Something that we touched on in class yesterday was the volume of Margery's demonstrations of devotion through weeping, crying and roaring loudly during church services a dinners. Even though we addressed how this behavior would have seemed jarring in her church and her larger community, I feel like her loudness is especially interesting within the context of the silent Christian women we have encountered in our previous texts.
Silence seems to be a key characteristic of the literary Christian women, beginning with our encounter with Julianna of The Song of Roland. As a Saracen queen, she had a voice and used it to express her anger against her failed gods, but once she is converted, her voice is not heard again. Similarly, when Silence is publicly returned to the realm of women by marrying the king, we as readers are cut off from her thoughts and words. Margery, who seems to want everyone to hear her feelings, seems to be cut from an entirely different cloth.
In writing her autobiography, Margery is obviously speaking to her book's audience, but she is also implicitly arguing for the value of her voice among the faithful. We can think of this as just a "PR campaign for sainthood," which I am sure it at least partially is, but I think that is too narrow an interpretation. She, and many of the other women mystics at the time, are redressing the tradition of silence around their place in Christian discourse.
Even though, if I were part of her fellowship, I would probably also be put off by her constant weeping through dinner, her daring in publicly and with great volume expressing the truth of her connection to God should not be underestimated.
That's a great point you make, about the value of silence in a Christian woman. It calls to mind a passage from the New Testament, I Timothy 2:11. "A woman should learn in quietness and full submission." I would be shocked to find that this Biblical sentiment didn't play prominently in medieval understandings of a woman's place in the church. But I think it's going a bit too far to say that the other mystics were making the point that women should be allowed to loud as well. Julian of Norwich seems pretty muted in her little room. Is that perhaps why Margery does not get to be a saint, then? Because she is so loud?
ReplyDeleteLeah, I think that's a good point. Margery's volume is certainly not echoed by the saints of her time, who were often reclusive and removed from society. Perhaps it is simply Margery's place among the public, on top of her loudness, that so clearly separated her from her fellow mystics. After all, if they were weeping, no one could hear them, so it would not have seemed nearly as transgressive.
ReplyDeleteThis sense that Margery was, in a way, performing for an audience, could very well have been at the heart of her lack of canonization. Her insistence on drawing attention to herself is seen as unseemly (even today) in a way that quietly starving in a cell is not.
Now that I read you all, Kempe seems to me like those loud preachers of this nation, that also created an style that proved to be worldwide successful. "And the lord spoke to me and he said me, sister, you should do this or that..." A Catholic saint have to be obedient and to respect the "chain of command"... and Kempe is dangerously in the border... she would be most successful after the reform!!1
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