Reading women in the medieval information age: the life of Elizabeth of Spalbeek and the book of Margery Kempe

Abstract

In fifteenth-century England, information about the natural and supernatural worlds came to be broadly distributed in texts that circulated well beyond the institutional contexts in which this knowledge was first produced. Vernacular texts that deal with natural philosophy, medicine, and science, alongside a range of religious topics, were created in record numbers for a widening audience. Many of these testify to intensified interest in all aspects of the human body. Religious works written by, about, and for women participate in this ferment of ideas and information, crossing the boundaries between secular and transcendent themes and concerns. Because religious women were understood to have a special relationship to forms of physical piety, their vitae served as important vehicles for the production and dissemination of thinking about corporeality. The radical asceticism of the thirteenth-century Low Countries visionary Elizabeth of Spalbeek, as detailed in an important Middle English collection from the 1420s, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 114, can be read as an investigation of the possibilities of the fleshly, this-worldly human body to materialize divine truth, and thus by extension as participating in local and intimate ways in the distribution and deinstitutionalization of knowledge. The Book of Margery Kempe, a work often seen as taking up the conventions of affective piety, [End Page 253] similarly participates in a current discourse concerning the materiality of the divine. As the work's complex treatment of the spirit as breath, fire, inspiration, or pneuma suggests, the Book is at once a contributor to and a product of the late medieval information era.