Teaching The Book of Margery Kempe #1 – Laura Varnam

As well as fostering and supporting research into Margery Kempe and her Book, Laura Kalas and I hope that the Margery Kempe Society website can also be a place for the discussion of teaching strategies, both within a university context and as outreach activity with the public.

In this introductory blogpost for our teaching series, I outline one of my own teaching experiences and I hope that readers will comment below or join in on the discussion on Twitter (@MargerySociety, @lauravarnam) with the hashtag #TeachingMargery and we can share what has (and hasn’t!) worked for us.

Note: This post is not meant to represent ‘best practice’, it is merely one way of teaching one aspect of The Book which arose from my personal experience and a perceived gap in students’ knowledge when coming to the text as first time readers. It is also particular to my teaching context in that I have the flexibility and time to approach The Book in this way. Other contexts and educational aims vary! (And I will say something at the end of this post about what it means to ‘teach’ The Book of Margery Kempe).

I regularly teach The Book of Margery Kempe as part of my second year undergraduate course on Middle English literature at Oxford. I’m lucky enough to be able to choose and organise content of that course myself, and so I want to offer some reflections on context when it comes to teaching The Book. Both course context and historical context.

I usually begin my course with work on Middle English romances (in part because the students are also studying Spenser’s Faerie Queene for their Early Modern paper) and then we read some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (the Franklin and the Wife of Bath), followed by the Gawain-poet (Gawain, Patience, and Pearl), a class on race (including The King of Tars and Mandeville’s Travels), and a week on dream vision poetry (Pearl, Chaucer and Clanvowe) before we turn to Margery Kempe and her context.

There are a number of themes and ideas in the earlier material that I hope students will take forward to Margery: questions of voice and authority (the Wife of Bath), the representation of travel (Mandeville), the retelling of Biblical material (Jonah and the whale in Patience, the New Jerusalem in Pearl), the textual representation of visions (dream vision poetry), and wider debates around genre (a particular theme in the weeks on romance).

However, for the last half a dozen years or so, I have taught an additional class before turning to Margery: on medieval religious culture. I devised this class because I felt that despite the continuities from the earlier material in my course, students were arriving at Margery and feeling a little at sea when it came to placing The Book in its contemporary religious context. As a result of this, the rich potential of visionary encounters with Christ and his mother, or the role of medieval religious objects or practices such as pilgrimage, were not easily accessible or comprehensible to students.

My class on religious culture requires students to give presentations on individual topics and share their learning with each other. I provide a pack of primary extracts for each of the following topics and I ask the students to choose five key points / images / ideas to share. The topics are: the Virgin Mary; Christ’s blood and wounds; Bible translation and meditation on the Passion; Lollardy and imagery; the medieval church; medieval drama; women’s mysticism (in particular, the life of the Low Countries mystic, Elizabeth of Spalbeek).

These are big topics! But the idea is to give the students a flavour of important beliefs, debates, and literary and devotional practices which will enable them to contextualise Margery’s life and text. For example, Margery’s visions of the Passion are less surprising when read in the context of Nicholas Love’s advice to place yourself at the scene of the crucifixion in his Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. Margery’s devotion to the manhood of Christ and to the Virgin Mary as a model of maternity are more recognisable in the context of contemporary devotional beliefs and modes (affective piety, for example, or lyric poetry). Discussion of the role of the parish church in late medieval social and religious life explains why Margery’s church of St Margaret’s in Lynn is so important in her Book, not only as a setting and location but as a community and a sacred space. 

Exploring medieval drama helps students to think about performativity and the ways in which Biblical events were re-enacted in the medieval city or town, making them relevant and contemporary to the medieval audience. Elizabeth of Spalbeek’s Life, written by Philip of Clairvaux, offers a counterpoint to Margery’s relationship with her scribes when it comes to writing her Book and Elizabeth’s performance of the Passion can be compared with Margery’s embodied imitatio Christi [imitation of Christ]. Exploration of Lollard heresy, and in particular Lollard approaches to religious imagery, opens up the debate around Margery’s orthodoxy and the ways in which objects such as the crucifix might operate as part of the material culture of her Book.

My experience of teaching The Book after this particular class was that the students were much more equipped to assess Margery’s religious experiences in the context of her time period and, moreover, they were less nervous about doing so. Margery’s behaviour seemed less ‘strange’ and more legible to them. Encouraging students to read and study primary materials also meant that they were able to approach secondary criticism on key topics such as orthodoxy and heresy with more confidence and an ability to assess critics’ arguments for themselves. 

So, how might this exercise/material be adapted? I’m lucky enough to have the space in my course to explore this material in full but how might this approach be used in a different context? Some of this material could be delivered in lecture format or it could be provided on a handout as comparative texts/images for particular chapters of Margery’s Book that have been set as reading for a class or essay. My students read the entire Book for my course but I do give them some guidance about how to navigate the text and how they might want to focus their essays around a particular episode in the text. 

Taking the opportunity to contextualise Margery’s religious experiences in the classroom helps the students to fill a gap in their knowledge and enables them to be confident in approaching the religious significance and purpose of The Book, which is, in my view, inseparable from questions of Margery’s authority or the genre of the Book as autobiography, for example.

Than seyd the Erchebischop to hir: ‘Thow schalt sweryn that thu ne schalt techyn ne chalengyn [reproving] the pepil in my diocyse.’

‘Nay, syr, I schal not sweryn,’ sche seyde, ‘for I schal spekyn of God…’

Chapter 52 The Book of Margery Kempe

Teaching is a major theme in The Book of Margery Kempe. Whether Margery, as a woman, has the right to teach or to speak about God. How she learns to perform her new religious identity through imitation of other devout individuals. How she teaches others how they should respond to her devotions (and how others learn through comparative reading; I’m thinking here of Margery’s scribe who in Chapter 62 explains that he responded more positively to Margery’s tears after reading the life of Marie D’Oignies and the tears that she shed for the love of God). The Book itself is a ‘schort tretyse’ for ‘ower exampyl and instruccyon’ (the Proem). But how does the text do this and how should we, as twenty-first century teachers and students, respond to it?

We have, I believe, a responsibility to Margery and to her text when we teach, as well as to our students to support their learning in their contemporary moment. We’d love to hear from you about your experiences of teaching Margery Kempe. Or indeed being a student in a class on The Book! How have you approached teaching Margery Kempe in your particular context? Which texts and editions do you use? If you teach selections from The Book, how do you choose your passages? If you teach Margery alongside other medieval texts, how does she fit in- or stand out? Has the Covid-19 pandemic caused you or your students to react differently to Margery and her text? (Julian of Norwich’s enclosure has certainly chimed with many of our experiences of lockdown; are there similar connections to be made with Margery?) Please get in touch with us and let us know your thoughts!