The Strategic Use of Memory in the Book of Margery Kempe / Margery Kempe’in Kitabı’nda Hafızanın Stratejik Kullanımı

Abstract

The Book of Margery Kempe (1430s) narrates Margery’s life story in loosely-knitted episodes, mainly focusing on her spiritual experiences, sufferings, and development. It is actually an autobiography dictated by Margery Kempe herself and written by two different scribes. However, it is recited and written after twenty years of her visions including personal conversations with God and Jesus Christ. Memory, thus, with its various types occupies a crucial place in both the writing process of the text and the text itself. As Margery, an illiterate woman as she claims, recites her experiences relying only on her memory, she may not be able to accurately recollect all memories of the past covering almost twenty-five years. Even, she may select, manipulate, and reconstruct them for various reasons. In this context, this paper aims to analyze how Kempe provides the fictional Margery with an alternative role of a mystic, a religious authority, and a pilgrim other than allotted roles of wifehood and motherhood for a medieval woman. To be able to achieve this, Margery Kempe makes use of the fictional Margery’s visions beginning after her first childbirth and also other strategies.

Keywords

• margery kempe
• memory
• autobiography
• womanhood
• wifehood
• motherhood