Albion (26 page)

One scholar of the early medieval period has suggested that the relative dearth of material is the result of the fact “that each woman writer has to wield her pen as an experimenting individual rather than as the fully official inheritor of a tradition.”
¹⁹
This is not in itself a local problem; there never was a recognised or recognisable female “tradition,” so that individual female writers have had to discover it within themselves. They have always been isolated. Aphra Behn and Virginia Woolf are in that sense the true inheritors of a medieval dispensation. The absence of any imaginative line or bond—the fact that most female writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not know the works that preceded them—may in part explain that recourse to living experience and to individual feeling which is characteristic of many later English women writers. It is not a question of female sensibility as opposed to male sense, but rather a necessary compensation for the absence of a written tradition.

Only in this context, therefore, can we comprehend the literature of female piety in the medieval period; it is predominantly a record of spiritual experience. The writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe are in that sense emblematic, particularly in their determination to celebrate the claims of bodily experience and physical sensation over doctrinal matters. The Wife of Bath, in Chaucer’s poem, declares, “By God! If wommen hadde writen stories”; to which Julian of Norwich replies, “Botte for I am a woman, schulde I therfor leve that I schulde nought telle yow of the goodenesse of God?” When Julian explains to her readers, no doubt themselves predominantly female, that “I am a womann, leued, febille and freylle,” it ought to be recalled that her most notable contribution to medieval religious writing is her revival of the concept of God as the Mother and Christ as the mother of humankind. She invokes “Mother Jesus” vouchsafed in “tendernes of love.” It has been suggested that “she developed the theology of divine motherhood far beyond any previous writer” in terms of initial creation, redemption and spiritual nourishment with the milk of grace.
²⁰
The emphasis is once more upon the experience of loving and even, by implication, upon the experience of childbirth as the feminine version of Genesis. Private revelation and personal experience may thus be a substitute for the authority of the Church. In the case of Julian these more private sources of authority are extended and amplified by her own knowledge of the scriptures and of patristic literature; it has been demonstrated that she used her own translations of the Vulgate, and was well acquainted with all relevant Latin and vernacular writing. It has also been concluded that she was well versed in all the devices of rhetoric, and employed its
colores
to embellish her argument. Her favourite expedients include rhyme and alliteration, which in turn raise an interesting matter of inheritance.

It could be argued that the Anglo-Saxon respect and reverence for women are somehow emmeshed in Old English itself, and that by instinct or intuition certain female writers have recourse to alliteration as a measure of their original pre-eminence. What might be termed “philogyny” can thus be seen as a measure of cadence as well as of sensibility. In her influential essay on women’s literature, “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf has recourse to alliteration in her impassioned moments of meditation—“that spot the size of a shilling”
²¹
which the sexes can discern in each other, a moment of stillness when a “single leaf detached itself from the plane tree at the end of the street, and in that pause and suspension fell,” and how sexist writing is “doomed to death.” Alliteration is a formidable textual feature of
Wuthering
Heights
, also, as, for example, in Cathy’s invocation of “woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy.” There is also a stern tactility in Emily Brontë’s language which may not be unconnected to Anglo-Saxon origins. The name of Heathcliff itself is suggestive; Hareton and Catherine incorporate “heart” and “earth,” which itself is the last word of the novel.
²²
Woolf speculates upon “the rhythmical order” of her perceptions, but it may represent some atavistic longing to be part of an earlier and more benign dispensation.

A
nother
aspect of medieval women’s literature
may offer suggestive analogies. Julian of Norwich dictated her narrative to a willing amanuensis, and the pressure of speech lies behind her insistent cadences; in similar fashion the autobiography of Margery Kempe is conceived as an oral feat, with plentiful references to women’s speech throughout it. She explains, for example, how the Abbess of Denny “oftyntymys sent for the said creatur that sche xulde come to speke wyth hir and wyth hir sisterys”; Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich spent several days in converse, “for the ankres was expert in swech thyngys and good cownsel cowd yeuyn.” Julian’s revelations were couched in the form of speech. In her desolation she was vouchsafed a vision of Jesus “syttyng upon hir beddys syde” in the shape of a man clad in purple silk. “Dowtyr,” he said, “why hast thou forsakyn me, and I forsoke neuer the?” Once more the intimacy of address, and homeliness of detail, mark out a characteristic native spirituality; in Margery Kempe’s spiritual journal there is none of the brooding plangency of Thomas à Kempis’s
Imitatio Christi
, for example, but rather the unaffected and somewhat rambling narrative of a Norfolk gentlewoman. When she began to describe her experiences of spiritual love, her neighbors asked her: “Why speke ye so of the myrth that is in Heuyn; ye know it not & ye have not be ther ne mor than we.” But from this time forward she became a loquacious pilgrim towards eternity; she spoke so volubly that certain preachers would not allow her in their churches. Others would not eat with her because she spoke of nothing but the gospels, and many accused her of being a charlatan too ostentatious in her avowals.

The Book of Margery Kempe, one of the first autobiographies in English, is devoted to the “forme of her leuyng” or the form of her living in the world, where the circumstantial detail of the fourteenth century is manifested. The reader can hear the voices. When she left Canterbury Cathedral she was harassed by cat-calls—“Thou xalt be brent, fals lollare!” You will be burned! On her devotional visit to Julian of Norwich, the recluse imparted to her these final words: “I pray God grawnt you perseuerawns.” There are many “Chaucerian” moments, by which is meant that strange but exhilarating conflation of the sacred and the secular, of piety and farce. She was, after all, both garrulous wife and mystic visionary, and in that respect she seems to have been as thoroughly English as Noah’s Wife in the mystery plays. She held acerbic conversations with monks and bishops. She “spak boldly and mytily” but saw Our Lord in all humbled and wounded creatures. She sat weeping in a poor woman’s house, until the woman herself begged Margery to stop; at which moment Jesus whispered to her, “Thys place is holy.” In the work of the female mystics, speech is revelation.

A scholar of the Paston letters largely composed in the fifteenth century has noted of the female members of that family, “even those who could not write were thoroughly articulate . . . for the most part the language is manifestly the speech of the time, only organised and sometimes heightened a little.”
²³
The description might equally well be applied to the novels of Fanny Burney, who was unique among writers of the late eighteenth century in creating a conversational argot. Her novels rely “heavily on the power of speech to reveal character and class” and contain “long stretches of dialogue.”
²⁴
The
Oxford English Dictionary
lists no less than 114 additions first cited in her works—including “dabble,” “gay-looking,” “unappeasable,” “undemurringly,” “unamusing,” “showable” and “plain-sailing,” all of which might be described as elements of eighteenth-century demotic. Her preoccupation with speech, therefore, manifests a concern for the texture and process of daily life.

The writings of Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich are characterised by one great sustaining voice. The visionary experience allows occasion and place for the manifestation of a female sensibility; it is a sacred area where the privileges of the male hierarchy do not apply, and where female authority can plausibly be asserted. It is the context for the succession of female mystics and prophets, from Jane Lead to Joanna Southcott, who oppose themselves to the dispensations of male power. Jane Lead, the seventeenth-century Protestant mystic, was vouchsafed the sight of “a Woman Cloathed with the Sun” who proclaimed, “Behold me as thy Mother”—an apparition not unrelated to Julian’s insistent invocations of God as the Mother. Lead gave precedence to the “exploration of her inner life,”
²⁵
where the emphasis rests again upon the power of experience rather than upon the stages or levels of visionary meditation outlined by male mystics.

It has been estimated that in the period from 1649 to 1688 “well over half the texts published by women ... were prophecies,”
²⁶
and there were very many female radicals or polemicists caught up in the religious controversies of that period. One of them, Margaret Fell Fox, reiterated one of the central claims—“the Church of Christ is a Woman”—which springs directly from the texts of Julian. In historical and scholarly accounts of this female activity the name and example of medieval women visionaries are continually invoked to suggest a line of influence or inheritance. We are not far removed from the poetry of Emily Brontë—

God within my breast Almighty ever-present Deity! Life, that in me has rest As I undying Life, have power in Thee!

—where mystical experience has gone through the refining fire of her fervent imagination. Or, as Jane Eyre puts it, “As I saw them with my spiritual eye, before I attempted to embody them . . .” The somewhat patronising assumptions about female “intuition” find their origin in the visionary acts and writings of medieval and seventeenth-century women. It was the claim of Dorothy Richardson, the great exponent of a language formed by female perception, that women possessed the faculty of prophecy. “It’s because they see the relation of things which don’t change,” she wrote, “more than things which are always changing.” It is a suggestive remark, implying a commitment to the ground of being rather than the busyness of becoming, and is complemented by Virginia Woolf ’s description of life as “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” This uterine light is not far removed from Jane Lead’s vision of the “Woman Cloathed with the Sun” and suggests a profound affinity between these otherwise quite different writers. It is the vision of glowing maternity which Julian of Norwich also saw.

In this light we may return to the manifestations of religious verse among female writers. In the fifteenth century are noted a hymn to the Virgin written by “an holy anchoress of Mansfield” and another hymn attributed to Eleanor Percy, Duchess of Buckingham. It has been speculated that certain other poems concerning the Mother of God, particularly those in which she laments the death of her son, are composed by women because they emphasise those inward themes of loss and isolation which have been discovered in the female poetry of the Anglo-Saxon period. It will become clear that the Reformation, with its emphasis upon the guiding light of inner experience, lent legitimacy and authority to the religious works of women, but of course the connection between gender and piety was already well established. The daughter of Thomas More, Margaret Roper, had been thoroughly educated in the classical disciplines; yet her devotion was such that she translated Erasmus’s treatise upon the
Pater Noster
and composed a devotional manual upon the
Four Last Things
. Fifteen such devotional works were written by women in the sixty years after 1545; it may not seem a considerable number but, in the context of the time, it is prolific and “established the literary presence of women”
²⁷
throughout the sixteenth century.

Many female prose-writers and poets from that period have been rescued from time’s oblivion by recent scholarship, among them Katherine Parr, Anne Locke the martyr, Anne Askew, who was sustained by the direct and powerful utterances of forebears such as Margery Kempe, and Anne Wheathill, who is tentatively supposed to have possessed a “feminine consciousness”
²⁸
and who wrote: “I cannot but lament, mourne and crie for helpe, as dooth a woman, whose time draweth neere to be delivered of hir child; for she can take no rest, till she be discharged of hir burthen.” It has been suggested that religious piety is “the principal subject-matter of women’s verse, the principal justification for women’s writing and the best guarantee of a poetess’s success for two hundred years.”
²⁹
It is not a question of a “feminine” sensibility, as promulgated in the nineteenth century and sustained by various scholarly guises into the present century; “intuition” and “sentiment” are not at odds with reason or doctrine, nor is religious devotion necessarily a displacement of “emotion” and “passion.” Women were as capable of writing treatises and sermons as were men. It is simply that for social and historical reasons their imaginative competence was deemed to be within the sphere of affective piety—in things unchanged, to use Dorothy Richardson’s account, rather than in the changing world.

A
t
this point
we may embark upon a short journey. A medieval prelate was visiting the isolated cell of a female anchorite when he remarked that her great compassion and understanding were unusual in one who had no contact with the world. “On the contrary,” she replied, “I am always travelling.” She was indeed a mental traveller, with the same facility for venturing into distant places as the contemporaneous female mystics. Travel itself was a reality, rather than a metaphor, for other medieval women. If Julian of Norwich wandered through time and space in search of the divine vision, Margery Kempe engaged in more earthly pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, Constantinople and Danzig. In that sense she is the forerunner of eminent women travellers who include Lady Hester Stanhope and Gertrude Bell. The journeys were fuelled by attitudes of discontent and sentiments of exclusion; the only way to escape a masculine world was, literally, to get away. The fervent contemplations of Julian of Norwich can be deemed modes of withdrawal, just as Margery Kempe’s extensive travels are a sure token of her resentment at an English ecclesiastical polity which seemed designed to exclude or marginalise her.