Lechery, Pride, and the Uses of Sin in The Book of Margery Kempe

The opening line to the prologue of The Book of Margery Kempe bills the work as “a schort tretys and a comfortabyl for sinful wrecchys, wherin thei may have gret solas and comfort to hem and undyrstondyn the hy and unspecabyl mercy of ower sovereyn Savyowr Cryst Jhesu . . . that now in ower days to us unworthy deyneth to exercysen hys nobeley and hys goodnesse.” 1 Thus Margery and/or her scribe/collaborator immediately identifi es the book’s readership as sinners who are in need of the savior’s mercy and goodness and its purpose as didactic and redemptive. 2 The main character, we are told, will be “a synful caytyf” who is drawn to the love of Jesus (Prologue, 13–14). The book’s famously dramatic fi rst chapter makes it clear that the prologue’s mentions of sin are not merely conventional; the reader is plunged in medias res with an early episode of Margery’s madness, triggered by an unconfessed sin, and much follows from this trauma. Julian of Norwich, Margery’s older contemporary and today her only serious rival as the most famous English medieval woman writer, organizes her Revelation of Love around the question of sin and the related issues of damnation and mercy. Like Margery, Julian experiences direct communication from God and attempts to interpret it in the course of her text, but the two writers’ methods could hardly be more different. Julian tackles big questions such as the paradox between a loving God and the necessity for hell and damnation and works them out theologically, by carefully categorizing thoughts and actions both human and divine and by interrogating the fundamental nature of the basic concepts of sin, evil, and mercy. Margery, by contrast, attacks similar questions through an intensely personalized autobiographical structure in which her own uniqueness is