The Medieval Church, The Book of Margery Kempe and Everyman :: Book of Margery Kempe Essays

The Medieval Church, The Book of Margery Kempe and Everyman While the Reformation is chiefly regarded to have begun with Martin Luthers famous treatise of 1517, the seeds of dissent sown in the fourteenthcentury had already taken full root in England by the middle of the 15thcentury. War, disease, and oppressive government led to a world(a) anger toward the Catholic Church, believed to be among the greatest of the oppressive landowners (Norton 10). John Wycliffe, whose sermons preached against abuses in the church and attempted to shift the focus of religious faith off from church rituals and onto scriptural interpretation, was persecuted. Renaissance Humanisms notion of individualistic agency was filtering across the Channel. The knightly school texts The Book of Margery Kempe (probably written in the latterly 1430s) and Everyman(after 1485) are therefore products of turbulent religious times. Everyman, in that it highlights the importance of the sacraments and the clergy, f uck be seen as a response on the part of the Catholic Church to the challenges it faced. The Book of Margery Kempe gives hints into the nature of these challenges. Both texts reveal a medieval concern about the role of the clergy in England. The Book of Margery Kempe, while presented as spiritual autobiography, was also a story as transcribed by a priest. Although the manuscript was not discovered until 1934, it shows evidence of having been read and study much before this time. Annotations by four additional hands, probably monks associated with the main(prenominal) Carthusian priory of Mount Grace in Yorkshire fill the margins of the British library MS (Staley 2). Believed to retain much of the characteristic form and expression of its actor, it nonetheless must be remembered that Kempes story was interpreted and presented by dint of a very specific (clerical) lens (Norton 367). Lynn Staley, who studied the early annotations do to the original manuscript, notes that the mar ginal comments and underlining are directed toward elucidating the affective emphasis of the text (5). The challenge to authority implicit in Margerys experiences, Staley continues, is downplayed by high spot those characteristics that link Margery to the conventions of spiritual ecstasy (6). Staley suggests that Kempes narration is shaped to look at subsequent readers towards a carefully controlled response, one that obviates the radical well-disposed religious doctrine submerged in Kempes Narrative (6). Given that this radical social gospel is nonetheless present in Kempes story and that it contains an indeterminate picture