Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lavinsky, David

Titel

“Speke to me be thowt”: Affectivity, Incendium Amoris, and the Book of Margery Kempe

Ist Teil von

• Journal of English and Germanic philology, 2013-07, Vol.112 (3), p.340-364

Ort / Verlag

Urbana: University of Illinois Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In the Book of Margery Kempe, Lavinsky suggests that Kempe's tensions emerge most sharply in relation to Richard Rolle and the devotional economy defined by Incendium Amoris. Rolle's work was important in consolidating an ideal of affective spirituality in the period and in some significant respects anticipates Margery's assumptions about the role of the body and the emotions in devotion. Although his Meditation B was at least as influential as Incendium Amoris, only the latter is explicitly cited in the Book, where it functions as a frequent reference point for the priest-scribe to whom Margery narrates her account.6 In crucial moments, however, the Book adopts a surprisingly resistant attitude toward Rolle's paradigm of inspired physical and emotional intimacy with God, elevating Margery's visionary experience over the model for spiritual discernment provided by Incendium Amoris; this is particularly true with respect to Margery's extended colloquies with God. Rarely found in the hagiographic and didactic literature upon which the Book so often draws, these "sacred conversations," to use Gail Gibson's description, deserve more extended consideration, especially because they register unease about the somatic experience which characterizes so many other aspects of Margery's spiritual life which links her to Rolle. Her account therefore disrupts the Book's place within Rolle's textual community and, in doing so, traces the discursive boundaries between historically specific modes of devotion.