The Textual Politics of The Book of Margery Kempe

• Main Authors: Kai-Hung Wang, 王凱弘
• Other Authors: Ming-Tsang Yang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/50042989731123509758

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學研究所 === 96 === The thesis is aimed at shedding new light on the issue of textuality of The Book of Margery Kempe. Concentrating my discussion on the cooperation between Margery Kempe and her transcribers, especially the second one, I hope to demonstrate the possibility of fulfilling a victory, though limited in scale, on the part of Kempe in a skirmish of textual—and gender—politics. As a priest who was supposed to safeguard the supremacy of the official Church in the interpretation of the Bible at any cost, the second scribe was in charge of ensuring the ideological purity of his dictator. Yet this didn’t preclude Kempe from actively intervening in the construction of her autobiography. In the complicated relationship between the two parties, I would like to argue that Kempe was the one to take the lead and gain control over her male partner—which not only reflected her authorship and authority, but also bespoke her subjectivity in an era dominated primarily by male clerics. In the first chapter, I analyze the issue of texuality of the Book to point out the laxity of the second scribe in the verification of Kempe’s self-claimed holiness. In the second part of my thesis, I turn to discuss the priest-scribe in relation to the contemporary social-religious circumstances to explain why he would be willing to help a controversial figure transcribe an equally controversial text. In the final portion of the thesis, I firstly argue that the modern definition of “literacy” is far from an apt measure to account for Kempe’s agency as displayed in the writing of the Book. In addition, she resorted to her physicality as another language to lay claim to a higher status as a real mystic. Through Imitatio Christi, Kemp made a step beyond the clerical surveillance and allowed her cries and screams to reverberate not only in the Book, but throughout the entire human history as well.