I'm finally doing blog entries in sans serif because all my graphic design friends insist it's easier to read on the screen. Here's one I wrote for British Literature I this past fall about Margery Kempe's autobiography and the centrality of guilt in Christian religious constructions.

The Centrality of Guilt in Margery Kempe

In pre-Reformation England, the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in matters of religion was virtually absolute. It was uncommon for anyone to circumvent the authority of the Church and rarer still for a woman to do so publicly. Yet that is just what Christian mystic Margery Kempe apparently did throughout her life, as documented in her autobiography The Book of Margery Kempe. While Kempe describes being accused repeatedly by Church authorities and taken into custody on suspicion of heresy, she managed to successfully defend herself against these accusations. One reason for this was that despite her sometimes theatrical outbursts, Kempe never opposed Church teachings on any major theological point. For this reason The Book of Margery Kempe supplies an understanding of a very orthodox medieval Catholicism, albeit filtered through often drastic forms of expression. A close reading of the first two chapters of Kempe's autobiography depicts in vivid detail what becomes a major theme in the work at large: the centrality of guilt in Kempe's faith and in the Christianity of her day.

The first chapter of The Book of Margery Kempe begins when Kempe—who refers to herself in the third person throughout—is “twenty years of age, somewhat more, [and] married to a worshipful burgess” (532). After illness during pregnancy and the birth of her first child, Kempe experiences a period of extreme instability. The episode, which a contemporary reader might interpret as an acute episode of postpartum depression magnified by poor health, is explained by Kempe in terms of religion, the dominant epistemological framework of her day. Her violent behavior and self-harm are, according to the text, the result of a spiritual assault.

Retracing the narrative to the direct cause of this attack reveals much about Kempe's understanding of herself and her faith. After giving birth, Kempe's health is very poor and she “[despairs] for her life, believing that she might not live” (ibid). She calls a confessor, fearing damnation for some sin about which she has been silent her whole life (the biography never reveals the nature of this sin). She demonstrates here a belief that her thoughts and actions are influenced by evil spirits: ”she was continually hindered by her enemy—the devil—always saying to her while she was in good health that she didn't need to confess but to do penance all by herself alone” (ibid). This passage is also notable for Kempe's designation of counter-orthodox religious ideas as fundamentally evil and even demonically inspired.

When the confessor comes to hear her sin, Kempe's guilt is realized in two conflicting fears, one of the Church's teachings the other in the Church itself. While she fears hell, Kempe is on the other hand equally terrified of her confessor's condemnation. It is her inability to resolve these two conflicting impulses that triggers her psychotic episode: “because of the dread she had of damnation on the one hand, and his sharp reproving of her on the other, this creature when out of her mind and was amazingly disturbed and tormented with spirits for half a year, eight weeks and odd days” (ibid). This passage indicates Kempe's profound sense of religious guilt as a leading factor in her “disturbed and tormented” state. But she experiences this crisis as a demonic one: “And in this time she saw, as she thought, devils opening their mouths all alight with burning flames of fire” (ibid).

It is unsurprising that Kempe, operating within this framework, finds relief in a vision of Christ. After months of torment in which she “desired all wickedness, just as the spirits tempted her to say and do . . . our merciful Lord Christ Jesus . . . appeared to his creature who had forsaken him” (532-533). In the wake of this Christophany, Kempe is fully and immediately relieved of demonic oppression. Suddenly, she is “as calm in her wits and reason as she ever was before,” and thereafter “[performs] all her duties wisely and soberly enough” (533).

This passage tells much about Kemp's understanding of herself in the context of her religious beliefs. She is subjected to external influence by both good and evil spiritual forces. The demons' coercion, in fact, is a much more violent influence than Christ's appearance. The spirits assail Kempe in force, “sometimes pawing at her, sometimes threatening her, sometimes pulling her and hauling her about both night and day” (532), whereas Christ appears, speaks a single sentence, and then departs. Despite this, and despite the fact that Kempe seems powerless to resist the demons prior to Christ's appearance, she holds herself responsible for her evil behavior and takes no credit for her recovery.

This attribution of all evil to the self and all good to an external entity is a recurring theme in The Book of Margery Kempe, and it inevitably colors Kempe's understanding of herself and the world around her. That she refers to herself throughout the text as “the creature” is indicative of her disdainful self-image, which becomes increasingly visible in the book's second chapter. Though Kempe is no under demonic assault here, her descriptions of her own actions and motives are unremittingly negative. She dresses vainly, hoping to attract attention to herself, and refuses her husband's attempts to chasten her: “when her husband used to try and speak to her, to urge her to leave her proud ways, she answered sharply and shortly, and said that she was come of worthy kindred—he should never have married her” (534).

Kempe describes her motives in this passage as “pure covetousness . . . pride and vanity” (ibid). These lead her to begin a brewing venture with the motive of maintaining her pride and esteem. Kempe's description of the success and failure of her brewery is ambiguous; the text states that she “was one of the greatest brewers in the town of N. for three or four years until she lost a great deal of money, for she had never had any experience in that business” (ibid).

When her business does begin to fail, another element of Kempe's guilt-driven worldview becomes visible: the belief that her misfortunes are the result of divine judgment. “For when the ale had as fine a head of froth on it as anyone might see, suddenly the froth would go flat, and all the ale was lost . . . Then this creature thought how God had punished her” (ibid). After similar failures in a milling enterprise and her resulting inability to retain servants, Kempe again attributes her hardships to God's wrath: “And then this creature, seeing all these adversities coming on every side, thought they were the scourges of the Lord that would chastise her for her sin” (535).

There is no room in this text for Kempe to celebrate her early success in brewing or even her later decision to do what she believes is right in abandoning it. Again, every action for which Kempe allows herself to take credit is evil, and every good thing she does is attributed to God rather than to her own choice. And these elements of the first two chapters persist throughout the text: Kempe protests sex with her husband, saying “it would be a good thing if by mutual consent they punished and chastised themselves by abstaining from the lust of their bodies” (535). She engages in fasting and various acts of penance throughout the narrative. Her only happiness is in her ecstatic, subtly erotic experience of Christ: “for the joy that she had and the sweetness that she felt in the conversation with our Lord, she was on the point of falling” (544). She is allowed no other satisfaction, be it the simple pleasure of human experience or fulfillment in her accomplishments. Filtered through Kempe's understanding, Christianity takes on an antipathetic, even nihilistic aspect, becoming a worldview that allows no room for good in the individual.

Robert Rusconi writes in Medieval Christianity that “in its effort to establish a clerical hegemony through the systematic application of the sacrament of penance, it may well be that the church achieved greater success in fostering a sense of guilt (especially in women) than in providing a means to deal effectively with that guilt” (Rusconi 225). The overwhelming and central presence of guilt in Margery Kempe's religious experience was not uncommon in late medieval England. The Book of Margery Kempe depicts a theology in which Christ is responsible for all good, man is guilty of all evil, and pleasure is inherently sinful unless it comes from the experience of God. Guilt was a central element in the Christendom of Kempe's time. Though in the intervening centuries it has been tempered with other concepts, it remains a strong force in the faith.