This final chapter considers Margery Kempe's old age as a framework for the casting of her entire project, the spiritualisation of her pain, and the Book as itself the ultimate surrogate production. As a retrospective, the pain narrative of Kempe's life is an anamnestic production in the context of her increased authority as an ‘elder’ in the world, therefore the dual forces of old age and the understanding of suffering are necessarily imbricated in the act of writing. Indeed, as Mary Carruthers has argued, ‘medieval culture was primarily memorial’ and, as a result, ‘a book itself is a mnemonic’. In finally inscribing her life and learning to the manuscript page some twenty years after her conversion, Margery Kempe recalls the memory of her pains – more recently experienced in the events of Book II than Book I – from the perspective of old age. From this position, her choices of narrative content are thus meaningful in terms not just of the dictation of her more recent experientia, but also the reflectivity upon the other events narrated in Books I and II. Furthermore, as I explore here, and, as the ageing Christine de Pizan (c. 1364–c. 1430) testifies in The Treasure of the City of Ladies, ‘there is no worse disease than old age’. Senescence, then, might also be regarded as a natural opportunity for what I have termed aged asceticism, since the culturally abject, ageing body, is, to an extent, diseased-by-default.

There exists much valuable scholarship about the authorship and authority of Kempe's Book, but little on the significance of the production of the text during her old age. The very timing of the Book's first embryonic advent in her elderly years is divinely dictated, since, years before, ‘sche was comawndyd in hir sowle þat sche schuld not wrytyn so soone’ (3).