Margery Kempe and Christine
de Pizan were near contemporaries: Margery lived from ca. 1373-1440,
Christine from ca. 1364-1430. Both were in the
vanguard of women writers--women who self-consciously styled themselves as
writers and, in the case of Christine, made her living as a writer--that
began to emerge in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is perhaps not surprising that women found their strongest
literary voice in works of a spiritual nature. Late
medieval mysticism, as practice and expression of religiosity, was a province
occupied equally by men and women; a significant percentage of both genders,
moreover, belonged to the laity.
Margery Kempe was born at the prosperous port
town of King's Lynn, Norfolk, about 70 km north of Cambridge. Her father held numerous prominent positions: he was the
town's mayor at least five times; a guild alderman; a justice of the peace;
and prominent members of English Parliament, where he served six terms. She was married at age 20 to John Kempe. In marrying Kempe,
the son of a local merchant family, Margery seems to have wed slightly below
her social station. Over the next 20 years, she gave
birth to fourteen children, of whom she only describes one, her oldest son,
with whom she had an at-times difficult relationship. After her last child
was born in 1413, Margery undertook a series of pilgrimages. Her initial trip
took her to Jerusalem, Rome, and Assisi. It was during this voyage that she
first began to experience her sustained 'cryings', initially triggered during
a period of profound contemplation on the death of Jesus in the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Her gift of 'holy tears' became a hallmark
of her piety, as she writes in her Book:
When she had cryings first at Jerusalem, she experienced them frequently, as she did in Rome also. And when she returned to England [in 1415], on her arrival the cryings only happened seldom at first, once a month as it were. Aftewards they happened once a week, then daily. Once she had fourteen in one day; and another day she had seven, and so as God would visit her with them, sometimes in church, sometimes in the street, sometimes in her chamber, sometimes in the field. . . (The Book of Margery Kempe. An Abridged Translation, trans. Liz Herbert McAvoy [Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003], p. 37)
In a somewhat crowded field of later
medieval women mystics -- Margery knew and had visited her older contemporary,
Julian of Norwich (1343-died after 1416), for example, who had written her
own spiritual autobiography -- Margery stands out. As
Margery could neither read nor write, her life's story, which included extensive
travels and pilgrimages (to Santiago in northern Spain as well as Germany,
and across Britain), debates with high-profile religious figures of her day,
and accounts of her visions, was dictated to a priest. Considerable scholarly
debate has swirled about whether the Book is authentically Margery's,
as opposed to the invention, in whole or part, of her scribe(s). Consensus
holds, however, that the work depicts Margery as she saw herself.
Christine de Pizan's
life was lived in even loftier circles than Margery's. Christine was born
about 1364 in Venice to Tommaso di Benevenuto da Pizzano, a municipal councilor.
Shortly after her birth, the French king Charles V (1364-1380) invited Tommaso
to be his court astrologer, and the family moved to Paris. There, Christine
grew up at court and was educated at her father's insistence (her mother was
opposed to it), a rare opportunity for women of that day. She was also fortunate
to marry, at age fifteen, a husband who encouraged her in her studies and
literary pursuits. Widowed ten years later, only now with three small children
to support, she turned to writing full time -- an especially bold move,
as there were few "professional" writers at this time to speak of -- and
her patrons included the highest nobility and kings and queens of France.
Her first literary products (like those of Guibert) were love poems, favored
by her elite audiences; she wrote hundreds. Although the Book of the City of Ladies, an extended allegorical defense of women's
role in history, is perhaps her best-known work, Christine was an accomplished
author in numerous genres, including verse, ballads, epistolary prose, instructional
manuals, and works on morality. She knew the works of Ovid, Boethius, and
Boccaccio among others, and was the first woman to write in vernacular prose
about women.
The political climate in France darkened considerably
in the first decade of the 1400s, with a civil war erupting between contending
French factions in 1407 and the incapacitating mental illness of King Charles
VI paralyzing the realm. It would last for more than two decades, and its
horrors led Christine to write her Lamentation on the Evils that have
befallen France in 1410. She died in 1430, having lived long enough to
witness the rise of Joan of Arc, the peasant girl who helped restore the
French monarchy and led the French army to victory over the English at Orléans
in 1429.
Questions:
(1) How, if at all, does Margery's autobiography and her ruminations on her religious experience differ from those of the male authors we've read to this point? Are there differences in content, in style, in voice?
(2) How does Margery
react to male authority figures--husband, son, male clergy, bishops?
How do they react to her? How is she perceived in her community?
(3) How would you
characterize her religiosity? What are her religious experiences, and
what personal life experiences shape her religious outlook? How would
you describe her sense of "feeling Christ"?
(4) Christine de
Pizan has been called the "first feminist writer" of the Middle Ages.
Is she? If so, what kind of feminist is she? Is this still a
useful label to apply to her?
(5) How does Christine appeal to her readers to
blunt the conflict of the Hundred Years' War? What rhetorical tactics
does she use to make her case?
(6)
How would you characterize her perspective on the war compared to that
of Froissart?