Book Review

Liz Herbert McAvoy, Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe
Woodbridge, Suffolk/ and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2004; viii + 276 pp. ISBN: 1843840081

by Jenny Rebecca Rytting

Jenny Rebecca Rytting studied Jane Austen for her Honors B.A. at Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah) and fantasy writer Robin McKinley for her M.A. at Acadia University (Wolfville, Nova Scotia). She has recently completed a dissertation on Julian of Norwich and Middle English sermons and received her Ph.D. from Arizona State University in December of 2005.

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Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe is a valuable addition to recent scholarship on visionary writing and the female body. In it, Liz Herbert McAvoy explains how Julian and Margery use feminized language and female categories to establish their authority and convey their visionary experiences. Although Julian and Margery are more often contrasted than compared, both women emerge from the same early fifteenth-century English mystical tradition, both redefine gender in radical ways, and both use the female body as a “hermeneutic tool” (23). Herbert McAvoy’s investigation alternates between the two women, exploring how each transforms the roles of mother, whore, and wise woman.

Chapter 1, “Motherhood and Margery Kempe,” shows how Margery’s redefinition of maternity exposes the slippage between patriarchal prescriptions for women’s bodies and actual female experience. The author asserts that Margery’s choice of what to reveal about her motherhood, given the lack of information in her text about her fourteen children, is a conscious and purposeful part of her self-construction. For example, Margery’s first experience with childbirth, a pivotal moment in book 1, captures her traumatic transformation from virgin to mother as a “re-enactment of the punishment imposed on Eve” (37); Christ’s subsequent appearance and absolution at her bedside gives her the chance to identify with the Virgin Mary instead. Margery’s reaction to her returning prodigal son in book 2 provides a similar focal point, in which she simultaneously enacts the orthodox but typically incompatible roles of anxious mother and holy spokeswoman. This chapter also explores the various maternal roles Margery performs as she envisions caring for Saint Anne, the Virgin Mary, and the Christ child; attends to assorted women on her travels; takes care of her incontinent husband in the last years of his life; and identifies with Mary’s sorrows while on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. These points lead to the final assertion that Margery’s redefinitions of motherhood allow her the spiritual autonomy she seeks.

Bibliography: Margery Kempe

Bibliography: Julian of Norwich

Chapter 2, “The Motherhood Matrix in the Writing of Julian of Norwich,” traces the development of maternal language and images from the Short Text of Julian’s Revelation of Love to its later, longer version. Herbert McAvoy sets up a symbolic link between the enclosed, liminal spaces of the sickroom where Julian first experiences her visions and the anchorhold where Julian probably wrote at least her Long Text, both of which can be seen as dual images of tomb and womb. In addition, the presence of Julian’s mother in the Short Text provides interesting parallels between her sorrow at the apparent loss of her daughter, Julian’s sorrow at her potential loss of Christ when her mother attempts to close her eyes, and Mary’s sorrow at the foot of the cross. These parallels serve to strengthen the associations between Julian and Christ, between Mary and worldly mothers, and between maternal and Godly love. The author’s subsequent discussion of the images of blood (and other fluids) and enclosure within a womb as they appear in Julian’s texts essentially reiterates the work of Elizabeth Robertson and Maria R. Lichtmann,1See Elizabeth Robertson, “Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 142-67; and Maria R. Lichtmann, “‘God fulfylled my bodye’: Body, Self, and God in Julian of Norwich,” in Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 1996), pp. 263-78. but her treatment of maternal imagery in the Parable of the Lord and the Servant is original and insightful.

Chapter 3, “Discourses of Prostitution and The Book of Margery Kempe,” discusses Margery’s manipulation of the medieval connotations of harlotry. Applying Gayle Rubin’s Marxist theories of the “use value” and “exchange value” attached to the female body, Luce Irigaray’s work on prostitution, and Judith Butler’s concept of “injurious naming,” Herbert McAvoy explores the tensions between Margery’s duties to her real-life husband John and her mystical husband Christ. She suggests—quite persuasively—that there is no way Margery can be a “good wife” to both until John agrees to “a type of sexualised economic transaction in reverse” (109) wherein Margery pays his monetary debts in exchange for being released from her marital debt. Moreover, the abuse Margery suffers while on her pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the various threats of rape recounted in her text attempt—but fail—to control and objectify her, serving rather to critique clerical hypocrisy and patriarchal stances toward women. This chapter also considers the subtle and extensive use of Mary Magdalene as a touchstone in the Book, noting the saint’s extreme popularity in the late Middle Ages as a model of penitence and of redeemed female sexuality and comparing her characteristic weeping to Margery’s. Thus, through her textual self-representation, Margery is able to symbolically take upon herself the role of prostitute and transform it into that of a mystical lover of Christ.

Chapter 4, “‘3yf thowe be payede,’ quod oure lorde, ‘I am payede’: Hermeneutics of the Holy Whore in Julian of Norwich,” treats hitherto overlooked images of transactional sexuality in the two versions of A Revelation of Love. Julian’s reinterpretation of medieval attitudes toward female and fleshly bodies contrasts with texts such as Ancrene Wisse that focus on the corrupting “abject body,” resembling instead the more positive views of Thomist liberalism. Building upon an earlier article,2Liz Herbert McAvory, “Julian of Norwich and a Trinity of the Feminine,” Mystics Quarterly 28.2 (2002): 68-77. Herbert McAvoy also considers the implications of Julian’s identification with Mary Magdalene, patron saint of both prostitutes and contemplatives, and Saint Cecilia, whose female body is the site of figurative rape, sexualized union with Christ, and symbolic transactions of salvation. She further claims that Julian uses her suffering body as a commodity to be traded for spiritual insight and divine love. Particularly compelling is her reading of Julian’s encounter with the devil as a grotesque, sexualized parody of bridal mysticism, especially in the Long Text’s more graphic description, in which the fiend appears as a lecherous, leprous young man. However, given the established trope of “indwelling” in medieval mystical literature, in which the Sacred Heart of Christ functions as a place of refuge,3See, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, pbk. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), esp. pp. 119-22. her assertion that Julian’s feminized Christ takes the role of a “holy whore” by making himself, and his vagina-like side-wound, available to multiple lovers—that is, all of humanity—seems overstated, as does her related conclusion that he unites unconditional maternal love with transactional sexuality.


Fig. 1. Jean Fouquet, Saint Anne and the Three
Marys. From The Hours of Étienne Chevalier.
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS NAL 1416.
(Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.)

Chapter 5, “Margery Kempe: Wisdom, Authority, and the Female Utterance,” explores Margery’s strategies for establishing authority for her oral discourse despite medieval distrust of the female voice. The author’s analysis of Margery’s social and geographical connections to the British heretical movement known as Lollardy is thorough, but her position that Margery had Lollard sympathies simply because both she and they encouraged female reading remains unconvincing.4For a discussion of this complex issue, see John H. Arnold, “Margery’s Trials: Heresy, Lollardy and Dissent,” in A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 75-93. More compelling is her assertion that Margery seeks authority less by relying on male supporters than by “establishing […] a community of female voices with varying degrees of authority” (186). These voices include those of the “apostless” Mary Magdalene and the prophetic Sybil. The chapter also analyzes scenes in which Margery connects with contemporary women, either as individuals or in groups, who validate her visionary activity through their reception and support. Furthermore, Margery’s account of the difficulties she faced in producing her text becomes a figurative representation of her difficulties of translating visionary experience into written text, or Word into word. The resulting text is characterized by the “primeval language of the body” of Margery’s weeping (200), her nonlinear structure, her “insistent orality” (201), and especially her female voice.

Chapter 6, “Julian of Norwich: The Voice of the Wise Women,” sheds light on the interaction between the female voice and the female body as both grow older. Julian’s development from youthful naiveté in the Short Text to mature wisdom in the Long Text can be compared to the figure of the Sybil, whose voice gains strength and wisdom as her body ages and shrinks in importance, and whose cave resembles Julian’s anchorhold. In addition, the function of Julian’s illness shifts from the fulfillment of her youthful, prophetic desires to the initiation of her mystical understanding; it becomes a focal point for the interaction between the body (or its absence) and vision. The chapter’s subsequent review of the history of sapiential theology, including the female personifications of Sophia/Sapientia and Ecclesia, and its discussion of the reception and audience of female writing, detailing the various manuscripts of Julian’s works, their ownership, and possible readership, are also interesting but seem to digress from the main focus of the chapter.

Finally, the “Afterword” returns to medieval, misogynistic views of Eve, suggesting that Julian and Margery participate in redeeming her legacy through their writings. Each of these women, in her own way, transforms negative stereotypes into positive hermeneutics wherein the female body becomes “an agent of redemption and […] a means of gaining and articulating direct access to God” (237). This is a fitting ending to a book that itself seeks to reevaluate the feminine hermeneutics in the texts created by these two women. Despite my quibbles with minor points, on the whole I find the author’s analysis to be perceptive and persuasive. Anyone interested in Julian, Margery, or the female visionary tradition will find her book to be well worth reading.

Notes

1. See Elizabeth Robertson, “Medieval Medical Views of Women and Female Spirituality in the Ancrene Wisse and Julian of Norwich’s Showings,” in Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 142-67; and Maria R. Lichtmann, “‘God fulfylled my bodye’: Body, Self, and God in Julian of Norwich,” in Gender and Text in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Jane Chance (Gainesville, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 1996), pp. 263-78.

2. Liz Herbert McAvory, “Julian of Norwich and a Trinity of the Feminine,” Mystics Quarterly 28.2 (2002): 68-77.

3. See, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, pbk. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), esp. pp. 119-22.

4. For a discussion of this complex issue, see John H. Arnold, “Margery’s Trials: Heresy, Lollardy and Dissent,” in A Companion to The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 75-93.

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