The 'book' of Margery Kempe: The Book of Margery Kempe

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Margery thanks her scribe for making the “trewe sentens” “in hys maner of wrytyng & spellyng” (made the true sentences in his manner of writing and spelling), but his manner is “not clerly ne opynly to owr maner of spekyng” (not clearly and openly in accordance with our manner of speaking). If The Book cannot present the exact truth for Margery, where might be the “trewe sentens” in her “maner of wrytyng & spellyng”? From the relation between readers and writers, between reading and writing the authority in the Middle Ages is born a translation of desire and failure from medieval writers to readers. In this translation of desire lies a crucial struggle with body and language─the two primary media in human representation. The struggles compel writers to transplant in their readers a readerly desire for the authority and at the same time spur them to search for new media of body and language: the de-fleshed body that is devoid of its sensual natures and the de-languaged language that is empty of arbitrary signifier-signified relation and misleading rhetoric. It is with these two media: the de-languaged language of crying and tears and the de-fleshed body of compulsion, that Margery translates her divine visionary text into wonder and marvel in the eyes of her audience. Like masses, Margery’s crying spectacle, with its de-languaged crying language and defleshed compulsive body, creates a signifier of fear that allows the audience experience the presence, and acquire the knowledge, of God, while fear is the beginning of the unknowable, the uncertainty, and the beginning of the knowledge of God for medieval Christians.