ABSTRACT
The passage has been much quoted since the discovery of the Butler-Bowden manuscript in 1934, and has determined many responses to The Book of Margery Kempe in its full form. The chapter deals with twentieth-century views of Kempe and twentieth-century guesses about why her book seems to have failed to endure in the fifteenth century: guesses, that is, about why Kempe failed, as a saint or as a writer, and about why she was excluded from both the literary and the ecclesiastical canons. Kempe understands very well the significance of Jesus’s feet and her own relation to them in the role of a Magdalen: she is, in a limited sense, learned. The need for speech binds both parties: the Second Person of the Trinity is forced to speak the words of the marriage ceremony in order for Kempe to consent to marriage.
