Perilous Passages

The Book of Margery Kempe, 1534–1934

Julie Chappell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137277671
• eBook ISBN: 9781137277688
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This study will significantly further our interpretations of the unique autobiography of Margery Kempe, lay woman turned mystic and visionary. Following the manuscript from a Carthusian monastery through history, Chappell bridges the gaps in our understanding of the transmission of texts from the medieval past to the present.

CHAPTER 1

THE CARTHUSIAN CONNECTION

It is well known that on December 27, 1934, American scholar, Hope Emily Allen, announced in The Times the reappearance of a late medieval manuscript called The Book of Margery Kempe. This Book had been previously known only from Edmund Gardner’s discovery of two early sixteenth-century extracts that he printed in 1910.¹ The first of these two extracts was printed by Wynkyn de Worde, probably in 1501, and entitled A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Ihesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margerie kempe of Lynn. Subsequently, another London printer, Henry Pepwell, reprinted de Worde with an additional insertion at the end of the title to make Margery Kempe ancresse of lynne.² Pepwell reasserted this status in his explicit: Here endeth a shorte treatyse of a deuoute ancres called Margerye kempe of Lynne and included it with six other mystical works written in English. Gardner noted, too, that Pepwell also “inserts a few words like ‘Our Lord Jesus said unto her,’ or ‘she said,’ ” as well as his addition of her religious status as ancress.³ The Book of Margery Kempe conveys spiritual experiences and their physical and verbal expressions of a medieval laywoman named Margery Kempe who turned mystic and visionary over the course of her life. These experiences led her to feelings of divine grace and earthly fear as she tried to make sense of them. Later critics made sense of Kempe’s experiences in varied ways.

In the mid-1950s, in his magisterial study of the religious in England, David Knowles would gender and disdain the piety expressed in Kempe’s Book, which was admired by the medieval Carthusians in England. Knowles asserted that

The author of The Cloud of Unknowing and Walter Hilton, have an intellectual and emotional austerity . . . derived from some of the purest sources of theological and ascetical tradition . . . [But] from the beginning of the fifteenth century onwards [this purity] was contaminated [by] a more emotional and idiosyncratic devotion, manifesting itself in visions, revelations and unusual behavior, deriving . . . partly from the influence of some of the women saints of the fourteenth century, such as . . . Bridget of Sweden. The most familiar example of this type in England is Margery Kempe.⁴

C. H. Lawrence would see this, instead, as a trend toward “individualistic piety” that had been building since at least the twelfth century and that would spread by way of the Carthusians. The foundations of Carthusians being made by wealthy patrons “in the centre of cities like London, Paris, and Cologne,” Lawrence views as “an outward and visible sign of spiritual kinship between the eremitical ideal and the religious individualism of the townsman.”⁵

The “spiritual kinship” between the townswoman Margery Kempe and the medieval Carthusian monks who embraced her expressions of spiritual experience would allow Kempe’s Book to survive in spite of its “idiosyncratic” nature. This was due in no small measure to the bookmaking practices and affective tendencies of the Carthusians along with their love of books and desire for communion with God.⁶ Jean Leclercq once asserted that the Rule of St. Benedict revealed “two elements . . . in the life of St. Benedict: the knowledge of letters and the search for God.”⁷ This could as easily be considered the distinguishing marks of the Carthusians who were early on compared to the Benedictines in their form of living.⁸ Their love of one book, The Book of Margery Kempe, would make possible at least five perilous passages beginning with its removal from the charterhouse at Mount Grace in North Yorkshire to the London Carthusians.

The Book of Margery Kempe might have remained perpetually in the hands of Carthusian monks in Yorkshire and London had King Henry VIII not seen fit to begin to dismantle the English monastic communities in the 1530s. The Valor Ecclesiasticus was ordered by Henry to determine the fiscal worth of such monasteries and clerical houses that had proliferated in England throughout the medieval period. The Carthusians were relative latecomers in this regard with the first house being established at Witham in 1178. The Carthusian monasteries in London and Yorkshire had their establishment still later in the fourteenth century in 1340 and 1397 respectively.

The Mount Grace charterhouse in Yorkshire was founded by Richard II’s nephew, Thomas de Holand, in 1397 as one of then nine successful Carthusian houses in England by the end of the fourteenth century. As Kent Emery asserts: “[B]ecause of their renown for purity of observance at a time when other religious foundations were perceived to be in a state of decline, the Carthusians experienced their greatest period of expansion, esteem, and influence” at this time.⁹ The “asceticism, and self-abnegation” of the Carthusians had been codified by the fifth prior of the order, Guigo I, in his Consuetudines of 1128.¹⁰ Laura Smyth notes that in the Consuetudines, Guigo had proclaimed “the reading and copying of books . . . [as] an integral piece of the contemplative life” of his monks.¹¹ Because of their faithful adherence to his customs, their devotion to the Virgin, and their eschewing of, as Dennis Martin calls it, “the machismo that lay both behind the rise of scholasticism . . . and the rise of commerce and trade,” the Carthusians played an “indispensable role . . . in disseminating and preserving a feminine literary record in England.”¹² Since Carthusian literary activity “involved mainly the gathering, copying, and disseminating of texts,” we can feel fairly certain that by the end of the fifteenth century, Carthusian libraries were well filled.¹³

In an article about the German Beguine mystic, Maria van Hout (d. 1547), and her Carthusian editor in Cologne, Gerhard Kalckbrenner, Kirsten M. Christensen asserts that van Hout’s life writings made her “mysticism attractive as a contribution to the emerging Catholic response to the Reformation.”¹⁴ These were prepared and printed by Kalckbrenner in 1531, less than 100 years after The Book of Margery Kempe was written down by a scribe named Salthows.¹⁵ In delineating exactly why the Carthusians would have found van Hout so “attractive,” Christensen reveals the reasons the reformers in Germany and elsewhere would have found van Hout so repugnant. Christensen claims that van Hout’s “emphases on unquestioning obedience to church authority, devotion to the Passion of Christ . . . and [especially] prayer and service for the salvation of one’s fellow beings lent her message . . . timeliness” in light of Luther’s defiance of the Church. The Carthusians, Christensen insists, were “willing to risk publication . . . to print the works of this unknown, uncloistered, living woman.”¹⁶ As Ulrike Wiethous has declared, van Hout’s “ ‘practice and embodiment of spiritual values’ ” through the account of her life experiences “ ‘was regarded [by her male supporters] as her central message’.”¹⁷ Gerhard Kalckbrenner’s commentary especially “underscores Maria’s constant claim that the grace in her life is most clearly manifest by the fact that God commanded her to write.”¹⁸ Maria van Hout had an English counterpart, if not a sister in the Beguine life, in Margery Kempe of Lynn.

Although Margery Kempe had been dead a generation before van Hout was born in c. 1470, like van Hout, Kempe was “comawndyd in hir sowle” to write down her visions and her “dalyans” with God (3/27–28).¹⁹ Kempe’s life experiences range from exempla that seem to come straight out of medieval sermons to commonplace trials and tribulations of late medieval English bourgeois life.²⁰ The parallels between Kempe’s and van Hout’s lives as well as the circumstances of the inscription of their lives by their Carthusian connections seem more than coincidental. These women’s lives were written down during their lifetimes and then edited in the early sixteenth century seemingly as acts of calculated resistance to the well-fueled (in Germany) and emerging (in England) reforming movements. At the same time that Gerhard Kalckbrenner was editing Maria van Hout’s writings, Margery Kempe’s Carthusian admirers were making sure that Kempe’s life as exemplum continued to be preserved in response to the swiftly moving reforms of 1534 when they glossed and edited Kempe’s Book a final time. As Laura Smyth points out, the Carthusians were responsible for the preservation “in many cases [of] the sole extant manuscript” of a mystical text.²¹ Although the Carthusians created and preserved these works generally for the instruction and meditation of the monks, texts were shared among Carthusian charterhouses as well as with other religious.

Kent Emery’s in-depth study of the Dutch Carthusian, Denys of Ryckel, a monk of the charterhouse in Roermond in the Netherlands, reveals Denys at the peak of his literary productivity in the 1440s and 1450s, possibly the same time Salthows made a copy of Kempe’s Book.²² This is the same period in which Sanford Brown Meech reports the conclusions of his early paper expert, C. T. Lamacraft, concerning the paper of The Book of Margery Kempe as “ ‘probably from Holland 1440–1450’.”²³ Emery declares that not only Denys but many of the new monks coming in during this time of growth “had received a university education” and “carried their learning into their monastic life.”²⁴ With the influx of new monks came new learning and new books from the outside. The probability of an exchange between an enclosed Carthusian and a cleric from another order was realized with the Carthusian Denys of Ryckel. Emery establishes Denys’s relationship with a Franciscan, Jan Brugman, who was considered “the most renowned preacher of his day in the Low Countries.”²⁵ Consequently, Denys supplied Brugman with preaching materials that Denys had prepared especially for him. In one of his early works, Denys declares:

Writing . . . is the most noble among the corporal works of the monk, insofar as those to whom we may not preach or teach by the tongue, we may edify, as readers, in books we write out and by the preaching material we bequeath to them.²⁶

From Guigo I’s Consuetudines, the Carthusians held books “to be kept very carefully as the everlasting food of our souls, and most industriously to be made, so that since we cannot do so by the mouth, we may preach the word of God with our hands.”²⁷ In spite of the eremetic life of the Carthusians, who were not allowed to leave their monastery except if “particular circumstances dictate[d] otherwise,” communications with other orders, as well as patrons, was not strictly forbidden.²⁸ Books were at the center of their contemplative life, and, though visitors were carefully restricted, the Carthusian houses of England “industriously” made books to use in house and for a kind of commerce among charterhouses and with other religious. Does the evidence for Carthusian book loving and exchange then indicate the possibility for a passage for The Book of Margery Kempe from Mount Grace to another Carthusian charterhouse?

The Kempe manuscript was not noted among the possessions of Mount Grace at the dissolution of that house. The valuation lists drawn up by Henry’s commissioners in the years leading up to this suggest that Henry’s government was more interested in goods made from saleable metals than in books bound in simple leather bindings, at least the ones that his agents could find. Lists of names and the prices they received for lead pilfered from religious sites is fairly telling. More than one man has several entries and, therefore, multiple sales.²⁹ Coppack and Aston assert that archaeological evidence for Mount Grace reveals the cells “stripped bare” in 1539.³⁰ Yet, they also found evidence for Mount Grace as a repo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1. The Carthusian Connection
• 2. Carthusian Preaching Materials
• 3. Death, Dissolution, and Dispersal
• 4. Digbys, Erdeswicks, Bowdons, and Butler-Bowdons
• 5. Recovery, Revelation, and Revival
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index