Thanks Marge: Interpretation and specialty area progress

The majority of this week, as we all know, has been spent studying our respective female authors in regards to their personal spiritual encounters. So far, my experience with this project and Margery Kempe has been.... interesting. From my exposure to The Book of Margery Kempe and an additional scholarly article from the one and only JSTOR, I've been reminded of some important lessons in how one should approach studying medieval literature.

One of the very first things our class discussed was during our time with Beowulf and the issue of translations came up. Now, I have only read the translation that Doc put on the website so I guess when I say 'translations' I'm using the term loosely and am referring to the transaction between author -> reader rather than author -> translator...Wait a second... what I'm thinking of was during the poetry unit, actually. OKAY so I'm trying to discuss the issue of INTERPRETATION. Remember when we discussed how people could get completely different meanings out of the poems if, for example, they gained more contextual knowledge? Well... I've wrestled with Margery a few times in that sense during this week. Upon first reading the excerpt from Chapter 28 I didn't think much of it. It seemed too straightforward, sporadic, and by the time I finished, I totally understood why Kempe was challenged by many as a mad woman. However, after finding and reading my every so helpful scholarly article I was able to gain a different yet fascinating perspective.

The article focused a lot on, honestly, proving Kempe's sanity. It didn't deny the fact that there were traces of her madness but, simply, re-focused it in terms of Margery (as seen in the autobiography) Wait, I don't want to spoil that for tomorrow. Okay so just know that it brought a few interesting points to my attention and, with the help of some newly discovered contextual information, the second time I read through the excerpt I was not only able to understand the reading itself better but I was also able to understand the reading from the author's perspective (a sane one, at that) which ultimately allowed me to give more credibility to the entire text.

Besides learning to be a bit more patient and a little slower to judge, I believe I learned something from this unit that could potentially aid in my specialty area. First, if you don't remember my specialty area... we're not friends. Just kidding, the technical name for it is: Religious conflict from the perspective of the Other. Now, this idea was implanted by Doc (of course) but the more I think about it, the more I convince myself that it can relate. Whilst leaving class today, she suggested that Kempe could almost be thought of as one of my 'Other' perspectives. Now, I quickly dismissed that idea because I forgot what my topic was and thought that I had restricted myself to a Jewish or Muslim 'Other' [ie. The Cultural Construction of Monsters: "The Prioress's Tale" and Song of Roland in Analysis and Instruction]...but since I didn't, I retract that dismissal!

So regardless that Kempe is arguing from a Christian perspective she is, nonetheless, still qualified to be an 'Other'. This religious conflict not only exemplifies a religious issue (Kempe's strive for Sainthood) but can also reflect a bigger, societal conflict of the time period (role of women in the middle ages, implications of exile/isolation, etc.). Furthermore, the fact that Kempe was able to be such a nuisance to higher order religious authority whom, for the majority, were men and have such an effect on the Christian hierarchy begs the question: how stable was Christianity and to what degree were the members who deemed themselves Christians really comfortable with their faith?