“You shall be burnt, false Lollard”:
Orthodoxy, Lollardy, and the Undecidability of The Book of Margery Kempe That Margery Kempe could burn for her religious alignment doubtfully surprised her. Charged on multiple occasions with heretical Lollardy, she was deemed a traitor to the church and, more importantly, to God, a transgression Kempe herself would likely have wept for had she believed it to be true. Throughout her autobiographical treatise, however, she maintains her innocence and asserts her adherence to Christian orthodoxy, even as she supplies evidence to the contrary. In fact, it is despite Kempe’s apparent devotion to orthodoxy that her rejection of the binaries embedded in earthly religious authority and personal relationship with…show more content… Even after Jesus commands her to wear white, she protests, “A, dear Lord, if I go arrayed in another manner than other chaste women do, I dread that the people will slander me” and travels to the Bishop of Lincoln so that he might “give [her] the mantle and the ring and clothe [her] all in white clothes” (Kempe 25-6). When he does not, she avoids conflict with the earthly church, postponing her buying the white clothes until she has traveled abroad to Rome despite the Archbishop of Canterbury having already granted her permission to dress in white. There, when Jesus once again orders her to dress virginally, she finally acquiesces, but it is, as Gunnel Cleve argues, in a time of “utmost distress.” He goes on to say that her “hesitation [to buy white clothes] goes a long way to show how generally known and approved of the symbolic import of these white clothes must have been in her time” (Cleve 164). Even with Archbishop Arundel’s permission, Kempe expects widespread clerical disapproval; while she fears God, she also fears the authority she invests in the church officials who continue to chastise her for what they consider to be the false imagery of her…show more content… Returning again to the example of her white clothes, her acquiescence in Rome necessitates a rejection of the travelling priest’s demand that she wear black: “Sir, our Lord was not be displeased though I wore white clothes, for he willed that I do so” (Kempe 62). The priest goes so far as to convince Kempe’s confessor to order her to wear black, but she finds comfort in this for “she felt that she pleased God with her obedience” (Kempe 62). In both of these cases, then, Kempe’s decision to obey the church’s commands is based on what she perceives to be God’s will instead of man’s. She thus degrades and delegitimizes, at least to an extent, the power of the earthly church and asserts her own will, which she, in turn, associates with God’s will. As Cleve says, “[B]oth her will and her obedience are at stake . . . there is a profound controversy going on beneath these words, a clash between the priest’s will and Margery’s wish to obey God” (165-6). By cutting the church out as God’s interpreter and messenger and instead speaking with and hearing of God herself, Kempe, whether she means to or not, follows the sixteenth conclusion of the Lollards that “[n]o power is but of god neiþir þe pope haþ power aȝens þe truþe of holi scripture” (Compston 744). The church is
