1.The Book of Margery Kempe, eds. S. B. Meech and H. E. Allen, Early English Text
Society
o.s. 212 (London, 1940), 8. I have translated the passage very literally, seeking to preserve the
courtliness of the Middle English. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent translations are also my
own.
2. Book, 9. 3. Kempe's mysticism has also been seen as a mode of resistance to this cultural economy.
See
Sarah Beckwith, "A Very Material Mysticism: the Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe," in
Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology, and History, ed. David Aers (New York, 1986),
34-57; and Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and the Translations of the (Philadelphia,
1991).
4 . Book, 8-9.
5. For a discussion of these conventions, see Susan Wittig, Stylistic and Narrative Structures
in the
Middle English Romances (Austin, 1978), 173-4; and Laura Hubbard, Mediaeval
Romance in
England, (New Yor, 1960). Some notable "miraculous visitations" occur in Sir
Degaré lines 87 ff.,
Generides, lines 57 ff., and Partonope of Blois, lines 1181 ff.
6. Rosemary Woolf, "The Theme of Christ the Lover-Knight in Middle English Literature,"
Review
of English Studies n.s. 13 (1962), 1-16, and Elizabeth Robertson, Early English
Devotional
Prose and the Female Audience (Knoxville, 1990), 121.
7. Devotional texts certainly constituted the largest category of books by owned women in the
Middle
Ages. See Susan Groag Bell, "Medieval Woman Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and
Ambassadors
of Culture," Signs 7 (1982), 742; Hilary Carey, "Devout Literate Lay People and the
Pursuit of the Mixed
Life in Later Medieval England," Journal of Religious History 14 (1987), 361-81; and Ann
Hutchison, "Devotional Reading in the Monastery and the Late Medieval Household," in De
Cella
in Saeculum: Religious and Secular Life in Late Medieval England, ed. Michael Sargent
(Cambridge,
1989), 215-28.
8. Recent cultural studies show how popular romances also function compensatorily (though
ambivalently) for modern women readers. See Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women,
Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill, 1984), 212; and Leslie Rabine, Reading
the
Romance Heroine (Ann Arbor, 1985).
9. For a fuller treatment of these issues, see my "'Lettyrs of Love': Discourses of Gender and
Genre in
Middle English Devotional Literature for Women (PhD Diss. University of Iowa, 1993).
page 17
10. For applications of these ideals to female conduct, see Thomas Wright, ed., The Book of
the Knight of La Tour-Landry, EETS o.s. 33 (London, 1868), especially, pp. 20, 25-6, 98,
136, and 147.
11. Hope Emily Allen, ed., The English Writings of Richard Rolle, Hermit of Hampole
(Oxford, 1963), 79.
12. Sister Mary Teresa Brady, ed. The Pore Caitif.- Edited from MS Harley 2336 with
Introduction and Notes (PhD Diss., Fordham University, 1954),
176.
13. Brady, Pore Caitif, 177.
14. On the exemplary function of courtesy in Middle English drama, see Kathleen Ashley,
"Medieval Courtesy Literature and Dramatic Mirrors of Female Conduct," in The Ideology of
Conduct: Essays on the Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and
Leonard Tennenhouse (New York, 1987), 25-38.
15. Nicholas Love, The Mirrour of the Blessed Lyf of Jesu Christ, ed. James Hogg and
Lawrence W. Powell. 2 vols. (Salzburg, 1989), I, 24.
16. Hogg and Powell, Mirrour, 1, 27.
17. Mary Sargeantson, ed., Legendys of Hooly Wummen by Osbern Bokenham, EETS
o.s. 206 (London, 1938), 12.
18. Sargeantson, Legendys, 23.
19. Aelred of Rievaulx's De Institutione Inclusarum: Two English Versions, ed. John
Ayto and Alexandra Barratt, EETS 287 (London, 1984), 26.
20. M. B. Salu, trans. Ancrene Riwle (Notre Dame, 1955), 180.
21. Brady, Pore Caitif, 195.
22. J. J. Vaissier, ed., The Tree and the xii frutes of the holy goost (Groningen, 1960), 81.
23. Vaissier, The xii frutes, 99.
24. R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love
(Chicago, 1991); and Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of God: Women,
Sexuality, and the Catholic Church, trans. Peter Heinegg (New York, 1990).
25. Bloch, 196.
26. John H. Fisher, ed., The Tretyse of Love, EETS o.s. 223 (London, 1951),
9.
27. Allen, The English Writings of Richard Rolle, 61.
28. Nicholas Watson's recent study, Richard Rolle and the Invention of Authority
(Cambridge, 1991), also relates this conceit to Troylus and Criseyde, but reads it as an
index of Rolle's close spiritual friendships with women and his development of an authorial
identity. See esp. 230-33.
29. Salu, Ancrene Riwle, 176-77.
30. This notion originates in both scientific and theological discourse, as well as in texts which
offer to harmonize the doctrines of the body and the soul. Soranus' Gynecology explains
the fact that during rape "the emotion of sexual appetite exist[s] in [women] too, but [is] obscured
by mental resolve." I.III.37, trans., Owsei Temkin (Baltimore, 1956), 36. Similarly,
page 18
Augustine
argues that rape "does not destroy a purity which has been maintained by the utmost resolution,
still it does engender a sense of shame, because it may be believed that an act, which perhaps
could not have taken place without some physical pleasure, was accompanied by a consent of the
mind." The City of God, ed. David Knowles, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth,
1972), 26. See also Jane Tibbets Schulenburg, "The Heroics of Virginity: Brides of Christ and
Sacrificial Mutilation," in Women in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Mary Beth
Rose (Syracuse, 1986), 29-72.
31. Salu, Ancrene Riwle, 30.
32. Allen, The English Writings, 125 and 130.
33. Salu, Ancrene Riwle, 140-41.
34. Bloch, 196.
35. For a useful summary of economic and social changes in the late Middle Ages, see
Christopher Dwyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989). On
the relationships between these fluctuations and Middle English literature, see Paul Strohm,
Social Chaucer (Cambridge, 1989), and Barbara Hanawalt, ed., Chaucer's England:
Literature in Historical Context (Minneapolis, 1992).
36. On this category of literature, see Barbara Newman's superb essay, "Flaws in the Golden
Bowl: Gender and Spiritual Formation in the Twelfth Century," Traditio 45 (1989-90),
111-46.
37. On the social function of women as tokens of exchange between men, see Gayle Rubin, "The
Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of
Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York, 1975), 157-210.
