Hope and Faith
On travels myself in a minor way this weekend as Mum and I go to Walsingham , 'England's Nazareth', as we generally do mid August. I've taken a couple of books with me, the first of which is Marea Mitchell's essentially cultural materialist account of The Book of Margery Kempe.
Fascinating in that Mitchell concerns herself not only with Margery and what she says (or dictates) in what is still known as the first autobiography in the English language, but also with its cultural reception and indeed how the discovery of Margery's complete text in 1934 led to the difficult and sometimes acrimonious production of the first published scholarly version of the text by Sandford Leech and his one-time mentor, Hope Emily Allen.
Allen's life is clearly fascinating in itself. An American born 'Independent Scholar' and apparently a distant cousin of Evelyn Underhill, Allen's parents were for some time members of the idealistic Oneida community, and Allen possibly carried some of its collaborative, frank-speaking ethos throughout her scholarly life, despite her claim to be a 'Christian agnostic'. Without the clear categorisations, commissions and deadlines of tertiary education, it seems as though Allen was in some ways ahead of her time in blending textual research with social, historical and cultural context. She was a medieval scholar and a feminist too, and felt that Margery Kempe offered ample opportunity for her wide field of academic interests. During and after her collaboration on the initial text, she claimed to be pouring her scholarship into a second publication which would be 'the synthesis of Margery the mystic and the woman'. As Mitchell writes:
It is not surprising that The Book of Margery Kempe lent itself so much to her imagination, given her belief that the Book needed both literary and historical perspective, and an understanding of the connections between the mystical and the social. In 1949 she wrote to Mabel Day of her 'wide ranging desire to make it my magnum opus - in which at least all the absorptions of my various incarnations coalesce, even though not all the methods''.
Grand ambitions indeed. Alas, this volume never saw completion. Allen was a meticulous scholar as well as a wide-ranging one and perhaps never felt she had followed up enough leads, drawn all the threads together. Perhaps she lacked the necessary institutional support or, in a strange way, the confidence to complete. She had to be content with having set together many dry bones for a future researcher to flesh out into a living work. And this has still not been done.
Allen was not solely a dryasdust scholar, however, despite the reproduction in Mitchell's book of a formal photographic portrait where she looks both staid and skeletal. She had a strong informal web of contacts, many of whom were women and two of whom, Joan Wake and Dorothy Ellis, were also strong independent scholars. They compared themselves to the three anchoresses to whom the thirteenth century Ancrene Riwle was addressed, but they bickered and conforted and advised each other in the way of many intense friendships between women. Does Mitchell dwell too much on the gossipy details of their volumous correspondence? Maybe; but the mixture of concerns in their letters does reflect the wide horizons of unofficial female writing of that and perhaps any time. I loved the conclusion of chapter 3, where Mitchell documents a particular evening in which Allen, Wake and some other women celebrated publication of their books by holding a bonfire of their proofs and notes. 'The image of Allen and her friends singing and dancing around the fire, celebrating their intellectual productivity, is an image to set alongside the formal presentation,' observes Mitchell. Fortunately there are no witchcraft trials these days. Anyway the stage is set for the rest of Margery's textual history in recent decades, and a strange sense of unruliness sits appropriately alongside her religious revelations.
Fascinating in that Mitchell concerns herself not only with Margery and what she says (or dictates) in what is still known as the first autobiography in the English language, but also with its cultural reception and indeed how the discovery of Margery's complete text in 1934 led to the difficult and sometimes acrimonious production of the first published scholarly version of the text by Sandford Leech and his one-time mentor, Hope Emily Allen.
Allen's life is clearly fascinating in itself. An American born 'Independent Scholar' and apparently a distant cousin of Evelyn Underhill, Allen's parents were for some time members of the idealistic Oneida community, and Allen possibly carried some of its collaborative, frank-speaking ethos throughout her scholarly life, despite her claim to be a 'Christian agnostic'. Without the clear categorisations, commissions and deadlines of tertiary education, it seems as though Allen was in some ways ahead of her time in blending textual research with social, historical and cultural context. She was a medieval scholar and a feminist too, and felt that Margery Kempe offered ample opportunity for her wide field of academic interests. During and after her collaboration on the initial text, she claimed to be pouring her scholarship into a second publication which would be 'the synthesis of Margery the mystic and the woman'. As Mitchell writes:
It is not surprising that The Book of Margery Kempe lent itself so much to her imagination, given her belief that the Book needed both literary and historical perspective, and an understanding of the connections between the mystical and the social. In 1949 she wrote to Mabel Day of her 'wide ranging desire to make it my magnum opus - in which at least all the absorptions of my various incarnations coalesce, even though not all the methods''.
Grand ambitions indeed. Alas, this volume never saw completion. Allen was a meticulous scholar as well as a wide-ranging one and perhaps never felt she had followed up enough leads, drawn all the threads together. Perhaps she lacked the necessary institutional support or, in a strange way, the confidence to complete. She had to be content with having set together many dry bones for a future researcher to flesh out into a living work. And this has still not been done.
Allen was not solely a dryasdust scholar, however, despite the reproduction in Mitchell's book of a formal photographic portrait where she looks both staid and skeletal. She had a strong informal web of contacts, many of whom were women and two of whom, Joan Wake and Dorothy Ellis, were also strong independent scholars. They compared themselves to the three anchoresses to whom the thirteenth century Ancrene Riwle was addressed, but they bickered and conforted and advised each other in the way of many intense friendships between women. Does Mitchell dwell too much on the gossipy details of their volumous correspondence? Maybe; but the mixture of concerns in their letters does reflect the wide horizons of unofficial female writing of that and perhaps any time. I loved the conclusion of chapter 3, where Mitchell documents a particular evening in which Allen, Wake and some other women celebrated publication of their books by holding a bonfire of their proofs and notes. 'The image of Allen and her friends singing and dancing around the fire, celebrating their intellectual productivity, is an image to set alongside the formal presentation,' observes Mitchell. Fortunately there are no witchcraft trials these days. Anyway the stage is set for the rest of Margery's textual history in recent decades, and a strange sense of unruliness sits appropriately alongside her religious revelations.
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