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Thursday, July 10, , amam. When the only complete manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe came to light in the 's, it brought both joy and disappointment to students of the religion of late medieval England. On the one … Expand. For a long time, it was believed that the people of the Middle Ages did not travel too much due to various reasons, but the great variety of travel-connected writings seems to contradict this belief … Expand. The Enigmatic, Threatening Margery Kempe. Many writers in the area of spiritual studies were excited by … Expand.
This article reads The Book of Margery Kempe as a rhetorically innovative visionary text that offered late medieval readers a powerful new method of accessing the vernacular Word of God. Through the … Expand.
The Difficult Women. Though two manuscripts seem to have nothing to do with each other, Margery Kempe in the … Expand. The life of St Margaret of Antioch in late medieval England: a gendered reading. Nancy F. Partner among others have already treated this topic to some degree.
I do not necessarily claim that Margery is a masochist, given that this term comes from the nineteenth century; rather, I conjecture that a comparison of Margery with masochism raises interesting patterns in her sexual expression and speaks to how we relate with her text today. All of these conditions are spelled out in Safe, Sane and Consensual , a leading academic text on the theory and practice of contemporary BDSM.
Sigmund Freud then located masochism in the psyche and reframed it as libidic direction: while he defined masochism as an aggressive drive towards the self, its opposite, sadism, aimed to inflict aggression on external objects. The contract differentiates masochism from sadism or sexual violence alone.
Deleuze argues: The masochist appears to be held by real chains, but in fact he is bound by his word alone. Margery is called to perform imitatio and embody his suffering in her own body, an act of utmost submission, but she also gazes through the privileged position of Virgin Mary.
Through a scopophilic perspective that evokes male gaze, which—as Laura Mulvey theorizes—men use to dominate women on the screen today, Margery transforms Christ into a passive object. Through this gaze, she reverses the roles of erotic domination between herself and the Son of God. Christ instructs: It is convenyent the wyf to be homly wyth hir husbond.
Dowtyr, thow desyrest gretly to se me, and thu mayst boldly, whan thu art in thi bed, take me to the as for thi weddyd husbond. It is appropriate for the wife to be familiar with her husband. Daughter, you desire greatly to see me, so you may boldly, when you are in your bed, take me as your wedded husband.
Of course, the agency that Margery exercises in her contract with Christ is never absolute, as Christ remains the master of their relationship. Thus, in contract with the Son of God, Margery experiences the steep power differential that is divine encounter. In my forthcoming journal article, I argue that The Book of Margery Kempe continually leaves gaps in the transmission of meaning, estranging her voice from our contemporary moment and becoming, in its own way, self-destructive.
The life of Margery Kempe amounts to more than just a total negation of her voice and personhood, in direct contrast to O. The understanding that consent undergirds contractual erotic submission is even more important today, in the wake of the MeToo movement and its heightened awareness of sexual assault. For us in medieval studies, a comparison of sadomasochism with medieval desires may seem unlikely but will never fail to surprise: it can teach us more than ever about premodern erotic experience and our engagements with it today.
Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Margery Kempe. Harless, Emily M. Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Liberal Arts Press, [].
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