Margery Kempe Listens (1/19/25)

 

Image of female pilgrim with "sounds," "melodies," and "Hallucinations" as responding themes

"Sum-tyme sche herd wyth hir bodily erys sweche sowndys & melodies that sche myth not wel heryn what a man seyd to hir in that tyme less he spoke the lowder."

Sometimes she heard with her bodily ears such sounds and melodies that she might not hear effectively what a man said to her at that time unless he spoke louder.

Here we see attention as commodity in the Book of Margery Kempe, that most idiosyncratic of medieval mystics.

Richard Lawes (2000) shows that Margery distinguished between the inner sound of visions (“hire gostly undirstondyng” (her ghostly understanding) and the external ear-based sounds. He believes that her passing experience (Sum-tyme) betokens an “auditory hallucination.” This, to him, is a signal of brain misfirings, and an acoustical experience generated from an interior rather than exterior source.

I wonder, however, if she describes here instead a kind of gendered listening. Margery describes herself as hearing those details of the surrounding landscape, attending to the “trivial” sounds of background noise, instead of to the details of the in-person conversation to which she, particular as a woman, is supposed to be attending. Just as parents yell, ahem, increase their volume to garner the attention of their inattentive offspring, so too Margery’s interlocutor increases his volume to drown out the distracting if more distant noises. Is the story, then, about a mystical vision? A medical moment? Or an (admittedly difficult) woman defying expectation? We should pause and consider context, I think, before deciding that she’s just hallucinating.

Similarly, Lawes names the “rushing sounds, likened to a bellows” that are one-sided, present only in her right ear. As a long-term sufferer of tinnitus, I suspect that she’s just describing the distracting internal ear noise to which all such sufferers might be vulnerable. Again, there are gendered implications; Margery is letting her experience of self dominate her perceptive world. Would a man, describing a “rushing like unto a river” be chided for the experience? Or might it more be wrapped up in assumptions of memory and experiential displacement?

That is not to say that Lawes was intending ill by Margery. Rather, I find him an empathetic reader, if a bit over-fond of his own temporal lobe epilepsy diagnosis that he believes to be her underlying medical condition. Still, his assessment and the care he gives to her sensory details did, IMHO, help to move forward the field of interpretive writing about her experiences. It’s just that we all come to our reading with the cultural habits of thought and unconscious biases of our own generation. And here, picking apart these examples a bit further does, I think, have something to tell us about the sound experiences of an important late-medieval laywoman.

Ultimately, Margery Kempe’s auditory experiences—whether mystical, medical, or mundane—make me, at least, want to reconsider how we approach sensory perception and identity in the medieval world. Margery’s “bodily ears” and their contested sounds challenge us to think about how gender, culture, and personal experience shape not only what we hear but also how we interpret it. Was Margery’s listening “misdirected,” as her contemporaries might have thought, or was it reflective of a richer and more complex sensory engagement with her world? Was she, in other words, simply hyper-aware of the world around her—and if so, shouldn’t we prize that?

RESPONDING TO:

Richard Lawes, “Psychological Disorder and the Autobiographical Impulse in Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and Thomas Hoccleve,” in Writing Religious Women: Female Spiritual and Textual Practices in Late Medieval England, edited by Denis Renevey and Christiana Whitehead (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000): 217-243.