ABSTRACT
Genelle Gertz-Robinson here subtly teases out the maneuverings of a complex feminine occupatio: women who preach while denying their discourse the status of preaching. Crucial here is their common insistence “that preaching must be defined by locationby the actual habitation of a pulpit” (p. 460). Both women recognize the pulpit as a highly charged social space that confers authority upon a speaker and what he, normatively he, has to say. Chaucer’s Pardoner, famously, deploys a whole range of gestural techniques with which to spellbind audiences from a pulpit (“And lo, sires, thus I preche,” 3.915). Chaucer himself, represented as author in the famous Corpus Christi frontis piece, is imagined in a pulpit-like structure that lends authority to his narrating.1 Preach ers, especially in Italy, would address large crowds from pulpits built out over public squares, and the rulers of Florence would similarly expose or display themselves from the ringhiera or external platform of the Palazzo Publico to the masses below.2 Both Margery Kempe and Anne Askew, Gertz-Robinson observes, neatly exploit their very absence from such a delimited masculine space as a means of enabling, of allowing continuance to, their religious discourse: “I preche nat ser,” says Kempe, “I come in no pulpytt” (126); “and then I asked hym,” says Askew (defending herself under interroga tion), “how manye women he had seane, go into the pulpett and preache” (30).
