Telling the Grace That She Felt: Linguistic Strategies in The Book of Margery Kempe

Abstract

While The Book of Margery Kempe has been touted as a foundational English autobiographical text, little critical attention has been paid to the link between Kempe's narrative and its relationship to the specialized techniques of autobiography. This essay uses the framework of autobiographical criticism, with a focus on the practices of women's life writing, to advocate The Book of Margery Kempe as a work deeply engaged in matters of authority and subject positioning. Autobiography's implicit engagement with issues of subjectivity and self-representation, its dependence on the perceived authority and self-authorizing strategies of the writer, and its inherently heterogeneous form render it a highly effective frame for reading Kempe's original and idiosyncratic text. The essay draws on the larger concerns of autobiographical writing and grounds them in the lexical minutiae of the narrative, with a particular focus on strategies of naming, syntax, and semantic exploitation of certain key words. A close linguistic analysis of The Book of Margery Kempe exposes Kempe as an author determined to establish herself as a legitimate and authoritative subject capable of writing herself into history.