Like Thorpe's Testimony, the Book of Margery Kempe tells us a lot about medieval pragmatics in action and about people's metapragmatic awareness of speech strategies and discourse practices in different subject positions. Kempe (c. 1373-after 1438) was born into a well-respected merchant family in Bishops Lynn and herself became a member of the powerful guild of the Holy Trinity. She probably composed and dictated her Book over several years in the 1430s. The autobiographical text narrates events from earlier decades up to about 1436. The Book is full of episodes representing Kempe's controversial, sometimes hostile interactions with clergy and lay people as well as her visions, positive religious connections, and friendships. Several episodes depict her examination by clergy to discern her orthodoxy or conformity. Some episodes depict her in sympathetic or positive interactions, but the overall perspective as narrated by Kempe is one of controversy and difficult talk. Kempe narrates in great detail her contests with clergy over her religious conformity and her and their judgments about proper Christian behavior. Kempe dictated her narrative in English to at least two scribes at different times during the 1430s. It's not altogether clear how the scribes’ work influenced the sole manuscript version once housed in the Carthusian monastery of Mount Grace, Yorkshire. Kempe's life-writing is a scribally mediated and collaborative text.

In this chapter, conversation analysis (CA) is again useful to read slowly a portion of Kempe's text and explore the narrative's pragmatics, metapragmatics, dialogism, and relevance.