ABSTRACT
Texts accessible to Margery Kempe, like the Meditations on the Life of Christ, have been proved to be visible in her manner and method of devotion. The content of Kempe’s story, though reminiscent of hagiographic tradition, has little in common with that genre’s familiar topics. Maureen Fries’s essay describes the nature of both medieval and modern objections to Kempe’s social and religious anomalies, concluding that in her own times and ours, her Book has been fit to a Procrustean bed. Roland Maisonneuve, responding to the embarrassment created in readers by the apparent naiveties, has most evocatively solved the problem in one way by describing Kempe as one of God’s Fools, a kind of mystic recognized better in the East. Christ habitually calls her “daughter,” as he does Saints Catherine and Bridget, but what he has to say to Kempe does truly suggest the domestic tone of a father speaking to a beloved daughter.
