Despair

This chapter locates the Book's origins in the emotional/spiritual experience of intense isolation and speechlessness, conditions associated with despair and, if despair was left unchecked, with suicidal inclinations. It suggests that this “temptation” toward suicide was Kempe's “secret sin” and that her decision to write the Book is an attempt to replace the silencing of confessional discourse, which had led her to a moment of near-suicidal crisis, with self-expression. In struggling to “say what she felt,” Kempe responds to the advice found in books of consolation: these warned against the damaging effects of despair but did little to explain how to escape its destructive power. She thus represents her discovery of the difference between “telling”—the process of saying how the condition felt—and enumerative confession that silenced and defined without allowing such expression as a solution to the problem.

Introduction

This introductory chapter details the background and context of Margery Kempe's spirituality and examines the extraordinary nature of Kempe's engagement with the written word. It emphasizes the uniqueness of Kempe's position given that, unlike many other late medieval women, she had gone out of her way to put her visions, feelings, and devotional experiences into writing. From here, the chapter begins formulating a new approach to Kempe's work as her own book of consolation by focusing on three issues which have occupied many of the Book's critics: the concept of revision, the nature of collaboration, and the relationship between writer and readers.

Afterword

This concluding chapter expands on the arguments provided in the previous chapters and goes on to give a further explanation on the reasons why Kempe's Book is written in the way it is. It identifies the theoretical concepts which informed the author's reading of the Book and how language and emotion have shaped it. Kempe was familiar with a range of literary and linguistic forms, and much of her knowledge must have come through informal channels. The chapter shows how she was able to incorporate various literary sources into her work, at times even reframing them, into personalized literary expressions. From here, the chapter considers the comfort which the Book itself offers Kempe and her readers.

Fear

This chapter traces Kempe's efforts to focus on the present moment, as the Book represents fear as alive and lived in an ever-returning present. According to devotional writers, fear was, on the one hand, spiritually hygienic and, on the other, an obstacle to genuine love of God. Fear's importance, for these writers, was in its meaning (not in the experience of fear itself). Kempe wrestles with both the positive and negative definitions but focuses primarily on the experience, rather than the meaning, of fear. The Book is filled with “believer-in-crisis” episodes, and the excitement and pleasure of dramatized fear encourage readers to identify with the Book's author/reader, reinforcing the exemplary function that the author and her scribes claim for its composition.

Shame

This chapter untangles the relationship between conflicting explanations of the value of shame, as found in devotional writing, and Kempe's methods for resisting its destructive power. Shame was the condition that defined her and the emotional experience that united her with potential readers. Hence, the Book models two approaches to shame. The first is to represent this experience as a cause for celebration. The second method treats shame as an opportunity to re-understand self-identity—Kempe's own and her reader's—in relation to ideas of future spiritual perfection. The latter half of the chapter offers a catalogue of her verbal “remedies” against the destructive force of shame and returns to the second book's concluding re-exploration of the subject in terms of social interaction and personal history.

Loneliness

This chapter looks at Kempe's search for spiritual joy and companionship in conjunction with contradictory advice, offered in books of consolation, about interpersonal relations. One model insisted that the highest form of spiritual love could be found only in solitude—in a relationship with “Jesus Alone;” another recommended that believers seek out the fellowship of “right-minded men.” This chapter shows that Kempe's Book traces her struggle to live in accordance with both models. This involves, first, separation from family and home, followed by a series of pilgrimages, and, second, upon her return to Lynn, reintegration into English devotional and familial communities.

Comfort

This chapter looks at the offer of consolation in late medieval devotional writing. It distinguishes between classical traditions, in which consolation was meant to eradicate grief and return the bereaved to civic life, and medieval ones, in which comfort was to be found in the recognition of both God's infinite goodness and the intense depravity of sinful humans. Medieval books of comfort sought to teach readers how they should feel about their “wretchedness;” the preface to Kempe's Book identifies it as offering “solace” to the “sinful wretches” who read it, to Kempe herself, and to her scribe. This chapter tracks the Book's exploration of communal experiences of high devotional desire, comfort, joy, and emotional expression as a replacement for isolated individual experiences of “wretchedness.”