“What Aylith Thee, Woman?”

THE BOOK OF Margery Kempe (1436 x 1438) is a unique and crucial document for exploring medieval subjectivity. At its heart, it is a text about one person's sensitive reactions— Kempe's “mevynggys,” “steringgys,” “felyngys,” “peynes”— and as such it offers a hugely valuable account for the historian of emotions. In this chapter, thinking about fluidity and embodiment, I turn to Kempe's tears, one of the most striking and controversial elements of her religious identity. The first modern editor of Kempe's book, the American medievalist Hope Emily Allen, diagnosed Kempe in the 1930s with what she called “neuroticism” because of her tears. In offering this medical or quasi-medical diagnosis, Allen set the tone of much twentieth-century writing on Kempe, in which Kempe was described as suffering “post-partum psychosis,” as being “quite mad— an uncurable hysteric with a large paranoid trend,” a depressive woman going through “a manic-depressive illness,” as a “psychotic,” as suffering from “frontal lobe epilepsy.” These assessments— given by neither qualified medical doctors nor psychiatrists— diagnose Kempe's crying as an illness and an ailment to be explained medically or psychologically, rather than understood spiritually or rhetorically, which is how I approach it here.

More recently, Kempe's tears have received sophisticated analysis, through a variety of approaches. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has identified “becoming liquid,” a dissolving of the self by crying and sobbing, as one of Kempe's main modes. Santha Bhattacharji has placed Kempe in the tradition of “loud and violent” religious weeping practised in later medieval mysticism; Bhattacharji identifies the main stimuli of Kempe's weeping as the overlapping causes of “penitence for her own sins; penitence for the sins of the world; and intense compassion for the sufferings of Christ.” As Bhattacharji explains, Kempe's weeping maps closely onto the advice given by the English mystic Walter Hilton, in which “great fits of weeping” and crying “with all the powers of the body” accompanied meditation given by God and compassion for Christ. Esther Cohen, in her work on the history of pain, has drawn a sharp distinction between bodily pain and medieval tears; Kempe's tears, “like stigmatization, … placed her apart from the rest of society, and she had to show her special devotion by openly weeping.”