits Julian of Norwich for counsel, the anchoress agrees: “Set all your trust in God and do not fear the talk of this world, for the more contempt, shame, and reproof that you have in this world, the more is your merit in the sight of God.”

Really, though?  Throw a dog a bone!  And that contempt, shame, and reproof becomes literally a life and death issue.  On several occasions, she was charged with heresy.  She is arrested by the Duke of Bedford on suspicion of Lollardy (the heretical proto-Protestant sect inspired by the theologian John Wycliffe).  In an interview with the Archbishop of York, she is accused of urging women to leave their husbands and follow her example.  All this, as one accuser puts it, is “enough to be burned for.”

Margery does not burn, but many see her lifestyle as perverse.  She is urged to “give up this life that you lead and go and spin, and card wool, as other women do.”  Towards the end of her book, Margery records that her husband John fell down the stairs of his home (they are living separately at this point) and suffered a head injury that incapacitates him for the rest of his life.  The townspeople say she should be hanged because she was not there to care for him as a good wife should have.  Margery, a little miffed that this will interfere with her constant prayer, eventually agrees to care for John and we get kind of a touching little domestic scene rather rare in 15th century literature.

Margery claims to be illiterate, unlike Julian, and so must have her book taken down from dictation.  There was some kerfuffle in the achieving of this, having to go through several scribes (including presumably her son).  But what she gives us is the first autobiography in English.  For the first time in the language, we get a woman speaking of the significance and experience of her own life.  It's a profoundly important book.  Its language is sensual and direct, its imagery intense (her description of the first hauntings by devils will give you nightmares).  She is not always a likable character – she of course does nothing to pretty herself up because suffering opprobrium is next to godliness.  She can be scoldy, self-righteous, uncomfortable.  But there are moments in the text in which I think she has her tongue in her cheek a bit.  Check out the scene in which her husband presents her with a blue-ball thought experiment.  

He asks her, “If a man came to kill me with a sword, but you could save my life by having sex with me, would you do it?”

She says, “Truly, I would rather see you being killed than that we should turn back to our uncleaness.”

“You are no good wife,” he replies.  The bluntness here cracks me up.  Besides, I kind of feel for the poor guy, don’t you?

Perhaps I should be a little more generous.  I mean, we get the portrait of a woman who has had a profound shock to the system. These visions gave her whole life – her faith, her marriage, her family, her selfhood – a complete volte-face.  She firmly believes that she has experienced a deep communion with the divine and this makes the world, the material body, repugnant to her.  She would rather have her husband die than make love to him.  Devotion?  Piety?  Madness?  Sadness?  I don’t know.   

We can call it post-partum psychosis or schizophrenia, and I’ll leave the diagnosis to those who know better. Margery’s behavior does seem to fit the profile.  She rips her own flesh, “she pitilessly tore the skin on her body near her heart with her nails,” and she had to be restrained from further self-harm.  She bites herself so savagely that she bears the scar forever.  We’ve already mentioned her explosive and persistent weeping and wailing, another common symptom.  Delusions are another symptom and, I suppose we would tend to see Margery’s mystical visions as delusional nowadays.  But I am wary – not because I’m a full-on believer in divine visions, but because I fear the term disavows Margery’s testimony about her own experience.  I suppose if you pushed me, I would say that Margery and Julian and other mystics are experiencing some neurochemical imbalances brought on by stress, trauma, or deprivation of various sorts.  But that feels to me like I’m saying that I know better than they do what they lived through and what it means.  I know: that rather implies that the other option is that these women actually had contact with supernatural beings.  Do I think they did? No – I’m a modern materialist and that doesn’t seem likely, but I’m also a cultural Catholic and still have some residual sympathy for that worldview. 

Well, some might say, how can we trust the narration of a person in the throes of a psychotic break? And we do, in fact, have a vastly superior understanding of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience than they did in the 15th century.  We do, in fact, know more than they did.

 Yeah, I get that.  Maybe I just worry that our rush to make everything clinical, to pathologize everything runs the risk of eliding real human experiences; that if we only look at medieval female mystical experience through a 21st century understanding of mental illness, we may miss why such experience was so significant to the people of the time.

Because how “mentally ill” was Margery Kempe?  I wager that there may be some difficulty even today settling on a complete plan of action for her.  Yes, the vivid visions.  But she was very self-aware – she clearly distinguishes between the trauma following her first pregnancy and the subsequent mystical events, which she insists were different from the initial vision.  She ably and frequently defended herself against grave charges of heresy.  She received validation from a number of authorities, including the Archbishops of York and Canterbury, Julian of Norwich, and Master Aleyn.  She could function independently and socially – that is, she could manage her own life.  She travelled incessantly, managed properties and relationships, and cared for a disabled husband.  Uh, also, she dictated a book of immense cultural and literary significance. 

Moreover, a religious framework existed in which she could meaningfully situate the mystical episodes.  How much of what we have traditionally termed “madness” is not biochemical but cultural?  Is madness always a matter of neuroscience or is it a matter of social expectation and acceptability? Are visions only pathological in a world that has ceased to need or believe in them?

The medieval world believed fully in divine interventionism, both benevolent and malevolent.  Plagues were thought to be judgments from God, mental illness a spiritual affliction.  Furthermore, the 14th and 15th centuries are times of great social, political, intellectual, and artistic transformation.  Mysticism is a way of harnessing those transformative energies for a new understanding of the world.

But why particularly women?  There were, of course, quite a number of male mystics in England and on the continent, names many know today, like St. Francis of Assisi.  Prominent figures in England include Richard Rolle and the anonymous author of the Neoplatonic “Cloud of Unknowing.”  Yet women, at least numerically, dominate mystical activity. In Europe, we have Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, St. Bridget of Sweden, Angela of Foligno, and on and on.  And certainly Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are far more well known to general readers.

I think that mysticism found a way to harness the medieval world’s misogynistic dismissal of female ways of knowing and turn them into constructive and vibrant ends.  The science of the time, based on Galen’s humor theory – had women as naturally intuitive, receptive, passive, and meditative.  Instruction in literacy was felt to be wasted on intellectually inferior women, who had comparatively few avenues to life in the institutional Church: join a convent, basically.  Education was very rare for any women not of the nobility, and none too copious there.  So if you channel a lot of pent-up spiritual longing and frustrated curiosity through one outlet, you’re going to get a lot of energy.  Maybe there’s something of a felix culpa here – that sexist ignorance allowed for the flourishing of female mystical expression, teaching, and literature.  

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Until next time: pax vobiscum!