최예정 -- 중세 영문학에 나타난 젠더, 기독교, 그리고 읽기: 성녀전과 마저리 켐프를 중심으로

Yejung Choi, "Gender, Religion and Reading in Medieval English Literature: Hagiography and The Book of Margery Kempe"

Abstract

What difference gender makes in reading, and, if any, to whom and in which way are the questions posed in this paper. Medieval literature presents many examples of a female reader’s consciousness of her own gender, whether she is a real or a fictional one. Contrastingly, it is hard to find in the texts of the middle ages a male reader who is conscious of his own gender. The complaints made by Christine de Pizan and the Wife of Bath of the texts which inculcates antifeminism in the minds of both male and female readers suggest that the gender-consciousness is gender specific phenomenon in the middle ages.

In particular, saints’ lives were recommended to female readers, for those books were believed to provide morality and good role models for females. And historical evidence shows that hagiography was the favorite genre in the female textual community. Margery Kempe was one of the female readers who tried to accommodate her lifestyle to that represented in the female saint’s legends.

Female mysticism in the late Middle Ages was the site in which woman could construct a new female subjectivity. Female mysticism elevated the so-called feminine attributes such as sensuality and corporeality, which had always been interpreted in a negative way, to the level of privileged vehicle by which one can approach to the Godhead nearer and have more intimate terms with God. The result is that the traditional analogy of God/groom and church/bride comes to have immediacy and erotical quality. Erotic and religious fantasies are intermingled.

Margery Kempe aspires to live a Virgin Mary’s life, although she is a married woman. The solution she finds is to promote multiple feminine roles including lover, daughter, handmaid, mother and bride. Her sexuality, sensuality, and femininity are no more ponderous burden but a good springboard which helps her to identify herself with Mary or be united with Jesus.   
 
Margery Kempe and other spiritual females, whom official culture is reluctant to accept as authoritative, construct their authority by showing that they are conversing with God in person. They insist that their knowledge, teaching and prophecy come direct from God. Personal contact with God is foregrounded to establish their authority, while they strive to shun the criticism of official church by locating themselves in the conventional images of women.

Interestingly, this strategy employed by both Margery Kempe and Bridget of Sweden and the subsequent change of the notion of a woman’s role are found in the hagiography of the later middles ages, including Chaucer’s saints’ legends in the Canterbury Tales. Hagiography constructs female subjectivity, but at the same time it is subject to the change of female subjectivity.   


Key Words
gender, religion, reading, hagiography, Margery Kempe, Christine de Pizan, subjectivity, feminity, antifeminism