Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich – Catholic Proto-feminists?
When thinking of great English writers over the centuries, the earliest female writers who come to mind often are Jane Austen or Emily Brontë. However, there are many extraordinary female writers who often are being overlooked.
While exploring testimonies of women’s creativity in a time, when participating at the artistic, creative and intellectual exchange of society was not commonly part of roles and expectations attributed to women, I came across two female writers that I found particularly interesting.
The aim of this essay is to introduce these two extraordinary medieval female writers, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, by briefly outlining their biographies and the main characteristics of their writing. Furthermore, commonalities and differences of these two female writers will be defined. Finally, it will be explained why these texts still have a relevance in a broader context today.
Beforehand, the key terms of this Essay shall be defined. The term gender is here being used as the distinction of sex and the constructed way of assigning meaning to people and behaviours due to their biological sex combined with this distinction. The most important authority to define gender related views in the here considered period is the catholic church. By devotion, religious devotion in the sense of worship, dedication and strong religious commitments is meant.
In order to understand why the two women presented in the following section are so remarkable, it is necessary to consider the position and education of women in mediaeval times.
Alexandra Pfisterer School of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics 11.11.2019
Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich – Catholic Proto-feminists?
When thinking of great English writers over the centuries, the earliest female writers who come to mind often are Jane Austen or Emily Brontë. However, there are many extraordinary female writers who often are being overlooked.
While exploring testimonies of women’s creativity in a time, when participating at the artistic, creative and intellectual exchange of society was not commonly part of roles and expectations attributed to women, I came across two female writers that I found particularly interesting.
The aim of this essay is to introduce these two extraordinary medieval female writers, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, by briefly outlining their biographies and the main characteristics of their writing. Furthermore, commonalities and differences of these two female writers will be defined. Finally, it will be explained why these texts still have a relevance in a broader context today.
Beforehand, the key terms of this Essay shall be defined. The term gender is here being used as the distinction of sex and the constructed way of assigning meaning to people and behaviours due to their biological sex combined with this distinction. The most important authority to define gender related views in the here considered period is the catholic church. By devotion, religious devotion in the sense of worship, dedication and strong religious commitments is meant.
In order to understand why the two women presented in the following section are so remarkable, it is necessary to consider the position and education of women in mediaeval times. While the education of English men increased from the thirteenth century onwards, the access that medieval women had to education and literacy was very restricted, especially when the respective woman was not noble.1 St. Paul, an authority of the Early Catholic church, stated that women should remain silent and submissive, he denied women the right and competence to teach as their talk was subversive and threatful to men.2 It is assumed that his doctrines were still very influential during the middle ages. As written texts were connotated with authority, it often was considered presumptuous when women decided to write down their thoughts.3 Whereas women who decided to spend their lives as virgins entering a convent had at least some latitude to express their thoughts on religious discourses, secular women who did not forsake ‘sins of the flesh’ were considered intellectually totally inferior to men.4
The first of the two women considered in this Essay was called Margery Kempe. Kempe, born circa 1373, was a married middle class woman from Norfolk with 14 children.5 After a serious illness affecting both body and mind, Kempe has been tormented by demons for several months followed by a mystical appearance of Christ.6 From this moment on, Kempe dedicated her life to her religious devotion. She undertook many pilgrimages to faraway places like Jerusalem and Santiago and showed her piety in such an affective way while praying that she was often accused of being heretic.7 To avoid distractions from spirituality, Kempe convinced her husband, John Kempe, to take a vow of chastity.8 Towards the end of her life, around 1436, Kempe let a scribe write down retrospectively the religious and secular experiences that shaped her life in a book that we now know as “the book of Margery Kempe”. It considers events as her difficult childbirth, low points in her life, as her psychosis and deep despair, her relationship with her husband and their later cohabitation in chastity. The book resists placement in a specific genre, it can be read as a travel narrative as it describes her various journeys or as a devotional manual inspired by other women like Bridget of Sweden with the aim to inspire other women on their spiritual path.9 Kempe’s book illustrates how much she aligned herself with the female describing visions in which she helps female Saints during childbirth, in one vision Christ even told her that he values married women just as much as virgins. In order to prevent being attacked for not being in line with the orthodox doctrine of the church, Kempe represented herself as vessel of God, just reporting what he has told her.10 11 When Kempe was in doubt about the origins of her visions, she did not turn to authoritative men of the church but to another extraordinary woman of her time, Julian of Norwich, who is the second female writer of the middle ages to be considered in this Essay.
Julian of Norwich was born around 1342 and had her first visions, like Kempe, after having recovered from a severe disease. Julian also described experiencing “doubt, despair and diabolic temptation”12 and speaks of being tormented by the devil. At this time, Julian was around thirty years old and probably married or widowed. Around 1413 Julian decided to become an anchoress at St. Julian’s church in Norwich, which means that she lived in a small space next to the church, connected with the outside world only via a small window.13 In her book “A Revelation of Love” Julian engaged in abstract and complex theological thinking concerning subjects like the reality of the sin or the constitution of the trinity.14 Christ’s passion plays an important role, both in Julian’s visions and in “A Revelation of Love”. She imagined slotting herself to the crucifixion scene so that she could suffer with Christ15. In the third passage of the book, Julian drew an interesting picture of the trinity reconstructing the trinity model on a Father-Mother rather than on a Father-Son basis.16 A parallel is being drawn between Christ’s unconditional love and self-sacrifice for humanity and a mother’s love for her children collating for instance Christ’s passion and the pain of a mother during childbirth. 17
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1 Barratt, Alexandra (1992) “Women’s writing in middle English”, Longman Group, p.2
2 Strauss, Mark. L (2010) “Distorting Scripture?: The Challenge of Bible Translation and Gender Accuracy” Wipf & Stock Pub, p. 26
3 Barratt, Alexandra (1992) “Women’s writing in middle English”, Longman Group, p.5
4 Salih, Sarah (2001) “Versions of Virginity in late medieval England”, D.S. Brewer, p.24
5 Whitaker, Muriel, Garrett, Charlotte (1995) “Sovereign Lady- Essays on Women in Middle English Literature”, Garland Publishing, p.157
6 Whitaker, Muriel, Garrett, Charlotte (1995) “Sovereign Lady- Essays on Women in Middle English Literature”, Garland Publishing, p. 164, 165
7 Barratt, Alexandra (1992) “Women’s writing in middle English”, Longman Group p. 179
8 Barratt, Alexandra (1992) “Women’s writing in middle English”, Longman Group p. 177
9 Barratt, Alexandra (1992) “Women’s writing in middle English”, Longman Group p. 179
10 Barratt, Alexandra (1992) “Women’s writing in middle English”, Longman Group, p. 179
11 Stanley, Lynn (1996) The Book of Margery Kempe, Introduction
12 Watt, Diane (2007) “Medieval Women’s Writing”, Polity Press, p.91
13 Barratt, Alexandra (1992) “Women’s writing in middle English”, Longman Group, p. 108
14 Barratt, Alexandra (1992) “Women’s writing in middle English”, Longman Group p. 108
15 Barratt, Alexandra (1992) “Women’s writing in middle English”, Longman Group, p. 111
16 Barratt, Alexandra (1992) “Women’s writing in middle English”, Longman Group, p. 119
17 Barratt, Alexandra (1992) “Women’s writing in middle English”, Longman Group, p. 109
- Quote paper
- Alexandra Pfisterer (Author), 2019, Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich. Catholic Proto-Feminists?, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/508851
