ABSTRACT
Poised on either side of an event as cataclysmic as the Reformation, Margery Kempe’s autobiographical Book (c. 1438) and Anne Askew’s Examinations (1546, 1547) introduce the subject of women’s preaching in remarkably similar ways. In each text heresy in vestigators accuse the woman protagonist of preaching, and while she necessarily de nies the act, she also asserts her right to preach by defining it as something else. In The Book of Margery Kempe, when a priest at Archbishop Henry Bowet’s court lifts up a book and “ley(s) Seynt Powwyl for hys party a-geyns hir that no woman schulde prechyn,” Kempe responds with an equivocal answer. She insists “I preche not ser, I come in no pulpytt. I vse but comownycacyon & good wordys, & J)at wil I do whil I leue” (126).1 By defining preaching as the occupation of a pulpit and all other speech ‘comownycacyon & good wordys,” Kempe reserves for herself the possibility of preaching in other pub lic settings.2
